The Light of the Star: A Novel

by Hamlin Garland

He did. His point of view, so modern, so uncompromising, so unshaded by tradition, delighted Anderson, and thereafter he was able to employ the young playwright regularly. These articles came to have a special value to the thoughtful "artists" of the stage, and were at last made into a little book, which sold several hundred copies, besides bringing him to the notice of a few congenial cranks and come-outers who met in an old tavern far down in the old city.

These articles—this assumption of the superior air of the critic—led naturally to the determination to write a play to prove his theories, and now that the play was written and the trial about to be made his anxiety to win the public was very keen. He had a threefold reason for toiling like mad—to prove his theories, to gain bread, and to win Helen; and his concentration was really destructive. He could think of nothing else. All his correspondence ceased. He read no more; he went no more to his club. His only diversions were the rides and the lunches which he took with Helen.

With her in the park he was a man transformed. His heaviness left him. His tongue loosened, and together they rose above the toilsome level of the rehearsal and abandoned themselves to the pure joy of being young. Together they visited the exhibitions of painting and sculpture, and to Helen these afternoons were a heavenly release from her own world.

It made no difference to her who objected to her friendship with Douglass. After years of incredible solitude and seclusion and hard work in the midst of multitudes of admirers and in the swift-beating heart of cities, with every inducement to take pleasure, she had remained the self-denying student of acting. Her summers had been spent in England or France, where she saw no one socially and met only those who were interested in her continued business success. Now she abandoned this policy of reserve and permitted herself the joys of a young girl in company with a handsome and honorable man, denying herself even to the few.

She played badly during these three weeks, and Westervelt was both sad and furious. Her joyous companionship with Douglass, her work on his sane and wholesome drama, their discussions of what the stage should be and do unfitted her for the factitious parts she was playing.

"I am going to drop all of these characters into the nearest abyss," she repeated each time with greater intensity. "I shall never play them again after your drama is ready. My contract with Westervelt has really expired so far as his exclusive control over me is concerned, and I will not be coerced into a return to such work."

Her eyes were opened also to the effect of her characters on the audiences that assembled night after night to hear her, and she began to be troubled by the thousands of young girls who flocked to her matinées. "Is it possible that what I call 'my art' is debasing to their bright young souls?" she asked herself. "Is Mr. Douglass right? Am I responsible?"

It was the depression of these moods which gave her corresponding elation as she met her lover's clear, calm eyes of a morning, and walked into the atmosphere of his drama, whose every line told for joy and right living as well as for serious art.

Those were glorious days for her—the delicious surprise of her surrender came back each morning. She had loved once, with the sweet single-heartedness of a girl, shaken with sweet and yielding joy of a boyish face and a slim and graceful figure. What he had said she could not remember; what he was, no longer counted; but what that love had been to her mattered a great deal, for when he passed out of her life the glow of his worship remained in her heart, enabling her to keep a jealous mastery of her art and to remain untouched by the admiration of those who sought her favor in every city she visited. Douglass was amazed to find how restricted her social circle was. Eagerly sought by many of the great drawing-rooms of the city, she seldom went to even the house of a friend.

"Her art is a jealous master," her intimates were accustomed to say, implying that she had remained single in order that she might climb higher on the shining ladder of fame, and in a sense this was true; but she was not sordid in her ambitions—she was a child of nature. She loved rocks, hills, trees, and clouds. And it was this elemental simplicity of taste which made Douglass the conquering hero that he was. She felt in him concrete, rugged strength and honesty of purpose, as wide as the sky from the polished courtesy and the conventional evasions of her urban admirers.