CHAPTER FOURTEENUTTERBOURNE NARROWS HIS EYES
Jerome gradually learned the ways of the formidable box office, and took charge of the General Ledger. Thus his time was abundantly filled: during the day hustling around with brokers in the interest of cargo shipments, and at night helping check up with the house manager. As a matter of fact, the company treasurer, whose real and legitimate profession was selling life insurance, had been approached with an attractive offer by a local insurance branch and at the end of the present engagement the main brunt of the financial responsibility would rest with Jerome—a rather vaster contract than the stool-pigeon job at Oaks, Ferguson & Whitley’s.
He found being connected with a theatre very delightful—the contacts, the excitement, the sense of privilege he felt early in the evening standing out in the lobby between a glaring poster that announced the night’s attraction and a huge frame within which were arranged the pictures of all the principal songbirds. He would watch the people stream in, then would himself slip inside until the curtain had gone up, after which he would go behind and absorb more and more of the mysterious atmosphere which the audience was denied. Here he could chat in the wings with his new friends, and hold long, important tête-à-têtes with Lili during periods of idleness when she wasn’t “on.”
The first popular-priced Saturday night, with theBohemian Girlin progress, these two young persons might have been discoveredleaning up against a fragment of some palace or other, engaged in a more than usually earnest conversation.
“Don’t get so excited, old dear,” cautioned the girl, beaming upon him at the same time, however, and letting her eyes slowly open wider and wider.
“But whywon’tyou marry me?” he persisted. It was the old, old urge—and seemed, indeed, about the only aspect of his former self that hadn’t been outgrown.
“Hear him rave!” she giggled. “You don’t seem to realize, Jerry, what it means to get married!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he replied in an indefinite but lofty tone.
“Come on,” she coaxed, “let’s both be sensible. Aren’t we all right as we are?”
“What’s the idea?” he pressed on doggedly. “You admit you love me. Isn’t that enough?”
She looked at him in her simple yet unfathomable way, her smooth brow, so seldom fretted, showing faint furrows of honest perplexity, as upon the night her challenged little soul strove to appreciate the wonder of the lighted sky. And she said: “This is a time when I wish I had some one to tell me what to do!” It was a little mysterious, indeed, though her eyes twinkled just perceptibly.
He gazed at her. “I’m telling you what to do, Lili!”
“You don’t understand,” she smiled. “I mean some one....” It trailed off. On the stage a barytone was beginning that famous soliloquy, theHeart Bowed Down. Lili looked all at once a bit weary. She sighed and slumped against the scenery, resting her cheek on a convenient brace.
“Listen, Jerry,” she coaxed, half dreamily, “I love you an awful lot. You’re a nice boy. But let’s don’t talk about getting married—please let’s don’t.”
“If you love me,” he insisted, “there’s no reason why we shouldn’t.”
She shook her head, yet in a vaguely undecided way which encouraged him to press his point. “I don’t see how it canbe money that’s holding you back. Two can live cheaper than one—everybody says so who’s tried it.”
“You mean two can live together cheaper than single, don’t you?” she laughed.
“You know it’s true!” he cried. “And if it’s only because you don’t want to give up hopes of being a prima donna, why you don’t have to. You’d still have your job, and I’d have mine.”
“But just supposing,” she rambled perversely, “I’d want to leave the stage some day and have swell things and an auto? What then, mister?”
“By that time,” he assured her, “I’ll be making enough for two myself. I hope you don’t think I’m never going to do anything bigger than this!” He spoke magnificently.
“Rich man, poor man,”—the girl gently enumerated the buttons down the front of his coat, holding her head playfully first on one side and then on the other.
“I’m crazy about you, Lili!” he said, somewhat thickly, grasping her hands but not otherwise knowing exactly what to do with such very strong emotion as this.
“I’m crazy about you too, Jerry,” she giggled. “They all laugh at us for a couple of love-sick prunes, but that don’t bother me. When I’m crazy about a man I’mgoingto be, that’s all. Don’t you love the way he holds onto that last note? Yes, I knew he’d get a hand! It always gets a hand when you hold on that way.” And she sighed. “I wish I could ever draw a real song like that. Do you think I’m satisfied with the bits I do? Iamnot!”
And then she had to hurry away, which really left them about where they had begun, so far as their curious little lagging love affair went.
But he made another determined effort under the romantic influence of Flora Utterbourne’s garden tea-party. The tea was strong and dreamy. He made Lili stroll off with himonto the beach, though she wanted to stay and enjoy every moment of what seemed to her a function of the highest social prestige. And he kissed her, behind a friendly palm tree, and begged her once more to marry him, but shewouldn’tbe serious, and kept singing and making eyes in the most tempting yet at the same time exasperating way, and sometimes she said, “Boo-o-o!”
Try as he might, Jerome couldn’t seem to arrive anywhere with Lili, even though she did admit she was desperately in love with him: she always proclaimed the heartening fact loudly and brazenly—didn’t care at all who knew it—was candidness itself. Well, the combination was beyond Jerome, and it humiliated him; it made his ego squirm. There seemed to be a hoo-doo at work somewhere.
He brooded over his troubles of the heart. The same thing seemed happening that had happened before, though with the notable exception that whereas Stella had simply ceased to love him and had married another man, Lili went right on loving him—she admitted it! She was pretty deep.
And she seemed—yes, he glimpsed the fact indistinctly—she seemed to be having certain flirtations on the side, which darkened the issue considerably. There was a soldier he had seen her with one day—a mere little shrimp in khaki, on duty here in Honolulu. It troubled him greatly, and he reproached her with it afterward; and she beamed on him and evaded the point, even cried a little, and made him end by feeling abject and penitent. Upon the whole, Jerome appeared doomed.
However, all this made no particular stir in the great world. The tea-party went right ahead. The songbirds were all having a beautiful time, and the coloratura, Miss Valentine, thrilling still over her Honolulu notices, walked about haughtily, not seeing any one at all, and holding her teacup with a poise which would have thrown Galesburg (whence she had been rescued from a career of choir-singing nonentity) into a spasm of amazement and envy. She talked with a mysteriously acquired “eastern” accent, almost never forgettingthat the letterrdid not legitimately belong in the alphabet.
Small tables were set out under an awning: you could sit with your tea or stroll with your tea, just as you chose. The hostess poured the tea and smiled in her unflagging way, conversing steadily; the river flowed cordially on, its rhythm unflecked by churning millwheel or breaking rapids: a deep and gracious river, quiet and gliding, yet sunny, too, and always singularly fresh and aglow with enthusiasm.
There was one distinguished guest who hadn’t been invited, and whose calm, sauntering arrival upon the scene created a genuine little sensation. This was Captain Utterbourne, whoseStar of Troyhad slipped into the harbour like a clever grey mouse. He was on his way back from somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Attired in cool flannels, he sat taking in the mixed picture which kept constantly breaking into new composition against the plush of the lawn and the blue of the sea. His eyes were amused, yet otherwise inexpressive.
Flora was enthroned like a very queen behind a comfortable big yellow teapot, with her enigmatic brother on one side and the impresario on the other. Mr. Curry looked about him dreamily, while a sense of peace seemed creeping into his heart. It was amazing that a place like this should have so utterly settled an appearance. It had been a mere empty house, and she had come and waved a wand or something, and lo! you would say she had always lived here. In a little while she would be gone—vanished; there would be strangers. So it went with her.
“My dearman,” she said richly, “your tea must bestonecold! Let me give you a fresh cup, and you must try this cake,really, for I made it myself, to see whether I’d forgottenhow—I don’t havetimeany more for such luxuries as ‘baking.’”
“Time,” murmured the Captain with a sleepy nod. “Time—and eternity....”
“Oh,now,” his sister countered, “you can’t eliminate my ‘responsibilities’ just by talking like aBuddhist!”
“Of course,” he admitted, “one may call things by whatever names one chooses—h’m? You choose to call them responsibilities.”
“You’ve always laughed at myapartments, Chris: but I can’t see that they’re any more uncertain thanships!” And there, in truth, she really had him.
It was all very delightful. And before long the illustrious coloratura was prevailed upon to sing a few songs, though she said the usual things about being in wretched voice, without expecting that they should be taken too seriously.
The impresario excitedly seated himself at the piano and spread out some music and they conferred in earnest whispers. He sat looking up at her with such a look of loving and hopeful anticipation as must move any one not utterly barricaded against sentiment. It was really beautiful to see them together. He was so manifestly proud of the songbird he had rescued from the Galesburg choir, while she showed such touching confidence in him—even if, when the strain was all over and bouquets of praise poured in, she would forget to give the zealous maestro any particular credit.
The singer drew in deeply, lowered her head a little, focused the whole force of her being into the momentous first tone, and sang. It was an aria from that sublime and noble work,Linda di Chamounix, in which, of course, the heroine goes mad in the second act or so, for no entirely apparent reason, and lets her hair down her back, and sings cascades in competition with a long-suffering flute. The “business end” of Miss Valentine’s voice was the vital stretch between B and E; it was these impressive top notes that made her, in reality, a coloratura to be reckoned with—that kept the harassed impresario also in a state of perpetual alarm.
“It’s her range,” he confessed afterward to Flora. “It puts me so on pins and needles. Every time she opens her mouth I’m afraid of losing her to one of the big managers.” He was, indeed, forever finding pearls on ash-heaps, for ultimate confiscationhigher up. “Lord, the singers I’ve lost because of a little special talent!” Curry dropped his hands from an expended gesture and wriggled the jewelled fingers helplessly. “They’ll get her—you’ll see. I can’t afford to keep a voice like that.” So life went. “From him who hath not....” Xenophon Curry was a born impresario, carrying in his heart a genuine sense of lift and grace which always touched his poor ragged performances with at least the virtue of lyrical buoyancy; but an impresario, alas, born to mediocrity and the provinces.
Presently Captain Utterbourne’s eyes became riveted upon a couple strolling back from the beach.
“Mr. Curry,” he drawled, his lips curling in mirth, “if I’m not mistaken, that’s the young man you had to dinner at the Pavillon d’Orient.”
“Yes,” laughed the impresario, “and thereby hangs a tale”—which he forthwith told, in his big, human way, omitting some of the more painfully satiric touches and stressing rather the new grip on life and the affairs of the world which the once obscure clerk seemed obtaining.
“Isn’t it simply gorgeous,” murmured the Captain in a tone of softly contemplative ecstasy, “the multiplicity of ever fresh reactions one discovers in the human organism! Here one sees a perfectly ordinary and unimaginative young man—h’m?—going along year after year. Then suddenly he’s carried off by a caprice of fortune and placed in a wholly new environment—h’m? And immediately the mechanism of consciousness begins to act along unpremeditated lines—throws up defences—digs trenches of new affirmation—h’m? h’m? It’s extraordinary—that alertness, that look of vigorous ‘becoming’....”
And the Captain sat there watching Jerome and watching, his eyes half closed in a quizzical, poising way.