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A Story of the Footlights and Kleigs
hopes . . . dreary little towns and being "stranded" . . . Grease paint!
The smell of it . . . the stench . . . the cheap people . . . the silly simulations . . . the gritty hotels . . . the unrinsed bed linen . . . the rough-dried wash . . . the homelcssness. . . .
Oh, how could anyone say they "loved" it? How could old actresses, cracked and bent-looking, come back-stage to revisit scenes that now seemed to them scenes of vanished triumphs? How could they stand in the dusty malodorous wings and seem to grow young again before your very eyes. You could actually see them do it. You could see their shriveled shoulders, their lean breasts swell into fluence, their lack-lustre eyes sparkle and shine . . . before your watching, fascinated eyes they were Camille again . . . they were Rosalind . . . Trina . . . Fragoletta . . . women ravishing and real ... They breathed in the grease paint and lo, from their shriveled bodies there stepped a galaxy of fair forgotten women. . . .
She would never be like that . . . never be one of them . she hated it . . . all of it . . had poisoned her. . . .
Old men, too . . . she had seen and heard old men . . . watched them straighten their autumnleaf shoulders, tell hoarse bravado stories about "the days when I was young" . . . they, too, were Ronieos, Orlandos, Don Juans. ...
It was funny . . . Jonquil didn't understand. She felt that she never would.
So far back as she could' drive her mind. Jonquil had been unhappy. And she felt that she could remember very far back indeed. There were things to make her remember. Terrible things. Scourges. Signposts of sadness.
There was, for instance, her mother. Of course, most girls remember their mothers, but not in just the way nor for just the reasons that Jonquil did.
Most children are made comfortable by their mothers. Soothingly, drowsingly comfortable. And in the blanketing lap of such warm comfort things become blurred into a pleasant whole. Things melt in a comfortable reminiscence of sweet sachets and cuddly arms and fragrant kitchens and a lullabying sort of
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voice. All these things compound and become one's mother.
Not so with Jonquil. She associated no comfort with her mother, no fragrant baking days when she had been allowed to make gingerbread men with raisin eyes, no lullabying voice.
Jonquil had been uncomfortable. She had been uncomfortable twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four. Even when she had sleptshe had beeji aware of discomfort, of the fact that the bed was gritty and lumpy, that her mother was sighing and making moany little noises in her sleep, that her father was snorting and sniffling, and that they would have to be up in the pallid dawn hustling thru dim chill streets to another train bound for another dreary town.
Jonquil had had long, head-drooping hours behind the scenes waiting for her mother to make her final dying appearance as Camille or whatever highly flavored role she happened to be enacting on that particular night.
The character woman had come into their room and shrieked dreadful things at her father and ather. She had seemed to put herself in the place with them and called them "poor dupes" and other hideous names
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