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The Lady Is Dead
by
Patrick Laing
Copyright 1951 by Phoenix Press
CHAPTER I
“Helena Stedman,” Prentiss said, and there was a wistful, far-away note in his voice, as if he were remembering a vanished love, “was the most remarkable actress I have ever seen—and the most beautiful woman. I’ll never forget the summer she gave a course of lectures here at the university dramatic school. All of the male students—and a large part of the faculty, I think—were more than half in love with her. But that was over twenty years ago.” His words trailed away into silence, as if those intervening years had blown like a cold wind across his heart.
“And you were one of them, perhaps?” Barto asked. He was our new professor of applied dramatics, and hadn’t been with us long enough to know that one didn’t put personal questions of that sort to our slightly pompous dean, even in the informal surroundings of the Faculty Club.
“I suppose I was.” Prentiss laughed depreciatingly and a little self-consciously. “I was a young English instructor then, in love with art and consequently in love with love.”
“What eventually became of the lady?” I inquired. Her name, when he had first mentioned it, had sounded vaguely familiar to me.
“She died,” he answered briefly.
“Wasn’t there a scandal of some kind about her?” Van Zittar, one of my colleagues in the psychology department, pursued. “I was too young at the time she flourished in the theater to remember much about it, but I seem to recall something. . . .”
“There was,” Prentiss admitted. “And it was all the more—er—spectacular because nothing even remotely suggestive of obliquity had ever been associated with the name of Helena Stedman before. She’d been married to a man not in the theatrical profession—a scientist of some kind, I believe, whose name I don’t remember. The year after she gave her lecture course here, she went to Hollywood to make a picture. During the filming of it, she fell in love with her leading man, a foreign importation who was expected to take the place of the late Rudolph Valentino, and who might have succeeded in doing it if he and Stedman had never met. There followed the usual scandal, in this instance a trifle lurid even for Hollywood.”
He paused, not for dramatic effect, but because, being, Prentiss, he always seemed to feel a vague embarrassment at discussing matters of this nature, as though he suspected that they robbed him of some of his scholastic dignity.
“She was granted her divorce from her husband exactly one month after her baby was born,” he finished stiffly.
Van Zittar, who upon occasion can be somewhat coarse in his reactions, gave a slightly vulgar whistle. “Wow!” he exclaimed. “If you mean what I think you mean—and I’ve no doubt that you do—I’ll bet that set tongues a-wagging, even back in the Roaring Twenties. And after such an episode, I suppose— Are you leaving us, Barto?”
Antonio Barto had risen. “I’m afraid I must,” he said apologetically. “I wish to prepare a written examination for my class in stage technique for tomorrow morning.” He turned to me. “If you’re leaving at this time too, Professor Laing,” he said, “I shall be happy to have your company across campus.”
I accepted his invitation, and we left the Faculty Club together.
But although he had requested my company, as we walked together through the cool stillness of the early spring night, he seemed lost in his own thoughts; and I received the impression that they concerned matters which were of more importance to him than the examination he had said he wanted to prepare for his class.
“I imagine,” I remarked in order to make conversation after we had progressed for several minutes in silence, “the affair Dr. Prentiss was telling us about ended Miss Stedman’s career as an actress.”
Barto made a sound in his throat that was half disgust, half contempt. “There is no doubt that you are right,” he answered in his precise English, which still retained a faint trace of a Spanish accent. “It was a great injustice to a great artist. You Americans!” He spat out the words as though they had been something bitter in his mouth. “You will never learn to appreciate art for itself alone, but you must go poking your clumsy fingers into that which does not concern you. Helena Stedman’s private life was her own affair; she had a right to do with it as she chose.”
Having some slight knowledge of the Latin attitude in such matters, I wasn’t surprised by his outburst. “Theoretically I agree with you,” I replied. “The art should not be judged by the private life of the artist. But unfortunately or otherwise, we Americans are so constituted that we demand a certain amount of conformity to the generally accepted standards of moral integrity in those we place upon our public pedestals. Otherwise, we cannot feel sure of their sincerity in anything.”
“Conformity!” he exclaimed passionately, and I heard a pebble skip across the path, as though he had kicked at it viciously as he walked. “Always there must be conformity to standards set up by others! Yet you prate of individual liberty, of the individual’s right to—”
He broke off with a self-conscious laugh. “Forgive me,” he said more quietly. “I didn’t mean to read you a lecture. It is only that we of the theater are inclined to speak with greater vehemence than we intend. It often, creates the impression that we feel more strongly upon a subject than is actually the Case.”
Although my blindness prevented me from seeing his expression, I wasn’t deceived by the apparent lightness with which he dismissed the subject. It was one which, I was positive, went deeper with him than he wanted me to suspect.
By this time we had reached the edge of the campus, where we said good night and went our separate ways. As I turned in at my own front walk a few minutes later, the faint, sweet scent of wood violets told me that my wife, Deirdre, was waiting for me on the porch.
“What was Dr. Prentiss holding forth on this evening that kept you so late, Paddy?” she greeted me. “The unspeakable imbecility of the Government in Washington or the intellectual poverty of present-day American literature as exemplified by the modern novel?”
I laughed, and sat down beside her on the swing. “Neither, Derry,” I answered. “In some way—don’t ask me how, for I haven’t the faintest idea—the subject got around to an actress whom he’d admired in his youth; one who made a rather spectacular fall from grace, smashing both her own career and the Seventh Commandment in the process.”
“Was that why Dr. Prentiss admired her?” Deirdre asked innocently. “Or shouldn’t I ask?”
“You should know better than to ask,” I told her, slipping my arm about her slender shoulders. “However, I believe the old fraud actually enjoyed repeating that piece of scandal about her, once he got started. Barto, our new dramatics man, was there, and I’m afraid he got a little disgusted with what he evidently considers our provincial American attitude toward artists and morality. On the way across campus, he started to give me a spirited lecture on the subject, then suddenly checked himself.”
“He probably remembered just in time that he was talking to a psychologist,” Deirdre observed shrewdly. She settled herself more comfortably
