I didn’t hear Will’s flattered response; Ella Martin was pushing a plate at me. ‘Eat your chicken salad’, she said. ‘Wake up, eat your salad and say something! Where’s your enthusiasm? Anybody’d think you haven’t enjoyed yourself this evening. Nothing at all to say?’
‘I’ve been wondering’, I explained. ‘In all this flood of praise I haven’t heard anybody mention the merits of young Edgar Semple.’
‘Of Edgar?’ Harriet murmured, and both she and Ella Martin looked vaguely surprised. ‘His merits? You mean his acting?’
‘He was rather the villain of the piece, wasn’t he?’ Ella said. ‘Did you think he stood out especially? Come to think of it, I can’t remember anything he did except get knocked down. Can you, Harriet?’
‘No, except I thought he had a good make-up.’ Then both of them began to talk again of Irvie and Emma and Ella’s Tommy.
Even Edgar’s acting, which to my singular mind resembled a good deed in a naughty world, threw not a candle’s beam upon these ladies or upon the eminent Sam Johnson Wilboyd or any other than myself. In a naughty world candles haven’t much chance against limelight.
Chapter Seven
IN THE ‘NEW Civic Theatre’, during this supper interval, the chairs were being piled upon the stage to clear the floor for dancing, and an orchestra had arrived. When jazzy strains issued from the old stable, making me anxious to go home, the young people fluttered pinkly under the neon light, hurrying through the doorway to begin their coupled, rhythmic meanderings, and Harriet restrained me.
‘Don’t be such an old dry-as-dust! Surely you want to watch her, don’t you — anyhow for a little while — when she’s having such a happy time? Of course Irvie’ll dance first with Mary Reame, as she’s his leading lady; but — Oh, come along, just for half an hour or so. It isn’t going to hurt you, is it?’
I said I didn’t know and we went in, stood near the wall and watched the dancing. That is to say, of course, that most of the time Harriet and I watched our Emma, who was dancing with short Tommy Martin and looking over his shoulder at the graceful sinuosities of Irvie Pease with Mary Reame.
Almost eighteen and neither a belle nor a wallflower, Emma was more what people call a ‘nice-looking girl’ than a pretty one. She had a pleasantly shaped face, an athletic tall figure, and as for her hair, she herself used the old description, ‘just hair-coloured hair’. She hadn’t any coquetry at all, lacked all the luring devices for which the new psychology and crooned slang have supplied unappetizing definitions, and she wasn’t often called ‘charming’ by even her most affectionate relatives. She had a studious, straightforward mind, not a brilliant one; but I have no child of my own, and ever since she and her mother had come to live with me when Emma was a solemn good little thing, she was dear to me — dearer, indeed, than all else. It seemed to me that she danced prettilly even with Tommy Martin, a partner two inches shorter than herself.
Irvie Pease and Mary Reame were spectacular. Mary was a golden-headed girl, delicately lovely, more a slim lily than the apple blossom Irvie’s song called her, and in their dancing now, as in the play, the two still were star and leading lady. To and from and everywhere, they intricately swung and glided, delighting the older people on the sidelines until another boy ‘cut in’, took Mary away and Irvie was released to his radiant mother. She’d been awaiting this opportunity.
‘It’s really important’, I heard Evelyn say as she seized his arm. ‘I coaxed Judge Wilboyd to wait until I could get hold of you. He says it’s time he was in bed; but he’s so anxious to—’
She brought Irvie into a group of parents and other spectators near me, and a moment later, in spite of the yammering ‘music’, I again heard imposing and resonant accents from under the grey lambrequin of moustache:
‘You are a dramatist!’
Harriet thought I might be missing this, nudged me to listen. ‘Isn’t that splendid? Just think: it’s Judge Wilboyd himself saying it to Irviel’
‘My lad,’ the Wilboydian thunders proclaimed, ‘that masterstroke at the end! Had it not been for that we might have thought you only a promisingly talented youth; but the end proves you capable of inspiration, and that is genius. That touch — the sudden deeply humorous intimacy with yourself — and then, with what disarming charm, the final intimacy with the audience, too! Perhaps only youth has these darings. Perhaps, as a more finished playwright later, you’ll not surpass this one. My boy, tell me how that idea came to you.’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Irvie laughed as if to prove he knew how much he was being over-praised. ‘How does anybody get ideas? I didn’t decide on this one till the very last; I wasn’t sure it’d go. I’d considered several ends for the play and the one I used I finally sort of worked out with — with — I mean I more or less worked it out with Edgar. Really I expect a good deal of the credit for it ought to be given to him because of the way he kept insisting on my using it. He—’
‘Ah, yes; but it was yours!’ This was the authoritative interruption, and thus was Irvie’s revelation of his debt corrupted. ‘The other young man insisted; but only upon what you had created. Modesty’s becoming but mustn’t bemuse us. Your father and mother will nourish this dramatic gift. Your career lies before you and—’
Here outrageous drum, saxophone and marimba prevailed over oratorical pontificacies, and a moment later a laughingly blushing Irvie emerged from the group. Perhaps he couldn’t have made his tribute to Edgar more definite without yelling, and maybe it was too much to ask that in this hour of triumph he should go about explaining everything fully to everybody. Probably he felt that he’d done his best to give credit where credit was due, and, if people insisted that all of it was due to himself, that wasn’t his fault. Already loping and gliding to the music, he danced his winding way among fluctuant couples to Mary Reame, and, in turn ‘cutting in’, swept her jubilantly away and away. Her look was that of the Sleeping Princess just awakened and understanding how.
Emma was now dancing with Edgar, her second partner shorter than herself. Edgar danced competently, I thought, and seemed to be talking, too, with his usual placidity. I doubted that she listened; and her frank face began to be wistful. No matter where they moved together she seemed to be looking over Edgar’s shoulder at Irvie and Mary.
Not enjoying this impression, I made such a fuss about the effect of the orchestra on my head that Harriet crossly succumbed. We found Evelyn and Will and as we said good night to them, and Harriet produced final raptures over the play, I thought this must have been the proudest and happiest evening in the lives, thus far, of those two good souls. Will shook my hand tumultuously and Evelyn joyously kissed both Harriet and me. Then my sister and I got ourselves out into the beautiful but unquiet night. The whackings and thumpings of that expensive orchestra became less obdurate upon us as we followed the path from the Peases’ drive and trudged back through our own shrubberies.
‘I think,’ Harriet said, breaking the silence between us, ‘I do think it was all just heavenly and Emma’s really having the time of her life. Of course Irvie feels he ought to dance more with Mary than with the other girls — I mean during the first part of the evening — because she had the best girl’s role and did it so well, so it’s appropriate he should. It was nice of him to tell old Wilboyd that Edgar’d helped him with the end, don’t you think?’
‘Yes. At least he rather tried.’
‘Of course it couldn’t have amounted to much, Edgar’s help’, Harriet said. ‘Irvie always has so many more ideas than poor Edgar has — but it was like Irvie to want to bring Edgar in, if there was any possible excuse for it. Don’t you admit now that the whole thing’s been most significant as the promise of a brilliant career?’
‘A theatrical one, Harriet? Irvie’s to abandon his father’s plans for him to come with Edgar into the law office?’
‘Nonsense!’ she said. ‘He’ll be all the greater lawyer because tonight he’s proved what a splendid creative mind he has. I don’t
believe you can deny it.’
T don’t, Harriet. When I think how he keeps us all thinking about him I can’t deny that he must have one of the most interesting minds in the world.’
‘At last!’ she exclaimed. We’d now come into the house and she dropped her light wrap on a hall table. ‘Thank heaven at last you’ve admitted he’s what everybody else has always known him to be — the brightest, dearest boy in the world!’ She went into the library and turned on a reading-lamp. ‘I’m going to sit up for Emma. You go to bed and repent your old sins.’
It wasn’t late — I often worked far deeper into the night — and I went up to the third floor and my workroom; but I didn’t try to work. I didn’t even sit down; I walked the floor, compelled to ponder upon the interesting mind — and character — of Irvie Pease. I’ve usually found that if I can see behind the shapings of any grown man’s face the shapings it has worn when the man was a boy, then I know the man. So, too’ if a boy’s face shows me what it will be in maturity, then I know the boy. Irvie was now half-man, half-boy, and tonight I’d seen both faces, the boy’s and the man’s.
There was nothing unkind in Irvie. He was lighthearted, gaily clever and instinctively winsome, and he was a delight to the eye; but to delight all eyes and ears was meat and drink to him. In youth that’s to be expected and only the repetitious shocks that produce maturity can banish it; but tonight I didn’t see Irvie’s coming years bringing with them that sort of maturity. I could only see him being always unalterably his own hero.
.. My windows were open, and high-flying beetles bumped the screens. Other bumps were faintly on the air, the distant torn-torn thumpings from the Peases’ old stable where the young danced to barbaric rhythms. Once I heard drums and saxophones pause for an interval and vaguely the clapping of the dancers’ hands claiming an encore, and I paused beside a window to listen. The encore didn’t come — evidently the musicians had set their minds to a recess — so for a time the night was as still as the overhead moon itself. Then I heard a sound that puzzled me because it seemed a human one and to come from near the lilac bushes close to the house, below my window. It wasn’t repeated and I thought I could easily have been mistaken; but it had seemed very like a brief utterance of pain — a sob in the voice of a young girl.
I stood listening for perhaps as long as five or six minutes, and heard nothing more. Then I went downstairs; but at the top of the lower flight, in the ‘upstairs hall’, I paused, hearing the front door open and close. Harriet called from the library: ‘That you, Emma? Is the party all over?’
‘No, not for quite a while yet probably.’ Emma’s voice was cheerful. ‘I just thought I’
‘Then why did you—’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Mother.’ Emma seemed to be casual. ‘I just thought I might as well come home.’ She went into the library and I continued on my way to the lower floor; but half-way down the stairway I stopped again. Harriet must have seen something that dismayed her; I heard her cry out:
‘Emma! Why, what — Dear child, you look as if—’
‘No, I don’t. Nothing of the kind! I’m only — I’m—’ Emma’s tone, sharp for a moment, went into tremolo. Though I could see neither of them, the picture I had was of Emma drooping into a chair as Harriet dropped a book and jumped up to face her.
‘Emma! What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing, I tell you! I just got tired; I don’t care to dance with Edgar Semple forever, Mother!’
‘But surely other boys—’
‘Oh, yes, plenty enough; it wasn’t that.’ Emma’s voice, though doing its best, had the quaver in it again. ‘I only — I mean everything was all just lovely. Mother, I’ve always thought Mary Reame’s the most utterly perfect girl in the world. Tell me something. I’ve never been in any theatricals before; but doesn’t it usually happen that the ones who are lovers in the play sort of fall in love with each other outside in real life, too? It’s usually like that in theatricals, isn’t it? It — it seems pretty natural that they would, doesn’t it?’
Harriet spoke quickly. ‘You don’t mean Irvie hasn’t danced with anybody except Mary all evening?’
‘Yes. He — he didn’t. Tommy laughed and said Irvie’d told him Mary was such a — such a honey-dazzle in his play he was going to dance with her all night and not anybody else — at all.’
‘Well, but, dear, that doesn’t mean he—’
‘I think it does, Mother. I think it’s just right, myself, especially after the beautiful way she did her part and how wonderful she looks. It’s right he should show everybody his appreciation and — and how he feels about her. I ought to be glad it’s like that, oughtn’t I? I can — I can — I will be glad, Mother!’
Then there were only vocal murmurings and a faint rustle of garments that made me think Harriet knelt before Emma and took her in her arms. I turned about on the stair and went back to my workroom and more pacing the floor. It had indeed been a sob I’d heard beneath my window.
When all but one of the people who surround any human being look upon him with something close upon adoration, the single cold heart should search itself. I searched mine and knew why my thoughts of Irvie Pease were no longer tinged by the hidden mirth that often moved me during his childhood and his earlier boyhood.
Youth and young love, both in blinders, dance or weep along the crest of flower-edged cliffs, and the better a youth is loved — and the more who love him — the more and deeper are the hurts that he can lightly do.
Chapter Eight
WITH THEIR FAMILIES, the owners of two of our newspapers had been pleased members of Irvie’s audience; few professional dramatic performances anywhere have received more enheartening attention from the Press. Sunday editions printed reproductions of photographs of the assembled cast; there were others of Irvie as ‘Abercrombie Brown’ and one showed him seated at a desk supposedly writing his play. Another, most effective of all, was of Irvie at the piano singing ‘My Apple Blossom, You’ to Mary Reame, who leaned toward him exquisitely spellbound. There was also an elaborate interview with Irvie.
The young dramatist had received her ‘graciously’, the interviewer said. He had shown her over his New Civic Theatre; but when she asked him if he hadn’t already planned a Broadway production for his play, striking while the iron was hot, he’d smilingly replied that really he hadn’t thought much about it, though possibly he’d decided to place ‘As If He Didn’t Know’ with a New York agent who’d see about interesting a manager — the interviewer thought there’d be no doubt of its being immediately ‘snapped up’. Other than this the young author had no plans for the immediate future except to accompany his family as usual to Stonehaven, the Atlantic resort where the Pease family had spent the hot months ‘since time immemorial’.
On the whole he treated his ‘new fame’ lightly, the interviewer said; he’d even expressed doubt that he’d ever care to write another play. ‘I just wanted to prove to myself I could do it’, he was quoted as saying. She reminded him that not only his writing but his acting, too, had been loudly praised by the audience; and here again his modesty shone forth. He responded that if he hadn’t been ‘quite indeed a ham’ this was because of the inspiration derived from ‘playing opposite a perfectly gorgeous leading lady’, and the interviewer said gaily that the ‘young writer-actor-director’s face lit up most significantly’ as he paid this tribute — she couldn’t help thinking that so Prince Florizel must have looked when he spoke of the lovely Perdita. The column ended by mentioning that its author parted with reluctance from Irvie and ‘that laughing light I fancy one would always see in his eyes’.
.. That phrase about the Pease family’s spending the hot months at Stonehaven ‘since time immemorial’ I thought genuinely Irvie’s, not the reporter’s. Time immemorial on the lips of the young is sometimes a reference to times astonishingly recent. The Pease family had been spending July and August at Stonehaven for a dozen years; but as that took Irvie’s memory back to when he was only
eight, the epoch was doubtless, for him, astronomical. I’d been a Stonehaven summer visitor, myself, for about thirty years and was still, in the estimation of previously established summer residents, not to mention the ‘natives’, something of an upstart.
Harriet and Emma thought summer on that northeastern strip of rock, pine, juniper, sand and salt surf the ‘next thing to heaven’, and it was Harriet who’d coaxed our home neighbours thither with us when Irvie and Edgar were small boys. Will Pease’s law office was always too busy to let him have a full season away, and this year he wasn’t to join us until the second week in August. The evening before the rest of us left, in early July, Harriet and I walked across the unseparated lawns to say good-bye to him. We found Emma already there, and Irvie, perched atop a wardrobe trunk in the hall, practicing palmistry upon her, predicting grotesque events for her future.
In the living-room where we went to sit with Evelyn and Will, we could hear my niece’s outcries of protest and Irvie’s mock-solemn assertion that he was a scientific prophet. Emma, we heard him insist, was destined to be expelled from Bryn Mawr promptly after her matriculation there in September. ‘No, you can’t escape it, my child. It’ll be for gambling and leaving a kangaroo in the president’s office.’ Then he and Emma whooped in young hilarity as he slid from the trunk and they pattered down the hall on their way to outdoors. Emma’s laughter sounded true — even though I thought I heard a catch in its overtones. She’d got at herself pretty thoroughly, I knew; and when she was living up to her ideals — being a ‘good sport’ — she didn’t mean to let anybody suspect it.
Will Pease’s good grey eyes shone with pleasure. ‘Everything’s going to be all right’, he said. ‘The day after the play, what with all the excitement and publicity, I’m afraid I wondered if he mightn’t want to follow that line the rest of his life; but no, he’s sound. He’ll tread the path his gandfather and I planned for him the night he was born. Naturally I want him to love literature and the drama; but only as pleasures for the mind, not as a vocation.’
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 457