said he. "The rain"s stopped. Let"s have breakfast. Then--a new deal--with everything to gain and nothing to lose. It"s a great advantage to be in a position where you"ve got nothing to lose!"
CHAPTER XVI
BURLINGHAM found for her a comfortable room in a flat in West Chestnut Street--a respectable middle-cla.s.s neighborhood with three churches in full view and the spires of two others visible over the housetops. Her landlady was Mrs. Redding, a simple-hearted, deaf old widow with bright kind eyes beaming guilelessness through steel-framed spectacles. Mrs. Redding had only recently been reduced to the necessity of letting a room.
She stated her moderate price--seven dollars a week for room and board--as if she expected to be arrested for attempted extortion. "I give good meals," she hastened to add. "I do the cooking myself--and buy the best. I"m no hand for canned stuff.
As for that there cold storage, it"s no better"n slow poison, and not so terrible slow at that. Anything your daughter wants I"ll give her."
"She"s not my daughter," said Burlingham, and it was his turn to be red and fl.u.s.tered. "I"m simply looking after her, as she"s alone in the world. I"m going to live somewhere else. But I"ll come here for meals, if you"re willing, ma"am."
"I--I"d have to make that extry, I"m afraid," pleaded Mrs. Redding.
"Rather!" exclaimed Burlingham. "I eat like a pair of Percherons."
"How much did you calculate to pay?" inquired the widow. Her one effort at price fixing, though entirely successful, had exhausted her courage.
Burlingham was clear out of his cla.s.s in those idyllic days of protector of innocence. He proceeded to be more than honest.
"Oh, say five a week."
"Gracious! That"s too much," protested she. "I hate to charge a body for food, somehow. It don"t seem to be accordin" to what G.o.d tells us. But I don"t see no way out."
"I"ll come for five not a cent less," insisted Burlingham. "I want to feel free to eat as much as I like." And it was so arranged. Away he went to look up his acquaintances, while Susan sat listening to the widow and trying to convince her that she and Mr. Burlingham didn"t want and couldn"t possibly eat all the things she suggested as suitable for a nice supper. Susan had been learning rapidly since she joined the theatrical profession. She saw why this fine old woman was getting poorer steadily, was arranging to spend her last years in an almshouse.
What a queer world it was! What a strange way for a good G.o.d to order things! The better you were, the worse off you were. No doubt it was Burlingham"s lifelong goodness of heart as shown in his generosity to her, that had kept him down. It was the same way with her dead mother--she had been loving and trusting, had given generously without thought of self, with generous confidence in the man she loved--and had paid with reputation and life.
She compelled Burlingham to take what was left of her fifty dollars. "You wouldn"t like to make me feel mean," was the argument she used. "I must put in what I"ve got--the same as you do. Now, isn"t that fair?" And as he was dead broke and had been unable to borrow, he did not oppose vigorously.
She a.s.sumed that after a day or two spent in getting his bearings he would take her with him as he went looking. When she suggested it, he promptly vetoed it. "That isn"t the way business is done in the profession," said he. "The star--you"re the star--keeps in the background, and her manager--that"s me does the hustling."
She had every reason for believing this; but as the days pa.s.sed with no results, sitting about waiting began to get upon her nerves. Mrs. Redding had the remnant of her dead husband"s library, and he had been a man of broad taste in literature. But Susan, ardent reader though she was, could not often lose herself in books now. She was too impatient for realities, too anxious about them.
Burlingham remained equable, neither hopeful nor gloomy; he made her feel that he was strong, and it gave her strength. Thus she was not depressed when on the last day of their week he said: "I think we"d better push on to Cincinnati tomorrow. There"s nothing here, and we"ve got to get placed before our cash gives out. In Cincinnati there are a dozen places to one in this snide town."
The idea of going to Cincinnati gave her a qualm of fear; but it pa.s.sed away when she considered how she had dropped out of the world. "They think I"m dead," she reflected. "Anyhow, I"d never be looked for among the kind of people I"m in with now."
The past with which she had broken seemed so far away and so dim to her that she could not but feel it must seem so to those who knew her in her former life. She had such a sense of her own insignificance, now that she knew something of the vastness and business of the world, that she was without a suspicion of the huge scandal and excitement her disappearance had caused in Sutherland.
To Cincinnati they went next day by the L. and N. and took two tiny rooms in the dingy old Walnut Street House, at a special rate--five dollars a week for the two, as a concession to the profession. "We"ll eat in cheap restaurants and spread our capital out," said Burlingham. "I want you to get placed _right_, not just placed." He bought a box of blacking and a brush, instructed her in the subtle art of making a front--an art whereof he was past master, as Susan had long since learned.
"Never let yourself look poor or act poor, until you simply have to throw up the sponge," said he. "The world judges by appearances. Put your first money and your last into clothes.
And never--never--tell a hard-luck story. Always seem to be doing well and comfortably looking out for a chance to do better. The whole world runs from seedy people and whimperers."
"Am I--that way?" she asked nervously.
"Not a bit," declared he. "The day you came up to me in Carrollton I knew you were playing in the hardest kind of hard luck because of what I had happened to see and hear--and guess.
But you weren"t looking for pity--and that was what I liked. And it made me feel you had the stuff in you. I"d not waste breath teaching a whiner or a cheap skate. You couldn"t be cheap if you tried. The reason I talk to you about these things is so you"ll learn to put the artistic touches by instinct into what you do."
"You"ve taken too much trouble for me," said the girl.
"Don"t you believe it, my dear," laughed he. "If I can do with you what I hope--I"ve an instinct that if I win out for you, I"ll come into my own at last."
"You"ve taught me a lot," said she.
"I wonder," replied he. "That is, I wonder how much you"ve learned. Perhaps enough to keep you--not to keep from being knocked down by fate, but to get on your feet afterward. I hope so--I hope so."
They dropped coffee, bought milk by the bottle, he smuggling it to their rooms disguised as a roll of newspapers. They carried in rolls also, and cut down their restaurant meals to supper which they got for twenty-five cents apiece at a bakery restaurant in Seventh Street. There is a way of resorting to these little economies--a sn.o.bbish, self-despairing way--that makes them sordid and makes the person indulging in them sink lower and lower. But Burlingham could not have taken that way.
He was the adventurer born, was a hardy seasoned campaigner who had never looked on life in the sn.o.b"s way, had never felt the impulse to apologize for his defeats or to grow haughty over his successes. Susan was an apt pupil; and for the career that lay before her his instructions were invaluable. He was teaching her how to keep the craft afloat and shipshape through the worst weather that can sweep the sea of life.
"How do you make yourself look always neat and clean?" he asked.
She confessed: "I wash out my things at night and hang them on the inside of the shutters to dry. They"re ready to wear again in the morning."
"Getting on!" cried he, full of admiration. "They simply can"t down us, and they might as well give up trying."
"But I don"t look neat," sighed she. "I can"t iron."
"No--that"s the devil of it," laughed he. He pulled aside his waistcoat and she saw he was wearing a d.i.c.key. "And my cuffs are pinned in," he said. "I have to be careful about raising and lowering my arms."
"Can"t I wash out some things for you?" she said, then hurried on to put it more strongly. "Yes, give them to me when we get back to the hotel."
"It does help a man to feel he"s clean underneath. And we"ve got nothing to waste on laundries."
"I wish I hadn"t spent that fifteen cents to have my heels straightened and new steels put in them." She had sat in a cobbler"s while this repair to the part of her person she was most insistent upon had been effected.
He laughed. "A good investment, that," said he. "I"ve been noticing how you always look nice about the feet. Keep it up.
The surest sign of a sloven and a failure, of a moral, mental, and physical no-good is down-at-the-heel. Always keep your heels straight, Lorna."
And never had he given her a piece of advice more to her liking.
She thought she knew now why she had always been so particular about her boots and shoes, her slippers and her stockings. He had given her a new confidence in herself--in a strength within her somewhere beneath the weakness she was always seeing and feeling.
Not until she thought it out afterward did she realize what they were pa.s.sing through, what frightful days of failure he was enduring. He acted like the steady-nerved gambler at life that he was. He was not one of those more or less weak losers who have to make desperate efforts to conceal a fainting heart. His heart was not fainting. He simply played calmly on, feeling that the next throw was as likely to be for as against him. She kept close to her room, walking about there--she had never been much of a sitter--thinking, practicing the new songs he had got for her--character songs in which he trained her as well as he could without music or costume or any of the accessories. He also had an idea for a church scene, with her in a choir boy"s costume, singing the most moving of the simple religious songs to organ music. She from time to time urged him to take her on the rounds with him. But he stood firm, giving always the same reason of the custom in the profession. Gradually, perhaps by some form of that curious process of infiltration that goes on between two minds long in intimate contact, the conviction came to her that the reason he alleged was not his real reason; but as she had absolute confidence in him she felt that there was some good reason or he would not keep her in the background--and that his silence about it must be respected. So she tried to hide from him how weary and heartsick inaction was making her, how hard it was for her to stay alone so many hours each day.
As he watched her closely, it soon dawned on him that something was wrong, and after a day or so he worked out the explanation.
He found a remedy--the reading room of the public library where she could make herself almost content the whole day long.
He began to have a haggard look, and she saw he was sick, was keeping up his strength with whisky. "It"s only this infernal summer cold I caught in the smashup," he explained. "I can"t shake it, but neither can it get me down. I"d not dare fall sick. What"d become of _us_?"
She knew that "us" meant only herself. Her mind had been aging rapidly in those long periods of unbroken reflection. To develop a human being, leave him or her alone most of the time; it is too much company, too little time to digest and a.s.similate, that keep us thoughtless and unformed until life is half over. She astonished him by suddenly announcing one evening:
"I am a drag on you. I"m going to take a place in a store."
He affected an indignation so artistic that it ought to have been convincing. "I"m ashamed of you!" he cried. "I see you"re losing your nerve."
This was ingenious, but it did not succeed. "You can"t deceive me any longer," was her steady answer. "Tell me honest--couldn"t you have got something to do long ago, if it hadn"t been for trying to do something for me?"
"Sure," replied he, too canny to deny the obvious. "But what has that to do with it? If I"d had a living offer, I"d have taken it. But at my age a man doesn"t dare take certain kinds of places. It"d settle him for life. And I"m playing for a really big stake and I"ll win. When I get what I want for you, we"ll make as much money a month as I could make a year. Trust me, my dear."
It was plausible; and her "loss of nerve" was visibly aggravating his condition--the twitching of hands and face, the terrifying brightness of his eyes, of the color in the deep hollows under his cheek bones. But she felt that she must persist. "How much money have we got?" she asked.