The Urge

Mr. Meier came and took her by the hand. His fat face was pale and sweating, he seemed almost awestruck by Cake's calm. He drew her out of the dressing room and through a crowd of people, men and women with painted faces, some beautifully, some extravagantly and strangely dressed. They all stared. One woman shook her head. A man said: "Search me! I never saw her before."

Then Mr. Meier thrust her out in the face of a bright light. "Begin," he said hoarsely. "Walk over there and begin."

Quietly Cake obeyed. She had walked right into the bright light that had drawn her so hard and so long. Of course it was time for her to begin. And with this bright light in her face, which soon became to her the candle in that dark room left so far behind, she fared away to the magic land of beautiful make-believe.

And only when Juliet, that precocious child, sank down poisoned did she become aware of the uproar about her. The shouts of the lodger, "Stop--my God, stop! How do you get that way?" augmented a million times. It was this she heard.

Slowly Cake lifted herself on her hands, dazedly she peered through the heart of the great light that had caused her such suffering and that she had followed faithfully so bitterly long. On the other side she saw faces, rows and rows of them mounting up to the very roof. Faces laughing; faces convulsed, streaming with tears; faces with eyes fixed and wearing that same queer, strained look she had noticed before; hundreds of faces topping each other in semicircular rows, all different but all alike in that they were all laughing.

She rose to her knees and rested there on all fours--staring.

Laughter! A great clapping of hands rolled about her like thunder, dying down and rising again to even greater volume. Cries of "Go on," assailed her ears, mingled with, "Stop, stop! I can't bear it!"

The curtain fell before her, blotting out the vision of those faces, making the uproar slightly dimmer. Mr. Meier advanced and lifted her to her feet. He moved weakly, exhausted with mirth.

"Even Noyes," he gasped. "He--he can't help it. Oh, my goo-hood Gaw-hud!"

Cake looked away from him to the men and women that thronged about her. The same faces that had turned to her such a short while ago; but now, how different!

"Oh, don't criticise," one woman cried. "Hand it to her! She can't be beat. She's the one that comes once in a century to show the rest of us what really can be done."

"Meier," shouted a man. "Meier--she'll have to go back, Meier; she's stopped the show."

Quiet and very still, Cake drew away.

It seemed to her only a moment later that Leafy touched her arm.

"Mr. Meier has taken a suite for you here in this hotel," she said. "Can't you eat a little, Miss?"

Eat? She had never had enough to eat in her life. Her life? She had spent her life securing food for the lodger that he might teach her to be famous. Leafy lifted the spoon of hot soup to her lips and immediately she drank--she who had never had enough to eat in her life. Morsel by morsel from the bountifully filled table the kindly dresser fed her. Obediently she ate, and the hot, rich food stimulated her to swifter, more agonizing thought.

Then, for the first time, she saw Arthur Noyes standing with his back against a closed door. She read pity in his eyes, comprehension, great wonder, and what she did not know then was the love that came to a rare perfection between them and has never faded--and has no place in this story.

"Will you tell me," he said, "what your name is, where your home is, and who are those that love you there?"

Then he broke off and shrank a little against the door. "Oh, don't," he protested.

Yet she had only looked at him and smiled. But it came to her keenly in her new awareness that his questions covered the whole of a woman's life: Her name, her home, and the ones that loved her there. While she--she had no name, she did not even know the lodger's name. She looked down with strange astonishment at her grown-up figure, her woman's hands. She saw herself a ragged, gaunt, bushy-headed child moving on a tight rope above a dark abyss, intent only upon a luminous globe floating just out of reach ahead of her, that she stretched out for eagerly with both her hands. Suddenly the lovely bubble burst and the child was a woman, falling and falling among rows of convulsed, shining white faces to the sound of gargantuan laughter.

"You tell me," Arthur Noyes pleaded gently.

And she did so very simply and beautifully. She did know Shakespeare; it was the only English that she had ever been taught. So Noyes heard how she became an instrument in the hands of the man who hated him mortally, and owed her debut and her terrible awakening to what he considered the only sporting answer to that insult. While he listened he pondered, awestruck, upon the fact that out of all this muck and blackness, the degradation of hate by the lodger, the refinement of hate by himself, had flowered that rarest of all human creatures--one that could make the whole world laugh.

"He always hated me," he said. "I told him he had traded his genius for drink, and he never forgave me. Where is he now?"

"Now?" Cake looked up at him in startled wonder. It came over her suddenly that he counted upon the lodger's being in the Imperial Theatre that night.

"Now?" she repeated. "Why, he is dead."

It took Noyes a minute to recover. "What will you do?" he asked her. "Will you go on from this start, continue this--this sort of success?" He felt it the basest cruelty, in the face of her story, to say it was the only kind she was ever destined to make. He waited for her answer, wondering, and a little awestruck. It seemed to him they had come to the supreme test of her genius.

And she looked up at him with such sadness and such mirth--such tragic, humorous appreciation of the darkness in which she had been born, the toilsome way she had travelled to the Great Light and what it actually revealed when she arrived.

"I will go on from this success," she said. Involuntarily she raised her hand to her breast. "I must, since it is the only way for me. You see," with a humour far more touching than the saddest tears, "I must be famous."

And she smiled that smile that hurt him, the smile the world loves and will give anything to see.

The most famous funmaker of her time looked away from the bright river fleeting beyond the trees to her giggling, half-terrified visitors.

"Fame," she said, "is a secret that cannot be told. It must be discovered by the seeker. Let me offer you tea as a substitute."

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