Evening Star Newspaper, August 7, 1921, Page 51

T 'HE “SUNDAY STAR; WASHINGTON, D. C, AUGUST 7, 1921-PART GUN PLAY HE idea came to her one night| under Pictou and Kibbell and had h nable to sleep. | Played with O'Neill and Modjeska_and when she was unable to sleeb. | [0 Slacr Barrymors. And veh Bud- o Lot anski, the great Budanski, then in through the drumming tent of | the first flush of his success as a pro- her wakefulness. She would kill Wal- | ucing-manager, had considered her s Caaseair for the American tour of the younger It was the only way out. It was Eut that was five months before her her one possible escape from that ac- | Jaughter Anada was born. And Cos- cumulated agony of hopelessness terella, suffering from and terrified by his second hemorrhage, had to be which was slowly but surely driving|taken back to Colorado. There, after her mad, which at that very moment Efe'a"‘,‘.‘,"‘,’;‘cf;i,"‘,'“’; she again strug- 3 ost ground. But the was sabering the back of her head| fight was a losing one. _The beht she with its familiar sharp pain. She could do was to mark time by at would kill Walton Craswell, and that | tempting to found a dramatic school For' two bitt would end the whole intolerable busi| with her sehoor duion wine she cosa ness. to support a dying husband and a It would end the thing at a stroke, dying home. After Costerella's death the same as you end a cricket’s inces- she joined a road company, which dis- banded at Sacramento. At San Fran- sant drone by smashing its body. And|cisco she. joined another company that, she knew, would give her a|working its way deviously but stub- chance to breathe again. For life had | bornly eastward. It was an unsav- grown like the room in which she lay.|ory company playing an unsavory the musty room that smelled of so farce. Its paraded indecencies pro- den carpet perpetually sour with|vided a strange setting for a young water spilled from a rickety wash-|mother and a nursing baby. But she stand. It seemed to crowd too suffo-|endured it all, knowing that each day catingly close about her. She was|was carrying her nearer and nearer only fighting for air, the air without|New York. And once she was back which she could not live. And in do-|to what in the metonymy of the ing the thing, she could do it 80 cun-|newer age was already being desig- ningly she uld never be accused,|nated as “Broadway,” she attempted she would never even be suspected |to regain a footing In that lost world Fate, with its continuous rain of of hers. She even went to Budanski chinery for carrying out a crime|powder on her face and were an irri- which the world would accept as an|tation to the preoccupied manager. accident. who had to tell her for the third time For it would be a crime, Katherine|that he had nothing for her. Her Kinsella reminded herself, as she lay | youthfulness had slipped away, her on her undulatory thin mattress as|face had thinned and hardened, and rigid as she would some day lie in|no one else in that preoccupied city her coffin. It would be a crime, no|seemed to have anything for her. matter how unselfish her motives| But she had to live. So eventually and no matter how extenuating the|she went out as assjstant to a xylo- circumstances. Killing_was killing, | phone player, where daily and blithe- and no one did such things lightly.|ly, adorned in rose-colored fleshings .But there were times when such|and a huzzar's jacket of blue and things were imposed upon you. The[gold, she was compelled to act as world did that when it went to war.|feeder and props to a trick musician. There were times when war made|From this intolerable position she you kill or be killed, times when the |finally escaped to small parts in a enemy at your door had to go down,|stock company at Los Angeles. There, or only too soon your whole housé of | in the end, she once more attached life would smoulder in ruins. herself to a road company And young Wallie Craswell was the | east. enemy at her door. He was an enemy | New York by this time had doubly already within her door, an enemy | forgotten her. against whom, because of his very|her. In the very hour that she hun- closeness, she had regarded herseif!gered most for it she awakened to as helpless. She had not been able!the devastating knowledge that she to fight him as life had taught her|could live only in regions remote from to fight. Even her hatred for him was|it. So the road swallowed her up shot through with a perverse pitylagain. It swallowed her up as lonely touched by envy. He was, in many ways, little more than a boy. But|intent on unseen ports. And som- with the unconsidering quick cru-|berly she adventured up and down elty of youth he had come trampling | the sordid byways of the theatrical through the one jealously guarded |world's hinterland, taking what she inclosure in her dusty courtyard of |could get, enduring what she had to failure. And with that lost to her, [face, but forever scheming and fret- there was nothing left in life. ting for something better. Her am- % % % bition, being instinctive, was an un- p reasoning one. It refused, accord- HE warned herself that she must |ingly, to accept defeat. She had set think straight about it all, though | out in the world to be a great actress, ‘ From the first. in her secret soul of souls, she carried the conviction that moving It had no place for sea routes swallow up a lonely craft €he had b2en harried of late by the fear of losing.her power to think|ghe had the makings of a great That fear had begun to|actress in her. With a man like Bud- anski behind her., for example, she could still show them what they had overlooked. And forlornly, through all those years of exile, she kept her card in ~Variety, ~duly announcing week by week and month by month that Katherine Kinsella was “on tour.” And long had the hoofs of ad- versity beaten on her brokel:l body the straight. haunt her, just as she had been haunted for years by the fear of los- ing her memory. It had happened to more than one old stock-actress. And she was getting old. Slowly and painfully, as she lay beside her sleeping daughter, with her thin hands crossed on her breast, she began to review her past life. With grim deliberateness she went back over it, trying to muffle her stark wakefulness with its merciful trailing veils, so that she saw, yet did not see, the oblong of light thrown by a street lamp on the broken plaster of the ceiling above her. Through the thin partition, of that sordid temperance hotel on a sordid street of a sordid town she could still hear the intemperate hi- Jarity of the four road salesmen at 1heir eternal stud-poker in the next room. But a note of remoteness crept into their noise, as it had done at first when she got up about mignight and took her five grains of sulphonal. -And close to her throbbingly wake: ful body she could hear, menoton- ous as the wash of water on a lake shore, the deep and regular breathing of her daughter. She heard that soft d tranquil breathing with a sort of hatred which gave selvage to the bric of her relief at the thought before they trampled out last spark of that stubborn fire. That change came about when her daughter Anada was a trifle over four years old. The child, taught prema- turely to lisp a few lines of which she comprehension. was carried on in “A Daughter of Midas." said her piece, and smiled engagingly at the audience. The result was a prompt and prolonged patter of ap- plause, through which the tiny Anada smiled at an_ audience which she recognized as friendly. She was still youthfully and blissfully ignorant of the claws behind its velvet. So she was led discreetly off in the face of her determination to repeat a piece which had already met with such un- mixed approval. and the wooden old melodrama went on its wooden old way. B‘.'T that precious moment of ap- the girl was at least getting her rest. plause had brought home to Kath- Tut it intensified the older woman's|erine Kinsella a fact which she had jmpression of isolation. It reminded, hitherto overlooked. It announced to e e e "warm body | her that in the little body which had hich she might have reached out in proved so irksome and so prolonged \e dark and touched. For many aia burden she possessed an unde- onth now they had slept side bY| eioped theatrical possibility. Her side in the samg bed. shrinking back from even accidental contact, as im-|daughter could be trained for “kid personal as two knife blades on a|parts, and 'from those she could grad- table top of marble. And that had)uate‘into juveniles, and from the in- ‘ickening cloud of hopelessness|&enue and soubrette she could climb which threatened to choke her. into leads. And some day, perhaps. For Katherine Kinsella, before all|she might be the great artiste which thing life, had loved and brooded | her mother had failed to make her- over and treasured her only daughter |self- Anada. From the first day of her So a change took place in the older birth she had brooded over that quiet- | Wwoman’s plan of life. From that day 1y breathing body, had brooded over | forward she no longer lived for her- it with the dull ferocity of the lioness | self. but for her daughter. From her brooding over her cub, had guarded it |own tired breast to the resilient and watched it grow and sought to(young body of her child she trans- impart to it the wisdom which comes | Planted her parched hopes, as a frugal only to the old lioness on whom life | 8ardener repots a blighted flower. has fixed its scars. There was a time [ From that day forward she began to when. without abashment, she had|train the child. She made undivulged been able to take that body in her |sacrifices to the end that little Anada arms, when the love which turned to|might have reading and dancing les- a foolish ache in her heart had been |Sons, overlaid with purely ornamental able to expend itself in simple and|{efforts in music, at which she d satisfying services. But the impal-|Played none of her father's talent | pable yet ponderous defenses of girl-|for that art. Amid the noises of hood had grown up about the child.|cheap hotels and the odors of cheaper Mysteriously the reserves of woman-|rooming houses she taught the girl hood had widened between them. And | What it seemed best to teach her. She the girl, while chained to her very|opened up to her the new world of side, had escaped her. She had|the printed word. and schooled her in escaped for the time being. But there | Poise and tone and gesture—gesture were relinquishments which Kath-|always outward and always from the erine Kinsella would not and could | thorax—and directed her reading and not endure. Rather than lose what|guarded her movements. But it was little remained of her life she would|at the theater more than anywhere kill Wallie Craswell. else she watched over the child. She She went back to the beginning of | sentineled those troubled lines until that life again, as though in tracing|the company fell into the habit of its course she might find the secret|speaking of her as “The She-Lion” of her failure as an actress and a|and realized there was to be neither mother. Her father, she recalled,|trifling nor profanity in the neigh- had failed in the same way, her|borhood of the precocious young lady father, the black-face comedian who still in ringlets, with her ardent had always secretly hungered to play | young eyes glued to a book. “Othello.” But instead of starring in| Her beauty at that time was more Shakespeare he had become the lesser | that of promise than of fulfillment. light_in the minstrel team of Raht|But already she had lived in a world and Flynn. She had held that failure|of her own, singularly detached from against him, after she herself had ap- | that loose-jointed little world which peared in “Blue Jeans” and “The|gyrated about her. And beside her al- County Judge" at the age of seven.|Ways was the untiring watch-dog of And when on the eve of her first ap- |her innocence. ~Already, Katherine pearance as an ingenue in “The Char- | Kinsella realized, there was too much ; ity Ball” he had died. of drunkenness, {at stake to allow the indifference of that ambiguous deprivation had in no | today to imperil the promise of to- way interfered with her professional |morrow. All her eggs were now in plans. From “The Charity Ball” she |one basket. and it was her duty to passed on to small parts in “Frou-|See that this basket was treated with Frou” and “Fedora.” Then she be- |respect. came soubrette in summer stock at| Not that the struggle, for it was a Peek’s Island and later at Indianapo- | struggle, was all selfishness on Kath- lis. When she returned to New York |erine Kinsella’s part. She loved the it was Frohman himself who put her|girl. even though her love was a on at the Old Lyceum, where only ill | jealous and unreasoning one. She was luck at the last moment elbowed her(all that life seemed willing to out of a part in “Trelawney of the|leave her. Besides being the only Wells.” She forgot her disappoint-|dink with the past. she became the ment, the next summer, by busying stodian of the older woman's hopes. herself in stock at Ehlich’s Gardens|And once she had merged into her in Denver, where she met Costerella. | teens she became her confidante and Costerella had made love to her as she | her companion. They shared their had never been made love to before.|hard and febrile lives just as they She was a woman of twenty then,|continued to share their hard and but she was already thinking of her | transitory beds. They had no secrets future. And this olive-skinned or-|from each other. chestra leader with the flery spirit| As the girl advanced toward break- and the tubercular flush had talked|ing womanhood the studious-eyed much of what they might do together. | mother began to discern the possi- She even remembered the hot after-|bilities for which she had hoped. By noon when he had actually asked her | this time the older woman was a to marry him, the hot afternoon when | star, if such worlds as hers could be their matinee performance was so re- |said to hold stars, for she was the peatedly interrupted by the cavern-|nominal head of the Kinsella Amuse- ous yumping of the sleepy zoo lion |ment Company. Besides being its head just ‘outside the open-doored theater. |she was also its sustaining spirit. for It seemed a very long time ago.|her years of varied stage work, much But it was momantous. because it was |as it may have cheapened her, had anything from a grande dame to an OSTERELLA had forgotten his|ingenue in an auburn wig. She could weak lungs and had gone east with her. where he soon likewise|She could throw a half-drunken actor forgot his music and his ambition. | his lines, count up a house before that the climate was killing him. But|innow the paper and deadheads Lshe worked hard, during those three|from the innocent and investing pub- ground to recover. She had rehearsed costume,'and in three days she could “ * % k X the first mistake of her life. also left her a most dexterous utility e e womdn. She could, at a pinch, play C handle firearms and decipher train routes and crimp up a stage wait. i 1 the end of her first speech, and by He complained, not without reason, the time for her second cross duly vears when she had a dying husband|lic. -In two hours’ time she could to .support, for she had much lost|throw together a Marie Antoinette ; | ! crueities, had at least been kind inland begged for her chance, heggedl th It had left in her hand the ma-|through the tears that streaked have a new vehi - have cle ready for produc. * ok ok % 'HEY were neither sophisticated nor subtle, these tawdry produc- tions so hastily coopered together, but they were prepared for audiences which were neither subtle nor so- phisticated. For the Kinsella Amuse- ment Company shunned ¢ urban centers s’ the vayota shons L settlement. There were times, it is true, when this threadbare company scuttled into a booking on one of the grapevine circuits, but for the most part they “outlawed" in the remoter districts, resting content to synchro- nize with the country fair and re- maining satisfled to milk the frontier towns and the mushroom centers usu- ally given over to the “burleyque” or the movies. They played in “opera Nouses” overlooking market squares and in town hall auditoriums with a stage too narrow for their sets, and in dingy. theaters where a lone piano thumper was often enough respon- BLENDED, UNTIL HER DIZZY BRA sible for the entire entr-acte music. They traveled light, carrying merely a few trunks of props and costumes, bartering passes®with the local hard- ware dealer for the use of those im- | plements needed in their rural dramas and borrowing red plush parlor sets from the accommodating undertaker who happened to sell furniture as a| side line. They did not greatly worry : when business was bad, for their caste was compact and their outlay was small. The tax of royalty payments ‘was something beyond their ken, for time and experience had long since taught them how easy it was to change the face and name of am old favorite. And even a newly appro- priated vehicle, once in those none- too-tender hands for a week or two underwent mysterious hardening proc esses. It was pounded into a_derelict of “sure fire stuff.” It was airily de- formed to fit the procrustean bed of their strictly limited sets and castes. They modernized “East Lynne” and gave “Ingomar” in cheesecloth tuaics. They did “Romeo and Juliet” with gratuitous comic relief and in the midst of Grand Rapids factory furni ture, and gave Saumet's adiator, revised in a way that would have made the unknown. Saumet turn in his grave—with tin swords and clanking girdles of cow-chain. But most of ail they reveled in “westerns,” westerns stripped to the bone of intrigue and gunplay., and with their creaking joints swathed in a merciful smoke Screen of cartridge blanks. Through these they went with a brisk and businesslike solemnity, the villain getting his daily round of hisse: heavy his daily round of laughs the ingenue her daily round of ap- plause. For Anada Kinsella was by this time playing juvenilts in her mother's company. She was playing these for- malized youthful parts with a fresh- ness and a quiet ardency which tended to accentuate the staleness of the road-hardened troupers about her. Her voice was small but musical, her figure was unquenchably giriish, and she had the trick of appearing ador- able in any costume, however thread- bare, and in any scene, however trivial. She had not been guarded in vain. She was beginning to break into womanhood with that miraculous virgin white of the pond_lily that flowers but a hand’s breadth above the slimy and festering waters of a swamp. She knew life with- out knowing that she did. She stood a witness of the most sordid of sex-in- trigues without seeming to waken to theit actual significances. There had been developed in her not only an ex- traordinary capacity for self-esteem but also an extraordinary gift of self-suffi- ciency. Even her own mother regarded her as unemotional. Then the awaken- ing came. And for the second time Katherine Kinsella's carefully balanced | world went tumbling down about her ears. N It began, as so many of life’s momen- tous things begin, without being ob- served and without any betrayal of its possibilities. 1t began when the Ki sella Amusement Company was playing a cow-town in the foothills, and Kath- erine Kinsella was waylaid_in the ro- tunda of the Commercial Hotel by a young man who seemed scarcely out of his teens. He was a dreamy-eved but somewhat frightened young man, with a sombrero in one hand and a roll of manuscript in the other. Katherine Kin- sella, as she examined the sun-browned face with the clean-cut profile and the back-brushed tawny hair, took him for a cowboy from one of the ontlving ranches. But he proved to be a teacher in a nearby prairie school who had writ- ten a drama of Alaska in the days of the gold rush and wanted a try-out. Or if not a try-out, at least a reading and a little advice from an actress of experience and reputation. Katherine Kinsella read the dreamy- eved youth's Alaska drama. She read it at considerable personal sacrifice of time and energy. And when he came back the next day she was quite open and motherly with him. She explained to him that It was an extremely clever play, but that it wasn't practical. It had a great deal of ptomise, but what he most needed, if he was going on at that sort of thing, was actual stage experience. Then he’d kpow better how to get his people on and off, and he'd see that it didn’t pay to be too poetical. It was then that young Walton Cras- well surprised her by asking to be taken into her company. She studied him with a narrowed eye, at that unexpected request, for she had many things to consider. More than once, of late, the world-weary hop-head who pretended to handle her male juveniles had “ducked the buggy” and further dislocated an already sadly disjointed performance. This apolloesque and blushing new- comer, on the other hand, was a mere boy. But she found him good to look at, with his _clear-cut young face and his impersonal studious eyes. He had, as well, a voice with timbre to it. He could be taught something, and he had acknowledged his willingness to work for fifteen dollars a week, the precise amount which his teaching had been bringing in. So‘xnmennekmflu broke life-long rule of her career and took on an amateur. She took him on with an odd stirring of her one-sided maternal in- stinct, and was unexpectedly patient and gentle with'him during his first blunder- ing weeks in that amazing new world of.make-believe. : She took him in hand * k k *k An Unusual Story of the Stage and Its People and taught him a few of the primary tricks of her trade. The time that she could give him was limited, but he was both eager to learn and grateful for her patience. Twice she turned him over to her daughter Anada for scene re- hearsals. But the younger woman seemed less adroit and less Interested. She appeared to go through those delegated tasks with the wearied tol- erance Wwith which one teaches an eager but awkward puppy to walk upright and speak for a biscuit. Wallie Craswell—for by this time they were all calling him Wallie—suf- fered acutely during his first few weeks with the Kinsella Amusement Company. He was a dignified and reticent youth, and he was shocked both by the habit of promiscuous dishablile back-stage and the manner in which Goldie Glendenning, the heavy's’ wife, made conscienceless and most unwelcome love to him. But his passion for stage experience seemed a fixed one, and in time he caught step with his confreres in motley. He settled into his place and went contentedly on with his work. ‘When not busy his nose was in a i R book. and a marked disappointment|might have ‘been a ra showed on his fact at Katherine Kin- sella’s reluctance to discuss with him the influence of the curtainless stage on the structure of the Elizabethan drama. But she was more actively interested in the fact that he “sized up” well with Anada Kinsella, that their njunction had already given a touch of freshness to some of the jaded old scenes, and that they seemed to go placidly on with their werk without any of the nonsense which one might expect from the young. Day by day Wallie Craswell learned a mew trick or two, and it was not long. in that hard and hectic school, before he achieved a convincing enough pretense at composure. It was not long, either, before he worked surprisingly. well with Anada Kin- sella. And in so doing., her ever- watchful mother perceived, he was umconsciously helping the girl. She was playing up to him without know- ing it. So, besides throwing an air of youth into the dust-laden old dramflfi through which they wandered witl a preoccupied detachment all their own, they brought Into it an occa- sional breath of power. And Kath- erine Kinsella began to congratulate herself on getting at so modest a figure a juvenile who could do a little more than merely pass muster. For even then she was utterly without any comprehension of the situation. She became conscious of Anada’s more rigorous moods of pre- occupation, of her silences and her reservations. There were times, too, when she was troubled by something electric in the air, something elusive and stirring and unfathomable. But her eye fell on nothing definitely su: picious. And there was very little that escaped that eve. She did not understand, indeed, un- til the irrefutable evidence of it came from the sheet of paper which she found folded together and pinned on the left side of the girl's chemise. It was the sheet of paper which Wallie, as the Robin Hood in chaps. besieged by the sheriff’s posse, thrusts into the girl's hand in the third act of “The Road Agent’s Reveng: It was supposed to be a message calling for help, written under great tension. it was customarily a mere stage scrawl, a dash or two of a pen across the paper. But it did not escape Katherine Kinsella's attention that the 'young outlaw in chaps, as he wrote that message, slowed down the tempo of the action by inditing actual words on sheet of paper. It an- noyed her, at first, and then it puz- zled her. And then it began to worry her. For after the act she caught sight of Anada tucking the scrap of paper tenderly into her bodice. She knew better than to ask about it. Her daughter, she remembered, had her privacies of life which she insisted on being Tespected. But the older woman bided her time. Long after midnight, when the girl was asleep beside her, she got up out of bed and quietly pursued her search. She found the paper pinned where it would rest over her daughter's heart. And it was a love message. “Even now,” were the words written there, “I can’t help saying just these three words: I love you.” Katherine Kinsella studied it with a sort of terror surging through her own tired heart. This was followed by a_ sense of betrayal, and this in turn by a sense of futility. Her first impulse was to act, an@ to act with decision. But the more she brooded over the situation the more she realized her helplessness. She knew her daughter well enough to understand that if she summarily dismissed young Craswell| pagte, the girl would go with him. They were already united in a campaign of deception against her. To talk to them singly was equally out of the question. She had nothing to say to them that would be understandable, from the viewpoint of reason. They knew nothing of life as she had come to know it. And an emotional appeal was out of the question. It was beyond her. It would never reach the self-contained girl who had built up about her young life its laborious walls of reserve. And there was the added danger of precipitating what was not yet final. * k % % SO Katherine Kinsella became dis- creet, silently and reptiliously discreet. She waited and watched. She studied the situation. SHE HAD TO FASHION MAKE-BELIEVE INTO ACTUALITY UNTIL STAGE 3 STOOD CONVINCED THAT IN SAV) THAT TAWDRY MELODRAMA SHE WAS SAVING THE LIVING DAUGHTER. | | i i | [ {world in spirit, ydozen times a day. by overuse, four-piece orchestra melted into the music of nightingales singing in Ava- lonian valleys. They had their being in a world of their own, a world which seemed infinitely remote from the older woman who watched them with troubled and tragic eyes. It was a world which she herself had been cheated out of, which she had protectively taught herself to deride. But In spite of her iron wili she found the thwarted ghosts of her youth stirring_in their graves. And her sense of frustration was a double- edged one. For the very bouudless- ness of this love which she was compelled to watch from the side- lines of life touched her with envy. It was something she had never ep- countered and explored, and it was something, not knowing it, of which she was indeterminately afraid. She was wounded, too, by the sheer knowledge of her helplessness. She suffered under a sense of exile, of banishment from the world where the one warm interest of her life had rested. If the man had any promise, any actual genius for the stage, there ILLUSION AND LIFE ITSELF NG THE MIMIC DAUGHTER OF y_of hope in the situation. They might still climb together, the girl and he. But he had nothing more than a trim figure and a fresh young face. And he had no slightest wish to become an actor. She found that out when she so dis- icreetly and guardedly sounded him on the matter. His ambition was to have a sheep ranch in the foot- hills, a three-roomed wickiup to rest in at night and a broncho to ride by day, a roomful of books for the win- ter, a month of trout fishing for the summer, and a bit of shooting up in the mountains for the autumn. That was his future. And that, she knew, was the placid and ox-like existence he had been whispering into the ear of her daughter. That was the sheeny bait he was dangling before the girl whose entire life had been made up of early trains and untidy day coaches, of cheap hotel life and rehearsals on musty-smelling stages, of hurry and glare and vulgarity in a little tinsel world of tinsel excitements. Already she had escaped from that if not in body. And the thing that impressed the tragic- eved watcher was the incommunica- ble happiness of the girl, the happi- ness which she had neither the cour- age nor the wish to share with her mother. They were so happy, the two of them, that they betrayed it a They thought they were hugging their secret, but it was as plain as light now to the keen-eyved older woman so covertly watching them from the dark corners of her misery. Her days were too busy for brooding. Eut she went through her daily and nightly round of work with the feeling of silent and sinister forces undermining her house of life. She knew that her daughter was still an innocent girl. She knew it by the uncontrolied exaltation which she sometimes caught from the brooding and barricaded face. It was the exaltation of purity stirred by emotions which it had not yet been able to fathom. And once, indeed even in the teeth of the tenacity with which she knew the girl would pro. tect her secret, the troubled watcher decided to give the two of them their final chance. She had practically de- cided to call tham into her dressing room and have it out with them. But in the half-light at the end of a stack of dusty paint frames that afternoon She happened to catch sight of them i each other's arms. It was the first time she had seen any such thing on their part. The sight of it went through her like a spear. It warned her of more things than one.. She knew. then, that it was already too late for words. And she knew, re- membering the headstrong blindness of youth, that the temporary armi- stice about her could not go on for long. Some night. she knew, the girl would no longer be ther: And the harried watchér waited, helpless to avert the inevitable. She waited until that night of lucid sleep- lessne: with the light of the street lamp on the broken ceiling and the ribald sounds of merriment assailing her through the thin partition of her cheap temperance hotel when, through the strangling_ fog of her hopeless- ness struck the flash of her final chance, the chance that would come BY ARTHUR STRINGER where the music of a[parallelism of actual life as it then|cumbed to the one fixed obsession of confronted her, it took on an added poignancy, a clumsy symbolism which more and more appeaied to her. And now she could prolong the parallel, She could make the coinidence:com- plete. The chance to do that would come when she stood before young Craswell, in his tin spurs and his Mexican sash and his burnt umber makeup, with her six-shooter in her hand. Into that six-shooter, before every performance, Hunkie Hoppe, who' acted as props, duly thrust his half-dozen blank cartridges. It would be easy enough, at the last moment, to substitute a ball cartridge for one of those blanks. And the rest was sufficiently simple, once she was sure of her cartridge being there. For the shot, she remembered, was fired point blank, with her sneering victim fall- ing close to her feet. The actor who had preceded young Craswell, in fact, had inaugurated the custom of wear-: ing a sheet of asbestos fixed by two safety pins under his short Mexican jacket edged with its sequins of brass, for once, through holding_the pistol too close to his body, she had set fire to_his clothing. It would, of course. be accepted as an accident. But she would have to pave the way for that consummation. And that campaign of preparation be- gan with a less infolerant attitude toward the youth who had so casually pulled down her house of life about her ears. She could even sense his bewilderment at that open softening toward him, but she was too old an actress to fail in sustaining a role once assumed. The task with regard to her own daughter was both easier and at the same time more difficult. It was harder to remain undisturbed under the coldly appraising glance of the girl who had grown away from her. ~But it was not hard to fall for- lornly back into a pretense at the more intimate note of their earlier years. For this girl with the barri- cided eyes was, after all, her own daughter, flesh of her flesh and bone of her bone. As much as life had robbed her of the equipment to ex- press her love, this self-contained young woman with the timorously audacious will of youth was the only thing she had ever loved. It was no easy thing to break the habit of silence which had grown up between them. But she could afford to be patient; she was even compelled to be patient, There were days dur- ing that quiet courtship for lost con- fidences, when the older woman would find the younger staring at her with a frown of perplexaiy on her troubled young face. Onke, too, Katherine Kinsella found herself changing color before that cool and level stare of curiosity. The girl, for some reason. made her think of a marble-cold figure of justice with invisible scales balanced in her hand. But her greater difficulties were not those of theispirit. There were other and more definite problems to be faced. She felt the need, from the first, of foreshadowing the use of her ‘solid shot. Judgment demanded some reasonable excuse for that mix- ing up of balls with blan: For a week she brooded over this problem without arriving at any situation which seemed to cafry the stamp of the authentic. But her chance came with sudden unexpectedness when. in making a long jump through a coun- try of rolling plain and jack pine, they were held up with a hot-box. They emerged from their dusty day coach, wandered about the roc! slopes, and watched two campers empty brand-new six-shooters at a ginger ale bottle which had been tied to the branch of a jackpine. Hun- kie Hoppe, having disinterred a couple of his shooting irons from the com- | pany’s arsenal, bought a box of cart- ridges from the campers and one by one they joined in the contest and took pot-shots at the bottle. They were still peppering ineffectually at their swaying target when a repeated blast from the engine whistle warned them that their train was about to move on. So they went scrambling back to the day coach. % % x ~ATHERINE KINSELLA was the last to -go, - She pretended to be stooping down:to-tie'a shoelace: - But while in that position she was actu- ally picking up from the ground a precious ball cartridge which one of the campers had tossed carelessly aside. She pushed it hurriedly down i to her when she had killed Wallie| Craswell. And she went about, once that night of troubled thought was over, hugging her own secret to her breast. * k % X THERE was no need for undue haste, she kept reminding herself. indeed, was the one thing she would have to guard against. For she must see to it that her tracks were covered at every step of the way. She knew by this time exactly how it was to be done. It would happen in the last act of “The Range Wolf,” where the innocent flower of the rancho, impersonated by Anada, was about to be despoiled by the schem- ing young Mexican already played some half-dozen_ times by Wallie Craswell himself. Katherine Kinsella invariably took the part of the girl's mother, for it was the “fat” part of the production and one of the few roles where the actress who had grown old in the manipulation of second-hand emotions could get a genuine thrill of power. This mother She held| was represented as the bad woman of the key, now, which opened the door- | the settlement, the bad woman who way to a hundred earlier enigmas. She began to understand the meaning of the girl's lassitude, the warmer and quicked flow of color to the smooth cheek which the rawest of makeup could scarcely disfigure, the new vi- brata in her deepening voice as she declaimed the once tawdry lines of her tawdry love scenes with the ap. pollonian youth who moved about, after making his exit, like a man in a dream- i For they were in a’'dream, the two of them, the immuring and _golden- misted dream of first love. They had taken wing, in spirit, from that shoddy road company .with shoddy plays and its shoddier dressing rooms. They had escaped to a garden of en- chantment, where the light was mel- lower than that which came from a jum spotlight, .where the ; roses we® not of stained - cotton * | was compelled to remain silent as to her true relationship to the girl. For two acts of tangled crime and in- trigue she must watch over ‘her daughter from a distance. For two acts she must keep bottled up in her tainted bosom the mother love which she dare not disclose. But in the last act, vhen life has come to mean nothing to her, she lets loose the pent_up flood. She has her moment then, and at the end of that moment she shoots the intriguing young grandee, shoots him point blank, through the heart, to save her daugh- ter from a fate worse than death it- self. It was antique and tawdry enough, she knew, but it held its big mo- ments of rough passion and worked up to a climax which never failed|foyer of the.Dibbley, Theater, ran a|of gray grotesque and crude | haggard eye.over the frame of faded | trivial, those lines and movements with to grip the house, as the units making up that house may have been. And in its accidental 2 Y° 4 in her shoe, where it bruised her in- step as she walked back, to the coach platform, from which they were now calling for her to:hurry. But she knew that no one had seen that move- ment and she knew that she had come into ppssession of the one thing essential to the carrying out of her plan. She was armed to strike now, and the sooner she struck the better. She realized that when they opened at Carbona Junction their first per- formance would have to be <“The Range Wolf.” For destiny had thrust Into her hands too precious a chance to_be overlooked. ... . . Budanski, with his coast train limp- ing into Carbona Junction five hours behind schedule, missed his connec: Ition for the east and found that it would be midnight before the trans- continental express could stop to take him aboard. So he and young Loeser tired of reading scripts and arguing over the infinitely ramified details of his coming production of “Monte Carlo,” dined moodily at a. Chinese restaurant, and listlessly explored the illuminated main street of Carbona Junction. ‘Budansk! stopped before the narrow the caste of photographs visualisin, promptly suc- “The Range Wolf,” an his life. His secretary, who also happened to be his son-in-law, apprehended that surrender and tried to forestall it. “Say, Chief, you're not going to try to sit through two hours of barn- storming like that?” he demanded, trying to elbow the great manager back from the steady stream ebbing in_through the narrow foyer. “They’re getting the thing over,” an- nounced the older and wiser man “and ir’s always worth while seeing how they do their trick. We're here till midnight. And I'm going to see this khow.” “Well, you'd better get your ear- muffs on!” warned the morose-eyed young man as he followed in through the wicket after the chief, who, in some way, seemed able to make everything grist for his mill. “For youll think you're in a shooting gal- lery before they get their first cur- tain dow. “My boy, there's lots to learn about gunplay, in this business,” was the other's solemn rejoiner. “And I've got to get fixed about that shooting scene of ours in ‘Monte Carlo.” *” “Darn little help you'll get from this outfit,” observed young Loeser as the first crash from the three-pi jazz band souaded from the obsolete old orchestra pit. It was Hunkie Hoppe, counting up the house through the curtain peep hole, who first spotted Budanski. For one ' incredulous moment he studied the silvery-haired man with the in- congruously granitic jaw, made sure it was Budanski, and turned back to electrify his company with the news. He encountered Anada Kinsella, made up and waiting. She was seated on a rickety flight of property steps, quictly darning a silk stoc “Girlie.” cried Hunkie, into mysterious excitement, play up tonight! You gotta send it over strong “Why?" asked the girl, weaving her needle in and out through the mesh of thin silk “Because Budanski's out front!” She looked up at him for an ab- stracted moment. Who's Budanski?’ she inquired, turning the stocking on her arm. Hunkie, who came from the banks of the Hudson, groaned aloud. ‘Who's Budanski? And vou adver- tisin’ yourself as an actress! You might as well say who's George Cohan or who's Shakespeare! Who's Budan- ski? Say, just pipe them words to your mother. girlie, and see if they get to her or not! But he found it impossible to infect her with any echo of his own excite- ment. “Why should I have to play up be- cause he happens to be out front?” asked the quiet-eyed girl as she folded up her stocking. “Because Budanski's the biggest producing manager in America,” averred Hunkie, with the emphasis of retarded enunciation. “That doesn’t necessarily interest me in him,” was the other's cool re- tort. “Then how about him being inter- ested in you?” demanded the patiently impatient Hunkie. “If he's here to spot new material, it ain't me, and it ain’t fat old Hornick over there, and it ain’t Goldie, and it ain’t the missus. Can't you see it. girl? You're the on comer in this bunch o' has-been: you who's going to be sized up The girl sat back with a sudden ar- resting of all movement. Her ques- tioning_eves sought Hunkie's broad face. Then her own face hardened! even under her make-up. “Supposing it's Wallie Craswell?” she said in little more than a whisper. Hunkie Hoppe's laugh was a raucous one. Wallie ain't no actor,” was his prompt declaration. “He's a sheep- herder stalliug along on his shape!” He heard the overture end and veered off to his duties, fortified with the thought of how the older woman would respond to his news. She un- derstood. Her response to that knowl- edge would be as automatic and in- stinctive as the response of an old fire horse to the sudden clungor of an alarm gong. 2 But when he told her. in the wings, jist before she went on for her first- act scene with her daughter. Kather- ine Kinsellmdid not seem to hear him. She moved with the abstraction of a sleep-walker, the bloodlessness of her face accentuating the lines of her make-up and imposing on her an ex- ceptional look of age. Even her voice rang back hu and hollow from the open maw of light into which she had “WATT TILL I FINISH DRESSING,” SHE FALTERED. “FIDDLESTICKS!” RETORTED THE GREAT MAN OF BROADWAY. stepped, for a great fire had burned that day in her body, and now a great weariness had taken its place. But there was to be no turning back. ‘Whatever it might cost her that night, she was going to save what remained of her house of life. Budanski, sitting low in his seat, with his ruminative eyes half closed. watched the act end and the curtain come down. “1 remember that old bird,” he said, as mother and daughter perfunctorily took an entirely perfunctory curtain call. “Her name’s Kinsella—Kather- ine Kinsella. She cried all over the office furniture to get into my first Sal- vini cast. That must have been well over fifteen years ago. * k * X UNG Loeser verified his chief's spectacular memory for names of | the past. Then he looked back at the woman being shut off from his view by the lowering curtain. “She’'s got a great face,” he ven- tured. reat for what?" “It strikes me as a pretty good face for that countess of ours when ‘Monte Carlo’ goes o The man beside him moved impa- tiently. “I want an actress, not a face,” was his sharp retort. Yet during the second act he sat with a troubled look on his own face. He was unwilling to withdray an ]opinion once expressed, and averse levcn to its secret revision. But there vas something about the Kinsella woman that disturbed him. He had contempt enough for the base coin in which she was bartering. But that woman, even against his will, was getting under his skin. Katherine Kinsella was oblivious to this, just as she was oblivious to his presence there. She knew little, indeed, of what was taking place about her. An immense preoccupation possessed her. All consciousness was _cen- tered on that darker drama which lay at the core of those dead lines and movements as a red coal lies in its bed ashes. They seemed infinitely which she was so familiar, She was able to go through with them aute- i |man sitting beside him ; lower of matically, so that her mind m«r open to pace its own forlorn corridors of desolation. She worked so quietly that the rest of her company accepted it a8 fatigwe. It was Anada Kinsella alone who was disturbed by the change in her mother. For it was seldom the older woman permitted mood Or Worry or weariness to show its head between her and her audience. “What's the matter with mother?” asked the girl in the middle of a high- voltage scene with Wallie. The girl had grown aiept at such word juggling be- tween her lines, and this question was put, as she was faced up-stage, without one perceptible halt in the rapid-fire movement of the pla: “Why?" asked th when his chance cam, ‘She frightens me with that look on Ler face,” explained the girl in a slightly delayed ‘asid “She ‘always frightens me,” was Wallie's final retort. But being less adroit in such things, he suddenly went dry, and had to cross and glower and cross again before his stage mate remembered to throw him his line and permit the heated scene to_gallop on to its end. But Katherine Kinsella, that night. refused to gallop. She seemed al- ways parrying for time, as though in- tent on withholding some culmination which she dreaded to face. She seem- od afraid to move deathly quiet by th act was under way, fatal cartridge had observed into the and she knew ti was destin needed t for by this seemed burned out It was not that she went through her part with an air of pathos and repose that seemed new to her. But life had hammered and shaped and chilled her to a cutting edge, and the knife went deep. Yet she vearned over her daughter with a tenderness which no longer remained in her control, for she could see happiness in the girl's face, and that happiness. she knew. was so soon to end. The girl would not understand the final kindness in all the seeming cruelty But she would learn in time. It would shock her out of her childish dreams. It would mature her, send her back to her life's work with a riper mind for it was only those who knew grief who could ever hope to portray it. That was the price th 11 had to pay. And it was too late now 1o turn back. She remembered that as she con- fronted the young Mexican grand who was her fictitious enemy of the moment. Yet he was u mere boy., she also remembered 2s she g nd cried with the automatism of habit so fixed that her thoughts were left free to range s they would. and her quickened emotions _came and went without hindrance. But he had taken out of her life the only thing she had loved. He was leaving her, in his blindness, nothing with which to face 3 She had planned and schemed and toiled for that future, and if a price was being demanded to hold it. it was she he self who ng that price. And FBung Mexican, forwa »r she knew the en slipped, un- waiting revolver. rt that cartridge v longer almnel Y ET as the act went on she had her sickening moments of hesitation And to fight back that threatening weakness she had to visualize the youth in the tawdry exotic makeup as the impersonation of all evil. She had to force herself to hate him. She was compelled to drug herself with the venom of a tortured and twisted imagination. She had to lash her- self into a fury at the thing which it was essential she should abhor. She had to fashion make b into the mold of actuality until stage illusion and life itself merged and blended. until her dizzy brain stood convinced that in saving the mimic daughter of that tawdry melodrama she Wwas saving the breathing and living daughter who could and should not be taken away from her. And in doing this, for the first time in many a year of over-facile ranting. she lost herself in her part. Budanski slouching seat, made a movement low in his which the accepted us one of annoyance. But the younger man, the next monfent, realized his For he could hear Budan- . “that wom: sure tearing it off edged voung Loeser. with his still on the tragic figure So cunningly concealing the revolver from her inu- tended victim Watch her gun-play, Budanski. leaning forward time, with his hands on his knees. “D’ you notice her kne chief? came from the other. in an anSwering whisper. e ‘em ke under that eves whispered Ly this her gun-pla retorted Budanski. intent on the stage. He did not fully understand what was taking place there. But this did not greatly disturb him. He was less interested. at the moment, in the movements themselyes than in the manner in which those movements were carried out. What held him was the precious air of genuiness about it all, the stark convincingness of the World-weary mother o grimly intent ivering her daughter from evil. He nursed the suspicio this final age characterization was about him “Watch lost on the audience for th nd the more obvious overlooked floweri om he had once searched the world for. and had but rarely found. He seldom searched for it among what Loeser called the bush leaguers. for he had long clung to a pet theory that five continuous years in stoc or on the road spelled ruin to any player's art. Yet here was a woman who must have spent the best part of her life under the cor- rupting influences and in the coarsen- ing air of cheap melo-drama. was a tank-towner stumbling into a bit of work which impressed him as startlingly close to his final word in stagecraft. It was a role with rigidly imposed restrictions, just as it was a performance with equally established limitations. But, as far as it went, it was perfect. The woman had 16st her- Self in her part. “There’s greatness in that,” be said aloud. She was getting it over. He could see that by the love which softened her face as she turned to her daughter. And he could see it again in the steel cold lines of hate which hardened her flaccid mouth as she turned delib- erately back to the yvouth who stood so perilously between that daughter and herself. She was stretching the wire dangerously thin, he felt, vet what he liked most about it was her pretense at hesitation. It impressed him as the deliberateness of the well- trained hand grown sure of its tool, grown contemptous of its cutting edge. She was even giving depth to a situ- ation primarily shallow, for what con- fronted him was no mere demirep sod- den with crime, cheaply shooting where shooting was called for, but a woman of emotion darkly stirred, only too tragically aware of what awaited her, yet driven against her will to the final resort of force where force spelled her only avenue of escape from the intolerable. He could see this even by the way she handled her fircarm. by her fur- tive movements of concealment until the impending last moment. For she gave the impression of being afraid of .the weapon, as though intent on cealing it as much from her own as from ner victim's. It was the in- strument of murder. and murder, after all, was murder. She must have hated the thought of it. behind all her iron will. And that human dread of a dreadful act tended to humanize her to the spectator. Even when the ten- sion was at its highest, for all the retarded tempo of those over-delib- erate movements of her, it seemed like a crowning touch when her face, under its plastering make-up, became cadaverously colorless. It seemed & miracle of will, to the narrowed-eyed Budanski, that her face and lips could (Continued on Eighth Page.)