CHAPTER V

Some months later word came from the West that Bob McNaughton had secured a divorce. There had been no personal reply to her letter. Calmly and quietly he had complied with her request, his lawyer merely notifying hers that Mrs. McNaughton’s wishes would be carried out to the letter. No possible way had she of gauging how he had taken it, no possible manner of knowing how, after all the years, such a request had affected him.

Her relief was like a gale of wind sweeping over the city after a stifling day. For months she had been trembling on the brink of terrifying uncertainty. The day following Gloria Cromwell’s amazing success had found her really ill, so ill that had she remained away from the theater that night there would have been justification. She was stunned, utterly bewildered, sickened to the soul by the trick she told herself Fate had played her.

Over and over she read the papers, as one gazes fascinated over the edge of a dizzying precipice. It was incredible! And worse still, it might easily have been avoided. She might have accepted the girl, made her a protégée, gracefully posed as having discovered a young genius and pushed her to the fore. She saw all that now. And—further irony—it would probably have redounded to her credit, a neat bit of self-advertisement. As things stood she had made herself a laughing-stock. She could not bear the thought of it.

On the verge of hysteria, she dragged herself out of bed and dressed for the street. When her maid dared to protest, she turned on the girl ready to strangle her.

Walking rapidly westward she veered north when she reached the Drive. It was a dull day, no clarity of air to fill the lungs, no shimmer of sunlight through the heavy clouds. Skeleton trees reached gaunt arms to the sky. Thick mud covered the ground which a month before had shown green and living. There was no cheer anywhere. Across the river the Palisades rose misty and unreal, as if they had never been more than mirages. Miles she made, on and on, seeking some way to still the terror voice in her breast.

That night she drove down to the theater with a sense of dread. But whatever the flurry of gossip backstage, it ceased with her arrival. Members of the company inquired concerning her health—that was all. While she was dressing a knock came. The maid opened and the Cromwell girl stood in the doorway. She took a rather timid step forward.

“I’m so glad you’re back, Miss Goring.” She spoke with a note of sincerity unmistakable, and in her wide eyes was a look of pleading as of unspoken apology for what she had done. “I just had to come and tell you.”

“Thank you,” Goring replied and for her life could not say more. Her hatred was a living, searing thing.

The coup she had made in absenting herself accomplished its end. Gloria Cromwell was withdrawn from the cast—to be featured by Cleeburg in a new production!

Anxiously Goring waited for some reference to the turn events had taken. None came, not even when the girl left the company. Little ’Dolph seemed to be full of the joy of living these days—cigar more active than ever, smile more genial, himself more generous to the down-and-outers and brimful of plans. In the weeks that followed he never spoke of their misunderstanding. Evidently his admiration had not in any way decreased. She had chosen, she concluded, the psychological moment to gain her freedom.

When news came that it was consummated the weight of uncertainty lifted. She felt buoyant, with a clear course to steer ahead. Not that she was at all eager to marry her manager. But since it was the one sure way to secure her future, it must be gone through.

She will always have reason to remember the bright spring day when she dropped into his office to break the news. For some time he had known Bob was suing.

“Glad to hear it,” he remarked when she told him everything was settled. Then he swung round in his chair and gazed out of the window at a pair of fleecy, fluttering clouds in the very blue heavens.

“Well, I took your advice, Jane,” he added casually.

“What advice?”

“Remember telling me once to make that Cromwell girl change her name? I went ahead and did it.”

“You did?”

“Sure! Changed it for her. She’s Mrs. ’Dolph now.” And he grinned happily.

She understood then why he had been grinning in just that way for a number of weeks. Had she not been so absorbed in self, she would have noticed that his smile was gayer—different from any he had ever worn. It made his face quite boyish.

The decline of Goring after that was gradual. As a matter of fact, it could have been dated actually from the night of her non-appearance. Upon the heels of that night followed a change, scarcely noticeable at first, in the sea of eyes and lips and hands to which she looked for signs of approval. Slowly—oh very slowly—there crept into the audience’s response to her a quality mechanical, automatic almost, as if largely force of habit, a quality that presaged the beginning of the end. Whether in herself or the public she could not tell. It was nothing tangible, nothing definite. But something had happened. The fine thread by which an actress chains herself to popular favor had snapped. In vain she told herself it was just nervous imagination. It made her choke with fear.

One thing Jane Goring had failed to take into consideration: Than the highest rung of the ladder there is nothing higher; and unless one dies having reached the top, there must be a descent. Youth pushes its way upward relentlessly, and those who have been must make way for those who will be. A ladder with top rung overcrowded would of necessity break.

Had she possessed the art of Bernhardt or the intellect of Fiske—that magnetic quality of soul that charms with the mellowing years—she could have laughed at time. But her ability consisted chiefly in a technique, the accumulated result of stage tricks that only up to a certain point can present itself as youth.

With an eagerness that approached hysteria she reached out for the adulation that for years she had accepted without question as her due. The thirst for it was the thirst of fever. Even the tame robins she had always regarded as more or less of a joke, she began to seek them as they in the past had sought her. The desire to be seen about pursued by youth; to lunch and tea at fashionable restaurants in their company; to hold the center of the public eye at any cost, became a mania. It was as grim an effort as that of a doomed man to cling to the last moments of life.

And when a year or so later came the inevitable day when Cleeburg said to her—trying to speak gently—

“Come, Jane, let’s talk horse sense. No use your trying to play a chicken! God knows you ain’t one!”—

Jane Goring went home, flung open her bedroom windows letting in an uncompromising flood of sunlight, sat down at her dressing-table and looked herself squarely in the face. The whiteness—smooth, glowing—which had made her skin like gardenia petals in the old days had gone long since. She had grown accustomed to simulating it with modern triumphs of the beauty parlor. But sitting there with God’s spotlight turned full on her, it was not the realization of muscles sagging as if pulled down by the hand of Time that made her shudder. It was not the gooselike shriveling of her throat when she turned her head that made her eyes shut with pain. It was the knowledge of ebbing self-confidence, the face to face admission that her day was done. From now on it would be—“Let’s go to see Jane Goring. She used to be—” or “Don’t let’s go to see Jane Goring. She used to be—”

But always “She used to be—” Always that.

There was no quibbling, no splitting of hairs. She knew! And with the acknowledgment she rose to her feet, a great overwhelming defiance seizing her. She would not let age get her. She would not go downhill. She would not become a has-been! Rather would she quit the stage now and let them say she had retired in her prime. Money she had—an income larger than she needed. She would cut herself off from the theater entirely; for looking in at the window of a house of cheer whose door is barred—that would be unbearable. She would have to travel, to seek diversion elsewhere. Then suddenly like the lifting of a rosy veil on barren waste, she saw her career a thing of the past and herself wandering down the declining years of life—alone. The desert youth takes no count of—aloneness—stretched bleak and endless, a reach of sand with no oasis to slake the thirst, no shade to cool the soul.

And there swamped her with a sickening sense of need the longing for that bulwark of days gone, the one thing that endures, the one thing that counts not success nor failure, that survives when the ladder itself lies crumbled in ruins. Giving it no conscious name, she knew only that had Bob been there he would have shouldered the burden of this cold hour of facing truth. He would somehow have contrived to make it easier for her to hold her head high and continue to look down, even though that look must be directed toward the sunset.

Bob, whose adoration had helped her always over the difficult places, Bob would to-day and through all the days to come have stood by to help her bridge this most difficult place of all.

Bob!! Well, why not?

Many hours she paced the floor, brows drawn together, hands clenched as if grappling with a flesh and blood thing.

The peacock’s strut is slow and calculating. He lowers his head only to gaze upon his own reflection in the pool. To shed the trait that has made him world famous is to lay his gorgeous plumage in the dust.

* * * * *

The train steamed into the Santa Fé Station at Los Angeles. A woman descended, the sort to whom one gives a second glance in spite of tired lines round the eyes and little crinkles at their corners. Gowned in the latest cut of blue serge, with a tan traveling cloak swung across her arm, she cried New York the instant one laid eyes on her.

She put her maid and bags into a cab, and sent them to the Ambassador Hotel. Stepping into another, she told the driver to take her to the Graystone Studio.

It was an afternoon of late June. The languorous breath of California summer had kissed the foliage into mammoth bloom. They drove through lazy, sunny streets, somnolent under warm skies, into that vortex of activity modern commerce has planted in the midst of beauty, the frame of artifice sprung up mushroom-like in the very heart of Nature.

Jane Goring descended at a row of small buildings that barricaded huge ones roofed with glass. She made her way past men and women with faces ghastly white and lips preternaturally red, mounted the steps and asked for Mr. McNaughton. The attendant wanted her name but she insisted upon being announced merely as a friend from the East. She had given Bob no warning of her visit and her eyes followed the man with a look half curious, half eager as he opened a door and disappeared along a corridor lined with offices.

He came back presently and shut the door. Mr. McNaughton had gone home. She asked his address quite as a matter of course—in a way that brooked no refusal, and once more was driven out of bedlam to the quiet of drowsy green streets, past the beautiful Hollywood homes of picture stars who yesterday were unknown.

Toward the sunset she went, melting amethystine into violet night. Shadows stretched across the road, cool and mellow, and a soft sense of fragrant tranquillity.

She lay back, closing her eyes. When she opened them she had turned a corner and was pulling up before the lawn of a rambling Queen Anne cottage set snugly in a mass of shrubbery. She gave a little start, pleasure surmounting surprise. It looked very much as though Bob McNaughton had found time to make his own career.

A gate with a lantern over it opened on a bricked path that led to the house. She paused there and looked in. Under a tree sat a man she scarcely knew. His hair was quite gray—iron gray—but the face under it was full and ruddy, the eyes keen, the mouth relaxed and smiling. The hand that held a newspaper which he no longer read was firm and capable. A hand accustomed to direct, the hand of a man sure of himself! Bob, who was almost fifty, looked less than forty!

As she stood staring at him, the house door opened and a slim figure was silhouetted against the light from within. The figure stepped to the lawn, light shining through masses of soft brown hair like a halo, eyes glowing, red lips parted in eager welcome, and with a cry full of sweetness held out something to Bob McNaughton. He gave a laugh, sprang to his feet, bent down to the eager lips, then caught the something swiftly in his arms—with infinite tenderness hugged it close against his heart. And it gave a gurgle of delight.

Jane Goring turned and went back to the waiting taxi.

GREASE-PAINT

_REALISM_

There is no such thing—either in life or the theater. For what is real to one is unreal to another. The tenement of the stage is real to those who live in drawing-rooms—the drawing-room, real to those who know only the squalor of tenements. That which seizes our imaginations with grim claws, shakes our emotions with sordid passions we have never experienced—we call reality. That which is uncertain, sad, elusive, delicate—we call unreality. Both are life!

GREASE-PAINT