IN THE VALLEY OF DESPAIR.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 44, 22 February 1926, Page 16

IN THE VALLEY OF DESPAIR.

<By GUY THORNE.)

[SHORT STORY.]

(Author of 'When It Was Dark," etc.} The fire danced upon the walls of the dainty little boudoir, in one corner of which sat a girl at a table on which was a typewriter and a red-shaded electric lamp. She was a pretty, rather faded girl, who looked as if "she was recovering from some illness of the mind or body, but who would bloom again ere lonL'. The machine rattled away under her deft fingers until, with a final "ping' ' of the bell, a letter was concluded and withdrawn with a harsh screech of th; | carrier. I Molly Burton rose from her seat and >, went to the fire. She looked down ituoj it with an arm upon the white mantel- ; shelf and one little bronze shoe resting i on the fender. The delicate lips j quivered, and the eyes filled with tear*. "Christmas Eve!" she said to herself. "A time when all the world is happy, when husbands and wives. . ." Her voice faltered and she gulped in her throat. Then she dried her eyes and left the room, stepping out into the broad, panelled hall with its soft carpet and great Chinese bronzes which belonged to the famous actress, Lydia Port man. Crossing the hall, with its discreet electric lights around the cornice, Molly tapped at a door and entered. She was in a great drawing room with white walls, upon which hung a priceless collection of Japanese colour prints by the old masters of their art. The room with its bizarre furnishing, its rare treasures of all kinds, was yet harmonious in itself. No details clashed, everything went well together. In short, the room was as famous as its owner, Lydia Portman, lessee and manager of the Parthenon Theatre, who now sat by the fire in a long tea-gown of dark green embroidered with silver. Lydia Portman was a woman just over medium height, aged perhaps fortyone or two. Her figure, her hands and feet were perfect in their shape and contour. Her hair, of a light brown, untouched by grey, and unassisted by art, was wavy and abundant. No one could have called her face beautiful. It was arresting. It sparkled with vitality and intellect, like' all the rest of her, it radiated character and charm but strictly beautiful she was not. She was unique among leading English actresses because she always preferred to drown her personality in the part she was playing. She believed that the actor or actress should absolutely disappear in the person he or she portrays, and she was as capable of playing Mrs. Gamp with perfect truth to life as she was of Lady Macbeth. The "Star system" which enables his admirers to go and see Mr. Blank in Hamlet, and see Mr. Blank ail the time, was abhorrent to her. "I have brought the letter, Miss Portman," said the girl. "Thank you, dear. Come and sit down by the fire, and Lurby shall bring in tea. Look at that lovely holly. Lurby is 60 old-fashioned, lie believes in keeping up old customs, and ha brought that in himself. I believe he is quite capable of putting a bunch of mistletoe in the hall." Molly sat down on a stool at her friend and patron's feet and stared into the fire. "Christmas Eve!" she said with a sigh. "Yes, another Christmas!" the older woman answered gravely. ' "It means more to mc than you, dear child. You haven't got to the age when you see each year several of your friends, and even contemporaries, making their, final exit. The curtain is not always fall- ■ ing upon some beloved form for you. Ah, mc. Well we musn't be sad." Lurby, the butler, a man of fifty ' with a mask-like, clean-shaven face Drought in the tea table and Miss Portman s white and jewelled hands busied tnemselves with cups and cream jug If it hadn't been for you, dear Miss ;, P , ort !/f the girl said, "I expect I 7 should be literally starving to-night. I should be walking the cold and cheerless streets with the broken, the wicked the homeless— lost soul, perhaps like them. r Miss Portman stroked the girl's hair against her knee. JS h^'J OX ) mnstn>t b e morbid," she wv I G °? for the chance th" lerrihT £ ?* whe * y ° U were in such terrible distress. No one could have beeen kinder to mc than you have Sot on y have I found an ileal Scretarv .but also someone who is like a daughter to mc. ■ 6""- 1 tears 0 " 7 ' 3 **""** ™* t0 burst into - "I know I know," she said, "you have been so kind to mc, and I love you £ much, dear Miss Portman, that at times -I cannot sleep for thinking of it But but this is Christmas Eve! and I £ thinking, I can help it, 'of Jameß . . 01 your husband, dear?" Miss Portman asked gently. nl," Y rf % he starTin S. is he wandering about London with no home, no one to" be kind to him this Christmas Eve?" The face of the great actress hardened a Mils. She was said to be no great lover of men. "I think, Molly," she said, «v should guard against sentiment. Mere 6 entiment is a very dangerous thing. You must remember that your husband deserted you when you had done nothing to deserve it. No doubt by this time— I don't want to distress you, child he has found someone else to console him!" The girl gave a bitter little lau^h. Never in this world!" she said, "he is incapable of it. He is too cold, too Belf-centred. Miss Portman, there are times when I believe that he married mc simply to save the expense of a typist and stenographer! I once told liun that it was only the accident of my possessing a machine of my own that made him propose to mc." "That was a bitter thing to say, Ter e p£ty MiBS por,M - «"£ * «°™ V. She knew that her young friend had 16 a aLort time to a very BUI j woman *""fe> annk, another ■ " He wa ß an absolute teetotaller tt I eol'l'Wl - tt feß j&* lle was te n-ibly 1 Wld-oli, It is so difficult to explain. He

thought himself,a great writer and put his whole life into one piece of work. He had no thought for anything or anyone else. Little by little he gave up nearly all the work which just made it possible for us to live. He did not seem to care about mc in the least. Often he would keep mc typing and re-typing a single page as he altered it for hours, when there was no food in the house, and I nearly fainted away. "Poor child, poor child!" said Miss Portman, marvelling at the strangeness of the stdYy, and throbbing with sympathy. ''And he let you- practically starve?" "I am afraid so. I had very little food and hardly any clothes, and yet I know he had money sometimes. It is a terrible thing to say about any man, but James had a heart of stone. I am often covered with shame when I think that I married a man whom I worshipped as ! great and who I found to be coldness, I meanness itself." ' The great actress asked a few more ! questions and then with her magnetic \ touch and voice, cheered the unhappy ! little wife and restored her to something 1 like calm. "To-morrow, dear," she said, "I will take you to High Mass at the Cathedral. Then we will go for a motor drive into the country, and get back in good time to dress for dinner. We shall be very bright and cheerful. I have asked two charming girls from my theatre, and dear old Harvey Lawrence, the greatest character actor and wit in London, is coming too with his son, Bruce. We are going to have a real old-fashioned Christmas dinner, turkey, plum pudding, and all the rest of it. Now I am going out for an hour or so." She made Molly lie down upon a sofa, covered her with a rug and turned down the electric lights. Then she went out into the hall and called for Lurby. While in her own room making ready to go out, Miss Portman thought over the story she had just heard. It had been told her with perfect sincerity, she was sure of that. And yet there was a missing link somewhere—the one little psychological fact, that might explain the situation to an acute mind which was always speculating upon human event. "But the meanness!" she said to herself, looking in the mirror with a satisfied smile, "that's the worst of all! Meanness, lack of generosity, seems- to mc the unpardonable sin!" It was a raw, cold night thi3 Christmas Eve. Neither snow nor rain had fallen, but the pavements were gTeasy, and a bitter fog, just above the tops of the houses, seemed to enclose London as in a chilly box. Upon a seat by the Serpentine in Hyde Park sat a young man. His boots were broken, his dark clothes in the last condition of dilapidation— apparent even in the light from an adjacent standard. His thin face, pallid and unshaven, was a white wedge of hopelessness in which sombre eyes glowed fitfully. He murmured to himself words of a long forgotten poem. Into the lonely part all frozen fast, Awhile ago there were two forms who passed. Lo, are their lips fallen and their eyes dead, Hardly shall a man hear the words they said. "Dost thou remember our old ecstasy?" Wherefore should I possess that memory "Were not the heavens blue, was not hope <iTT high ?"• Hope hath fled vanquished down the darkling skjr.' , - He laughed bitterly. "Is she wandering abroad this bitter night?" he said, speaking aloud to himself, "as lonely and miserable men do. I think I could bear things better if I were certain, absolutely certain, that she had at least warmth and food. But she has her work and could always find a job. Thank God she never sold her machine. But she never cared for mc. Her pre-occupation was always with wretched material things, a comfortable home, clothes, food. She did not in the least understand my aims, or sympathise with them. She did not know that she was married to a man who, if he had but had the chance of a hearing, would have been among the great ones of this world." His left hand went to his heart where, he felt a bulky packet of paper in the pocket of his ragged jacket. He raised his right arm in the air and shook it furiously at the leaden pall abovehalf mad from hunger and despair, an impotent atom defying Fate. Then he fell into a violent fit of coughing, and while he sat shaking with the violence of it, another outcast of the night shuffled through the gloom and sat beside him. It was a little old woman with a rusty bonnet and a torn shawl, her dirty face and blear eyes stamped with want and drink. "A merry Christmas, young feller," she said with a little snigger. "Yes, we're a merry pair, Mother," the man replied in "a caustic voice. "What are you doing out to-night. The little old woman started when he spoke. "Why, yer a gentleman," she said. "You have discovered that, have you, Mother? Yes, well to tell you the truth' I have just strolled out * of my great house over there in Park Lane. These rags are only a disguise. I felt so bored with the champagne and rich food and the footmen." He laughed savagely at his own acid wit. "Syme 'ere," said the old woman. "I'm reely staying with my daughter, the Duchess. There's a ball on to-night and the French Ambassador was a little too pressing in his attentions, so I borrowed the charlady's second best costoom and come out for a breaf of Gawd's fresh air." v "I perceive you are an original," said the young man. "But tell mc the truth." "Much the syme as yours, I expec.' Broke to the wide, no "ome, no friends, and no more chance o'getting a rum and corfy to celebrate the 'appy season than of seem' the cop at 'Yde Park corner sprout into a blinkin hangel. The young man looked at her. She was old, very old, dirty, hopeless. But he saw how her hands trembled and the lines of want deep graven in her face. "But what are you, a gentleman, doin' 'ere? Ain't you got nowhere to go ?" "That's it, Mother, that's the joke, and you seem to have an ironic wit of your own." "Been in trouble, dearie?" "I was born to trouble as the sparks fly upward." "That's Shykspeare!" said the old woman instantly. "It is, but what do you know of Shakespeare?" "I was in the Profession once," she said, drawing her shawl round her and sitting up with a terribly pathetic dignity. "Never 'ad no chance though of gettin' out of the chorus, and' 'ere I am. Why, whenever I got a shillin' or IT+V T?i are, aforo I come down so low and I' M g ° *° Frenche ' B in the Strand, !S I -* he actin ' editio of a play PIS?.-* ° Ver and ° Ver •*"*> Btreu "

The young man laughed, but not at her, bitter and hollow-sounding hie laughter was. "I will end a life of foolish illusions," he said, "by a final act of folly. Take this"—he put his hand into his pocket and withdrew a roll of typewriting tied round with string: "Here's a masterpiece which no one will look at, Mother, but you can spend your Christmas Day reading it. It won't be any good to the Thames rats. And go and get food and a bed for once at any rate. Here's a half-crown—it's all I've got and I shan't need it." He threw the money into her hip and with a wild "Merry Christmas,' , shuffled off into the gloom. Yes! he would end it all. He could not walk very fast, he was too weak, but shuffled out of the Park and into Piccadilly. Westminster Bridge! that would be the place. A splash, a brief agony, no more, and- —peace. Piccadilly, the brilliantly lit circus, Coventry Street and Trafalgar Square, seemed like the painted phantasmagoria of a dream as he went towards extinction. lie had nothing now, nothing in the world. Even the fruits of his genius he had flung into the hands of the old beggar in one final act of supreme despair. He almost wondered at himself for his feeling of utter detachment. ''I might be dead already," he thought. "At any rate this is a Supreme Christmas for mc!" He was now nearly at the bottom of Parliament Street among the Government Offices, at this hour almost deserted, when he heard a quick footfall behind him. then someone touched him on the shoulder. He wheeled round to find himself confronted by a clean-shaven man dre&sed in a dark overcoat with a velvet collar, and a bowler hat. "Excuse mc. sir," =aid the stranger "are you Mr. James Burton, sir?" '"That was my name—once." The man bowed. "Then, sir, if you will please to come •.vith mc." "But I have done nothing, leave a wretched man alone in his misery." "Yes, sir, very good, sir, this way, sir" A well-appointed motor car piided up to the kerb. The stranger gripped the would-be suicide by the arm, and in a moment or two more the car was speeding away in the same direction ivom which the young man had come. ''But what is this?" he gasped, leaning back in the luxurious car, and trembling from head to foot. "Brandy and water, sir," was the answer, and he felt a metal cup at his lips. "But I don't understand." "Xot necessary, sir, I assure you." Tlie strong spirit threw James Burton into a ?ort of stupor. He abandoned himself to the tide of circumstance like a straw upon a river, and it was still in a dream that he was escorted from the car, through a broad and glowing place into a lift that shot upwards, and finally found himself alone for a moment in a great, white drawing-room, gleaming with softly-shaded lights. But only for a moment. The door opened and a lady in a tea-gown entered, a lady whose face seemed quite familiar to him. "Why," he said suddenly, "it's Lydia Portman!"—he had been a great theatregoer all his life. "Quite so, Mr. Burton," she said. "Draw your chair up to the fire and sit down." The voice was commanding but kindly. "I—l shall soil your chairs," he stammered, but he ?at down all the same. 'That's my affair," Mr. Burton," said the great actress with a smile. "You are a playwright, I understand?" He started; how did she know? "Yes, madam," he replied, "I have given the best years of my life to the writing of a play, but time after time it was rejected." "Those times are over. I will produce your play, Mr. Burton." He stared at her in unutterable wonder—surely this was all a dream? And then his hand went to the pocket over his heart—he gave a cry of agony. "It's lost, gone for ever! I have gi\-en it away!" "No, you have not," she answered, "you have merely cast your bread upon the waters. I am a quick reader, Mr. Burton, and the first two acts of 'Love's Proper Way' are the work of a genius." •His jaw dropped, he knew he was going mad.----"I am really staying with the Duchess, my daughter; there is a ball on to-night, and the French Ambassador was a little too pressing in his attentions, so I borrowed the charlady's best second costoom and come out for a breaf of Gawd's fresh air!" The man leapt to his feet. "You!" he cried. 6he nodded. "In the play I am rehearsing now." she said, "the one that will immediately precede yours, I have to assume the role of a brokendown woman of the people. It is only by making up and otherwise disguising myself and inviting chance encounters among the very poor, and, of Cfcurse, always at night, that I am able to make my studies. That's how we met in Hyde Park. iMy butler the man who brought you here, is always close by in attendance on mc to see that I come to no harm. That's the explanation." '"But, but," he stammered—his mind was in a whirl of mingled joy and utter confusion. " "But mc no buts, Mr. Burton, I am now going to fetch—Molly."