Part 4

"She doesn't seem quite real."

"Then Jimmie shall make her real." Elise laid her hand lightly on her husband's shoulder. Her gown and golden net were all flame and sparkle, but her voice was cold. "He shall make her real."

"No"--it seemed to me that as he spoke Jimmie drew away from her hand--"I am not going to rewrite it, Elise. I'm tired of it."

"Jimmie!"

"I'm tired of it--"

"Finish it, and then you'll be free--"

"Shall I ever be free?" He stood up and turned his head from side to side, as if he sought some way of escape. "Shall I ever be free? I sometimes think that you and I will stick to this old house until we grow as dry as dust. I want to live, Elise! I want to live--!"

* * * * *

But Elise was not ready to let Jimmie live. To her, Jimmie the artist was more than Jimmie the lover. I may have been unjust, but she seemed to me a sort of mental vampire, who was sucking Jimmie's youth. Duncan Street snorted when I told him what I thought. Elise was a pretty woman, and a pretty woman in the eyes of men can do no wrong.

"You'll see," I said, "what she'll do to him."

The situation was to me astounding. Here was Life holding out its hands to Elise, glory of youth demanding glorious response, and she, incredibly, holding back. In spite of my gray hair and stiff figure, I am of the galloping kind, and my soul followed Jimmie Harding's in its quest for freedom.

But there was one thing that Elise could not do. She could not make Jimmie rewrite his play. "I'll come to it some day," he said, "but not yet. In the meantime I'll see what I can do with books."

He did a great deal with books, so that he wrote several best-sellers. This eased the financial situation and they might have had more time for things. But Elise still kept him at it. She wanted to be the wife of a great man.

Yet as the years went on, Duncan and I began to wonder if her hopes would be realized. Jimmie wrote and wrote. He was successful in a commercial sense, but fame did not come to him. There was gray in his burnt-gold hair; his shoulders acquired a scholarly droop, and he wore glasses on a black ribbon. It was when he put on glasses that I began to feel a thousand years old. Yet always when he was away from me I thought of him as the Jimmie whose youth had shone with blinding radiance.

His constancy to Duncan and to me began to take on a rather pathetic quality. The others in the office drifted gradually 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?"