"Why, what else are you here for?"
That in fact appeared to be Mr. O'Farrell's view of it, and though I went through the form of taking the day to think it over and telegraph to Tommy, I did finally engage myself to the Shamrock Company for the term of Miss Dean's illness. My husband made no objection except that he preferred I should not use my own name, as indeed, O'Farrell had no notion of my doing, as the posters and programmes stood in Miss Dean's name already.
We had from Thursday to Monday to get up my part. With all my quickness I could not have managed it, except for the alacrity with which, after the first day, all the company played up to my business, prompted me in my lines, and assisted in my make-up. There was, if I had but known it, a reason for this extra helpfulness, which, remembering the way the ladies of the United Congregations had pulled and hauled about the Easter entertainment, went far with me toward raising the estimate of professional acting among the blessed privileges. Several members of the cast had felt themselves entitled to Miss Dean's place, for the manager had refused to pay an understudy, and found it easier to concede it to me, a brilliant society woman as I had been figured to them—I suspected McWhirter there—a talented amateur who would return to privacy and trouble the profession no more, rather than to one who might be expected to develop tendencies to keep what she had got. Moreover, they had played to small houses of late, most of the salaries were in arrears, and from the first of my taking hold of it, it began to be certain that the piece would go. For I not only played the part of the gay, melodramatic Irish Eileen, but I played with it. There was all my youth in it, the youth I hadn't had, there was wild Ellen McGee and the wet pastures and the woods aflame. With Tommy and a home to fall back upon, with no professional standing to keep, with no bitterness and rancours, I adventured with the part, tossed it up and made sport of it, played it as a stupendous lark. The rest of the company took it from me that it was a lark, and were as solicitous to see it through for me as though I had been an only child among a lot of maiden aunts. And I did not know of course that this charm of good fellowship was based more directly on the box-office returns than on the community of art.
Incidentally a great deal that went on in my behalf threw light on the character and disposition of the star.
"I 'most wore my fingers off, hookin' 'er up," confided the dresser who took in her gowns for me, "but she won't let out an inch, not she. Well, this spell 'll pull 'er down a bit, that's one comfort."
Cecelia Brune made me up. She was the youngest member of the company and that she was distractingly and unnecessarily pretty didn't obviate the certainty that in Milwaukee where she was born she had been known as Cissy Brown.
"You don't really need anything but a little colour and black around the eyes," she insisted. "Dean is a sight when she's made up; got so much to cover. I'll bet she is no sicker than me, she's just taken the slack time to get her wrinkles massaged. Gee, if I had a face like hers I'd take it off and have it ironed!"
Cecelia, I may remark, lived for her prettiness; she lived by it. She had a speaking part of half a dozen lines and a dance in the Village Green act, and her mere appearance on the street of any town where we were billed, was good for two solid rows clear across the house. In Cecelia's opinion this was the quintessence of art, to attract males and keep them dangling, and to eke out her personal adornment by gifts which she managed to extract from her admirers without having yet paid the inestimable price for them. Married woman as I was, I was too countrified to understand that inevitably she must finally pay it. She had all the dewy, large-eyed softness of look that one reluctantly disassociates from innocence, and a degree of cold, grubby calculation which she mistook, flaunted about in fact, for chastity. It was she who told me as much as I got to know for a great many years of Sarah Croyden, who had already taken me with the fascination of her Gift, the inordinate curiosity to know, to touch and to prove, which makes me still the victim of its least elusive promise and the dupe of any poor pretender to it. I wanted something to account for, except when she was under the obsession of a part, her marked inadequacy to her perfect exterior, for the rich full voice that, caught in the wind of her genius, gripped and threatened, but ran through her ordinary conversation as flaccid as a velvet ribbon.
She was, by Cecelia's account, the daughter of a Baptist elder in a small New York town, strictly brought up—I could measure the weals of the strictness upon my own heart—and had run away with an actor named Lawrence, after one wild, brief encounter when O'Farrell had been playing in the town. That was before Cecelia's time and she had no report of the said Lawrence except that he was as handsome as they make them and a regular rotter.
"She'd ought to have known," opined Cecelia—though where in her nineteen years she could have acquired the groundwork of such knowledge was more than I could guess—"She'd ought to have known what she was up against by his bein' so willing to marry her. He wouldn't have put his head in a noose like that without he had hold of the loose end of it himself."