The Cup of Fury Part 36

This sobered her. It was unpleasant not to be unique. The chill woods seemed to be rather glum about it, too. The road abandoned them and flung into a sun-bathed plain.

"Really? You really knew another--er--Mamise?"

"Yes. Years ago."

"Was she nice?"

"Very."

"Oh!" She was sorry about that, too. The road slipped across a loose-planked, bone-racking bridge. With some jealousy she asked, "What was she like?"

"You."

"That's odd." A little shabby, topply-tombed graveyard glided by, reverting to oblivion. "Tell me about her."

A big motor charged past so fast that the pa.s.sengers were only blurs, a grim chauffeur-effect with blobs of fat womankind trailing snapping veils. The car trailed a long streamer of dust that tasted of the road. When this was penetrated they entered upon a stretch of pleasant travel for eyes and wheels, on a long, long channel through a fruitful prairie, a very allegory of placid opulence.

"It was funny," said Davidge. "I was younger than I am. I went to a show one night. A musical team played that everlasting 'Poet and Peasant' on the xylophones. They played nearly everything on nearly everything--same old stuff, accordions, horns, bells; same old jokes by the same fool clown and the solemn dubs. But they had a girl with 'em--a young thing. She didn't play very well. She had a way with her, though--seemed kind of disgusted with life and the rest of the troupe and the audience. And she had a right to be disgusted, for she was as pretty as--I don't know what. She was just beautiful--slim and limber and long--what you might imagine a nymph would look like if she got loose in a music-hall.

"I was crazy about her. If I could ever have written a poem about anybody, it would have been about her. She struck me as something sort of--well, divine. She wore the usual, and not much of it--low neck, bare arms, and--tights. But I kind of revered her; she was so dog-on pretty.

"When the drop fell on that act I was lost. I was an orphan for true.

I couldn't rest till I saw the manager and asked him to take me back and introduce me to her. He gave me a nasty grin and said he didn't run that kind of a theater, and I said I'd knock his face off if he thought I thought he did. Well, he gave in finally and took me back. I fell down the side-aisle steps and sprawled along the back of the boxes and stumbled up the steps to the stage.

"And then I met Mamise--that was her name on the program--Mamise. She was pretty and young as ever, but she wasn't a nymph any longer. She was just a young, painted thing, a sulky, disgusted girl. And she was feeding a big monkey--a chimpanzee or something. It was sitting on a bicycle and smoking a cigar--getting ready to go on the stage.

"It was so human and so unhuman and so ugly, and she was so graceful, that it seemed like a sort of satire on humanity. The manager said, 'Say, Mamise, this gentleman here wants to pays his respecks.' She looked up in a sullen way, and the chimpanzee showed his teeth at me, and I mumbled something about expecting to see the name Mamise up in the big electric lights.

"She gave me a look that showed she thought I was a darned fool, and I agreed with her then--and since. She said, 'Much obliged' in a contemptuous contralto and--and turned to the other monkey.

"The interview was finished. I backed over a scene-prop, knocked down a stand of Indian-clubs, and got out into the alley. I was mad at her at first, but afterward I always respected her for snubbing me. I never saw her again, never saw her name again. As for the big electric lights, I was a punk prophet. But her name has stood out in electric lights in my--my memory. I suppose she left the stage soon after. She may be dead now.

"It hurt me a lot to have her wither me with that one big, slow glance of hers, but I was glad of it afterward. It made me feel more comfortable about her. If she had welcomed every stranger that came along she--well, as she didn't, she must have been a good girl, don't you suppose?"

The road still pierced the golden scene, a monotony of plenty, an endless-seeming treasure of sheaves of wheat and stacks of corn, with pumpkins of yellow metal and twisted ingots of squash; but an autumnal sorrow clouded the landscape for Marie Louise.

"What do you call a good girl?" she asked.

"That's a hard question to answer nowadays."

"Why nowadays?"

"Oh, because our ideas of good are so much more merciful and our ideas of girls are so much more--complicated. Anyway, as the fellow said, that's my story. And now you know all about Mamise that I know. Can you forgive her for wearing your name?"

"I could forgive that Mamise anything," she sighed. "But this Mamise I can't forgive at all."

This puzzled him. "I don't quite get that."

She let him simmer in his own perplexity through a furlong of what helpless writers call "a shady dell"; its tenderness won from him a timid confession.

"You reminded me of her when I first met you. You are as different as can be, and yet somehow you remind me of each other."

"Somehow we are each other."

He leaned forward and stared at her, and she spared him a hasty glance from the road. She was blus.h.i.+ng.

He was so childishly happy that he nearly said, "It's a small world, after all." He nearly swung to the other extreme. "Well, I'll be--" He settled like a dying pendulum on, "Well--well!" They both laughed, and he put out his hand. "Pleased to meet you again."

She let go the wheel and pressed his hand an instant.

The plateau was ended, and the road went overboard in a long, steep cascade. She pushed out the clutch and coasted. The whir of the engine stopped. The car sailed softly.

He was eager for news of the years between then and now. It was so wonderful that the surly young beginner in vaudeville should have evolved into this orchid of the salons. He was interested in the working of such social machinery. He urged:

"Tell me all about yourself."

"No, thanks."

"But what happened to you after I saw you? You don't remember me, of course."

"I remember the monkey."

They both laughed at the unconscious brutality of this. He turned solemn and asked:

"You mean that so many men came back to call on you?"

"No, not so many--too many, but not many. But--well, the monkey was more unusual, I suppose. He traveled with us several weeks. He was very jealous. He had a fight with a big trained dog that I petted once. They nearly killed each other before they could be separated.

And such noises as they made! I can hear them yet. The manager of the monkey wanted to marry me. I was unhappy with my team, but I hated that man--he was such a cruel beast with the monkey that supported him. He'd have beaten me, too, I suppose, and made me support him."

Davidge sighed with relief as if her escape had been just a moment before instead of years ago.

"Lord! I'm glad you didn't marry him! But tell me what did happen after I saw you."

The road led them into a sizable town, street-car tracks, bad pavements, stupid shops, workmen's little homes in rows like chicken-houses, then better streets, better homes, business blocks well paved, a hotel, a post-office, a Carnegie library, a gawky Civil War statue, then poorer shops, rickety pavements, shanties, and the country again.

Davidge noted that she had not answered his question. He repeated it:

"What happened after you and the monkey-trainer parted?"

"Oh, years later I was in Berlin with a team called the Musical Mokes, and Sir Joseph and Lady Webling saw me and thought I looked like their daughter, and they adopted me--that's all."

She had grown a bit weary of her autobiography. Abbie had made her tell it over and over, but had tried in vain to find out what went on between her stage-beginnings and her last appearance in Berlin.

Davidge was fascinated by her careless summary of such great events; for to one in love, all biography of the beloved becomes important history. But having seen her as a member of Sir Joseph's household, he was more interested in the interregnum.

"But between your reaching Berlin and the time I saw you what happened?"

"That's my business."