Five nights at the Five Pines

by Harriet A. Gaul

I smiled a little ruefully after he had gone. Why did I think I had to have any more child than just him? I had always supposed that when a man’s play was produced his wife had a box and all her friends gathered around her with congratulations, and that the wives of the actors were all arrayed, family style, to see them come on. But it did not develop that way among the members of “the profession” as I knew them. The wives were mostly staying at home with the children, or lived outside the city and couldn’t afford to come in, or frankly had another engagement. They were “not expected.”

It was raining when I crowded my way into the foyer and begged a seat for “The Shoals of Yesterday” from the man at the window. He gave me the best he had, without any comment, and I took off my rubbers and laid down my umbrella in the balcony. From this point I was as interested as if I did not know every line that was to be said—almost every gesture. After the first act I relaxed and enjoyed it.

The play went of its own volition, developing an amazing independent vitality which withstood the surprising shocks administered to it by the actors. I smiled benignly when the audience sat tense, and wept when I saw them burst into laughter.

Jasper’s hurried hand-pressure, when he found me, and his whispered “Is everything all right out here, dear?” made me feel that I, too, had some part in it, outside of its original conception, which of course every one had forgotten. As a watcher of the first performance, alert to catch any criticism that might be useful, I sat up all night with the play that I had tended from infancy. When the curtain went up upon “The Shoals of Yesterday,” it was a manuscript from our apartment; when the asbestos went down, it was upon a Broadway success.

I found my way back to the dressing-rooms and met Jasper coming along with a crowd of actors, Myrtle crowding close. She wore an orange-feathered toque, which set off her light hair like a flame, and a sealskin wrap, drawn tight around her slim, lightly clothed body. She was one of those competent blond girls who know not only how to make their own clothes but how to get some one to buy them, so that they will not have to, and how to wear them after they get them. It is vanity which forces them into bizarre conquests. I could not tell whether her absorption of Jasper’s time had in it elements that would ever come to hurt me, or whether she was simply using him to further her own advancement. Probably she did not know herself.

“Isn’t he a bright little boy?” She petted him and hung upon his neck. “We’re going to take him out and buy him a supper, so we are; him’s hungry.”

I knew perfectly well that it would be Jasper who would pay for the supper, but at that moment I could not bear any one ill-will. I even recognized that, for Myrtle, this was generosity. It would have been more like her to have spoken of the play in terms of herself.

“It went awfully well,” I said to him over their heads. I thought he would be waiting for some word from me.

But he did not reply. He was laughing and talking with the whole group. In that intimate moment he was not aware of me in the way that I was of him. Something inside me withdrew, so that I saw myself standing there, waiting. I became embarrassed.

“Shall I go on home?” I asked.