Part 15

Judge Dunn finally summed up against the defendant, and in default of a fine, ordered him to find personal security to be of good behavior for three months. Much amusement was then caused by Mrs. Adair unexpectedly stepping forward, and pleading most charmingly with the judge to permit her to assume the obligation. The court was unable to resist so attractive a bit of femininity, and though remarking it was somewhat irregular, consented, amid general laughter, to grant her request.

The judge made up for it, however, by giving the defendant a stiff little lecture before dismissing the case, expressing his surprise that the husband of so young and pretty a wife should care to pass the early morning hours at poker and fisticuffs. Adair accepted the rebuke with great good nature and prompted by his wife thanked his honor for his forbearance, adding to the general hilarity by repeating aloud some of the advice that was being whispered in his ear. Apologies followed outside, and the whole party returned to their hotel in the same hack. All's well that ends well!

CHAPTER XX

Adair waited until Christmas before severing his connection with Steinberger. The holidays were bad for theatrical business, and the prospect of a temporarily reduced salary and several extra matinees seemed to make this period an auspicious one for departure. With two hundred and eighty dollars, their trunks, the clothes they stood in, and hearts beating high with eagerness and hope, the pair took the train for the City of Success.

Even on their way to it their respective positions began to change. The actor, for all his broad shoulders and big voice and commanding presence, betrayed from the first a helplessness and dependence that both pleased and surprised his little wife. He anxiously deferred to her in everything; fell in readily with every suggestion; listened with profound respect to her plans. He knew New York inside out; poverty was no stranger to him, nor the makeshifts and struggles of the poor; yet in the crisis of their fortunes it was the girl that took the lead—the girl who had never suffered a single privation in her life, who had been reared in luxury, to whom money and ease were as the air she breathed.

Left to his own unguided will Adair would have gravitated to a dingy bedroom in a dingy boarding-house. It was Phyllis who perceived the greater freedom, and the unspeakably greater comfort and charm of a tiny apartment. The nest-making instinct was strong in her, and also the bred-in-the-bone belief that it was the woman's place to guard her man's well-being, and to send him forth to work in the best of trim. She did not know how to cook; she had never swept out a room in her life, she had never even folded a table-cloth, yet her self-assurance and determination never wavered. All this could be learned—pooh, it only needed hard work and intelligence,—she would answer for its being the nicest little flat in New York, and would dismiss Adair every morning in his best clothes, smiling, well-fed, and happy, to look for an engagement.

Brave, confident little heart! Intent little head absorbed in calculations; magic the love that could cast effulgence over those soiled green notes, and the phantom gray city, and the man, none too good, or wise on whom such a treasure of devotion was lavished! But some conception of it pierced his thick skin, and what there was in him that was unselfish and noble felt disquieted at the contrast, and strangely stirred and humbled.

"Phyllis," he said huskily, "I—I didn't know what love meant until I met you. I guess lots of men go all their lives and never know. I've been sitting back here, thinking how nearly I might have missed it."

"And getting quite scared and worried?—The poor precious! If it wasn't for the conductor and that bald-headed man who's sure we're not married, because I put my feet on the seat, and wear red stockings—I'd kiss you right now, and give you a gurgle hug!"

"There are lots like me," Adair went on with unaffected seriousness, "but, Phyllis, there is only one of you. I suppose people are born like that sometimes—just one of them—and there aren't any more.—When we get round to it, we must have children; you mustn't be allowed to die and disappear; it wouldn't be right by the world."

Phyllis wrote down: "Pair tea-cups and saucers, thirty cents," and announced that in the meanwhile the world would have to wait, as one couldn't do everything at once. She added a duster to the list and a pie-pan, while a smile hovered at the corners of her lips. It impelled her to press her knee against Adair's, and whisper something so sparklingly improper that he blushed. Then she returned to housekeeping considerations with a pleased and saucy air, never so happy as when she had embarrassed him.

Accommodation for dormice, although plentiful, left much to be desired, except for dormice fond of grubbiness, gloom, and ill-smelling passages and halls. For dormice willing to live on One-hundred-and-jump-off-the-earth Street there was light and air, and reasonably sized rooms, and even skimpy glimpses of the Hudson. But Cyril wished to be near the theater district and the Thespian Club of which he was a member, and this restricted their choice to below Fifty-ninth Street. Heavens, what innumerable janitors they raised from the depths, what miles and miles of stairs they climbed, what desperate moments of indecision they endured, as, utterly spent, the precious deposit was nearly tempted from their pockets!

At last, however, at the tail of the most offensive little man in New York, whose questions included the likelihood or not of an increase in the family, and who had to be specifically assured that his new tenants meditated starting neither a bagnio nor a sweatshop, nor were going to teach music, or keep naphtha on the premises—at the tail of this personage, who at every step remembered some fresh prohibition, and some fresh possibility, the ideal was reached on the seventh floor of a house between Second and Third Avenue. It was a box of a place—sitting-room, bedroom, kitchen and bath—but shiny new, and with every window open to the sun, and Fifty-eighth Street to look out on instead of some dismal rear. It was taken at twenty-one dollars a month; their trunks followed them in; and they camped out their second night in New York on the bare boards of their new home.

With all our talk of the value of money very few of us have any conception of it. How many at least could believe that a small apartment in New York could be furnished, and prettily furnished, for a hundred and fifty dollars? On a doll-baby scale, of course, with pictures taken from the ten cent weeklies, and framed in blue creton and the same invaluable material accomplishing wonders over packing cases, improvised into wash-stands, bureaus and seats. Phyllis sent Adair off to the club, and set to work alone. She did not want him to see her dirty, tousled, and wearing an old dressing-gown of his in that chaos of disorder; though she presented a sweeter figure than she knew on her knees beside the pail, and scrubbing the floor like a little stage soubrette, or hammering creton with her mouth full of tacks and an inspired expression that would have befitted a Madonna. She was too girlish, too young, for anything to harm her beauty, and so gay and charming that all who came fell under her spell. Gawky messengers helped to move boxes, nail down matting, and elucidate the mysteries of setting up a bed. The janitor's wife, a faded German woman with gentle eyes and a soft voice, and all the European's respect for caste, insisted on joining in; and when, Phyllis, with difficulty and some shame, managed to explain she was unable to pay for such services, the creature kissed her hand, and redoubled her exertions. Beauty is a power everywhere, and if the poor can not pay its toll in compliments, they can wash windows, clean up litter, and carry an offering of frankfurters and sauerkraut up six flights of stairs; and with many an "Ach" and "lieber Gott" urge the little "high-born" to rest and eat.

And so amid kindliness and good will, the tiny apartment was got into shape, while the dark wild days without turned to snow, and the frosted panes showed nothing through but white and desolation. The dormice lay snug in their nest, and though their money ebbed, and the cupboard was next to bare, and the household work at times weighed hardly on unaccustomed, slender shoulders, perhaps they were too near Heaven to complain.

Adair had never been a very respectable nor popular member of the Thespian Club, that influential organization from which the New York stage is so largely recruited; and the return of the lost sheep was not accompanied by any particular enthusiasm. But Adair was too noticeable a man, and his talent too well remembered for his presence not to cause some stir, and soon there was comment on his extraordinary change for the better. He was certainly no longer the loud, swaggering, over-dressed Adair of the old days, with the dubious geniality, and the restless eyes. He did not drink; he seemed to have lost his surly streak; in many other ways more indefinite he had softened and improved. The Thespians, who were nothing if not good-natured and generous, very willingly let bygones be bygones, and some of the more important began to suggest his name to managers.

But the managers were made of sterner stuff than the actors and playwrights; they had longer memories, and skins that still smarted. They brightened at the name of Adair for the unexpected pleasure it gave them to say "No." Each had his special wrong to avenge, each his emphatic and passionate denunciation of a man they abominated. "I've only two rules in running my theaters," said Mr. Fielman. "The first is to give the public the best that money can buy; the second, never to engage Mr. Cyril Adair!"—Mr. Paw went further: "My poy, they say in our peeziness that the box-office talks, but if it said Adair all day and all night, I'd sooner get out and sell shoe-laces on the street than see his damn sneering face in any broduction of mine!" Niedringer was no more encouraging, and the Fordingham Brothers were curt and profane.

But the New York theatrical world is a big one; and these giants, while of enormous importance, do not rule all the roost. There are always new producers bobbing up; stars themselves make ventures into management and branch out; many others, independent on a smaller scale, choose the companies that support them. Then there are the second class houses, the vaudeville houses, the stock companies—all requiring an army of professional people. Then, too, hardly a season passes without several incoming actors from some woolly, wild, unheard-of region, arriving, full of eagerness to add Broadway laurels to brows already crowned in Teepee City or Nuggetville, Nevada. Add to these, imported English companies with the lesser parts often unfilled, and "angels," both male and female, with barrels of money for some stagestruck pet, who, desirous of a short cut to greatness, insists on beginning (and usually ending) at the top;—and you will have some small conception of what New York is—theatrically.

Adair did not despair. Not only was the atmosphere of the Thespian Club too redolent of success for that, but he was sustained besides by a couple of small offers which he received for the "road." Determined though he was to appear on Broadway, it was good for his courage and perseverence to have these engagements to refuse. They served to take the edge off the rebuffs he constantly experienced, and gave him something not altogether mournful to reflect on as he waited interminable hours in agents' and managers' anterooms. Not but what there were times when it was almost unendurable. Rejection, with an actor, carries with it a personal mortification; and his air of fashion, his nosegay, his smartly folded overcoat, his affected jauntiness—all intensify by their contrast the bitterness of his lot. He slinks off with pitiful bravado, and eyes suspiciously bright, to pull himself together for another attempt at another place, as dispirited a figure as any to be seen under heaven.

While Adair, with an effort as clumsy as it was touching, strove to hide his disappointment from his wife, and put by in their little home a steadily deepening sense of failure—she, on her side, was keeping him in ignorance of a matter that troubled her exceedingly. Her father had begun to write to her, but in such a way that a reconciliation, instead of becoming nearer, seemed more remote and impossible than ever. With all his tenderness and longing, and almost pathetic appeal "to be friends again," he was unable to resist taking flings at Adair. His hatred for the man came out in implications and covert allusions Phyllis could not forgive. Ostensibly holding out the olive branch, his letters served instead to heighten the estrangement, for behind everything was his conviction it was simply her pride that kept them apart; that having made a mess of her life, and committed an irreparable folly, she was defiantly accepting the misery she had brought down upon herself. That she was insanely happy—that she adored her husband—that neither poverty nor hardship counted a jot in her decision—all these to Mr. Ladd were incredibilities.—Yet the same story dressed up for him on the stage or in a book, would have won his sympathy, and reached his heart.—Of such inconsistencies are we made, and the poor puppets are cried over when flesh and blood is denied.

Of course, Phyllis was abnormally sensitive. Had her husband secured a good engagement, and some recognition she would have been in a more receptive mind to receive her father's advances. But Adair's unspoken anxiety, their diminishing money, their meager meals and the need that they had to take account of every penny—here were so many reasons to accentuate her critical faculties.—And this to be held as a proof that she had been "dragged down" was altogether too much. At first, full of eagerness and over many a closely-written page she had tried to explain matters to her father; but his disbelief was chilling, and from hopelessness her feelings gradually changed to anger. For a couple of weeks she had kept the thousand-dollar check he had sent her, hoping that he would so far relent toward Adair that she might accept it without disloyalty. Then, chagrined, she had returned it, though her extremity was bitter, and the tears dripped over the letter that bore it back. No reconciliation was possible that did not include her husband, or that was offered to him contemptuously and grudgingly. If this were impossible she begged her father to write no more, and spare her further suffering. His answer was as unreasonable as the others, and he contrived to wound even while he thought he was conceding everything.

His next letter she sent back unopened, and also the one after that. Then there were no more, and the postman's whistle presaged nothing after that but a post card from Tommy. These, with pictures of a local court house, or a new Masonic building, or some bald park, were almost daily visitors. But they spoke of affection and remembrance, and to a sad heart were not without their comfort.

Early one afternoon the sound of the key in the lock warned her that Adair had unexpectedly returned. His face announced his good news before he could so much as utter a word, and then the facts came out in a panting, breathless torrent. Shamus O'Dowd—she knew Shamus O'Dowd, the Irish comedian?—No?—What, never heard of Shamus O'Dowd?—Well, anyway, O'Dowd was at the Herald Square—big business—seats selling three weeks in advance—A Broth of a Boy, you know—and the fellow who was playing Captain Carleton had dropped out, and the understudy wasn't satisfactory—and—and—it was seventy-five dollars a week—and here were the lines—and you could have knocked him over with a feather when O'Dowd came right up to him at the club, and fixed it up in five minutes, and they had run through a rehearsal to give him a notion of the business, and it was a damned good character part, and—then, I wonder if that twenty-one dollar apartment had ever seen the like—with Phyllis sitting in Booful's lap, and her arms tight around his neck, and talking two to his one, all rapture and exclamations as though he had done something extraordinary instead of merely getting a job; and Booful, no less proud and foolish and excited felt, too, he had done something extraordinary, holding to the lines as though they were a patent of nobility, and crazy to begin the study of them; and describing the play with such humor and absurdity that his little wife thought she had never heard anything so funny in her life, her teeth shining as she laughed and laughed—especially at O'Dowd, who was described as fifty, with a bull-neck, and ever too much of him in front and behind, with a very short coat, and bounding fat legs, and such a Broth of a Boy that he was ready to fight or dance or sing or make love at the drop of a hat, and generally to caper from sheer exuberance of Irish youth.—Then Booful turned suddenly serious, and got up, and said that on no, no account was he to be disturbed, and began to pace like a lion up and down the doll-baby sitting-room, mumbling his part to himself with a far-away expression, and an occasional frown and swear as he missed a word; while Phyllis, pretending to sew, squeezed herself into a corner, and made as though she was not watching him, which she did in timid little peeps, thinking how handsome he was and noble and manly and splendid, with such returning recollections of his devotion, and gentleness, and simple, unrepining courage in the hard days now fast finishing, that she could have swooned from very tenderness.

A Broth of a Boy was a typical Irish drama. The central figure was a rollicking imbecile, with a tuneful voice and the customary shillelah, who foils the wicked mortgager, chucks colleens under the chin, does a hair-raising leap over a waterfall, and is altogether so Brothy and gay that no one can resist him. The usual British officer, condemned to carry out an unpalatable order, and falling under the spell of a pair of saucy Irish eyes, is found not to be half so bad a fellow as we had anticipated; and though a good deal of a booby, and the target for sarcasms that he is too obtusely English to perceive, gradually wins the toleration and even the affection of the gallery. In real life he would probably have been court-martialed for his arrant disregard of instructions, nor would a bare-legged milk-maid have been considered quite the prize the dramatist deemed her.—But one mustn't criticize this dreamy region too harshly. That great baby, the public, loves it,—and in the theater-world there is plenty of room for this grotesque Ireland, and always will be; and baby's patronage feeds many worthy and deserving people, who otherwise might have not a little trouble of it to live.

Yes, let us be lenient toward the Irish drama. It brought seventy-five dollars a week to that little apartment high up in East Fifty-eighth Street, and hope and courage to hearts that were beginning to falter.

CHAPTER XXI

In the whole house that night of Adair's return to Broadway there was probably but one person in front who was even aware that the bill had been changed. That rapt little spectator waited with her heart in her mouth for the actor's appearance, and thrilled herself with fairy tales while the play ponderously opened, and took its course. Adair would be recognized; there would be a wild demonstration of welcome; cheers, applause, yes, an ovation, with people standing up, and the gallery in an uproar!—It was a dream, of course, a phantasy, for her head was too squarely set on her shoulders to count on anything of the sort, but nevertheless it exhilarated her enough to make the reality doubly, trebly disappointing.

His entrance was unheralded by a single handclap, O'Dowd having just retired amid thunders, with part of the audience still insistently humming the refrain of Sweet Kitty O'Rourke, (words by Stevowsky; music by Cohen). Adair's first few lines were altogether lost in consequence, the scene beginning in vehement pantomime, and the house only gradually, and with extreme unwillingness, resigning itself to the exit of the star. It must be said they had some right to regret him. Adair was anxious and forced, and so desperately in earnest to be funny that he suggested a marionette. Phyllis' surprise turned to dismay, and dismay to an inexpressible pain. That he won many a boorish laugh only heightened her misery. It was worse than bad, it was common, and she could have bent down and cried in very shame. But in the throes of her despair she was watchful, and her pretty brows corrugated with the intensity of her attention. Poor though the part was, surely it could be done better, oh, so much better; and if only she dared—! An infinite compassion dimmed her eyes, an infinite pity, for was it not for her he had stooped to this vile clowning, debasing himself, blowing out his cheeks like a turkey-gobbler, feverishly catching at every trick to get a grin or a titter? All this sacrifice of dignity, manhood and self-respect to keep the poor little pot boiling on Fifty-eighth Street?