The Golden Vanity (14 page)

"Which theater?" Arthur asked.

"Oh, don't bother; let me out where you're going and I'll get a taxi."

Arthur insisted. "All right," Mysie agreed, "you'll be taken for a stagedoor Johnny, the last one. There really aren't any more; I'm sorry they became extinct before my time. An actress has a hard time getting talked about nowadays. ... Do you want to come in and watch the rehearsal?"

Arthur did want to. He had never been backstage, nor given supper parties to chorus girls. That fashion had gone out among the gilded youth before he went to college; besides, his shyness and his upbringing and his bookish tastes would have prevented him. Yet, like all shy people who are not priggish, who are debarred from easy satisfactions by sensibility, he thought at times there must be something in that other way of living, reckless though crude. A reality that books couldn't give.... The fact that Mysie was an actress puzzled him. He had expected her to be different; he couldn't have said just how. Glamorous, perhaps, or dangerous, or loud. Not like this—her plain linen frock was limp and crumpled from the morning's wear; she had no make-up other than a dab of powder; but above all, she was preoccupied with the necessity of being on time for her work. He thought, she's like that girl running in the rain—He was trying to fit her to the legend of either the prima donna or the chorus girl, which she couldn't very well sustain, being neither. She had, simply, the character and manners of a woman who did work for her living....

They didn't go in by the stage door, but the main entrance. Mysie led him down the side aisle.

She stopped halfway, with a feeling that something had gone wrong. The half-lighted stage had the dusty aspect of any theater in the daytime. A dozen or fifteen people, the cast, stood grouped in the center. It was because they were all standing there, not dispersed casually, sitting by the wings waiting for their cues, for scenes which might or might not be rehearsed that day. Mysie guessed at trouble. The leading woman, Anne Fairfield, was speaking, tragically: "But only last week, Keller offered me—"

The producer, Lew Morris, interrupted: "Well, I can't help it; good God, I'm the one that's left holding the sack. The guarantee won't even cover—"

Miss Fairfield became shrill. "Do you mean to tell me—"

"Oh, hell!" Morris flung out his hands. "Ain't I telling you? I should try to tell a woman anything—" They both talked at once, becoming incoherent.

Having no clue to the meaning, Arthur did not hear the conversation very clearly. Mysie laid her hand on his arm and muttered: "Holy cats! Please wait here a minute, I'm afraid there isn't going to be any—" She hurried on and vanished beyond the boxes. Arthur saw her reappear on the stage. He lingered uncertainly, still unable to make sense of the argument in progress beyond the footlights. He supposed it must be dialogue from the play. Mysie spoke to Lew Morris, with a motion of her head toward Arthur in the shadowy orchestra. Arthur distinguished a few words: "I brought someone . . . No, nobody, just . . . I'll go and...."

She came back to Arthur. "I'm awfully sorry," her tone was distrait. "The rehearsal is called off, but I have to stay awhile, I don't know how long. Thanks for driving me in."

Arthur was sorry too. In the outer lobby of the theater, he stopped for a moment to observe that the rain was slackening, and debated with himself how he should fill the rest of the afternoon. He felt superfluous; it came to him occasionally, when he met people who worked because they had to. They seemed to be part of the scheme of life, while he was an onlooker.

It occurred to him that he could go to the office of his magazine,
The Candle.

His car was still at the curb; Dominic threw away a cigarette unobtrusively and opened the tonneau door. Arthur said: "No, thanks; will you please wait for Miss Brennan—the lady who came with us—and take her wherever she wants to go? Watch out for her; I'll take a taxi."

Dominic said: "Yessir," and drew his own conclusions.

On his way to the office, Arthur reflected that the editors might be absent, since it was Friday and the end of August. They took long week-ends and holidays. There was a managing editor and two associate editors, besides the literary editor and the art editor and nine or ten contributing editors, whatever that meant. They were all very earnest and high-minded, and had the peculiar and unanalyzable faculty of getting endowed for their opinions, a sacerdotal quality. And they held those opinions whole and undigested, so that it was hard to discover the person behind the formulas. They deplored the standardization of the machine age; and at a given time they all found a new gospel in psychoanalysis, or thought Charlie Chaplin tragic, or discovered a profound philosophy in Krazy Kat.

Jake Van Buren was not an editor, though he was the dramatic critic. As he owed his job directly to Arthur, he was tolerated, but never invited to conferences. The moving picture critic, Ray Lynch, was an editor; he devoted most of his attention to Russian films, appraising them abstrusely in terms of rhythm and mass movement. The prodigious inanities of Hollywood filled him with moral indignation; he saw in them a "mechanism of escape." Nobody should escape if he could prevent it.

The Russians got into everything at
The Candle,
Arthur thought. He wondered what made him think that; it wasn't the way he was used to thinking. Young Roger Dickerson was mainly responsible. Though Roger put up only a third of the financial backing, he had most to do with engaging the editorial board and thereby introducing the sociological and economic interest in what had originally been a very precious aesthetic publication. That is, Roger had engaged Miss Sarnoff, the managing editor, and she did the rest.

Miss Sarnoff was married to a Russian. Her maiden name was Endicott; she was a New Englander of long descent. She compromised with her feministic principles by calling herself Miss with her husband's name. Arthur had never seen her husband. He existed in the distance. Though a Communist, he was mysteriously debarred from returning to Russia, for having known Trotsky or something. His main occupation seemed to be reviving
The Cherry Orchard
at Little Theaters.

The outer portal of
The Candle
was guarded by a girl sitting behind a wicket with a telephone and a pad of paper on which callers were required to state their business. Arthur had never noticed her especially, except that she was a thin, black-eyed girl with a wide mouth needlessly emphasized by a liberal use of lipstick. As he entered he heard her talking over the telephone: "Oh, Lester is a big sap; you gotta schmoos him a bit...." She looked up and saw Arthur. "Who do you wish to—oh!" She was flustered into a spontaneous giggle. Arthur smiled back at her as he went by. He's kinda nice, she thought. She had got her job through an employment bureau, and her private opinion of the editors was that they were a bunch of nuts.

Arthur's office could be reached only through that of Miss Sarnoff. She had a sound tactical sense. It happened she was in, and she received him almost as an equal; she was always patient with him. An athletic, handsome woman in the thirties, she had emerged from college a dozen years ago as one of the post-war revoltees, who acquired "sex experience" as a duty, whether they liked it or not. After marriage she committed adultery in the same conscientious fashion, because jealousy was anti-social and extra-marital episodes were necessary to a full life. She had a child because without maternity a woman is unfulfilled in her biological function.

She daunted Arthur. He was aware of her obvious diplomacy with young Roger Dickerson; it was, indeed, obvious to everyone but Roger. She schmoosed Roger. Arthur recognized that she didn't consider it necessary to be diplomatic with himself. She was firm and proprietary about large questions such as birth control, disarmament, and the Treaty of Versailles.

Arthur's flat-topped desk was bare except for a blotting pad, pen and ink. Miss Sarnoff fetched an advance copy of the next issue of
The Candle.
It contained the regular articles on the Russian experiment, handicraft culture in Mexico, the psychiatric treatment of criminals as victims of society, the cancellation of the war debts, Negro sculpture, James Joyce, and the art of Stanislas Prezmsyl, a Pole who modeled all his subjects in the likeness of eggs. There was also an article on the need of a literature of the proletariat.

Arthur speculated vainly why Julius Dickerson—for of course Roger got the money from his father—should subsidize propaganda for cancellation of the war debts, when Julius had been adviser to one of the debt commissions which had fixed the terms of settlement a few years earlier, terms which cancellation must abrogate as unpractical and unethical. Arthur didn't connect this fact with the subsequent fact that Helder & Dickerson had participated in various European industrial concessions which were quietly arranged at the same time as the debt settlement, though with no visible connection. Immense issues of stocks and bonds had been sold to American investors on those industrials, with commissions to Helder & Dickerson, and other big bankers. What puzzled Arthur was the argument that payment of the war debts would ruin the United States because payment must be made in either money or goods, both fatal; also, if the war debts were paid, Europe would be unable to meet the industrial loans. It seemed to him they should have thought of that sooner. And he tried to figure out why payment of the industrial loans wouldn't be equally disastrous, unless some third method, neither money nor goods, could be invented. He gave it up, assuming that he didn't understand economics. He could see that it would be a vast relief to European statesmen not to have to pay for a very expensive war; and he had the humanly kindly impulse to be generous at no matter whose expense; in effect, he fell back on the roseate theory that nobody would have to pay.

Arthur signed a check—that was what the pen and ink were for—to cover his share of the quarter's deficit on the magazine, and took his departure. The bareness of his desk depressed him subtly. In the adjoining offices girls were typing busily, or answering telephone calls about cuts and dummies and proofs, or explaining that the editor called for was out. All that, the actual work, went on regardless of Arthur. He had bought the magazine because he had a taste for letters and because he thought he ought to make some disinterested use of his money; but in the main with the unformulated hope that it would serve as an admission card to the working world. It wasn't that he was unable to understand the routine; only there was no place for him after all. He could have mailed the check; his presence or absence made no difference.

In the street again, he decided that he might as well drop in at his nearest club for a belated lunch. Then he recalled, with a bad conscience, that he had stayed over, while Gina and Mrs. Siddall went back to Bar Harbor, on the pretext of attending a meeting of the building committee of that very club.

So he really might as well go there.

13

M
YSIE
rejoined the group on the stage. There was nothing to be done. One word had informed her of the worst. But she was bound to lend the moral support and consolation of a listener to Jake. He was lurking in the wings, too stricken to take part in the futile debate.

The backer of the play, the angel from Wall Street, had failed them. He had gone broke, or at least had lost so much on a turn of the market that he could not find money for the play. Quite as much of a gamble, Mysie reflected. It was a wonder where people got all the money they lost. The angel would have to cut his loss on whatever sum he had already advanced to cover the equity bond and expenses to date. Naturally enough he had not come to break the bad news in person; Lew Morris had been informed by telephone. Mysie was sorry for Morris, a shoestring producer with a record of one moderate success and three flops. Probably he had let himself in for bills that would mean bankruptcy, not daring to extract a safely large sum in advance from his angel. An inexperienced backer would put up four or five thousand dollars, and then keep on paying to see the thing through.

Morris had taken a chance on
Third String
because he could get Anne Fairfield for the lead. Anne's name ensured the attendance of the dramatic critics instead of their assistants; she was a recognized star. But she too had had several bad seasons, or she wouldn't have been available. In fact, she was greatly in need of a part and an immediate salary. There was the disadvantage of ranking as a star; you had to have leading parts or none, and a succession of failures, even though the fault might be in the plays, made managers shy off from an unlucky player. There were so many stars now, with so many theaters—sixty or seventy or eighty, was it? New stars every week, dimming the radiance of last week's luminaries.

Anne Fairfield went into sobbing hysterics suddenly and Vida Winship, who played dowagers, led her to a dressing room. Vida disliked Anne, but forgot it in the facile kindness of theatrical folks. Lew Morris clasped his head in his hands and enquired at large: "Can I help it?" An anxious girl who had been cast for a maid's bit whispered to Mysie: "Do you think we'll get our week's pay?" They had been rehearsing for almost three weeks. "Oh, I guess so," Mysie replied rather mendaciously; she wasn't at all sure. "Lew, can't we adjourn this lodge of sorrow? Can't everybody come to your office in the morning, when you've had time to check up?"

"You've got sense," Morris said gratefully.

Mysie went over to Jake. "Well," she said, "that's that. Let's get out of here." Jake said nothing, but obeyed.

The heat met them aggressively as they stepped onto the pavement. "This is awful," Mysie sighed. She didn't mean the collapse of the play; that had already mingled with the past. "I wish I could go to the country and never come back." Dominic presented himself respectfully. "Hasn't Arthur—Mr. Siddall—gone yet?" Mysie demanded in surprise.

"Mist' Siddall said to wait and take you wherever you wanna go," Dominic explained.

"Oh—why—thank you. I guess I'll go home—do you want to come along and have a cold drink?" she asked Jake.