# Phoebe Among the Thespians

Extracted from American Magazine, vol 70, 1910, pp. 382–392. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted.
Phoebe AMONG THE THESPIANS
BY
INEZ HAYNES GILLMORE AUTHOR OF “ERNEST AND THE CASE OF OLD MUDGUARDS,” ETC.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY R. F. SHABELITZ
IN Volume V (“Storm and Stress”) of Phoebe Martin's diary will be found a description of what Phoebe called her “ideal.”
“I care not,” she says with a freedom from prejudice splendid in one so young, “whether he be light or dark. I care not whether he be tall or short. I care not whether he be rich Or poor. Two things only I stipulate. One is that he shall not be handsome, for if there is any thing I loathe, abominate and despise, it is a handsome man. The other is that he shall be over forty, for young men are so frivolous and brainless that I avoid their society wherever it is possible. What I am most particular about is his eyes. They must be mysterious and disillusioned and sad and cynical and bitter, all at once, if you know what I mean. And those eyes must be the keynote of his whole soul. For he must have seen everything, done everything, been through everything—blasé, in fact, just ready for some pure young girl to restore his faith in the Good and the True and the Beautiful. He must be able not only to interest but to command me. He must be possessed of such subtlety that I shall never be able to penetrate to the deepest depths of his unfathomable nature. He must be clean-shaven and iron-gray. From his lower lip, his chin must curve way in before it comes to a point. Other than this I ask nothing. Only he CANNOT have an Adam's apple. And I hope the sleeves of his coat will not be short, that his collar comes together in the middle and he does not wear his hat on one side.”
With this picture graven on her mind, it is not surprising that she recognized it the moment she saw it embodied. The occasion was the matinée of the play of a brilliant young Irish dramatist. The embodied ideal was no other than Mr. Willis Raikes, the most able and eccentric of theatrical meteors.
But in the meantime Phoebe's diary had gone to the limbo of outgrown things—had gone as irrevocably as Phoebe's dolls, Phoebe's baby picture-books, Phoebe's home-made “The Flora of Maywood.” And in its place—for Phoebe's nature was one that demanded expression—sprang up a correspondence with Sylvia Gordon. To this correspondence, so furious of pace, so thick of volume, so written over, so scrawled across, so underscored, so single, double, triple and quadruple postscripted, so revised and addendumed, mere type, short of facsimile, never can do justice.
“Gee, girls are the limit,” Ernest said, “the way they write letters. You can't fool me—they like it.”
But the proof of the correspondence is in the quotation. Vide:
Dearest Sylvia:
If you haven't seen Willis Raikes in “The Woman Soul Leadeth Us—Where?” do for goodness' sake buy a ticket for the next performance if you have to stand up. Of course the play itself is too lovely for words, but I won't go into that now, for you know just what a treat is before you when you go to see anything by Glaive. It's not the play I'm so crazy about, but Willis Raikes himself. Oh, Sylvia, he is really marvelous. When he first came on the stage, I had the queerest sensation—I can't describe it—I simply can't—but it was something weird. You know those feelings that you have sometimes that you've been in a place before and done exactly the same thing although you know as well as you know anything that you have never been there or done those things in this life. Oh, Sylvia, do you know, more and more, I'm growing to believe in reincarnation? Well, it was a good deal like that only so much more creepy. Sylvia, I couldn't take my eyes off of him. He is certainly the most stunning-looking man I ever saw—he's handsomer than father. He wears a corking green uniform trimmed with bushels of gold braid and one of those little jackets hanging from his shoulders that foreign soldiers wear. It was green, too, trimmed with fur and lined with red. On his head was one of those tall fur hats. He has the dearest Irish accent. You know, Sylvia, how you and I love clean-shaven men. Well, he wasn't that exactly. He wore just a little smudge of mustache on his upper lip and just a dab beneath his lower one. And his eyes—Sylvia, you never saw such eyes. I was in the front row, and I may be mistaken, but I thought he looked at me once or twice. Sylvia, they went right through me. Sylvia, I beg and entreat and implore and beseech you to go. I am simply crazy to hear what you will say about him. You always have such original ideas on things.
Yours frantically, Phoebe Martin.
P. S.—Be sure to notice his chin in profile and see if you ever in your life saw anything so adorable.
P. Martin.
2d P.S.—Notice particularly and tell me what you think his attitude toward his leading woman is —I should say cold contempt.
Phobe M.
3d P.S.—Try to find out whether that is a wig or his own hair. I think it's a wig.
P. M.
4th P. S.—Don't forget to tell me in your next how old you think he is. P
Illustration: “PHOEBE STARTED a RAIKES ALBUM”
The Raikes engagement lasted a month. Phoebe attended as many matinées as her allowance would permit. After the first performance, a picture of the star in the costume of Terence O'Toole, appeared on her dressing-table. Later, she placed before it a little Chinese affair made of an Oriental metal, pierced like a salt-cellar at the top with many holes. Every night before going to bed Phoebe burnt a pair of joss-sticks at this shrine of dramatic art. The picture changed every week, for every week Phoebe bought a new one. But the Chinese affair never budged.
After the Raikes company left Boston, Phoebe started a Raikes album. In it she pasted magazine and newspaper pictures of Mr. Raikes, interviews with Mr. Raikes, announcements of the plans of Mr. Raikes, stray personal data about Mr. Raikes. These last came rarely, and Phoebe's biography of her hero was, in consequence, a patched-up thing. Mr. Raikes was a reticent being. If he had a press agent, that gentleman must have labored under perpetual blight. Mr. Raikes seemed to entertain the idea that there was a definite line where the curiosity of the public must stop and the privacy of even an actor may begin. He refused to make capital out of his personal history. And as for his experiences of the heart, he might have lived in an Eveless Eden. The divorce court knew him not. It was whispered that even the letters from unknown women which his mail constantly brought him fluttered in tiny unread pieces to his waste basket.
Going through the paper one evening, shears in hand, Phoebe came across that which elicited the following:
Sylvia Dearest:
Have you seen the papers? If you have, you know how crazy I am. But of course you haven't. Willis Raikes has been asked to act in the production of an Elizabethan play at Harvard this June. Things have happened to bring his season to an early close and he will come on a month ahead of the date in order to see that everything is all right. Of course, I shall go if I have to pay twenty dollars for my ticket. But it won't be anything like so expensive as that. Do save your pennies so that we can go together.
Yours, walking-on-air, Phoebe.
P. S.—Do you happen to have a copy of the play, “Epicene or The Silent Woman,” by Ben Jonson. a
For a while the correspondence whirled at lightning velocity. Then it settled down to its normal pace, which was only a gallop. One day Sylvia received an envelope directed in Phoebe's hand. Inside was only a newspaper clipping:
Mrs. Willis Raikes, who accompanies her husband everywhere, will take a house near Boston for the two months preceding the production of “Epicene” by Mr. Raikes.
The italics were Phoebe's.
A month later, after a period of silence, painfully suggestive of dumb agony, came a second clipping:
Mr. and Mrs. Willis Raikes have engaged a house in Maywood for May and June. They will occupy it during the rehearsals of the Ben Jonson production at Harvard.
It is fate.
Both comment and italics were Phoebe's.
For an interval after this, a series of daily epistles beat on Sylvia like a fall of autumn leaves. Notes, not letters, they trembled indiscriminately with anxieties, doubts, misgivings, anticipations. Then came the following:
O Sylvia, Sylvia, Sylvia:
He is here. I have seen him once. I am going to see him again. I should have said they are here, for of course Mrs. Raikes is with him. I had quite a time getting mother to go and call—not that she has any prejudice against actors, but because she thought they wouldn't be interested probably to see her. Interested! I wish you could have seen the hit she made. Well, I might as well start in the beginning and tell you all about it. We called a little after four. I wore my taupe and mother wore her brown. I had my hair done the new way and I wore a gardenia for which I squandered a dollar. You know where they are staying—in that funny barn-like place near the pond on the Gorham road. It seems that Mr. Raikes went crazy about the view. Old Mr. Gorham built it for his daughter, who was a painter. There was no means of heating it and Mr. Raikes had a fireplace put in at his own expense.
But I won't anticipate. A Chinese servant opened the door. He disappeared with our cards, but came back in no time and asked us to come into the studio. Well, if that studio wasn't a shock! I don't know exactly what I expected—something like the Marblehead places I guess, or rich Eastern draperies, armor, tiger skins and artistic things like that. For I do love an artistic atmosphere, don't you, Sylvia?
Well, it was far from artistic and it was all cluttered up—not untidy, but a kind of orderly disorder, if you understand me. Of course I didn't like to seem to rubber and yet you know how I can't help taking things in. The walls were simply covered—not with pictures, although there were a few sketches in black and white (I'll tell you more about those later). On one wall was a map of London—old London, I guess, because it was queer-looking—and, on another, a map of Paris. Pinned up everywhere were blue prints of machinery things—I recognized some of them to be locomotives from my course in physics in High, and others were undoubtedly flying-machines. On the table also, if you please, was what looked like a home-made model of a flying-machine, the wings of paper and the whole business held together with matches and sealing-wax.
On the table in the window was—what do you suppose? A fern, a rubber-plant, a bust of Shakespeare? Far from it. A typewriter! At one side was a carpenter's bench just like the Sloyd benches in school. In the middle of the room was the biggest table I ever saw in my life, made of common wood, just like a kitchen table. And, Sylvia, the things that were on that table! Papers and magazines—but not magazines that anybody would ever read—T-squares and triangles like what we used to have in drawing at High, scales—a funny kind such as I have never seen before—a whole set of files, triangular and square and flat and sort of half-round, and what looked like the inside of a clock, scattered over everything—bouncy springs that squirmed every time anybody touched the table. And right in the center of all this, the darlingest thing, Sylvia Gordon, that you ever saw in your life—a little doll's theatre. The baby stage was set with the cunningest scenery and furniture—well, it just made me want to sit down and play dolls again. There wasn't a picture of an actor or actress in the place—not even of Mr. Raikes. It would have been kind of homesick-feeling if it hadn't been for the big fire; and later they served tea. But I'm getting ahead.
Mrs. Raikes came forward to meet us. She was very cordial and mother thinks she's lovely. I took an immediate dislike to her because I saw that she was cold and practical. And all the time I was talking to her about Mr. Raikes' work there was a little smile in her eyes—sort of patronizing—as if she didn't think what I said was important. She wore a Chinese mandarin's coat—prune-color with blue embroidery on it. She told mother that she wore Chinese clothes almost always in the house because they were beautiful and comfortable. Doesn't that sound awfully queer to you? It sounds posey to me. Now, if it had been one of those wonderful Japanese kimonos, black satin, lined with scarlet and trimmed with gold and wistaria—'made in Weehawken' she said when I spoke of them—I could understand. I could not seem to talk with her, although I tried my best. Every time I said anything about Mr. Raikes' work, she changed the subject. And then, right in the midst of it, the door opened—and there he stood!
Sylvia, I knew him at once, though he was different—oh, so different.
In the first place he was shorter than he looks on the stage. And in the second place, he must always wear a wig. His skin is no particular color. Neither is his hair, because it is quite gray. But his chin was all I expected—his hands are simply lovely. And his eyes! Sylvia, I never saw such eyes. When they met mine, I felt as if a pair of revolvers were pointed at me.
I cannot describe to you how different it was after he came into the room. You felt all trembly inside like when there's an automobile starting up under your window. He seemed to be in a very gracious mood. He talked and talked—mostly to mother. Then Mrs. Raikes took mother out into her kitchen and Mr. Raikes began to show me things. The sketches on the wall were all of Mrs. Raikes and by such expensive artists—Sargent and Zorn and Sorolla. Mr. Raikes said that artists found her very paintable, and of course she is very beautiful, he added. She may be paintable, although I can't imagine Christy or Fisher or Hutt putting her on a magazine cover. But she certainly is not beautiful. She's tall and flat and sort of loosely-woven, if you see what I mean. Her hair's a kind of pale green gold and her eyes are hazelly-green—like the inside of a grape. And, Sylvia, she's thirty-five if she's a day. He said that people compared his wife to Sarah Bernhardt and George Eliot and Botticelli's “Spring.” Well, you know Bernhardt. She is certainly far from beautiful. And as for George Eliot—why, she looks like a horse. I have never seen Botticelli's “Spring,” but Mr. Raikes showed me a photograph and—well, if she wants to look like that it's all right, but I wouldn't be flattered.
I couldn't seem to get him started on his work—he changed the subject every time I brought it up. And presently the Chinese servant came wheeling in the most wonderful tea-table I ever saw. It was mahogany, inlaid, and covered with the quaintest-looking silver. They served the darlingest cakes! Oh, I wish you could have seen him drink his tea—the way he held his cup was the most graceful thing I have ever witnessed.
Well, during tea, he talked with mother again and I talked with Mrs. Raikes. I hardly remember whas she said, for of course I had eyes only for him.
Oh, Sylvia, I am so excited and happy.
Phoebe.
P. S.—He wore the most worn-looking clothes, but, oh, such a dandy cut! I wonder if he has his things made in London.
2d P. S.—On his third finger, he wore a ring—not a seal—a perfectly plain one like a wedding-ring.
3d P. S.—When he speaks his voice is—well, it makes you feel like you've put your hand on the cat's throat when it's purring.
4th P. S.—I am perfectly sure that she does not understand him. And think what a privilege to be the wife of a man like that!
5th P. S.—I would give the world to hear what he said after we went out.
But if Phoebe had heard what Mr. Raikes said, this story would never have been written.
“Well,” Mrs. Raikes commented, settling herself beside her husband on the couch, “did you ever see a more perfect 'case'? Delicious little thing, isn't she?”
Her husband did not reply for a moment, but that interval was visibly given over to exasperation. Then he said in a burst both choleric and petulant: “Susan, is there anything wrong with me! Why is it I hate a young girl so? Take that one. Of course she's as pretty as paint, but, oh Lord, how she bored me! Now, the mother was nice—I liked her. What a Constance she would make, by the way!”
“Yes,” Mrs. Raikes agreed absently. “But don't make the mistake, Will, of thinking that child's only ingénue. She hasn't come to any sense of values yet, but she's just spilling over with suppressed character.”
Illustration: “MR. RAIKES BEGAN TO SHOW ME THINGS”
Mr. Raikes was not interested. “I had a really charming talk with Mrs. Martin. She had seen dad in everything he played at the old Boston Museum. She even saw him the one time he went with Booth. Her comments were naïve, of course, and yet, somehow, she did get to the bottom of things. Curious about dad! You know, Susan, he was too damn good for his time. I mean he was simple and natural and realistic in a period when every play that was not farce was bombast. Deuce take it all, he'd be starred nowadays! Have the books come?”
“Everything from North and Paynter to Besant and Baedeker. I've been looking through the “English Garner”—it's fascinating. Professor Titheredge called this afternoon. He's a wonderful person—not dry-as-dust at all. A fine type—scholar and soldier. If he'd have worn a helmet, he'd be the ghost in “Hamlet” He was delighted with my model. He's going to send us some of his own books, obsolete things with rare old maps and pictures. He said he'd get us some things from the Harvard Library when we came to his house. He talked about Elizabethan London exactly as we'd talk about New York.”
“That's good.” Raikes' voice had kindled a little enthusiasm, but still his interest seemed detached. He lounged on the couch, his fine hands clasped over his head.
“Oh, I forgot,” his wife said. She reached to the table back of her and seized a pile of magazines. “For a good boy! 'The American Inventor, ' 'Steel,' 'The Machinist's Monthly,' 'The Universal Amateur,' 'The American Journal of Technology.'”
Raikes straightened up, and all the listlessness seemed to go out of him with the movement. His whole manner was electric as he seized the bundle of magazines.
Mr. and Mrs. Raikes returned the Martin call in a few days. And gradually Willis Raikes, who ignored utterly the overtures of the Maywood Women's Club and who responded with a dampening chill to the beckonings of Maywood's social leaders, became an intimate of sorts in the Martin household. Mrs. Raikes alone knew that he went there because he could go and come as he pleased without making a ripple on the domestic tide.
Mr. Raikes and Mr. Martin recognized each other at once as two real human beings. But they had to signal across a wide gulf of conflicting interests, habits, points of view.
Mr. Raikes and Ernest talked exactly the same language. That is to say, the larger vocabulary of the actor included the lesser one of the boy. Foot-ball, base-ball, basket-ball, automobile, a prospective prize-fight—they ran the gamut together. In point of fact, in Ernest's company, Mr. Raikes performed an admirable bit of juvenile acting.
Mr. Raikes and Mrs. Martin—but that is almost a story by itself.
Mr. Raikes spent most of his morning working in Cambridge on the Harvard production. He spent all his evenings reading, studying, planning. In between, his life seemed to be cut, by furious horseback gallops through the surrounding country, into periods of complete idleness. One afternoon, Phoebe, coming into the living-room, found him established in front of the fire, talking. Opposite, her mother occupied herself quietly with darning and listening. After that, Phoebe left the house in the afternoon as rarely as possible. Three times a week at least, the sound of pounding hoofs outside would send her heart fluttering into her throat. The knock on the door of a crop-butt—for Mr. Raikes scorned the convenience of the bell—would echo through her palpitation. Forestalling Julia, Phoebe would fly into the hall, opening the door to romance.
And yet, seemingly, those afternoons were the very antithesis of romance as nineteen sees it. Mrs. Martin had never before served afternoon tea. But when Mr. Raikes was there, Julia appeared with the tray promptly at four. Their guest ate Mrs. Martin's gingerbread not by the piece, but by the foot.
“He's as bad about eating as Ern,” was Phoebe's single criticism of perfection.
Often Mr. Raikes would sit a whole quarter of an hour without speaking, his head on his hand, his absent gaze on the fire. But this was at his worst. At his best, he talked. And when one of his rare garrulous moods fell on Willis Raikes, his entire world stopped to listen. He talked about anything or everything. He assumed extraordinary sapience in his listeners and his very confidence seemed to create that. Once, to prove a theory about literary atmosphere, he reached into the book-case and read them the opening scene from “Hamlet.” Once, to prove a theory about Latin vowel-sounds as opposed to Anglo-Saxon consonants, he recited, “The Lord is My Shepherd,” first in English and then in Italian. Curiously enough at this, Mrs. Martin, who had listened to the Shakespeare without comment, dropped her work to the floor.
“Oh, I would like to see you act!” she exclaimed. “You're so like your father.”
Mr. Raikes' only answer was his smile. And his smile—the least-used of all his expressions—made such havoc of the sardonic choler of his look, brought out such gentleness of mouth and eye, that even Phoebe disbelieved what she saw.
Thereafter Mrs. Martin occasionally asked him to read to her: “Thanatopsis,” Gray's “Elegy,” “The Burial of Sir John Moore,”—these selections not because she was naturally melancholy, but because she remembered them from her reader. Mr. Raikes' deep-voiced sincerity made such marvel of the swelling rhythms that Mrs. Martin often could not see her sewing for the mists that swam between her and it. On the other hand, Mr. Raikes rendered the poems of Phoebe's choice, selections from “Lucille,” Tennyson's “Maud” and “Aurora Leigh,” as briskly as if they were weather reports.
“Will Raikes, you must stop fascinating that little Martin girl,” his wife remonstrated with him one day. “She gets worse and worse. She bored me this whole afternoon with her talk about you. She hates me, of course, for she sees only too plainly that I do not understand your sensitive nature. But I really like her.”
“Stop fascinating her! Susan, I never speak to her if I can help it. Well, you can imagine. If I am forced into a tête-à-tête with her, the conversation is always what you would call 'literary.' You know, light of my existence, how that invariably brings out all my natural cussedness. Something like this:
She: I love Shakespeare, don't you, Mr. Raikes?
Me: As an actor, I approve of Shakespeare, although, as a man,I prefer Ben Jonson. But if I were a dramatist, I would be quite of the opinion of Mr. G. Bernard Shaw, who thinks he's over-rated.
She: Oh, Mr. Raikes, surely you want to make Shakespearian productions—Hamlet, 'Othello' and 'Macbeth'?
Me (sheer perversity): No; you see I'm always more interested in the parts that aren't star parts—Polonius, for instance.
She: Don't you think 'Romeo and Juliet' is a perfectly charming play? I should think you'd make a splendid Romeo.
Me: No; I passed up Romeo with my salad days.
She: Would you like to play Orlando, then?
Me: No; I hate a lover. I can't make love. I don't know how to. I always manage to have my love-making off the stage. When I fell in love with Mrs. Raikes, I told her in the beginning that I would agree to marry her only on the condition that she did the wooing.
She: But think of your Terence O'Toole!
Me: That proves how young you are, to cite Terence as a model love-maker.
She (in a chilling voice and looking eatably pretty): Mr. Raikes, I am not as young as you think, I shall be twenty my next birthday.
Me: I beg your pardon.”
It had been a matter of comment among his friends that Mr. Raikes' superb powers of creation included none of mimicry. During this quoted dialogue, he had not moved from his chair, he had not gestured. Yet anybody who had once seen Phoebe would have known that her spiritual counterpart sat in the room.
The twinkle in Mrs. Raikes' eyes exploded in a laugh. “Oh, Willis,” she said, “you must do something—if it's only one of your exquisite rudenesses. I like Miss Martin too much.”
“Well, I'll try to think up some gentlemanly Nance Oldfield stunt.” For a moment the problem seemed to interest him. His eyes drew to a point of concentrated thought. “How about treating you brutally, Susan?”
“That would never do. She knows too well that I deserve it.”
He dismissed the problem. “Susan, nobody will convince me that you were ever a young girl. If you were, thank God I never saw you!”
My dear, dear, dear Sylvia:
I see them all the time now. He is just as wonderful as ever. But, oh, how he puzzles me. Sylvia, you never heard a man talk of his art the way he does. You would hardly believe he took it seriously the way he goes on sometimes. Why, the other day he gave me the longest lecture about the hardships and disagreeableness of stage life. He said that often he'd give anything in the world if he could chuck the whole business and go to selling carpets or anything that was self-respecting. I hate to hear him talk that way. If I had not seen him act, I would never think that his art was sacred to him or that he realized what his responsibility to his generation was.
But as much as he puzzles me, she puzzles me more. I go there a great deal and, in a way, she is much easier to talk with than him. She listens beautifully. It is the funniest thing how she does look like Botticelli's “Spring”—the Primavera, they call it. That picture has sort of haunted me, and the other day when I was in town I bought a photograph of it and pinned it upon my wall. It's the queerest thing about it—Sylvia, you can't call her pretty and yet you can't help looking at her. You simply can't forget her. She looks at you with such a bold air and yet she is not the least bit ashamed of being bold, which is certainly Mrs. Raikes to at. Another thing that's funny. When I look at the picture, I'm always thinking of Mrs. Raikes. When I look at Mrs. Raikes, I'm always thinking of the picture.
But though I like her a little better, I don't approve of her any more than I did. I mean she is not my idea of a loyal wife, especially when it is her privilege to be married to a great genius. For instance, Sylvia, if you were the wife of a man like that, wouldn't you consider it your duty—to say nothing of an inestimable privilege—to stand in the wings ready to give him a cooling draught when he came off? Why, Sylvia, I should just dog his footsteps, trying to save that great mind the wear and tear of daily existence. But she doesn't do anything for him. She doesn't even go to the theatre with him. All she does is read and paint. Just as if it were not her duty to lose any thought of personal ambition and pour it all into him. That's what I'd do, Sylvia.
O, Sylvia, my dear:
He gave me another long talk the other day. And I certainly never heard a human being knock himself as Willis Raikes did. He said that he had such a temper that he really ought not to be at large. He said that he was so fussy rehearsing that it was only one in ten actors would stay with him. He said he'd got such a reputation as a slave-driver that there were only two professional people in the whole United States who wouldn't poison him if they got the chance. But I guess I understand the artistic temperament as well as anybody. I guess there never was a genius who wasn't just like that. Think of Carlyle and Napoleon! And I guess if I was his wife, I'd just fix it so that there wouldn't be a living thing to ruffle him. I can see that Mrs. Raikes is really rather attractive in certain lights. Somehow her eyes and her skin and her hair all melt in together. And, Sylvia, she is certainly the most graceful person I ever saw. She just glides.
Illustration: “HE REACHED INTO THE BOOK-CASE AND READ THEM THE OPENING SCENE FROM 'HAMLET'”
O Sylvia
It is late—very late, but I cannot go to bed until I have taken back certain things that I have said about Mrs. Raikes. This evening Mr. Raikes got to talking about his wife, and it seems that, all along, I've been mistaken about her. You see, she's such a quiet thing and talks so little about herself that you only learn about her gradually. And a whole lot of conclusions that I jumped to are all dead wrong.
It seems that all her reading is in the line of Mr. Raikes' work. All her painting is of costumes and settings for his various productions. She's an authority on a whole lot of things. And, my dear, if you'll believe it, she made with her own hands that wonderful tiny theatre that I told you about. She makes a model of every scene of every play that he produces. Did you ever hear anything like it? As far as I can see all he has to do is to learn his part, and, of course, if you've got a good memory, that won't kill you. One thing, he does seem to appreciate all she does for him.
But of course, there are other things that a man of genius may demand of his wife. And honestly, Sylvia, she is not a woman that I could imagine him talking about his deals with—I mean all those sacred things that you cannot discuss with anybody but a kindred soul.
Sylvia, he is a very great genius. Every day of my life, I think how lucky I am to know him.
“By the way, Will, how about that little Martin girl?” Mrs. Raikes asked a little later. “She still seems to think of you as a cross between a Greek god and a medieval knight with a little of cher maître thrown in.”
“How can I help it?” her husband humorously retorted. “You know perfectly well, woman, that I'm all those critters. But one thing I will say to the credit of the little wretch—she is not stage-struck. I guess you're right, Susan, there must be something to her.”
One day late in June Phoebe came home from a call on Florence Marsh through the Maywood woods. Suddenly swift footsteps came up behind and Willis Raikes greeted her with a “How now, proud Maisie in the woods?”
“I've walked from Rosedale,” Phoebe said, “I simply could not resist these trees.”
“Ive walked from Seriph,” Raikes said. His brow was overcast and he seemed at once to fall into one of his dark meditations. For an instant, Phoebe had the feeling that it was one thing to talk with a great genius in the presence of his wife or your mother and quite another to sustain a téte-à-téte. She experienced the discomfort, rare with her, of trying to find something to say.
But before she could speak, they came out of one section of the woods onto a railroad crossing. The gates were down, and a locomotive was slowly moving down on the track. Phoebe saw Raikes' eyes narrow to a look of intense observation as he watched. The engine stopped, and suddenly, without a word, Mr. Raikes darted under the gates.
“Seems to me that's a new kind of link-motion,” Phoebe heard him call to the engineer.
“Yes,” the man drawled. “It's a freak patent thing being tried out. Inventor claims great flexibility. Works badly, though, seems to me.” He leaned out of the cab-window and they entered into a discussion which involved the use of terms inexplicably technical.
“Too complicated, anyway,” the engineer said finally. He opened the throttle and backed. Raikes joined Phoebe, the gates went up, they plunged into the Maywood woods again.
“Its a marvelous day,” Raikes said.
Phoebe heard in his voice and saw in his aspect that his mood had changed. Vaguely it came to her, as he stood for an instant smiling at the universe, that it would be hard to say which radiated the most warmth or light. For an instant, Phoebe entertained the preposterous idea that his talk with the locomotive engineer had unloosed all these spirits.
The footpath narrowed often so that they had to go in single file. But always on both sides the trees, blazing with a delicate green fire, screened them filmily from the rest of the world. Again and again, Mr. Raikes' swift glance stabbed through this living veil. As often, it came back to Phoebe's face.
It was one of those days when all that was girl in her seemed to have run to the surface, seemed to tint her shiningly with the iridescence of youth. Her hair cascaded in mutinous ringlets over her ears and onto her neck. The wistful look which often characterized her seemed to deepen the misty gray of her eyes, seemed to droop her lips to their sweetest look of innocence. And her chatter, full of its violent girl-vocabulary—all italics and superlatives—seemed the fitting song of so birdlike a creature. With her hero in the heaven of a happy mood, all was well with Phoebe's world. She talked as she had never talked before. She unburdened her mind of dozens of girlish ambitions, scores of girlish hopes, hundreds of girlish deals. Raikes listened with his lips curved to the smile that took ten years off his age. Was it the spring in the liquid air, the spring in the green earth, the spring in the creature at his side? Suddenly he, too, began to talk as, twenty-four hours before, he would never have fancied himself talking to Phoebe.
“It is curious,” he said apropos of Phoebe's complaint in vocal italics of the disillusions of life, “how few of us are captains of our fate. Once I tried to count up the people I know who are doing what they started out to do. I don't know more than three. Take my own case! I am successful. I have achieved more fame than I deserve. I have acquired more money than I've earned. I've reached the point where I can do what I want, when I want and how I want. And still I haven't yet done the thing I most want to do.”
Illustration: “SUDDENLY SWIFT FOOTSTEPS CAME UP BEHIND AND WILLIS RAIKES GREETED HER WITH A 'HOW NOW, PROUD MAISIE IN THE WOODS!'”
He stopped and looked reflectively at Phoebe. Phoebe did not speak. But she turned upon him eyes that were those of the fawn the first time she is startled.
“You see I was pitchforked into this acting business. My father and mother acted before me and their mother and father before them. Oh, well, you know it all. I went on when I was a baby in arms and I've kept going on ever since. It never occurred to me to do anything else. As far as my personal tastes and ambitions are concerned, I've been brought up in captivity. You know some of the lions in the Bronx Zoo know nothing about the forest—they've never seen it. I've never seen it either. Why I never had a chance to find out whether there was anything else in me until I was a grown man—until I was established in my profession and no other trade open to me. And yet I should have known—if there'd been anybody to tell me. What do you suppose my terrible secret ambition is?”
Phoebe's “What?” barely lifted above a whisper. But so might they speak for whom the veil over the holy of holies is about to be rent.
“It's to own a machine-shop—to have a place where I can work and experiment and invent. I shall retire from the stage in five years and then I shall have one. You see, when I was a child,” his manner took a leap further into confidence, “I picked up somewhere a book called 'Ure's Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences.' I read it out of its covers. How I used to pore over the accounts of colliery-engines and ore-crushers! Then, as I grew older, I studied machinery whenever and wherever I could. It was fascinating to me to work on the pitch of cog-wheels. I used to make little Howe trusses with matches and sealing-wax and thread. I'd buy the rough-cast parts of little model horizontal engines and finish them up myself, filing them smooth, drilling holes, cutting threads. I carried a little soldering outfit about with me in a box. I tried once to melt a five-dollar gold-piece to make a ring for Susan with a blow-pipe and a piece of hollowed charcoal. Even the faucet of my sink would have a little turbine water-motor attached to it. It was an awful inconvenience.” He laughed a little. “I always had to unscrew it to wash. I used it to polish castings, drill holes, almost to brush my teeth.”
He stopped for an absent-minded, retrospective moment. Phoebe's eyes had gone from his face. She was looking straight ahead. Her under lip drooped, but her eyes were very wide.
“As I began to produce plays, I invented things for them. That interested me more than anything connected with the production. I invented an automatic galloper—you know what that is—something to produce the effect of galloping off-stage. I invented an echoing-device. The play required a clear, audible echo and I practised for months with all sorts of tin sounding-boards and reflectors. For a long time I've been working on reversible scenery to save expressage and a new way of presenting cloud-effects when there isn't room behind the flat for the moving-picture machine. When I get a chance to go to the theatre on the road what do you suppose I do?”
Phoebe did not answer. Her tooth gnawed her lip.
Raikes went on with the pleased chuckle of a small boy who appreciates his own naughtiness. “Not for me Bernhardt or Coquelin, Irving or Hare, Rejane or Terry. But if there is a magician show, I'm there in the front row. In fact, the 'Magician's Monthly' and 'Parlor Tricks' are as good reading as I know.”
“Thank goodness,” Mr. Martin said, a few days later, “Phoebe has stopped talking about Raikes. Mother, to tell you the truth, I was beginning to get a little worried— If Raikes wasn't such a gentleman— It didn't seem to bother you any, though.”
“You did!” Mr. Martin stared at the woman who, after twenty-odd years of wifehood, could flash a new aspect. “You never told me that.”
“No,” Mrs. Martin said dryly. “Phoebe won't tell her husband until she's gray-headed.”
“Oh, Will,” Mrs. Raikes said about the same time, “I had a call from Phoebe Martin this afternoon. She was really very interesting. And pretty, too. But you certainly have disillusioned her. She said she'd come to make an explanation and an apology. She said that at first she had an idea that I was a selfish, idle woman who really stood in the way of her husband's career. But things had happened to make her see it all in a different light. She knew now that I was the most devoted wife in the world. About fifteen minutes of this. Then to my intense surprise she walked over to me, gave me a little hug and said, 'You're perfectly beautiful, too, and I just love to look at you. I didn't see it at first, but you are!' and marched out. Now what in the world did you do to her? And was it very violent? And will it last?”
Mr. Raikes reached for the “Patent Office Report for the Year 1907.” He smiled, but his smile was a little acerb.
“It will last,” he said. “It was not violent. I only bared my secret soul to her.”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1970, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 53 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
Public domainPublic domainfalsefalse