CHAPTER III—ACT III

The hum of arrival in that great hive, the Grand Central, kept up an incessant drone. Scurrying figures swarmed like bees from the gates to disappear into the night. Red caps raced back and forth, elbowing one another in the rush for spoils. City husbands reached out eagerly from roped-off lines to country wives and sunburned youngsters. Embraces and laughter and inarticulate efforts to tell everything in one moment kept the air abuzz. Life, centralized in one small area of space, was at its busiest.

Into this hubbub from the Lake Shore Limited swung a man in tweed suit, the porter at his side laden with the trappings of a long trip. His big shoulders pushed through the throng into the lighted terminal and he looked around. Rapidly his glance traveled from face to face, then back along the congested line and once again its length. A look of annoyance that brought brows together followed the swift scrutiny and he made for the telephone booths. Impatiently he gave the operator a number, concentrating his gaze on her while she made the Long Island connection. When some three minutes later he emerged from the booth, the look of annoyance had changed to anger.

With characteristic stride of authority he moved across the crowded stone floor, bounded up the steps and waited, peering at his watch in the outer gloom as taxis unloaded their burdens and took on others. When his turn came he sprang in, gave the address of a small select hotel off Fifth Avenue and all the way there sat staring fixedly out at the lighted shops, his lips a thin, angry line.

The line had not disappeared as he stepped from the elevator to the door of a suite and imperatively rang the bell. It was opened by a girl in nursemaid’s cap who gave a start when she saw who it was. He pushed past with the same look he had cast about the station. Then he turned abruptly, sending at her a volley of rapid-fire questions.

Madam was not there, she answered. Yes, the children were, but Mrs. Cunningham had gone to dinner and the theater. No, she did not believe any telegram had been received from him. Madam, she was sure, had not expected him to-night. They had been in town since the beginning of the week. No, Mrs. Cunningham had not gone out with any one. To The Coghlan Theatre, she believed.

Her curious gaze followed him as he went down the hall to the elevator. Then softly she shut the door.

At ten minutes to nine he strolled into The Coghlan Theater, the last of a fashionably late audience.

The place was packed and he leaned leisurely against the rear balustrade to wait for the curtain before trying to locate his wife.

Across the footlights palm trees swayed, recalling the land of secrets he had left behind. Something about the sensuous atmosphere so realistically reproduced made him turn away. Then his eyes took in the woman who held the center of the stage. Her voice—low, beautifully modulated—rolled toward him. Her eyes, burning black, turned in his direction. He gripped the rail, bent over it.

Nancy!! In spite of the dark wig and olive tinted skin, there was no mistake! Nancy—on the stage of The Coghlan! The sudden sharp crackle of a program broke the stillness.

NANCY BRADSHAW in “Broken Wings”

There it was—Nancy Bradshaw—staring at him from the sheet he had not troubled to read.

Nancy! Mrs. Richard Cunningham!

He made the lobby like a bull gone mad. Generations of training, years of the will to control, were as if they had never been. He was the outraged male, bent on destroying the thing which had defied him.

Outside he found Coghlan who, from the box-office, had glimpsed him sauntering in and evidently anticipated precisely what had happened.

Jerry’s good-natured face with its row of chins was hard as an iron mask as he blocked Cunningham’s onrush.

“Hello, there,” he said genially, reaching out a hand.

Cunningham’s fists clenched white.

“I’ve got to see my wife.”

“Well, can’t see her from anywhere but in there until after the performance. Nobody goes backstage—strict orders.” Then smiling broadly, “Made a hell of a hit! You ought to be damn proud of her.”

“I’m going to see her _now_!”

Jerry grinned serenely. “Don’t blame you. Should have been here Monday for the opening—sensation, old man! Always said that in five years she’d be the greatest actress in the country. And take it from me—”

From within, a swelling volume of applause told the fall of the curtain.

Cunningham made a lunge to pass the figure that blocked him.

“Careful, careful, old boy!” came firmly from the manager. “Hold tight there! They’ll be coming out—take it easy.”

The other man’s face was set.

“I’ve told you—”

“And I tell _you_! This is my theater! Anybody who causes any disturbance gets out!”

A prominent clubman sighted Cunningham at this juncture and hurried across the lobby. From that moment Nancy’s husband was forced to assume an easy pride calculated to disarm gossip, forced to become the center of a throng bent upon congratulating him on his wife’s success.

During the ten minutes of intermission he bore it with a smile chiseled on his handsome face, then left the theater as the lights went low. Back to the hotel he tramped, turned and retraced his steps like some madman muttering to himself. Then up and down the dark alley of the stage entrance, watching for signs that the final curtain had fallen, unable to consider the sane and sensible alternative of waiting for his wife in the privacy of her own rooms.

When at last they stood face to face under the brilliant lights of her dressing-room it was evident Coghlan had warned her.

She was alone. In the little room where they had met five years ago they met once more. And to-night as that night a flame like a living thing darted between them. Then it had been white and warming. Now it filled the place, a devastating fury. But in the face of it she stood calm.

It would have taken an observer less self-absorbed to note that her hand trembled as it grasped a chair-back, that her breath came quickly. In silence they measured each other. In silence she waited, her eyes never leaving him.

At last he spoke and his voice was as hard as that of a judge pronouncing extreme penalty.

“Well—have you anything to say for yourself?”

She shook her head and not defiance but sadness was in the look she sent him. “Nothing I _want_ to say.”

“You realize, of course, that I’m going to put a stop to this business here and now.”

Again that look—half regret, half sorrow.

“You can no longer put a stop to anything I do.”

In his unreasoning wrath the actual import of her words missed him.

“I don’t care what contracts you’ve made—to-night finishes them.”

“Suppose we try to talk this over quietly”—she gave a slight gesture of weariness as she sat down before her dressing-table—“if it must be discussed.”

“Must be discussed? Good God! I come back after three months, ring my home, find that my wife has moved into town without a word to me—”

“You forget—you had overlooked giving me your address.”

“And come up against the fact,” he rushed on, “that she’s taken advantage of my absence to put over— What’s your explanation of this damned outrage?” he broke off hotly.

Her eyes, tense and brilliant, held his. He gave a short laugh.

“I assume you and Coghlan have concocted one.”

“Coghlan has no idea of my reason for doing it. He merely knows that in July I sent word to him that I would take this part if Lilla Grant refused it. He didn’t wait to find out, though she cabled him a week later saying Kane was going to star her.”

“And you thought I’d let you get away with it! After five years of living with me you thought I’d stand for anything like this!”

“It doesn’t matter whether you stand for it or not.”

He had been pacing up and down, hands thrust into his pockets, ready to plunge through the walls. Now suddenly he veered about, stood rooted.

“I mean it.” Softly she answered his amazement. “I’m back on the stage because I realize how little my leaving it meant to you.”

He went close to her then, threat in every line of his big frame.

“You’re my wife—the mother of my children.”

“Yes—that’s all.”

“All?”

“I bore your name, I bore your children. I gave up the stage to do both. And in giving it up, I sacrificed your love.”

Her back was turned but out of the shadows of her triple mirror gazed a face white with pity of him, with suffering for the thing which, through him, both had lost.

“Sacrificed my love?” he began as a man feels his way along paths he is not sure of. “What in heaven’s name gave you that idea?”

“Please,” she stopped him with a swift gesture, “please—don’t speak of it! I can’t bear it!”

“Look here, Nancy,” came somewhat more calmly, “this is nonsense—silly woman stuff. I’m not saying you didn’t think you had some rational excuse for doing this thing. But it’s out of the question. It simply can’t continue. I made that clear when I married you. Boredom or restlessness or the sort of unreasoning mood that gets hold of women probably drove you to it.”

“You drove me to it,” she answered quietly.

“What’s got over you?” he came back sharply. “You talk like a mad woman.”

“No—I’m quite sane. I see quite clearly—too clearly. I’ve had plenty of time to go over it—to face the truth. I thought when I married you that you loved the woman in me. Now I know it was the actress. You loved me for the thing I gave up because I loved you—the glamour of the stage. Popularity—the fact that I was conspicuous made me desirable. You demanded that I sacrifice all that. And when I did, I became the same to you as hundreds of women you’d known, women you were tired of. You cut me off completely from my old life, except as a spectator—then sought in that old life the thrill and interest I could no longer give you.”

She paused. Her hand went to her throat as it had that day in the house of the fir trees.

“All these five years when I’ve longed for a glimpse of it—just a glimpse—to become part of it again if only for a little while, I’ve felt guilty, almost as if I’d been untrue to you. I’ve thrust the thought aside as something unworthy. I’ve let you fill my life. Well,” she paused, “now I’ve gone back to it. I’ve gone back to the thing that made you love me. And I’ve gone—to stay.”

Defiance at last leaped at him. It tore from her, as they stood measuring each other, like a panther from some rustling jungle. It gripped his throat.

“Woman excuses!” he brought out at last. “Without rhyme or reason to back them! Well, they won’t answer. I’m still waiting for a straight, rational explanation. Suppose you let me have it—now.”

“All right, I will. I didn’t want to, but since you demand it you shall have it. I’ve given you my reason, my motive. I’ve told you what sent me back to the stage. But the thing that brought me to my senses, that made me realize the truth, can be summed up in just three words: Hawaii—Lilla Grant.”

She spoke as if merely voicing them were tearing open a wound unhealed, spoke them so low that they came like a breath.

And hearing, he straightened, stood silent, too stunned to think of an answer.

The noise of slamming doors and scurrying feet beat instead against the stillness, all the echoing movements that strike bare walls when the play is done.

“It was rather funny—wasn’t it?—that I should have believed you that first time,” she went on. “But I told myself what I had seen was impossible; that if I had given up the thing that was life to me, surely you wouldn’t go back to it for the fascination of grease-paint and footlights. Surely you couldn’t seek in another woman the thing you had denied me! That’s why I accepted your half truths—eagerly. Because I wanted to—and one does so many foolish things when one wants to. That’s why it was so much harder when I did find out.”

“Nancy—” he began.

“Please don’t try to explain this away!” came breathlessly. “It can’t be set right. It’s done! And I’d like to go on being friends, because, you see, I _did_ love you.”

“Then—” he seized on the note in her voice.

“No! Never!”

They were just two words, low as a conscience whisper. But they closed the gates of what had been with the grim certainty of fate. His steel-colored eyes—habitually so sure of themselves—wavered. His fists gripped against an enemy unknown. And only the woman whose gaze locked with his knew that the enemy was himself.

He looked down at the blonde head round which the lights of the theater glimmered once more; those lights he had torn away to make her entirely his.

“You mean that?” he brought out at last.

“Yes.”

“Finally?”

“It can’t be otherwise—now.”

He turned swiftly on his heel and went the length of the room, then back to where she stood. He pulled up sharp and his lips snapped together.

“All right. But you leave one item out of the reckoning. As long as you bear my name, you respect it! If you persist in this—I’ll divorce you.”

“The name is yours. I am Nancy Bradshaw again.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Only what I said. You can have it back any time you want. I won’t make a move to stop you. You can have everything you’ve ever given me—everything. The one thing I had a right to keep—you’ve taken away. So what else matters?”

She walked slowly over to where her clothes hung behind a cretonne curtain, took down a black hat and pulled it over her shining hair. She stood there, shoulders drooping, head bent.

Outside the soft shuffle of the old watchman’s feet told he was going the rounds. Good-nights had been tossed from one to another of the departing company. That heavy quiet of night in a darkened theater rolled backstage. The world of make-believe had vanished. Only the shell remained.

Cunningham leaned a bit heavily against the door. For the first time life had thwarted, left him impotent, and a new sensation, when unpleasant, is difficult to handle.

The woman he had loved and desired, the woman who had stirred him, who had been his, came toward him as to a stranger.

“I’m afraid I must go,” she said.

He roused himself to a final stand.

“You realize,” came hoarsely, “that I’ll fight this—fight it to a finish? You realize as well that the children will come to me?”

Pain for what had been and what might have been; memories, all that had made these moments a requiem, vanished from her voice. She went close to him. Like his own her body went taut, her hands tense, her head high. Primitive even as himself, she met him, ready for combat.

Suddenly something in her answering gaze, in the black of her eyes that could flame up like two live things, made clear the writing on the wall.

“I don’t think you’ll try to do that. I shan’t attempt to keep them from you, of course. But they’re mine, you know,—and _I_ haven’t forfeited the right to them.”

Without another word, she stood waiting for him to step aside. He hesitated, made as if to speak, then turned abruptly and the slam of a door resounded like thunder.

One by one she turned off the lights. Out across the familiar boards she went to the center of the stage, set for to-morrow. Face lifted to the darkness, she stood where had come to her the struggle eternal—success, conflict, love, renunciation. And to her lips came the question woman will always ask, the question always unanswered: “Why?”

And so the curtain descended on Act III of Nancy Bradshaw’s life drama.

THE CURTAIN FALLS

The lights of the auditorium flame high. The audience rises. It has stepped down from the footlights. It moves in undulating tide toward the wide-flung doors.

Beyond those doors is night, the world of care. The brief hours of living in a house of dreams is over. Forgetfulness gives place to memory. The spirit of the theater lifts its magic touch from tired eyes.

Backstage all is dark and wondering. Have we played our parts as an audience and sensed its heartbeats? Have we smiled its smiles? Teased its vanity? Gained its approval? We of this little play—have we succeeded in our striving to make a critical throng throb to it? Back of the swaying curtain, before which one of asbestos has dropped heavily, all is wild hope, eager prayer, despairing question.

The house of dreams is empty, the soft-armed chairs shrouded as if each held a pale ghost. Is it to be alight or dark? Do we live or die?

To-morrow holds the answer.

* * * * * *

Transcriber’s note:

A small number of clear typographic errors have been corrected.

Consistent period spelling has been retained, as has inconsistent hyphenation.