Held to Answer/Chapter 14
So paralyzing to a man of Hampstead's sensitive nature was the effect of Marien Dounay's startling disclosure that he experienced a partial arrest of consciousness, the symptoms of which hung on surprisingly.
Somehow that night he got back to Oakland, and the next morning was again about his work; but the days went by mechanically—days of risings and retirings, eatings and sleepings, memorizing of lines, mumbling of speeches, sliding into clothes, slipping into grease paint, walkings on and walkings off. Through all of these daily obligations the man moved with a certain absent-minded precision, like a person with a split consciousness, who does not let his right lobe know what his left lobe is thinking.
He knew, for instance, that a telegram came to him one day with the charges collect, and that he paid the charges and signed for the message, but he did not know that the message lay unopened on his dresser while he spent all his unoccupied time sunk in a stupor of meditation upon the thing which had befallen him.
Most astonishing to John was the fact that while he felt rage and humiliation at having so duped himself over Marien Dounay, he had no sense of pain. He was like a man run over by a railroad train who experiences no throb of anguish but only a sickish, numbing sensation in his mangled limbs.
Recognizing that his condition was not normal, Hampstead wondered if he could be going insane. He was eating little; he was taking no interest in his work. He went and came from the theater automatically, impatient of company, impatient of noise, of newspaper headlines, of interruptions of any sort, anxious only to get to his room, to throw himself into a chair or upon a bed, and relapse into a state of mental drooling. After several days he roused from one of these reveries with the clear impression that some presence had been there in the room, had breathed upon him, had touched his lips, and spoken to him. He leaped up and looked about him. He opened the door and scanned the corridor. No one was there,—no echo of corporeal footsteps resounded.
Realizing that it must have been his own dream that waked him, he came back sheepishly and tried again to induce that state of mental dusk in which the odd sensation had been experienced. Soon he roused again with the knowledge that the presence had been with him and had departed; but this time a clear picture of the vision remained. It was a woman,—it was like Marien. It was, he told himself, the image of his Love. He entertained it sadly, like an apparition from the grave. The vision came again, but with repeated visits, its form began to change, until it no longer resembled the form of Marien.
This was exciting; the image might change still further till it definitely resembled some one else.
This surmise proved correct. It did change more and more until identity was for a time completely lost, but as days passed, the features ceased to blur and jumble. The eyes were now constantly blue; the complexion was consistently pink and white; the hair was brown and began to appear crinkly; the lips grew shorter, and of a more youthful red; the chin broadened and appeared fuller and softer. One morning these rosier lips smiled with a rarer spontaneity than the vision had ever shown before, and with the smile came two dimples into the peach-blow cheeks.
"Bessie!" John cried, with a welcoming shout of incoherent joy. "Bessie!"
But his joy was speedily swallowed up in the gloom of mortifying reflections. Could it be that his love was so inconstant as to transfer itself in a few days from Marien Dounay to Bessie Mitchell, and if it did, what was such love worth? Besides, how could he love Bessie as he had loved Marien. There was no fire in her. As yet, she was only a girl. But at this juncture a memory came floating in of that day on the Cliff House rocks, when some vague impulse, which he thought to be sympathy, had made him draw Bessie's face up to his and kiss it. Now, as he recalled it, the touch of her lips was the touch of a woman; and her look that puzzled him then,—why, it was the look of love!
Hampstead leaped up excitedly. Bessie was a woman, and she loved him! And he loved her! But how could he have been such a fool as to think that he loved Marien?
"Passion," he told himself scornfully, "mere passion."
"She was the first ripe woman I ever touched, and I fell for her! That's all," he muttered. "But, how could I ever, ever, ever have done it?"
Heaping bitter self-reproaches, he took his bewildered head in his hands, while he wrestled with the humiliating chain of ruminations. Naturally enough, it was the memory of a speech of Marien's which afforded him his first clue.
"In what you have just been saying, you have given me a character," she had replied to one of his advances. "If I could play that part always, I should be what you are in love with, and you would love me always; but I cannot play it always; I can play it seldom. I play it now for an hour and then perhaps never again."
This speech, vexatiously enigmatic then, sounded suddenly rational now. It meant that he had unconsciously bestowed upon her his idealized conception of womanhood. This was made comparatively easy because in the plays Marien almost invariably enacted the heroines, always sweet, always gentle, and almost always good; or, if erring, they were more sinned against than sinning. Most of these piled-up virtues of her rôles John dotingly had ascribed to her, and his professional contacts afforded few glimpses of the real Marien by which his drawing could be corrected.
Atop of this had come those few hours of delicious intimacy in her apartment, when she had deliberately played the part she saw that he would like. This had sufficed to make his illusion complete.
Still John had no reproaches for the actress. Instead, he found within him a renascence of respect for her, particularly for her frankness. Most women—most men, too, for that matter, he thought—play the hypocrite with themselves and with others. He must do her full credit. She had not done so. She might have ruined him. He owed his escape to no discernment of his own. When he had not understood, she had resolutely played the scene out for him—to the uttermost. It must have cost a woman, any woman, something to do that, he reasoned. Under this interpretation, Marien was no longer repulsive to him. Instead, he found in her something to admire. Her courage was sublime. Her devotion to her god, ambition, if terrible, was also magnificent.
"Yet, why," he asked himself, "did she let me take her in my arms? Sympathy," he answered at last. "She never loved me. A woman who loved a man could not do what she did in the restaurant. She was very sorry for me, that was all. She let me kiss her as she would let a dog lick her hand." And then he remembered another speech of hers: "If a man is sometimes man, may not woman be also sometimes woman?"
This helped him finally and completely, as he thought, to understand; but it left him with a still deeper sense of his own weakness and humiliation.
Marien Dounay had roused the woman want in him and while she was near, her personality had been strong enough to center that want upon herself. But when she shook his passion free of her, it turned, after circling like a homing pigeon, due upon its course to Bessie. John saw that this was all logical and psychological. Patently, it was also biological.
But it was mortifying beyond words. He felt that he had dishonored himself and dishonored Bessie. He had supposed himself strong; he found himself weak. He had been swept off his feet and out of his head. He was ashamed of himself, heartily. Bessie, the good, the pure, the noble! Why, he could not think of her at all in the terms in which he thought of Marien Dounay. His instinct for Marien had been to possess. For Bessie it was to revere, to worship—and yet—and yet—he wanted her now with an urge that was stronger than ever he had felt for Marien.
Still, he had no impulse to rush to Bessie. He felt unworthy. He could not see himself taking her hand, touching her lips, declaring his love to her now. It seemed to him that he must test his love for Bessie before he declared it, and purify it by months—years, perhaps,—of waiting, as if to expiate the sin of his weakness.
But in the meantime, Bessie loved him, and would be loving him all the time. And he could write to her! Ah, what letters he would write, letters that would not only keep her love alive but fan it, while he punished himself for his insane disloyalty.
Disloyalty! Yes, that was the very word. He knew as he reflected that he had been disloyal ever to yield to the spell of Marien Dounay. He had been disloyal to Bessie, to his ideals, and to himself.
He turned to where a few days before he had pinned his old Los Angeles motto on the wall of his Oakland room: "Eternal Hammering is the Price of Success."
Hammering, he decided, was the wrong word. It was not high enough. He stepped over to the wall and changed it to the new word so that it read:
"Eternal Loyalty is the Price of Success."
He liked that better; so well, in fact, that he lifted his hand dramatically and swore his life anew, not to hammering but to Loyalty,—loyalty to himself, to Bessie, to Dick and Tayna, and to God!
This gave him a feeling of new courage. He turned away as from a disagreeable experience now forever past. His eyes wandered about the room exactly as if he had returned from an absence, taking in detail by detail the familiar, scanty furniture, the hateful spring rocker, the washstand, the bed, the torn, smoke-soiled curtains at the window, the picture of Washington at Valley Forge upon the wall, and the dresser with its cheap speckled mirror.
His glance had just paused mystified at the sight of the unopened telegram upon the dresser when there was a knock at the door.
With a stride, John turned the key and swung open the door.
Bud, the fourteen-year-old call boy of the Sampson Theater, entered; a breathless, self-important youngster with freckles and a stubby pompadour.
"Mr. Cohen's says yer better write a letter ter yer sister," the lad blurted, while his eyes scanned the room and the actor, where he stood reaching in a dazed sort of way for the telegram.
"Hey," exclaimed Hampstead, looking up sharply, "my sister?"
"Ye-uh," affirmed Bud stoutly. "Mr. Cohen's got a letter from her, and she wants to know if yer sick 'r anything."
"By jove, that's right, Bud," confessed John with sudden conviction. "I've had my mind on something of late, and guess I've rather overlooked the folks at home. I'll write to-day. Awfully kind of you, old chap, to come over. Here!"
And Hampstead, now with the telegram in his hand, attempted to cover a feeling of confusion before these bright, peering eyes by a pilgrimage to the closet, from which he tossed Bud a quarter. The lad accepted the quarter thankfully.
"Say, Mr. Hampstead," he broke out impulsively, with an embarrassed note in his voice, "I'm sorry you got your notice!"
"Got my notice?" asked John a bit sharply.
"Yes. Yer let out," announced Bud, with unfeeling directness, though consideration was in his heart. "You been good to me, Mr. Hampstead, and I'm sorry you're goin'. Some of the others is, too."
But John was roused now, thoroughly.
"Why, Bud, what are you talking about?" he demanded, turning accusingly to the boy.
"For the love of Mike," exclaimed Bud, advancing a little fearsomely and studying the face of Hampstead with new curiosity, "Yer let out and don't know it! What'd I tell 'em? Why, there it is," and he snatched up a blue, thin-looking envelope from the dresser. "Y' got it a week ago when you got yer pay. Y' ain't opened it even."
Hampstead took the blue envelope from Bud's hand, an awful sense of weakness running through him as he read that his services would not be required after the customary two weeks.
"What did I get this for, Bud?" he asked, sensing the uselessness of dissimulation before this impertinent child.
"Y' got it fer bein' dopey," answered Bud reproachfully. "Y' ain't had no more sense than a wooden man fer ten days. Say, Mr. Hampstead," he ventured further with sympathetic friendliness, "yer a good actor when you let the hop alone. Why don't you cut it? You're young yet. You got a future, Mr. Cohen says, if you'll let the dope alone."
Hampstead's face took on a queer, half-amused look.
"Is that what he said?"
"That's what he said," affirmed Bud aggressively.
"Well, then, all right, Bud. I will cut it out. Here's my hand on it."
Bud took the hand, a trifle surprised and feeling a little more important than usual. "Say," he added confidentially, "wise me, will y'; what kind have you been takin'? Mr. Cohen says he's never seen nothin' like it, and he thought he'd seen 'em all."
"Oh, it's a little brand I mixed myself," confessed John. "But I'm done with it. Run along now, Bud. You've been a good pal," and he gave the lad a pat on the shoulder and a significant shove toward the door.
"Glad I came over," reflected Bud at the door, jingling the quarter in his pocket. "Better write yer sister, or she'll be comin' up here. Say," and Bud returned as if for a further confidence, "y' never know what a woman's goin' to do, do y'? Las' fall a woman shot our leadin' juvenile in the leg—because she loved him. Get that? Because she loved him!"
Bud's drawling scorn was inimitable.
"Y' can't figger 'em, can yuh? Some of 'em wants to be called, and some of 'em don't. Some of 'em wants their letters before the show, and some of 'em after. Some of 'em is one way one day and the other way the next day. If I ever get my notice,—if I ever lose my job it'll be about a woman. I never seen a man yet that I couldn't get his nannie. I never seen a woman yet that couldn't get mine and get it fresh every time I run a step fer her. Say! Mr. Hampstead—honest—ain't they the jinx?"
Bud had got his hand on the door, but getting no answer to this very direct and to him very important question, he turned and scrutinized the face of the big man curiously at first and then with amazement, as he exclaimed: "Fer the love of Mike! He ain't heard me. Say, Mr. Hampstead! Say!" Bud went back and shook the big man's arm, with a look of apprehension on his face, and shouted very loud, as if to the deaf: "Say! Come out of it, will y'? Don't write. Telegraph her. Gosh! She might blame me!"
After which parting gun in behalf of duty and of prudence, with a sigh and the air of having done a man's best, the lad got hastily through the door and slammed it after him very loudly.