With this sonorous bit of character reading still ringing in his ears, Canby emerged from the cream-coloured apartment to find the stoop-shouldered figure of the also hypocritical son leaning wearily against the wall, waiting for a delaying elevator. The attitude was not wholly devoid of pathos, to Canby's view of it. Neither was the careworn, harried face, unharmoniously topped by a green hat so sparklingly jaunty, not only in colour but in its shape and the angle of its perch, that it was outright hilarious, and, above the face of Packer, made the playwright think pityingly of a St. Patrick's Day party holding a noisy celebration upon a hearse.
Its wearer nodded solemnly as the elevator bounced up, flashing, and settled to the level of the floor; but the quick drop through the long shaft seemed to do the stage-manager a disproportionate amount of good. Halfway down he emitted a heavy “Whew!” of relief and threw back his shoulders. He seemed to swell, to grow larger; lines verged into the texture of his face, disappearing; and with them went care and seeming years. Canby had casually taken him to be about forty, but so radical was the transformation of him that, as the distance from his harrowing overlord increased, the playwright beheld another kind of creature. In place of the placative, middle-aged varlet, troubled and hurrying to serve, there stepped out of the elevator, at the street level, a deep-chested, assertive, manly adventurer, about thirty, kindly eyed, picturesque, and careless. The green hat belonged to him perfectly.
He gave Canby a look of burlesque ruefulness over his shoulder, the comedy appeal of one schoolboy to another as they leave a scolding teacher on the far side of the door. “The governor does keep himself worked up!” he laughed, as they reached the street and paused. “If it isn't one thing, it's some thing!”
“Perhaps it's my play just now,” said Canby. “I was afraid, earlier this evening, he meant to drop it. Making so many changes may have upset his nerves.”
“Lord bless your soul! No!” exclaimed the new Packer. “His nerves are all right! He's always the same! He can't help it!”
“I thought possibly he might have been more upset than usual,” Canby said. “There was a critic or something that—”
“No, no, Mr. Canby!” Packer chuckled. “New plays and critics, they don't worry him any more than anything else. Of course he isn't going to be pleased with any critics. Most of them give him splendid notices, but they don't please him. How could they?”
“He's always the same, you think?” Canby said blankly.
“Always—always at top pitch, that is, and always unexpected. You'll see as you get to know him. You won't know him any better than you do now, Mr. Canby; you'll only know him more. I've been with him for four years—stage-manager—hired man—maid-of-all-work—order his meals for him in hotels—and I guess old Tinker and I know him as well as anybody does, but it's a mighty big job to handle him just right. It keeps us hopping, but that's bread and butter. Not much bread and butter anywhere these days unless you do hop! We all have to hop for somebody!” He chuckled again, and then unexpectedly became so serious he was almost truculent. “And I tell you, Mr. Canby,” he cried, “by George! I'd sooner hop for Talbot Potter than for any other man that ever walked the earth!”
He took a yellow walking-stick from under his arm, thrust the manuscript Potter had given him into the pocket of his light overcoat, and bade his companion good-night with a genial flourish of the stick. “Subway to Brooklyn for mine. Your play will go, all right; don't worry about that, Mr. Canby. Good-night and good luck, Mr. Canby.”
Canby went the other way, marvelling.
It was eleven; and for half an hour the theatres had been releasing their audiences to the streets;—the sidewalks were bobbing and fluttering; automobiles cometed by bleating peevishly. Suddenly, through the window of a limousine, brilliantly lighted within, Canby saw the face of Wanda Malone, laughing, and embowered in white furs. He stopped, startled; then he realized that Wanda Malone's hair was not red. The girl in the limousine had red hair, and was altogether unlike Wanda Malone in feature and expression.
He walked on angrily.
Immediately a slender girl, prettily dressed, passed him. She clung charmingly to the arm of a big boy; and to Canby's first glance she was Wanda Malone. Wrenching his eyes from her, he saw Wanda Malone across the street getting into a taxicab, and then he stumbled out of the way of a Wanda Malone who almost walked into him. Wherever there was a graceful gesture or turn of the head, there was Wanda Malone.
He wheeled, and walked back toward Broadway, and thought he caught a glimpse of Packer going into a crowded drug-store near the corner. The man he took to be Packer lifted his hat and spoke to a girl who was sitting at a table and drinking soda-water, but when she looked up and seemed to be Wanda Malone with a blue veil down to her nose, Canby turned on his heel, face-about, and headed violently for home.
When he reached quieter streets his gait slackened, and he walked slowly, lost in deep reverie. By and by he came to a halt, and stood still for several minutes without knowing it. Slowly he came out of the trance, wondering where he was. Then he realized that his staring eyes had halted him automatically; and as they finally conveyed their information to his conscious mind, he perceived that he was standing directly in front of a saloon, and glaring at the sign upon the window:
ALES WINES LIQUORS AND CIGARS TIM MALONE
At that, somewhere in his inside, he cried out, in a kind of anguish: “Isn't there anything—anywhere—any more—except Wanda Malone!”
“Second act, ladies and gentlemen!” cried Packer, at precisely ten o'clock the next morning.
About a dozen actors were chatting in small groups upon the stage; three or four paced singly, muttering and mildly gesticulating, with the fretful preoccupation of people trying to remember; two or three, seated, bent over their typewritten “sides,” studying intently; and a few, invisible from the auditorium, were scattered about the rearward rooms and passageways. Talbot Potter, himself, was nowhere to be seen, and, what was even more important to one tumultuously beating heart “in front,” neither was Wanda Malone. Mr. Stewart Canby in a silvery new suit, wearing a white border to his waistcoat collar and other decorations proper to a new playwright, sat in the centre of the front row of the orchestra. Yesterday he had taken a seat about nine rows back.
He bore no surface signs of the wear and tear of a witches' night; riding his runaway play and fighting the enchantment that was upon him. Elastic twenty-seven does not mark a bedless session with violet arcs below its eyes;—what violet a witch had used upon Stewart Canby this morning appeared as a dewey boutonniere in the lapel of his new coat; he was that far gone.
Miss Ellsling and a youth of the company took their places near the front of the stage and began the rehearsal of the second act with a dialogue that led up to the entrance of the star with the “ingenue,” both of whom still remained out of the playwright's range of vision.
As the moment for their appearance drew near, Canby became, to his own rage, almost uncontrollably agitated. Miss Ellsling's scene, which he should have followed carefully, meant nothing to him but a ticking off of the seconds before he should behold with his physical eyes the living presence of the fairy ghost that had put a spell upon him. He was tremulous all over.
Miss Ellsling and her companion came to a full stop and stood waiting. Thereupon Packer went to the rear of the stage, leaned through an open doorway, and spoke deferentially:
“Mr. Potter? All ready, sir. All ready, Miss—ah—Malone?”
Then he stepped back with the air of an unimportant person making way for his betters to pass before him, while Canby's eyes fixed themselves glassily upon the shabby old doorway through which an actual, breathing Wanda Malone was to come.
But he was destined not to see her appear in that expectant frame. Twenty years before—though he had forgotten it—in a dazzling room where there was a Christmas tree, he had uttered a shriek of ecstatic timidity just as a jingling Santa Claus began to emerge from behind the tree, and he had run out of the room and out of the house. He did exactly the same thing now, though this time the shriek was not vocal.
Suffocating, he fled up the aisle and out into the lobby. There he addressed himself distractedly but plainly:
“Jackass!”
Breathing heavily, he went out to the wide front steps of the theatre and stood, sunlit Broadway swimming before him.
“Hello, Canby!”
A shabby, shaggy, pale young man, with hot eyes, checked his ardent gait and paused, extending a cordial, thin hand, the fingers browned at the sides by cigarettes smoked to the bitter end. “Rieger,” he said. “Arnold Rieger. Remember me at the old Ink Club meetings before we broke up?”
“Yes,” said Canby dimly. “Yes. The old Ink Club. I came out for a breath of air. Just a breath.”
“We used to settle the universe in that little back restaurant room,” said Rieger. “Not one of use had ever got a thing into print—and me, I haven't yet, for that matter. Editors still hate my stuff. I've kept my oath, though; I've never compromised—never for a moment.”
“Yes,” Canby responded feebly, wondering what the man was talking about. Wanda Malone was surely on the stage, now. If he turned, walked about thirty feet, and opened a door, he would see her—hear her speaking!
“I've had news of your success,” said Rieger. “I saw in the paper that Talbot Potter was to put on a play you'd written. I congratulate you. That man's a great artist, but he never seems to get a good play; he's always much, much greater than his part. I'm sure you've given him a real play at last. I remember your principles: Realism; no compromise! The truth; no shirking it, no tampering with it! You've struck out for that—you've never compro—”
“No. Oh, no,” said Canby, waking up a little. “Of course you've got to make a little change or two in plays. You see, you've got to make an actor like a play or he won't play it, and if he won't play it you haven't got any play—you've only got some typewriting.”
Rieger set his foot upon the step and rested his left forearm upon his knee, and attitude comfortable for street debate. “Admitting the truth of that for the sake of argument, and only for the moment, because I don't for one instant accept such a jesuitism—”
“Yes,” said Canby dreamily. “Yes.” And, with not only apparent but genuine unconsciousness of this one-time friend's existence, he turned and walked back into the lobby, and presently was vaguely aware that somebody near the street doors of the theatre seemed to be in a temper. Somebody kept shouting “Swell-headed pup!” and “Go to the devil!” at somebody else repeatedly, but finally went away, after reaching a vociferous climax of even harsher epithets and instructions.
The departure of this raging unknown left the lobby quiet; Canby had gone near to the inner doors. Listening fearfully, he heard through these a murmurous baritone cadencing: Talbot Potter declaiming the inwardness of “Roderick Hanscom”; and then—oh, bells of Elfland faintly chiming!—the voice of Wanda Malone!
He pressed, trembling, against the doors, and went in.
Talbot Potter and Wanda Malone stood together, the two alone in the great hollow space of the stage. The actors of the company, silent and remote, watched them; old Tinker, halfway down an aisle, stood listening; and near the proscenium two workmen, tools in their hands, had paused in attitudes of arrested motion. Save for the voices of the two players, the whole vast cavern of the theatre was as still as the very self of silence. And the stirless air that filled it was charged with necromancy.
Rehearsal is like the painted canvas without a frame; it is more like a plaster cast, most like of all to the sculptor's hollow moulds. It needs the bronze to bring a statue to life, and it needs the audience to bring a play to life. Some glamour must come from one to the other; some wind of enchantment must blow between them—there must be a magic spell. But these two actors had produced the spell without the audience.
And yet they were only reading a wistful little love-scene that Stewart Canby had written the night before.
Two people were falling in love with each other, neither realizing it. And these two who played the lovers had found some hidden rhythm that brought them together in one picture as a chord is one sound. They played to each other and with each other instinctively; Talbot Potter had forgotten “the smile” and all the mechanism that went with it. The two held the little breathless silences of lovers; they broke these silences timidly, and then their movements and voices ran together like waters in a fountain. A radiance was about them as it is about all lovers; they were suffused with it.
To Stewart Canby, watching, they seemed to move within a sorcerer's circle of enchantment. Upon his disturbed mind there was dawning a conviction that these inspired mummers were beings apart from him, knowing things he never could know, feeling things he never could feel, belonging to another planet whither he could never voyage, where strange winds blew and all things lived and grew in a light beyond his understanding. For the light that shone in the faces of these two was “the light that never was, on sea or land.”
It had its blessing for him. From that moment, if he had known it, this play, which was being born of so many parents, was certain of “success,” of “popularity,” and of what quality of renown such things may bring. And he who was to be called its author stood there a Made Man, unless some accident befell.
Miss Ellsling spoke and came forward, another actor with her. The scene was over. There was a clearing of throats; everybody moved. The stage-carpenter and his assistant went away blinking, like men roused from deep sleep. The routine of rehearsal resumed its place; and old Tinker, who had not stirred a muscle, rubbed the back of his neck suddenly, and came up the aisle to Canby.
“Good business!” he cried. “Did you see that little run off the stage she made when Miss Ellsling came on? And you saw what he can do when he wants to!”
“He?” Canby echoed. “He?”
“Played for the scene instead of himself. Oh, he can do it! He's an old hand—got too many tricks in the bag to let her get the piece away from him—but he's found a girl that can play with him at last, and he'll use every value she's got. He knows good property when he sees it. She's got a pretty good box of tricks herself; stock's the way to learn 'em, but it's apt to take the bloom off. It hasn't taken off any of hers, the darlin'! What do you think, Mr. Canby?”
To Canby, who hardly noticed that this dead old man had come to life, the speech was jargon. The playwright was preoccupied with the fact that Talbot Potter was still on the stage, would continue there until the rather distant end of the act, and that the “ingenue,” after completing the little run at her exit, had begun to study the manuscript of her part, and in that absorption had disappeared through a door into the rear passageway. Canby knew that she was not to be “on” again until the next act, and he followed a desperate impulse.
“See a person,” he mumbled, and went out through the lobby, turned south to the cross-street, proceeded thereby to the stage-door of the theatre, and resolutely crossed the path of the distrustful man who lounged there.
“Here!” called the distrustful man.
“I'm with the show,” said Canby, an expression foreign to his lips and a clear case of inspiration. The distrustful man waved him on.
Wanda Malone was leaning against the wall at the other end of the passageway, studying her manuscript. She did not look up until he paused beside her.
“Miss Malone,” he began. “I have come—I have come—I have-ah—”
These were his first words to her. She did nothing more than look at him inquiringly, but with such radiance that he floundered to a stop. There were only two things within his power to do: he had either to cough or to speak much too sweetly.
“There's a draught here,” she said, Christian anxiety roused by the paroxysm which rescued him from the damning alternative. “You oughtn't to stand here perhaps, Mr. Canby.”
“'Canby?'” he repeated inquiringly, the name seeming new to him. “Canby?”
“You're Mr. Canby, aren't you?”
“I meant where—who—” he stammered. “How did you know?”
“The stage-manager pointed you out to me yesterday at rehearsal. I was so excited! You're the first author I ever saw, you see. I've been in stock where we don't see authors.”
“Do you—like it?” he said. “I mean stock. Do you like stock? How much do you like stock? I ah—” Again he fell back upon the faithful old device of nervous people since the world began.
“I'm sure you oughtn't to stand in this passageway,” she urged.
“No, no!” he said hurriedly. “I love it! I love it! I haven't any cold. It's the air. That's what does it.” He nodded brightly, with the expression of a man who knows the answer to everything. “It's bad for me.”
“Then you—”
“No,” he said, and went back to the beginning. “I have come—I wanted to come—I wished to say that I wi—” He put forth a manful effort which made him master of the speech he had planned. “I want to thank you for the way you play your part. What I wrote seemed dry stuff, but when you act it, why, then, it seems to be—beautiful!”
“Oh! Do you think so?” she cried, her eyes bedewing ineffably. “Do you think so?”
“Oh—I—oh!—” He got no further, and, although a stranger to the context of this conversation might have supposed him to be speaking of a celebrated commonwealth, Mother of Presidents, his meaning was sufficiently clear to Wanda Malone.
“You're lovely to me,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Lovely! I'll never forget it! I'll never forget anything that's happened to me all this beautiful, beautiful week!”
The little kerchief she had lifted to her eyes was wet with tears not of the stage. “It seems so foolish!” she said bravely. “It's because I'm so happy! Everything has come all at once, this week. I'd never been in New York before in my life. Doesn't that seem funny for a girl that's been on the stage ever since she left school? And now I am here, all at once I get this beautiful part you've written, and you tell me you like it—and Mr. Potter says he likes it. Oh! Mr. Potter's just beautiful to me! Don't you think Mr. Potter's wonderful, Mr. Canby?”
The truth about Mr. Canby's opinion of Mr. Potter at this moment was not to the playwright's credit. However, he went only so far as to say: “I didn't like him much yesterday afternoon.”
“Oh, no, no!” she said quickly. “That was every bit my fault. I was frightened and it made me stupid. And he's just beautiful to me to-day! But I'd never mind anything from a man that works with you as he does. It's the most wonderful thing! To a woman who loves her profession for its own sake—”
“You do, Miss Malone?”
“Love it?” she cried. “Is there anything like it in the world?”
“I might have known you felt that, from your acting,” he said, managing somehow to be coherent, though it was difficult.
“Oh, but we all do!” she protested eagerly. “I believe all actors love it more than they love life itself. Don't think I mean those that never grew up out of their 'show-off' time in childhood. Those don't count, in what I mean, any more than the 'show-girls' and heaven knows what not that the newspapers call 'actresses'. Oh, Mr. Canby, I mean the people with the art and the fire born in them: those who must come to the stage and who ought to and who do. It isn't because we want to be 'looked at' that we go on the stage and starve to stay there! It's because we want to make pictures—to make pictures of characters in plays for people in audiences. It's like being a sculptor or painter; only we paint and model with ourselves—and we're different from sculptors and painters because they do their work in quiet studios, while we do ours under the tension of great crowds watching every stroke we make—and, oh, the exhilaration when they show us we make the right stroke!”
“Bravo!” he said. “Bravo!”
“Isn't it the greatest of all the arts? Isn't it?” she went on with the same glowing eagerness. “We feed our nerves to it, and our lives to it, and are glad! It makes us different from other people. But what of that? Don't we give ourselves? Don't we live and die just to make these pictures for the world? Oughtn't the world to be thankful for us? Oughtn't it? Oh, it is, Mr. Canby; it is thankful for us; and I, for one, never forget that a Prime Minister of England was proud to warm Davy Garrick's breeches at the grate for him!”
She clapped her hands together in a gesture of such spirit and fire that Canby could have thrown his hat in the air and cheered, she had lifted him so clear of his timidity.
“Bravo!” he cried again. “Bravo!”
At that she blushed. “What a little goose I am!” she cried. “Playing the orator! Mr. Canby, you mustn't mind—”
“I won't!”
“It's because I'm so happy,” she explained—to his way of thinking, divinely. “I'm so happy I just pour out everything. I want to sing every minute. You see, it seemed such a long while that I was waiting for my chance. Some of us wait forever, Mr. Canby, and I was so afraid mine might never come. If it hadn't come now it might never have come. If I'd missed this one, I might never have had another. It frightens me to think of it—and I oughtn't to be thinking of it! I ought to be spending all my time on my knees thanking God that old Mr. Packer got it into his head that 'The Little Minister' was a play about the Baptists!”
“I don't see—”
“If he hadn't,” she said, “I wouldn't be here!”
“God bless old Mr. Packer!”
“I hope you mean it, Mr. Canby.” She blushed again, because there was no possible doubt that he meant it. “It seems a miracle to me that I am here, and that my chance is here with me, at last. It's twice as good a chance as it was yesterday, thanks to you. You've given me such beautiful new things to do and such beautiful new things to say. How I'll work at it! After rehearsal this afternoon I'll learn every word of it in the tunnel before I get to my station in Brooklyn. That's funny, too, isn't it; the first time I've ever been to New York I go and board over in Brooklyn! But it's a beautiful place to study, and by the time I get home I'll know the lines and have all the rest of the time for the real work: trying to make myself into a faraway picture of the adorable girl you had in your mind when you wrote it. You see—”
She checked herself again. “Oh! Oh!” she said, half-laughing, half-ashamed. “I've never talked so much in my life! You see it seems to me that the whole world has just burst into bloom!”
She radiated a happiness that was almost tangible; it was a glow so real it seemed to warm and light that dingy old passageway. Certainly it warmed and lighted the young man who stood there with her. For him, too, the whole world was transfigured, and life just an orchard to walk through in perpetual April morning.
The voice of Packer proclaimed: “Two o'clock, ladies and gentlemen! Rehearsal two o'clock this afternoon!”
The next moment he looked into the passageway. “This afternoon's rehearsal, two o'clock, Miss—ahh—Malone. Oh, Mr. Canby, Mr. Potter wants you to go to lunch with him and Mr. Tinker. He's waiting. This way, Mr. Canby.”
“In a moment,” said the young playwright. “Miss Malone, you spoke of your going home to work at making yourself into 'the adorable girl' I had in my mind when I wrote your part. It oughtn't”—he faltered, growing red—“it oughtn't to take much—much work!”
And, breathless, he followed the genially waiting Packer.
“Your overcoat, Mr. Potter!” called that faithful servitor as Potter was going out through the theatre with old Tinker and Canby. “You've forgotten your overcoat, sir.”
“I don't want it.”
“Yes sir; but it's a little raw to-day.” He leaped down into the orchestra from the high stage, striking his knee upon a chair with violence, but, pausing not an instant for that, came running up the aisle carrying the overcoat. “You might want it after you get out into the air, Mr. Potter. I'm sure Mr. Tinker or Mr. Canby won't mind taking charge of it for you until you feel like putting it on.”
“Lord! Don't make such a fuss, Packer. Put it on me—put it on me!”
He extended his arms behind him, and was enveloped solicitously and reverently in the garment.
“Confound him!” said Potter good-humouredly, as they came out into the lobby. “It is chilly; he's usually right, the idiot!”
Turning from Broadway, at the corner, they went over to Fifth Avenue, where Potter's unconsciousness of the people who recognized and stared at him was, as usual, one of the finest things he did, either upon the stage or “off.” Superb performance as it was, it went for nothing with Stewart Canby, who did not even see it, for he walked entranced, not in a town, but through orchards in bloom.
If Wanda Malone had remained with him, clear and insistent after yesterday's impersonal vision of her at rehearsal, what was she now, when every tremulous lilt of the zither-string voice, and every little gesture of the impulsive hands, and every eager change of the glowing face, were fresh and living, in all their beautiful reality, but a matter of minutes past? He no longer resisted the bewitchment; he wanted all of it. His companions and himself were as trees walking, and when they had taken their seats at a table in the men's restaurant of a hotel where he had never been, he was not roused from his rapturous apathy even by the conduct of probably the most remarkable maitre d'hotel in the world.
“You don't git 'em!” said this personage briefly, when Potter had ordered chops and “oeufs a la creole” and lettuce salad, from a card. “You got to eat partridge and asparagus tips salad!”
And he went away, leaving the terrible Potter resigned and unrebellious.
The partridge was undeniable when it came; a stuffed man would have eaten it. But Talbot Potter and his two guests did little more than nibble it; they neither ate nor talked, and yet they looked anything but unhappy. Detached from their surroundings, as they sat over their coffee, they might have been taken to be three poetic gentlemen listening to a serenade.
After a long and apparently satisfactory silence, Talbot Potter looked at his watch, but not, as it proved, to see if it was time to return to the theatre, his ensuing action being to send a messenger to procure a fresh orchid to take the place of the one that had begun to droop a little from his buttonhold. He attached the new one with an attentive gravity shared by his companions.
“Good thing, a boutonniere,” he explained. “Lighten it up a little. Rehearsal's dry work, usually. Thinking about it last night. Why not lighten it up a little? Why shouldn't an actor dress as well for a company of strangers at a reception? Ought to make it as cheerful as we can.”
“Yes,” said Tinker, nodding. “Something in that. I believe they work better. I must say I never saw much better work than those people were doing this morning. It was a fine rehearsal.”
“It's a fine company,” Potter said warmly. “They're the best people I ever had. They're all good, every one of them, and they're putting their hearts into this play. It's the kind of work that makes me proud to be an actor. I am proud to be an actor! Is there anything better?” He touched the young playwright on the arm, a gesture that hinted affection. “Stewart Canby,” he said, “I want to tell you I think we're going to make a big thing out of this play. It's going to be the best I've ever done. It's going to be beautiful!”
From the doorway into the lobby of the hotel there came a pretty sound of girlish voices whispering and laughing excitedly, and, glancing that way, the three men beheld a group of peering nymphs who fled, delighted.
“Ladies stop to rubber at Mr. Potter,” explained the remarkable headwaiter over the star's shoulder. “Mr. Potter, it's time you got marrit, anyhow. You git marrit, you don't git stared at so much!” He paused not for a reply, but hastened away to countermand the order of another customer.
“Married,” said Potter musingly. “Well, there is such a thing as remaining a bachelor too long—even for an actor.”
“Widower, either,” assented Mr. Tinker as from a gentle reverie. “A man's never too old to get married.”
His employer looked at him somewhat disapprovingly, but said nothing; and presently the three rose, without vocal suggestion from any of them, and strolled thoughtfully back to the theatre, pausing a moment by the way, while Tinker bought a white carnation for his buttonhole. There was a good deal, he remarked absent-mindedly, in what Mr. Potter had said about lightening up a rehearsal.
Probably there never was a more lightened-up rehearsal than that afternoon's. Potter's amiability continued;—nay, it increased: he was cordial; he was angelic; he was exalted and unprecedented. A stranger would have thought Packer the person in control; and the actors, losing their nervousness, were allowed to display not only their energy but their intelligence. The stage became a cheery workshop, where ambition flourished and kindness was the rule. For thus did the starry happiness that glowed within the beatific bosom of the little “ingenue” make Arcady around her.
At four o'clock Talbot Potter stepped to the front of the stage and lifted his hand benevolently. “That will do for to-day,” he said, facing the company. “Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you. I have never had a better rehearsal, and I think it is only your due to say you have pleased me very much, indeed. I cannot tell you how much. I feel strongly assured of our success in this play. Again I thank you. Ladies and gentlemen”—he waved his hand in dismissal—“till to-morrow morning.”
“By Joles!” old Carson Tinker muttered. “I never knew anything like it!”
“Oh—ah—Packer,” called the star, as the actors moved toward the doors. “Packer, ask Miss—Malone to wait a moment. I want—I'd like to go over a little business in the next act before tomorrow.”
“Yes, Mr. Potter?” It was she who answered, turning eagerly to him.
“In a moment, Miss Malone.” He spoke to the stage-manager in a low tone, and the latter came down into the auditorium, where Canby and Tinker had remained in their seats.
“He says for you not to wait, gentlemen. There's nothing more to do this afternoon, and he may be detained quite a time.”
The violet boutonniere and the white carnation went somewhat reluctantly up the aisle together, and, after a last glance back at the stage from the doorway, found themselves in the colder air of the lobby, a little wilted.
Bidding Tinker farewell, on the steps of the theatre, Canby walked briskly out to the Park, and there, abating his energy, paced the loneliest paths he could find until long after dark. They were not lonely for him; a radiant presence went with him through the twilight. She was all about him: in the blue brightness of the afterglow, in the haze of the meadow stretches, and in the elusive woodland scents that vanished as he caught them;—she was in the rosy vapour wreaths on the high horizon, in the laughter of children playing somewhere in the darkness, in the twinkling of the lights that began to show—for now she was wherever a lover finds his lady, and that is everywhere. He went over and over their talk of the morning, rehearsing wonderful things he would say to her upon the morrow, and taking the liberty of suggesting replies from her even more wonderful. It was a rhapsody; he was as happy as Tom o'Bedlam.
By and by, he went to a restaurant in the Park and ordered food to be brought him. Then, after looking at it with an expression of fixed animation for half an hour, he paid for it and went home. He let himself into the boarding-house quietly, having hazy impressions that he was not popular there, also that it might be embarrassing to encounter Miss Cornish in the hall; and, after reconnoitering the stairway, went cautiously up to his room.
Three minutes later he came bounding down again, stricken white, and not caring if he encountered the devil. On his table he had found a package—the complete manuscript of “Roderick Hanscom” and this scrawl:
Canby,
I can't produce your play—everything off.
Y'rs,
Tal't P'r.
Carson Tinker was in the elevator at the Pantheon, and the operator was closing the door thereof, about to ascend, but delayed upon a sound of running footsteps and a call of “Up!” Stewart Canby plunged into the cage; his hat, clutched in his hand, disclosing emphatically that he had been at his hair again.
“What's he mean?” he demanded fiercely. “What have I done?”
“What's the matter?” inquired the calm Tinker.
“What's he called it off for?”
“Called what off?”
“The play! My play!”
“I don't know what you're talking about. I haven't seen him since rehearsal. His Japanese boy called me on the telephone a little while ago and told me he wanted to see me.”
“He did?” cried the distracted Canby. “The Japanese boy wanted to see—”
“No,” Tinker corrected. “He did.”
“And you haven't heard—”
“Twelfth,” urged the operator, having opened the door. “Twelfth, if you please, gentlemen.”
“I haven't heard anything to cause excitement,” said Tinker, stepping out. “I haven't heard anything at all.” He pressed the tiny disc beside the door of Potter's apartment. “What's upset you?”
With a pathetic gesture Canby handed him Potter's note. “What have I done? What does he think I've done to him?”
Tinker read the note and shook his head. “The Lord knows! You see he's all moods, and they change—they change any time. He knows his business, but you can't count on him. He's liable to do anything—anything at all.”
“But what reason—”
The Japanese boy, Sato, stood bobbing in the doorway.
“Mis' Potter kassee,” he said courteously. “Ve'y so'y Mis' Potter kassee nobody.”
“Can't see us?” said Tinker. “Yes, he can. You telephoned me that he wanted to see me, not over a quarter of an hour ago.”
Sato beamed upon him enthusiastically. “Yisso, yisso! See Mis' Tinker, yisso! You come in, Mis' Tinker. Ve'y so'y. Mis' Potter kassee nobody.”
“You mean he'll see Mister Tinker but won't see anybody else?” cried the playwright.
“Yisso,” said Sato, delighted. “Ve'y so'y. Mis' Potter kassee nobody.”
“I will see him. I—”
“Wait. It's all right,” Tinker reassured him soothingly. “It's all right, Sato. You go and tell Mr. Potter that I'm here and Mr. Canby came with me.”
“Yisso.” Sato stood back from the door obediently, and they passed into the hall. “You sidowm, please.”
“Tell him we're waiting in here,” said Tinker, leading the way into the cream-coloured salon.
“Yisso.” Sato disappeared.
The pretty room was exquisitely cheerful, a coal fire burning rosily in the neat little grate, but for its effect upon Canby it might have been a dentist's anteroom. He was unable to sit, and began to pace up and down, shampooing himself with both hands.
“I've racked my brains every step of the way here,” he groaned. “All I could think of was that possibly I've unconsciously paralleled some other play that I never saw. Maybe someone's told him about a plot like mine. Such things must happen—they do happen, of course—because all plots are old. But I can't believe my treatment of it could be so like—”
“I don't think it's that,” said Tinker. “It's never anything you expect—with him.”
“Well, what else can it be?” the playwright demanded. “I haven't done anything to offend him. What have I done that he should—”
“You'd better sit down,” the manager advised him. “Going plumb crazy never helped anything yet that I know of.”
“But, good heavens! How can I—”
“Sh!” whispered Tinker.
A tragic figure made its appearance upon the threshold of the inner doorway: Potter, his face set with epic woe, gloom burning in his eyes like the green fire in a tripod at a funeral of state. His plastic hair hung damp and irregular over his white brow—a wreath upon a tombstone in the rain—and his garment, from throat to ankle, was a dressing-gown of dead black, embroidered in purple; soiled, magnificent, awful. Beneath its midnight border were his bare ankles, final testimony to his desperate condition, for only in ultimate despair does a suffering man remove his trousers. The feet themselves were distractedly not of the tableau, being immersed in bedroom shoes of gay white fur shaped in a Romeo pattern; but this was the grimmest touch of all—the merry song of mad Ophelia.
“Mr. Potter!” the playwright began, “I—”
Potter turned without a word and disappeared into the room whence he came.
“Mr. Potter!” Canby started to follow. “Mr. Pot—”
“Sh!” whispered Tinker.
Potter appeared again upon the threshold In one hand he held a large goblet; in the other a bottle of Bourbon whiskey, just opened. With solemn tread he approached a delicate table, set the goblet upon it, and lifted the bottle high above.
“I am in no condition to talk to anybody,” he said hoarsely. “I am about to take my first drink of spirits in five years.”
And he tilted the bottle. The liquor clucked and guggled, plashed into the goblet, and splashed upon the table; but when he set the bottle down the glass was full to its capacious brim, and looked, upon the little “Louis Sixteenth” table, like a sot at the Trianon. Potter stepped back and pointed to it majestically.
“That,” he said, “is the size of the drink I am about to take!”
“Mr. Potter,” said Canby hotly, “will you tell me what's the matter with my play? Haven't I made every change you suggested? Haven't—”
Potter tossed his arms above his head and flung himself full length upon the chaise lounge.
“STOP it!” he shouted. “I won't be pestered. I won't! Nothing's the matter with your play!”
“Then what—”
Potter swung himself round to a sitting position and hammered with his open palm upon his knee for emphasis: “Nothing's the matter with it, I tell you! I simply won't play it!”
“Why not?”
“I simply won't play it! I don't like it!”
The playwright dropped into a chair, open-mouthed. “Will you tell me why you ever accepted it?”
“I don't like any play! I hate 'em all! I'm through with 'em all! I'm through with the whole business! 'Show-business!' Faugh!”
Old Tinker regarded him thoughtfully, then inquired: “Gone back on it?”
“I tell you I'm going to buy a farm!” He sprang up, went to the mantel and struck it a startling blow with his fist, which appeared to calm him somewhat—for a moment. “I've been thinking of it for a long time. I ought never to have been in this business at all, and I'm going to live in the country. Oh, I'm in my right mind!” He paused to glare indignantly in response to old Tinker's steady gaze. “Of course you think 'something's happened' to upset me. Well, nothing has. Nothing of the slightest consequence has occurred since I saw you at rehearsal. Can't a man be allowed to think? I just came home here and got to thinking of the kind of life I lead—and I decided that I'm tired of it. And I'm not going to lead it any longer. That's all.”
“Ah,” said Tinker quietly. “Nerves.”
Talbot Potter appealed to the universe with a passionate gesture. “Nerves!” he cried bitterly. “Yes, that's what they say when an actor dares to think. 'Go on! Play your part! Be a marionette forever!' That's what you tell us! 'Slave for your living, you sordid little puppet! Squirm and sweat and strut, but don't you ever dare to think!' You tell us that because you know if we ever did stop to think for one instant about ourselves you wouldn't have any actors! Actors! Faugh! What do we get, I ask you?”
He strode close to Tinker and shook a frantic forefinger within a foot of the quiet old fellow's face.
“What do I get?” he demanded, passionately. “Do you think it means anything to me that some fat old woman sees me making love to a sawdust actress at a matinee and then goes home and hates her fat old husband across the dinner-table?”
He returned to the fireplace, seeming appeased, at least infinitesimally, by this thought. “There wouldn't even be that, except for the mystery. It's only because I'm mysterious to them—the way a man always thinks the girl he doesn't know is prettier than the one he's with. What's that got to do with acting? What is acting, anyhow?” His voice rose passionately again. “I'll tell you one thing it is: It's the most sordid profession in this devilish world!”
He strode to the centre of the room. “It's at the bottom—in the muck! That's where it is. And it ought to be! What am I, out there on that silly platform they call a stage? A fool, that's all, making faces, and pretending to be somebody with another name, for two dollars! A monkey-on-a-stick for the children! Of course the world despises us! Why shouldn't it? It calls us mummers and mountebanks, and that's what we are! Buffoons! We aren't men and women at all—we're strolling players! We're gypsies! One of us marries a broker's daughter and her relatives say she's married 'a damned actor!' That's what they say—'a damned actor!' Great heavens, Tinker, can't a man get tired of being called a 'damned actor' without your making all this uproar over it—squalling 'nerves' in my face till I wish I was dead and done with it!”
He went back to the fireplace again, but omitted another dolorous stroke upon the mantel. “And look at the women in the profession,” he continued, as he turned to face his visitors. “My soul! Look at them! Nothing but sawdust—sawdust—sawdust! Do you expect to go on acting with sawdust? Making sawdust love with sawdust? Sawdust, I tell you! Sawdust—sawdust—saw—”
“Oh, no,” said Tinker easily. “Not all. Not by any means. No.”
“Show me one that isn't sawdust!” the tragedian cried fiercely. “Show me just one!”
“We-ll,” said Tinker with extraordinary deliberation, “to start near home: Wanda Malone.”
Potter burst into terrible laughter. “All sawdust! That's why I discharged her this afternoon.”
“You what?” Canby shouted incredulously.
“I dismissed her from my company,” said Potter with a startling change to icy calmness. “I dismissed her from my company this afternoon.”
Old Tinker leaned forward. “You didn't!”
Potter's iciness increased. “Shall I repeat it? I was obliged to dismiss Miss Wanda Malone from my company, this afternoon, after rehearsal.”
“Why?” Canby gasped.
“Because,” said Potter, with the same calmness, “she has an utterly commonplace mind.”
Canby rose in agitation, quite unable, for that moment, to speak; but Tinker, still leaning forward, gazing intently at the face of the actor, made a low, long-drawn sound of wonder and affirmation, the slow exclamation of a man comprehending what amazes him. “So that's it!”
“Besides being intensely ordinary,” said Potter, with superiority, “I discovered that she is deceitful. That had nothing whatever to do with my decision to leave the stage.” He whirled upon Tinker suddenly, and shouted: “No matter what you think!”
“No,” said Tinker. “No matter.”
Potter laughed. “Talbot Potter leaves the stage because a little 'ingenue' understudy tries to break the rules of his company! Likely, isn't it?”
“Looks so,” said old Tinker.
“Does it?” retorted Potter with rising fury. “Then I'll tell you, since you seem not to know it, that I'm not going to leave the stage! Can't a man give vent to his feelings once in his life without being caught up and held to it by every old school-teacher that's stumbled into the 'show-business' by mistake! We're going right on with this play, I tell you; we rehearse it to-morrow morning just the same as if this hadn't happened. Only there will be a new 'ingenue' in Miss Malone's place. People can't break iron rules in my company. Maybe they could in Mounet-Sully's, but they can't in mine!”
“What rule did she break?” Canby's voice was unsteady. “What rule?”
“Yes,” Tinker urged. “Tell us what it was.”
“After rehearsal,” the star began with dignity, “I was—I—” He paused. “I was disappointed in her.”
“Ye-es?” drawled Tinker encouragingly.
Potter sent him a vicious glance, but continued: “I had hopes of her intelligence—as an actress. She seemed to have, also, a fairly attractive personality. I felt some little—ah, interest in her, personally. There is something about her that—” Again he paused. “I talked to her—about her part—at length; and finally I—ah—said I should be glad to walk home with her, as it was after dark. She said no, she wouldn't let me take so much trouble, because she lived almost at the other end of Brooklyn. It seemed to me that—ah, she is very young—you both probably noticed that—so I said I would—that is, I offered to drive her home in a taxicab. She thanked me, but said she couldn't. She kept saying that she was sorry, but she couldn't. It seemed very peculiar, and, in fact, I insisted. I asked her if she objected to me as an escort, and she said, 'Oh, no!' and got more and more embarrassed. I wanted to know what was the matter and why she couldn't seem to like—that is, I talked very kindly to her, very kindly indeed. Nobody could have been kinder!” He cleared his throat loudly and firmly, with an angry look at Tinker. “I say nobody could have been kinder to an obscure member of the company that I was to Miss Malone. But I was decided. That's all. That's all there was to it. I was merely kind. That's all.” He waved his hand as in dismissal of the subject.
“All?” repeated Canby. “All? You haven't—”
“Oh, yes.” Potter seemed surprised at his own omission. “Oh, yes. Right in the midst of—of what I was saying—she blurted out that she couldn't let me take her home, because 'Lancelot' was waiting for her at a corner drug-store.”
“Lancelot!” There was a catch of dismay in Canby's outcry.
“That's what I said, 'Lancelot'!” cried Potter, more desolately than he intended. “It seems they've been meeting after rehearsal, in their damn corner drug-store. Lancelot!” His voice rose in fury. “If I'd known I had a man named Lancelot in my company I'd have discharged him long ago! If I'd known it was his name I'd have shot him. 'Lancelot!' He came sneaking in there just after she'd blundered it all out to me. Got uneasy because she didn't come, and came to see what was the matter. Naturally, I discharged them both, on the spot! I've never had a rule of my company broken yet—and I never will! He didn't say a word. He didn't dare.”
“Who?” shouted Canby and old Tinker together.
“Lancelot!” said Potter savagely.
“Who?”
“Packer! His first name's Lancelot, the hypocrite! L. Smith Packer! She's Mrs. Packer! They were married two days before rehearsals began. She's Mrs. L. Smith Packer!”
As the sound of the furious voice stopped short, there fell a stricken silence upon these three men.
Old Carson Tinker's gaze drifted downward from his employer's face. He sat, then, gazing into the rosy little fire until something upon the lapel of his coat caught his attention—a wilted and disreputable carnation. He threw it into the fire; and, with a sombre satisfaction, watched it sizzle. This brief pleasure ended, he became expressionless and relapsed into complete mummification.
Potter cleared his throat several times, and as many times seemed about to speak, and did not; but finally, hearing a murmur from the old man gazing at the fire, he requested to be informed of its nature.
“What?” Tinker asked, feebly.
“I said: 'What are you mumbling about?'”
“Nothing.”
“What was it you said?”
“I said it was the bride-look,” said the old man gently. “That's what it was about her—the bride-look.”
“The bride-look!”
It was a word that went deep into the mourning heart of the playwright. “The bride-look!” That was it: the bride's happiness!
“She had more than that,” said Potter peevishly, but, if the others had noticed it his voice shook. “She could act! And I don't know how the devil to get along without that hypocrite. Just like her to marry the first regular man that asked her!”
Then young Stewart Canby had a vision of a room in a boarding-house far over in Brooklyn, and of two poor, brave young people there, and of a loss more actual than his own—a vision of a hard-working, careworn, stalwart Packer trying to comfort a weeping little bride who had lost her chance—the one chance—“that might never have come!”
Something leaped into generous life within him.
“I think I was almost going to ask her to marry me, to-morrow,” he said, turning to Talbot Potter. “But I'm glad Packer's the man. For years he's been a kind of nurse for you, Mr. Potter. And that's what she needs—a nurse—because she's a genius, too. And it will all be wasted if she doesn't get her chance!”
“Are you asking me to take her back?” Potter cried fiercely. “Do you think I'll break one of my iron—”
“We couldn't all have married her!” said the playwright with a fine inspiration. “But if you take her back we can all see her—every day!”
The actor gazed upon him sternly, but with sensitive lips beginning to quiver. He spoke uncertainly.
“Well,” he began. “I'm no stubborn Frenchman—”
“Do it!” cried Canby.
Then Potter's expression changed; he looked queer.
He clapped his hands loudly;—Sato appeared.
“Sato, take that stuff out.” He pointed to the untouched whiskey. “Order supper at ten o'clock—for five people. Champagne. Orchids. Get me a taxicab in half an hour.”
“Yisso!”
Tinker rose, astounded. “Taxicab? Where you—”
“To Brooklyn!” shouted Potter with shining eyes. “She'll drive with me if I bring them both, I guess, won't she?”
He began to sing:
“For to-night we'll merry, merry be!
For to-night we'll merry, merry be—”
Leaping uproariously upon the aged Tinker, he caught him by the waist and waltzed him round and round the room.