Kitabı oku: «Concerning Belinda», sayfa 8

CHAPTER X
ADELINA AND THE DRAMA

THE Youngest Teacher looked across the room at the new girl and tried to goad her conscience into action. New girls were her specialty. She was an expert in homesickness, a professional drier of tears and promoter of cheerfulness. When she really brought her batteries into action the most forlorn of new pupils wiped her eyes and decided that boarding-school life might have its sunny side.

Gradually the Misses Ryder and Belinda's fellow-teachers had recognised the masterly effectiveness of her system and her personality, and had shifted the responsibility of "settling" the new girls to the Youngest Teacher's shoulders. As a rule, Belinda cheerfully bowed her very fine shoulders to the burden. She knew that as an accomplished diplomat she was of surpassing value, and that her heart-to-heart relations with the pupils were of more service than her guidance in the paths of English.

She comforted the homesick, set the shy at ease, drew confidences from the reserved, restrained the extravagances of the gushing.

But on this January evening she felt a colossal indifference concerning the welfare of girls in general and of new girls in particular – a strong disinclination to assume any responsibility in regard to the girl who sat alone upon the highly ornamental Louis Quinze sofa.

The newcomer was good looking, in an overgrown, florid, spectacular fashion. Belinda took note of her thick yellow hair, her big blue eyes, her statuesque proportions. She noted, too, that the yellow hair was dressed picturesquely but untidily, that the big eyes rolled from side to side self-consciously, that the statuesque figure was incased in a too tightly laced corset.

Miss Adelina Wilson did not look promising, but her family was – so Miss Ryder had been credibly informed – an ornament to Cayuga County, and Mr. Wilson, père, who had called to make arrangements for his daughter's schooling, had seemed a gentlemanly, mild, slightly harassed man, of a type essentially American – a shrewd, successful business man, embarrassed by the responsibility of a family he could support but could not understand.

"She's my only daughter, and her mother is gone," he explained to Miss Ryder, leaving her to vague speculation concerning the manner of Mrs. Wilson's departure.

"The boys are all right. I can fix them, but Addie's different, and I guess she needs a good school and some sensible women to look after her. She's a good girl, but she has some silly notions."

Looking at Addie, Belinda accepted the theory of the silly notions, but wondered just what those notions might be. She would have to find out, sooner or later, and it might as well be sooner; so she rose, set her diplomatic lance at rest, and charged the young woman.

"I'm afraid you'll feel a trifle lonely at first," she said with her most friendly smile.

The new girl made room for the Youngest Teacher upon the sofa beside her, and executed a smile of her own – a mechanical, studied, carefully radiant smile that left Belinda gasping.

"Oh, no; I'm never lonely. I'm used to being apart," said Adelina in resigned and impressive tones.

Belinda met the shock with admirable calm.

"Yes, you have no sisters," she said; "brothers are nice, but they're different."

Adelina sighed.

"It isn't my being an only daughter that makes the difference," she explained. "It's my genius, my ambition. Nobody understands and can really sympathise with me, so I've worked on alone."

The "alone" was tolled sadly and accompanied by a slow, sweet, die-away smile that worked automatically.

Belinda's brain fumbled for a clew to the girl's words and affectation, and she looked closely for any earmarks of genius that might clear up the situation.

Suddenly Adelina clasped her hands around her crossed knees, struck a photographic pose, and languishingly turned her great eyes full upon Belinda.

"Do you think I look like Langtry?" she asked. "Lots of people have noticed the resemblance. Of course, I don't know, but I can't help believing what people tell me. There's a young gentleman who crossed on the same steamer with Langtry, and he says I'm the very image of her – only more spiritual."

The Youngest Teacher had found her clew. She was sitting beside an embryonic tragedy queen, a histrionic genius in the rough.

"Well, you're near Langtry's size," she admitted, "and the shape of your face is something like hers."

Adelina relaxed her pose.

"Yes, I guess it's so. At first I wasn't very well suited, I'd hoped I'd be more like Bernhardt. I just adore the thin, mysterious, snaky kind, don't you? I think those serpentine, willowy, tigerish, squirmy actresses are perfectly splendid. They're so fascinating, and they can wear such lovely, queer clothes. I wouldn't have minded being like Mrs. Pat Campbell, either. There's something awfully taking about that hollow-chested, loppy sort of woman. But you just can't choose what you'll look like. I got long enough for anything, but then I just began to spread out and get fat, and there wasn't any stopping it, so I had to give up any idea of being the willowy kind. I was awfully disappointed for a while, and I hardly ate anything for months, trying to stay thin, but it didn't make a bit of difference. I kept right on getting fat just the same. After all, it isn't shape that counts so much if you've got genius. Mary Anderson's pictures look awfully healthy, and I know lots of folks think Langtry's finer than Bernhardt. Which do you like best?"

Belinda diplomatically evaded the question. "You hope to go on the stage?" she asked.

Adelina lapsed into tragedy. "I'd die if I couldn't. I was just born for the stage. Papa and the boys don't seem to understand. They think I'm silly, stage-struck, like girls who go on in the chorus and are Amazons and things. I can't make them see that I'm going to be a star, and that being a great actress is an entirely different thing from being an Amazon. Folks up home are all so dreadfully narrow. A genius hardly ever gets sympathy in her own home, though. I've read lots of lives that showed that – but you can't keep real genius down."

The retiring bell rang.

Belinda rose with alacrity.

In her own room, with the door closed behind her, she gave way to unseemly mirth. Then she sallied forth to tell Miss Barnes of the young Rachel within their gates; but there was a troubled look from between her twinkling eyes.

"She's silly enough to do something foolish," she thought. "I hope she's too silly to do it."

The stage-struck Adelina's hopes and ambitions were known throughout the length and breadth of the school within twenty-four hours. Some of the girls thought her ridiculous. Some of the romantic set sympathised with her aims. All found her a source of considerable entertainment and treated her with good-natured tolerance.

Miss Ryder and the teachers shook their heads disapprovingly, but had no real cause for complaint.

The Stage-struck One didn't shine in her classes, but the same criticism might have been made concerning a large assortment of girls who made no pretensions to dramatic talent.

Adelina obeyed the rules, attended recitations, was respectful to her teachers and amiable toward her schoolmates. If she spent her recreation hours in memorising poetry and drama, or spouting scenes from her favourite plays, the proceedings could hardly be labelled misdemeanors. To be sure, she broke considerable bedroom crockery in the course of strenuous scenes, and in one of her famous death falls she dislodged plaster on the ceiling of the room below, but she cheerfully provided new crockery and paid for ceiling repairs, so Miss Ryder's censure, though earnest and emphatic, was not over-severe.

Belinda's English literature class became popular to an unusual degree, and its sessions were diverting rather than academic. In this class only did Adelina take a fervid interest. The midwinter semester was being devoted to consideration of Elizabethan drama, and in the Shakespearian readings, recitations and discussions which were a feature of the study the Cayuga County genius played a star rôle. The other girls might search out and memorise the shortest possible quotations – Adelina absorbed whole scenes, entire acts, and ranted through them with fine frenzy, until stopped in full career by the teacher's stern command. With folded arms and frowning brow she rendered Hamlet's soliloquy. She gave a version of Ophelia that proved beyond question that luckless heroine's fitness for a padded cell. She frisked through Rosalind's coquetries like a gamesome calf, and kept Lady Macbeth's vigils with groans and sighs and shuddering horrors.

Only by constantly snuffing her out could the Youngest Teacher maintain anything like order in the class; and, as it was, the enjoyment of Adelina's classmates often verged upon hysteria. As for the Gifted One's own honest pride and satisfaction in her prowess, words cannot do justice to it, and it would have been pathetic had it not been so amusing.

But it was in her own room that Adelina was at her best. There she rendered with wild intensity scenes from a score of plays, and there the girls resorted during their leisure hours, in full certainty of prodigal entertainment.

In one of the trunks brought from home Langtry's counterpart had a choice assortment of costumes, constructed chiefly from cheesecloth and cotton flannel, but reënforced by tinsel paper, beads, swan's-down and other essentials for regal rôles. There were artificial flowers, too, among the supplies, and a make-up box – jealously guarded from the notice of a faculty prone to narrow prejudices – was used by the tragédienne with wonderful and fearful results.

Adelina did not – intentionally – lean toward comedy. Tragedy was her sphere. She loved to shiver, and shudder, and groan, and shriek, and swoon, and die violent deaths; and although she admitted, as all true artists must, the claims of Shakespeare, she, in her secret soul, considered Sardou the immortal William's superior.

An indiscriminate course of theatre-going during visits to New York with an indulgent and unobservant father had introduced her to a class of modern dramas that are, to put it mildly, not meant for babes – though the parents of New York babes seem blandly indifferent to the unfitness – and the chances are that had the teachers been thoroughly posted as to her repertoire it would have been suddenly and forcibly abridged; but she reserved Shakespearian rôles for the edification of the faculty.

Miss Emmeline passing through the hall one day was much perturbed by hearing from behind a closed door emphatic iteration of "Out, damned spot," and even Miss Lucilla's firm assurance that the lines were Shakespeare's could not wholly reconcile the younger principal to such language.

Heavy sobbing, maniacal laughter, and cries of "My child, my child!" or "Spare him! I will tell all," ceased to attract the slightest attention upon the third floor.

Beyond restricting performances to recreation hours, insisting that they should not interfere with regular study, and supervising strictly the choice of real plays which Adelina and her fellow-pupils were allowed to attend, the powers that be did not take the dramatic mania seriously nor attempt to suppress it. So many fads come and go during a boarding-school year, perishing usually of their own momentum.

"The girls will soon tire of it," said Miss Ryder, very sensibly, "and Adelina will be through with the nonsense the more quickly for being allowed to work it off."

Incidentally she wrote to Mr. Wilson, père, asking for his opinion. He replied in a typewritten, businesslike note that he, too, believed the stage fever would soon run its course; and there, so far as official action was concerned, the matter dropped.

Gradually the girls ceased to find sport in the dramatic exhibitions and fell away, but Adelina pursued her course valiantly and unflaggingly.

Occasionally Belinda labored with her honestly, trying to insert into her brain some rational and practical ideas concerning stage life, dramatic art and vaulting ambition; but her efforts were of no avail, and she, too, fell into an attitude of tolerant amusement, quite free from alarm.

It was during the last week of March that the unexpected happened. One Tuesday morning Adelina failed to appear at chapel. The teacher sent to investigate reported her room in order but without occupant. A maid was sent to look through the house for the recreant, but came back without her.

Then Belinda, with a flash of intuition, ran up to the vacant room.

The bed had not been slept in. The trunks were there, but the girl's dress-suit case, coat, hat, furs and best street frock were missing.

Pinned to the pincushion Belinda found a note, written in Adelina's spidery hand. It ran:

"I am going away to carve out a career for myself. It will be useless to try to find me. I have some money, and, if necessary, I will pawn my jewels; but I will soon be making plenty of money, and as soon as I am famous I will come back to see you all.

"Tell my father not to worry. I will be all right and he won't miss me, and I can't let him keep me from my Art any longer. If he is willing to let me study for the stage he can advertise in the papers."

Even in the midst of her annoyance and her apprehension the Youngest Teacher could not smother a chuckle over the melodramatic tone of the letter, the reference to the jewels – consisting of three rings, a breastpin and a watch – the serene egotism and confidence in imminent fame and fortune.

But there was a serious side to the complication. There was no telling into what hands the stage-struck girl had fallen, nor where she might have been persuaded to take refuge. It would probably be an easy matter to find her with the aid of detectives, even if she had confided her plans to no one in the school; but meanwhile she might have an unpleasant experience.

So Belinda's face was grave as she ran down to Miss Ryder's study with the letter, and it was still grave as she went out, a little later, to send a telegram to Mr. Wilson, and visit the office of a well-known detective agency. In the interval everyone in the house had been questioned and professed complete ignorance.

The detective was smilingly optimistic – even scornful. The thing was too easy. But when Mr. Wilson, torn 'twixt distress and vexation, arrived that evening the self-confident sleuth had made no progress. Adelina had apparently vanished off the face of the earth. The very simplicity of her disappearance was baffling.

That she would, sooner or later, apply to some theatrical manager or agency, or interview some teacher of dramatic art, was a foregone conclusion, and on the second day after her departure it was found that she had tried to obtain interviews with several managers, and had had a talk with one, who good-naturedly told what had taken place at the interview.

"Handsome young idiot," he said to the detective. "That's why they let her in; but she hasn't a gleam of intelligence concealed about her, and it would take her a lifetime to get rid of her crazy ideas and mannerisms, even if there were any hope of her amounting to anything after she did get rid of them. Her idea of stage life is a regular pipe dream, and she'd never be willing to begin at the bottom. She wouldn't stand the hard work twenty-four hours. She had sort of an idea that she was a howling beauty with a genius that didn't need any training, and that if she could only get to see me I'd throw a fit over her and start her out on the road at five hundred dollars a week to star in 'Camille,' or something of that kind. She made me tired. I've seen thousands of the same kind, but I talked to her like a Dutch uncle; told her she wasn't so much as a beauty, and that she had a voice like a hurdy-gurdy, and that all her ideas about acting were crazy. Kind of rough, of course, but wholesome, that sort of straight talk is. I told her genius in the stage line was twins with slaving night and day; that they looked so much alike you couldn't tell them apart, and that the kind of genius she was ranting about was all hot air. I said if she could take some lessons and learn to sing and dance a little she might go on in the chorus, but that I'd advise charwork ahead of that, and that I didn't see the faintest illusive twinkle of a star about her. She cried and looked sick, but she seemed to be discouraged and open to conviction. So then I told her the best thing she could do was to go home to her folks and marry some decent fellow and look at the stage across the footlights – not too much of that, either. Yet the Gerry Society doesn't think much of us managers, and nobody'd suspect me of heading rescue brigades. I've got a daughter of my own, and she isn't on the stage – not by a blamed sight."

All this was interesting, but the clew began and ended at the manager's office door, and no further trace of Adelina was found during the day.

About nine o'clock that evening Maria, the parlour maid at the school, knocked at Belinda's door in a fine state of excitement.

"If you please, Miss Carewe, Miss Wilson's come back. I let her in and she's gone up to her room, and Miss Ryder ain't here, and she looks fit to drop, and her face is that swollen from crying, and – "

Belinda cut the monologue short and hurried down to the front room on the third floor.

It was dark, but by the gleam from the street lamps the teacher made out a bulky form on the bed, and the sound of stifled sobbing came to her ears.

She went over and knelt by the bed.

"I'm glad you've come back, dear," she said in a cheerful, matter-of-fact voice. "Your father will be so relieved, and it isn't quite right for a girl to be alone in a big city, you know."

The figure on the bed gave a convulsive flop and the sobbing redoubled.

"Don't cry any more. It will make you ill. Nothing very bad has happened, has it?"

Belinda was still prosaically cheerful.

"Oh, it was horrid," wailed the youthful tragédienne with more spontaneous feeling than she had ever put into Ophelia's ravings or Juliet's anguish. "They wouldn't take me in at boarding-houses, and when I did find a place it was so smelly, and they had corned beef for dinner, and I loathe corned beef, and the people were so queer, and the sheets weren't clean, and the bed had lumps; and I thought when Mr. Frohman saw me and heard me give the sleep-walking scene he'd be glad to educate me for the stage like they do in books, but he wouldn't even see me. Hardly anybody would see me, and when one manager did he told me I hadn't any talent, and that I wasn't even fit for an Amazon unless I could learn to dance, and that I'd better do charwork, and he said such dreadful things about the stage and the work; and then I went back to the boarding-house, and it smelled worse than ever, and one of the men spoke to me in the hall, and – Oh, dear. Oh, d-e-a-r!"

She ran out of breath for anything save wailing, and Belinda patted her on the back encouragingly without speaking.

"And then I felt so sick, and I was afraid to stay alone all night, and I just left my bag and slipped out – and I really do feel dreadfully sick, Miss Carewe. I guess it's a judgment. It'd be a good thing if I'd die. I'm not any good and I can't be a star, and papa and the boys'll never forgive me."

"Nonsense," laughed Belinda. "It wasn't nice of you, but fathers are not so unforgiving as all that, and if you'll just give up raving about the stage – "

"I never want to hear of acting again."

"Well, I don't think your father will be very angry if he hears that."

"But suppose I die?"

Belinda lighted the gas. In the light the girl's cheeks showed scarlet, and when the Youngest Teacher felt Adelina's hands and face she found them burning with fever.

"Small danger of your dying within fifty years, child, but you are tired and nervous. I'll have the doctor come in and see you."

She put the returned wanderer to bed and telephoned for the doctor, but while she waited for him there was a ring at the bell and she heard Mr. Wilson's voice in the hall.

He was standing in the doorway, uncertainly twirling his hat in nervous hands, and looking even more harassed than usual, when Belinda went down to him.

"I don't suppose – " he began.

"She's here," interrupted Belinda.

The father's face flushed swiftly.

"And she's all right, only I'm afraid she's going to be ill from the excitement. She's very much ashamed and very much disillusioned, Mr. Wilson. I think she's had her lesson, and I don't think I'd scold much if – "

There was an odd moisture on the glasses which Mr. Wilson removed from his nose and wiped with scrupulous care; and he cleared his voice several times before he spoke.

"I won't scold, Miss Carewe. I guess I'm a good deal to blame. She didn't have any mother, and I was pretty busy, and nobody paid much attention to what she was doing and reading and thinking. I just gave her money and thought I'd done all that was necessary; but I expect the carpet business could have got along without me occasionally, and I could have known my girl a little better."

They climbed the stairs together, but Belinda left him at his daughter's door.

When she went up, later, with the doctor Mr. Wilson looked more at ease in the world than usual, and Adelina's face was cheerful, though grotesquely swollen from much crying.

"Papa and I are going to Europe for the summer, Miss Carewe," she called out excitedly. Then, as she saw the doctor, her dramatic habit reasserted itself, and she fell into one of her most cherished death-scene poses, looking as limp and forlorn as circumstances and a lack of rehearsal would permit.

With melancholy languor she held out her hand to the doctor. He took it, felt her pulse, looked her over quickly and keenly.

"Measles," he said crisply. "You'd better look out for the other girls, Miss Carewe."

Adelina sank back in her pillows with a sigh of profound despair.

"I might have known I wouldn't have anything romantic," she said with gloomy resignation.