MOSTLY TONY
Among the voluble, excited, commencement-bound
crowd that boarded the Northampton train at Springfield
two male passengers were conspicuous for their silence
as they sat absorbed in their respective newspapers
which each had hurriedly purchased in transit from
train to train.
A striking enough contrast otherwise,
however, the two presented. The man next the
aisle was well past sixty, rotund of abdomen, rubicund
of countenance, beetle-browed. He was elaborately
well-groomed, almost foppish in attire, and wore the
obvious stamp of worldly success, the air of one accustomed
to giving orders and seeing them obeyed before his
eyes.
His companion and chance seat-mate
was young, probably a scant five and twenty, tall,
lean, close-knit of frame with finely chiseled, almost
ascetic features, though the vigorous chin and generous
sized mouth forbade any hint of weakness or effeminacy.
His deep-set, clear gray-blue eyes were the eyes of
youth; but they would have set a keen observer to
wondering what they had seen to leave that shadow of
unyouthful gravity upon them.
It happened that both men the
elderly and the young had their papers
folded at identically the same page, and both were
studying intently the face of the lovely, dark-eyed
young girl who smiled out of the duplicate printed
sheets impartially at both.
The legend beneath the cut explained
that the dark-eyed young beauty was Miss Antoinette
Holiday, who would play Rosalind that night in the
Smith College annual senior dramatics. The interested
reader was further enlightened to the fact that Miss
Holiday was the daughter of the late Colonel Holiday
and Laura LaRue, a well known actress of a generation
ago, and that the daughter inherited the gifts as well
as the beauty of her famous mother, and was said to
be planning to follow the stage herself, having made
her debut as the charming heroine of “As You
Like It.”
The man next the aisle frowned a little
as he came to this last sentence and went back to
the perusal of the girl’s face. So this
was Laura’s daughter. Well, they had not
lied in one respect at least. She was a winner
for looks. That was plain to be seen even from
the crude newspaper reproduction. The girl was
pretty. But what else did she have beside prettiness?
That was the question. Did she have any of the
rest of it Laura’s wit, her inimitable
charm, her fire, her genius? Pshaw! No,
of course she hadn’t. Nature did not make
two Laura LaRue’s in one century. It was
too much to expect.
Lord, what a woman! And what
a future she had had and thrown away for love!
Love! That wasn’t it. She could have
had love and still kept on with her career. 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
ingenue 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 ingenue 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 considerable
collection by now and one in which he took great joy
in lonely hours in his dingy little lodging room,
or in odd moments as he went his way at his task as
a reporter for a great New York daily. The perspicuous
reader will not need to be told that the young man
was in love with Tony Holiday desperately
in love.
Desperately was the word. Slight
as Max Hempel’s hope may have been that Laura
LaRue’s daughter was to prove the ingenue he
sought, infinitely slighter was Dick Carson’s
hope of ever making Tony his wife. How could
it be otherwise? Tony Holiday was as far above
him in his own eyes as the top of Mount Tom was high
above the onion beds of the valley. The very
name he used was his only because she had given it
to him. Dick Nobody he had been. Richard
Carson he had become through grace of Tony.
Like his companion the young man went
back into the past, though not so far a journey.
As vividly as if it were but yesterday he remembered
the misery of flesh and spirit which had been his
as he stowed himself away in the hay loft in the Holiday’s
barn, that long ago summer dawn, too sick to take
another step and caring little whether he lived or
died, conscious vaguely, however, that death would
be infinitely preferable to going back to the life
of the circus and the man Jim’s coarse brutality
from which he had made his escape at last.
And then he had opened his eyes, hours
later, and there had been Tony and there
had been chiefly Tony ever since, for him.
If ever he amounted to anything, and
he meant to amount to something, it would be all due
to Tony and her Uncle Phil. The two of them had
saved him in more ways than one, had faith in him
when he wasn’t much but a scarecrow, ignorant,
profane, unmoral, miserable, a “gutter brat”
as some one had once called him, a phrase he had never
forgotten. It had seemed to brand him, set him
apart from people like the Holidays forever. But
Tony and Doctor Phil had shown him a different way
of looking at it, proved to him that nothing could
really disgrace him but himself. They had given
him his chance and he had taken it. Please God
he would make himself yet into something they could
be proud of, and it would all be their doing.
He would never forget that, whatever happened.
A half hour later the train puffed
and wheezed into the station at Northampton.
Dick Carson and Max Hempel, still close together, descended
into the swarming, chattering crowd which was delightfully
if confusingly congested with pretty girls, more pretty
girls and still more pretty girls. But Dick was
not confused. Even before the train had come to
a full stop he had caught sight of Tony. He had
a single track mind so far as girls were concerned.
From the moment his eyes discovered Tony Holiday the
rest simply did not exist for him. It is to be
doubted whether he knew they were there at all, in
spite of their manifest ubiquity and equally manifest
pulchritude.
Tony saw him, too, as he loomed up,
taller than the others, bearing resistlessly down
upon her. She waved a gay greeting and smiled
her welcome to him through the throng. Max Hempel,
close behind, caught the message, too, and recognized
the face of the girl who smiled as the original of
the newspaper cut he had just been studying so assiduously.
Deliberately he dogged the young man’s heels.
He wanted to get a close-up view of Laura LaRue’s
daughter. She was much prettier than the picture.
Even from a distance he had made that out, as she stood
there among the crowd, vivacious, vivid, clad all
in white except for the loose coral-hued sweater which
set off her warm brunette beauty and the slim but
charmingly rounded curves of her supple young body.
Yes, she was like Laura, like her and yet different,
with a quality which he fancied belonged to herself
and none other.
Almost jealously Hempel watched the
meeting between the girl and the youth who up to now
had been negligible enough, but suddenly emerged into
significance as the possible young galoot already mentally
warned off the premises by the stage manager.
“Dick! O Dick! I’m
so glad to see you,” cried the girl, holding
out both hands to the new arrival. Her cheeks
were flushed, her eyes shining. She looked quite
as glad as she proclaimed.
As for the young man who had set down
his suitcase and taken possession of both the proffered
hands, there wasn’t the slightest doubt that
he was in the seventh heaven of bliss wherever that
may be. Next door to Fool’s Paradise, Max
Hempel hoped somewhat vindictively.
“Just you wait, young man,”
he muttered to himself. “Bet you’ll
have to, anyway. That glorious young thing isn’t
going to settle down to the shallows of matrimony
without trying the deep waters first, unless I’m
mightily mistaken. In the meantime we shall see
what we shall see to-night.” And the man
of power trudged away in the direction of a taxicab,
leaving youth alone with itself.
“Everybody is here,” bubbled
Tony. “At least, nearly everybody.
Larry went to a horrid old medical convention at Chicago,
and can’t be here for the play; but he’s
coming to commencement. Of course, Granny isn’t
able to travel and Aunt Margery couldn’t come
because the kiddies have been measling, but Ted is
here, and Uncle Phil bless him! He
brought the twins over from Dunbury in the car.
Phil Lambert and everybody are waiting down the street.
Carlotta too! To think you haven’t ever
met her, when she’s been my roommate and best
friend for two years! And, oh! Dicky!
I haven’t seen you myself for most a year and
I’m so glad.” She beamed up at him
as she made this rather ambiguous statement. “And
you haven’t said a word but just ‘hello!’
Aren’t you glad to see me, Dicky?” she
reproached.
He grunted at that.
“About a thousand times gladder
than if I were in Heaven, unless you happened to be
sitting beside me on the golden stairs. And if
you think I don’t know how long it is since
I’ve seen you, you are mightily mistaken.
It is precisely one million years in round numbers.”
“Oh, it is?” Tony smiled,
appeased. “Why didn’t you say so before,
and not leave me to squeeze it out of you like tooth-paste?”
Dick grinned back happily.
“Because you brought me up not
to interrupt a lady. You seemed to have the floor,
so to speak.”
“So to speak, indeed,”
laughed Tony. “Carlotta says I exist for
that sole purpose. But come on. Everybody’s
crazy to see you and I’ve a million things to
do.” And tucking her arm in his, Tony marshaled
the procession of two down the stairs to the street
where the car and the old Holiday Hill crowd waited
to greet the newest comer to the ranks of the commencement
celebrants.
With the exception of Carlotta Cressy,
Tony’s roommate, the occupants of the car are
known already to those who followed the earlier tale
of Holiday Hill.
First of all there was the owner of
the car, Dr. Philip Holiday himself, a married man
now, with a small son and daughter of his own, “Miss
Margery’s” children. A little thicker
of build and thinner of hair was the doctor, but possessed
of the same genial friendliness of manner and whimsical
humor, the same steady hand held out to help wherever
and whenever help was needed. He was head of the
House of Holiday now for his father, the saintly old
pastor, had gone on to other fields and his soldier
brother Ned, Tony’s father, had also gone, in
the prime of life, two years before, victim of typhus,
leaving his beloved little daughter, and his two sons
just verging into manhood, in the care of the younger
Holiday.
As Dick and the doctor exchanged cordial
greetings, the latter’s friendly eyes challenged
the young man’s and were answered. Plainly
as if words had been spoken the doctor knew that Dick
was keeping faith with the old pact, living up to
the name the little girl Tony had given him in her
impulsive generosity.
“Something not quite right,
though,” he thought. “The boy isn’t
all happy. Wonder what the trouble is. Probably
a girl. Usually is at that age.”
At the wheel beside the doctor was
his namesake and neighbor, Philip Lambert. Phil
was graduating, himself, this year from the college
across the river, a sturdy athlete of some note and
a Phi Beta Kappa man as well. Out of a harum-scarum,
willful boyhood he had emerged into a finely tempered,
steady young manhood. The Dunbury wiseacres who
had been wont to shake their heads over Phil’s
youthful escapades and prophesy a bad end for such
a devil-may-care youngster now patted themselves complacently
on the back, as wiseacres will, and declared they had
always known the boy would turn out a credit to his
family and the town.
On the back seat were Phil’s
sisters, the pretty twins, Charley and Clare, still
astonishingly alike at twenty, as they had been at
twelve, and still full of the high spirits and ready
laughter and wit that had made them the life of the
Hill in the old days. Neither looked a day over
sixteen, but Clare had already been teaching two years
in a Dunbury public school and Charley was to go into
nurse’s training in the fall.
Larry, the young doctor, as Dunbury
had taken to calling him in distinction from his uncle,
was not yet arrived, as Tony had explained; but Ted,
her younger brother, was very much on the scene, arrayed
in all the extravagant niceties of modish attire affected
by university undergraduates. At twenty, Ted
Holiday was as handsome as the traditional young Greek
god and possessed of a godlike propensity to do as
he liked and the devil take the consequences.
Already Ned Holiday’s younger son had acquired
something of a reputation as a high flier among his
own sex, and a heart breaker among the fairer one.
Reckless, debonair, utterly irresponsible, he was
still “terrible Teddy” as his father had
jocosely dubbed him long ago. Yet he was quite
as lovable as he was irrepressible, and had a manifest
grace to counterbalance every one of his many faults.
His soberer brother Larry worried uselessly over Ted’s
misdeeds, and took him sharply to task for them; but
even Larry admitted that there was something rather
magnificent about Ted and that possibly in the end
he would come out the soundest Holiday of them all.
There remains only Carlotta to be
introduced. Carlotta was lovely to look upon.
A poet speaks somewhere of a face “made out of
a rose.” Carlotta had that kind of a face
and her eyes were of that deep, violet shade which
works mischief and magic in the hearts of men.
As for her hair, it might well have been the envy
of any princess, in or out of the covers of a book,
so fine spun was it in texture, so pure gold in color,
like the warm, vivid shimmer of tropical sunshine.
She lifted an inquiring gaze now to Dick, as she held
out her hand in acknowledgment of the introduction,
and Dick murmured something platitudinous, bowed politely
over the hand and never noticed what color her eyes
were. A single track mind is both a curse and
a protection to a man.
“Carlotta would come,”
Tony was explaining gaily, “though I told her
there wasn’t room. Let me inform you all
that Carlotta is the most completely, magnificently,
delightfully spoiled young person in these United
States of America.”
“Barring you?” teased her uncle.
“Barring none. By comparison
with Carlotta, I am all the noble army of saints,
martyrs and seraphim on record combined. Carlotta
is preordained to have her own way. Everybody
unites to give it to her. We can’t help
it. She hypnotizes us. Some night you will
miss the moon in its accustomed place and you will
find that she wanted it for a few moments to play
with.”
Philip Lambert had turned around in
his seat and was surveying Carlotta rather curiously
during this teasing tirade of Tony’s.
“Oh, well,” murmured Carlotta.
“Your old moon can be put up again when I am
through with it. I shan’t do it a bit of
harm. Anyway, Mr. Carson must not be told such
horrid things about me the very first time he meets
me, must he, Phil? He might think they were true.”
She suddenly lifted her eyes and smiled straight up
into the face of the young man on the front seat who
was watching her so intently.
“Well, aren’t they?”
returned the young man addressed, stooping to examine
the brake.
Carlotta did not appear in the least
offended at his curt comment. Indeed the smile
on her lips lingered as if it had some inner reason
for being there.
“Hop in, Tony,” ordered
Ted with brotherly peremptoriness. “Carlotta,
you are one too many, my love. You will have
to sit in my lap.”
“I’m getting out,”
said Phil. “I’m due across the river.
Want Ted to take the wheel, Doctor?”
“I do not. I have a wife
and children at home. I cannot afford to place
my life in jeopardy.” The doctor’s
eyes twinkled as they rested a moment on his youngest
nephew.
“Now, Uncle Phil, that’s
mean of you. You ought to see me drive.”
“I have,” commented Dr.
Holiday drily. “Come on over here, one of
you twinnies, if Phil must go. See you to-night,
my boy?” he turned to his namesake to ask as
Charley accepted the invitation and clambered over
the back of the seat while the doctor took her brother’s
vacated post.
Phil shook his head.
“No. I was in on the dress
rehearsal last night. I’ve had my share.
But you folks are going to see the jolliest Rosalind
that ever grew in Arden or out of it. That’s
one sure thing.”
Phil smiled at Tony as he spoke, and
Dick, settling himself in the small seat beside Ted,
felt a small barbed dart of jealousy prick into him.
Tony and Phil were obviously exceedingly
good friends. They had, he knew, seen much of
each other during the past four years, with only a
river between. Phil was Tony’s own kind,
college-trained, with a certified line of good old
New England ancestry behind him. Moreover, he
was a darned fine fellow one of the best,
in fact. In spite of that hateful little jabbing
dart, Dick acknowledged that. Ah well, there was
more than a river between himself and Tony Holiday
and there always would be. Who was he, nameless
as he was, to enter the lists against Philip Lambert
or any one else?
The car sped away, leaving Phil standing
bareheaded in the sunshine, staring after it.
The mocking silver lilt of Carlotta Cressy’s
laughter drifted back to him. He shrugged, jammed
on his hat and strode off in the direction of the
trolley car.
Dick Carson might just as well have
spared himself the pain of jealousy. Phil had
already forgotten Tony, was remembering only Carlotta,
who would never deliberately do a mite of harm to
the moon, would merely want to play with it at her
fancy and leave it at her whim for somebody else to
replace, if anybody cared to take the pains. And
what was a moon more or less anyway?