The Breaking Point - Page 50/275

She closed the door on him, and he turned and went away. It was all

clear to him; Gregory had seen, not Clark, but the older man; had told

him and gone away. And under the shock the older man had collapsed. That

was sad. It was very sad. But it was also extremely convincing.

He sat up late that night again, running over the entries in his

notebook. The old story, as he pieced it out, ran like this: It had been twelve years ago, when, according to the old files,

Clark had financed Beverly Carlysle's first starring venture. He had,

apparently, started out in the beginning only to give her the publicity

she needed. In devising it, however, he had shown a sort of boyish

recklessness and ingenuity that had caught the interest of the press,

and set newspaper men to chuckling wherever they got together.

He had got together a dozen or so of young men like himself, wealthy,

idle and reckless with youth, and, headed by him, they had made the

exploitation of the young star an occupation. The newspapers referred

to the star and her constellation as Beverly Carlysle and her Broadway

Beauties. It had been unvicious, young, and highly entertaining, and it

had cost Judson Clark his membership in his father's conservative old

clubs.

For a time it livened the theatrical world with escapades that were

harmless enough, if sensational. Then, after a time, newspaper row began

to whisper that young Clark was in love with the girl. The Broadway

Beauties broke up, after a wild farewell dinner. The audiences ceased

to expect a row of a dozen youths, all dressed alike with gardenias in

their buttonholes and perhaps red neckties with their evening suits, to

rise in their boxes on the star's appearance and solemnly bow. And the

star herself lost a little of the anxious look she frequently wore.

The story went, after a while, that Judson Clark had been refused, and

was taking his refusal badly. Reporters saw him, carelessly dressed,

outside the stage door waiting, and the story went that the girl had

thrown him over, money and all, for her leading man. One thing was

clear; Clark, not a drinker before, had taken to drinking hard, and

after a time, and some unpleasant scenes probably, she refused to see

him any more.

When the play closed, in June, 1911, she married Howard Lucas,

her leading man; his third wife. Lucas had been not a bad chap, a

good-looking, rather negligible man, given to all-day Sunday poker,

carefully valeted, not very keen mentally, but amiable. They had bought

a house on East Fifty-sixth Street, and were looking for a new play

with Lucas as co-star, when he unaccountably went to pieces nervously,

stopped sleeping, and developed a slight twitching of his handsome,

rather vacuous face.