Infatuation
unrefined. He had done much with himself; he had achieved wonders,
considering the handicap he had always been under--but admitting all
that, what enormous deficiencies still remained! How ill at ease he was
in such a room as this! How hard he would have to strive to hide his
lack of knowledge and breeding! He had almost wished he had never come.
In such a place he was an intruder--a boor--condemned to blunder through
a part with no author's lines to help him.
As it turned out, nothing could have been more fortunate for him than
this dejected mood. First appearances are everything, and he might
easily--so easily--have made an intolerable impression. Indeed, in the
cold fit, almost the terror, succeeding the impulse that had caused
Phyllis to invite him, she was prepared to find him forward, and perhaps
eager to take advantage of her recklessness, and misconstrue it. At the
hint of such a thing she would have frozen; and the fact that she would
only have had herself to blame would have doubled her humiliation. A
woman who makes the first advances to a man is more capable than any of
sudden revulsions. Her pride is on edge, and morbidly apprehensive.
But the grave, quiet, handsome man awaiting her dispelled these fancies
as soon as their eyes had met. He thanked her with an embarrassment not
unbecoming under the circumstances, for the unconventionality that had
given him the privilege of meeting her. His smile as he said this was
charming; his respect and courtesy beyond reproach; that other nature of
his, the artist-nature, so quick and responsive in its intuitions warned
him to put a guard on himself. Besides, if the room had over-awed him,
how much more overpowering was the apparition of this slim and radiant
woman, the mistress of all this splendor, whose pure dark face filled
him with an indefinable sense of another world in which he was but a
clod. Though he was a connoisseur of pretty women, and had possessed in
his disreputable past many of greater physical beauty than Phyllis, not
one of them had had the least pretensions to what in her appealed to him
so strongly--distinction. From her glossy hair to the tips of her
little feet, she was the embodiment of race, of high-breeding and high
spirit; it was as marked in her girlish beauty as in any thoroughbred.
She was the child of those who had admitted no superior save their God
and their King.
Adair found himself bereft of all his assurance. The professional
besieger, accustomed to advance with sureness and precision,
unaccountably held back, hardly knowing why his heart had turned to
water. It seemed presumptuous enough that he should even talk on terms
of equality with one so immeasurably above him. His humility was
painful. He stammered. He colored. His hand trembled on his tea-cup
as he strove to keep alive a conversation of the usual commonplaces.
"Miss Ladd," he said suddenly, "you mustn't think I am a
gentleman--because I am not. I am not accustomed to this kind of thing;
you are the first lady I--I've ever met." He arrested the expostulation
on her lips and went on hurriedly. "It's much better to tell you that
right off. I don't know those books you speak of; I don't know anything
very much; I am awfully uncultivated and ignorant. There, I have said
it! It will make me feel more comfortable, and it will be lots better
than pretending I am something I'm not."
"You are a great actor, Mr. Adair."
"My God," he returned with simplicity, "sometimes I'm not so sure that I
am." Then he burst into laughter at his own artlessness--a delightful
laugh, contagious and musical, that no one could hear without liking him
the better. Phyllis laughed, too, and somehow with it the ice seemed
broken, and constraint disappeared. "Miss Ladd," he went on, "people
like you, and places like this, are the realities which we try so hard
to copy with our poor theatrical pasteboard and calico. I used to hate
Mansfield for saying we ought to work as servants amongst--well, people
we couldn't meet in any other way, and yet the ones we are audacious
enough to represent on the stage. He meant it as an insult, of
course--but he was right in some ways. Just seeing you pour tea makes
me feel how badly we do even that!"
Phyllis, naturally, was touched and flattered.
"Why, we just pour it anyhow," she said, smiling.
"Precisely," exclaimed Adair, "and now let me do it our way!" He drew
nearer the table, put his hand to the tea-pot, and grimacing at an
imaginary company, proceeded to pour and pass several imaginary cups
with a grotesque affectation of grace and elegance. "Two lumps, dear
Sir James?--Patricia, the Bishop is famishing for some almond cake.--Oh,
mercy me, and what's become of the Dook?" It was an admirable bit of
mimicry, and so gay and captivating in its satire that Phyllis thought
she had never seen anything so clever. She laughed with delight and
clapped her hands.
"Though you shock me, too," she protested. "Correze mustn't do things
like that--it isn't in keeping."
"Correze?"
"Yes, you are not Mr. Adair to me, though I know that's your name, and I
have invited you. I can only think of you as Correze."
"Was I as good as that in the part?"
"I told you what I thought of it in my note."
"And you really meant it?"
"Would I have written if I hadn't? It was an awful thing to do. I
can't think of it without burning with shame.--How can you say you are
not a gentleman, Mr. Adair? Only a gentleman would have put the right
construction on it."
He was questioning her face with his fine eyes. His intuition again
stood him in good stead. This was not provocation, it was innocence.
To himself he said: "No, it is impossible."
Then aloud: "It was the only construction--and I felt childishly
pleased. We're great children, you know, we actors; and after all, are
we to blame for liking approbation? Just think a moment. How close it
all is to the ridiculous, our standing up there and declaiming all sorts
of red-hot emotions, with painted paper on one side, and bald-headed
fiddlers on the other! Doesn't it sometimes come over a man--sort of
shoot through him--the feeling of what a monkey-spectacle he is making
of himself? _You_ go ahead and play Lady Macbeth in a nightgown; rage
and strut before those cold, scornful faces. Then let one amongst them
cry: 'Bravo, bravo,' and give you a hand!--My Lord, you'd give him your
watch and chain, your diamond pin--don't you see, he returns you your
self-respect, makes your work worth the doing?--and that's what your
note did for me, Miss Ladd."
"Oh, Mr. Adair, don't talk to me about the cold, scornful faces at your
performance. I was there twice, and saw how they called you out!"
"Miss Ladd," he said, his strong, handsome, eager face whimsically
alight, "let me confess the honest truth--an actor simply can't have
enough admiration!"
"You worry me for fear I didn't make mine warm enough! For really, Mr.
Adair, in all sincerity, I--"
"Well, go on."
"Bravo, bravo!" Her lips parted mockingly over her white teeth as she
pretended to applaud madly. It was the daintiest teasing, and more
charming in the intimacy it implied than any downright praise. Adair
glowed with a pleasure so honest and boyish that Phyllis might be
forgiven for not suspecting the baser depths he hid so well.
"I'm a conceited ass," he admitted, "and after all, isn't it enough to
turn a man's head to be here with you, and feel I owe it to the ginger I
put into Correze? Most people get their friends by introductions and
all that, but I just snatched you out of a whole theater full of
strangers. For you are my friend, aren't you, Miss Ladd?"
"Yes, Correze."
"You'll be making me jealous of the chap," he cried running his hands
through his hair with make-believe exasperation. "I think he is a good
deal of a whining humbug myself, and the sly way he throws bouquets at
himself is disgusting. Miss Ladd, I am ever so much nicer than he
is--really I am--though I see I shall never be able to convince you."
"No reason why you shouldn't try."
"Perhaps I am ashamed to," he returned, with an intensity of expression
that became him well. "You find me in a wretched little theater, the
cheapest of cheap stars--the hoodlum's pet, the shop-girl's dream--and
how can it help coloring your whole idea of me? You admire my Correze,
but for me myself how can you have anything but contempt? No,
no--listen--it's true--and the more you knew of my history the more
contemptuous you'd be. I've been rated very high; I've had every chance
in the world; I've played with the biggest kind of people,
and--succeeded. Yet I have always been the dog who hanged himself. No,
there is no mystery about it--there never is with a man who is
sinking--a man of ability. It's his own fault every time--every, every
time."
His earnestness made Phyllis thrill. Adair was playing his best
role--himself, and playing it with the fire and eloquence he could
always bring to it. His voice, incomparable in the beauty and range of
its tones, was never so effective as when tinged with emotion. Nothing
was more manly, more sincere, more moving. It rose and fell in cadences
that lingered in the ear after the words themselves were
spoken--veritable music, affecting not only the listener, but the
musician as well. Under the spell of it he now found himself tempted
into strange confidences. Never before had he spoken of his childhood
and early life except to lie, to brag, to romance. Yet here, to his own
wonder, and impelled by he hardly knew what, he was unbosoming himself
of the whole ignoble truth. That instinct of his, so often wiser than
himself, so diabolically helpful, was showing him the right road. Had
Phyllis been some little milliner this would have been no road at all;
such a one would have been too familiar with the seamy side of life to
find any glamour in the tale; such a one would have preferred the bogus
palaces and bogus splendors his instinct would then have indicated.
Phyllis' intelligence was too keen thus to be deceived; even genuine
splendors would have interested her less than this pitiful story of the
slums; it not only touched her sensibility to the quick, but enhanced
Adair in her tender and sympathetic eyes.
His father had been an Englishman--a remittance man named Mayne--George
Cyril Augustus Fitzroy Mayne. Whether his pretensions were justified or
not, and they were inordinate, including "Wales" and "Cambridge," he was
beyond all doubt a gentleman, with grand manners, a back like a ramrod,
and a curt, military directness in speaking. He used to say "dammy";
was fond of alluding to himself as "an old Hussar"; was wont to remark
that a gentleman could always be told by his hat and his boots; and
once, when attacked on the street, had shown extraordinary courage and
adroitness in defending himself with a light cane. This was about all
Adair remembered of him, except that he drank hard; had recurring fits
of delirium tremens in which he raged and fought like a wild beast; and
finally, dying in a hospital ward, was buried like a dog in the Potter's
Field.
Adair's mother had been an Irish peasant girl. She was kind and
warm-hearted, and spoke with a brogue; she was always laughing and
singing, even under circumstances when a right-minded person would have
thrown himself into the East River. She drank, too. Everybody drank.
He used to be given sips from her glass, and knew what it was to be
tipsy before he was eight. It was about that time he began to sell
papers on the streets, for his father was dead, and his mother-- Well,
he wouldn't go into that. But in her way she had always been good to
him. She wouldn't let the men beat him. When she was sent to the