Jack and Susan in 1913 Read Online Free Page B

again—let us hope, in a more becoming frock.
    She didn’t have the heart to read any more of the reviews, though the stage manager, who visited her in the ward at Bellevue Hospital, assured her that they were all very good. It was just her luck that on the night that promised to be the beginning of a long and prosperous career, she should suffer a broken leg.
    And not only was her leg broken, but she’d learned that one of Ida Conquest’s friends took over the part of Daisy the following evening, and from all reports, was irredeemably dreadful. For her two weeks of intensive rehearsal, for all her hopes, and for all her plans, Susan received exactly seven dollars and twenty-five cents, a pro rata salary for one evening’s performance—a sum that was immediately consumed by the first night in the hospital.
    What good were handsome reviews when you lay in bed with a broken leg? The doctor hoped she wouldn’t limp for more than six months, but of course you never could tell in cases like this.
    â€œCases like what?” Susan demanded.
    â€œBroken legs,” said the doctor, unhelpfully.
    After he’d done with the police, Mr. Austin came to the hospital, but Susan wouldn’t see him. She knew that the accident had not been his fault—that he really had been trying to save her life—but still, she could not help but feel that it was on his account that she had lost her part in He and She . In fact, if the limp were permanent, Susan would no longer have any future at all on the stage. Maybe Bernhardt could do it on a wooden leg, but it was an unwritten law among theater managers that ingenues needed their limbs intact.
    Mr. Austin sent flowers. Mr. Austin sent her notes. Mr. Austin went to her doctor and said that he would be responsible for all charges incurred by Miss Bright’s confinement in the hospital.
    Susan blushed with shame when she heard this, and hastened to inform the doctor that she would pay all the fees. Single women did not accept money from strange gentlemen.
    Susan fretted in the hospital. The days were long and tedious. The old woman in the bed on one side of her was alternately nonsensically garrulous and comatose. The young woman in the bed to her other side insisted on Susan’s reading aloud to her all the serial stories out of the past year of Cosmopolitan magazine. Susan got her fill of the improbable inanities of such sagas as “Virginia of the Air Lanes.”
    She estimated that this stay in the hospital, which the doctor said would be about two weeks, would cost her about one hundred dollars, which represented exactly two-thirds of her scanty Wall Street cache. That left her less than sixty dollars to live on for the next two months—the amount of time, the doctor also said, she would have to spend at home recuperating.
    Fifty dollars was not enough. It would give her a weekly allowance of about six dollars, and her rent was three dollars a week. That left three dollars for such incidentals as food, firewood, clothing, and transportation. Then, even supposing that she did make do on this fifty dollars and that her leg healed properly and with miraculous swiftness, what then?
    To live she’d be absolutely dependent on her income, and stage jobs were not easy to come by. It had, after all, been a long while between the fan-waving of Cleopatra and the syrupy love-swooning of He and She . Why, oh why hadn’t she simply gone home directly after the opening of the play? Why had she ever read the note that Mr. Austin had sent her? Why hadn’t she listened to Ida’s warnings? Why hadn’t she allowed that unfortunate dog to drive her admirer away?
    It wasn’t his fault, she knew that. But when Susan conjured up and execrated Malign Fate, Malign Fate possessed Mr. Austin’s shadowy features and hoarse voice.
    Yet even with her constant refusals to see him when he visited the hospital—at least every other