FullReads

The little kerchief she had lifted to her eyes was wet with tears not of the stage. “It seems so foolish!” she said bravely. “It’s because I’m so happy! Everything has come all at once, this week. I’d never been in New York before in my life. Doesn’t that seem funny for a girl that’s been on the stage ever since she left school? And now I am here, all at once I get this beautiful part you’ve written, and you tell me you like it–and Mr. Potter says he likes it. Oh! Mr. Potter’s just beautiful to me! Don’t you think Mr. Potter’s wonderful, Mr. Canby?”

The truth about Mr. Canby’s opinion of Mr. Potter at this moment was not to the playwright’s credit. However, he went only so far as to say: “I didn’t like him much yesterday afternoon.”

“Oh, no, no!” she said quickly. “That was every bit my fault. I was frightened and it made me stupid. And he’s just beautiful to me to-day! But I’d never mind anything from a man that works with you as he does. It’s the most wonderful thing! To a woman who loves her profession for its own sake–“

“You do, Miss Malone?”

“Love it?” she cried. “Is there anything like it in the world?”

“I might have known you felt that, from your acting,” he said, managing somehow to be coherent, though it was difficult.

“Oh, but we all do!” she protested eagerly. “I believe all actors love it more than they love life itself. Don’t think I mean those that never grew up out of their ‘show-off’ time in childhood. Those don’t count, in what I mean, any more than the ‘show-girls’ and heaven knows what not that the newspapers call ‘actresses’. Oh, Mr. Canby, I mean the people with the art and the fire born in them: those who must come to the stage and who ought to and who do. It isn’t because we want to be ‘looked at’ that we go on the stage and starve to stay there! It’s because we want to make pictures–to make pictures of characters in plays for people in audiences. It’s like being a sculptor or painter; only we paint and model with ourselves–and we’re different from sculptors and painters because they do their work in quiet studios, while we do ours under the tension of great crowds watching every stroke we make–and, oh, the exhilaration when they show us we make the right stroke!”

“Bravo!” he said. “Bravo!”

“Isn’t it the greatest of all the arts? Isn’t it?” she went on with the same glowing eagerness. “We feed our nerves to it, and our lives to it, and are glad! It makes us different from other people. But what of that? Don’t we give ourselves? Don’t we live and die just to make these pictures for the world? Oughtn’t the world to be thankful for us? Oughtn’t it? Oh, it is, Mr. Canby; it is thankful for us; and I, for one, never forget that a Prime Minister of England was proud to warm Davy Garrick’s breeches at the grate for him!”

She clapped her hands together in a gesture of such spirit and fire that Canby could have thrown his hat in the air and cheered, she had lifted him so clear of his timidity.

“Bravo!” he cried again. “Bravo!”

At that she blushed. “What a little goose I am!” she cried. “Playing the orator! Mr. Canby, you mustn’t mind–“

“I won’t!”

“It’s because I’m so happy,” she explained–to his way of thinking, divinely. “I’m so happy I just pour out everything. I want to sing every minute. You see, it seemed such a long while that I was waiting for my chance. Some of us wait forever, Mr. Canby, and I was so afraid mine might never come. If it hadn’t come now it might never have come. If I’d missed this one, I might never have had another. It frightens me to think of it– and I oughtn’t to be thinking of it! I ought to be spending all my time on my knees thanking God that old Mr. Packer got it into his head that ‘The Little Minister’ was a play about the Baptists!”