Chapter 4

I looked and believed. The dramas were variously and pithily described as The Picture with the Punch Powerful--The Smashing Five-Reel Masterpiece--A Play of Peculiar Problems and Tense Situations--Six Gripping Reels, 7,000 Feet and Every Foot a Punch! Vida Sommers, in the scenes reproduced from these plays, had indeed a busy face. In the picture captioned "Why Did You Make My Mamma Cry?" the tiny golden-haired girl is reproaching her father in evening dress. I read the opening lines of the synopsis: "A young business man, who has been made successful through his wife's money, is led to neglect her through pressure of affairs, falls into the toils of a dancer in a public place and becomes a victim of her habit, that of drinking perfume in her tea--"

But I had not the heart to follow this tragedy. In another, "The Woman Pays--Powerful and Picturesque, a Virile Masterpiece of Red-Blooded Hearts," Vida Sommers is powerfully hating her husband whom she has confronted in the den of a sneering and superbly gowned adventuress who declares that the husband must choose between them. Of course there can be no doubt about the husband's choice. No sane movie actor would hesitate a second. The caption says of Vida Sommers: "Her Love Has Turned to Hate." It may be good acting, but it would never get her chosen by the male of her species--the adventuress being what is known in some circles as a pippin.

I studied still another of these documents--"Hearts Asunder." Vida Sommers has sent her beautiful daughter to the spring for a pail of water, though everyone in the audience must know that Gordon Balch, the detestable villain, is lurking outside for precisely this to occur. The synopsis beautiful says: "The mother now goes in search of her darling, only to find her struggling in the grasp of Gordon Balch, who is trying to force his attentions on her." This is where Vida Sommers has to look frightened, though in a later picture one sees that her fright changed to "A Mother's Honest Rage." The result is that Gordon Balch gets his, and gets it good. The line under his last appearance is "The End of a Misspent Life." Vida Sommers here registers pity. As Ma Pettengill had said, her face seemed never to have a moment's rest.

While I studied these exhibits my hostess had not been silent upon the merits of her little actress friend. Slowly she made me curious as to the origin and inner life of this valued member of an exalted profession.

"Yes, sir; there she is at the top, drawing down big money, with a nice vine-clad home in this film town, furnished from a page in a woman's magazine, with a big black limousine like a hearse--all but the plumes--and a husband that she worships the ground he walks on. Everything the heart can desire, even to being mother to some of the very saddest persons ever seen on a screen. It shows what genius will do for a woman when she finds out what kind of genius she's got and is further goaded by the necessity of supporting a husband in the style to which he has been accustomed by a doting father. She's some person now, let me tell you.

"She spent a week with me in Red Gap last fall, and you'd ought to seen how certain parties kowtowed to me so they'd get to meet her. I found that about every woman under fifty in our town is sure she was born for this here picture work, from Henrietta Templeton Price to Beryl Mae Macomber, who's expecting any day to be snapped up by some shrewd manager that her type is bound to appeal to, she being a fair young thing with big eyes and lots of teeth, like all film actresses. Metta Bigler, that teaches oil painting and burnt wood, give Vida a reception in her Bohemian studio in Red Gap's Latin Quarter--the studio having a chain of Chianti bottles on the wall and an ash tray with five burnt cigarette ends on a taboret to make it look Bohemian--and that was sure the biggest thrill our town has had since the Gus Levy All Star Shamrock Vaudeville Company stranded there five years ago. It just shows how important my little actress friend is--and look what she come up from!"

I said I wouldn't mind looking what she come up from if she had started low enough to make it exciting.

Ma Pettengill said she had that! She had come up from the gutter. She said that Vida Sommers, the idol of thousands, had been "a mere daughter of the people." Her eyes crinkled as she uttered this phrase. So I chose a chair in the shadow while she built a second cigarette.

Ten years ago I'm taking a vacation down in New York City. Along comes a letter from Aunt Esther Colborn, of Fredonia, who is a kind of a third cousin of mine about twice removed. Says her niece, Vida, has had a good city job as cashier of a dairy lunch in Boston, which is across the river from some college, but has thrown this job to the winds to marry the only college son of a rich New York magnate or Wall Street crook who has cast the boy off for contracting this low alliance with a daughter of the people. Aunt Esther is now afraid Vida isn't right happy and wants I should look her up and find out. It didn't sound too good, but I obliged.

I go to the address in Sixty-seventh Street on the West Side and find that Vida is keeping a boarding house. But I was ready to cheer Aunt Esther with a telegram one second after she opened the door on me--in a big blue apron and a dustcap on her hair. She was the happiest young woman I ever did see--shining it out every which way. A very attractive girl about twenty-five, with a slim figure and one of these faces that ain't exactly of howling beauty in any one feature, but that sure get you when they're sunned up with joy like this one was.

She was pleased to death when I told her my name, and of course I must come in and stay for dinner so I could see all her boarders that was like one big family and, above all, meet her darling husband Clyde when he got home from business. The cheeriest thing she was, and I adore to meet people that are cheery, so I said nothing would please me better. She took me up to her little bedroom to lay my things off and then down to the parlour where she said I must rest and excuse her because she still had a few little things to supervise. She did have too. In the next hour and a half she run up and down two flights of stairs at least ten times. I could hear her sweeping overhead and jamming things round on the stove when she raced down to the kitchen. Yes, she had several little things to supervise and one girl to help her. I peeked into the kitchen once while I was wandering through the lower rooms, and she seemed to be showing this girl how to boil potatoes. I wondered if she never run down and if her happy look was really chronic or mebbe put on for my benefit. Still, I could hear her singing to herself and she moved like a happy person.

In looking round the parlour I was greeted on every wall by pictures of a charming youth I guessed was darling Clyde. A fine young face he had, and looked as happy as Vida herself. There was pictures of him with a tennis racket and on a sailboat and with a mandolin and standing up with his college glee club and setting on a high-powered horse and so forth, all showing he must be a great social favourite and one born to have a good time. I wondered how he'd come to confer himself on the cashier of a quick-lunch place. I thought it must be one of these romances. Then--I'm always remembering the foolishest things--I recalled a funny little absent look in Vida's eyes when she spoke of her darling coming home from business. I thought now it must of been pride; that he was performing some low job in a factory or store while she run the boarding house, and she didn't want me to know it. I thought he must be a pretty fine rich man's son to stand the gaff this way when cast off by his father for mixing up with a daughter of the people.

It come dinnertime; about a dozen boarders straggling in, with Vida in a pretty frock anxious because darling Clyde was ten minutes late and of course something fatal must of happened to him in crossing a crowded street. But nothing had. He showed up safe and sound and whistling in another ten minutes, and became the life of the party. He looked near as happy as Vida did when she embraced him out in the hall, a fine handsome young fellow, the best-natured in the world, jollying the boarders and jollying me and jollying Vida that he called Baby Girl, or Babe. I saw, too, that I must of been mistaken about the job he was holding down. He was dressed in a very expensive manner, with neat little gold trinkets half concealed about him, the shirt and collar exactly right and the silk socks carefully matching the lavender tie.

He kept the table lively all through dinner with jokes and quips from the latest musical comedies and anecdotes of his dear old college days, and how that very afternoon he had won a silver cup and the pool championship of his college club--and against a lot of corking good players, too, he didn't mind saying. Also I noticed we was eating a mighty good dinner; so darned good you didn't see how Vida could set it up at the price boarders usually pay.

After dinner Clyde sat down to the piano in the parlour and entertained one and all with songs of a comic or sentimental character. He knew a piano intimately, and his voice was one of these here melting tenors that get right inside of you and nestle. He was about the most ingratiating young man I'd ever met, and I didn't wonder any more about Vida's look of joy being permanent. She'd look in on the party every once in a while from the kitchen or the dining room where she was helping her Swede do the dishes for fifteen people and set the table for breakfast.

She was about an hour at this, and when at last she'd slipped out of her big apron and joined us she was looking right tuckered but still joyous. Clyde patted his Baby Girl's hand when she come in, and she let herself go into an easy-chair near him that one of the boarders got up to give her. I got the swift idea that this was the first time all day she'd set down with any right feeling of rest.

Then Clyde sung to her. You could tell it was a song he meant for her and never sung till she'd got the work done up. A right pretty old song it was, Clyde throwing all the loving warmth of his first-class tenor voice into the words:

Good night, good night, beloved! I come to watch o'er thee, To be near thee, to be near thee.

I forget the rest, but there was happy tears in Vida's eyes when he finished in one climbing tenor burst. Then Clyde gets up and says he has an engagement down to his college club because some of his dear old classmates has gathered there for a quiet little evening of reminiscence and the jolly old rascals pretend they can't get along without him. Vida beams on him brighter than ever and tells him to be sure and have a good time, which I'd bet money he'd be sure to.

It was a very pretty scene when they said good night. Vida pretended that Clyde's voice was falling off from smoking too many cigarettes at this club. "I wouldn't mind you're going there, but I just know you spend most of the time in the club's horrid old smoking room!" She tells him this with a pout. Smoking room of a club! The knowing little minx! And Clyde chided her right back in a merry fashion. He lifted one of her hands and said his Baby Girl would have to take better care of them because the cunnun' little handies was getting all rough. Then they both laughed and went out for a long embrace in the hall.

Vida come back with a glowing countenance, and the boarders having dropped off to their rooms when the life of the party went to his club we had a nice chat. All about Clyde. She hoped I did like him, and I frankly said he was about the most taking young brat I'd ever been close to. She explained how their union had been a dream; that during their entire married life of a year and a half he had never spoken one cross word to her. She said I couldn't imagine his goodness of heart nor his sunny disposition nor how much everyone admired him. But the tired thing got so sleepy in ten minutes, even talking about her husband, that she couldn't keep back the yawns, so I said I'd had a wonderful evening and would have to go now.

But up in the bedroom, while I'm putting my things on, she gets waked up and goes more into detail about her happiness. I've never been able to figure out why, but women will tell each other things in a bedroom that they wouldn't dream of telling in any other room. Not that Vida went very far. Just a few little points. Like how Clyde's father had cast him off when they married and how she had felt herself that she was nothing but a bad woman taking advantage of this youth, she being a whole year older than he was; but Clyde had acted stunning in the matter, telling his father he had chosen the better part. Also it turned out this father hadn't cast him off from so much after all, because the old man went flat broke in Wall Street a couple of months later, perishing of heart failure right afterward, and about the only thing Clyde would of drawn from the estate anyway was an old-fashioned watch of his grandfather's with a chain made from his grandmother's hair when she was a bride.

I gathered they had been right up against it at this time, except for the two thousand dollars that had been left Vida by her Uncle Gideon in the savings bank at Fredonia. Clyde, when she drew this out, wanted they should go to Newport with it where they could lead a quiet life for a couple of months while he looked about for a suitable opening for himself. But Vida had been firm, even ugly, she said, on this point. She'd took the two thousand and started a boarding house that would be more like a home than a boarding house, though Clyde kept saying he'd never be able to endure seeing the woman bearing his name reduced to such ignoble straits.

Still he had swallowed his foolish pride and been really very nice about it after she got the business started. Now he was always telling her to be sure and set a good table. He said if you were going to do a thing, even if it was only keeping a boarding house, to do it well. That was his motto--do it well or don't do it at all! So she was buying the best cuts of meats and all fresh vegetables because of his strict ideas in this matter, and it didn't look as if they'd ever really make a fortune at it--to say nothing of there being more persons than I'd believe that had hard luck and got behind in their payments, and of course one couldn't be stern to the poor unfortunates.

I listened to this chatter till it seemed about time to ask what business Clyde had took up. It seemed that right at the moment he was disengaged. It further seemed that he had been disengaged at most other moments since he had stooped to this marriage with a daughter of the people. I mustn't think it was the poor boy's fault, though. He was willing at all times to accept a situation and sometimes would get so depressed that he'd actually look for work. Twice he had found it, but it proved to be something confining in an office where the hours were long and conditions far from satisfactory.

That's how she put it, with glowing eyes and flushed cheeks: "It proved to be mere dull routine work not in the least suited to darling Clyde's talents and the conditions were far from satisfactory. I had the hardest time prevailing on him to give the nasty old places up and wait patiently for a suitable opening. He was quite impatient with me when he consented--but, of course, he's only a boy of twenty-four, a whole year younger than I am. I tell him every day a suitable opening is bound to occur very soon. You see, he had so many grand friends, people of the right sort that are wealthy. I insist on his meeting them constantly. Just think; only last week he spent Saturday and Sunday at one of the biggest country houses on Long Island, and had such a good time. He's a prime favourite with a lot of people like that and they're always having him to dine or to the opera or to their balls and parties. I miss him horribly, of course, and the poor dear misses me, but I tell him it will surely lead to something. His old college chums all love him too--a boy makes so many valuable friends in college, don't you think? A lot of them try to put things in his way. I couldn't bear to have him accept a situation unworthy of him--I know it would kill him. Why, he wilts like a flower under the least depression."

Well, I set and listened to a long string of this--and not a word for me to say. What could any one of said? Wasn't it being told to me by the happiest woman I ever set eyes on? Yes, sir; I'd never believe how gentle natured the boy was. Why, that very morning, being worried about something that went wrong with breakfast, which she had to turn out at five A. M. to get started hadn't she clean forgot to change his studs to a fresh shirt? And, to make it worse, hadn't she laid out a wrong color of socks with his lavender tie? But had he been cross to her, as most men would of been? Not for one second! He'd simply joked her about it when she brought up his breakfast tray, just as he'd joked her to-night about her hands getting rough from the kitchen work. And so forth and so forth!

The poor thing had got so dead for sleep by this time that she was merely babbling. She'd probably of fallen over in her clothes if I hadn't been there. Anyway, I got her undressed and into bed. She said Clyde's goodnight song always rung in her ears till she slept. It didn't ring long this night. She was off before I got out the door. Darned if I hadn't been kind of embarrassed by her talk, knowing it would never do for me to bust in with anything bordering on the vicious, such as suggesting that if Clyde now and then went into the kitchen and helped Baby Girl with the dishes it would make a very attractive difference in him. I took another good look at his pictures in the parlour before I let myself out of the house. He still looked good--but hell!

I wrote Aunt Esther the same evening not to worry one minute about Vida's happiness, because I wished we could all be as happy as she was. All the same I took pains to go round to that boarding house a couple times more because it seemed like the girl's happiness might have a bum foundation. Darling Clyde was as merry and attentive as ever and Vida was still joyous. I guess she kept joyous at her work all day by looking forward to that golden moment after dinner when her boy would sing Good night, good night, beloved--he'd come to watch o'er her! How that song did light her face up!

She confided to me one of these times that the funny men are always making jokes about how much it costs a woman for clothes, and she wondered why they didn't make some of their old jokes about how much it costs for men's clothes too. She said I wouldn't believe how much they had to lay out on Clyde's clothes so he'd be sure to look right when a suitable opening occurred. I could take the item of shirts alone that had to be made to order and cost seven-fifty each, to say nothing of collars and ties and suits from what Clyde said was the only tailor in New York that could dress a gentleman so he looked like one. She said if these funny humourists could see what they spent on her clothes and what they had to spend on Clyde's, she bet they'd feel mighty cheap. She laughed like she had a bully joke on the poor things.

She was glad, too, for Clyde's sake that a suitable opening was just about to occur any moment, because the poor chap said himself it was a dog's life he was leading, with nothing much to do every day but go to the club and set round. And how thankful she'd ought to be that he never drank--the least bit of liquor made him ill--and so many young men of his class nowadays drank to excess.

No; nothing for me to say and nothing to do. Here was one happy love match. So I come home, making Vida promise to write often.

She did write about six times in the next three years. The chief fact standing out was that the right opening for Clyde hadn't opened yet--and he was getting more impatient every day. He always had something in view. But I judged he was far-sighted. And some way when he had got his rope over a job the hondoo wouldn't seem to render. He couldn't cinch anything. He was as full of blandishment as ever, though, and not a one of his staunch old friends had dropped him on account of his unfortunate marriage. He was a great diner-out and spent lots of week-ends, and just now was on a jolly houseboat in Florida for three months with an old college mate worth nine million dollars, and wasn't that nice! She could just see him keeping the whole party gay with his mandolin and his songs. The summer before that this same friend had let Clyde have an elegant motor car for his own use, and the foolish boy had actually took her out in it one Sunday, there being a pongee motor coat in the car that fit her beautifully so that none of his rich friends could have told she wasn't dressed as smartly as they was. He not only kept her out all afternoon, but would have took her to dinner some place only she had to get back to the boarding house because you couldn't trust these raw Swedes.

And there was one thing she was going to bring herself to confess to me, no matter if it did sound disloyal--a dreadful thing about Clyde. It was ugly of her to breathe a word against him, but she was greatly worried and mebbe I could help her. The horrible truth was that her boy was betraying an inclination to get fat, and he'd only laugh at her when she warned him. Many a night her pillow had been wet with tears on this account, and did I believe in any of these remedies for reducing? Wasn't there something she could slip into his pudding that would keep him down without his knowing it, because otherwise, though it was a thing no true wife ought to say, her beloved would dig his grave with his teeth.

I thought that was about enough and even ample. I started a hot answer to this letter, saying that if darling Clyde was digging his grave with his teeth it was her own fault because she was providing the spade and the burial plot, and the quickest way to thin her darling down would be for her to quit work. But shucks! Why insult the poor thing? I got back my composure and wrote her a nice letter of sympathy in her hour of great trouble. I didn't say at all that if I had been in her place Mr. Clyde would of long since had my permission to go to the devil. Yes, sir; I'd have had that lad going south early in the second year. Mebbe not at that! A woman never really knows how some other man might of made a fool of her.

Two more years drug on, with about two letters from Vida, and then I get a terrible one announcing the grand crash. First, the boarding house had died a lingering death, what from Vida buying the best the market afforded and not having learned to say "No!" to parties that got behind, and Clyde having had to lend a couple hundred dollars to a fraternity brother that was having a little hard luck. She'd run the business on a narrow trail for the last two months, trying to guard every penny, but it got so she and Clyde actually had to worry over his next club dues, to say nothing of a new dress suit he was badly needing. Then some parties she owed bills to come along and pushed her over the cliff by taking her furniture. She was at first dreadfully worried about how her boy would stand the blow, but he'd took it like the brave, staunch man he was, being such a help to her when they had to move to a furnished room near the old home where they both had been so happy. He'd fairly made the place ring with his musical laughter and his merry jesting about their hardships.