Darley relented and came back next day with the Maisie part in “The Girl from Honolulu” in his pocket. “Damn her,” he thought, “she’s honest about it and there have been avaricious artists. Avarice and Art aren’t contradictory.” He expected no more at their parting than the cool “Good-by” she gave him.
“Full of possibilities,” he reported her to Drayton, and when Drayton asked him to be more definite, “I can’t,” he wrote, “be more definite than this. You know those Chinese toys consisting of a box within a box of beautiful wood, wonderfully made? You marvel at the workmanship and you open box after box. You get tired and you go on opening because each box is beautiful and because of a faint hope you have that there’ll be something in the last box. I don’t know what’s in hers. That’s her secret and her mystery, and, by the way, you can discount what Pettigrew is going to tell you of her Maisie. It isn’t her Maisie. It’s mine. I’ve rehearsed her in it.”
“Darley’s mad about her,” Drayton interpreted this to Rossiter.
Darley was, anyhow, sufficiently interested to travel across half England to see her play Maisie on her first Saturday night, in Liverpool. He stood at the side of the circle where he could watch both her and the house, and he waited, especially for a scene which was one of the weaknesses of the piece, when Maisie, by sheer blague, has to subdue a rascally beachcomber who intends robbery. He wasn’t afraid of her song, but this scene called for acting; it wasn’t plausible, even for musical comedy, unless Maisie carried it off con brio.
And he had, that night, his reward for the labor of these months. It was Saturday night, and the audience stopped eating chocolates. Darley wasn’t looking at the stage, he was looking at the audience and he knew triumph when he saw it. They stopped eating. Darley looked upon his work and knew that it was good.
“Ich dieu” he muttered. “By God, I do. Where’s the bar?”
CHAPTER VI—THE DREAM IN STONE
IF some one idiosyncratic and original, some one bold to challenge the accepted order, had dared to put Mary Arden on her defense, if it had been asked what she was doing in the war, she would have replied with cool assurance that she was keeping her head about it when nothing was more easy than intemperance. Every day her post brought letters which encouraged the belief, not that she made an opportunity of war, but that she held high rank amongst home-keeping indispensables. Her letters from unknown men in the trenches were explicit that Mary Arden was the England they were fighting for—food, if she had cared to eat it, for the grossest conceit.