Held to Answer/Chapter 4
But the General Freight Agent took care that Mrs. Mitchell, Bessie, and himself were in a box at the Burbank on the following Monday night, when the curtain went up on the Mowrey Stock Company's sumptuous production of Quo Vadis, which for more than nine days was the talk of the town in the city of angels, oranges, atmosphere, and oil. The Mitchells strained their eyes for a sight of their late-grown protégé, but it appeared he was not "on." However, in the midst of a garden scene with Roman lords, ladies, soldiers in armor and slaves decking the view, there appeared a huge barbarian, long of hair and beard, his torso bound round with an immense bearskin, his sandals tied with thongs, his sinewy limbs apparently unclad, savage bands of silver upon his massy, muscled arms, the alpine ruggedness of his countenance and the light of a fanatical devotion that gleamed in his eye contributing in their every detail to make the creature appear the thing the programme proclaimed him, "Ursus, a Christian Slave."
But the programme claimed something more: that this Ursus was John Hampstead.
Mitchell gaped and then rocked uneasily. The thing was unbelievable. If the man would only speak, perhaps some tone of voice—but the man did not speak, not even move. He stood half in the background, far up the center of the stage, while the talk and action of the piece went on beneath his lofty brow, like some mountain tow ering above a lakelet in which ripples sparkle and fish are leaping. At length, however, stage attention does center on Ursus, when the man enacting St. Peter, struck by the nature-man's appearance of gigantic strength, observes:
"Thou art strong, my son?"
The rugged human statue moved. In a voice that was low at first but broke quickly into reverberating tones which filled the theater to the rafters, the answer came:
"Holy Father! I can break iron like wood!"
As the speech was delivered, the eye of Ursus gleamed, the folded arms unbent, and one mighty muscle flexed the forearm through a short but significant arc, after which the figure resumed its pose of respectful but impressive immobility.
In that single speech and gesture Hampstead had achieved a personal success and keyed the play as plausible, for by it he had come to birth before a theater-full as a character equal to the prodigious feats of strength upon which the action turned.
"Go to the stable, Ursus!" commanded an authoritative voice.
The huge head of the hairy man, with its crown of long, wild locks was inclined humbly, and with an odd, rolling stride suggestive of enormous animal-like strength, he swung deliberately across the scene and out of it.
Robert Mitchell, staring fixedly, suddenly nodded his head with satisfaction. At last, in that careening walk, he had seen something that he recognized. That was the walk of Hampstead; but now Mitchell recalled it was long since he had seen that gait, long since he had heard the office door reverberate from a bang of one of those hip joints, long since the big man had made any conspicuous exhibition of the physical awkwardness that once had been so characteristic. And now? Why now John was an actor. Not Nero yonder, harp in hand, looked more nearly like his part. Hampstead had put on the pose, the voice, the walk, as he had put on the bearskin and the beard.
"Isn't he w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l?" breathed Bessie, with a little squeeze of her father's arm.
Mitchell laughed amiably and reached out for the curling lock upon his brow which was his mainstay in time of mental shipwreck and began to twist it, while he waited impatiently to see more of Ursus.
But the play appeared to have forgotten Ursus. A great party was on in the palace of Cæsar. The stage was alive with lights and music, and with the movements of many people—senators in togas, generals in armor, women with jewels in their hair and golden bands upon their white, gracefully swelling arms. There was drinking and laughter and high carousal. In right center, Cæsar upon his throne was singing and pretending to strike notes from a harp of pasteboard and gilt, notes which in reality proceeded from the orchestra pit. At lower left upon a couch sat Lygia, the Christian maiden, beautiful beyond imagining and being greatly annoyed by the love-makings of the half-intoxicated Roman soldier, Vinicius, who had laid aside his helmet and his sword, and was pleading with the lovely but embarrassed girl, at first upon his knees, then standing, with one knee upon the couch, while he trailed his fingers luxuriously through the glossy blackness of her hair.
As the love-making proceeded, Lygia's apprehension grew. When Vinicius pressed her tresses to his lips, she shrank from him. When, after another cup of wine and just as the whole court was in raptures over the conclusion of Cæsar's song, Vinicius attempted to place his kisses yet more daringly, Lygia started up with a cry of terror. Instantly there sounded from the wings a bellowing roar of rage, and like a flying fury, the wild, hairy figure of Ursus came bounding upon the scene.
Seizing Vinicius by the shoulders, Ursus shook him till all his harness rattled, then hurled him up stage and crashing to the floor. Lygia was swaying dizzily as if about to faint, but with another leap Ursus had gained her side and swung her into his arms, after which he turned and went hurdling across the stage, running in long, springing strides as lightly as a deer, the fair, delicious form of the girl balanced buoyantly on his arms, while her dark hair streamed out and downward over his shoulder—all of this to the complete consternation of the half-drunken Court of Cæsar and the vast and tumultuously expressed delight of the audience, which kept the curtain frisking up and down repeatedly over this climactic conclusion of the second act, while the principals posed and bowed and posed again and bowed again, to the audience, to themselves, and to the scenery. Robert Mitchell even supposed that Ursus was bowing to him, so being naturally polite and somewhat beside himself, the General Freight Agent was on the point of bowing back again when Bessie screamed:
"Oh! Oh! He bowed directly at me."
By this time, however, the curtain had recovered from its frenzy and stayed soberly down while the lights came up so the people could read the advertisements on the front. Immediately the tongues of the audience were all a-buzz, and industriously passing up and down the lines of the seats was the information that John Hampstead was a local character. "Oh, yes, indeed,—instructor in public speaking at the Young Men's Christian Association."
In due course, this piece of interesting information reached the Mitchells in their box.
"I knew it all along," gurgled Bessie proudly.
"I begin to be jealous," announced Mrs. Mitchell, broad of face, expansive of heart, aggressive of disposition. "I want all these people to know that Ursus is our rate clerk."
"And I want them to know," said Mr. Mitchell, by way of venting his disapproval, "that he is spoiling a mighty good rate clerk to make a mighty poor actor."
"But," pouted the loyal Bessie, "he is not a poor actor. He's a w-o-n-d-e-r-f-u-l actor! You are spoiling the plain truth to make a poor epigram. You," and she looked up pertly at her father, "you are just a bunch of sour grapes! You kept my poor Jack's nose on the grindstone so long that he broke out in a new place, and now you are afraid you'll lose him."
"Your poor Jack!" sneered Mrs. Mitchell merrily.
"Yes—mine!" answered Bessie stoutly. "I always told you Jack Hampstead was a great man in disguise. I saw him first—before he saw himself, almost. I'm going to be his friend for always and for always. Oh, look there!"
The curtain had gone up on an odd, out-of-the-way corner of the imperial city. There had been some colloquy over the gate of a small close, participated in by the vibrant voice of an unseen Ursus and the calmer one of a visible St. Peter, after which the gate opened and Ursus entered, bearing the still fainting form of Lygia in his arms; giving, of course, the desired impression that this fair figure of a woman had been nestling on his great bosom ever since the curtain went down some twelve minutes before, an inference that led some of the clerks in the General Freight Office and other persons scattered through the audience, to envy John. This presumption, however, was some distance from the truth. As a matter of fact, Lygia had but recently resumed her position in the arms of Ursus, while two stage hands, lying prone, had plucked open the gate; and various happenings quite unsuspected of the audience had intervened, at least one of which had been a severe shock to the Puritan nature of John Hampstead.
However, there was the dramatic impression already referred to, and it ate its way like acid into the consciousness of at least one person in the playhouse.
Ursus, after looking about him for a moment in the little yard of the Christian's house to make sure he was entirely surrounded by friends, drew his fair burden closer and, as if by a protective instinct, bent over it with a look of tenderness so long and concentrated that his flaxen beard toyed with the white cheek, and his flaxen locks gleamed for a moment amid the raven ones.
"Well," commented Bessie, in a tone that mingled sharp annoyance with that judicially critical note which is the right of all high-school girls in their last year, "I do not see any dramatic necessity for prolonging this. Why doesn't he stick her face under the fountain there for a moment and then lay her on the grass?"
Mercifully, Bessie was not compelled to contain her annoyance too long. Ursus did eventually relinquish his hold upon the lady, and the piece moved on from scene to scene to the final holocaust of Rome.
With the news instinct breaking out above the critical, the dramatic columns of the morning papers gave the major stickful of type to the performance of that histrionic athlete, John Hampstead, forgetting to mention his connection with the Y. M. C. A., but making clear that in daylight he was a highly respected member of the staff of Robert Mitchell, the well-known railroad man.
But to John, the process of conversion from rate clerk to actor had been even more exciting than the demonstration of the fact proved to his friends.
To begin with, it was an experience quite unforgettable to the chairman of the Prayer Meeting Committee of the Christian Endeavor Society of the grand old First Church when for the first time he found himself upon the stage of the Burbank at rehearsal time, with twenty-five or thirty real actors and actresses about him. He looked them over curiously, with a puritanic instinct for moral appraisal, as they stood, lounged, sat, gossiped, smoked, laughed or did several of these things at once; yet all keeping a wary eye and ear for the two men who sat at the little table in the center of the bare, empty stage with their heads together over a manuscript.
"Just about like other people," confessed Hampstead to himself, with something of disappointment.
There were some tailor suited women, there were some smartly dressed young men, there were some very nice girls, not more than a whit different in look and manner from the typists in the general office. There were two or three gray-haired men who, so far as appearance and demeanor went, might have served as deacons of the First Church. There were a couple of dignified, matronly-looking elderly ladies with fancy-work or mending in their laps, as they swayed to and fro in the wicker rockers that were a part of the furnishings for Act II of the play then running. These two ladies, so far as John could see, might have been respectively President of the Ladies' Aid and of the Woman's Missionary Society, instead of what they were, "character old women," as he later learned.
Totaling his impressions, Mowrey's Stock Company seemed like a large exclusive family in which he was suffered but not seen. Nobody introduced him to anybody. Mowrey merely threw him a glance, and that was not of recognition but of observation that he was present.
"First act!" snapped the manager, with a voice as sharp as the clatter of the ruler with which he rapped upon the table. Stepping forward, prompt book in one hand, ruler in the other for a pointer, he began to outline the scene upon the bare stage:
"This chair is a tree—that stage brace is a bench—this box is a rock," and so forth.
The rehearsal had begun. It moved swiftly, for Mowrey was a man with snap to him. His words were quick, nervous, few—until angry. His glance was imperative. It was all business, hot, relentless pressure of human beings into moulds, like hammering damp sand in a foundry.
"Go there! Stand here! Laugh! Weep! Look pleased! Feign intoxication!" Each short word was a blow of Mowrey's upon the wet human sand.
John's name was never mentioned. Mowrey called him by the name of his part, Ursus. Ursus was "on" in the first act, but with nothing to do, and his eyes were wide with watching. One woman in particular attracted him. She was tall and shapely, clad in a close-fitting tailored suit, with hat and veil that seemed to match both her garments and herself. She moved through her part with a kind of distinguished nonchalance, her veil half raised, and a vagrant fold of it flicking daringly at a rosy spot on her cheek when she turned suddenly; while in her gloved hands she held a short pencil with which, from time to time, additional stage directions were noted upon the pages of her part. This accomplished and really beautiful young actress was Miss Marien Dounay, one of the two leading women of the company.
Hampstead was inexperienced of women. He confessed it now to himself. But this was to be the day of his opportunity, and he felt the blood of adventure leaping in his veins. In his consciousness, too, floated little arrows like indicators, and as if by common agreement, they pointed their heads toward Miss Dounay.
If it were she now who played Lygia? Yes; it was she. They were calling her Lygia. Hampstead smiled to himself. Presently he chuckled softly, and the chuckle appeared to loose a small avalanche of new-born emotions that leaped and jumbled somewhere inside.
But the first encounter was disappointing. Miss Dounay seized him by the arm, without a glance,—her eyes being fixed on Mowrey,—and led the big man out of the scene exactly as if he had been a wooden Indian on rollers.
"Now," she said, "you have just carried me off." Her voice had wonderful tones in it, tones that started more avalanches inside; but she appeared as unconscious of the tones and their effect as of him. She was making another note in her part.
"Better practice that 'carry off stage' before we try it at rehearsal," called the sharp voice of Mowrey. His eyes and his remark were addressed to Miss Dounay. Miss Dounay nodded.
"Shall we?" she said, and looked straight at Hampstead, giving him his first glance into self-confident eyes which were clear, brownish-black, with liquescent, unsounded depths. In form it was a question she had asked; in effect it was a command from a very cool and business-like young person.
"I presume we had better," said John, affecting a foolish little laugh, which did not, however, get very far because the earnest air of Miss Dounay was inhospitable to levity.
"See here!" she instructed. "I throw up my arms in a faint. My left arm falls across your right shoulder. At the same time I give a little spring with my right leg, and I throw up my left leg like this. At the same instant you throw your right arm under my shoulders, your left arm gathers my legs; I will hold 'em stiff. There!"
Miss Dounay's arm was on John's shoulder, and she was preparing to suit the rest; of her action to her words. "Without any effort to lift me," she continued, talking now into his ear, "I will be extended in your arms. All you have to do is to be taking your running stride as I come to you, and after that to hold me poised while you bound off the stage. Can you do it?"
With this crisp, challenging question on her lips, Miss Dounay completed the proposed manœuvre of her lower limbs, and John found himself with the long, exquisitely moulded body of a beautiful woman balancing in his arms, while a foolish quiver passed over him and shook him till he actually trembled.
"Am I so heavy?" asked a matter-of-fact voice from his shoulder.
"You are not heavy at all," replied Hampstead, hotly provoked at himself.
"Run, then," she commanded.
The resultant effort was a few staggering, ungraceful steps.
"Dounay weighs a hundred and fifty if she weighs an ounce," said a passing voice.
John, all chagrin as he deposited the lady upon her feet, saw her lip curl, and her dark eyes flash scornfully at the leading juvenile man who, with grimacing intent to tease, had made the remark to the ingénue as both passed near.
"Insolence!" hissed Miss Dounay after the scoffer, and turned again to Hampstead, speaking sharply. "Very bad! You must be in your running stride when my weight falls on you. We must practice."
And practice they did, at every spare moment of the rehearsal during the entire week. From these
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"practices", Hampstead learned an unusual number of things about women which, in his limited experience, he had either not known or which had not been brought home to him before. Some of these he presumed applied generally to all women; others, he had no doubt, were particular to Miss Dounay.
As, for instance, when he looked down at her face where it lay in the curve of his arm, he saw that the oval outline of her cheeks was startlingly perfect; that there were pools of liquid fire in her eyes; that her lips were beautifully and naturally red; that they were long, pliable, sensitive, with fleeting curves that raced like ripples upon these shores of velvet and ruby, expressing as they ran an infinite variety of passing moods. The chin, too, came in for a great deal of this attention. It was round and smooth at the corners, with a delicately chiseled vertical cleft in it, which at times ran up and met a horizontal cleft that appeared beneath the lower lip, when any slight breath of displeasure brought a pout to that ruby, pendant lobe. This meeting-place of the two clefts formed a kind of transitory dimple, a trysting-place of all sorts of fugitive attractions which exercised a singular fascination for the big man.
He used to wonder what the sensation would be like to sink his lips in that precious, delectable valley. It would have been physically simple. A slight lifting of his right arm and shoulder, a slight declension of his neck, and the mere instinctive planting of his lips, and the thing was done. However, John had no thought of doing this. In the first place he wouldn't—without permission; for he was a man of honor and of self-control. In the second place, he wouldn't because a woman was a thing very sacred to him, and a kiss, a deliberate and flesh-tingling kiss, was a caress to be held as sacred as the woman herself and for the expression of an emotion he had not yet felt for any woman; a statement which to the half-cynical might prove again that John Hampstead was a very inexperienced and very monk-minded youth indeed to be abroad in the unromanticism of this twentieth century. Yet the fact remains that Hampstead did not consciously conspire to violate the neutrality of this tiny, alluring haunt of tantalizing beauty which lurked bewitchingly between the red lower lip and the white firm chin of Miss Marien Dounay.
But there were other things that John was learning swiftly, some of which amounted to positive disillusionment. One was that a woman's body is not necessarily so sacred nor so inviolate, after all. That instead of inviolate, it may be made inviolable by a sort of desexing at will. Miss Dounay could do this and did do it, so that for instance when her form stiffened in his arms, it was no more like what he supposed the touch of a woman's body should be than a post. In the first place the body itself, beneath that trim, tailored suit, appeared to be sheathed in steel from the shoulder almost to the knee. John had supposed that corsets were to confine the waist. This one, if that were what it was and not some sort of armor put on for these rehearsals, encased the whole body.
Another thing that contributed to this desexing of the female person was Miss Dounay's bearing toward himself. He might have been a mere mechanical device for any regard she showed him at rehearsals. She pushed or pulled him about, commanded the bend and adjustment of his arms as if he had been an artificial man, and never by any hint indicated that she thought of him as a person, least of all as a male person. Undoubtedly this robbed his new adventure of some of its spice. But a change came. When for five days John was undecided whether he should admire this manner of hers as supreme artistic abstraction or resent it as supercilious disdain, Margaret O'Neil, one of the character old ladies who had constituted herself a combination of critic and chaperone of these "carry" practices, turned, after a word with Miss Dounay, and said:
"We should like to know who it is that is carrying us about."
"Why, certainly," exclaimed John, all his doubt disappearing in a toothful smile as he swept off his hat. "My name is Hampstead, John Hampstead."
"Miss Dounay, allow me to present Mr. Hampstead," said Miss O'Neil, without the moulting of an eyelash.
Miss Dounay extended her hand cordially for a lofty, English handshake, accompanied by an agreeable smile and a chuckling laugh, understood by John to be in recognition of the oddness of the situation.
After this, things were somewhat different. There was less sense of strain on his part, and he began to realize that there had been some strain upon hers which now was relaxed. Her body was less post-like; and toward the end of rehearsal, when possibly she was a little tired, it lay in his arms quite placidly, relaxing until its curves yielded and conformed to the muscular lines of his own torso.
Yet Miss Dounay never betrayed the slightest self-consciousness at such moments. Whatever the woman as woman might be, she was, as an actress, so absolutely devoted to the creation of the character she was rehearsing, so painstakingly careful to reproduce in every detail of tone and action the true impression of a pure-minded, Christian maiden that Hampstead, with his firm religious backgrounding, unhesitatingly imputed to the woman herself all the virtues of the chaste and incomparable Lygia.
When dress-rehearsal time came at midnight on Sunday, just after the regular performance had been concluded, and John saw Miss Dounay for the first time in the dress of the character, his soul was enraptured. The simple folds of her Grecian robe were furled at the waist and then swept downward in one billowy leap, unrelieved in their impressive whiteness by any touch of color, save that afforded by the jet-bright eyes with their assumed worshipful look and the wide, flowing stream of her dark, luxuriant hair, which, loosely bound at the neck, waved downward to her hips. The devout curve of her alabaster neck, the gleaming shoulders, the full, tapering, ivory arms, her sandaled bare feet—yes, John looked close to make sure, and they were actually bare—rounded out the picture.
Marien Dounay stood forth more like an angel vision than a woman, at once so beautiful and so adorable that big, sincere, open-eyed John Hampstead worshipped her where she stood—worshipped her and loved her—as a man should love an angel. Yet as he looked, he was almost guiltily conscious that he knew a secret about this angelic vision,—that this chiseled flesh with rounded, shapely contours that would be the despair of any sculptor was not as marble-like as it looked, was, indeed, soft to the touch and warm, radiant and magnetic.
And John, blissfully aglow with his spiritual ardor, had no faint suspicion that his secret might kill his illusion dead, nor that his devotion would survive that decease, although something very like this happened on the night of the first performance.
The great second act was on. Things were not going as smoothly as they appeared to from the front. Even the inexperienced Hampstead, as he waited for his cue, could see that his angel was being enormously vexed by the manner in which Vinicius made love. Henry Lester was a brilliant actor, but flighty and erratic. During rehearsal Mowrey had much trouble in getting him to memorize accurately the business of his part. He would do one thing one way to-day and forget it or reverse it on the next. To-night Lester was committing all these histrionic crimes. Miss Dounay had continually to adapt herself to his impulsive erraticisms, to shift speeches and alter business. The climax of exasperation came when one of the wide metal circlets upon his arm became entangled in the gossamer threads of Lygia's hair and pulled it painfully. Yet the actress was sufficiently accomplished to play her own part irreproachably and deliver John's cue at the right moment to secure the startling entrance already described, and thus to be gracefully and dramatically swept away from the rude advances of her importunate lover.
It was at the end of this particular scene and off stage, when the curtain was descending to the accompaniment of applause from the audience, that the death of John's illusion came. For a delicious instant, he was still holding Lygia from the floor as if instinctively sheltering her amidst the general confusion of crowding actors and hurrying stage hands. Nothing loth, she lay at rest, with eyes closed and features composed as if in the faint. To the raw, impressionable young man, Marien had never looked so much an angel as at this moment; and now she was coming to, as if still in character. Her eyelids fluttered but did not open, and then her lips moved slightly, stiffly, under their load of greasy carmine, as if she would speak. In self-forgetful ecstasy, Hampstead bent eagerly to receive the confidence. Perhaps she was going to thank him, to whisper a word of congratulation. Whatever the communication might be, his soul was in raptures of delightful anticipation as he felt her breath upon his cheek.
The communication was made promptly and unhesitatingly, after which Miss Dounay alertly swung her feet to the floor and walked out upon the stage to receive her curtain call, leading Ursus by the hand, mentally dazed, inwardly wabbling, outwardly bowing,—trying, in fact, to do just as the others did. But in John's mind now there was this numbing sense of shock, for he could not refuse to believe his ears, and what this angelic vision had breathed into them in tones of cool, emphatic conviction, was:
"What a damn fool that man Lester is!"
Off the stage again Hampstead stumbled about amid flying scenery, racing stage hands, and a surging mass of supernumeraries, like a man recovering consciousness. He wanted to get out of sight somewhere. He had the feeling of having been stripped naked. Every vestige of his religious adoration had been dynamited out of existence. This was no Christian maiden but an actress playing a part. As for the woman herself, she was very blasé and very modern, who, at this moment, as he could see by a glance into the open door of her dressing room, was sitting with crossed knees, head back and enveloped in a halo of smoke, while her pretty lips were distended in a yawn, and the spark of a cigarette glowed in her finger tips.
"And I am another!" Hampstead muttered, with a sneer that was aimed inward.
Seven minutes later, Lygia walked out of her dressing room minus the cigarette and looking again that angel vision, but Hampstead knew better now. He viewed her at first critically and then reflectively; but was presently startled at the gist of his reflections, which was a sort of self-congratulation because this creature that he was about to take in his arms was not an angel, but that more alluring, less elusive thing, a woman.
Two more minutes and the pair of stage hands were stretched stomach-wise upon the floor ready to swing open the wings of the gate at the cue from St. Peter, and Lygia was lying once more in John's arms. In the instant of waiting before the curtain rose, he had time to notice how contentedly and trustfully she appeared to nestle there. Her breathing was like his at first, easy and natural; but gradually, as the moment of suspense lengthened and the instant of action drew near, the rhythmic pulse of both bosoms accelerated, as if, heart on heart, their souls beat in unison. John was noticing, too, how soft Marien's body was where the armor did not extend, how deliciously warm it was, indeed how something like an ethereal heat radiated from it and filled all his veins with a strange, electric, impulsive wistfulness. What was that giddy perfume?
Involuntarily he drew her closer, with a gentle, steady pressure. At this she raised her eyelids and gazed at him for a moment, contemplatively first and then passively curious, after which she lowered the lids again, while her lips half parted in a voiceless sigh.
So far as Hampstead was concerned, illusion had gone. He knew that he was just a man. So far as Miss Dounay was concerned, he suspected that she was just a woman. But devotion remained. John did not relax his hold. Instead there was a momentary tightening of his arms.
"Let 'er go," called the low, tense voice of Mowrey; and with a rustling sound the great curtain slipped slowly upward.