CHAPTER XIIIGENIUS ARRIVES
Betty Waleswas going home for Christmas—a “ploshkin” income puts life on such a comfortable financial basis! And between Christmas and New Year’s Babe was going to be married. That meant coming half-way back to Harding for the wedding; and it made easier Betty’s sad decision that since the stocking factory was willing to postpone its Christmas party till New Year’s, and since most of the Morton Hall girls would spend their vacations in town, and certainly be very forlorn indeed unless somebody looked after them, it was the duty of Miss B. Wales, Secretary, to come back early and lend a hand.
Betty breathed a deep sigh of relief when she had seen Eleanor off to New York, in the company of Madeline Ayres, who had finished her play and now flatly refused to delay the putting on of the final touches in New York for the interests of the Tally-ho’s gift-shop department.
“Why, my dear girls,” she declared tragically, “I’m not half through yet. I’ve got to see every success on Broadway now, to get into touch with the season’s fads. Then I shall ‘supe’ a few times, to catch the right feeling for one or two bare spots in my first act. Finally, I shall probably hate my play so that I’ll tear it up and take the next boat for Naples, to be consoled by my Bohemian family, who will laud me to the skies for tearing up a play because I considered it bad art.”
“Oh, Madeline!” came in horror-struck chorus at this point.
“Well,” Madeline admitted blandly, “I’m willing to confide to friends that at present my humble effort looks to me like the play of the year—and I’m fairly stage-wise already. Dick Blake used to advise all the aspiring dramatic critics he knew to take me along to their big first nights, because I can always tell by instinct what the audience is saying to itself. I’m a perfect mirror of public opinion. If I still believe in my play after I’ve been ’round a little I shall see Miss Dwight and her manager. After that——” Madelineshrugged her shoulders, and confided irrelevantly to the resident B. C. A.’s, who had come down to see the travelers off, that she wanted a black velvet hat with a white feather.
“And I’m going to have it, what’s more,” she ended. “I wrote dad, and he just said, ‘It’s lucky you don’t want two white feathers, now isn’t it?’ And he sent along a munificent check.”
Which proved, Betty said, that genius is not incompatible with frivolous-mindedness.
Jim sniffled manfully on their arrival, and his carefully marshaled “features” diverted Eleanor beautifully, especially after she had been up to Harding once to see Rafael, who, after he began to mend, progressed with amazing rapidity on the road to recovery. Because she had dreaded seeing him, she was relieved to get the meeting over, and much more relieved to find the boy so completely changed. As soon as it could be managed he had been moved to a hospital, and the new atmosphere, supplemented by good care and kindness, had done wonders for him. Before he was well enough to leave, Mr. Thayer declared,Rafael would be completely Americanized.
He greeted Eleanor with a frank smile above his big bandages.
“I awful silly boy,” he said, holding out a thin hand to her. “I guess you want laugh at me. I guess you tink I know not how gran’ you live in this country. Now I know. I know two, tree nurse-lady and many visitor-lady, looka like you. I like to live here always. I hope I get well awful slow.”
But, when Eleanor had delivered Jim’s message about Rafael’s going, as soon as he was strong enough, to a fine trade-school in Philadelphia, he changed his mind.
“Den I hope I get well awful fast. Before I get old, I know how all de wheels in dis world go round, mebbe. I think you be mad at me, and now you do me dis great big splendor.”
“Oh, no, I wasn’t ever ‘mad’ at you,” Eleanor explained, “only sorry you were so silly, and dreadfully frightened when you were so ill the first week.”
Rafael shrugged his shoulders. “Good ting for me. I come here. I learn how tobe ’Merican man in two, tree weeks. I come here silly lil foreign boy. I look roun’. I listen hard. I see how you do here in your gran’ country. And now,” Rafael snuggled into his pillows with a beatific smile, “I find why all dose wheel go roun’. I maka fine machine, mebbe. I swear off carry a dagger. And I tank you alla my life.”
So Eleanor could return to Jim, the bull pup, the suitors, and the diversions of New York, with the happy assurance that in the end Rafael’s devotion to her might be the making of him, and at the least its untoward climax would do him more good than harm. Having nothing now to worry about, she devoted the journey back to New York to planning a ravishing new gown for Babe’s wedding. It was to be yellow, because Dick Blake (who would not be at the wedding) liked yellow gowns on her best; and very plain, because Dick liked simple lines and no furbelows. Details might safely be left to Madame Celeste. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that Eleanor devoted the journey back to New York to thinking about Dick Blake.
Babe’s wedding was to be a grand society function.
“To please John’s father and my mother,” Babe wrote to her friends of 19—; “John and I are resigned, because a wedding only lasts for one evening, and after that we can shut ourselves up in our regular castle of a house, with only the people we want, and everything you can think of in your wildest dreams to amuse ourselves with. So one little evening isn’t much to sacrifice. Mother says we owe it to our social position. She doesn’t know that we have decided not to have any social position. We’re just going to have a good time and try to make some good times for other people. An impromptu wedding would have been lots more fun, but you must all come, just the same.”
Babe’s sister was to be maid of honor, Bob and Babbie, Betty and Roberta Lewis were to be bridesmaids, and the other “Merry Hearts” would sit together in a front pew, and be considered just as much in the wedding party as if they were bridesmaids also. Jasper J. Morton was coming up the night of the wedding in his private car. He hadmeant to come the day before “to help you entertain Miss B. A. and her friends,” he wrote Babe, but there were important directors’ meetings to keep him at the last minute. He wrote Babe not to worry about him. “I shall charter a special train if necessary—and don’t I always arrive on time as a matter of principle?”
But when Babe left the house for the church he had not appeared, and after they had kept people waiting and wondering half an hour, and Babe was so nervous that she declared she should cry in one more minute it was decided to go on without him.
The reception was half over when he appeared, looking very meek and sheepish. He kissed Babe on both cheeks, shook John’s hand till it ached, and despatched Babbie to “find those reporter fellows and tell ’em I’m not smashed up anywhere between here and New York, and I don’t withhold my blessing from the happy couple. Tell ’em I was accidentally detained, and if they want to know how say it was on a private matter that is none of their business.”
“And add some characteristic remarksabout the ridiculous apes who try to run our railroads,” put in John with a chuckle.
“No, sir,” said Jasper J. Morton, with emphasis, “not this trip. Pretty nearly every mile was a record, and I’ve recommended that engineer to run the road’s Lightning Limited at a big increase over his present pay. The reason I didn’t get here was personal—purely personal.”
Later in the evening he got Babe and John and Betty into a corner, and told them all about it. “Miss B. A.’s to blame, as usual,” he began. “You see my train went out just ten minutes behind the Lightning Limited, with no stop till Albany and the track clear all the way west. I was hurrying through the station to get on, when I nearly ran down a pretty little woman who was crying so hard she didn’t see me coming. She’d lost the Lightning Limited, and her husband was dying in a little place just beyond Albany where he’d gone on business and been taken suddenly sick. There was a slow train in an hour, but that would be too late, she said.
“Naturally I told her to come with me to Albany. And then of course I couldn’t leaveher there to hunt up her connection alone, and have to waste time waiting, maybe. So I arranged for a stop at the town she was going to, and then,” Jasper J. Morton flushed shamefacedly, “when nobody met her, we side-tracked our outfit and I drove up to the hotel with her. She was barely in time, the doctor said. They’d been married just a year to-day, she told me. I guess if ever you two are in a tight place you’ll be thankful to anybody who misses his boy’s wedding to help you out. But I wouldn’t have those reporters out there know what a soft-hearted old auntie I’m getting to be, not for anything. Miss B. A., you’ll be the ruin of me yet, with all your theories about looking out for the other fellow.”
“We’ll be married all over again if you’d like us to, Father Morton,” Babe offered gallantly, although she had assured John after the ceremony that she wouldn’t ever have promised to marry him if she bad realized the queer feelings you have while you are doing it.
But Mr. Morton refused her generous offer. “I’m satisfied,” he said, “as long as John’sgot you for a wife and I’ve got you for a daughter. My seeing it done wouldn’t have made any big difference to you——”
“Oh, yes, it would,” broke in Babe kindly.
“Not the difference it made to that poor little crying lady to see her husband,” pursued Mr. Morton. Then he chuckled merrily as Babbie appeared, looking very angry and quite absurdly pretty in consequence. “Were those reporters inquisitive?” he demanded.
“They did think you stayed away on purpose,” declared Babbie indignantly. “As if any one could possibly disapprove of Babe! I told them you were just as fond of her as John is. And now they’re discussing what effect your being late will have on Wall Street. They said to tell you that, and to ask you please to come out and talk to them, if you didn’t want the market to collapse to-morrow like a pricked balloon. They laughed right in my face when I said it was a ‘private affair’ that kept you.”
“I’ll settle them,” said Jasper J. Morton, and went off muttering something about “those chimpanzees that run the newspapers.”
Whereat John looked relieved. “First timehe’s acted natural to-night,” he said. “If he hadn’t gone up in the air pretty soon, I should have telegraphed his doctor. But now we can start on our wedding trip feeling perfectly safe about him.”
Madeline couldn’t come to the wedding. She had sent her play to Miss Dwight’s manager, and now she was exerting all her ingenuity to get a personal interview with Miss Dwight herself.
“Her present play isn’t going well, and she’s as cross as a bear,” Madeline wrote Babe. “Dick Blake knows her—had dinner with her just before I came down. She said that night that she believed in her play, and if it failed she should lose all faith in American audiences, buy a lake in Maine and a river in Florida, and retire from the stage. Dick says she will never do that, but he thinks it’s no use talking my play to her in her present mood. He got the manager of the Lyric Repertoire Theatre to say he’d read the manuscript, and now he’s perfectly furious with me because I persist with Miss Dwight. ‘Agatha or nobody’ is my war-cry! If she’d only read my play or talk to me, one or the other,I know there wouldn’t be any more trouble. That play fits her like a glove, and it will take—oh, how it will take!”
When college opened again Madeline was still on Miss Dwight’s trail, but almost ready to give up and let the Lyric manager, or anybody else who wanted it, take her play. Miss Dwight’s manager had made no sign. Miss Dwight herself, piqued by her first failure, had entrenched herself behind unassailable barriers.
“I’ve tried everything,” wrote Madeline despairingly. “I got ‘The Sentinel’ to send me to interview her, and she wouldn’t let me in. The Enderbys gave a dinner for her; she accepted and then sent word she was ill. Dick Blake relented and tried to introduce the subject of his talented young friend, and she would hear none of me.
“To-night I’m playing my last card. If it doesn’t take the trick, why, I’ve lost, that’s all. Rumor says that her manager has had six hundred plays sent him this last week—of course he won’t find mine under that pile.”
JUST AS THEY HAD GIVEN HER UP
JUST AS THEY HAD GIVEN HER UP
For two weeks thereafter the pen of the aspiring playwright was silent. Betty andMary Brooks decided that she was busy getting her play out from under the pile of other manuscripts, in order to send it to the despised manager of the Lyric. So they were surprised and delighted when Betty received a rapturous, incoherent scrawl, announcing complete success.
“She took it. She’s rehearsing it now. The part does fit her, just as I said it would. She’s coming up with me soon to see Harding.“With love from the happiest girl in New York,Mad.“P. S.—Plan a B. C. A. tea-party for to-morrow. I can’t wait any longer to tell you all about it.”
“She took it. She’s rehearsing it now. The part does fit her, just as I said it would. She’s coming up with me soon to see Harding.
“With love from the happiest girl in New York,
Mad.
“P. S.—Plan a B. C. A. tea-party for to-morrow. I can’t wait any longer to tell you all about it.”
The B. C. A.’s assembled joyously, and just as they had given her up Madeline appeared, trying hard to act offhand and unconcerned, and managing it about as badly as might have been expected of a young person whose first play was being rehearsed with much enthusiasm by Agatha Dwight, and advertised far and wide by her manager as the play of the year.
The B. C. A.’s plied her with tea, muffins,and jam, which she despatched promptly, and with questions, which she totally ignored, giving them all sorts of irrelevant information about Eleanor’s music, Jim’s dog, and Dick’s splendid serial, by a “dark horse” in fiction-writing, which was doing wonders for the subscription list and the standing of “The Quiver.” When she had finished three cups of tea and uncounted muffins, she settled back in a corner of the Tally-ho stall with a sigh of complete satisfaction.
“Now,” she said, “I’ll tell you all about it. It’s much too good a story to mix up with crumpets and tea, like ordinary conversation. And don’t interrupt, or I shall be sorry I came.”
Awestruck silence met this dire announcement, and Madeline began.
“I wrote you about the interview I couldn’t get, the dinner Miss Dwight wouldn’t come to, the time she snapped Dick off so short, and all that. There were other things of the same kind—a reception the Woman’s College Club gave for her, when she swept in looking like a princess, made a funny, fascinating little speech, and swept out again. Well, Iwas to have introduced her to people that afternoon, and I’d counted on making her notice me and so getting my chance. I didn’t get it that way, but I made a discovery.
“I found that a girl who had a walking part in the first act of her play and another in the last, and who was down on the bills as Annette Weeks for one and Felicia Trench for the other, was a Harding girl named plain Mary Smith. That is, she didn’t graduate, but was here a year or two just before our time. Well, I went to that ridiculous play every night for a week, until I knew every bit of the Weeks-Trench business as well as Mary Smith herself. Then I waited for her at the stage door after a matinée, took her for tea somewhere, told her what I wanted, and begged her to play sick and let me do her part for a week or two.
“At first she laughed at me—said she might play sick all she could, but I wouldn’t get the place. Besides, I was taller than she. What would I do for clothes? Before I could get the dresses made the play would be done for. For a minute I was stumped by that—I hadn’t thought of clothes. Then I rememberedEleanor’s super-elegant wardrobe, and I knew she’d lend me some things under the circumstances. And I saw that Mary Smith was in the same mood as Miss Dwight,—discouraged over the play and worried at being left in mid-season without a part. So I talked hard, all about my play and the honor of Harding, and the college girl’s elevating the stage by writing as well as by acting. And then I put it to her: ‘You’ve got nothing much to lose, and I’ve got everything to gain. Can you act?’ She shook her head. ‘Miss Dwight took me on because she wants to encourage nice girls to go on the stage. There’s a walking part in nearly every play, so she’s kept me.’ ‘There’s a walking part in my play,’ I told her, ‘and if this one isn’t good for over two weeks you can rest and go to the theatre and save your dresses for another part.’ ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Of course you get the salary,’ I said. ‘Give me a pencil,’ she said, ‘and I’ll write you the reference.’ That’s how I landed in Agatha Dwight’s company, exactly two weeks ago to-night.”
Madeline paused dramatically. Mary Brooks opened her mouth to ask a question,and closed it again hastily, gasping like a fish. Helen Chase Adams got as far as the initial “burble” of “but,” and stopped spasmodically. Madeline had impressed them all with the importance of obeying the rules of the occasion.
“That,” she said, looking around the circle with a pleased smile, “is chapter one. The next thing was to get Her Highness to notice me. The first night, as she swept by me on her way to her car, she inquired for the girl I’d ousted, and said it was refreshing to find an understudy who didn’t need breaking in. After that she never looked at me for four days except in the scenes, and then with a vacant sort of a stare and a stage smile. But the next night she turned giddy in the first act, and I managed to improvise a parlor story that fitted well enough into the scene while she snuffed smelling-salts and pulled herself together, so that the audience never guessed that anything was wrong. She looked awfully angry—at herself or me, I couldn’t tell which. But the manager patted me on the back, and perhaps because he told her to she sent for me to come to her in thelong intermission. And I went, of course, and she asked me all about myself, and she liked my answers. So I plunged right in. The manager spent the night finding my play for her, and she spent the morning reading it and the afternoon talking to me about it, and the next day they began rehearsals—with the walking lady back in her part. I explained about her, and Miss Dwight thought it was a lovely story. She’s got a real Harding sense of humor; and she’s coming up here before long to see the place. That’s all.” Madeline leaned forward to reach for the muffin plate, and perceiving it to be empty hastily leaned back again.
Mary summoned Nora. “More muffins, please,” she ordered, “and don’t look so reproachful, Nora, please, over our appetites. Miss Madeline has been too busy lately proving that she’s a genius to take time to eat. Now she’s making up for it.”
“Oh, and is that what’s to pay?” said Nora, smiling comprehensively at the B. C. A.’s. “Provin’ anything is hard worrk. I could never prove me sums at school. That’s because they was generally wrong. It’s awfulhard to prove what ain’t so, ain’t it now, Miss Madeline?” And Nora departed amiably for more muffins, ignoring the bursts of laughter that followed her. Nora had long since ceased to attach any significance to the laughter of the Harding girls. They laughed just as other people breathed. It was as unaccountable as the enormous number of muffins they consumed.
They were still laughing when Nora came back with Mary’s order. They sent her off again for hot tea, and they drank Madeline’s health in it, and Miss Dwight’s, and the health of the Walking Lady who had helped Madeline to play out her trump card. They congratulated Madeline riotously, they made wonderful plans for Miss Dwight’s visit to Harding, and others for seeing the first night of the play.
“We are at last justified in the eyes of the wide, wide world,” declaimed Mary pompously. “We’ve been called the cleverest crowd in college, and now we’ve shown ’em. A well-kept husband like mine and a well-kept tea-room like Betty’s are nice little features, but a play for Agatha Dwight is thereal thing. And the moral of that is: Look out for a genius, and the grand-stand play will look out for itself.”
“And the moral of that,” said little Helen Chase Adams primly, “is that it’s time for faculty wives to dress for dinner.”
“Also campus faculty,” added Rachel hastily, and the most exciting B. C. A. tea-drinking of the season reluctantly dispersed.