"You tell me," Arthur Noyes pleaded gently.
And she did so very simply and beautifully. She did know Shakespeare; it was the only English that she had ever been taught. So Noyes heard how she became an instrument in the hands of the man who hated him mortally, and owed her debut and her terrible awakening to what he considered the only sporting answer to that insult. While he listened he pondered, awestruck, upon the fact that out of all this muck and blackness, the degradation of hate by the lodger, the refinement of hate by himself, had flowered that rarest of all human creatures—one that could make the whole world laugh.
"He always hated me," he said. "I told him he had traded his genius for drink, and he never forgave me. Where is he now?"
"Now?" Cake looked up at him in startled wonder. It came over her suddenly that he counted upon the lodger's being in the Imperial Theatre that night.
"Now?" she repeated. "Why, he is dead."
It took Noyes a minute to recover. "What will you do?" he asked her. "Will you go on from this start, continue this—this sort of success?" He felt it the basest cruelty, in the face of her story, to say it was the only kind she was ever destined to make. He waited for her answer, wondering, and a little awestruck. It seemed to him they had come to the supreme test of her genius.
And she looked up at him with such sadness and such mirth—such tragic, humorous appreciation of the darkness in which she had been born, the toilsome way she had travelled to the Great Light and what it actually revealed when she arrived.
"I will go on from this success," she said. Involuntarily she raised her hand to her breast. "I must, since it is the only way for me. You see," with a humour far more touching than the saddest tears, "I must be famous."
And she smiled that smile that hurt him, the smile the world loves and will give anything to see.
The most famous funmaker of her time looked away from the bright river fleeting beyond the trees to her giggling, half-terrified visitors.