Part 4
Phyllis was soon flying with the rest of them, and her ready adaptability caused her to be accepted in their midst without more than a passing hesitation. Hiding her riper and more womanly nature, and absorbing herself in this animated triviality, she pretended to be as much a sparrow as any of the flock, and no less lively and empty-headed. She was lonely, heart-tired, and very much adrift on the sea of life; and in the engaging childishness of these girls and boys, who, though of her own age, were mentally only up to her elbow, she found a sort of solace, a sort of peace. They kept her from thinking; their chatter and good spirits were exhilarating; the naive admiration of the young men warmed, and yet did not disturb her.--Before her long flight to other skies, the little bird might well be thankful for the sparrows.
Spring came--summer. Her twenty-first birthday passed in the Adirondacks, where her father had a cottage in that wilderness of woods and lakes. She was in her twenty-second year now, and knew what it was to feel old--oh, so old! That she was able, by the laws of the land, to buy and hold real-estate seemed but a poor set-off to this encroachment of time--though her father repeatedly pointed out this new privilege the years had brought. She could marry, too, without his consent--another empty concession to maturity, considering there was no one to marry with or without it. Of course, there were a few silly babies running after her as though she were a woolly sheep--but no one that the wildest stretch of imagination could consider a man. Some of their fathers ran, too--stout widowers panting with the unaccustomed exertion,--but that was grotesque and disgusting. Far or wide, high or low, there wasn't a pin feather of the Golden Young Man. His noble race was extinct. He lived in books, but you never met him. Never, never. He had died out a million years ago, leaving nothing save a tradition for poets and novelists to paw over.
Quite convinced that it was a wretched world, Phyllis danced and rode, picnicked and camped out after deer in a bewitching Wild West costume, and was always the first to a party, and the last to leave it--all very much like one who found it tolerable enough. Some would have called her an insatiable little pleasure-seeker, and been wholly misled. "What are any of us doing except waiting for a man?" she once announced with shocking candor. "It's the fashion to talk of 'other interests' and we girls are all graduating, and slumming, and teaching little foreign Jews to sing '_My Country 'Tis of Thee_, and _Columbia_, _Gem of the Ocean_, and learning to be trained nurses and bacteriologists--just in the effort to save our poor little self-respect. We ruin our complexions, dim our eyes, and spoil our nice hands--all the property of some future lord and master, whom we really are pilfering--and who's deceived? Who takes it seriously? We don't, who do it. Poof, what a pretense it is!--If you have to wait, why not two-step through it as I do, and be as happy as you can, like people snowed up in a train. That's what a young girl is--snowed up--and I only wish some one would come with a spade and dig me out!"
These racy confidences entertained and delighted her father, but on other people they often had a contrary effect. The truth from the lips of babes and sucklings, however phenomenal, is also disconcerting. Old women, who in private taught their daughters a revolting cynicism, and called it "putting them on their guard," were much overcome by Phyllis' frankness. It was "bold"; it was "unladylike"; it was "dreadful." They tore Phyllis to pieces, and prophesied the most awful things. It may be that they were right. Selfishness is a fine ballast, and an anxious regard for number one keeps many a little ship on an undeviating course. Phyllis was made to smart for her unconventional sayings, and they often came back to her, so distorted and coarsened by their travels, that her cheeks flushed with anger.
"There's one thing I am learning fast," she said, "and that is, all my friends seem to be men, and all my enemies, women--and I may as well get used to it now. I know there are a few exceptions either way, but it's substantially that, anyhow, and one might as well face up to it, and save trouble."
"I'm afraid you are what they call a man's woman, my dear," said Mr. Ladd.
"I'm glad of it," exclaimed Phyllis saucily. "I don't want to be any other kind of a woman, least of all one of those sneaking, cowardly, backbiting, hypocritical things. I don't wonder they used to whip them in the good old days. If men hadn't degenerated so terribly, they'd be whipping them now!"
Autumn saw her back in Carthage again. Aunt Sarah was begging to have her for another Washington winter, and was in a beautifully forgiving humor. The breaches in her social position had been repaired, and the Demon Want, confound him, was knocking loudly at the door of her elegant establishment--so that the hope of another visit, with its accompanying shower of Brother Bob's gold, loomed very attractively before these cold, blue eyes. But Phyllis could not be beguiled; she had no wish to repeat that mad winter; her mood was all the other way--for her big tranquil house, her books, her dogs, her horses, and long dreaming hours to herself, undisturbed. She had loved Washington, and had exhausted it. The strain of its business-like gaiety was not to be endured again. It was a factory of pleasure, and the hours over-long, the tasks over-hard. Aunt Sarah might ring the bell all she wished, but the factory that winter would be one toiler short. When a person has entered her twenty-second year, that advanced age brings with it a certain serenity unknown to wilder twenty. You are glad to lie back with a dog's head in your lap, and lazily watch the procession. Silly young men, choking in immense collars, no longer can keep you out of bed till three A.M. Let the new debutantes have that doubtful joy. Twenty-two preferred her book, and her silent rooms.--Not that Carthage was without its simple relaxations, but they were well spaced out, with long intervals between.
"Miss Daisy wants you on the 'phone, Miss."
"Oh, all right--I'm coming.--Hello, hello, hello--What a dear you are to ask me--A--matinee Wednesday? Love to!--What's it to be?"
"Oh, Phyllis, you won't be offended, will you, but I'm so poor, and their boxes are only five dollars, and will hold six, and they've promised to squeeze in three more chairs--and so I've invited nine--and it's in that cheap, horrid Thalia Theater, but nobody can hurt us in a box, and everybody says the play's wonderful, and you can eat peanuts, which you can't do in a real theater; and it's _Moths_, by Ouida, and Cyril Adair is the star, and he is so wonderfully handsome--oh, you must have seen his pictures in the barber-shop windows--and anyway, even if he isn't, the play is delightfully wicked--because I had such a fight with mama about it, and then Howard has been twice, which he wouldn't have done if it wasn't; and even if it isn't, how am I to give a theater-party on no more than five dollars? The Columbia boxes are fifteen, and so are the Lyceum's, and when they say six, it's six, and you simply couldn't dare to ask nine girls because they wouldn't let them in. But the Thalia man was so pleased and impressed that I believe he would have included ice-cream if I had asked him--and Phyllis?"
"Yes, darling."
"It would give such a lot of ginger to it, if you would lend me your carriage and the dog-cart--! Oh, I knew you would! What a comfort you are, Phyllis. I don't know how I'd get along without you, you are always so generous and obliging. Nettie Havens has volunteered tea at her house--just insisted on it when I told her. I guess that poor little five never went so far in all its little history! I can't think it ever ran a whole theater-party before, with carriages and teas. It's an awful tacky way of doing things, I admit, but what does it matter if we have a good time?--Yes, that's the only way to look at it, and you're a darling. Do you know I think Harry Thayre is sweet on--! Oh, bother, she says I've to ring off, or pay another nickel. If it was a man she'd let him have fifteen cents' worth! Well, good-by, good-by--!"
It was a pretty sight they presented in their box, a veritable flower-bed of young American womanhood. The bright, girlish faces, the laughter, the animation, the sparkling eyes, the ripples of merriment, the air of innocent bravado--all were in such contrast to the usual patrons of the Thalia that the house could not take its eyes off them. It was essentially a shop-girl-and-best-young-man theater, with a hoodlum gallery, and a general appearance of extreme youth. Those who did not chew gum were almost conspicuous, and a formidable young man with a voice of brass, perambulated the aisles with a large tray, and terrorized nickels and dimes from the pockets of swains. He had a humorous directness that made the price of immunity seem cheap at the money. It was worth a dime any time to escape him.
And the play?
It was a rousing love-story, crude, stilted, old-fashioned, but developed with a force and earnestness that Ouida has always possessed. The brutal Prince, the ill-used Princess, Correze, the idol of the public, the tenor whose voice has taken the world by storm, heart-broken and noble in his hopeless love--here were full-blooded situations to make the heart beat. And how nine of them _did_ beat in that crowded box. And what scalding tears rolled down those youthful cheeks! And what little fists clenched as the Prince, passing all bounds, and incensed to frenzy, struck--positively struck--the adorable being who was clinging so desperately to honor and duty! Who could blame Correze for what was to follow? Assuredly not our nine rosebuds, who, if anything, found the splendid creature almost too backward, too self-sacrificing. But--!
And Cyril Adair, who played Correze with a fervid pathos that tore the heart out of your breast! Of course, you knew he had taken the world by storm. Of course you knew the public idolized him. Wasn't he the handsomest, manliest, most chivalrous fellow alive? Hadn't he a voice to melt a stone, or drive, as cutting as a rapier, through even a Prince? His firm chin, his faultless teeth, his strange, smoldering, compelling eyes, his vigorous yet graceful frame--small wonder that the Princess threw everything to the winds for such a man. Under the circumstances none of the nine would have waited half so long. The Princess' devotion to honor and duty seemed hardly less than morbid. Her patience under insults was positively exasperating. She clung to respectability with both hands--screamed, raged, but stuck to it as tight as a limpet--until a blow in the face, and the vilest of epithets from her brutal husband, toppled her finally to perdition--that is, if it were perdition to link the remainder of her life with that glorious being, and abandon everything for love.
The box applauded wildly, and led off the whole house. The curtain was made to rise again and again. Correze, advancing to the footlights, was left in no doubt as to where he had scored his heaviest hit, and rewarded those eager, girlish faces with a glance of his fine eyes, and a bow intended for them alone. Phyllis was the least enthusiastic of the party, and her silence during the first intermission was noisily commented on. She ate caramels slowly, and added nothing but monosyllables and an enigmatic smile to the rapturous demonstrations of her companions. But had they noticed her during the further course of the performance, they might have had something else to wonder at. With parted lips, and breath so faint that she seemed not to breathe at all--with a face paling to marble, and poignant with a curious and unreasoning distress, her eyes never quitted those of Cyril Adair, and fixed themselves on his in a stare so troubled, so fascinated, that her soul seemed to leave her body and to pass the footlights.
*CHAPTER VII*
The tea that followed was but a blurred memory, a confused recollection of noise and chatter, with a stab at the heart every time the actor's name was mentioned. She was thankful to get home, and lock herself in her room. She was in a tumult of shame, agitation, and an exquisite guilty joy. She partly undressed, and threw herself on her bed, shutting her eyes to win back the face and voice that had moved her to the depths. What had he done to her? A few hours before she had never known of his existence. The merest accident had revealed it to her, and now he was causing the blood to surge through her veins, and mantle her cheeks with dishonor. For it was dishonor. Everything in her revolted at such a position. His preposterous name struck fiercely on her pride and her sense of the ridiculous--Cyril Adair! How could any one, masquerading under such an egregious alias, dare to give her a moment's concern. She burst out laughing at herself, a contemptuous and bitter laugh. Cyril Adair! No dazzled little housemaid could have been sillier than she.
Yet his face haunted her, the tones of his voice, that strange, smoldering look in his eyes. How greedily that dreadful woman had kissed him! Those were no stage kisses. Before a thousand people she had abandoned herself to his arms, and fastened that painted mouth to his in an ecstasy. The audience thought it was acting. Phyllis, with a keener perception, saw the truth, and it made her savage with jealousy. That dreadful woman was shameless, crazy, beside herself. She had wooed him with every fiber of her body, pressing his head to her bosom, using every artifice to inflame him, and what had brought down the thunders of the house had not been a delineation of passion, but the naked thing itself.
It was horrible. Actors and actresses were horrible. No wonder they were despised even while they were run after. No wonder their lives were notorious. How could it be otherwise when--? But she envied that woman. Yes, she envied that woman, terrible as it was to admit it. Hated her, and envied her.--No, she pitied her as one of her own silly, headlong sex, cursed with this need to love. She was no longer young; she was thirty years old if a day; she was probably poor, disreputable, with nothing in the world but a trunk full of trashy finery, and no home but a cheap hotel. Love was the only thing she had, poor wretch, the only thing.
And Cyril Adair? It was hard to imagine him in private life except as Correze. But, of course, he wasn't Correze--that was absurd. Perhaps he would be so changed that one would scarcely know him on the street. She had heard of such disillusions--of tottering old men playing boys--and wasn't Bernhardt sixty? But a woman can tell, a woman who--who--cares. That vigorous manhood was no made-up pretense; such freshness, such warmth, such grace, could not be affected; he was certainly not much more than thirty, on the border line of youth and early-maturity when men, to her, possessed their greatest charm.
Lying there, in a swoon of shy delight, she allowed her fancy to fly away in dreams. Hand in hand, they trod a fairy-land of love and rapture. She stole sentences from his part, and made him repeat them to her alone--avowals, passionate and tender, in all the mellow sweetness of the voice that still reechoed in her heart. He was Correze, and she, in the madness of her infatuation, had forced her way to him and thrown herself humbly at his feet. His love was not for her; she aspired to no such heights; but she had come to be his little slave; to follow him in his wanderings; to sleep across his door, and guard him while he slept. To be near him was all she asked. His little slave, who, when he was dejected and weary, would nestle beside him, and cover his hand with the softest kisses. She wanted no reward; she would try not to be jealous of those great ladies, though there would be times when she could not hold back her feelings, and his hand, as she drew it across her eyes, would be all wet with tears.
With her maid's knock at the door there came a sudden revulsion. Phyllis called to her to go away, unwilling to be seen in her defenselessness, and fearful of she knew not what. But the spell was broken. The bubble of that pretty fantasy vanished at one touch of fact. Harsh reality obtruded itself, and with it a pitiless self-arraignment. She had been swept off her feet by a third-class actor, in a third-class play, full of mawkish sentiment and unreality, in a third-class theater where they chewed gum, and ate apples while they wept over the hero's woes! A wave of self-disgust rose within her. She felt soiled, humiliated. How dared this cheap, showy creature reach out to take such liberties with a woman a thousand times above him? A creature, who in all probability ate with his knife, carried on low love affairs with admiring shop-girls, and practised his fascinations before a mirror, like a trick-monkey! Pah, the thought of her amorous imaginings reddened her cheeks, and consumed her with bitterness and shame. Where was her self-respect, her modesty? If wishes could have killed, there would have been no performance of _Moths_ that night at the Thalia Theater.
At dinner she convulsed her father with an account of the play, in which neither Adair nor the audience were in any way spared. In her zest and mockery, it all took on a richly humorous aspect, and at times she was interrupted by her own silvery peals of laughter. To hear her, how could any one have guessed that she had been stirred as she had never been stirred before, and that the screaming farce she described had been in reality the one drama that had ever touched her? Was it in revenge for what she had suffered? Was it perversity? Or was it the attempt to conquer a physical attraction so irresistible that it tormented and terrified her even while she fought it with the best of all weapons--derision?
She passed a wretched night, tossing and turning on her bed in a whirl of emotions. She was haunted by that face which appeared to regard her with such reproach. Why had she betrayed him, it seemed to ask? The smoldering eyes, compelling always, were questioning and melancholy. That look, of such singular intensity, and with its strange and mysterious appeal to some other self of hers, again asserted its resistless power. She felt herself slipping back, in a langour of tenderness, to the mood that had shocked her so much before. In vain she repeated the saving words--threw out those little life-buoys to a swimmer drowning in unworthy love--"third-class actor"--"matinee hero"--"shop-girls' idol."--The drowning swimmer continued to drown, unhelped. The life-buoys floated away, and disappeared. Engulfing love, worthy or unworthy, drew down her spent body to the blue and coraled depths, and held her there, fainting with delight.
In our secret hearts, who has not, at some time or other, felt an unreasoning desire for one all unknown. Is love, indeed--true love, anything else? Glamour and idealization--we would not go far without either, and many, hand in hand, have trod the long path to the grave, and died happy with their illusions. Nature, to screen her coarser intent, fools us, little children that we are, with these pretty and poetic artifices. May it always be so, for God knows, it is an ugly world, and it does not do to peer too curiously behind the scenes.
There was a Mrs. Beekman that Phyllis knew, the widow of a distinguished lawyer, left with nothing, who had bravely set herself to earn her living as a milliner. It was to the credit of Carthage that Mrs. Beekman's altered fortunes had not impaired its regard for her. She kept her friends in spite of the "Hortense" over her shop, and a window full of home-made hats, which, of themselves, would have amply justified ostracism. It was no new thing for Mrs. Beekman to act as chaperon, and repay, in this small measure, many kindnesses that verged on charity. So she was not surprised, though much pleased and excited, when Phyllis telephoned, and asked her to go with her to the theater. "I liked the play so much I want to see it again," trickled that tiny voice into her ear, "and though it's at that awful Thalia Theater, we can sit in a box, and be quite safe and comfortable.--May I call for you a little after eight, dear?"
Mrs. Beekman, who was an indefatigable pleasure-seeker, consented with effusiveness. Phyllis was a darling to have thought of her. One of her girls had told her the play was splendid, and that the star--oh, what didn't she say about the star! Was Phyllis crazy about him, too? Hee, hee, all alike under their skins, as Kipling said! Not that she liked Kipling--he was so unrefined--but Miss Britt (you know Miss Britt, the silly one, with poodle eyes, and a poodle-fool if ever there was one) Miss Britt raved for hours about his "somber beauty." Wasn't it killing! If Adair wanted to, he could leave town with two box-cars of conquests! My, the milliners wouldn't have a girl left, and the ice-cream parlors would all have to shut.--At eight, dear?--And dress quietly so as not to attract attention? Hee, hee, it was quite a lark, wasn't it?
Sitting in the same box, on the same chair, but with a feeling as though years had elapsed since she had last been there, Phyllis again saw the curtain rise on _Moths_. The impulse that had brought her, the mad desire to see the man who had tortured her so cruelly, had changed to a cold critical mood, to a disdain so comprehensive that it included herself no less than Adair. Dispassionate and contemptuous, it cost her no effort to steel herself against his first appearance. His mouth was undeniably rather coarse; she detected a self-complacency beneath his Correze that his acting failed to hide; she saw his glance seek the back-benches with a satisfaction at finding them filled, that struck her as somehow greedy and tradesmanlike. What a disgusting business it was to posture and rant, and choke back sham tears, and mimic the sacredest things in life--and watch back-benches with an eye to the evening's profits! The wretchedest laborer, with his pick and shovel, was more of a man. At any rate he did something that was dignified, that was useful and wanted. He was not framed in cardboard; there was no row of lights at his honest, muddy feet; his loving was a private matter, and when he kissed he meant it.--How fortunate it was that she had come! How unerring the instinct that had brought her back to be cured!
But as the play proceeded such reflections were forgotten in the intensity of her absorption. Again she was leaning forward with parted lips; rapt, over-borne, lost to everything, and pale with an indescribable tumult of emotion. She was conscious of no audience; of naught save the man who held her captive with a power so absolute and irresistible that birth, training, pride, weighed as nothing in the balance. His voice pierced her heart; his eyes seemed to draw the soul from her body; she trembled at her own helplessness, though the realization of it was also a strange and intoxicating pleasure.