Wild Wings | Page 2

It was marriage that had been the catastrophe--the fatal
blunder. Marriage and domesticity for a woman like that! It was
asinine--worse--criminal! It ought to have been forbidden by law. And
the stubbornness of her! After all these years, remembering, Max
Hempel could have groaned aloud. Every stage manager in New York,
including himself, had been ready to bankrupt himself offering her
what in those days were almost incredible contracts to prevent her from
the suicidal folly on which she was bent. But to no avail. She had
laughed at them all, laughed and quit the stage at six and twenty, and a
few years later her beauty and genius were still--in death. What a waste!
What a damnation waste!
At this point in his animadversions Max Hempel again looked at the
girl in the newspaper, the girl who was the product of the very marriage
he had been cursing, LaRue's only daughter. If there had been no
marriage, neither would there have been this glorious, radiant, vividly
alive young creature. Men called Laura LaRue dead. But was she? Was
she not tremendously alive in the life of her lovely young daughter?
Was it not he, and the other childless ones who had treated matrimony
as the one supreme mistake, that would soon be very much dead, dead
past any resurrection?

Pshaw! He was getting sentimental. He wasn't here for sentiment. He
was here for cold, hard business. He was taking this confounded
journey to witness an amateur performance of a Shakespeare play,
when he loathed traveling in hot weather, detested amateur
performances of anything, particularly of Shakespeare, on the millionth
of a chance that Antoinette Holiday might be possessed of a tithe of her
mother's talent and might eventually be starred as the new ingénue he
was in need of, afar off, so to speak. It was Carol Clay herself who had
warned him. Carol was wonderful--would always be wonderful. But
time passes. There would come a season when the public would begin
to count back and remember that Carol had been playing ingénue parts
already for over a decade. There must always be youth--fresh, flaming
youth in the offing. That was the stage and life.
As for this Antoinette Holiday girl, he had none too much hope. Max
Hempel never hoped much on general principles, so far as potential
stars were concerned. He had seen too many of them go off fizz bang
into nothingness, like rockets. It was more than likely he was on a false
trail, that people who had seen the girl act in amateur things had
exaggerated her ability. He trusted no judgment but his own, which was
perhaps one of the reasons why he was one of the greatest living stage
managers. It was more than likely she had nothing but a pretty, shallow
little talent for play acting and no notion under the sun of giving up
society or matrimony or what-not for the devilish hard work of a stage
career. Very likely there was some young galoot waiting even now, to
whisk Laura LaRue's daughter off the stage before she ever got on.
Moreover there was always her family to cope with, dyed in the wool
New Englanders at that, no doubt with the heavy Puritan mortmain
upon them, narrow as a shoe string, circumscribed as a duck pond,
walled in by ghastly respectability. Ten to one, if the girl had talent and
ambition, they would smother these things in her, balk her at every turn.
They had regarded Ned Holiday's marriage to Laura a misalliance, he
recalled. There had been quite a to-do about it at the time. Good God! It
had been a misalliance all right, but not as they reckoned it. It had not
been considered suitable for a Holiday to marry an actress. Probably it
would be considered more unsuitable for a Holiday to be an actress.

Suitable! Bah! The question was not whether the career was fit for the
girl, but whether the girl could measure up to the career. And irascibly,
unreasonably indignant as if he had already been contending in
argument with legions of mythical, over-respectable Holidays, Max
Hempel whipped his paper open to another page, a page that told of a
drive somewhere on the western front that had failed miserably, for this
was the year nineteen hundred and sixteen and there was a war going
on, "on the other side." Oh, typically American phrase!
Meanwhile the young man, too, had stopped staring at Antoinette
Holiday's pictured face and was staring out of the window instead at the
fast flying landscape. He had really no need anyway to look at a picture
of Tony. His head and heart were full of them. He had been storing
them up for over eight years and it was a