"Fancy Filette!"
"Oh, well, she's snappy enough, I suppose."
"I know; I don't even like to be billed with her; but, anyway, the part wasn't worthy of you." But I felt as I went home to my lodging that that was only Sarah's kind way of putting it.
CHAPTER II
I saw more than a little of Jerry McDermott during the spring and summer that I stayed in Chicago, haunting managers' offices in my winter's suit and a fixed determination not to let any of them suspect that I knew I couldn't, for the moment, act at all. Where the gift had gone I did not know, nor when, in some desperate encounter with the chance of an engagement, I attempted to draw about me the tattered remnants of my old facility, had I any notion what would bring it back again.
Effie wrote me to come home for the hot weather, but though I regretted afterward not having done so I could not make up my mind to leave Chicago. It seemed to me then that the deadly quality of Taylorville lay waiting like a trap, which in my present benumbed condition might close on me if I put myself in the way of it. I thought that if I got out of reach of the flare of light from the theatre doors, of the smell of back scenes and the florid grip of the posters, that I should never in this world win back to them. A summer in Taylorville would have saved me money, would have rested and perhaps restored the balance of my powers, but the inward monitor of which I was the mere shell and surface, clutched upon the city with the grip of desperation. I hung upon whatever slight attachments to the theatre my circumstances afforded, like the drowned upon a rope, and waited for the resuscitating touch. Somewhere beyond me I was aware of succour; not knowing from whence it should come, I grasped at everything within reach and was buffeted and torn about in the eddy of reverses.
What more even than his need of me, drove me back on Gerald McDermott, was the certainty that he was deriving from Fancy Filette the quality I missed. She was playing in one of the cheaper theatres in one of those entertainments that men are supposed to resort to when their families are out of town, and I had a moment's feeling that he exposed his sex to ridicule by the avidity with which he surrendered himself to her perfectly obvious methods. Until he sent his family north to one of the lake resorts for the hot weather, I found myself involved in certain obligations of visiting at his house, where I saw that his wife created for him by her incompetence much the same sort of background that my bereaved and purse-pinched condition made for me, and watched with alternate sympathy and resentment his flight from it to the effective self-complacency which Miss Filette induced in him.
I don't mean that Jerry wasn't fond of his wife in a way, and faithful to her, in so far as she didn't interfere with his male prerogative of being played upon by other women, but I do not think he had ever an inkling that the vortex of anger and despair which she forced him to share with her, in lieu of the passion which she couldn't any more excite, was of the same stripe as his need of the high, inflated mood that Miss Filette provided for him with her little bag of tricks. For from the first Jerry seized on me, poured himself out, despoiled himself of all the hopes, conjectures, half-guesses of his career, and that without in the least discovering that I was in need of much the same sort of relief myself. After his wife had taken the children to the country—though she used even then to come down on him suddenly with both of them and break up his work for days, or just when it was running smoothly, wire to him to rush up to Lake View and allay the horrors of her too active imagination—often evenings after the day's work, he would take me to dine at queer little French or Italian restaurants which were supposed to be preferred on account of the "atmosphere" rather than their cheapness, and uncoil for me there all the intricate turnings of his work upon itself, and the rich shapes and colours it took, played upon by the slanting eyes and carmine smile of Miss Filette. He would sit opposite me with a cigarette and a glass of "Dago red," his black, shining hair, which he wore too long, slanting above his forehead like a boding wing, uncramping his soul; and though I liked him as a friend, and as a playwright thought him immensely worth while, I was divided between exasperation at his tacit exclusion of me from the world of excited powers in which any stimulation of his maleness threw him, and fear that in missing his capacity for quick, shallow passions, I had missed the one indispensable thing for my art.
"It is the chance of a lifetime," Jerry would be reassuring me, "to delineate a character that will be so intimate an expression of the one who is to play it ... it's really extraordinary that she should have been named Fancy ... it's symbolic."