Back-Trailers from the Middle Border | Page 9

much hesitation and debate) to sign the contract which his company desired. "This ends your troubles," he genially remarked as we came to terms.
My hopes seem comic to me now, but his enthusiastic report combined with Mark Sullivan's check in payment for the remaining chapters of A Son of the Middle Border so lightened my financial world that I wired an exultant message to my wife "Our skies are clearing Don't worry any more " And in a letter of the same date I explained in detail the glorious possibilities of this contract and said.
"Mark Sullivan thinks it almost a necessity for me to establish a home in New York. He thinks I should be in close cooperation with Colonel Brady in working out the five-year picture program on which we have started. He thinks I should be here for other literary reasons. We can now safely count on buying a place here. Put our house on sale, and bring the children East at the earliest possible moment. I'll have a roof ready for them."
Such childlike trust in the promise of a motion picture firm may cause my readers to smile, but I was not alone in a motor of her own. Indeed she frequently said, "Some day I'm going to own my own horses and ride in the Park--"
Through all this delicate adjustment between life in our little flat and visits to the palaces of our friends, I bore witness to the lovely restraint, the beautiful reasonableness of both my daughters, for while the school in which they were enrolled was expensive, and most of their classmates came from homes of luxury, I never heard either of my children complain of a made-over gown or a retrimmed ha Occasionally Mary Isabel alluded to the fact that they were the only members of their class who walked to and from the school, and whimsically admitted that in answer to the question, "Where is your car?" she had replied, "Ofer on Madison Avenue," leaving her questioner to make hr own guess as to whether the vehicle alluded to was a parked limousine or merely a street car. She remained without envy and without complaint.
They both had prominent parts in the dramatics of the school and whenever they played, their mother and I were always in the audience. Sometimes I was the only doting father present, but that did not trouble me To have failed of attendance on such occasions would have been a sad dereliction of duty. That my presence was essential to the happiness of my girls was warrant enough for me.
They both loved to have me read Shakespeare to them, and with the memory of Edwin Booth's interpretation to guide me, I was able to characterize Brutus, Hamlet and Othello in such wise that they listened with absorbed attention, their shining eyes and glowing cheeks attesting their delight Afterward I overheard them declaiming some of the lines, just as I used to do in Boston after hearing Booth.
I also read Tennyson and Browning with them, and our of leaving, found allurement in the thought of seeing wondrous New York with Daddy.
She adored Chicago. To her it was a vast and splendid capital, possessing limitless gardens and lofty palaces. It was a place of towers whose parapets looked out on shoreless seas and across spaces inhabited by roaring friendly demons. She rejoiced in the "White City" and the parks glorious with bloom which no other part of her world could equal. The snows which fell in winter, the winds which whistled upon the lips of our chimney, and the moon riding among the stars above our roof were of sweetest charm to her. To go east on a visit was agreeable, but to abandon forever this magical world, to give up her playmates and her familiar walks and walls, amounted to a breakup in her world.
'What about West Salem? Shall we never see the old homestead again? Can't we ever picnic on the hill or camp in the coulees again? Must we say good-by to 'The Nest in the Tree,' and the doll's house under the maples?"
So she queried and her mother answered whilst I, moving painfully on lame legs, wrought each morning in my New York hotel on my serial, and discussed each evening the scenario of the four novels which Colonel Brady had chosen for the screen The letters which my wife and I exchanged at this time bring a lump in my throat as I go over them twelve years later. Mine were so boyishly confident, so urgent, so lyrical, hers so deeply pathetic by reason of their repeated expressions of pain and hesitation.
Early in December, Sullivan asked me to return to Chicago to do some special editorial work for him, and this enabled me to spend