The Project Gutenberg eBook ofFootlights

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofFootlightsThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: FootlightsAuthor: Rita WeimanRelease date: December 18, 2019 [eBook #60950]Most recently updated: October 17, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Tim Lindell, David Wilson, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOOTLIGHTS ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: FootlightsAuthor: Rita WeimanRelease date: December 18, 2019 [eBook #60950]Most recently updated: October 17, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Tim Lindell, David Wilson, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)

Title: Footlights

Author: Rita Weiman

Release date: December 18, 2019 [eBook #60950]Most recently updated: October 17, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Tim Lindell, David Wilson, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOOTLIGHTS ***

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Footlights, by Rita Weiman

[i]FOOTLIGHTS

[iii]FOOTLIGHTSBYRITA WEIMAN[Publisher’s Device]NEW YORKDODD, MEAD AND COMPANY1923

BYRITA WEIMAN

NEW YORKDODD, MEAD AND COMPANY1923

[iv]Copyright, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922By RITA WEIMANPRINTED IN U. S. A.

[iv]Copyright, 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922By RITA WEIMAN

PRINTED IN U. S. A.

[v]ToMY MOTHERon whose love and influencethe curtain will never fall.

[v]ToMY MOTHER

on whose love and influencethe curtain will never fall.

[vii]CONTENTSPAGEThe Curtain RisesixFootlights3Madame Peacock67Grease-Paint127The Back Drop169Two Masters219Up Stage249Curtain!289The Curtain Falls341

The Curtain Rises

Footlights

Madame Peacock

Grease-Paint

The Back Drop

Two Masters

Up Stage

Curtain!

The Curtain Falls

[ix]THE CURTAIN RISESArched like the dome of heaven, illumined with a glow not brilliant but warm and intimate, carpeted with velvet that gives gently to the tread of many feet, the air vaguely scented with a perfume that has no name, row upon row of wide, soft-armed chairs facing a curtain that falls in long, mysterious folds—silent, expectant, tantalizing, inviting—a world all its own—THE THEATER.Behind that curtain—the same world bounded by brick walls. Scenery with act numbers scrawled in charcoal across its back being shoved into place, hustling property men, frantic stage manager, nervous director giving last minute husky orders, anxiously repeated lines and cues, the final touches of make-up, restive feet striding dressing-room floors. There is the murmur of hushed voices, its excited undercurrent like a rising chant, the tremulo of uncertainty, the eager activity of that suspended moment of waiting for the curtain to lift.Actors and audience—they must for a few brief hours change places if this world made for forgetfulness, this house of dreams is to realize its unwritten law:—“Abandon care, all ye who enter here:” The spirit of the theater lays magic fingers over tired eyes. The audience steps across the footlights and becomes the actor, throbs to his emotions, sheds his tears, tingles with his laughter. The actor must step across the footlights and become the audience, feel his pulse beat, sense his pleasure or disapproval, know his reaction.[x]And in proportion to the measure with which each becomes the other, the enthusiasm with which the audience acts, the keenness with which the actor observes, the play lives. The house of dreams is alight! But if either should fail—and if one fail, it is because the other does—then the play is phantom. A stalking ghost walks the boards. The house of dreams goes dark!

Arched like the dome of heaven, illumined with a glow not brilliant but warm and intimate, carpeted with velvet that gives gently to the tread of many feet, the air vaguely scented with a perfume that has no name, row upon row of wide, soft-armed chairs facing a curtain that falls in long, mysterious folds—silent, expectant, tantalizing, inviting—a world all its own—THE THEATER.

Behind that curtain—the same world bounded by brick walls. Scenery with act numbers scrawled in charcoal across its back being shoved into place, hustling property men, frantic stage manager, nervous director giving last minute husky orders, anxiously repeated lines and cues, the final touches of make-up, restive feet striding dressing-room floors. There is the murmur of hushed voices, its excited undercurrent like a rising chant, the tremulo of uncertainty, the eager activity of that suspended moment of waiting for the curtain to lift.

Actors and audience—they must for a few brief hours change places if this world made for forgetfulness, this house of dreams is to realize its unwritten law:—“Abandon care, all ye who enter here:” The spirit of the theater lays magic fingers over tired eyes. The audience steps across the footlights and becomes the actor, throbs to his emotions, sheds his tears, tingles with his laughter. The actor must step across the footlights and become the audience, feel his pulse beat, sense his pleasure or disapproval, know his reaction.

[x]And in proportion to the measure with which each becomes the other, the enthusiasm with which the audience acts, the keenness with which the actor observes, the play lives. The house of dreams is alight! But if either should fail—and if one fail, it is because the other does—then the play is phantom. A stalking ghost walks the boards. The house of dreams goes dark!

[1]FOOTLIGHTSSATIREThe Romance of yesterday is the Satire of to-morrow. Juliet to-day would be a lovesick flapper. We’d regard with tongue in cheek her moonings to the moon. There is such a fine line between the smile of sympathy and the smile of sophistication, that the author confesses she is still in doubt which the heroine of “Footlights” will call forth—if either.

The Romance of yesterday is the Satire of to-morrow. Juliet to-day would be a lovesick flapper. We’d regard with tongue in cheek her moonings to the moon. There is such a fine line between the smile of sympathy and the smile of sophistication, that the author confesses she is still in doubt which the heroine of “Footlights” will call forth—if either.

[3]FOOTLIGHTSCHAPTER IHaveyou ever been in a small town, small time vaudeville house? Well, even if you have, and could live through it, you’ve probably never seen that mysterious region known as “backstage.” You’ve never heard warped boards creak under the lightest step. You’ve never stood in the wings waiting for your turn, trying to escape the draught that is everywhere, shivering but afraid to sneeze. You’ve never dodged misdirected tobacco juice. You’ve never endured the composite odors only a one time “opery-house,” sometime warehouse, another time stable, can produce. You’ve never done your three a day, rain, shine or blizzard, then rushed to catch a local with oil lamps swinging weirdly overhead and a jerky halt at every peach tree. But most of all, if you’re a woman, you’ve never known what it is to sit weeping in a pea-green walled dressing-room because you chose to do the darn thing yourself and won’t go back home and admit you’re beaten.If any one of these experiences had been yours, you’d probably walk straight into the pea-green dressing-room referred to, pat Elizabeth Parsons on the shoulder and say, “I’m with you, old girl! It’s a black, black world. No sunshine anywhere! Never was, never will be!”As it happened, those in her world at the moment were not of her world. They were a hardened lot, with hands ready to dig down and share a copper with a pal, with glib greeting in their own peculiar patois as they swung[4]through the stage entrance, but inured to creaking boards, to combined odors, to oaths and tobacco juice and icy currents that gripped more sensitive shoulders like the hand of death. Life had handed them a deal that wasn’t exactly square, perhaps. Almost any of them would have been a knock-out on Broadway! But they had reached the point where emotion, as well as indignation, expressed itself in shrugs.They could snore peacefully in a swaying day-coach, dreaming of the hour when the flower of success would spring up by the wayside. So Elizabeth Parsons wept alone. Her make-up boxes reeled in every direction as her head went down in their midst. Her hands, pressed against her lips, tried to still the sobs she knew were cowardly. Her body shook with that least beautiful of human emotions, self-pity, and she wished she were dead.A gale of sleet and snow tore against her little alley window. It rattled the single pane furiously. It forced its way through cracks and dripped into pools of water on the stone floor. It blurred the already dull electric globes round her dressing-table with a dank mist and soaked a chill into her bones. But it had nothing whatever to do with her tears. They were the result of an accumulation of misery and loneliness, and finally the receipt of a wire from her booking agent advising her that her route had been changed. For the next three days she must play her own home town.It was the crowning humiliation! She had endured the disappointment of all the rest of it; but to go back to the barnlike old theater in Main Street, wedged between movies and tinsel acrobats, was too much. To[5]hear the wagging tongues and see the wagging heads of those who had warned her two years ago that New York was a pit of the devil; to let them see that even his satanic majesty had let her sink into oblivion, was more than she could bear.From the stage at the foot of the iron stairs came a crashing chord and the voice of Jack Halloran, “The Funniest Man in the World,” singing a nasal travesty:—“Oh, Rigoletto—give me a stiletto!”Elizabeth raised her head, mopped away the tears, and rearranged her make-up. Her turn was next but one.“BETTY PARSONS—FAMOUS IMITATOR OFFAMOUS STARSSTRAIGHT FROM BROADWAY.”So proclaimed the announcements that accompanied her pictures outside the theater. They always made Elizabeth smile. She had certainly come from Broadway—straight.She brushed back her soft brown hair, pinned a towel round it, laid on a layer of grease-paint. A supply was needed to blot out traces of the last bad half hour. She beaded the lashes, penciled black shadows under them that made her gray eyes look green, and carmined her lips so that the slightly austere New England lines of them softened into luscious curves.In the midst of transforming a primrose into an orchid, and with thoughts still fastened on the dreaded to-morrow, she did not hear the knock on her door. It was[6]repeated. Turning, she saw a white square of paper shoved through the crack. She picked it up wonderingly. Communications from any one but her agent were almost unknown quantities.Dear Lizzie Parsons (she read),I’m outside of the door waiting to come in and say hello.Your old friend,Lou Seabury.In spite of her dread, in spite of her determination to die rather than face home folks, she dropped her powder puff, made one bound for the door, flung it wide.“Oh, Rigoletti—give me a yard of spaghetti,” warbled Halloran from below.With a little checked cry, Elizabeth reached out both hands. A plump, pink cheeked young man took them and somewhat diffidently stepped into the little square of room. But Elizabeth clung to him shamelessly and her voice caught when she tried to speak. He was the first link between two years of loneliness and the yesterdays of happy childhood.“Lou,” came at last, “Lou Seabury!”“I got a nerve, haven’t I,—walkin’ in on you like this?”His pink face flushed a deeper pink as she pulled the chair from the dressing-table, thrust him into it, and stood looking down. “You’re just an angel from heaven, that’s what you are! How ever in the world did you find me?”“I came over here yesterday to look at some threshin’ machines. Scott Brothers are sellin’ out and Dad got[7]word they’re lettin’ their stuff go dirt cheap, so he sent me to take a squint. By Jiminy, I almost dropped dead when I went past the theater this afternoon and saw your picture. Maybe I didn’t go right up to the girl in the ticket box and tell her I was an old friend of yours!”Elizabeth’s tongue went into her cheek. “And what did she say?”“Asked why I didn’t come in to see you perform to-night and I said I would. But first I made up my mind I’d let you know I was here. Say—what is it you do?”“Imitations.”“Who do you imitate?”“Oh, Ethel Barrymore and Elsie Janis and Eddie Foy and George Cohan and Nazimova—” She reeled off a list, most of them strange to him.“I’ll bet you’re great. Gee—Lizzie—but you’re pretty.” His round face went scarlet as the words popped out and he shifted uneasily under the loose ill-fitting coat that hung from his broad shoulders.She met his wide-eyed admiration with a smile. “It’s the paint, Lou.”“No, sirree! You always were pretty. I used to watch you sittin’ beside me in the choir, and when you threw back your head and sort of closed your eyes to sing, I didn’t wonder Sam Goodwin was crazy about you.”“Is he still organist at the First Presbyterian?”“Yep.”“And are you still in the choir?”“Yep.” His boyish brown eyes dropped. His plump hands twisted the brim of his wide slouch hat. “Guess that’s the most I’ll ever amount to.”[8]“But that beautiful voice of yours—it’s a sin!”“My Dad don’t think so. Gimcracks, he calls it. I asked him once to give me enough to get it trained,” the eyes lifted with a twinkle, “and I never asked him again.”She patted his arm sympathetically. “He wouldn’t understand—of course.”“Gee, I wish I had your sand, Lizzie! To break away—and make good.”She turned swiftly to the mirror, picked up the discarded puff, dabbed some powder on her nose, then carefully rouged her nostrils. And if a tear smudged into the shadow under her eye, he didn’t notice it.He watched her fascinated, every move, every practiced touch to her make-up. She had unpinned the towel and her hair fluffed like a golden brown halo round her small, mobile face. And catching his rapt expression in the mirror, it flashed over her that to him she did represent success. The mere fact that she had broken the chains of New England tradition, that she had crossed the rubicon of the footlights, put her on a plane apart.Somehow the look in his nice eyes, of wonder, of envy, of homage—the look she had so often worn when from a fifty cent seat in the gallery she had studied the methods of the stars she impersonated—gave her new courage. To-nightshe would not go through her ten minutes listlessly with just one idea uppermost—to get her theater trunk packed in a rush so that she might snatch a few hours’ sleep before making the train in the dull gray dawn. To-night she would be sure at least of an audience of one, of interest and enthusiasm and a thrill of[9]excitement—and these she would merit. She would do her turn for Lou Seabury in a way he’d never forget.She drew a stool from under the dressing-table, sat down and plied him with hurried questions about the folks at home. He gave her the latest news, little intimate bits that mean nothing but are so dear to one who knows no fireside but the battered washstand and cracked basin of a third-rate hotel room.Grand’pa Terwilliger, seventy-nine, was keeping company with the widow Bonser but was scared to marry her for fear folks would talk. Grace Perkins had a new baby. Stanley Perkins had married a stenographer in Boston and bought a flivver. He, Lou, had bought a victrola for fifteen dollars second-hand and had some crackerjack opera records for it. She ought to hear them!When finally she sent him round to the front of the house and hurried down the ugly iron steps, her low-heeled white slippers touched them with an eager lightness they had not known for months.The curtain was rung down on a one-act sketch. A placard announced “Miss Betty Parsons—in her Famous Imitations.”With a dazzling smile, Elizabeth sallied forth, cane in hand singing, “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.”Through her repertoire she went, changing like a chameleon from the bland grin and strut of Eddie Foy to the crumpled pleading and out-flung hands of Nazimova in “The Doll’s House.” She plunged into Nora’s final scene with her husband:[10]... “When your terror was over—not for what threatened me, but for yourself ... then it seemed to me—as though nothing had happened. I was your lark again, your doll just as before—whom you would take twice as much care of in future, because she was so weak and fragile. Torwald—in that moment it burst upon me that I had been living here these eight years with a strange man.... Oh, I can’t bear to think of it! I couldtearmyself to pieces!”The greater part of the audience had never heard of the Russian actress, knew less of the Scandinavian author. But the sob in the voice of the frail little girl on the stage, the anguish in her face got them by the throat.There was a spontaneous burst of applause that held for a moment while Betty bowed, glance straying into the misty auditorium, heart fluttering with a gratification it had not known since the Grand Central spilled her into the bewildering maze that is New York.She swung quickly into ragtime after that, the drawling syncopation and rolling step of a black-face comedian, and as a conclusion gave them Elsie Janis in one of the songs from her latest Broadway success.They brought her back several times. She threw them a final kiss, disappeared into the wings and whisked up the stairs. Lou was going to see the show to its finish, then call for her. He was sure they could persuade the proprietor of the hotel where she was staying to fix up a little supper of sandwiches and milk.She slipped out of her white dress and into a dark one, folded the former in layers of tissue paper and laid it in the top trunk tray, stuffing stockings into the corners to keep it in place. She gathered together her make-up,[11]packed it into a tin box. To-morrow another pea-green dressing-room, or perhaps, saffron-yellow. The week following, one of chalk-blue. And so on, ad infinitum. Of such her infinite variety!A knock came at the door. She glanced at the gold watch which had been her grandmother’s. Ten-fifteen. Lou had probably tired of the show.Pulling on her black velvet tarn, she called gaily—“Come in!”A mellow voice answered interrogatively, “Miss Parsons?”It was then she wheeled about. Standing framed in the doorway was a tall man with a cloud of black hair sweeping from a white forehead and a pair of intense dark eyes. Elizabeth knew him instantly.No mistaking that face and long, lean figure.She drew a bewildered hand across a bewildered brow. In the doorway of her dressing-room stood Oswald Kane, famous New York theatrical producer!She made no attempt at speech, just stared at him.He smiled. “You expected some one else, I see. May I come in?” And as she nodded, “You know me?”She nodded again, indicated the chair and sank onto the low stool. She couldn’t have stood another instant.“You’re wondering, of course, why I am here,” the low musical voice went on.“Y-yes.”“I’m very much interested in your work, Miss Parsons. I have come to see it three times—last night and twice to-day. Until to-night, however, I was not quite sure of you. There was a listless quality. Had any one,[12]perhaps, informed you that I was in front to-night?”“If any one had, I’d probably have died of nervousness.”He smiled again, ran a hand through his heavy hair, pushing it back from his forehead, and leaned forward. “You seem to be a very talented little girl. No technique, of course. You have the A B C’s of that to learn. But you have a flexible voice and expressive face, and you showed in that Nazimova bit emotional possibilities. Your reproduction of her tone and accent were really excellent.”“Th—thank you,” came with difficulty.“Of course, I have no proof that you can act. Even if you can, it will require infinite patience and training to make an actress of you. But I could do it, I believe.”Elizabeth gulped.He shook back his shock of hair. His burrowing eyes narrowed. His fingers hesitatingly played with the thin watch chain that spanned his high waistcoat. “The majority of actresses on the American stage are mere mummers. Those I have made are artistes. But in order to accomplish this, they have given themselves into my hands—absolutely. I have taken girls out of the chorus and made stars of them in the drama—not because they were lovely to look at, or quick or clever, but because I have worked hard with them, with infinite patience developed their personalities, injected into them the inspiration that is Oswald Kane.”“Yes,” said Elizabeth.“Of course there must be ability or I would not waste my time. I must be sure the seed is there to be nursed[13]into a beautiful flower. But first and foremost, the actress I train must obliterate self. She must become so much clay for me to model. She must accept my direction without question. She must obey as a soldier obeys his commanding officer.”“Yes,” sighed Elizabeth.“I see you now not as you are, but as what I can make of you. No two of my stars are alike. Each has distinct and startling personality. That is why the American public looks to me for sensations. Not one is the actress she was when I discovered her. They are, one and all, Oswald Kane creations.” He leaned back, still studying her.Elizabeth felt a sea of eyes upon her in a gaze of hypnosis. She stared back like one in a trance.He sat for a long moment silent. Then the low, quiet voice went on, richly vibrant as the tones of a cello.“Yes, I think I might do something with you. That Nazimova bit showed promise. But it will require training and patience—infinite patience. You will have to work hard without complaint, hours over one line, weeks over one short scene. And no recognition, perhaps, for some years to come. You must not consider mundane things. Money must count for nothing. I cannot think of money in connection with my art. You must never grow tired or disgruntled. Above all, you must not question. And in the end, a great artiste, my child,—a great artiste.”Elizabeth nodded mechanically. She felt like screaming.He got up slowly as if still uncertain, moved into a[14]corner of the little room, eyes still upon her. “Will you take off your hat and smooth down your hair. I must see your features at close range.”With fingers that trembled and stiffened, she pulled off her tam, combed back her fluffy brown hair and breathlessly lifted her profile to the light. It was, as he had said, a face not beautiful, but malleable to mood as wax, with gray eyes set wide apart, a short nose, full sensitive red lips, deep-cleft chin and swift change of expression that was almost a change of feature. And there was in her slim figure with its soft suggestion of curve, the magnetism of youth, the flame of enduring energy.He moved finally toward the door.“You will take the 11:18 to-night to New York, cancel all bookings, and I shall expect you at my theater to-morrow at noon.”Elizabeth found her voice at last. “If you knew how many, many times I’ve gone to your office, Mr. Kane, and begged on my knees for just one little word with you!”He smiled once more, that charming, somewhat deprecatory smile of his. “That is not my way of engaging artistes. I must seek them, not they me. I never see those who come to my office, unless I have sent for them. No, my way is to haunt out-of-the-way places. Railroad stations, unknown stock theaters, cheap theatrical hotels, vaudeville houses like this. There, occasionally, I find my flower among the weeds. And when I do, I pluck it to transplant in my own garden. If I discover one a year, I ask no more.”[15]A sob broke in Elizabeth’s throat. “Oh, Mr. Kane—I—I’m so proud—and so—so grateful.”He took her trembling hand, patted it with his own rather soft, artistic one. “You must prove a good pupil, that is all. Remember—no mention of this when you go to cancel your booking—no mention of my name to any one. For a time we must keep the agreement to ourselves. Until you have my permission, the fact that you have come under my management is to remain absolutely unknown to any but ourselves.”She looked up at him wonderingly, “Anything you wish, of course.”He dropped her hand, ran his fingers once more through the dark thatch that persistently fell over his eyes. “I must have absolute faith in you, little girl,—and you in Oswald Kane.”“I—I have.”“That is as it should be. To-morrow, then, at noon.”He was gone.In less than twenty minutes, after the manner of such happenings, a miracle had been wrought.Elizabeth stood dazed an instant. Then she stumbled to the window, flung up the sash and leaned out to drink in the gale-slashed air with deep convulsive breaths.“Oh God,” she cried, tears streaming down her cheeks, “help me to make good. Help me—help me!”And so it happened that on a biting day in January, 1917, at the stroke of twelve, Elizabeth Parsons, aged twenty-three, entered the sanctum sanctorum of Oswald Kane, was handed a pen by his business manager and[16]forthwith signed away five years of her life with an option on the next five, at the rate of fifty dollars per week for the first two years, one hundred for the third, and one hundred and fifty for each year following.But just then Elizabeth would have signed away her whole life for nothing.

Haveyou ever been in a small town, small time vaudeville house? Well, even if you have, and could live through it, you’ve probably never seen that mysterious region known as “backstage.” You’ve never heard warped boards creak under the lightest step. You’ve never stood in the wings waiting for your turn, trying to escape the draught that is everywhere, shivering but afraid to sneeze. You’ve never dodged misdirected tobacco juice. You’ve never endured the composite odors only a one time “opery-house,” sometime warehouse, another time stable, can produce. You’ve never done your three a day, rain, shine or blizzard, then rushed to catch a local with oil lamps swinging weirdly overhead and a jerky halt at every peach tree. But most of all, if you’re a woman, you’ve never known what it is to sit weeping in a pea-green walled dressing-room because you chose to do the darn thing yourself and won’t go back home and admit you’re beaten.

If any one of these experiences had been yours, you’d probably walk straight into the pea-green dressing-room referred to, pat Elizabeth Parsons on the shoulder and say, “I’m with you, old girl! It’s a black, black world. No sunshine anywhere! Never was, never will be!”

As it happened, those in her world at the moment were not of her world. They were a hardened lot, with hands ready to dig down and share a copper with a pal, with glib greeting in their own peculiar patois as they swung[4]through the stage entrance, but inured to creaking boards, to combined odors, to oaths and tobacco juice and icy currents that gripped more sensitive shoulders like the hand of death. Life had handed them a deal that wasn’t exactly square, perhaps. Almost any of them would have been a knock-out on Broadway! But they had reached the point where emotion, as well as indignation, expressed itself in shrugs.

They could snore peacefully in a swaying day-coach, dreaming of the hour when the flower of success would spring up by the wayside. So Elizabeth Parsons wept alone. Her make-up boxes reeled in every direction as her head went down in their midst. Her hands, pressed against her lips, tried to still the sobs she knew were cowardly. Her body shook with that least beautiful of human emotions, self-pity, and she wished she were dead.

A gale of sleet and snow tore against her little alley window. It rattled the single pane furiously. It forced its way through cracks and dripped into pools of water on the stone floor. It blurred the already dull electric globes round her dressing-table with a dank mist and soaked a chill into her bones. But it had nothing whatever to do with her tears. They were the result of an accumulation of misery and loneliness, and finally the receipt of a wire from her booking agent advising her that her route had been changed. For the next three days she must play her own home town.

It was the crowning humiliation! She had endured the disappointment of all the rest of it; but to go back to the barnlike old theater in Main Street, wedged between movies and tinsel acrobats, was too much. To[5]hear the wagging tongues and see the wagging heads of those who had warned her two years ago that New York was a pit of the devil; to let them see that even his satanic majesty had let her sink into oblivion, was more than she could bear.

From the stage at the foot of the iron stairs came a crashing chord and the voice of Jack Halloran, “The Funniest Man in the World,” singing a nasal travesty:—

“Oh, Rigoletto—give me a stiletto!”

Elizabeth raised her head, mopped away the tears, and rearranged her make-up. Her turn was next but one.

“BETTY PARSONS—FAMOUS IMITATOR OFFAMOUS STARSSTRAIGHT FROM BROADWAY.”

So proclaimed the announcements that accompanied her pictures outside the theater. They always made Elizabeth smile. She had certainly come from Broadway—straight.

She brushed back her soft brown hair, pinned a towel round it, laid on a layer of grease-paint. A supply was needed to blot out traces of the last bad half hour. She beaded the lashes, penciled black shadows under them that made her gray eyes look green, and carmined her lips so that the slightly austere New England lines of them softened into luscious curves.

In the midst of transforming a primrose into an orchid, and with thoughts still fastened on the dreaded to-morrow, she did not hear the knock on her door. It was[6]repeated. Turning, she saw a white square of paper shoved through the crack. She picked it up wonderingly. Communications from any one but her agent were almost unknown quantities.

Dear Lizzie Parsons (she read),I’m outside of the door waiting to come in and say hello.Your old friend,Lou Seabury.

Dear Lizzie Parsons (she read),

I’m outside of the door waiting to come in and say hello.

Your old friend,Lou Seabury.

In spite of her dread, in spite of her determination to die rather than face home folks, she dropped her powder puff, made one bound for the door, flung it wide.

“Oh, Rigoletti—give me a yard of spaghetti,” warbled Halloran from below.

With a little checked cry, Elizabeth reached out both hands. A plump, pink cheeked young man took them and somewhat diffidently stepped into the little square of room. But Elizabeth clung to him shamelessly and her voice caught when she tried to speak. He was the first link between two years of loneliness and the yesterdays of happy childhood.

“Lou,” came at last, “Lou Seabury!”

“I got a nerve, haven’t I,—walkin’ in on you like this?”

His pink face flushed a deeper pink as she pulled the chair from the dressing-table, thrust him into it, and stood looking down. “You’re just an angel from heaven, that’s what you are! How ever in the world did you find me?”

“I came over here yesterday to look at some threshin’ machines. Scott Brothers are sellin’ out and Dad got[7]word they’re lettin’ their stuff go dirt cheap, so he sent me to take a squint. By Jiminy, I almost dropped dead when I went past the theater this afternoon and saw your picture. Maybe I didn’t go right up to the girl in the ticket box and tell her I was an old friend of yours!”

Elizabeth’s tongue went into her cheek. “And what did she say?”

“Asked why I didn’t come in to see you perform to-night and I said I would. But first I made up my mind I’d let you know I was here. Say—what is it you do?”

“Imitations.”

“Who do you imitate?”

“Oh, Ethel Barrymore and Elsie Janis and Eddie Foy and George Cohan and Nazimova—” She reeled off a list, most of them strange to him.

“I’ll bet you’re great. Gee—Lizzie—but you’re pretty.” His round face went scarlet as the words popped out and he shifted uneasily under the loose ill-fitting coat that hung from his broad shoulders.

She met his wide-eyed admiration with a smile. “It’s the paint, Lou.”

“No, sirree! You always were pretty. I used to watch you sittin’ beside me in the choir, and when you threw back your head and sort of closed your eyes to sing, I didn’t wonder Sam Goodwin was crazy about you.”

“Is he still organist at the First Presbyterian?”

“Yep.”

“And are you still in the choir?”

“Yep.” His boyish brown eyes dropped. His plump hands twisted the brim of his wide slouch hat. “Guess that’s the most I’ll ever amount to.”

[8]“But that beautiful voice of yours—it’s a sin!”

“My Dad don’t think so. Gimcracks, he calls it. I asked him once to give me enough to get it trained,” the eyes lifted with a twinkle, “and I never asked him again.”

She patted his arm sympathetically. “He wouldn’t understand—of course.”

“Gee, I wish I had your sand, Lizzie! To break away—and make good.”

She turned swiftly to the mirror, picked up the discarded puff, dabbed some powder on her nose, then carefully rouged her nostrils. And if a tear smudged into the shadow under her eye, he didn’t notice it.

He watched her fascinated, every move, every practiced touch to her make-up. She had unpinned the towel and her hair fluffed like a golden brown halo round her small, mobile face. And catching his rapt expression in the mirror, it flashed over her that to him she did represent success. The mere fact that she had broken the chains of New England tradition, that she had crossed the rubicon of the footlights, put her on a plane apart.

Somehow the look in his nice eyes, of wonder, of envy, of homage—the look she had so often worn when from a fifty cent seat in the gallery she had studied the methods of the stars she impersonated—gave her new courage. To-nightshe would not go through her ten minutes listlessly with just one idea uppermost—to get her theater trunk packed in a rush so that she might snatch a few hours’ sleep before making the train in the dull gray dawn. To-night she would be sure at least of an audience of one, of interest and enthusiasm and a thrill of[9]excitement—and these she would merit. She would do her turn for Lou Seabury in a way he’d never forget.

She drew a stool from under the dressing-table, sat down and plied him with hurried questions about the folks at home. He gave her the latest news, little intimate bits that mean nothing but are so dear to one who knows no fireside but the battered washstand and cracked basin of a third-rate hotel room.

Grand’pa Terwilliger, seventy-nine, was keeping company with the widow Bonser but was scared to marry her for fear folks would talk. Grace Perkins had a new baby. Stanley Perkins had married a stenographer in Boston and bought a flivver. He, Lou, had bought a victrola for fifteen dollars second-hand and had some crackerjack opera records for it. She ought to hear them!

When finally she sent him round to the front of the house and hurried down the ugly iron steps, her low-heeled white slippers touched them with an eager lightness they had not known for months.

The curtain was rung down on a one-act sketch. A placard announced “Miss Betty Parsons—in her Famous Imitations.”

With a dazzling smile, Elizabeth sallied forth, cane in hand singing, “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

Through her repertoire she went, changing like a chameleon from the bland grin and strut of Eddie Foy to the crumpled pleading and out-flung hands of Nazimova in “The Doll’s House.” She plunged into Nora’s final scene with her husband:

[10]... “When your terror was over—not for what threatened me, but for yourself ... then it seemed to me—as though nothing had happened. I was your lark again, your doll just as before—whom you would take twice as much care of in future, because she was so weak and fragile. Torwald—in that moment it burst upon me that I had been living here these eight years with a strange man.... Oh, I can’t bear to think of it! I couldtearmyself to pieces!”

The greater part of the audience had never heard of the Russian actress, knew less of the Scandinavian author. But the sob in the voice of the frail little girl on the stage, the anguish in her face got them by the throat.

There was a spontaneous burst of applause that held for a moment while Betty bowed, glance straying into the misty auditorium, heart fluttering with a gratification it had not known since the Grand Central spilled her into the bewildering maze that is New York.

She swung quickly into ragtime after that, the drawling syncopation and rolling step of a black-face comedian, and as a conclusion gave them Elsie Janis in one of the songs from her latest Broadway success.

They brought her back several times. She threw them a final kiss, disappeared into the wings and whisked up the stairs. Lou was going to see the show to its finish, then call for her. He was sure they could persuade the proprietor of the hotel where she was staying to fix up a little supper of sandwiches and milk.

She slipped out of her white dress and into a dark one, folded the former in layers of tissue paper and laid it in the top trunk tray, stuffing stockings into the corners to keep it in place. She gathered together her make-up,[11]packed it into a tin box. To-morrow another pea-green dressing-room, or perhaps, saffron-yellow. The week following, one of chalk-blue. And so on, ad infinitum. Of such her infinite variety!

A knock came at the door. She glanced at the gold watch which had been her grandmother’s. Ten-fifteen. Lou had probably tired of the show.

Pulling on her black velvet tarn, she called gaily—“Come in!”

A mellow voice answered interrogatively, “Miss Parsons?”

It was then she wheeled about. Standing framed in the doorway was a tall man with a cloud of black hair sweeping from a white forehead and a pair of intense dark eyes. Elizabeth knew him instantly.

No mistaking that face and long, lean figure.

She drew a bewildered hand across a bewildered brow. In the doorway of her dressing-room stood Oswald Kane, famous New York theatrical producer!

She made no attempt at speech, just stared at him.

He smiled. “You expected some one else, I see. May I come in?” And as she nodded, “You know me?”

She nodded again, indicated the chair and sank onto the low stool. She couldn’t have stood another instant.

“You’re wondering, of course, why I am here,” the low musical voice went on.

“Y-yes.”

“I’m very much interested in your work, Miss Parsons. I have come to see it three times—last night and twice to-day. Until to-night, however, I was not quite sure of you. There was a listless quality. Had any one,[12]perhaps, informed you that I was in front to-night?”

“If any one had, I’d probably have died of nervousness.”

He smiled again, ran a hand through his heavy hair, pushing it back from his forehead, and leaned forward. “You seem to be a very talented little girl. No technique, of course. You have the A B C’s of that to learn. But you have a flexible voice and expressive face, and you showed in that Nazimova bit emotional possibilities. Your reproduction of her tone and accent were really excellent.”

“Th—thank you,” came with difficulty.

“Of course, I have no proof that you can act. Even if you can, it will require infinite patience and training to make an actress of you. But I could do it, I believe.”

Elizabeth gulped.

He shook back his shock of hair. His burrowing eyes narrowed. His fingers hesitatingly played with the thin watch chain that spanned his high waistcoat. “The majority of actresses on the American stage are mere mummers. Those I have made are artistes. But in order to accomplish this, they have given themselves into my hands—absolutely. I have taken girls out of the chorus and made stars of them in the drama—not because they were lovely to look at, or quick or clever, but because I have worked hard with them, with infinite patience developed their personalities, injected into them the inspiration that is Oswald Kane.”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth.

“Of course there must be ability or I would not waste my time. I must be sure the seed is there to be nursed[13]into a beautiful flower. But first and foremost, the actress I train must obliterate self. She must become so much clay for me to model. She must accept my direction without question. She must obey as a soldier obeys his commanding officer.”

“Yes,” sighed Elizabeth.

“I see you now not as you are, but as what I can make of you. No two of my stars are alike. Each has distinct and startling personality. That is why the American public looks to me for sensations. Not one is the actress she was when I discovered her. They are, one and all, Oswald Kane creations.” He leaned back, still studying her.

Elizabeth felt a sea of eyes upon her in a gaze of hypnosis. She stared back like one in a trance.

He sat for a long moment silent. Then the low, quiet voice went on, richly vibrant as the tones of a cello.

“Yes, I think I might do something with you. That Nazimova bit showed promise. But it will require training and patience—infinite patience. You will have to work hard without complaint, hours over one line, weeks over one short scene. And no recognition, perhaps, for some years to come. You must not consider mundane things. Money must count for nothing. I cannot think of money in connection with my art. You must never grow tired or disgruntled. Above all, you must not question. And in the end, a great artiste, my child,—a great artiste.”

Elizabeth nodded mechanically. She felt like screaming.

He got up slowly as if still uncertain, moved into a[14]corner of the little room, eyes still upon her. “Will you take off your hat and smooth down your hair. I must see your features at close range.”

With fingers that trembled and stiffened, she pulled off her tam, combed back her fluffy brown hair and breathlessly lifted her profile to the light. It was, as he had said, a face not beautiful, but malleable to mood as wax, with gray eyes set wide apart, a short nose, full sensitive red lips, deep-cleft chin and swift change of expression that was almost a change of feature. And there was in her slim figure with its soft suggestion of curve, the magnetism of youth, the flame of enduring energy.

He moved finally toward the door.

“You will take the 11:18 to-night to New York, cancel all bookings, and I shall expect you at my theater to-morrow at noon.”

Elizabeth found her voice at last. “If you knew how many, many times I’ve gone to your office, Mr. Kane, and begged on my knees for just one little word with you!”

He smiled once more, that charming, somewhat deprecatory smile of his. “That is not my way of engaging artistes. I must seek them, not they me. I never see those who come to my office, unless I have sent for them. No, my way is to haunt out-of-the-way places. Railroad stations, unknown stock theaters, cheap theatrical hotels, vaudeville houses like this. There, occasionally, I find my flower among the weeds. And when I do, I pluck it to transplant in my own garden. If I discover one a year, I ask no more.”

[15]A sob broke in Elizabeth’s throat. “Oh, Mr. Kane—I—I’m so proud—and so—so grateful.”

He took her trembling hand, patted it with his own rather soft, artistic one. “You must prove a good pupil, that is all. Remember—no mention of this when you go to cancel your booking—no mention of my name to any one. For a time we must keep the agreement to ourselves. Until you have my permission, the fact that you have come under my management is to remain absolutely unknown to any but ourselves.”

She looked up at him wonderingly, “Anything you wish, of course.”

He dropped her hand, ran his fingers once more through the dark thatch that persistently fell over his eyes. “I must have absolute faith in you, little girl,—and you in Oswald Kane.”

“I—I have.”

“That is as it should be. To-morrow, then, at noon.”

He was gone.

In less than twenty minutes, after the manner of such happenings, a miracle had been wrought.

Elizabeth stood dazed an instant. Then she stumbled to the window, flung up the sash and leaned out to drink in the gale-slashed air with deep convulsive breaths.

“Oh God,” she cried, tears streaming down her cheeks, “help me to make good. Help me—help me!”

And so it happened that on a biting day in January, 1917, at the stroke of twelve, Elizabeth Parsons, aged twenty-three, entered the sanctum sanctorum of Oswald Kane, was handed a pen by his business manager and[16]forthwith signed away five years of her life with an option on the next five, at the rate of fifty dollars per week for the first two years, one hundred for the third, and one hundred and fifty for each year following.

But just then Elizabeth would have signed away her whole life for nothing.

[17]CHAPTER IIOna brilliant night in January, 1920, under the sponsorship of Oswald Kane, Mme. Lisa Parsinova made her bow to an expectant New York public.For a long time, almost a year to be exact, Mr. Kane had been letting fall gentle hints of his discovery of a rare Russian genius, driven by the war to these shores. He was having her instructed in English, the story went, and once equal to the exigencies of emotional acting in a strange tongue, she would be presented by him to an American public which could not fail to be entranced by her great art. All this had been revealed in various interviews, bit by bit—a word here, a phrase there, a subtle suggestion elsewhere. At first he had not given out her name, had been gradually prevailed upon to do so, and by the time he announced the date of her première, “Mme. Lisa Parsinova” was on the lips of all that eager theater-going throng alert for a new sensation.Stories of a cloudy past had already gone the rounds, vaguely suggested by Mr. Kane’s press representative, not through the medium of the press. There were tales of her startling beauty, her lovers, her temper. But so far no one had been permitted even a glimpse of her.So that when she made her appearance the opening night, the gasp of thrilled admiration that met her was very genuine. The play was “The Temptress”—Oriental in atmosphere, written for her by Kane and a young collaborator whose name didn’t particularly matter. The[18]plot was not by any means unconventional, that of a slave of early Egypt wreaking revenge through the ages upon the descendants of the master, who, because she refused to yield to him, threw her to the crocodiles.The first act, a prologue, took place on a flagged terrace of a palace by the slow-flowing Nile. As the curtain rose, faint zephyrs of incense wafted outward, a misty aroma. The terrace glistened under a golden moon with still stars piercing a sky of emerald. The tinkle of some far-off languorous instrument sounded soft against the night. And waiting, his lustful gaze on the marble steps, sat the master.Slowly, the slave descended. Sullen and silent, she slunk forward, like some halting panther in the night.Her body gleamed, golden as the moon, sinuous and satiny under the transparent cestus. Her bare feet moved noiselessly, every step one of infinite grace. She came forward, eyes brooding, and stood half shrinking, half defiant before the long stone bench where sat her master. Suddenly she raised her head, tossed back her short black hair and faced him.As by a signal, opera-glasses went up, a sigh of pleasure went through the house. The audience waited. She opened her lips and her voice, low and liquid, flowed out, thrilling through their veins. The thick contralto of it, the fascinating foreign accent, completely captivated them.He reached out, drew her toward him. One felt the wave of terror seizing her. His big hands grasped her shoulders. She gave a smothered cry and he laughed.[19]She pleaded, then resisted, and finally, voice rising like a viol with strings drawn taut, defied him, calling upon the gods to save her for the man she loved.And all the while he laughed, a chuckling laugh full of anticipation.At last his arms closed round the golden body, his lips bent to hers. The sudden gleam of a tiny dagger, its clatter as he caught her upraised arm,—and he flung her from him, clapping his hands for the eunuchs who waited.With one swift word he condemned her.She crumpled at his feet. The black men lifted her. She cried out in horror, a curse upon him and his through all the ages.A long moan as they bore her away, a pause, a splash against the silence, and the curtain descended.For a breath the house sat motionless. Then came a surge of applause. But the curtain did not rise.Buzz of conversation met the upgoing lights. Only a few, however, moved from their seats. Those who did came together in the lobby and discussed the new star with a wonder close to awe.“They sure can turn them out over there,” avowed one seasoned first nighter. “Temperament, that’s the answer, Slav temperament. No little cut and dried two-by-four conventions to tie them down. They’ve got something the American woman don’t know the first thing about.”“Well, they know how to let go, for one thing!”The curtain rose on Act II, a modern drawing-room in the London home of an English peer, member of[20]Parliament, on the occasion of his thirty-ninth birthday. He entered, big, handsome, with his little, clinging English wife.There was revealed the fact that for generations the oldest male of his line died before the age of forty, a violent death. They married, there were children, and always reaching the prime of manhood, they were cut down. A curse upon his family it seemed to be and the little wife trembled.Guests dropped in to tea. With them came the announcement that a prominent barrister was bringing a French authoress who had asked to meet their host. She had heard him in the House of Lords. They spoke of her beauty, her extraordinary personality.Then Mme. Parsinova appeared. In the brilliantly lighted set, the audience had its first good look at her. Slim, with a slenderness that made her seem tall, a mass of pitch-black hair piled high on her small head, a pair of burning eyes, dark and shadowed, creamy skin, a short nose, deep-cleft chin, and scarlet lips full and mobile, she seemed a living flame. She moved forward with gliding step, her lizard-green velvet gown clinging about her limbs, her sable cloak drooping from her shoulders. And one felt at once, as her white hand, weighted with a cabochon emerald, rested in his, the spell she would weave about the insular and very British member of Parliament.Not so insular at that, for it developed that in his veins ran a strain, a very thin strain, of the blood of Egypt.[21]There followed the love story, obvious if you like, but with the everlasting thrill and appeal of a great passion, magnificently portrayed. For as the drama moved to its climax, the spirit of the slave which through the ages had visited its will upon the family of its master, found itself captive. The French woman fell madly in love with her victim and in the end gave her life that the curse might be lifted and his saved.In the climactic love scene at the end of Act III when passion tore from her lips, an onrushing tide, the beautiful voice ran a crescendo of emotion that was almost song. Its strange accent stirred and fascinated. Its abandon was that of a soul giving all, sweeping aside like an avalanche law, thought, ultimate penalty.And still at the curtain, when the house rang with demands for her, Parsinova did not appear. Oswald Kane made his accustomed speech, coming before the purple velvet curtain to tell his audience in his usual reticent manner how deeply he appreciated their reception of the genius he had discovered. He thanked them—he thanked them—he thanked them. He raised a graceful hand, pushed back his weight of hair and slipped into the wings while the house resounded once more with clapping hands and stamping feet, and a full fifteen minutes elapsed before the play could go on.All through the final act sounded the low note of tragedy, the realization that she who for centuries had ruthlessly taken toll must now once more be sacrificed that the one who had become dearer than life might endure.When the audience finally rose after another futile[22]attempt to bring her out, the women’s eyes were red, the men’s faces white. New York was undoubtedly taken by storm. It had been more than a typical Kane first night. It had been a Kane ovation.In the first row a man got to his feet as if shaking off a spell. He was tall, very erect, almost rawboned, with hair turning gray about the temples, a demanding jaw, sharp straight nose and eyes that somehow seemed younger than the rest of his face, younger than the bushy black brows that mounted over them. They had caught Parsinova’s gaze, those eyes, as it swept once or twice over the audience. They had held it longer than was fair to her.“Great, isn’t she, Rand?” His companion tapped his arm as he stood gazing at the fallen curtain.“Paralyzing,” was the laconic reply. He wheeled about and made his way up the aisle, followed by the other man.Outside, close to the shadowy stage entrance, Oswald Kane’s car, a royal blue limousine, and a curious throng of bystanders waited.Inside, Oswald Kane himself begged the circle of those privileged by wealth, position, influence, who clustered round the door of the star’s dressing-room, to excuse her for to-night. Madame was completely exhausted.When both crowds, tired of waiting, had dispersed two figures hurried down the little alley that led to the stage door and entered the limousine.The door slammed.The car rolled out and east toward Fifth Avenue.The man switched off the light that illumined the[23]woman’s white face. Her dark-shadowed eyes were burning with excitement. She leaned back, closing them, and heaved a great sigh. He leaned forward, hair falling over his eyes, echoed the sigh, and his hand shut tightly round her ungloved one. With a tense, almost nervous movement she drew it away, shrank imperceptibly into her corner.“They are at your feet,” he whispered. “I have made you.”She did not answer—merely opened her eyes and looked at him and through the darkness, something like tears glistened on the lashes.They drove on in silence. He recaptured her hand, held it to his lips. She looked away.The car drew up before a modest apartment building in a side street. He helped her out, entered with her, and the elevator swung them upward. He made a movement for the key she took from her bag but she unlocked the door and led the way into the foyer.Slowly he reached up, lifted the fur toque from her black hair and the wrap from her shoulders, and his touch lingered caressingly as he turned her toward him.“You are my creation!” he told her. “Parsinova cannot exist without me.”Into the throat of the great Russian actress with the questionable past came a flutter of fear. Her lips quivered. She gave a convulsive choking sound. Her eyes raced the length of the hall as though she wanted to run away, then went pleading up to his. He smiled down into them, drew her firmly to him.[24]With a swift, hysterical laugh, a twist of her body, she was out of his arms and across the foyer.“Come,” she called.She opened a door at the other side. The gold flames of a log fire played upon the face of the little gray-haired woman in dusky silk who rose to greet her.“Mother,” said Parsinova, “kiss your child and thank Mr. Kane. I think I’ve made a hit.”Oswald Kane watched with a frown as she held out her arms adoringly to the little old woman.For over a year the little mother had had a way of appearing in the background whenever he claimed the few sentimental hours which should have been but small acknowledgment of his new pupil’s debt to him.

Ona brilliant night in January, 1920, under the sponsorship of Oswald Kane, Mme. Lisa Parsinova made her bow to an expectant New York public.

For a long time, almost a year to be exact, Mr. Kane had been letting fall gentle hints of his discovery of a rare Russian genius, driven by the war to these shores. He was having her instructed in English, the story went, and once equal to the exigencies of emotional acting in a strange tongue, she would be presented by him to an American public which could not fail to be entranced by her great art. All this had been revealed in various interviews, bit by bit—a word here, a phrase there, a subtle suggestion elsewhere. At first he had not given out her name, had been gradually prevailed upon to do so, and by the time he announced the date of her première, “Mme. Lisa Parsinova” was on the lips of all that eager theater-going throng alert for a new sensation.

Stories of a cloudy past had already gone the rounds, vaguely suggested by Mr. Kane’s press representative, not through the medium of the press. There were tales of her startling beauty, her lovers, her temper. But so far no one had been permitted even a glimpse of her.

So that when she made her appearance the opening night, the gasp of thrilled admiration that met her was very genuine. The play was “The Temptress”—Oriental in atmosphere, written for her by Kane and a young collaborator whose name didn’t particularly matter. The[18]plot was not by any means unconventional, that of a slave of early Egypt wreaking revenge through the ages upon the descendants of the master, who, because she refused to yield to him, threw her to the crocodiles.

The first act, a prologue, took place on a flagged terrace of a palace by the slow-flowing Nile. As the curtain rose, faint zephyrs of incense wafted outward, a misty aroma. The terrace glistened under a golden moon with still stars piercing a sky of emerald. The tinkle of some far-off languorous instrument sounded soft against the night. And waiting, his lustful gaze on the marble steps, sat the master.

Slowly, the slave descended. Sullen and silent, she slunk forward, like some halting panther in the night.

Her body gleamed, golden as the moon, sinuous and satiny under the transparent cestus. Her bare feet moved noiselessly, every step one of infinite grace. She came forward, eyes brooding, and stood half shrinking, half defiant before the long stone bench where sat her master. Suddenly she raised her head, tossed back her short black hair and faced him.

As by a signal, opera-glasses went up, a sigh of pleasure went through the house. The audience waited. She opened her lips and her voice, low and liquid, flowed out, thrilling through their veins. The thick contralto of it, the fascinating foreign accent, completely captivated them.

He reached out, drew her toward him. One felt the wave of terror seizing her. His big hands grasped her shoulders. She gave a smothered cry and he laughed.

[19]She pleaded, then resisted, and finally, voice rising like a viol with strings drawn taut, defied him, calling upon the gods to save her for the man she loved.

And all the while he laughed, a chuckling laugh full of anticipation.

At last his arms closed round the golden body, his lips bent to hers. The sudden gleam of a tiny dagger, its clatter as he caught her upraised arm,—and he flung her from him, clapping his hands for the eunuchs who waited.

With one swift word he condemned her.

She crumpled at his feet. The black men lifted her. She cried out in horror, a curse upon him and his through all the ages.

A long moan as they bore her away, a pause, a splash against the silence, and the curtain descended.

For a breath the house sat motionless. Then came a surge of applause. But the curtain did not rise.

Buzz of conversation met the upgoing lights. Only a few, however, moved from their seats. Those who did came together in the lobby and discussed the new star with a wonder close to awe.

“They sure can turn them out over there,” avowed one seasoned first nighter. “Temperament, that’s the answer, Slav temperament. No little cut and dried two-by-four conventions to tie them down. They’ve got something the American woman don’t know the first thing about.”

“Well, they know how to let go, for one thing!”

The curtain rose on Act II, a modern drawing-room in the London home of an English peer, member of[20]Parliament, on the occasion of his thirty-ninth birthday. He entered, big, handsome, with his little, clinging English wife.

There was revealed the fact that for generations the oldest male of his line died before the age of forty, a violent death. They married, there were children, and always reaching the prime of manhood, they were cut down. A curse upon his family it seemed to be and the little wife trembled.

Guests dropped in to tea. With them came the announcement that a prominent barrister was bringing a French authoress who had asked to meet their host. She had heard him in the House of Lords. They spoke of her beauty, her extraordinary personality.

Then Mme. Parsinova appeared. In the brilliantly lighted set, the audience had its first good look at her. Slim, with a slenderness that made her seem tall, a mass of pitch-black hair piled high on her small head, a pair of burning eyes, dark and shadowed, creamy skin, a short nose, deep-cleft chin, and scarlet lips full and mobile, she seemed a living flame. She moved forward with gliding step, her lizard-green velvet gown clinging about her limbs, her sable cloak drooping from her shoulders. And one felt at once, as her white hand, weighted with a cabochon emerald, rested in his, the spell she would weave about the insular and very British member of Parliament.

Not so insular at that, for it developed that in his veins ran a strain, a very thin strain, of the blood of Egypt.

[21]There followed the love story, obvious if you like, but with the everlasting thrill and appeal of a great passion, magnificently portrayed. For as the drama moved to its climax, the spirit of the slave which through the ages had visited its will upon the family of its master, found itself captive. The French woman fell madly in love with her victim and in the end gave her life that the curse might be lifted and his saved.

In the climactic love scene at the end of Act III when passion tore from her lips, an onrushing tide, the beautiful voice ran a crescendo of emotion that was almost song. Its strange accent stirred and fascinated. Its abandon was that of a soul giving all, sweeping aside like an avalanche law, thought, ultimate penalty.

And still at the curtain, when the house rang with demands for her, Parsinova did not appear. Oswald Kane made his accustomed speech, coming before the purple velvet curtain to tell his audience in his usual reticent manner how deeply he appreciated their reception of the genius he had discovered. He thanked them—he thanked them—he thanked them. He raised a graceful hand, pushed back his weight of hair and slipped into the wings while the house resounded once more with clapping hands and stamping feet, and a full fifteen minutes elapsed before the play could go on.

All through the final act sounded the low note of tragedy, the realization that she who for centuries had ruthlessly taken toll must now once more be sacrificed that the one who had become dearer than life might endure.

When the audience finally rose after another futile[22]attempt to bring her out, the women’s eyes were red, the men’s faces white. New York was undoubtedly taken by storm. It had been more than a typical Kane first night. It had been a Kane ovation.

In the first row a man got to his feet as if shaking off a spell. He was tall, very erect, almost rawboned, with hair turning gray about the temples, a demanding jaw, sharp straight nose and eyes that somehow seemed younger than the rest of his face, younger than the bushy black brows that mounted over them. They had caught Parsinova’s gaze, those eyes, as it swept once or twice over the audience. They had held it longer than was fair to her.

“Great, isn’t she, Rand?” His companion tapped his arm as he stood gazing at the fallen curtain.

“Paralyzing,” was the laconic reply. He wheeled about and made his way up the aisle, followed by the other man.

Outside, close to the shadowy stage entrance, Oswald Kane’s car, a royal blue limousine, and a curious throng of bystanders waited.

Inside, Oswald Kane himself begged the circle of those privileged by wealth, position, influence, who clustered round the door of the star’s dressing-room, to excuse her for to-night. Madame was completely exhausted.

When both crowds, tired of waiting, had dispersed two figures hurried down the little alley that led to the stage door and entered the limousine.

The door slammed.

The car rolled out and east toward Fifth Avenue.

The man switched off the light that illumined the[23]woman’s white face. Her dark-shadowed eyes were burning with excitement. She leaned back, closing them, and heaved a great sigh. He leaned forward, hair falling over his eyes, echoed the sigh, and his hand shut tightly round her ungloved one. With a tense, almost nervous movement she drew it away, shrank imperceptibly into her corner.

“They are at your feet,” he whispered. “I have made you.”

She did not answer—merely opened her eyes and looked at him and through the darkness, something like tears glistened on the lashes.

They drove on in silence. He recaptured her hand, held it to his lips. She looked away.

The car drew up before a modest apartment building in a side street. He helped her out, entered with her, and the elevator swung them upward. He made a movement for the key she took from her bag but she unlocked the door and led the way into the foyer.

Slowly he reached up, lifted the fur toque from her black hair and the wrap from her shoulders, and his touch lingered caressingly as he turned her toward him.

“You are my creation!” he told her. “Parsinova cannot exist without me.”

Into the throat of the great Russian actress with the questionable past came a flutter of fear. Her lips quivered. She gave a convulsive choking sound. Her eyes raced the length of the hall as though she wanted to run away, then went pleading up to his. He smiled down into them, drew her firmly to him.

[24]With a swift, hysterical laugh, a twist of her body, she was out of his arms and across the foyer.

“Come,” she called.

She opened a door at the other side. The gold flames of a log fire played upon the face of the little gray-haired woman in dusky silk who rose to greet her.

“Mother,” said Parsinova, “kiss your child and thank Mr. Kane. I think I’ve made a hit.”

Oswald Kane watched with a frown as she held out her arms adoringly to the little old woman.

For over a year the little mother had had a way of appearing in the background whenever he claimed the few sentimental hours which should have been but small acknowledgment of his new pupil’s debt to him.

[25]CHAPTER IIIParsinovainstantly became the rage.She gave delicious interviews in which she misapplied American slang in a way that made the press chuckle. She spoke of the tragedy of Russia. She told of her struggles there. She gave her impressions of the American theater; American art; American fashions; the energy of the American man; the vitality of the American woman.“They do not give as we foreign women,” she said. “They take. And so it is that they grow rich—in beauty—and are forever young.”“But emotionally?” prompted the interviewer.“I have said—they are forever young. Emotionally—they are children always.”This statement was followed by indignant protest from American actresses and the sort of heated dramatic controversy that delighted the soul of Oswald Kane.She received all reporters in her dressing-room at the theater. If any one save Kane knew where she lived, no one had ever crossed the sacred threshold.“I live two lives quite a-part,” she said. “One in my home which is for me a-lone. And one in the theater which is for my dear public.”Mr. Kane amplified this by stating that her hours at home were spent in study. Others intimated that her hours at home were given to some mysterious romance.In spite of which she was not a hermit. Society, with[26]a capital S, sought the privilege of entertaining her. Occasionally she accepted a dinner invitation—never on any day but Sunday, however—or permitted a tea to be given in her honor. She went nowhere during the week.Her dressing-room was always fragrant with flowers. Kane had had it done over when she took possession. An alcove had been cut off for her make-up table, and the orchid silken drapes, black rug, suspended lights and carved chairs of the outer room gave it more the impression of a salon. Here she held court. Here she read the hysterical notes of matinée girls, the pleas of dilletanti youth that she dine or sup with them, the tributes of actors, the encomium of the world in general. Here, every week or so, she went into tantrums, threatening to kill her maid in a voice that caused the stage hands to tremble, until Kane himself had to be called to calm her. Here she smoked Russian cigarettes and looked over the urgent invitations that piled mountain high upon the bronze tray.It was only at home in a cretonne hung bedroom, furnished with a rigid fourposter and dotted swiss curtains through which sunlight flowed, that she wept and sometimes felt lonely.She played of course to packed houses. The S. R. O. sign was a common occurrence. More than once in that same place in the front row, the footlights illumined the face of the man whose intent gaze had fastened on hers the opening night. He seemed never to tire of her art.Early in March Mrs. Collingwood Martin gave a reception for her. Mrs. Julian van Ness Collingwood[27]Martin flattered herself, with justification, that in her wide old house facing Washington Square she maintained the nearest approach to a salon that could be found this side of Paris.Her high drawing-room brought together leading spirits of the professional, business and diplomatic worlds, and her gracefully tinted head was never troubled with fear that the wrong ones might meet. All those on her selected list were the right ones, each interested in what the other represented. Many a little coup between the artiste and the financier is consummated under the guise of drinking a cup of tea or punch. And more than one professional has amassed a neat little fortune by making wide-eyed queries of the Wall Street man about his end of the game.On the afternoon in question the rooms on the lower floor were crowded with laughter, perfume, silks, jewels, furs and the hum of animated voices.Bowls of early spring bloom, azaleas, jonquils, mammoth daisies, stood on tables and at either side of the arched doorway. A faint blue haze of cigarette smoke hung overhead. Twilight had sifted through sunlight before Parsinova appeared. She always came late.As she stood, a silhouette within the white arch between the shining bowls of jonquils, there was a general hush, then a forward movement. She was gowned entirely in black—black lace trailing from her feet, a black hat shadowing her face, and drooping from it to curl against her shoulder, a black paradise. Black pearls dangled from her ears and a strand of them about her neck emphasized its whiteness.[28]“Isn’t she wonderful? What personality—what atmosphere!”“There’s no one like her.”“She fairly oozes temperament.”“Absolutely startling!”“By Jove—these foreigners! Naughty but—er—so promising, don’t you know!”Mrs. Collingwood Martin bore her triumphantly to a thronelike chair and presented the guests in turn.Parsinova’s manner was charming, a bit weary but gracious, and her efforts to carry on a conversation in colloquial English were excruciating.“That lit-tle French gentleman by the punch bowl,—I fear he has on a biscuit,” she told the group of adorers.They looked puzzled. Then one of them flung back his head with a laugh. “You mean he has a bun on.”“I shall never be right,” she sighed in the chorus of laughter that followed.From the music-room came a clear tenor singing the “Ave Maria.” Silence met the lifted voice and at the final sobbing note, gentle applause.Mrs. Collingwood Martin swept toward her guest of honor.“Darling,” she smiled with that touch of privileged intimacy she loved to assume, “here is some one most anxious to meet you. Let me present Signor Luigi Rogero of the Metropolitan.”Parsinova looked up and out from under dropped lids. Then she wondered whether any one saw the start she gave. Facing her with lips bent to her outstretched hand stood Lou Seabury.[29]No mistaking him in spite of the close-fitting coat, carefully waxed little mustache and black-ribboned monocle! Due to a New York tailor’s art, his plump figure had grown slimmer. In place of the loose disjointed shamble of old home days, he bore himself with consummatesavoir faire. But the pink cheeks and kind brown eyes were the same.Parsinova waited breathlessly for some sign of recognition. None came. In perfect English he merely voiced his satisfaction at the meeting and joined the group about her chair. It was not until she rose to leave and he craved the honor of escorting her to her car that she met his gaze with curious question in her own. But his eyes were blank so far as any subtle meaning was concerned.He followed down the steps, helped her into the perfectly appointed limousine. An impulse she made no attempt to curb prompted her to ask if she could drive him uptown. They had gone several blocks before either spoke. Then very low came the words:—“Lizzie Parsons,—you’re a wonder!”Instinctively she looked about to make sure his whisper had not been overheard. Then she gave a long, smothered laugh and clutched his hand just as she had that night in the three-a-day vaudeville theater.“Lou,” she breathed, “I’m so glad, so glad!”“Were you surprised to see me?”“Surprised? I almost died.” She gave a little gasp. “Were you surprised to see me?”“Not a bit.”“You knew me then—at once?”[30]“I’ve known who you were ever since your opening. I was there. Matter of fact, I have you to thank for the brilliant idea that made me an Italian.”“Me?”“Yep.” He lapsed into the old lingo and she closed her eyes with a beatific smile. “You don’t think my brains would ever be equal to such an inspiration.”“Mine weren’t either. It was Oswald Kane’s.”“Nobody would ever guess that you’re anything but Russian from the word go.”“You did.”“That was only because I’d known you. And even then I mightn’t have been on if I hadn’t heard your imitations. Do you remember that night?”“Do I remember it! That was the night that ‘made me what I am to-day.’”He laughed.“I did my best to please you,” she went on, “and Oswald Kane was in front and liked my act. He came back afterward and arranged to sign me.”“So that was why you left me cold. I dated you for supper and went round after the show, to find my bird had flown. Believe me, I was the most disappointed rube in town.”“I wouldn’t have remembered my own name after Kane saw me.”“Is that why you canned it?”She laughed then, her low, rich contralto. “That was all his plan. I was as amazed when he told me about it as if he’d asked me to change my skin. He’s never told[31]me why he did it—he doesn’t trouble to tell you why. But I suppose he thought the public needed a thrill, something new, something different. And my impersonations gave him the idea. I think I might have made good if he had let me go on as just plain Parsons. But of course, not half the hit that Parsinova has made.”“They sure are crazy about you. I wondered often how you were getting on.”“You didn’t guess that somebody was making a new woman of me, did you?”His gaze, as it traveled from her dark-rimmed eyes shadowed by the drooping hat, to the long white hands and slim black-swathed body, held the same look of awe it had worn the night he had seen her make up.“Lordy, girl!” he gasped. “How you must have worked to accomplish it!”“Work!” came in a breath. “I worked like a galley slave—never stopping, except for sleep. Even while I ate I studied—Russian and French, and gesture and movement. I even learned to eat herring. And all the time he was teaching me to act. In four years—almost—I’ve seen no one, talked to no one but him. I’ve had to obliterate self completely. He has in reality created Lisa Parsinova.”“He had to have the material to do it. The stuff was there.”“But he is a genius, Lou. He knows his public just as a magician knows his bag of tricks.”The traffic at Thirty-fourth Street halted them. They spoke in whispers, and every now and then her eyes[32]rested with a look of caution on the inexpressive back of her chauffeur.“Do you think he can hear?” she asked.“’Course not.”“I have to be so careful.”She turned to him, eyes alight with interest as they started on up the Avenue. “Tell me about yourself. You’re another man, too.”“Dad died shortly after I saw you,” he explained. “Apoplexy. And I thought of you, the break you had made, the gamble you took. So I gathered together what he left me, sold out to my brother Jim, and came to New York to stake everything on that voice you took such stock in. I went to Fernald and he thought he could do something with it. I’ve been in training so to speak ever since. And this season he got me the job with the Metropolitan.”“If only I could hear you!”“Oh, I haven’t done much—not yet. A few matinées and one or two Saturday nights. Next year, though, they’ve promised me a go at leads.”“I knew if ever you had the chance you’d prove yourself.”“I owe a great part of that chance to Randolph,—you know, Hubert Randolph. He’s one of the directors of the Metropolitan. I met him at Fernald’s studio last winter and it was through him that Fernald pushed me. He’s interested in you, by the way,—thinks you’re the greatest actress of the century.”“The century is very young,” she smiled.“Well, Rand’s seen them all in the last fifteen or[33]twenty years and knows what he’s talking about. We were at your opening together and he said then you were paralyzing.”“Did I do that to you, too?”“Paralyze me? Bet your life you did! When you walked out on that stage and raised your head, a ramrod went up my back. ‘That’s Lizzie Parsons,’ I said to myself, ‘or I’ll be shot.’ Then I thought I must be loony, that when I’d see you in a better light without the short wig, I’d laugh at my mistake. But in the second act I knew I was right, in spite of the black hair—”“It’s dyed, Lou.” She made the confession haltingly. “At first I didn’t want to. My hair seemed sort of part of me—the color, I mean. But that’s just why he made me do it; it was a question of personality, he said. I begged him to let me wear a wig but he was afraid it would be detected. And he was right, I dare say. He’s always right.”“Don’t you worry about the way it looks, either. You used to be just pretty. Now you’re a beauty!”“Am I—really?” There was a childish earnestness in the query.“Should have heard Randolph rave! Say, I’m dining with him to-night. Why not come along? He’s crazy to meet you and he won’t go to any of those society fandangles to do it.”“Meet a stranger—with you around? Oh—I couldn’t! I’d burst into straight English as naturally as you burst into song. And that would ruin me.”He patted her hand and his kind brown eyes beamed. “Nonsense! You’re too clever an actress for that.”[34]There was something pathetic in the way she clung to his handclasp. “It’s so good finding you this way. I haven’t any friends—no one to whom I can actually talk. With me it isn’t a case of acting behind the footlights. I’m acting all the time, except when I’m alone.”“But it’s not acting any more—this Russian business, is it?”“No—it’s myself, the greater part of self, I dare say. But Lizzie Parsons isn’t all dead yet and I don’t want her to die—” She blinked up at him. “Don’t make me cry, please,—or the shadows will all come off my eyes.”His eyes took in the luxurious appointment of the car, mauve enameled vanity apparatus on one side, smoking outfit on the other, gilt vase with its spray of fresh orchids, soft tan cushions and robe of fur. He gave her a warming look of satisfaction.“I should say the exchange was all for the better. You must be making a mint.”“One hundred and fifty a week.”“One hundred and fifty—?”“That’s my contract.”“But good Lord—”“Oh, I made it with my eyes open. It extends over the first five years—with an option on the next five.”“But all this—” He waved his arm, bewildered, through the air.“All this he gives me—my clothes, my car and its upkeep, my jewels, though they’re mostly paste, everything except my home. I wouldn’t let him give me that.”He made an attempt to conceal the swift suspicion that[35]would have clouded any man’s eyes. Instantly she saw and answered it.“Oh, don’t misunderstand! It’s purely a matter of business. I’ve got to be equipped to play my part off the stage and I don’t earn enough to do it on my own.”“Then why doesn’t he give you enough?”“I should probably grow too independent. This way he holds the reins. That’s only supposition, of course. I’ve never discussed it. One can’t discuss money with Oswald Kane.”“It’s a damned outrage!”“Oh, no it isn’t. He took a sporting chance. He staked time and effort and money on a venture that might have proved a hopeless failure. I had everything to gain. And now that I’ve made good under his guidance, it’s only fair that he should reap the harvest.”“Indefinitely?”“For six years to come, at any rate,—until my contract expires.” She leaned back, eyes closed, and an intensely weary look dropped the corners of her red, mobile mouth.They drew near the park. She urged him to ride with her a bit and they drove into the blue velvet dusk, past the shimmer of lake curled among the bushes. The car glided on swiftly through cool dark silence.“You haven’t told me yet how I inspired you to become an Italian,” she prompted.“Oh, that—simple enough! Randolph remarked the night of your première that there was an aura of romance about artistes from the other side, particularly when they[36]hailed from Southern Europe; sort of Oriental, you understand. The next day I went to Fernald. ‘Can’t you change me to something Italian?’ I said. ‘Seabury’s a rotten name for an opera singer.’ Well, he did it. Of course, I make no attempt at accent—I couldn’t handle that job in conversation. But the people I’ve met don’t look for it; they understand the fact that I was brought up in England. All I have to be careful of is my grammar.”They laughed together. As her laugh bubbled girlishly into the quiet night, she halted it with a swift movement of hand to lips and once more sent that look of caution at her chauffeur’s back.He reminded her of his dinner engagement with Randolph. “He’s made up his mind to know you informally. And that’s all he has to do to get what he wants. He’s a human dynamo, that man. Never knew anybody with his finger in so many pies and able to put over whatever he tackles. Sooner or later you’re bound to meet him in his own way. Might as well be to-night.”“What good would it do? He’ll never know me—the real me.”“He’ll know a fascinating woman, any way you look at it.”But she dropped him at the bachelor apartment on Park Avenue in spite of his pleas.“Come and see me, Lou, often,” she murmured, giving him her address as he stepped out of the car. “You don’t know what a joy it is to play at being myself.”

Parsinovainstantly became the rage.

She gave delicious interviews in which she misapplied American slang in a way that made the press chuckle. She spoke of the tragedy of Russia. She told of her struggles there. She gave her impressions of the American theater; American art; American fashions; the energy of the American man; the vitality of the American woman.

“They do not give as we foreign women,” she said. “They take. And so it is that they grow rich—in beauty—and are forever young.”

“But emotionally?” prompted the interviewer.

“I have said—they are forever young. Emotionally—they are children always.”

This statement was followed by indignant protest from American actresses and the sort of heated dramatic controversy that delighted the soul of Oswald Kane.

She received all reporters in her dressing-room at the theater. If any one save Kane knew where she lived, no one had ever crossed the sacred threshold.

“I live two lives quite a-part,” she said. “One in my home which is for me a-lone. And one in the theater which is for my dear public.”

Mr. Kane amplified this by stating that her hours at home were spent in study. Others intimated that her hours at home were given to some mysterious romance.

In spite of which she was not a hermit. Society, with[26]a capital S, sought the privilege of entertaining her. Occasionally she accepted a dinner invitation—never on any day but Sunday, however—or permitted a tea to be given in her honor. She went nowhere during the week.

Her dressing-room was always fragrant with flowers. Kane had had it done over when she took possession. An alcove had been cut off for her make-up table, and the orchid silken drapes, black rug, suspended lights and carved chairs of the outer room gave it more the impression of a salon. Here she held court. Here she read the hysterical notes of matinée girls, the pleas of dilletanti youth that she dine or sup with them, the tributes of actors, the encomium of the world in general. Here, every week or so, she went into tantrums, threatening to kill her maid in a voice that caused the stage hands to tremble, until Kane himself had to be called to calm her. Here she smoked Russian cigarettes and looked over the urgent invitations that piled mountain high upon the bronze tray.

It was only at home in a cretonne hung bedroom, furnished with a rigid fourposter and dotted swiss curtains through which sunlight flowed, that she wept and sometimes felt lonely.

She played of course to packed houses. The S. R. O. sign was a common occurrence. More than once in that same place in the front row, the footlights illumined the face of the man whose intent gaze had fastened on hers the opening night. He seemed never to tire of her art.

Early in March Mrs. Collingwood Martin gave a reception for her. Mrs. Julian van Ness Collingwood[27]Martin flattered herself, with justification, that in her wide old house facing Washington Square she maintained the nearest approach to a salon that could be found this side of Paris.

Her high drawing-room brought together leading spirits of the professional, business and diplomatic worlds, and her gracefully tinted head was never troubled with fear that the wrong ones might meet. All those on her selected list were the right ones, each interested in what the other represented. Many a little coup between the artiste and the financier is consummated under the guise of drinking a cup of tea or punch. And more than one professional has amassed a neat little fortune by making wide-eyed queries of the Wall Street man about his end of the game.

On the afternoon in question the rooms on the lower floor were crowded with laughter, perfume, silks, jewels, furs and the hum of animated voices.

Bowls of early spring bloom, azaleas, jonquils, mammoth daisies, stood on tables and at either side of the arched doorway. A faint blue haze of cigarette smoke hung overhead. Twilight had sifted through sunlight before Parsinova appeared. She always came late.

As she stood, a silhouette within the white arch between the shining bowls of jonquils, there was a general hush, then a forward movement. She was gowned entirely in black—black lace trailing from her feet, a black hat shadowing her face, and drooping from it to curl against her shoulder, a black paradise. Black pearls dangled from her ears and a strand of them about her neck emphasized its whiteness.

[28]“Isn’t she wonderful? What personality—what atmosphere!”

“There’s no one like her.”

“She fairly oozes temperament.”

“Absolutely startling!”

“By Jove—these foreigners! Naughty but—er—so promising, don’t you know!”

Mrs. Collingwood Martin bore her triumphantly to a thronelike chair and presented the guests in turn.

Parsinova’s manner was charming, a bit weary but gracious, and her efforts to carry on a conversation in colloquial English were excruciating.

“That lit-tle French gentleman by the punch bowl,—I fear he has on a biscuit,” she told the group of adorers.

They looked puzzled. Then one of them flung back his head with a laugh. “You mean he has a bun on.”

“I shall never be right,” she sighed in the chorus of laughter that followed.

From the music-room came a clear tenor singing the “Ave Maria.” Silence met the lifted voice and at the final sobbing note, gentle applause.

Mrs. Collingwood Martin swept toward her guest of honor.

“Darling,” she smiled with that touch of privileged intimacy she loved to assume, “here is some one most anxious to meet you. Let me present Signor Luigi Rogero of the Metropolitan.”

Parsinova looked up and out from under dropped lids. Then she wondered whether any one saw the start she gave. Facing her with lips bent to her outstretched hand stood Lou Seabury.

[29]No mistaking him in spite of the close-fitting coat, carefully waxed little mustache and black-ribboned monocle! Due to a New York tailor’s art, his plump figure had grown slimmer. In place of the loose disjointed shamble of old home days, he bore himself with consummatesavoir faire. But the pink cheeks and kind brown eyes were the same.

Parsinova waited breathlessly for some sign of recognition. None came. In perfect English he merely voiced his satisfaction at the meeting and joined the group about her chair. It was not until she rose to leave and he craved the honor of escorting her to her car that she met his gaze with curious question in her own. But his eyes were blank so far as any subtle meaning was concerned.

He followed down the steps, helped her into the perfectly appointed limousine. An impulse she made no attempt to curb prompted her to ask if she could drive him uptown. They had gone several blocks before either spoke. Then very low came the words:—

“Lizzie Parsons,—you’re a wonder!”

Instinctively she looked about to make sure his whisper had not been overheard. Then she gave a long, smothered laugh and clutched his hand just as she had that night in the three-a-day vaudeville theater.

“Lou,” she breathed, “I’m so glad, so glad!”

“Were you surprised to see me?”

“Surprised? I almost died.” She gave a little gasp. “Were you surprised to see me?”

“Not a bit.”

“You knew me then—at once?”

[30]“I’ve known who you were ever since your opening. I was there. Matter of fact, I have you to thank for the brilliant idea that made me an Italian.”

“Me?”

“Yep.” He lapsed into the old lingo and she closed her eyes with a beatific smile. “You don’t think my brains would ever be equal to such an inspiration.”

“Mine weren’t either. It was Oswald Kane’s.”

“Nobody would ever guess that you’re anything but Russian from the word go.”

“You did.”

“That was only because I’d known you. And even then I mightn’t have been on if I hadn’t heard your imitations. Do you remember that night?”

“Do I remember it! That was the night that ‘made me what I am to-day.’”

He laughed.

“I did my best to please you,” she went on, “and Oswald Kane was in front and liked my act. He came back afterward and arranged to sign me.”

“So that was why you left me cold. I dated you for supper and went round after the show, to find my bird had flown. Believe me, I was the most disappointed rube in town.”

“I wouldn’t have remembered my own name after Kane saw me.”

“Is that why you canned it?”

She laughed then, her low, rich contralto. “That was all his plan. I was as amazed when he told me about it as if he’d asked me to change my skin. He’s never told[31]me why he did it—he doesn’t trouble to tell you why. But I suppose he thought the public needed a thrill, something new, something different. And my impersonations gave him the idea. I think I might have made good if he had let me go on as just plain Parsons. But of course, not half the hit that Parsinova has made.”

“They sure are crazy about you. I wondered often how you were getting on.”

“You didn’t guess that somebody was making a new woman of me, did you?”

His gaze, as it traveled from her dark-rimmed eyes shadowed by the drooping hat, to the long white hands and slim black-swathed body, held the same look of awe it had worn the night he had seen her make up.

“Lordy, girl!” he gasped. “How you must have worked to accomplish it!”

“Work!” came in a breath. “I worked like a galley slave—never stopping, except for sleep. Even while I ate I studied—Russian and French, and gesture and movement. I even learned to eat herring. And all the time he was teaching me to act. In four years—almost—I’ve seen no one, talked to no one but him. I’ve had to obliterate self completely. He has in reality created Lisa Parsinova.”

“He had to have the material to do it. The stuff was there.”

“But he is a genius, Lou. He knows his public just as a magician knows his bag of tricks.”

The traffic at Thirty-fourth Street halted them. They spoke in whispers, and every now and then her eyes[32]rested with a look of caution on the inexpressive back of her chauffeur.

“Do you think he can hear?” she asked.

“’Course not.”

“I have to be so careful.”

She turned to him, eyes alight with interest as they started on up the Avenue. “Tell me about yourself. You’re another man, too.”

“Dad died shortly after I saw you,” he explained. “Apoplexy. And I thought of you, the break you had made, the gamble you took. So I gathered together what he left me, sold out to my brother Jim, and came to New York to stake everything on that voice you took such stock in. I went to Fernald and he thought he could do something with it. I’ve been in training so to speak ever since. And this season he got me the job with the Metropolitan.”

“If only I could hear you!”

“Oh, I haven’t done much—not yet. A few matinées and one or two Saturday nights. Next year, though, they’ve promised me a go at leads.”

“I knew if ever you had the chance you’d prove yourself.”

“I owe a great part of that chance to Randolph,—you know, Hubert Randolph. He’s one of the directors of the Metropolitan. I met him at Fernald’s studio last winter and it was through him that Fernald pushed me. He’s interested in you, by the way,—thinks you’re the greatest actress of the century.”

“The century is very young,” she smiled.

“Well, Rand’s seen them all in the last fifteen or[33]twenty years and knows what he’s talking about. We were at your opening together and he said then you were paralyzing.”

“Did I do that to you, too?”

“Paralyze me? Bet your life you did! When you walked out on that stage and raised your head, a ramrod went up my back. ‘That’s Lizzie Parsons,’ I said to myself, ‘or I’ll be shot.’ Then I thought I must be loony, that when I’d see you in a better light without the short wig, I’d laugh at my mistake. But in the second act I knew I was right, in spite of the black hair—”

“It’s dyed, Lou.” She made the confession haltingly. “At first I didn’t want to. My hair seemed sort of part of me—the color, I mean. But that’s just why he made me do it; it was a question of personality, he said. I begged him to let me wear a wig but he was afraid it would be detected. And he was right, I dare say. He’s always right.”

“Don’t you worry about the way it looks, either. You used to be just pretty. Now you’re a beauty!”

“Am I—really?” There was a childish earnestness in the query.

“Should have heard Randolph rave! Say, I’m dining with him to-night. Why not come along? He’s crazy to meet you and he won’t go to any of those society fandangles to do it.”

“Meet a stranger—with you around? Oh—I couldn’t! I’d burst into straight English as naturally as you burst into song. And that would ruin me.”

He patted her hand and his kind brown eyes beamed. “Nonsense! You’re too clever an actress for that.”

[34]There was something pathetic in the way she clung to his handclasp. “It’s so good finding you this way. I haven’t any friends—no one to whom I can actually talk. With me it isn’t a case of acting behind the footlights. I’m acting all the time, except when I’m alone.”

“But it’s not acting any more—this Russian business, is it?”

“No—it’s myself, the greater part of self, I dare say. But Lizzie Parsons isn’t all dead yet and I don’t want her to die—” She blinked up at him. “Don’t make me cry, please,—or the shadows will all come off my eyes.”

His eyes took in the luxurious appointment of the car, mauve enameled vanity apparatus on one side, smoking outfit on the other, gilt vase with its spray of fresh orchids, soft tan cushions and robe of fur. He gave her a warming look of satisfaction.

“I should say the exchange was all for the better. You must be making a mint.”

“One hundred and fifty a week.”

“One hundred and fifty—?”

“That’s my contract.”

“But good Lord—”

“Oh, I made it with my eyes open. It extends over the first five years—with an option on the next five.”

“But all this—” He waved his arm, bewildered, through the air.

“All this he gives me—my clothes, my car and its upkeep, my jewels, though they’re mostly paste, everything except my home. I wouldn’t let him give me that.”

He made an attempt to conceal the swift suspicion that[35]would have clouded any man’s eyes. Instantly she saw and answered it.

“Oh, don’t misunderstand! It’s purely a matter of business. I’ve got to be equipped to play my part off the stage and I don’t earn enough to do it on my own.”

“Then why doesn’t he give you enough?”

“I should probably grow too independent. This way he holds the reins. That’s only supposition, of course. I’ve never discussed it. One can’t discuss money with Oswald Kane.”

“It’s a damned outrage!”

“Oh, no it isn’t. He took a sporting chance. He staked time and effort and money on a venture that might have proved a hopeless failure. I had everything to gain. And now that I’ve made good under his guidance, it’s only fair that he should reap the harvest.”

“Indefinitely?”

“For six years to come, at any rate,—until my contract expires.” She leaned back, eyes closed, and an intensely weary look dropped the corners of her red, mobile mouth.

They drew near the park. She urged him to ride with her a bit and they drove into the blue velvet dusk, past the shimmer of lake curled among the bushes. The car glided on swiftly through cool dark silence.

“You haven’t told me yet how I inspired you to become an Italian,” she prompted.

“Oh, that—simple enough! Randolph remarked the night of your première that there was an aura of romance about artistes from the other side, particularly when they[36]hailed from Southern Europe; sort of Oriental, you understand. The next day I went to Fernald. ‘Can’t you change me to something Italian?’ I said. ‘Seabury’s a rotten name for an opera singer.’ Well, he did it. Of course, I make no attempt at accent—I couldn’t handle that job in conversation. But the people I’ve met don’t look for it; they understand the fact that I was brought up in England. All I have to be careful of is my grammar.”

They laughed together. As her laugh bubbled girlishly into the quiet night, she halted it with a swift movement of hand to lips and once more sent that look of caution at her chauffeur’s back.

He reminded her of his dinner engagement with Randolph. “He’s made up his mind to know you informally. And that’s all he has to do to get what he wants. He’s a human dynamo, that man. Never knew anybody with his finger in so many pies and able to put over whatever he tackles. Sooner or later you’re bound to meet him in his own way. Might as well be to-night.”

“What good would it do? He’ll never know me—the real me.”

“He’ll know a fascinating woman, any way you look at it.”

But she dropped him at the bachelor apartment on Park Avenue in spite of his pleas.

“Come and see me, Lou, often,” she murmured, giving him her address as he stepped out of the car. “You don’t know what a joy it is to play at being myself.”

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