Wild Wings: A Romance of Youth

by Margaret Piper Chalmers

Tony lay awake a long time that night, dreaming dreams that carried her far and far into the future, until Rosalind's happy triumph of the evening almost faded away in the glory of the yet-to-be. It was characteristic of the girl's stage of development that in all her dreams, no lovers, much less a possible husband, ever once entered. Tony Holiday was in love with life and life alone that wonderful June night. As Hempel had shrewdly perceived she was conscious of having wings and desirous of flying far and free with them ere she came to pause.

She did remember, in passing however, how she had caught Dick's eyes once as he sat in the box near the stage, and how his rapt gaze had thrilled her to intenser playing of her part. And she remembered how dear he was afterward in the car when he held her roses and told her softly what a wonderful, wonderful Rosalind she was. But, on the whole, Dick, like most of the rest of the people with whom she had held converse since the curtain went down upon Arden, seemed unimportant and indistinct, like courtiers and foresters, not specifically named among the dramatis personae, just put in to fill out and make a more effective stage setting.

Dick, too, in his room on Greene Street, was wakeful. He sat by the window far into the night. His heart was heavy within him. The gulf between him and Tony had suddenly widened immeasureably. She was a real actress. He hadn't needed a great manager's verdict to teach him that. He had seen it with his own eyes, heard it with his own ears, felt it with his own heart. He had worshiped and adored and been made unutterably sad and lonely by her dazzling success, glad as he was that it had come to her. Tony would go on in her shining path. He would always lag behind in the shadows. They would never come together as long as they both lived. She had started too far ahead. He could never overtake her.

If only there were some way of finding out who he was, get some clue as to his parentage. He only knew that the man they called Jim, who had kicked and beaten and sworn at him with foul oaths until he could bear it no longer, was no kin of his, though the other had claimed the authority to abuse him as he abused his horses and dogs when drink and ugliness were upon him. If only he could find Jim again after all these years, perhaps he could manage to get the truth out of him, find out what the man knew of himself, and how he had come to be in a circus troupe. Yet after all, perhaps it was better not to know. The facts might separate him from Tony even more than he was separated by his ignorance of them. As it was, he started even, with neither honor nor shame bequeathed him from the past. What he was, he was in himself. And if by any miracle of fortune Tony ever did come to care for him it would be just himself, plain Dick, that she would love. He knew that.

The thought was vaguely comforting and he, too, fell adreaming. Most of us foiled humans learn to play the game of make-believe and to find such consolation as we may therein. Often and often in his lonely hours Dick Carson had summoned Tony Holiday to his side, a Tony as bright and beautiful and all adorable as the real Tony, but a dream Tony, withal, a Tony who loved him even as he loved her. And in his make-believe he was no longer a nameless, impecunious cub reporter, but a man who had arrived somewhere, made himself worthy, so far as any mere man could, of the supreme gift of Tony's caring.

To-night, too, Dick played the game determinedly, but somehow he found its consolation rather meager, as cold and remote as the sparkle of the June stars, millions of miles away up there in the velvet sky, after having sat by the side of the living, breathing Tony and, looking into her happy eyes, known how little, how very little, he was in her thoughts. She liked him to be near her, he knew, just as she liked her roses to be fragrant, but neither the roses nor himself was a vital necessity to her. She could do very well without either. That was the pity of it.

At last he got up and went to bed. Falling into troubled sleep he dreamed that he and Tony were wandering, hand in hand, in the Forest of Arden. From afar off came the sound of music, airy voices chanting:

"When birds do sing, hey ding a ding
Sweet lovers love the spring."

And then somebody laughed mockingly, like Jacques, and somebody else, clad in motley like Touchstone, but who seemed to speak in Dick's own voice, murmured, "Ay, now am I in Arden, the more fool I."

And even with these words the forest vanished and Tony with it and the dreamer was left alone on a steep and dusty road, lost and aching for the missing touch of her hand.