The Gay Cockade | Page 5

out of his life. Some
of them died, some of them resigned, some of them worked on, plump
or wizened parodies of their former selves. I was stouter than ever, and
stiffer, and the top of Duncan's head was a shining cone. And the one
interesting thing in our otherwise dreary days was Jimmie.
"You're such darling old dears," was his pleasant way of putting it.
But Duncan dug up the truth for me. "We knew him before he wrote.
He gets back to that when he is with us."
I had grown to hate Elise. It was not a pleasant emotion, and I am not
sure that she really deserved it. But Duncan hated her, too. "You're
right," he said one day when we had lunched with Jimmie; "she's
sucked him dry." Jimmie had been unusually silent. He had laughed
little. He had tapped the table with his finger, and had kept his eyes on
his finger. He had been absent-minded. "She has sucked him dry," said
Duncan, with great heat.
But she hadn't. That was the surprising thing. Just as we were all giving
up hope of Jimmie's proving himself something more than a hack, he
did the great thing and the wonderful thing that years ago Elise had
prophesied. His play, "The Gay Cockade," was accepted by a New
York manager, and after the first night the world went wild about it.
I had helped Jimmie with the name. I had spoken once of youth as a
gay cockade. "That's a corking title," Jimmie had said, and had written
it in his note-book.

When his play was put in rehearsal, Duncan and I were there to see. We
took our month's leave, traveled to New York, and stayed at an
old-fashioned boarding-house in Washington Square. Every day we
went to the theatre. Elise was always there, looking younger than ever
in the sables bought with Jimmie's advance royalty, and with various
gowns and hats which were the by-products of his best-sellers.
The part of the heroine of "The Gay Cockade" was taken by Ursula
Simms. She was, as those of you who have seen her know, a Rosalind
come to life. With an almost boyish frankness she combined feminine
witchery. She had glowing red hair, a voice that was gay and fresh, a
temper that was hot. She galloped through the play as Jimmie had
meant that she should gallop in that first poor draft which he had read
to us in Albemarle, and it was when I saw Ursula in rehearsal that I
realized what Jimmie had done--he had embodied in his heroine all the
youth that he had lost--she stood for everything that Elise had stolen
from him--for the wildness, the impetuosity, the passion which swept
away prudence and went neck to nothing to fulfilment.
Indeed, the whole play partook of the madness of youth. It bubbled
over. Everybody galloped to a rollicking measure. We laughed until we
cried. But there was more than laughter in it. There was the melancholy
which belongs to tender years set in exquisite contrast to the prevailing
mirth.
Jimmie had a great deal to do with the rehearsals. Several times he
challenged Ursula's reading of the part.
"You must not give your kisses with such ease," he told her upon one
occasion; "the girl in the play has never been kissed."
She shrugged her shoulders and ignored him. Again he remonstrated.
"She's frank and free," he said. "Make her that. Make her that. Men
must fight for her favors."
She came to it at last, helped by that Rosalind-like quality in herself.
She was young, as he had wanted Elise to be, clean-hearted,
joyous--girlhood at its best.

Gradually Jimmie ceased to suggest. He would sit beside us in the
dimness of the empty auditorium, and watch her as if he drank her in.
Now and then he would laugh a little, and say, under his breath: "How
did I ever write it? How did it ever happen?"
Elise, on the other side of him, said, at last, "I knew you could do it,
Jimmie."
"You thought I could do great things. You never knew I could
do--this--"
It was toward the end of the month that Duncan said to me one night as
we rode home on the top of a 'bus, "You don't suppose that he--"
"Elise thinks it," I said. "It's waking her up."
Elise and Jimmie had been married fifteen years, and had never had a
honeymoon, not in the sense that Jimmie wanted it--an adventure in
romance, to some spot where they could forget the world of work, the
world of sordid things, the world that was making Jimmie old. Every
summer Jimmie had asked for it, and always Elise had said, "Wait."
But now it was