The Gay Cockade | Page 6

Elise who began to plan. "When your play is produced,
we'll run away somewhere. Do you remember the place you always
talked about--up in the hills?"
He looked at her through his round glasses. "I can't get away from
this"--he waved his hand toward the stage.
"If it's a success you can, Jimmie."
"It will be a success. Ursula Simms is a wonder. Look at her, Elise.
Look at her!"
Duncan and I could look at nothing else. As many times as I had seen
her in the part, I came to it always eagerly. It was her great
scene--where the girl, breaking free from all that has bound her, takes
the hand of her vagabond lover and goes forth, leaving behind wealth

and a marriage of distinction, that she may wander across the moors
and down on the sands, with the wild wind in her face, the stars for a
canopy!
It tugged at our hearts. It would tug, we knew, at the heart of any
audience. It was the human nature in us all which responded. Not one
of us but would have broken bonds. Oh, youth, youth! Is there anything
like it in the whole wide world?
I do not think that it tugged at the heart of Elise. Her heart was not like
that. It was a stay-at-home heart. A workaday-world heart. Elise would
never under any circumstance have gone forth with a vagabond on a
wild night.
But here was Ursula doing it every day. On the evening of the first
dress-rehearsal she wore clothes that showed her sense of fitness. As if
in casting off conventional restraints, she renounced conventional attire;
she came down to her lover wrapped in a cloak of the deep-purple
bloom of the heather of the moor, and there was a pheasant's feather in
her cap.
"May you never regret it, my dear, my dear," said the lover on the
stage.
"I shall love you for a million years," said Ursula, and we felt that she
would, and that love was eternal, and that any woman might have it if
she would put her hand in her lover's and run away with him on a wild
night!
And it was the genius of Jimmie Harding that made us feel that the
thing could be done. He sat forward in his chair, his arms on the back
of the seat in front of him. "Jove!" he kept saying under his breath. "It's
the real thing. It's the real thing--"
When the scene was over, he went on the stage and stood by Ursula.
Elise from her seat watched them. Ursula had taken off the cap with the
pheasant's feather. Her glorious hair shone like copper, her hand was on
her hip, her little swagger matched the swagger that we remembered in

the old Jimmie. I wondered if Elise remembered.
* * * * *
I am not sure what made Ursula care for Jimmie Harding. He was no
longer a figure for romance. But she did care. It was, perhaps, that she
saw in him the fundamental things which belonged to both of them, and
which did not belong to Elise.
As the days went on I was sorry for Elise. I should never have believed
that I could be sorry, but I was. Jimmie was always punctiliously polite
to her. But he was only that.
"She's getting what she deserves," Duncan said, but I felt that she was,
perhaps, getting more than she deserved. For, after all, it was she who
had kept Jimmie at it, and it was her keeping him at it which had
brought success.
Neither Duncan nor I could tell how Jimmie felt about Ursula. But the
thought of her troubled my sleep. Stripped of her art, she was not in the
least the heroine of Jimmie's play. She was of coarser clay, commoner.
And Jimmie was fine. The fear I had was that he might clothe her with
the virtues which he had created, and the thought, as I have said,
troubled me.
At last Duncan and I had to go home, although we promised to return
for the opening night. Ursula gave a farewell supper for us. She lived
alone with a housekeeper and maid. Her apartment was furnished in
good taste, with, perhaps, a touch of over-emphasis. The table had
unshaded purple candles and heather in glass dishes. Ursula wore
woodland green, with a chaplet of heather about her glorious hair. Elise
was in white with pearls. She was thirty-five, but she did not look it.
Ursula was older, but she would always be in a sense ageless, as such
women are--one would thrill to Sara Bernhardt were she seventeen or
seventy.
Jimmie seemed to have dropped the years from him. He was very
confident