Marked gaped at the black and empty door. Then his homesickness swelled up and he sighed, squeezing the sponge. His body trembled drearily. He lowered his head as does a lonesome calf turned into strange pastures.
II
He Progresses
“NICOLINE” lasted until April, 1896. Mark played the country boy in “Mr. Bell” all the next season and, duly coached by Sarah Cowell LeMoyne, figured as the young duke in “The Princess of Croy” when Carlson imported that disaster in the autumn of 1897. Its failure afflicted Mark less than his private griefs. He played for four months in Carlson’s Boston stock company. This was penible. He had never been so far from his adored family. True, freed of Cora, he could send ten or twenty dollars a week to his father but he missed Sundays in Fayettesville and the Boston wind gave him chilblains. The friendly women of the Stock Company found him shy and here began the legend of Mark’s misogyny. He read novels and tramped about Boston, surveyed the theatrical setting of Louisburg Square and sidelong admired the ladies walking rigidly in sober hats on Commonwealth Avenue. Such persons, he mused, would never fling hot curling irons in a husband’s face and it wasn’t possible to imagine them smoking cigarettes in bed. But he hated Boston and the war was welcome as it honourably pulled him back to a New Jersey Infantry regiment.
In June, 1898, he sat on a palmetto trunk in the filthy camp of Tampa watching Eddie Bernamer pitch a ball to Joe Walling. Mark had every satisfaction in the sight and liked his piebald uniform much more than any costume hitherto. The camp pleased him as a problem. There would be plays made on the war, of course, and it wouldn’t be easy to mount them. These bright trees and the muddle of railroad ties could be effected but the theatre lacked lights to send down this parching glitter on black mud and strolling men. He sighed for realism. He had spent hours in Davidge’s workshop while the grass of “The Princess of Croy” was being made. It hadn’t the right sheen. The sunset had turned it blue and the sunset was all wrong even though the critics had praised it. Mark swung his gaiters and pondered irreproducible nature. But it would be nice to counterfeit all this—the glister of remote tin roofing, the harsh palms, the listless soldiery. The police would object to exactness of course. Brother Joe was pitching the ball with great flexures of his bronze, naked chest. Eddie Bernamer swore astoundingly when he ripped his undershirt. One couldn’t be so honest on the stage or echo the sharp, unreal note of mail call sounding. Mark ran off to see if the wayward postal service had brought him a letter. There was a roll of newspapers addressed to his brother-in-law and Bernamer, a bad reader, turned them over to Mark and Joe. It was Joe who found the pencilled paragraph Mark rather expected. He slapped Mark’s back and grunted, “Well, so there y’are, Bud.”
Mark read, “The suit for divorce begun by Mark Walling, the well known young actor against his wife, Cora Boyle Walling, was concluded yesterday. Neither party to the action was present in court. Miss Boyle is touring the West with the Jarvis Hope Stock Company. Jarvis Hope is named as co-respondent in the case. The action was not defended. Mr. Walling is now with the —th N.J. Infantry. The divorced couple were married in August, 1895. They have no children.”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” said Eddie Bernamer, “and don’t you let the next woman looks at you haul you off to a preacher, neither.”
Mark felt dubious. There had never been a divorce in the family. He said, “I guess if we’d had a baby, she wouldn’t of—Dunno.... It’s kind of too bad.”
His relatives denied it. They had never liked Cora Boyle. She wasn’t a lady and her clothes had shocked Sadie’s conservative mind. They pointed out that a stable and meritorious woman wouldn’t have seduced Mark before marriage. They were glad to see the boy free and were puzzled by his mournfulness. He agreed with their judgments. But his eyes moistened for all their affectionate pawing. He muttered, “She was awful good lookin’,” and sat moody while they indicated advantages. He could save his pay, now, and wear respectable, black neckties, as a Walling should. He wouldn’t be bullied or have hot curling irons flung in his face. He could come home on the Saturday midnight train and stay until Monday afternoon. And Joe reasonably assured him that women were plentiful. But Mark mourned, in his tangled fashion, the collapse of beauty. Cora, he choked, didn’t match her outside. She was ruthless, disturbing. She cared nothing for Mark’s pet plan of an ideal lighting system for theatres. She had spilled coffee on his smudged, laborious chart of a stage to be made in hinged parts. She called his sacred family a parcel of mossbacks and left the flat when Sadie and Bernamer brought their baby to town for a day. Still, Mark was mournful and often missed her for several years. He shuddered from marriage as a game more complicated than golf.