Something flashed into my mind that I had read in the newspapers recently about the corporations Henry worked for, and I wondered if Pauline had the least notion how the way, for her, was humanly provided, but the sound of Henry's latchkey put an end to the conversation, which I hadn't felt sufficiently encouraging to warrant my taking up again.
I went from Pauline's, at the very first opportunity, to Sarah Croyden, who was playing in Chicago, and doing her kindliest to blow the wind of hope into my sagging sails. I met Cecelia Brune there. It had been to me the witness of how far I had fallen from my mark, that I had been thrown with her again in my last engagement. Hers was the sort of talent that Cline and Erskine could play up to the limit of the inadmissible. There were not wanting intimations that Cecelia had moved her own limit a notch or two in that direction. She had taken a characteristic view of my reappearance in her neighbourhood.
"Got into the band-wagon, didn't you?" she remarked. "I saw Dean on the road last year and she said you was going in for high-brow stunts. Nothin' to it. You stay with Cline and Erskine; they get you on like anything." Her own notion of getting on was to figure as the sole female attraction in a song and dance skit in what she pronounced "Vawdville."
"It's the only place havin' a figgur does you any good!" That she did not recommend it for me must be taken for her estimate of mine. Nevertheless I was amused by her, and Sarah, I knew, was even a little fond. Sarah's affections were a sort of natural emanation from her, like the rays of a candle, and warmed all they lighted on. On this afternoon I found Cecelia drinking tea there and I wasn't able to conceal my professional depression from her sharp, shallow inquisitiveness. There were never two or three players got together, I believe, but the talk turned on the comparative ineffectiveness of Merit as against Pull in the struggle for success.
"There's no two ways about it," insisted Cecelia Brune; "you gotta get a hold of some rich guy and freeze to him." The extent to which Cecelia had blossomed out in ostrich tips and orchids that bright spring afternoon, might have suggested to an experienced eye, that the freezing process had already begun. I say might have, because Sarah and I found it difficult to disassociate her from the hard, grubby innocence in which our acquaintance had begun. Sarah, I know, believed in her and had her in often to informal occasions as a bulwark against what, with all her faith and pains, she didn't finally save her from.
"You can talk all you want to," Cecelia asseverated, "about man being the natural provider. I've noticed he don't work at the job much without he's gettin' something out of it. If you're sufferin' with that little old song and dance about men doin' for you because you're a woman and need it, you gotta get over it. There's nothin' laid down over that counter unless you deliver the goods." She was nibbling lumps of sugar moistened in her tea, and the wild rose of her cheeks and the distracting rings of her hair made her offensiveness a mere childish impertinence.
"Look at Helen Matlock," she ran on, "gettin' five hundred a week. And when old Sedgwick put it up to her she said she'd die rather; and then she went home and found her mother sick, and what did she do? Never batted an eye, but told her she'd got an engagement, and went back and made it good. An' now she's gettin' five hundred. That's what I call doin' well by yourself."
"She can't mean it," Sarah extenuated when Cecelia had gone; "she's too frank about it. When she stops talking I shall begin to suspect her."
"But is it true, about Miss Matlock, I mean?" Just at that juncture Helen Matlock was doing the work I felt most drawn to, most fit to undertake.
"I suppose so," Sarah allowed; "it's a common saying that the way to the footlights in the Majestic is through the manager's private room." She came over and sat beside me on the bed, which, under a Bagdad curtain, did duty as a couch. "There are other theatres besides the Majestic," she said.