Held to Answer/Chapter 13
Marien Dounay loved him, but for the sake of her own ambition was trying to kill that love. This was the explanation which the sleepless, tossing hours fed again and again into John Hampstead's mind until he accepted it as the demonstrated truth.
As for himself, he could no more have killed his love for Marien than he could have killed a child. He determined deliberately to match his will against hers and break it; to see her again immediately, to meet her arguments with better arguments, her firm rejections with firmer affirmations; to melt her resolution with an appeal to her heart; in short, and by some means not now clear, to overmaster her purpose for the sake of her own happiness as well as his.
But a thought of Bessie Mitchell came crowding in. Now this was not altogether strange, since John had half-consciously cherished the notion that he would some day love Bessie, and he reflected now that she must have had a feeling of the same sort toward himself. Perhaps this was why she cried that day upon the rocks; perhaps, too, that was why he kissed her, for he was beginning now to understand some things better than he had before. Conscience demanded therefore that he write Bessie a tactful letter which, while vague and general, would yet somehow reveal the tremendous change in the drift of his affections.
Just that much, however, was going to be hard—a brutal piece of work—to merely hint that some other woman might be coming more intimately into his life than this trustful, jolly-hearted companion. But it was honest and it must, therefore, be done.
Hampstead summoned grimly all his resolution and dipped his pen in ink.
"Dear Bessie," he wrote, and then his pen stopped, and an itching sensation came into the corners of his eyes and a lump into his throat.
Presently he laid the pen down as resolutely as he had taken it up. He could not write Bessie out of his life, after all; at least not like that. Instead he wrote a letter that was a lie, or that started out to be a lie; but the surprising thing to Hampstead was that while he wrote, visioning Bessie at home in Los Angeles, rose-embowered, or walking to school beneath rows of palms, he was himself transported to Los Angeles, and the letter was not false. He was back again in the old life, and Bessie was an interesting and necessary part of it.
Yet he found he could not seal himself into the old life when he closed the flap of the envelope. The moment the letter was mailed, his mind went irresistibly back to Marien, whom it was a part of his plan to see that very day. This was possible because Mowrey rehearsals were long and somewhat painful affairs.
Hurrying from the Sampson Stock, at the end of his own rehearsal, John was able to cross the bay and reach the Grand Opera House while Mowrey's people were still wearily at work, and to make his way apparently unseen through the huge, gloomy auditorium to a box which was deep in shadow, as boxes usually are at rehearsal time.
Marien was "on", and the big fellow's heart leaped at the sound of her voice; yet presently it stood still again, for his jealous ear had detected a disquieting note in her utterance, a sort of cajoling purr which the lover recognized instantly. It was not Marien Dounay in rehearsal, nor yet in "character"; it was Marien herself when in her most ingratiating mood, and was meant neither for the rehearsal nor for the character, but for the actor who played the opposing rôle.
Who, by the way, was this handsome man, with the rare, low voice that combined refinement and carrying power, so absolutely sure of himself, whose every move betokened the seasoned, accomplished actor, and who displayed to perfection those very graces which John himself hoped some day to exhibit?
In the box in front of Hampstead was another ghostly figure, also watching the rehearsal. John reached forward and touched him on the shoulder, whispering hollowly: "Who is the new leading man?"
"Charles Manning of New York," was the reply; "specially engaged for this and three other rôles."
"Thank you," said John, swallowing hard, for now he understood perfectly the disagreeable meaning of those cajoleries. They represented just one more element in Marien Dounay's calculating life. This New York actor might go back and drop the word that would bring her opportunity, the thing her vaulting ambition coveted more than it coveted love. Therefore she was taking deliberate advantage of these situations to kindle a personal interest in herself, for which, once her object was gained, she would refuse responsibility as heartlessly as she had tried to reject the big man who just now started so violently as he watched her.
Look at that now! The stage direction had required Manning to take Marien in his arms for a minute. Hampstead ground his teeth.
Well, why didn't they separate? What was she clinging to him so long for? Why, indeed, if it were not for this same reason that to John, stewing in jealous rage, seemed despicable and base. This was not nice; it was not womanly; it was not a true reflection of Marien's character. It was, he assured himself hotly, one of the things from which he must save her.
But he had no opportunity to begin his work of salvation that afternoon, for rehearsal ended, Marien walked out with Charles Manning so closely in her company that Hampstead could not so much as catch her eye, and his emotions were in such a riot that he dared not trust himself to accost her.
When John had walked the streets for an hour, with the storm of his feelings rising instead of settling, he resolved upon a note to Marien and went to the office of the Dramatic Review to dispatch it.
"Dear Marien," he wrote. "I must see you to-night. I will call at twelve. John."
The brevity of this communication was deliberately calculated to express his headlong mood and the depths of his determination. He had not asked an answer, but waited for one, assuring himself that if none came he would call just the same. Yet the answer was ominously prompt. John tore it open with brutal strength and saw Marien's handwriting for the first time. It was vigorous and rectangular, but unmistakably feminine, and there was neither salutation nor signature.
"Stupid!" the note began abruptly. "I saw you in the box to-day. I will not have you spying upon me. You must not call. I have tried to make you understand. Why can you not accept the situation? Or are you mad enough to compel me to stage the scene and play it out for you?"
John read the note twice, crumpled it in his hand, and walked slowly down Geary Street to Market and down Market Street to the ferry.
In the second act that night he forgot to take on the knife with which he was to stab his victim, and nearly spoiled the scene, through having to strangle him instead.
"Stage the scene and play it out for you?" What could she mean by that.
Determined to find out, John hurried from the theater at the close of the performance, with his lips pursed stubbornly, and at exactly twelve o'clock Julie was answering his ring at the door of the little apartment on Turk Street.
"Ah!" she exclaimed, smiling cordially. "It is the big man again. No, Madame is not in. She is having supper out to-night. With whom? La! la! I should not tell you that," and Julie shrugged one shoulder only, after a way of hers, and made a movement to close the door; but something in John's eyes induced her to add, with both sympathy and chiding in her tone: "You must not come to see Madame when Madame does not want you."
"But I must see her, Julie!" John pleaded huskily, rather throwing himself upon the mercy of the little French woman.
Julie gazed at him doubtfully. She had fended off the attentions of many an importunate suitor from her beautiful mistress but never one who engaged at once so much of her sympathy and respect as he. In her mind she was weighing something; reflecting perhaps whether it was not kindness to this big, earnest man to let his own eyes serve him. Her decision was evidently in the affirmative.
"If you go quickly to the entrance of Antone's," she suggested hurriedly, "you will see Madame arriving presently in an automobile."
Stubborn as John was in his purpose, he nevertheless flushed that even Julie could think him capable of standing at the door of a French restaurant at midnight waiting to catch a glimpse of the woman he loved in the company of another man. Yet pride was so completely swallowed up in jealousy and passion that another five minutes found him loitering before the entrance to Antone's, resolving to go, to stay; to look and not to look; feeling now weakly ashamed of himself and now meanly resolute.
The place was half underground, with a gilded and illumined entrance that yawned like the mouth of a monster. John was sure from its outward look that Antone's was no more than half respectable. The fragrance of the food which assailed his nostrils was, he felt equally sure, an expensive fragrance. A meal there would cost as much as a week of meals where he was accustomed to take his food. Manning, of course, had a fine salary. He could afford to take Marien for an automobile ride and to Antone's for supper.
Hampstead's envious rage flamed again at this thought, but at the moment the flash of a headlight in his eyes called attention to an automobile just then sweeping in toward the curb. However, instead of the stalwart, graceful figure of Manning, there emerged from the car a squat, oily-faced man, huge of paunch, with thick lips, a heavy nose, pouched cheeks, and small, pig-like eyes, upon whose broad countenance hung an expression of bland self-complaisance. By an odd coincidence, this man was also connected with the stage. John knew him by sight as Gustav Litschi, and by reputation as a very swine among men, utterly without scruple, although endowed with an uncanny business sense; a man who had money and whose theatrical ventures always made money, though often their character was as doubtful as himself.
Disappointed, Hampstead nevertheless experienced a feeling of curiosity as to Litschi's companion, and before drawing back, followed the gross glance of the gimlet eyes within the car to where they rested gloatingly upon a woman in evening clothes, who was gathering her train and cloak about her preparatory to being helped from the car. To John's utter amazement the woman was Marien.
For a moment he stared as if confronted with a specter, then felt his great hands itching while he wavered between a desire to leap upon this coarse creature and tear him to pieces, and the impulse to accost Marien with reproaches and a warning. But the swift reflection that she probably knew the man's character perfectly well prompted John instead to the despicable expedient of deliberately spying upon her. Turning impetuously, he ran quickly down the steps in advance of the couple.
"One?" queried the headwaiter, with a keen estimating glance under which John ordinarily would have felt himself to shrivel; but now a frenzy of jealousy and a sense of outrage had made him bold.
"Yes," he replied brusquely; "that seat yonder in the corner where I can see the whole show."
It was a lonely and undesirable table, smack against the side of the wall, along which ran a row of curtained, box-like alcoves that served as tiny private dining rooms. John could have it and welcome. He got it, and as he turned to sit down, his eye scanned the interior swiftly for Marien and Litschi. To his surprise they were coming straight at him, Marien leading. Certain that she had seen him and was going to address him, John nevertheless determined to await a look of recognition before arising. To his further surprise, no such look came. Coldly, icily beautiful to-night, the glitter in her eyes was hard and desperate, with a suggestion of menace in it, reminding John of that momentary intuition he had once experienced, that this woman could be dangerous. Her note had warned him not to spy upon her, he recalled. It must be that her discovery of his presence had roused a devil in her now. So strong did this feeling become that he felt a relief as great as his surprise when she brushed by as if oblivious of his presence and passed from view into the nearest box, the curtain of which a waiter was holding aside obsequiously.
When the screening curtain dropped, swinging so near that John could have reached across his table and touched it with a hand, he had a sense of sudden escape, as if a tigress, sleekly beautiful and powerfully cruel, had over-leaped him to tear a richer prey beyond. The swine-like Litschi, waddling after her into the box, was the chosen victim. Yonder by the curb John had feared for Marien; now, repulsive as the creature was, he felt a kind of pity for Litschi.
Yet with the curtain drawn, Hampstead's emotion passed swiftly back to love and anxiety for her. She had not seen him, that was all. The supposed look of menace was the product of his imagination and his jealousy.
As the minutes passed unnoted, this anxiety grew again into sympathy and consideration. Marien had complained to him of the hard things she had to do. This supper with Litschi was merely one of them. That scene with Manning was another. He reflected triumphantly that she had not welcomed Litschi to her apartment; but compelled him to bring her to this public place. Poor, brave girl! She had to play with all these men; to warm them without herself getting burnt; to woo them desperately upon the chance: Manning that he might somewhere speak the fortunate word, Litschi that in some greedy hope of gain he might be induced to risk his money on the venture that would give Marien the opportunity for which she had been calculating indomitably for seven years.
But what was that?
John's hand reached out and clutched the table violently, while his body leaned forward as if to rise. What was that she had said so loudly he could hear, and so astonishing that he could not believe his ears?
He had been sitting there such a long, long time, thinking thoughts like these, stirred, soothed, and stirred again by the sound of her voice, heard intermittently between the numbers of the orchestra. He had ordered food and eaten, then ordered more and eaten that,—anything to think and wait, he did not know for what.
Waiters bearing trays had come and gone unceasingly from behind the curtain four feet from his eyes, and he knew that they had borne more bottles than food. Several times he had heard a sound like "shots off-stage." This sound always succeeded the entry of a gold sealed bottle. Evidently they were drinking heavily behind the curtain, Litschi's voice growing lower and less coherent, and Marien's louder and less reserved, till for some time he had been catching little snatches of her conversation. She had been talking about her future, painting a picture of the success she would make when her opportunity came; but now she had said the thing that staggered him.
"What?" he came near to saying aloud; and at the same time he heard the drink-smothered voice of Litschi also with interrogative inflection. Litschi, too, wanted to be sure that he had heard aright.
"I say," iterated the voice of Marien deliberately, as if with calculated carrying power, "that a woman who is ambitious must be prepared to pay the price demanded—her heart, her soul—if need be—herself!"
She plumped out the last word ruthlessly, and broke into a half-tipsy laugh that had in it a suggestion unmistakable as much as to say:
"You understand now, don't you, Gustav Litschi? You realize what I am offering to the man who buys me opportunity?"
Her heart—her soul—herself! Hampstead, having started up, sat down again weakly, the cold sweat of horror standing out upon his brow.
So this was what she had meant all the time in her speech about the calculating life. She could not give herself up to love him or any one, because she was dangling herself as a final lure to the man who would give her opportunity.
"Why, this woman was spiritually—morally—potentially, a—" he could barely let himself think the hateful word. To utter it was impossible.
Perhaps she was worse! A choking, burning sensation was in his throat. He tore at it with his hands, gasping for breath. He wanted to tear at the curtain—at the woman! How he hated her! She had no longer any fineness. She was a coarse, designing, reckless—prostitute! There! In his agony, the word was out. He sent it hurtling across the stage of his own brain. It flew straight. It found its mark upon the face of his love and stuck there blotched and quivering, biting into the picture like acid. It ate out the eyes of Marien Dounay from his mind; it ate away her pliant ruby lips, her cheeks and her soft round chin, and it left of that face only a grinning hideousness from which John Hampstead shrank with a horrible sickness in his heart.
At this moment the curtain rings clicked sharply under the sweep of an impetuous arm, and with the suddenness of an apparition, Marien stood just across the table from him. Her face was highly colored, but the preternatural brightness of the eyes had begun to dull, and there was a loose look, too, about the mouth, the lips of which were curled by a mocking smile.
"Well, John Hampstead!" she sneered, with a vindictive look in her eyes, insinuating scorn in her tones. "Now that I have played out the scene, do you think you understand?"
John had risen stiffly, every fiber of him in riot at the horror he had heard and was now seeing; but his self-control was perfect, and a kind of dignity invested him for the moment.
"Yes," he said, meeting her gaze unflinchingly, "I understand!"
The tone of finality that went into this latter word was unescapable. As it was uttered, Marien attempted one of her lightning changes of manner but failed, breaking instead into a fit of hysterical laughter, during which, with head thrown back, her body swayed, and she disappeared behind the curtain, where the laughter ended abruptly in something like a choke, or a fit of coughing.
But John's indignation and disgust were so great that he did not concern himself as to whether Miss Dounay's laughter might be choking her or not. Embarrassed, too, by the number of eyes turned curiously upon him from the nearer tables where the diners had observed the incident without gathering any of its purport, his only impulse was to pay his bill and escape, before the building and the world came clattering down upon him.