The Gay Cockade
he had no talent, I should love him without it. But, having it, I must
hold him up to it."
She was very sure of herself, very sure of the rightness of her attitude
toward Jimmie. "I know how great he is," she said, as we went down, "and
other people don't. So I've got to prove it."
* * * * *
It was at dinner that I first noticed a change in Jimmie. It was a
change which was hard to define. Yet I missed something in him--the
enthusiasm, the buoyancy, the almost breathless radiance with which he
had rekindled our dying fires. Yet he looked young enough and happy
enough as he sat at the table in his velvet studio coat, with his crisp,
burnt-gold hair catching the light of the candles. He and his wife were
a handsome pair. His manner to her was perfect. There could be no
question of his adoration.
After dinner we had the tree. It was a young pine set up at one end of
the long dining-room, and lighted in the old fashion by red wax candles.
There were presents on it for all of us. Jimmie gave me an adorably
illustrated _Mother Goose_.
"You are the only other child here, Miss Standish," he said, as he
handed it to me. "I saw this in a book-shop, and couldn't resist it."
We looked over the pictures together. They were enchanting. All the
bells of old London rang out for a wistful Whittington in a ragged
jacket; Bo-Peep in panniers and pink ribbons wailed for her historic
sheep; Mother Hubbard, quaint in a mammoth cap, pursued her fruitless
search for bones. There was, too, an entrancing Boy Blue who wound his
horn, a sturdy darling with his legs planted far apart and distended
rosy cheeks.
"That picture is worth the price of the whole book," said Jimmie, and
hung over it. Then suddenly he straightened up. "There should be
children in this old house."
I knew then what I had missed from the tree. Elise had a great many
gifts--exquisite trifles sent to her by sophisticated friends--a
wine-jug of seventeenth-century Venetian glass, a bag of Chinese brocade
with handles of carved ivory, a pair of ancient silver buckles, a box of
rare lacquer filled with Oriental sweets, a jade pendant, a crystal ball
on a bronze base--all of them lovely, all to be exclaimed over; but the
things I wanted were drums and horns and candy canes, and tarletan bags,
and pop-corn chains, and things that had to be wound up, and things that
whistled, and things that squawked, and things that sparkled. And Jimmie
wanted these things, but Elise didn't. She was perfectly content with
her elegant trifles.
It was late when we went out finally to the studio. There was snow
everywhere, but it was a clear night with a moon above the pines. A
great log burned in the fireplace, a shaded lamp threw a circle of gold
on shining mahogany. It seemed to me that Jimmie's writing quarters were
even more attractive in December than in June.
Yet, looking back, I can see that to Jimmie the little house was a sort
of prison. He loved men and women, contact with his own kind. He had
even liked our dingy old office and our dreary, dried-up selves. And
here, day after day, he sat alone--as an artist must sit if he is to
achieve--_es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille_.
We sat around the fire in deep leather chairs, all except Elise, who had
a cushion on the floor at Jimmie's feet.
He read with complete absorption, and when he finished he looked at me.
"What do you think of it?"
I had to tell the truth. "It isn't your masterpiece."
He ran his fingers through his hair with a nervous gesture. "I told
Elise that it wasn't."
"But the girl"--Elise's gaze held hot resentment--"is wonderful. Surely
you can see that."
"She doesn't seem quite real."
"Then Jimmie shall make her real." Elise laid her hand lightly on her
husband's shoulder. Her gown and golden net were all flame and sparkle,
but her voice was cold. "He shall make her real."
"No"--it seemed to me that as he spoke Jimmie drew away from her
hand--"I am not going to rewrite it, Elise. I'm tired of it."
"Jimmie!"
"I'm tired of it--"
"Finish it, and then you'll be free--"
"Shall I ever be free?" He stood up and turned his head from side to
side, as if he sought some way of escape. "Shall I ever be free? I
sometimes think that you and I will stick to this old house until we
grow as dry as dust. I want to live, Elise! I want to live--!"
* * * * *
But Elise was not ready to let Jimmie live. To her, Jimmie the artist was
more than Jimmie the lover. I may have been unjust, but she seemed to me
a sort of mental vampire, who was sucking Jimmie's youth. Duncan Street
snorted when I told him what I thought. Elise was a pretty woman, and a
pretty woman in the eyes of men can do no wrong.
"You'll see," I said, "what she'll do to him."
The situation was to me astounding. Here was Life holding out its hands
to Elise, glory of youth demanding glorious response, and she,
incredibly, holding back. In spite of my gray hair and stiff figure, I
am of the galloping kind, and my soul followed Jimmie Harding's in its
quest for freedom.
But there was one thing that Elise could not do. She could not make
Jimmie rewrite his play. "I'll come to it some day," he said, "but not
yet. In the meantime I'll see what I can do with books."
He did a great deal with books, so that he wrote several best-sellers.
This eased the financial situation and they might have had more time for
things. But Elise still kept him at it. She wanted to be the wife of a
great man.
Yet as the years went on, Duncan and I began to wonder if her hopes
would be realized. Jimmie wrote and wrote. He was successful in a
commercial sense, but fame did not come to him. There was gray in his
burnt-gold hair; his shoulders acquired a scholarly droop, and he wore
glasses on a black ribbon. It was when he put on glasses that I began to
feel a thousand years old. Yet always when he was away from me I thought
of him as the Jimmie whose youth had shone with blinding radiance.
His constancy to Duncan and to me began to take on a rather pathetic
quality. The others in the office drifted gradually out of his life.
Some of them died, some of them resigned, some of them worked on, plump
or wizened parodies of their former selves. I was stouter than ever, and
stiffer, and the top of Duncan's head was a shining cone. And the one
interesting thing in our otherwise dreary days was Jimmie.
"You're such darling old dears," was his pleasant way of putting it.
But Duncan dug up the truth for me. "We knew him before he wrote. He
gets back to that when he is with us."
I had grown to hate Elise. It was not a pleasant emotion, and I am not
sure that she really deserved it. But Duncan hated her, too. "You're
right," he said one day when we had lunched with Jimmie; "she's sucked
him dry." Jimmie had been unusually silent. He had laughed little. He
had tapped the table with his finger, and had kept his eyes on his
finger. He had been absent-minded. "She has sucked him dry," said
Duncan, with great heat.
But she hadn't. That was the surprising thing. Just as we were all
giving up hope of Jimmie's proving himself something more than a hack,
he did the great thing and the wonderful thing that years ago Elise had
prophesied. His play, "The Gay Cockade," was accepted by a New York
manager, and after the first night the world went wild about it.
I had helped Jimmie with the name. I had spoken once of youth as a gay
cockade. "That's a corking title," Jimmie had said, and had written it
in his note-book.
When his play was put in rehearsal, Duncan and I were there to see. We
took our month's leave, traveled to New York, and stayed at an
old-fashioned boarding-house in Washington Square. Every day we went to
the theatre. Elise was always there, looking younger than ever in the
sables bought with Jimmie's advance royalty, and with various gowns and
hats which were the by-products of his best-sellers.
The part of the heroine of "The Gay Cockade" was taken by Ursula Simms.
She was, as those of you who have seen her know, a Rosalind come to
life. With an almost boyish frankness she combined feminine witchery.
She had glowing red hair, a voice that was gay and fresh, a temper that
was hot. She galloped through the play as Jimmie had meant that she
should gallop in that first poor draft which he had read to us in
Albemarle, and it was when I saw Ursula in rehearsal that I realized
what Jimmie had done--he had embodied in his heroine all the youth that
he had lost--she stood for everything that Elise had stolen from
him--for the wildness, the impetuosity, the passion which swept away
prudence and went neck to nothing to fulfilment.
Indeed, the whole play partook of the madness of youth. It bubbled over.
Everybody galloped to a rollicking measure. We laughed until we cried.
But there was more than laughter in it. There was the melancholy which
belongs to tender years set in exquisite contrast to the prevailing
mirth.
Jimmie had a great deal to do with the rehearsals. Several times he
challenged Ursula's reading of the part.
"You must not give your kisses with such ease," he told her upon one
occasion; "the girl in the play has never been kissed."
She shrugged her shoulders and ignored him. Again he remonstrated.
"She's frank and free," he said. "Make her that. Make her that. Men must
fight for her favors."
She came to it at last, helped by that Rosalind-like quality in herself.
She was young, as he had wanted Elise to be, clean-hearted,
joyous--girlhood at its best.
Gradually Jimmie ceased to suggest. He would sit beside us in the
dimness of the empty auditorium, and watch her as if he drank her in.
Now and then he would laugh a little, and say, under his breath: "How
did I ever write it? How did it ever happen?"
Elise, on the other side of him, said, at last, "I knew you could do it,
Jimmie."
"You thought I could do great things. You never knew I could do--this--"
It was toward the end of the month that Duncan said to me one night as
we rode home on the top of a 'bus, "You don't suppose that he--"
"Elise thinks it," I said. "It's waking her up."
Elise and Jimmie had been married fifteen years, and had never had a
honeymoon, not in the sense that Jimmie wanted it--an adventure in
romance, to some spot where they could forget the world of work, the
world of sordid things, the world that was making Jimmie old. Every
summer Jimmie had asked for it, and always Elise had said, "Wait."
But now it was Elise who began to plan. "When your play is produced,
we'll run away somewhere. Do you remember the place you always talked
about--up in the hills?"
He looked at her through his round glasses. "I can't get away from
this"--he waved his hand toward the stage.
"If it's a success you can, Jimmie."
"It will be a success. Ursula Simms is a wonder. Look at her, Elise.
Look at her!"
Duncan and I could look at nothing else. As many times as I had seen her
in the part, I came to it always eagerly. It was her great scene--where
the girl, breaking free from all that has bound her, takes the hand of
her vagabond lover and goes forth, leaving behind wealth and a marriage
of distinction, that she may wander across the moors and down on the
sands, with the wild wind in her face, the stars for a canopy!
It tugged at our hearts. It would tug, we knew, at the heart of any
audience. It was the human nature in us all which responded. Not one of
us but would have broken bonds. Oh, youth, youth! Is there anything like
it in the whole wide world?
I do not think that it tugged at the heart of Elise. Her heart was not
like that. It was a stay-at-home heart. A workaday-world heart. Elise
would never under any circumstance have gone forth with a vagabond on a