“The meeting of the committee this morning was to decide on our first production. There was some debate. Miss Hammerton’s drama”—he bowed in the direction of the trousered lady—“received serious consideration, but since one of our benefactors is opposed to representations of the class war, we have postponed consideration of Miss Hammerton’s powerful play until later.”
At this point Josephine was startled to hear Miss Hammerton say “Boo!” in a large, angry voice, give a series of groans, varied as if to express the groans of many people—then clap on a soft gray hat and stride angrily from the room.
“Elsie takes it hard,” said the chairman. “Unhappily, the benefactor I spoke of, whose identity you have doubtless guessed, is adamant on the subject—a thorough reactionary. So your committee have unanimously voted that our production shall be ‘Race Riot’, by John Boynton Bailey.”
Josephine gasped congratulations. In the applause the girl with the furtive eyes brought her chair over and sat down beside Josephine.
“You live at Lake Forest,” she said challengingly.
“In the summer.”
“Do you know Emily Kohl?”
“No, I don’t.”
“I thought you were from Lake Forest.”
“I live at Lake Forest,” said Josephine, still pleasantly, “but I don’t know Emily Kohl.”
Rebuffed only for a moment, the girl continued, “I don’t suppose all this means much to you.”
“It’s a sort of dramatic club, isn’t it?” said Josephine.
“Dramatic club! Oh, gosh!” cried the girl. “Did you hear that? She thinks it’s a dramatic club, like Miss Pinkerton’s school.” In a moment her uninfectious laughter died away, and she turned to the playwright. “How about it? Have you picked your cast?”
“Not yet,” he said shortly, annoyed at the baiting of Josephine.
“I suppose you’ll have Mrs. Fiske coming on from New York,” the girl continued. “Come on, we’re all on pins and needles. Who’s going to be in it?”
“I’ll tell you one thing, Evelyn. You’re not.”
She grew red with astonishment and anger. “Oho! When did you decide that?”
“Some time ago.”
“Oho! How about all the lines I gave you for Clare?”
“I’ll cut them tonight; there were only three. I’d rather not produce the thing than have you play Clare.”
The others were listening now.
“Far be it from me,” the girl began, her voice trembling a little, “far be it from me——”
Josephine saw that John Bailey’s face was even whiter than usual. His mouth was hard and cold. Suddenly the girl got up, cried out, “You fool!” and hurried from the room.
With this second temperamental departure a certain depression settled on those remaining; presently the meeting broke up, convoked for next day.
“Let’s take a walk,” John said to Josephine as they came out into a different afternoon; the heat had lifted with the first breeze from Lake Michigan.
“Let’s take a walk,” John suggested. “That made me sort of sick— her talking to you like that.”
“I didn’t like her, but now I’m sorry for her. Who is she?”
“She’s a newspaper woman,” he answered vaguely. “Listen. How would you like to be in this play?”
“Oh, I couldn’t—I’ve got to be in a play out at the Lake.”
“Society stuff,” he said, scornfully mimicking: “ ‘Here come the jolly, jolly golfing girls. Maybe they’ll sing us a song.’ If you want to be in this thing of mine you can have the lead.”
“But how do you know I could act?”
“Come on! With that voice of yours? Listen. The girl in the play is like you. This race riot is caused by two men, one black and one white. The black man is fed up with his black wife and in love with a high-yellow girl, and that makes him bitter, see? And the white man married too young and he’s in the same situation. When they both get their domestic affairs straightened the race riot dies down, too, see?”
“It’s very original,” said Josephine breathlessly. “Which would I be?”
“You’d be the girl the married man was in love with.”
“Is that the part that girl was going to play?”
“Yes.” He frowned, and then added, “She’s my wife.”
“Oh—you’re married?”
“I married young—like the man in my play. In one way it isn’t so bad, because neither of us believed in the old-fashioned bourgeois marriage, living in the same apartment and all. She kept her own name. But we got to hate each other anyhow.”
After the first shock was over, it did not seem so strange to Josephine that he was married; there had been a day two years before when only the conscientiousness of a rural justice had prevented Josephine from becoming Mrs. Travis de Coppet.
“We all get what’s coming to us,” he remarked.
They turned up the boulevard, passing the Blackstone, where faint dance music clung about the windows.
On the street the plate glass of a hundred cars, bound for the country or the North Shore, took the burning sunset, but the city would make shift without them, and Josephine’s imagination rested here instead of following the cars; she thought of electric fans in little restaurants with lobsters on ice in the windows, and of pearly signs glittering and revolving against the obscure, urban sky, the hot, dark sky. And pervading everything, a terribly strange, brooding mystery of roof tops and empty apartments, of white dresses in the paths of parks, and fingers for stars and faces instead of moons, and people with strange people scarcely knowing one another’s names.
A sensuous shiver went over Josephine, and she knew that the fact that John Bailey was married simply added to his attraction for her. Life broke up a little; barred and forbidden doors swung open, unmasking enchanted corridors. Was it that which drew her father, some call to adventure that she had from him?
“I wish there was some place we could go and be alone together,” John Bailey said, and suddenly, “I wish I had a car.”
But they were already alone, she thought. She had spun him out a background now that was all his—the summer streets of the city. They were alone here; when he kissed her, finally, they would be less alone. That would be his time; this was hers. Their mutually clinging arms pulled her close to his tall side.
A little later, sitting in the back of a movie with the yellow clock in the corner creeping fatally toward six, she leaned into the hollow of his rounded shoulder and his cool white cheek bent down to hers.
“I’m letting myself in for a lot of suffering,” he whispered. She saw his black eyes thinking in the darkness and met them reassuringly with hers.
“I take things pretty hard,” he went on. “And what in hell could we ever be to each other?”
She didn’t answer. Instead she let the familiar lift and float and flow of love close around them, pulling him back from his far-away uniqueness with the pressure of her hand.
“What will your wife think if I take that part in your play?” she whispered.
At the same moment Josephine’s wayward parent was being met by her mother at the Lake Forest Station.
“It’s deathly hot in town,” he said. “What a day!”
“Did you see her?”
“Yes, and after one look I took her to the La Grange for lunch. I wanted to preserve a few shreds of my reputation.”
“Is it settled?”
“Yes. She’s agreed to leave Will alone and stop using his name for three hundred a month for life. I wired your highly discriminating brother in Hawaii that he can come home.”
“Poor Will,” sighed Mrs. Perry.
III
Three days later, in the cool of the evening, Josephine spoke to her father as he came out on the veranda.
“Daddy, do you want to back a play?”
“I never thought about it. I’d always thought I’d like to write one. Is Jenny McRae’s vaudeville on the rocks?”
Josephine ticked impatiently with her tongue. “I’m not even going to be in the vaudeville. I’m talking about an attempt to do something fine. What I want to ask is: What would be your possible objections to backing it?”
“My objections?”
“What would they be?”
“You haven’t given me time to drum up any.”
“I should think you’d want to do something decent with your money.”
“What’s the play?” He sat down beside her, and she moved just slightly away from him.
“Mother knows some of the patronesses and it’s absolutely all right. But the man who was going to be the backer is very narrow and wants to make a lot of changes that would ruin the whole thing; so they want to find another backer.”
“What’s it about?”
“Oh, the play’s all right, don’t you worry,” she assured him. “The man that wrote it is still alive, but the play is a part of English literature.”
He considered. “Well, if you’re going to be in it, and your mother thinks it all right, I’d put up a couple of hundred.”
“A couple of hundred!” she exclaimed. “A man who goes around throwing away his money like you do! They need at least a thousand.”
“Throwing away my money?” he repeated. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about.” It seemed to her
