THE COLLAPSE OF THE IDEAL
CANWARDEN did not write sonnets, or he would have composed many, not only in celebration of Petronella’s eyebrows, but of her crystalline blue eyes and burnished hair, her willowy figure of the latest and most wonderful shape, and her slim, white hands and arched insteps. But in all his plays—for he was a budding dramatist of exceeding promise—he described her in red-lined type:—“Enter So-and-So, a fair and graceful girl of not more than twenty-five summers, with sapphire eyes and golden locks, attired in the costume of the period� (whatever the period might be). “She exhales the joyous freshness of a May morning, and her gurgling laugh rivals the spring song of the thrush.� This pleased the leading ladies hugely, even when their eyes were not of sapphire; but stage-managers found Urban Canwarden’s stage directions a trial. If he had been firmly seated in the motor-car of public approval, both hands on the driving-wheel as he ripped along the track of success, they would have smiled even while they writhed. But Canwarden was not yet famous, and the stage-managers were free not to disguise their feelings. However, he went on; getting thin—thin for a plump man—in the effort to make enough to marry on. For the beloved of his soul was not of the bread-and-cheese-and-kisses type of betrothed of whom we read in novels that have many years ago silted to the bottom-shelves in public libraries, and are occasionally issued as new in paper covers at fourpence-halfpenny. Her full name was Petronella Lesser, and she dwelt with her parents in an Early Victorian villa on Haverstock Hill, a residence which had been slowly settling down on one side ever since the Tube borings had started. The lease would be out, old Mr. Lesser calculated, a day or two before the Corinthian-pillared stucco and brick porch sat down. He was something in the Italian warehouse supply-line in the City, and a singular judge of olives, Gruyère, and barreled Norwegian sprats. Petronella never looked a fairer, more poetic thing than when concealing vast quantities of these zests behind the latest thing in blouses, day or evening wear, and Urban Canwarden, as he gazed upon his betrothed, or very nearly so, swore to himself that she should never know what it is to go lacking the hors d’œuvres that lend piquancy to the Banquet of Life.
Petronella was a girl whose white and well-developed bosom was the home of emotions but little livelier than those that animate the beautiful person of a Regent-street wax-doll. Sawdust will burn, it is true, but the costlier puppets are stuffed with choicer stuffing. She had not fallen in love with Urban Canwarden; she had simply frozen on to him. She had liked sitting in the author’s box on First Nights, while the author tore his hair at his Club or in his chambers. She liked his person, his friends, his prospects. She looked forward to an elegantly-furnished villa on Campden Hill, with a cottage at Sonning or Hampton Wick, and mid-winter runs to the South of France, when a distinguished dramatist, the husband of a charming and attractive wife, whose salon would be the constant resort of the fine flower, the top of the basket of London Society, should require rest and change of air after his exhausting labors undergone in the composition and rehearsal of the brilliant play, in four acts and eleven scenes, destined to be the opening attraction of Mr. James Toplofty’s Spring Season at the West End Theater. She would dream thus paragraphically, whenever she did dream, which was seldom, for her imaginative region was small. She was stupid and narrow, cold-hearted and mercenary.
“Since I have loved you,� Canwarden would say, “I have been able to write of noble women. You have inspired me; everything that is best in me comes from you; everything I have done that is good I owe to you....�
“You dear, exaggerating, Romantic Thing!� was invariably the reply of Petronella. “And when we are married we shall have a 28 h.p. Gohard with nickel fittings and a changeable body, and a chauffeur in livery. I used to dream of a dear little private brougham when we were first engaged, but nobody who wants to be thought Anybody would have such an old-fashioned thing now. How the world is changing, isn’t it, with motors and airships and Tubes to travel in?�
The Haverstock Hill villa vibrated as she prattled, and the porch settled lower by the fraction of an inch. It was a July evening, and the lovers, arm-in-arm, paced up and down the damp and puddly graveled avenue under the liquid-soot-distilling lilacs and acacias. The reflection of a large fire danced upon the windows of Mrs. Lesser’s drawing-room, and Petronella, despite the warmth of Canwarden’s love, felt chilly. She wondered why Urban had pressed her to put on goloshes and a warm wrap after dinner and take this clammy evening stroll arm-in-arm with him. And then she was conscious that the heart against which her right hand rested thumped heavily, and she felt his arm tremble, and remembered that at dinner her betrothed had shown a poor appetite in conjunction with a well-developed thirst. As pigs are said to feel wind coming, as cats—even the most sedate—set up their backs and sprint about the garden at the approach of a storm, Petronella instinctively felt that bad news was in the air. A more sentimental and much prettier girl might have anticipated a shipwreck of the affections—expected to be told that Canwarden had found his Fate in another’s eyes. Petronella’s previsions of disaster concerned only his banking account. It was that to which she was really referring when she said she felt that something had happened.
“It is true, dearest,� Canwarden said, with the kind of hoarse groan that he had not been able to extract from the leading young man in his last romantic drama even with the grappling-hooks of continued effort. “Something has happened. My great play—for that it is great I feel, and always shall, despite the slings and arrows of that eater of red meat, the Transatlantic critic ... my great play, ‘The ...’�
“I know, ‘The Popshop Hearse’ ...� Petronella put in hurriedly.
“No, no ... ‘The Poisoned Curse,’� corrected the author, with a wince. “My play, produced a fortnight ago at Barney and Keedler’s Classical Theater, New York, is a failure ... a blank and utter failure! Yes, yes! the management did cable to me to say it had been enthusiastically received. I showed the message to you, and you shared my gladness. But here—here is another cable from my agent, Loris K. Boodler, of Skyscraper Mansions, 49,000,000 Broadway, that says....� He drew a crackling, flimsy paper from his waistcoat pocket, and tried to unfold it with hands that shook. “I can’t read it because it’s too dark, but I remember every word. ‘Your—play—taken—off—Saturday—following—production. Variety vaudeville substituted. Writing. Boodler.’ And I was looking forward to the author’s fees to�—he coughed in a choky way—“to furnish our house and ... and buy that motor-car you were talking about. It ... it seemed so sure a thing! I had got such capital percentages; Barney and Keedler had cabled to say the play was a success....� He choked. “And now!...�
“You told me all that before, dear,� said Petronella. “But you have two other plays coming out, haven’t you, in London theaters?... West End houses.... And one failure doesn’t spell ruin....�
“One failure can break a dramatist, when it is a failure of this kind,� said her disconsolate lover. “Those two other plays are ... were coming out at theaters held by the same lessees—Barney and Keedler, of the Mammoth American Dramatic Trust. And so, don’t you see, all my balloons are deflated at once. I’ve come down with a crash, and ... it hurts! But you will trust me, won’t you? You will go on believing in me, though I’ve had what technical people will call a set-back. And if our ... our marriage must be delayed....� He stopped under one of the liquid soot-distilling lilacs, and caught Petronella in his arms, crushing the draperies arranged by her Hampstead dressmaker roughly against his damp evening overcoat. “You will not mind!... We will wait and hope, and love each other ... love each other.... After all, while we are together, nothing is too hard to bear....�
Thus spoke Canwarden, counting his chickens ere their emergence from the shell, after the fashion of a young man too deeply in love to see clearly what manner of young woman his heart is set upon. But Petronella shivered, conscious that the Hampstead garden was clammy, and that the dazzling halo of coming fame and approaching prosperity had been banished from Canwarden’s brow. He stood before her, tall and straight, and sufficiently good to look at, with his bright brown eyes, straight, short nose, and sensitive, clean-shaven lips, though his curly hair, it must be added, was receding too fast from a brow more bumpy than, according to the accepted canons of classical proportion, a brow should be. Upon his shirt-front a lilac had shed an inky tear, and his voice was husky with love and sorrow, not of an utterly selfish kind, as he promised Petronella to work hard, never to cease working until he had regained the lost ground.
“But you never may!...� she said, and the doubt in those shallow blue eyes—he never had realized before that they were shallow—pierced him to the soul. “And Nora will be married before me, and she is two years younger, and everybody in Hampstead will say....�
Canwarden, with heat, devoted Hampstead to the devil. I am not defending him. Petronella thought him brutal, coarse, and profane. Women of Petronella’s kind always enthusiastically uphold the dignity of the devil. She told him what she thought, and she wound up in the red-papered hall of the one-sided Hampstead villa by saying that he and she had better part. She added, as women of Petronella’s type invariably do add, that the dead past might bury its dead. And she drew off her engagement ring—an olivine, imposed by a Bond Street jeweler upon the too-confiding Canwarden as an emerald, harnessed between two indifferent diamonds of yellowish hue—and thrust it back upon him, and went upstairs to her room and locked the door; and as the hall-door banged violently and the iron avenue gates clashed behind the haggard Canwarden, his late betrothed sat down to pen a little note to Percy Flicker—a young man without a chin, junior partner of a small but pushing firm of shipbrokers at No. 35,000 Cornhill. The porch made up its mind and sat down that night, and Percy the chinless called upon the following evening, and was compelled to enter his Love’s bower by the back-door.
And Canwarden, seeing volcanic ruins smoking where his Castle of Hope had stood, wandered the West End and the Strand like a thing accursed. He went into his club, and men slapped him on the shoulder and congratulated him upon the New York success. They would learn the truth later, he said to himself, and then they would chuckle and sneer. The rustling of the cablegram in his waistcoat pocket whispered “Yes s’s’!� Meanwhile he had no appetite for solid food, and, quenching the thirst that consumed him with iced brandy and soda, he, Canwarden, usually the most temperate of men, realized how easily spanned is the gulf that severs the sober man from the inebriate. He might, perhaps, have crossed it for good and all had he not chanced to pass the invitingly open door of Grow’s Transatlantic Bureau of Exchange. The shipping advertisements loomed large and gaily-colored in the window; passenger lists and railway guides hung from hooks upon the walls, and lay in piles upon the counter, and a civil clerk and an attractive girl with squirrel-colored hair were busy over ledgers and things. Prompted by his guardian angel Canwarden went in and asked for the New York papers. The mail was just in, and he got them, and, leaning on the polished shelf-desk where people write out code telegrams, he turned to the theatrical column. His drama, The Poisoned Curse, had been withdrawn a fortnight ago from the stage of Barney and Keedler’s Theater—slain as a thing unfit to live—and a variety vaudeville substituted in its stead. Did not the cablegram—Loris K. Boodler’s cablegram—say so? He would see the hideous announcement for himself, and then go under, as men went who had broken the golden bowl of Youth and Hope, and were too weary to go on fighting.
Could it ... could it be a mistake...? Was the play a success after all? It looked like it. For in flamboyant type The Poisoned Curse: a Romantic Drama in four acts and eleven scenes, by Urban Canwarden, was announced by the New York Trumpeter as being presented to-night, and every night, and to-day at 1.30, and Saturday matinées as announced. The play had been running when Loris K. Boodler sent the cablegram announcing its withdrawal; the play was running now—would run. Canwarden’s hands shook so that the flimsy news-sheet tore. He glanced at the girl with the squirrel-colored hair and apologized, saying that he would pay for the paper. She smiled, and he found that he was able to smile back again. He despatched a short but expressive cablegram to the office of Mr. Loris K. Boodler, relieving that smart and go-ahead agent from further responsibility in connection with the collection of his percentages, and walked out of Grow’s Transatlantic Bureau of Exchange with his head up—a free man.
Petronella married Percy Flicker. Canwarden is a flourishing and popular dramatist, with a thumping bank balance and a permanent predilection for bachelor existence. All the female villains in his plays are blondes. The stage directions, underlined in red, run thus: “Enter So-and-So, a fair and slightly formed woman of barely thirty, with icy and repellent blue eyes and hair of a pale and sunless straw color. She conveys the impression of cold insincerity and self-centered absorption, and her hard and mocking laugh falls gratingly upon the ear.� Which goes to prove that Human Nature is and never will be anything but Human Nature until the Curtain drops.