The Gay Cockade. Temple Bailey
when she showed me my room.
"Oh, do you like it?" she asked. "Jimmie hates to see me in dark things. He says that when I wear this he can see his heroine."
"Is she like you?"
"Not a bit. She is rather untamed. Jimmie does her very well. She positively gallops through the play."
"And do you never gallop?"
She shook her head. "It's a good thing that I don't. If I did, Jimmie would never write. He says that I keep his nose to the grindstone. It isn't that, but I love him too much to let him squander his talent. If he had no talent, I should love him without it. But, having it, I must hold him up to it."
She was very sure of herself, very sure of the rightness of her attitude toward Jimmie. "I know how great he is," she said, as we went down, "and other people don't. So I've got to prove it."
It was at dinner that I first noticed a change in Jimmie. It was a change which was hard to define. Yet I missed something in him—the enthusiasm, the buoyancy, the almost breathless radiance with which he had rekindled our dying fires. Yet he looked young enough and happy enough as he sat at the table in his velvet studio coat, with his crisp, burnt-gold hair catching the light of the candles. He and his wife were a handsome pair. His manner to her was perfect. There could be no question of his adoration.
After dinner we had the tree. It was a young pine set up at one end of the long dining-room, and lighted in the old fashion by red wax candles. There were presents on it for all of us. Jimmie gave me an adorably illustrated Mother Goose.
"You are the only other child here, Miss Standish," he said, as he handed it to me. "I saw this in a book-shop, and couldn't resist it."
We looked over the pictures together. They were enchanting. All the bells of old London rang out for a wistful Whittington in a ragged jacket; Bo-Peep in panniers and pink ribbons wailed for her historic sheep; Mother Hubbard, quaint in a mammoth cap, pursued her fruitless search for bones. There was, too, an entrancing Boy Blue who wound his horn, a sturdy darling with his legs planted far apart and distended rosy cheeks.
"That picture is worth the price of the whole book," said Jimmie, and hung over it. Then suddenly he straightened up. "There should be children in this old house."
I knew then what I had missed from the tree. Elise had a great many gifts—exquisite trifles sent to her by sophisticated friends—a wine-jug of seventeenth-century Venetian glass, a bag of Chinese brocade with handles of carved ivory, a pair of ancient silver buckles, a box of rare lacquer filled with Oriental sweets, a jade pendant, a crystal ball on a bronze base—all of them lovely, all to be exclaimed over; but the things I wanted were drums and horns and candy canes, and tarletan bags, and pop-corn chains, and things that had to be wound up, and things that whistled, and things that squawked, and things that sparkled. And Jimmie wanted these things, but Elise didn't. She was perfectly content with her elegant trifles.
It was late when we went out finally to the studio. There was snow everywhere, but it was a clear night with a moon above the pines. A great log burned in the fireplace, a shaded lamp threw a circle of gold on shining mahogany. It seemed to me that Jimmie's writing quarters were even more attractive in December than in June.
Yet, looking back, I can see that to Jimmie the little house was a sort of prison. He loved men and women, contact with his own kind. He had even liked our dingy old office and our dreary, dried-up selves. And here, day after day, he sat alone—as an artist must sit if he is to achieve—es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille.
We sat around the fire in deep leather chairs, all except Elise, who had a cushion on the floor at Jimmie's feet.
He read with complete absorption, and when he finished he looked at me. "What do you think of it?"
I had to tell the truth. "It isn't your masterpiece."
He ran his fingers through his hair with a nervous gesture. "I told Elise that it wasn't."
"But the girl"—Elise's gaze held hot resentment—"is wonderful. Surely you can see that."
"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