CORA BOYLE played “Red Winter” in London for two years. She began her run in May of 1908 with a popular English male star as her hero. He presently retired from the company and Cosmo Rand replaced him. Olive Ilden wrote an opinion to Mark from her new house in Chelsea: “It seems to me that your one time wife is a competent second rate actress. She—or someone near her—must have intelligence. She has perfectly applied our musical comedy manner to melodrama. She is languid and rude to the audience and is enormously, successful, naturally. Ambrose Russell is painting her. If you knew London you would understand that to have Ambrose Russell paint one implies entire success. He alternates Gaiety girls and Duchesses and has acquired a trick of wonderful vulgarity. I met Miss Boyle at his studio on Sunday. We talked about you and she rather gushed. Her infantile husband stood by and said Rawther at intervals like an automatic figure on a clock. A pretty thing.... Of course I prefer London to Winchester. Ecclesiastical[79] society is only amusing in Trollope. My husband got our house from a retired Admiral and it has a garden. I have fallen in love with him—my husband, not the Admiral. He has written a book of Naval tales on the sly and to my horror they are quite good. Having scorned him as a mere gentleman all these years it upsets me to have to consider him as an artist. I hear from Ian Gail that your plays all make quantities of money because they are utter rubbish in lovely settings and that your house is an upholsterer’s paradise. Very bad for the children who are probably spoiled beyond hope or help.” Mark wrote four pages of denial and received: “Nonsense! Of course you do not have courtesans to lunch but leading ladies come and swoon on your drawing room floor and the children are pointed out in your Central Park as Mark Walling’s brats. Your parasites fawn on them. Their world is made up of expensive motors, sweets and an adoring idiot as God. The little boy reads theatrical reviews over his porridge and the little girl probably does not know that she is a mammal and liable to death, spanking or lessons. They live in a treacle well.... Your one time wife has taken a house near me and her pictures, eating breakfast in bed with a Pom on the pillow, adorn the Sketch. I danced with her husband last night.”
[80]Cora Boyle’s photographs in the London Weeklies made old Carlson sneer. He lounged in Mark’s library and derided: “A fine figger and a pair of black eyes. Actress? Sure. She makes pictures of herself. And what the hell else do folks want, huh? Just that. They want pictures. You say they want fine scenery and new ideas about lights and all? Bosh, son! They want to see a good lookin’ gal in good clothes—and not much clothes—with all the lights in the house jammed on her. Act? Make ’em cry a little and they think it’s actin’. Margot’ll be the boss actress of the United States when she’s twenty—Come here, Maggie, and tell me how old you are.”
“Seven and a half,” said Margot, “and I don’t want to be an actress.”
“Huh. Why not?”
“Aunt Sadie says actresses aren’t nice,” Margot informed him.
Carlson wrinkled his yellow face and chuckled out, “Ask Mark what he thinks of ’em, sister.”
She turned her eyes up to Mark gravely and smiled. She was unlike her father, most like her mother. Mark bent and lifted her in the air, kissed her bare knees and put her hair aside from the little ears, faintly red, delightfully chilled for his mouth from a walk in the Park. She[81] said, on his shoulder, “Oo, that’s a new stickpin, papa!”
“Diamonds get ’em all,” Carlson nodded.
“It’s a sapphire,” said Mark.
“Nice,” Margot approved and Mark felt glorified. Children were certainly a relief after the arid nonchalance of women who took money, jewels or good r?les and asked for more donations over the house telephone. Margot played with the sapphire square a moment and then scrambled down from Mark’s shoulder to his knee where she sat admiring him while he wrote checks. He smiled at her now and then, let her blot signatures and kissed her hands when she did so.
“You’d spoil a trick elephant,” Carlson muttered, “Ain’t Gurdy old enough to go to school?”
“He started in at Doctor Cary’s last week. They’ve got him learning Latin and French, right off.”
“What’s Doctor Cary’s?”
“It’s a school in Sixtieth Street.”
“Hump,” said Carlson, “Private School? Well, you’re right. Public schools teach hogwash. They got to. They teach hogs. But why didn’t you send him to one these schools out of town while you were at it? Get him out of New York.”
“My G—glory,” Mark cried, “He’s only nine!”
[82]Margot corrected, “Ten, papa. He was ten in May.” Then she told Carlson, “Papa’d just die if Gurdy went away to school. He told Miss Converse.” She slid from his knee and curtsied to Carlson with, “I must take my French lesson, now. So, good afternoon.” She was gone out of the room before Mark could kiss her again. She was always within reach of kisses and her warmth, curled on his lap was something consolatory when he did send Gurdy away to Saint Andrew’s School in September 1910. Villay, his broker, and his lawyer advised the step. Olive Ilden wrote to him: “I am glad you have done the right thing. God knows I am no cryer up of the Public School System. But a Public School (I forget what you call private kennels for rich cubs in the States) is the only thing for the boy, in your situation. Ian Gail tells me that Gurdy is rather clever. I can imagine nothing worse than to be the son by adoption of a theatrical manager and a day scholar at a small New York school. But I know how miserable you are. Every one has sentimental accretions. I dislike seeing old women run down by motors, myself. No, I know how badly you feel, just now. But these be the fair rewards of them that love, you know? My own son is, of course, as the archangels. I hear through his Housemaster at Harrow that he smokes cigarettes and bets on all the races.”
[83]Mark tried to take Gurdy’s absence with a fine philosophy. His broker and his lawyer assured him that Saint Andrew’s was the best school in the country. But the red, Georgian buildings spread on the New England meadow and the impersonal stateliness of the lean Headmaster seemed a cold nest for Gurdy. He missed the boy with a dry and aching pain that wasn’t curable by work on five new plays, Margot’s plump warmth on his knee or contrived, brief intoxication. All his usual enchantments failed. He wore out the phonograph plates of the Danse Macabre and the Peer Gynt “Sunrise.” He worried wretchedly and the disasters of October and November hardly balanced his interior trouble. Two, the more expensive two of the five Carlson and Walling productions failed. Carlson cheerfully indicated the shrinkage of applicants for jobs, hopeful playwrights and performers in the office above the 45th Street Theatre. Mark regretted twenty thousand dollars spent for shares in the Terriss Pictograph Company. Yet young Terriss was a keen fellow and Carlson thought something might come of motion pictures after a while. His friends sighed about Mark that the “show business was a gamble” and on visits to the farm Mark tried to be gay. A Military Academy had been built in Fayettesville on a stony field owned by Eddie Bernamer, the only heritage from Bernamer’s[84] Norwegian father. Gurdy’s brothers were transferred to this polished school and Mark was soothed, in thinking that he’d made his own people grandees. He wished that he could ape the composure of the Bernamers and said so on a visit near Christmas time.
“But, great C?sar,” Bernamer blinked, kicking balled snow from a boot-heel, “this Saint Andrew’s is a good school ain’t it, even if it is up by Boston? The buildin’s are fire proof, ain’t they? Gurdy can’t git out at night and raise Ned? Then what’s got into you?”
“Oh, but—my God, Eddie!... I miss him.”
“You’re a fool,” said his brother-in-law, staring at Mark, “You’re doin’ the right thing by the boy. You always do the right thing—like you done it by us. Sadie and me’ve got seven kids and I love ’em all.... They got to grow up. Stop bein’ a fool.... You don’t look well. Thin’s a rail. Business bad?”
“We lost about forty-five thousand in two months.”
“That countin’ in the thousand you gave Sadie for her birthday?”
“No—Lord, no!”
Bernamer looked about the increased, wide farm and the tin roofed garage where Mark’s blue motor stood pompous beside the cheap family machine. He drawled, “Well, you’ve sunk about[85] twenty-five thousand right here, bud. You let up on us. Save your money and set up that theatre of your own you want so. And I’m makin’ some money on the side.”
“How?”
The farmer grinned.
“That no good Healy boy—Margot’s mamma’s cousin, come soft soapin’ round for a loan last summer. He and another feller have a kind of music hall place in Trenton. A couple of girls that sing and one of those movin’ picsher machines. They wanted five hundred to put in more chairs. I fixed it I’d get a tenth the profit and they’ve been sendin’ me twenty-five and thirty dollars a week ever since—and prob’ly cheatin’ the eye teeth out of me. Dunno what folks go to the place for—but they do.”
“Funny,” said Mark.
A bugle blew in the grey bulk of the Military Academy. Boys came threading out across the flat snow between ice girt tree trunks. A triple rank formed below the quivering height of the flagpole where the wind afflicted the banner. The minute shimmer of brass on the blue uniforms thrilled Mark. The flag rippled down in folds of a momentary beauty. He sighed and turned back to the pink papered living room where Gurdy’s small, fat legged sisters were clotted around Margot’s rosy velvet on a leather lounge.[86] Old Walling smoked a sickening cheroot and smiled at all this prettiness. Margot’s black hair was curled expansively by the damp air. She sat regally, telling her country cousins of Mastin’s shop where Mark bought her clothes. She kissed every one good-bye when Mark’s driver steered the car to the door and told Eddie Bernamer how well his furred moleskin jacket suited him. In the limousine she stretched her bright pumps on the footwarmer beside Mark’s feet and said, “Oh, you’ve some colour, now, papa!”
“Have I? Cold air. D’you know you say na-ow and ca-ow, daughter, just like you lived on the farm the year ’round?”
Margot gave her queer, chiming chuckle which was like muffled Chinese bells. “Do I?”
“Pure New Jersey, honey. I used to. Mrs. Le Moyne used to guy me about it when I was a kid.”
“Miss Converse says ‘guy’ is slang,” Margot murmured.
“So it is, sister. We ought to go to England some summer pretty soon and let Miss Converse visit her folks.”
“I’d love to.... I’ve never been abroad,” she said, gravely stating it as though Mark mightn’t know, “And every one goes abroad, don’t they?”
“And what would you do abroad?”
She considered one pump and fretted the silver[87] buckle with the other heel. “I’d see people, papa.”
“What people, sis?”
“Oh,” she said, “every one!”
It set him thinking that she lived pent in his house with her stiff, alien governess. She was infinitely safe, so, but she might be bored; he recalled hot and stagnant evenings on the farm when his mind had floated free of the porch steps and his father’s drawl into a paradise of black haired nymphs and illustrious warriors dressed from the engravings of the Centennial Shakespeare. Perhaps she should go to school? He consulted the governess, was surprised by her agreement, began to ask questions about schools for small girls.
“Miss Thorne’s,” said his broker, Villay, “She’ll really be taught something there.... Miss Thorne was my wife’s governess. I’ll see if I can manage....”
“Manage what?”
The broker clicked his cigarette case open, shut it and laughed, “You know what I mean, Walling.”
“No, I don’t.”
“It was one thing getting Gurdy into Saint Andrew’s. The Headmaster’s a broad minded man.... My dear boy, you’re Walling—Walling, of Carlson and Walling and you used to be[88] a matinée idol.... I don’t like hurting your feelings.”
“You mean you’ll have to go down on your knees to this Miss Thorne to get her to take Margot?”
The broker said, “Not exactly down on my knees, Walling. I’ll have it managed. The school’s a corporation and my wife owns some stock.” Mark groaned and was driven uptown thinking sourly of New York. Things like this made Socialists, he fancied, and looked with sympathy at an orator on a box in union Square. But Gurdy was arriving by the five o’clock train at the Grand Central Station and the lush swirl of the crowd on Fifth Avenue cured Mark’s spleen. Snow fluttered in planes of brief opal from the depth of assorted cornices above the exciting lights. A scarlet car crossed his at Thirty Fourth Street and bore a rigid, revealed woman in emerald velvet, like a figure of pride in a luminous shell. Her machine moved with his up the slope. Mark examined her happily. She chewed gum with the least movement of her white and vermilion cheeks. He despised her and felt strong against the pyramidal society in which Walling, of Carlson and Walling, was disdained. A cocktail in the Manhattan bar helped. The yellow place was full of undergraduates bustling away from Harvard and Yale. The consciousness[89] of dull trim boots and the black, perpetual decency of his dress raised Mark high out of this herd. At least he knew better than to smoke cigarettes with gold tips and the oblique, racy colours of neckties had no meaning for him beyond gaudiness. He strolled to the clapboards and icy labyrinthine bewilderment of the station, found the right gate and beheld uncountable ladies gathered together with children in leather gaiters, chauffeurs at attention smoking furtively. Here, he knew, was good breeding collected to take charge of its sons. The cocktail struggled for a moment with cold air. Mark retired to the rough wooden wall and watched this crowd. The mingling voices never reached plangency. The small girls and boys stirred like low flowers in a field of dark, human stalks. Colours, this winter, were sombre. The women walked with restraint, with tiny gestures that revealed nothing, with smiles to each other that meant nothing. He had a feeling of deft performance and a young fellow at the wall beside Mark chuckled, lighting a cigarette.
“A lot of rich dames waitin’ for their kids from some goddam school up in Boston, see?”
Mark nodded. The young fellow gave the grouped women another stare and crossed the tight knees of his sailor’s breeches. The nostrils of his shapely, short nose shook a trifle. He[90] tilted his flat cap further over an ear and winked comradely at Mark, “Wonder who the kids’ fathers are, huh? A lot of rich dames....” He spat and added, “Well, you can’t blame ’em so much. Their husban’s are all keepin’ these chorus girls. But it’s too much money, that’s what. If they’d got to work some and cook an’ all they wouldn’t have time for this society stuff. It’s too much money. If they’d got to cook their meals they wouldn’t have time for carryin’ on with all these artists an’ actors an’ things—” He broke off to snap at a girl who came hurrying from a telephone booth, “Say, what in hell? Makin’ another date?”
“Honest, I was just phonin’ mamma,” the girl said.
“You took a time!—Phonin’ her what?” He scowled, dominating the girl, “Huh?”
The girl argued, “I’d got to tell her sump’n, ain’t I, Jimmy? I told her I was goin’ to a show with a gerl fren’—”
“Some friend,” said the sailor, laughed at himself and tramped off with his girl under an arm. The girl’s cheap suit of beryl cloth shook out a scent of cinnamon. Mark sighed; she was young and pretty and shouldn’t lie to her mother about men. But perhaps her mother was bad tempered, illiberal. Perhaps the flat was crowded with a preposterous family and exuded this slim[91] thing often, hoping a fragment of pleasure. A man couldn’t be critical. Mark went to meet Gurdy and immediately forgot all discomforts in seeing that the boy had grown an inch, that the lashes about his dark blue eyes were blackening, in hearing him admit that he was glad to be at home again.
Gurdy’s schoolmates had sisters at Miss Thorne’s, it seemed, and Mark waited, fretting, through the Christmas holidays until his broker wrote that Miss Thorne would be pleased to have Margot as a pupil. Miss Converse, the governess, asked Mark bluntly how he had managed this matter.
“You Americans are extraordinary,” she said, “You’re so—so essentially undemocratic. It’s shocking. But we must get Margot some decent frocks directly.”
The bill for Margot’s massed Christmas clothes lay on his desk. Mark started, protesting, “But—”
“I’ve been meaning to talk of this for some time,” said the governess.
“Her clothes?”
“Her clothes.—My people were quite rich, you know, and I had things from Paris but really—O, really, Mr. Walling, you mustn’t let her have every pretty frock she sees! I must say you’ve more taste than most women—quite remarkable.[92] But what will there be left for the child when she comes out?”
He wanted to answer that no frock devised of man could make Miss Converse other than a bulky, angular female but gave his meek consent to authority. He resented the dull serges and linens of Margot’s school dress and Sunday became precious because he saw her in all glory, flounced in rose and sapphire. She was a miracle; she deserved brilliancies of toned silk to set off the pale brown of her skin, the crisp thickness of her hair. But in June on the Cedric he heard one woman say to another, “Positively indecent. Like a doll,” when he walked the decks with Margot and the other woman’s, “But she’s quite lovely,” didn’t assuage that tart summary of Margot’s costume. An elderly actress told him, “My dear boy, you mustn’t overdo the child’s clothes,” and a fat lady from Detroit came gurgling to ask where he bought things for Margot. He knew this creature to be the wife of a motor king and looked down at her thoughtfully.
“I suppose you have daughters, yourself?”
“Yes, three. All of them married. But they still come to me for advice.—Mastin’s? I thought so. Thank you so much.”
He watched her purple linen frock ruck up in lumps as her fat knees bent over the brass sill of a door and pitied her daughters. He was[93] playing poker in the smoke room when Gurdy slid into the couch beside him and sat silently observing the game. The boy was lately thirteen and gaunt. His silence coated an emotion that Mark felt, disturbing as the chill of an audience on an opening night. Gurdy was angry. The milky skin below his lips twitched and wrinkled. The luncheon bugle blew. The game stopped and, when the other players rose, Mark could turn to him. “Was that fat woman in tortoise shell glasses talkin’ to you?” The boy demanded.
“Yes.”
“Well, it was a bet. I was reading in the parlour place. It was a bet. One of the women bet you got Margot’s things in New York and the rest of ’em said Paris. And that fat hog—” Gurdy’s voice broke—“said she didn’t mind slumming. So she went off and talked to you. They all s-said that Margot looked like a poster.”
This was horrible. Mark saw some likeness between Margot’s pink splendour and the new posters clever people made for him. He must be wrong. He uncertainly fingered the pile of poker chips and asked Gurdy, “D’you think sister’s—too dressed up?”
Gurdy loosed a sob that slapped Mark’s face with its misery and dashed his hand into the piled chips. He said, “D-don’t give a dam’ what they[94] say about her. I hate hearin’ them talk about you that way!”
Mark waited until the nervous sobs slacked. Then he asked, “Do they ever talk about me at your school, sonny?”
“No. Oh, one of the masters asked me why you didn’t put on some play. Is there a play called the Cherry Orchard?”
“Russian. It wouldn’t run a week.” Mark piled up the chips and said, “I may be all wrong—Anyhow, don’t you bother, son ... God bless you.”
Olive Ilden gave him her view while Margot and Gurdy explored the garden that opened from her Chelsea drawing room. She sat painting her lips with a perfumed stick of deep red and mimicked his drawl, “No, her things ar-r-ren’t too bright, old man. She isn’t too much dressed up. It’s merely that this thin faced time of ours isn’t dressed up to her. She’s Della Robbia and we’re—Whistler. It’s burgherdom. Prudence. It’s the nineteenth century. It’s the tupenny ha’penny belief that dullness is respectable. Hasn’t she some Italian blood? Now Joan—my wretched daughter—simply revels in dowdiness. She’s only happy in a jersey or Girl Guides rubbish. She’s at Cheltenham, mixing with the British flapper. When she’s at home she drives me into painting my face and putting dyed attire on[95] my head. If I had to live with Margot I shouldn’t wear anything gayer than taupe.”
He stared out at Margot whose pink frock revolved above her gleaming silver buckles on the crushed shell of the walk. Olive saw his face light, attaining for the second a holy glow. It was a window in the wall of dark night. He looked and doted. The woman wondered at him. He had all the breathless beauty of a child facing its dearest toy. His grey eyes dilated. In her own eyes she felt the dry threat of tears and said, “Old man, I’m sorry for you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re such a dear and because you’re a pariah. I don’t know that all this garden party petting is good for our player folk but—over in your wilderness—no one seems to investigate the stage except professors and the police. It must be sickening.... What’ll become of Margot when she’s grown up?”
It had begun to worry him on the Cedric. He loosely thought that her friends from Miss Thorne’s school would be kind to her. Wouldn’t they? He said, “She’s only ten, Olive,” and sat brooding. It wasn’t fair. Smart society, the decorous women of small gestures, hadn’t any use for him. He looked at Olive who wrote letters to him and called him old man. She wrote books. She knew all the world. She had been[96] to the king’s court and laughed about it. He went to shelter in her strange kindness and sighed, “It isn’t fair. She ought to have—she ought to go anywhere she wants to.”
“She probably will if there’s anything in eyelashes,” said Olive, “and Gurdy will go anywhere he wants to, by the shape of his jaw. I’ve been dissecting American society with horrific interest. It seems to have reached a lower level than British! You haven’t even an intelligent Bohemia.”
“There ain’t many literary people,” Mark reflected, “and they mostly seem to live in Philadelphia and Indiana, anyhow. Or over here. What’s a man to do? I can’t—”
“You can’t do anything. Whistle the children in. There’s a one man show. Stage settings. Italian. I haven’t seen them and you should.” She threw the stick of paint away and set about cheering him. She liked him, muddled in his trade, labouring after beauty, unaware of his own odd sweetness. She gave up the last weeks of the season, guiding him about London, watching him glow when Margot wanted a scarf of orange silk in Liberty’s, when Gurdy demonstrated his Latin, not badly, before a tomb in Saint Paul’s. Margot was the obvious idol, something to be petted and dressed. But the child had a rich attraction of her own, graces of placid curves, a quiet loveliness that missed stupidity.
[97]“You don’t like Margot,” Olive told Gurdy in a waste of the British Museum.
The boy lied, “Of course I do,” in his cracked voice but Olive took that as the product of good schooling, like his easy performance of airs on the piano. He was jealous of Margot and showed it so often that the woman wondered why Mark didn’t see. But this wasn’t the usual boy.
“You let him read anything he likes,” she scolded Mark.
“Sure. Where’s the harm? I haven’t got the Contes Drolatiques at the house or any of those things. Aunt Edith used to make me read the Book of Kings when I was a kid. Oh, Gurd knows that babies don’t come by express,” said Mark, “He’s lived in the country, too much.”
“I thought the American peasantry entirely compounded of the Puritan virtues, old man.”
“You missed your guess, then. You read a lot of American novels, Olive. Some day or other some writer’s goin’ to come along and write up an American country town like it is. The police will probably suppress the book.... My father and Gurdy’s mamma are sort of scared because I’ve got the kid at a rich school. You mustn’t believe all the stuff you see in the American magazines and papers about the wicked rich, Olive. I’ve met some of the rich roués at suppers and[98] so on. Put any of ’em alongside some of the hired men and clerks and things that were in my regiment in Cuba—or alongside Tommy Grover that’s blacksmith at Fayettesville and they’d look like Sunday School teachers. I sort of wish the poor folks in the United States’d leave off yawping about the wicked rich and look after their own backyards a while! No, I don’t take any stock in this country virtue thing. The only girl in Fayettesville that ever run off with a wicked drummer had morals that’d scare a chorus girl stiff. Who’s the fellow that hangs ’round the stage door of a musical show? Nine times out of ten he’s a kid from the country that’s won twenty dollars at poker. Who’s the fellow that—well—seduces the poor working girl? Once in a hundred it’s a rich whelp in a dinner jacket. Rest of the time it’s the boy in the next flat. When I was acting and used to get mash notes from fool women, were they from women on Fifth Avenue or Park Avenue? Not much! Stenographers and ladies in Harlem that had husbands travelling a good deal. You believe in talking about these kind of things out loud and I expect you’re right.”
“Gurdy’s not handsome,” said Olive, “but he’s attractive—charming eyes—and women are going to like him a goodish bit, bye and bye. And man is fire. What moral precepts are you going to—”
[99]“Just what my father told me. I’m going to tell him that he mustn’t make love to a married woman and that he mustn’t fool after an innocent girl unless he means matrimony—but God knows it’s getting pretty hard to tell what an innocent girl is, these days! Nine tenths of ’em dress like cocottes.”
“Old man, where did you pick up that very decent French accent?” Olive saw his blush slide fleetly from his collar to the red hair and added, “I hope it was honestly come by. You’re a good deal of a Puritan for a sensualist.”
“Oh ... I am a sensualist, I guess. But, I ain’t a hog.”
Olive said, “No, that’s quite true, my son. There’s nothing porcine about you. My brother has a house this season and he’s giving a dance tonight. There might be some pretty frocks.”
“Didn’t know you had a brother!”
“Sir Gerald Shelmardine of Shelmardine Cross, Hampshire. He’s rather dreary. Will you come?”
She took him to several evening parties and his wooden coldness before a crowd was enchanting. It occurred to her that individuals wearied the man. He eyed pretty women, striking gowns, studied the decoration of ball-rooms. He confessed, “I’ll never see any of them again and shouldn’t remember them if I did. My memory[100] for people’s no good—unless they’re interestin’ to look at. My god, look at that girl in purple. Her dressmaker ought to be hung! Skirt’s crooked all across the front.” He gave the girl in purple his rare frown then asked, “Well, where’s some place in France, on the seashore, where I can take the kids until August?”
She recommended Royan and had from him a letter describing Margot’s success among the ladies of a quiet hotel. His letters of 1912 and 1913 were full of Margot. Snapshots of the child dropped often from the thick blue envelopes. When he sent his thin book, “Modern Scenery” in the autumn of 1913 it was dedicated, “To my Daughter.” The bald prose was correct, the photographs and plates were well selected. Mark wrote: “Gurdy went over it with a fine tooth comb to see if the grammar was O. K. Mr. Carlson is not well and we have four plays to bring in by December. Spoke at a lunch of a ladies’ dramatic society yesterday. Forgot where I was and said Hell in the middle of it. They did not mind. Things seem to be changing a lot. I am pretty worried about one of our plays.”
Olive saw in the New York Herald some discussion of this play and a furious reference to it on the editorial page, signed by a clergyman. This was at Christmas time when she was entertaining her tiresome brother at Ilden’s house in[101] Suffolk. She folded the newspaper away, meaning to explore the business. She forgot the accident in the hurry of her attempt to reach a Scotch country house where her daughter Joan died of pneumonia on New Year’s Day. The shock sent Olive into grey seclusion. Her husband was on the China station with his cruiser. She suddenly found herself worrying over the health of her son, then in the Fifth Form at Harrow, so took a cottage in Harrow village and there reflected on the nastiness of death while she wrote her next novel. The cottage was singularly dismal and the daughters of the next dwelling were pretty girls of thirteen and fourteen, with fair hair. “Sentimental analogy is the bane of life,” she wrote to her husband, “I went to town yesterday for some gloves and saw the posters of Peter Pan on a hoarding in Baker Street. Joan liked it so. So I went to the theatre and squandered five sovereigns in stalls and gave the tickets to these wretched girls who would infinitely prefer a cinema, naturally. However I managed to laugh on Saturday. The news had just reached Mark Walling by way of Ian Gail who is in the States trying to sell his worst and newest play. Mark cabled me a hundred words quite incoherent and mostly inappropriate.”
Three days later Olive came in from a walk and Mark opened the door of the stupid cottage.[102] When she drew her hands away from his stooped face they were hot and wet.
“But, my dear boy,” she said, presently, “what blessing brought you over? In the middle of your season, too.”
“I’m in trouble. See anything in the papers about the Mayor stoppin’ a play we put on?—I don’t blame the Mayor, for a minute. Mr. Carlson wanted it.... Well, it was stopped and some of the newspapers took it up. And then Mr. Carlson had a sort of stroke. His mind’s all right but his legs are paralyzed. Won’t ever walk again.” His voice drummed suddenly as if it might break into a sob. He passed his fingers over the red hair and went on, “I’ve got him up at my house.”
“Of course,” said Olive.
“Sure. The doctors say he’ll last four or five years, maybe.—Say you’ve always said we’re a nation of prudes. Look at this,” and he dragged from a black pocket a note on formal paper. Olive read: “The Thorne School, Madison Avenue and Sixty Sixth Street. December 28th, 1913. My dear Mr. Walling, Will you be so good as to call upon me when it is possible in order to discuss Margaret’s future attendance. It seems kindest to warn you that several parents have suggested that—”
[103]“What is this nonsense?” Olive asked, “What’s the child been doing?”
“Doing? Nothin’! It’s this damned play!”
“You mean that there were women who seriously asked this Miss Thorne to have Margot withdrawn because you’d produced a risqué farce? But that’s—”
His wrath reached a piteous climax in, “Oh, damn women, anyhow!... Well I took her out. My broker could have fixed the thing up. What’s the use? Well, I brought her over with me. She’s at the Ritz. What’s the best girls’ school in England?”
Olive said, “Oh, I’ll take her,” saw him smile and began to weep.