Part 36 (1/2)
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.