| "Unnumbered cords, frail strands full fraught with pain, |
| That join the soul to things of time and sense." |
The thought of leaving all that held the nearness of his spirit was repugnant to me. I wanted to be alone with my grief. Gradually I came to realize that it was for the best. Experience, too—simple, honest soul—was shaken by the suddenness and swiftness of our loss. I decided to send her to her home for a rest and change of scene. After all, what did it matter where I went?... Boy was not there....
The season dragged by, drab and comfortless. Will's devotion to me was the only ray of light in the murkiness of my spirit. Our common grief had bridged the gulf between us. All the gentleness, the tenderness in his nature seemed to revive. He never left me to accept invitations in which he knew I could not share; something like the old camaraderie was restored between us. I found a kind of balm in the thought that, if the death of my son had been the means of bringing my husband and me closer together, the sacrifice had not been in vain—and yet—and yet ... in the inner consciousness of my heart I knew the truth: had I been called upon to choose, the sacrifice had not been Boy. Truly, life is a continuous compromise.
The season ended, we returned to New York. Because we could not afford to move—there being the usual deficit in the family budget—we opened the apartment. To dwell upon the resurging pain which the reminders in my home undammed were to make fetish of my grief. Neither did I ask Experience to return. She, too, belonged to the past of things.
Will had determined to leave his present management and seek new fields. The company for the next season was to be curtailed and the cast cheapened, an extended tour of one-night stands. The summer was passed in New York, and luckily, except for periodic waves of tropical heat, the weather was not unendurable. Will spent a goodly part of his time at the Lambs' Club, where he said he kept in touch with the activities of the managerial world. The season promised to be backward. Plans appeared to be slow of consummation. The tedium began to tell on Will's nerves and his temper, especially when he found himself suspended from the Lambs for non-payment of dues. None of his colleagues came to his rescue. That the theatrical profession is a fraternal organization is another of those popular fallacies. There can be no spirit of fraternity in an overcrowded profession.
It became expedient that Will appeal to his father for financial assistance, a resort which he postponed as long as possible, since the old gentleman invariably accompanied his grudging remittances with advice, censure and no little contumely. Will could not understand why he was not "snapped up" at once, so he expressed it. He had made good in his last engagement, had kept himself well advertised (vide the press-agent) and it would appear that, as a natural sequence, his services should be in demand. He commented on the statement made by several managers, viz.: they had nothing in his line. It was evident that in making a pronounced success in a certain genre of plays he had become identified with the one type of hero and the managers could "see" him in no other. Managers are, with rare exceptions, an unimaginative lot. In no other way can one explain the deluge of plays patterned on the same type: for example, let a manager by hit or miss produce successfully a play built around the Far West, immediately there spring up a dozen of the ilk. Or, again, let a play of farcical construction score a hit; the public is immediately surfeited with a run of farces. So with the actor. Let him once become identified with heroes of romantic drama and the manager fears to entrust him with the dress-suit rôle, and vice versa.
More and more I was impressed with the ephemeral quality of the actor's success. At best the actor's is an aleatory profession and, as in all games of chance, the losses score highest.
It was well along in the autumn when Will signed and immediately began rehearsals. The star was a petulant little lady who, by grace of her marriage with a manager, had been hoisted to her present position, a position to which she was not equal either by training, personality or talent. For several seasons the husband-manager had invested—and lost—large sums of money in the attempt to build up a following for his wife. The present venture was a kind of last straw. That there was more or less "feeling" between the couple was evinced by their frequent passages d'armes of a personal nature, at rehearsals. Accustomed as he was to the thoroughness of the stage-management under which he had worked during the past two seasons, Will found the hit and miss methods of his new affiliation disconcerting and irritating. In addition to this, the husband-manager-director had a picturesque if not a literate command of the language. He was in the habit of standing in the centre aisle or at the back of the theatre and shouting his directions to the members on the stage. When, as sometimes happened, a member resented the manager's method of criticism in no uncertain terms, that personage would back down and with tearful, if blasphemous, appeal explain himself. On opening nights, in response to the persistent calls from the claque, the manager reluctantly (!) appeared before the curtain to bow his acknowledgment—in shirt sleeves—his air of exhaustion contrasting sharply with his jaws which worked a piece of chewing-gum like a ticket-chopper in rush hours. It would seem that the vanity of actors is not an exclusive attribute.
The metropolitan reception of the play and star was not one of unmitigated joy. The husband-manager, not liking the opinions of the press, talked back both in print and from the stage. Two ghastly weeks in New York, playing to a papered house or empty seats, and the company took to the coal regions. Another fortnight was spent sparring for open time, reluctantly doled out to the weak, and the company gave up the ghost. Obviously Will had entered upon a cycle of bad luck. I took upon myself to look for an engagement. Not only on account of the material consideration, but because the emptiness and loneliness of my life had become no longer endurable. Self-imposed tasks palled. My mind refused to concentrate upon the line of study I had outlined. "And thus the native hue of resolution is sickled o'er with the pale cast of thought." The career I once planned for myself had been consigned to the dump heap of lost illusions. I could not touch the clay which once had thrilled me with ambition.
Will went about with me on my visits to various managers. He encouraged me in my intention and I was glad to interest him, to take him out of himself, as it were. His run of hard luck had preyed on his nerves and frayed his temper. There was reason for me to suspect he was drinking more than was good for him. Finally there came an offer of a small part in a musical comedy which had settled down for a run in New York. The fact that I was possessed of no great amount of vocal equipment did not preclude me from the field. The manager intimated that what I lacked in voice I made up in pulchritude, though I recall he referred to it as "shape." The salary was to be thirty-five dollars a week. The gowns were furnished—those worn by my predecessor—though I was called upon to supply my own shoes, silk hose and gloves. In reality I was to be nothing more than a show-girl, with a few lines to speak.