Пользователь - WORLDS END Страница 60

He had the bright idea that he would surprise Gracyn; so he took a taxi to the address to which he had been writing. He found it was a poor lodging house - and that she had moved from there a month ago, leaving no address. Her mail was being forwarded by the post office; but at the post office they wouldn't give the address - he would have to write her a letter and wait for a reply. After thinking it over he decided to call Walter Hayden's office. The director was away on an assignment, but his secretary said, yes, she knew about Phyllis Gracyn, she was rehearsing at the Metropole Theater - she had the leading part in The Colonel's Lady, a new play by somebody who was apparently somebody, although Lanny had never heard the name.

He drove to the theater. You don't have to send in your card during rehearsals; one of the front doors is apt to be unlocked, and you can walk in and look around. Lanny did so. Since the auditorium was dark no one paid any attention to him; he took a seat in back and watched.

Gracyn was on the bare stage with perhaps a dozen other persons, mostly men: a director, a couple of assistants, a property boy, and so on - Lanny was familiar with the procedure by now. The place was hot, and all the men were in their shirtsleeves and mopped their foreheads frequently. Gracyn was sitting in a chair watching the work; when her cue came she would get up and go through a scene.

Another war play; the men sat at small tables and it became apparent that they were supposed to be doughboys in a wine shop somewhere behind the lines. Gracyn was a French girl, daughter of the proprietor - her father scolded her for being too free with the soldiers. When he went off she teased them and some of her lines were a trifle crude - evidently it was a "realistic" play. The doughboys sang songs, one of them "Madelon," in translation. "She laughs - it is the only harm she knows."

Gracyn was doing it with great spirit. Oh, yes, she could act! Lanny had never seen the American boys in France, but he recalled the scene with the French soldiers when he and his mother motored to see Marcel. He thought: "I could have given the director a lot of help." But they wouldn't let Gracyn tell what she was doing. And yet the secretary at Hayden's place had known about it and had told it freely. Very strange!

VII

Lanny didn't want to disturb her. He waited until the rehearsal was over and she was about to leave. Then he came down the aisle, saying: "Hello, Gracyn."

She was startled. "Lanny! Of all people! Where on earth did you come from?"

"Out of a taxi," he said.

"How did you find me?"

"Your secret appears to have leaked."

She came into the auditorium to join him. She led him back, away from the others, and sat down. "Darling," she said, swiftly, "I have something that's dreadfully hard to tell you. I couldn't put it on paper. But you have to know right away." She caught her breath and said: "I have a lover."

"A what?" he exclaimed. When he took in the meaning of her words, he said: "Oh, my God!"

"I know you'll think it's horrid, but don't be too mean to me. I couldn't help it. It's the man who's putting up the money for the show and giving me this part."

The youth had never been so stunned in all his life. He was speechless; and the girl rushed on:

"I had a chance, Lanny; I might never have had another. He's a big coffee merchant, who happened to see my performance in Holborn. He lives in New York and he invited me to come. He offered to take me to a good manager and find me a part - right away, without any waste of time. What could I say, Lanny?"

The youth remembered his mother's phrase. "You paid the price?"

"Don't be horrid to me, Lanny. Don't let's spoil our friendship. Try to see my side. You know I'm an actress. I told you I didn't know anything else, I didn't care about anything else - I wanted to get on the stage, and I'm doing it."

"There isn't any honest way?"

"Please, darling - use your common sense. This is New York. What chance does a girl stand? I'd have tramped the heels off my shoes going to managers' offices, and they wouldn't even have seen me. I'd have called myself lucky to get a part with three lines - and I'd have spent a month or two rehearsing, going into debt for my board while I did it. The play might have failed the first week, and I'd have twenty dollars, maybe thirty, to pay my debts with. Believe me, I've talked to show girls these few weeks, and I know what the game is."

"Well, it's all right," he said. "I wish you success, and the highest salary on Broadway."

"Don't sneer at me, Lanny. Life has been easy for you. You were born with a gold spoon in your mouth, and you've no right to scorn a poor girl."

"I'll do my best to remember it. Thanks for telling me the truth."

"I'd have told you before, Lanny; but it was so hard. I hate to lose you for a friend."

"I'm afraid you have done so," he said, coldly. "Your angel might be jealous."

"I know it's a shock, darling. But you know so little about the stage world. Somebody had to give me a start. You couldn't have done it - you surely know that."

Said he: "It may interest you to hear that I was thinking of asking you to marry me."

Did this startle her? If so, she was a good actress. "I haven't failed to consider that. But you have to go to school, and then to college - that's five years, and in that time I'd be an old woman."

"My father would have helped me to marry, if I'd asked him."

"I know, dear, but can't you understand? I don't want to be a wife, I want to be an actress! I couldn't think of settling down and having babies, and being a society lady - not in Newcastle, not even in France. I want to have a career - and what sort of a life would it be for you, tagging along behind a stage celebrity? Would you enjoy being called Mister Phyllis Gracyn?"

He saw that she had thought it all out; and, anyhow, it was too late. No good saying any unkind words. "All right, darling," he said - it was the stage name. "I'll be a good sport, and wish you all the luck there is. I'm only sorry I couldn't give you what you needed."

"No, Lanny dear," she said. "It's thirty thousand dollars!" And there wasn't any acting in what she put into those words!

VIII

The sun was going down as Lanny climbed onto the top of one of the big Fifth Avenue busses, which for a dime took you uptown, and across to Riverside Drive, and up to where the nation had built a great granite tomb for General Grant, in the shape of a soap box with a cheese box on top. Part of the time Lanny looked at the crowds on the avenue, and at sailboats and steamers on the river; the rest of the time he thought about the strange adventure into which he had blundered. He decided that he wasn't proud of it, and wouldn't tell anybody, excepting of course Robbie, and perhaps Rick or Kurt if he ever saw them again.

He told himself that he had made himself cheap. That little tart-well, no, he mustn't call her names - she had her side, she had her job to do and might do it well. But he mustn't let himself blunder like that again; he must know more about a woman before he threw himself into her arms. A man had to have standards; he must learn to say no. Lanny thought about the number of times he had said yes to Gracyn Phillipson, and in such extravagant language. He writhed with humiliation.

He didn't want to go home in that mood, and he didn't want to go to school ahead of time, so he put up at a hotel, and spent his time in the museums and art galleries. He looked at hundreds of paintings - and all the nudes were Gracyn, except those that were Rosemary. He told himself with bitterness that they were all for sale, whether for thirty-thousand-dollar shows on Broadway, or for three dollars, the price of the pitiful painted ones who hunted on that Great White Way in the late hours of the evening. Rosemary's price would be a title and a country estate, but she was being sold just the same; it didn't matter that the bargain would be solemnized by a bishop in fancy costume, and proclaimed by pealing chimes in St. Margaret's. Would he ever meet one that didn't have her price? And how would he know her - since they were all so hellishly clever at fooling you?

There was another hot spell in New York, and he looked at the crowds of steaming people. The women wore light and airy garments and the young ones tripped gaily; but all the men who wanted to be thought respectable had to wear hot coats, and Lanny pitied them and himself. It was the time of year when "everybody" was supposed to be out of town; but there was an enormous number of "nobodies," and Lanny marveled how nature had managed it so that they all wanted to live. There were more Jews than anywhere else in the world and he might have satisfied his curiosity about that race if he had had time. There were great numbers of soldiers, and foreigners of every sort, so New York didn't seem very different from Paris. He found a French restaurant and had his dinners there and felt at home; he wished his mother were with him - what a comfort to tell her about Gracyn and hear her wise comments!

IX

The young man went back to St. Thomas's, and forgot his troubles in the pleasure of meeting his schoolfellows and hearing stories of where they had been and what they had done. He had a firm resolve to buckle down and make a record that would please his father and grandfather, and perhaps even his stepmother. It was pleasant to have your work cut up into daily chunks, duly weighed and measured, so that you knew exactly what you had to do and were spared all uncertainties and moral struggles.

The Americans had begun their attack in the Argonne, a forest full of rock-strewn hills and deep ravines thick with brush, one of the most heavily fortified districts in the war zone, and considered by the Germans to be impregnable. The doughboys were hammering there, and fifty thousand of them would be killed or wounded in three weeks. It was the greatest battle in American history, and it was a part of Lanny's life; his friends were in it, and his heart. There came now and then a post card from Jerry Pendleton - that fellow had been fighting every day and almost every night for a month and hadn't been touched. Now he was back in a rest camp, enjoying the peace his valor won. Somehow Lanny couldn't think of wounds and death in connection with Jerry; he was the wearer of some sort of Tarnhelm and would come out safe and whole to tell Lanny about it.

Also a letter from Nina. She had a brother who had been in the fighting south of the Somme and had got what the British called a "blighty" wound, one that brought him home and kept him out of danger for a while. Rick had had his operation, and this time they really hoped for better results. There were even a few lines from Rick to prove it; nothing about wounds, of course, you'd never know if Rick was suffering. "Well, old top, it looks like Fritz is really in trouble. Moving out and no time to pack his boxes. Cheerio!"

Beauty was always a dependable correspondent, and managed to smile through her tears. No word from Marcel yet. M. Rochambeau had written to friends in Switzerland, asking for information. M. Rochambeau said that Germany was cracking; discontent was breaking out everywhere inside the country. President Wilson's propaganda was having a tremendous effect; his "Fourteen Points" left the German people no reason for fighting. Baby Marceline was thriving, and all the world agreed that she was the most beautiful baby in the Midi.

Lanny knew, of course, that all this was an effort on his mother's part to hide her grieving for Marcel. What was she going to do when the war was over? He had made up his mind that his stepfather was dead; and Beauty was not a person who could live alone. Sometimes he wondered, had he made a mistake in bringing about that marriage? What would he have done if he had known that Marcel was going to be a mutilй inside of one year and a corpse in less than four? Maybe she should have taken the plate-glass man after all!

X

The Allied armies continued their grinding advance. The Hindenburg line was cracked and the Germans forced to retreat. First Bulgaria collapsed, then Turkey, then Austria; there came a revolution in Germany and the Kaiser fled to Holland - all that series of dramatic events, culminating in the day when everybody rushed into the streets of American cities and towns, shouting and singing and dancing, blowing horns and beating tin pans, making every sort of racket they could think of. The war was over! There wasn't going to be any more killing! No more bombs, shells, bullets, poison gas, torpedoes! The boys who were still alive could stay alive! The war to end war had been won and the world was safe for democracy! People thought all these things, one after another, and with -each thought they shouted and sang and danced some more.

Even at St. Thomas's Academy, the place of good manners, there was a celebration. Lanny got his father on the telephone; they laughed together, and Lanny cried a little. He sent a cablegram to his mother and one to Rick. People were behaving the same way in France, of course. Even those cold and aloof beings, the gentlemen of England, were rushing out into the streets embracing strangers. It had been a tough grind for the people of that small island; they hadn't been in such danger since the days of the Spanish Armada.

A couple of weeks later came Thanksgiving Day and Lanny went home. One of the first things his father said was: "Well, kid, I guess I'm going to have to go back to Europe pretty soon. There'll be a lot of matters to be cleared up."

Lanny's first thought was: You can cross the ocean and enjoy it! You can walk on deck and look for whales instead of submarines!

One needed time for that to sink in. Then he said: "Listen, Robbie - don't be surprised. I want you to take me with you."

"You mean - to stay?"

"I've thought it all over. I'll be a lot happier in France. I can get much more of what I want there."

"Aren't you happy here?"

"Everybody's been kind to me, and I'm glad I came. I had to know your people, and I wouldn't have missed the experience. But I have to see my mother, too. And she needs me right now. I don't think she's ever going to see Marcel again."

"You could visit her, you know."

"Of course; but I have to think of one place as home, and that's Juan."

"What about the business?"

"If I'm going to help you, it'll be over there. You'll be going back and forth, and I'll see as much of you one way as the other."

"You don't care about going to college?"

"I don't think so, Robbie. I've asked people about it and it isn't what I need. I was going through with it on account of the war, and to please you."

"Just what is it you want - if you know?"

"It isn't easy to put into words. More than anything else I want art. I've lived here a year and a half and I've heard almost no music. I haven't seen any good plays - of course I might see them in New York, but I haven't any friends there, all my best friends are in England and France."

"You'll be a foreigner, Lanny."

"I'll be a citizen of several countries. The world will need some like that."

"Just what exactly do you plan to do?"

"I want to feel my way. The first thing is to stop doing all the things that I don't want to do. I'm in a sort of education treadmill. I make myself like it, but all the time I know that I don't; and if I dropped it and went on board a ship with you I'd feel like a bird getting out of a cage. Don't misunderstand me, I don't want to loaf; but I'm nineteen, and I believe I can direct my own education. I want to have time to read the books I'm interested in. I want to meet cultured people, and know what's going on in the arts - music, drama, painting, everything. Paris is going to be interesting right now, with the peace conference. Do you suppose you can manage to get me a passport? I understand they let hardly anybody go." "I can fix that up all right, if you're sure it's what you want." "I want to know what you're doing, and I want to help you - I'll be your secretary, run your errands, anything. To be with you and meet the people you meet - don't you see how much more that's worth to me than being stuck in a classroom at St. Thomas's, hearing lectures on modern European history by some master who's a child in comparison with you? Everything they have is out of books, and I can get the same books and read them in a tenth of the time. I'll wager you that on the steamer going across I can learn more modern European history than I'd get in a whole term in school." "All right," said the father. "I guess it's no use trying to fit you into anybody else's boots."