V
When Canby (with his hair smoothed) descended to the basement dining room of his Madison Avenue boarding-house that evening, his table comrades gave him an effective entrance; they rose, waving napkins and cheering, and there were cries of “Author! Author!” “Speech!” and “Cher maitre!”
The recipient of these honours bore them with an uneasiness attributed to modesty, and making inadequate response, sat down to his soup with no importunate appetite.
“Seriously, though,” said a bearded man opposite, who always broke into everything with “seriously though,” or else, “all joking aside,” and had thereby gained a reputation for conservatism and soundness—“seriously, though, it must have been a great experience to take charge of the rehearsal of such a company as Talbot Potter's.”
“Tell us how it felt, Canby, old boy,” said another. “How does it feel to sit up there like a king makin' everybody step around to suit you?”
Other neighbors took it up.
“Any pretty girls in the company, Can?”
“How does it feel to be a great dramatist, old man?”
“When you goin' to hire a valet-chauffeur?”
“Better ask him when he's goin' to take us to rehearsal, to see him in his glory.”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” said the hostess deprecatingly, “Miss Cornish is trying to speak to Mr. Canby.”
Miss Cornish, a middle-aged lady in black lace, sat at her right, at the head of the largest table, being the most paying of these paying guests, by which virtue she held also the ingleside premiership of the parlour overhead. She was reputed to walk much among gentles, and to have a high taste in letters and the drama; for she was chief of an essay club, had a hushing manner, and often quoted with precision from reviews, or from such publishers' advertisements as contained no slang; and she was a member of one of the leagues for patronizing the theatre in moderation.
“Mr. Canby,” said the hostess pleasantly, “Miss Cornish wishes to—”
This obtained the attention of the assembly, while Canby, at the other end of the room, sat back in his chair with the unenthusiastic air of a man being served with papers.
“Yes, Miss Cornish.”
Miss Cornish cleared her throat, not practically, but with culture, as preliminary to an address. “I was saying, Mr. Canby,” she began, “that I had a suggestion to make which may not only interest you, but certain others of us who do not enjoy equal opportunities in some matters—as—as others of us who do. Indeed, I believe it will interest all of us without regard to—to—to this. What I was about to suggest was that since today you have had a very interesting experience, not only interesting because you have entered into a professional as well as personal friendship with one of our foremost artists—an artist whose work is cultivated always—but also interesting because there are some of us here whose more practical occupations and walk in life must necessarily withhold them from—from this. What I meant to suggest was that, as this prevents them from—from this—would it not be a favourable opportunity for them to—to glean some commentary upon the actual methods of a field of art? Personally, it happens that whenever opportunities and invitations have been—have been urged, other duties intervened, but though, on that account never having been actually present, I am familiar, of course, through conversation with great artists and memoirs and—and other sources of literature—with the procedure and etiquette of rehearsal. But others among us, no doubt through lack of leisure, are perhaps less so than—than this. What I wished to suggest was that, not now, but after dinner, we all assemble quietly, in the large parlour upstairs, of which Mrs. Reibold has kindly consented to allow us the use for the evening, for this purpose, and that you, Mr. Canby, would then give us an informal talk—” (She was momentarily interrupted by a deferential murmur of “Hear! Hear!” from everybody.) “What I meant to suggest,” she resumed, smiling graciously as from a platform, “was a sort of descriptive lecture, of course wholly informal—not so much upon your little play itself, Mr. Canby, for I believe we are all familiar with its subject-matter, but what would perhaps be more improving in artistic ways would be that you give us your impressions of this little experience of yours to-day while it is fresh in your mind. I would suggest that you tell us, simply, and in your own way, exactly what was the form of procedure at rehearsal, so that those of us not so fortunate as to be already en rapport with such matters may form a helpful and artistic idea of—of this. I would suggest that you go into some details of this, perhaps adding whatever anecdotes or incidents of—of—of the day—you think would give additional value to this. I would suggest that you tell us, for instance, how you were received upon your arrival, who took you to the most favourable position for observing the performance, and what was said. We should be glad to hear also, I am sure, and artistic thoughts or—or knowledge—Mr. Potter may have let fall in the green-room; or even a few witticisms might not be out of place, if you should recall these. We should all like to know, I am sure, what Mr. Potter's method of conceiving his part was. Also, does he leave entire freedom to his company in the creation of their own roles, or does he aid them? Many questions, no doubt, occur to all of us. For instance: Did Mr. Potter offer you any suggestions for changes and alterations that might aid to develop the literary and artistic value of the pl—”
The placid voice, flowing on in gentle great content of itself (while all the boarders gallantly refrained from eating), was checked by an interruption which united into one shattering impact the effects of lese-majeste and of violence.
“Couldn't! No! No parlour! Horrib—”
The words mingled in the throat of the playwright, producing an explosion somewhere between choke and bellow, as he got upon his feet, overturning his chair and coincidentally dislodging several articles of china and glassware. He stood among the ruins for one moment, publicly wiping his brow with a napkin, then plunged, murmuring, out of the room and up the stairway; and, before any of the company had recovered speech, the front door was heard to slam tumultuously, its reverberations being simultaneous with the sound of footsteps running down the stoop.
Turning northward upon the pavement, the fugitive hurriedly passed the two lighted windows of the dining-room; they rattled with a concussion—the outburst of suddenly released voices beginning what was to be a protracted wake over the remains of his reputation as a gentleman. He fled, flinging on his overcoat as he went. In his pockets were portions of the manuscript of his play, already distorted since rehearsal to suit the new nobleness of “Roderick Hanscom,” and among these inky sheets was a note from Talbot Potter, received just before dinner:
Dear Mr. Canby,
Come up to my apartments at the Pantheon after dinner and let me see what changes you have been able to make in the second and third acts. I should like to look at them before deciding to put on another play I have been considering.
Hastily y'rs,
Tal't Potter.
VI
Canby walked fast, the clamorous dining-room seeming to pursue him, and the thought of what figure he had cut there filling him with horror of himself, though he found a little consolation in wondering if he hadn't insulted Miss Cornish because he was a genius and couldn't help doing queer things. That solace was slight, indeed; Canby was only twenty-seven, but he was frightened.
The night before he had been as eagerly happy as a boy at Christmas Eve. He had finished his last day at the office, and after initiating the youth who was to take his desk, had parted with his employer genially, but to the undeniable satisfaction of both. The new career, opening so gloriously, a month earlier, with Talbot Potter's acceptance of the play, was thus definitely adopted, and no old one left to fall back upon. And Madison Avenue, after dark, shows little to reassure a new playwright who carries in his pocket a note ending with the words, “before deciding to put on another play I have been considering.” It was Bleak Street, that night, for young Stewart Canby, and a bleak, bleak walk he took therein.
Desperate alterations were already scratched into the manuscript; plans for more and more ran overlapping one another in his mind, accompanied by phrases—echoes and fragments of Talbot Potter: “Punch! What this play needs is Punch!” “Big love scenes!” “Big scene with a man!” “Great sacrifice for a woman!” “Big-hearted, lovable fellow!” “You dog! So on, so on!” “Zowie!” He must get all this into the play and yet preserve his “third act situation,” leniently admitted to be “quite a fair” one. Slacking his gait somewhat, the tormented young man lifted his hat in order to run his hand viciously through his hair, which he seemed to blame for everything. Then he muttered, under his breath, indignantly: “Darn you, let me alone!”
Curious bedevilment! It was not Talbot Potter whom he thus adjured: it was Wanda Malone. And yet, during the rehearsal, he had not once thought consciously of the understudy; and he had come away from the theatre occupied—exclusively, he would have sworn—with the predicament in which he found himself and his play. Surely that was enough to fill and overflow any new playwright's mind, but, about half an hour after he had reached his room and set to work upon the manuscript of the second act, he discovered that he had retained, unawares, a singularly clear impression of Miss Malone.
Then, presently, he realized that distinct pictures of her kept coming between him and his work, and that her voice rang softly and persistently in his ear. Over and over in that voice's slender music—plaintive, laughing, reaching everywhere so clearly—he heard the detested “line”: “What are you two good people conspiring about?” Over and over he saw the slow, comprehending movement with which she removed her hat and veil to let Talbot Potter judge her. And as she stood, with that critic's eye searching her, Canby remembered that through some untraceable association of ideas he had inexplicably thought of a drawing of “Florence Dombey” in an old set of Dickens engravings he had seen at his grandfather's in his boyhood—and had not seen since. And he remembered the lilac bushes in bloom on a May morning at his grandfather's. Somehow she made him think of them, too.
And as he sat at his desk, striving to concentrate upon the manuscript, the clearness with which Wanda Malone came before him increased; she became more and more vivid to him, and she would not be dismissed; she persisted and insisted, becoming first an annoyance, and then, as he fought the witchery, a serious detriment to his writing. She became part of every thought about his play, and of every other thought. He did not want her; he felt no interest in her; he had vital work to do—and she haunted him, seemed to be in the very room with him. He worked in spite of her, but she pursued him none the less constantly; she had gone down the stairs to dinner with him; she floated before him throughout the torture of Miss Cornish's address; she was present even when he exploded and fled; she was with him now, in this desolate walk toward Talbot Potter's apartment—the pale, symmetrical little face and the relentless sweet voice commandeering the attention he wanted desperately to keep upon what he meant to say to Potter.
Once before in his life he had suffered such an experience: that of having his thoughts possessed, against his will, by a person he did not know and did not care to know. It had followed his happening to see an intoxicated truck-driver lying beneath an overturned wagon. “Easy, boys! Don' mangle me!” the man kept begging his rescuers. And Canby recalled how “Easy, boys! Don' mangle me!” sounded plaintively in his ears for days, bothering him in his work at the office. Remembering it now, he felt a spiteful satisfaction in classing that obsession with this one. It seemed at least a step toward teaching Miss Wanda Malone to know her place.
But he got no respite from the siege, and was still incessantly beleaguered when he encountered the marble severities of the Pantheon Apartments' entrance hall and those of its field-marshal, who paraded him stonily to the elevator. Mr. Potter's apartment was upon the twelfth floor, a facet stated in a monosyllable by the field-marshal, and confirmed, upon the opening of the cage at that height, by Mr. Potter's voice melodiously belling a flourish of laughter on the other side of a closed door bearing his card. It was rich laughter, cadenced and deep and loud, but so musically modulated that, though it might never seem impromptu, even old Carson Tinker had once declared that he liked to listen to it almost as much as Potter did.
Old Carson Tinker was listening to it now, as Canby discovered, after a lisping Japanese had announced him at the doorway of a cream-coloured Louis Sixteenth salon: an exquisite apartment, delicately personalized here and there by luxurious fragilities which would have done charmingly, on the stage, for a marquise's boudoir. Old Tinker, in evening dress, sat uncomfortably, sideways, upon the edge of a wicker and brocade “chaise lounge,” finishing a tiny glass of chartreuse, while Talbot Potter, in the middle of the room, took leave of a second guest who had been dining with him.
Potter was concluding the rendition of hilarity which had penetrated to the outer hall, and, merely waving the playwright toward Tinker, swept the same gesture upward to complete it by resting a cordial hand upon the departing guest's shoulder. This personage, a wasp-figured, languorous youth, with pale plastered hair over a talcum face, flicked his host lightly upon the breast with a pair of white gloves.
“None the less, Pottuh,” he said, “why shouldn't you play Othello as a mulatto? I maintain, you see, it would be taking a step in technique; they'd get the face, you see. Then I want you to do something really and truly big: Oedipus. Why not Oedipus? Think of giving the States a thing like Oedipus done as you could do it! Of coss, I don't say you could ever be another Mewnay-Sooyay. No. I don't go that far. You haven't Mewnay-Sooyay's technique. But you could give us just the savour of Attic culture—at least the savour, you see. The mere savour would be something. Why should you keep on producing these cheap little plays they foist on you? Oh, I know you always score a personal success in the wahst of them, but they've never given you a Big character—and the play, outside of you, is always piffle. Of coss, you know what I've always wanted you to do, what I've constantly insisted in print: Rostand. You commission Rostand to do one of his magnificent things for you and we serious men will do our part. Now, my duh good chap, I must be getting on, or the little gel will be telephoning all round the town!” He turned to the door, pausing upon the threshold. “Now, don't let any of these cheap little fellows foist any of their cheap little plays on you. This for my stirrup-cup: you cable Rostand tomorrow. Drop the cheap little things and cable Rostand. Tell him I suggested it, if you like.” He disappeared in the hallway, calling back: “My duh Pottuh, good-night!” And the outer door was heard to close.
Canby, feeling a natural prejudice against this personage, glanced uneasily at Talbot Potter's face and was surprised to find that fine bit of modelling contorted with rage. The sight of this emotion was reassuring, but its source was a mystery, for it had seemed to the playwright that the wasp-waisted youth's remarks—though horribly damaging to the cheap little Canbys with their cheap little “Roderick Hanscoms”—were on the whole rather flattering to the subject of them, and betokened a real interest in his career.
“Ass!” said Potter.
Canby exhaled a breath of relief. He began to feel that it might be possible to like this man.
“Ass!” said Potter, striding up and down the room. “Ass! Ass! Ass! Ass!”
And Canby felt easier and happier. He foresaw, too, that there would be no cabling to Rostand, a thing he had naively feared, for a moment, as imminent.
Potter halted, bursting into speech less monosyllabic but no less vehement: “Mr. Tinker, did you ever see Mounet-Sully?”
“No.”
“Did you, Mr. Canby?”
“No.”
“Mewnay-Sooyay!” Potter mimicked the pronunciation of his adviser. “'Mewnay-Sooyay! Of coss I don't say YOU could ever be another Mewnay-Sooyay!' Ass! I'll tell you what Mounet-Sully's 'technique' amounts to, Mr. Tinker. It's yell! Just yell, yell, yell! Does he think I can't yell! Why, Packer could open his mouth like a hippopotamus and yell through a part! Ass!”
“Was that young man a-a critic?” Canby asked.
“No!” shouted Potter. “There aren't any!”
“He writes about theatrical matters,” said Carson Tinker. “Talky-talk writing: 'the drama'—'temperament'—'people of cultivation'—quotes Latin or Italian or something. 'Technique' is his star word; he plays 'technique' for a hand every other line. Doesn't do any harm; in fact, I think he does us a good deal of good. Lots of people read that talky-talk writing nowadays. Not in New York, but in road-towns, where they have plenty of time. This fellow's never against any show much, unless he takes a notion. You slip 'dolsy far nienty' or something about Danty or logarithms somewhere into your play, where it won't delay the action much, and he'll be for you.”
Canby nodded and laughed eagerly. Tinker seemed to take it for granted that “Roderick Hanscom” was to be produced in spite of “another play I have been considering.”
“There aren't any critics, I tell you!” Potter stormed. “Mounet-Sully!”
“Well,” said old Tinker quietly, “I'd like to believe it, but people making a living that way have ruined a good many million dollars' worth of property in this town. Some of it was very good property.” He paused, and added: “Some of it was mine, too.”
“Good property?” said the playwright with fresh uneasiness. “You mean the critics sometimes ruin a good play?”
“How do they know a good play—or good acting?” Tinker returned placidly. “Every play you ever saw in your life, some people in the audience said they thought it was good; some said it was bad. How do critics know any more about it than anybody else? For instance, how can anybody that hasn't been in the business tell what's good acting and what's a good part?”
“But a critic—aren't critics in the bus—”
“No. They aren't theatrical people,” said Tinker dryly. “They're writers.”
“But some of them must have studied from the inside,” Canby urged, feeling that “Roderick Hanscom's” chances were getting slighter and slighter. “Some of them must have either been managers for a while, or actors—or had plays pro—”
“No,” said Tinker. “If they had they wouldn't do for critics. They wouldn't have the heart.”
“They oughtn't to have so much power!” the young man exclaimed passionately. “Think of a playwright working on his play—two years, maybe—night after night—and then, all in one swoop, these fellows that you say don't know anything—”
“Power!” Potter laughed contemptuously. “Tinker, you're in your dotage! Look at what I've done: Haven't I made my way in spite of everything they could do to stifle me? And have I ever compromised for one moment? Haven't I gone my own way, absolutely?”
“Yes.” Tinker's face was more cryptic than usual. “Yes, indeed!”
“Power! Haven't I made them eat out of my hand? Look at that ass—glad to crawl in here and nibble a crust from my table to-night! Ass!” He had halted for a second in front of the manager, but resumed his pacing with a mutter of subterranean thunder: “Mounet-Sully!”
“Hasn't the public got a mind?” cried Canby. “Doesn't the public understand that a good play might be ruined by these scoundrels?”
Old Tinker returned his chartreuse glass to the case whence it came, a miniature sedan chair in silver and painted silk. “The public?” he said. “I've never been able to find out what that was. Just about the time I decided it was a trained sheep it turned out to be a cyclone. You think it's intelligent, and it plays the fool; you decide it's a fool, and it turns out to know more than you do. You make love to it, and it may sidle up and kiss you—or give you a good, hard kick!”
“But if we make this a good play—”
“It won't be a play at all,” said Tinker, “unless the public thinks it's a good one. A play isn't something you read; it's something actors do on a stage; and they can't afford to do it unless the public pays to watch 'em. If it won't buy tickets, you haven't got a play; you've only got some typewriting.”
Canby glanced involuntarily at the blue-covered manuscript he had placed upon a table beside him. It had a guilty look.
“I get confused,” he said. “If the public's so flighty, why does it take so much stock in what these wolves print about a play?”
“Print. That's it,” old Tinker answered serenely. “Write your opinion in a letter or say it with your mouth, and it doesn't amount to anything. Print's different. You see some nonsense about yourself in a newspaper, and you think I'm an idiot for believing it. But you read nonsense about me, and you believe it. You don't stop and think; 'That's a lie; he isn't that sort of a man.' No. You just wonder why I'm such a darn fool.”
“Then these cannibals have got us where—”
“Dotage!” Talbot Potter broke in, halting under the chandelier. “Tinker's reached his dotage!” He levelled a denouncing forefinger at the manager. “Do you mean to tell me that if I decide to go on with Mr. Canby's play any critic or combination or cabal of critics can keep it from being a success? Then I tell you, you're in your dotage! For one point, if I play this part they're going to say it's a big thing; I don't mean the play, of course, because you must know, yourself, Mr. Canby, we could bribe them into calling it a strong play. We know it isn't, and they'll know it isn't. What I mean is the characterization of 'Roderick Hanscom.' I tell you, if I do it, they're going to call it a big thing. They aren't all maniacs about everything made in France, thank heaven! Rostand! Ass! I'm not playing parts with a clothespin on the end of my nose!” And again he mimicked the departed visitor: “'This for my stirrup-cup: you cable Rostand tomorrow.' My soul! Does he think I want to play CHICKENS?”
Sulphurously, he resumed his pacing of the floor.
Old Tinker seemed unaffected by this outburst, but for that matter he seemed unaffected by anything. His dead gaze followed his employer's to-and-fro striding as a cat's follows a pendulum, but without the cat's curiosity about a pendulum. He never interrupted when Potter was speaking; and Canby noticed that whenever Potter talked at any length Tinker looked thoughtful and distant, like a mechanic so accustomed to the whirr and thunder of the machine-shop that he may indulge in reveries there. After a moment or two the old fellow ceased to follow the pendulum stride, and turned to the playwright.
“I'll tell you the two surest ways to make what you call the public like a play, Mr. Canby,” he said. “Nothing is sure, but these are the nearest to it. Make 'em laugh. I mean, make 'em laugh after they get home, or the next day in the office, any time they get to thinking about it. The other way is to get two actors for your lovers that the audience, young and old, can't help falling in love with; a young actor that the females in the audience think they'd like to marry, and a young actress that the males all think they'd like to marry. It doesn't matter much about the writing; just have something interfere between them from eight-fifteen until along about twenty-five minutes after ten. The two lovers don't necessarily have to know much about acting, either, though of course it's better if they happen to. The best stage-lover I ever knew, and the one that played in the most successes, did happen to understand acting thor—”
“Who was that?” Potter interrupted fiercely. “Mounet-Sully?”
“No. I meant Dora Preston.”
“Never heard of her!”
“No,” said the old man. “You wouldn't. They don't put up monuments to pretty actresses, nor write about them in school histories. She dropped dead in her dressing-room one night forty-two years ago. I was thinking of her to-day; something reminded me of her.”
“Was she a friend of yours, Mr. Tinker?” Canby asked.
“Friend? No. I was an usher in the old Calumet Theatre, and she owned New York. She had this quality; every man in the audience fell in love with her. So did the women, too, for that matter, and the actors who played with her. When she played a love-scene, people who'd been married thirty years would sit and watch her and hold each other's hands—yes, with tears in their eyes. I've seen 'em. And after the performance, one night, the stage-door keeper, a man seventy years old, was caught kissing the latch of the door where she'd touched it; and he was sober, too. There was something about her looks and something about her voice you couldn't get away from. You couldn't tell to save you what it was, but after you'd seen her she'd seem to be with you for days, and you couldn't think much about anything else, even if you wanted to. People used to go around in a kind of spell; they couldn't think of anything or talk of anything but Dora Preston. It didn't matter much what she did; everything she did made you feel like a boy falling in love the first time. It made you think of apple-blossoms and moonlight just to look at her. She—”
“See here, Mr. Canby”—Talbot Potter interrupted suddenly. He dropped into a chair and picked up the manuscript—“See here! I've got an idea that may save this play. Suppose we let 'Roderick Hanscom' make his sacrifice, not for the heroine, but because he's in love with the other girl—the ingenue—I've forgotten the name you call her in the script. I mean the part played by that little Miss Miss girl—Miss-what's-her-name—Wanda Malone!”
Canby stared at Potter in fascinated amazement, his straining eyes showing the whites above and below the pupils. It was the look of a man struck dumb by a sudden marvel of telepathy.
“Why, yes,” he said slowly, when he had recovered his breath, “I believe that would be a good idea!”
VII
For two hours, responding to the manipulation of the star and his thoroughly subjugated playwright, the character of “Roderick Hanscom” grew nobler and nobler, speech by speech and deed by deed, while the expression of the gentleman who was to impersonate it became, in precise parallel with this regeneration, sweeter and loftier and lovelier.
“A little Biblical quotation wouldn't go so bad right in there,” he said, when they had finally established the Great Sacrifice for a Woman. “We'll let Roderick have a line like: 'Greater love hath no man than laying down his life to save another's.'” He touched a page of the manuscript with his finger. “There's a good place for it.”
“Aren't you afraid it would sound a little—smug?” Canby asked timidly. “The way we've got him now, Roderick seems to me to be always seeing himself as a splendid man and sort of pointing it out to the—”
“Good gracious!” cried Potter, astounded. “Hasn't it got to be pointed out? The audience hasn't got a whole lifetime to study him in; it's only got about two hours. Besides, I don't see what you say; I don't see it at all! It seems to me I've worked him around into being a perfectly natural character.”
“I suppose you're right,” said Canby, meekly scribbling.
“Biblical quotations never do any harm to the box-office,” Potter added. “You may not get a hand on 'em, but you'll never get a cough, either.” He looked dreamily at the ceiling. “I've often thought of doing a Biblical play. I'd have it built around the character of St. Paul. That's one they haven't touched yet, and it's new. I wouldn't do it with a beard and long hair. I wouldn't use much makeup. No. Just the face as it is.”
“You can do practically anything with a religious show,” said Tinker. “That's been proved. You can run in gambling and horse-racing and ballys, and you'll get people into the house, night after night, that think the theatre's wicked and wouldn't go to see 'Rip Van Winkle.' They do a lot of good, too—religious shows—just that way.”
“I think I'd play it in armour,” Potter continued his thought, still gazing at the ceiling. “I believe it would be a big thing.”
“It might if it was touted right,” said Tinker. “It all depends on the touting. If you get it touted to the tank towns that you've got a play with the great religious gonzabo, then your show's a big property. Same if you get it touted for a great educational gonzabo. Or 'artistic.' Get it touted right for 'artistic,' and the tanks'll think they like it, even if they don't. Look at 'Cyrano'—they liked Mansfield and his acting, but they didn't like the show. They said they liked the show, and thought they did, but they didn't. If they'd like it as much as they said they did, that show would be running like 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' Speaking of that”—he paused, coughed, and went on—“I'm glad you've got the ingenue's part straightened out in this piece. I thought from the first it would stand a little lengthening.”
Potter, unheeding, dreamily proceeded: “In silver armour. Might silver the hair a little—not too much. Play it as a spiritual character, but not solemn. Wouldn't make it turgid; keep it light. Have the whole play spiritual but light. For instance, have room in it for a religious ingenue part—make her a younger sister of Mary Magdalene, say, with St. Paul becoming converted for her sake after he'd been a Roman General. I believe it's a big idea.”
Canby was growing nervous. All this seemed to be rambling farther and farther from “Roderick Hanscom.” Potter relieved his anxiety, however, after a thoughtful sigh, by saying abruptly: “Well, well, we can't go into a big production like that, this late in the year. We'll have to see what can be done with 'Roderick Hanscom.'” He looked at the door, where the Japanese was performing a shrinking curtsey. “What is it, Sato?”
“Miss Pata.”
“Who?”
“Miss Pata.”
A voice called from the hallway: “It's me, Mr. Potter. Packer.”
“Oh, come in! Come in!”
The stage-manager made a deferential entrance. “It's about Miss—”
“Sit down, Packer.”
“Thank you, Mr. Potter.” Evidently considering the command a favour, Packer sat. “I saw Miss Lyston, sir—”
“I won't turn her adrift,” said his employer peevishly. “You see, Mr. Canby, here's another of the difficulties of my position. Miss Lyston has been with me for several years, and for this piece we've got somebody I think will play her part better, but I haven't any other part for Miss Lyston. And we start so late in the season, this year, she'll probably not be able to get anything else to do; so she's on my hands. I can't turn people out in the snow like that. Some managers can, but I can't. And yet I have letters begging me for all kinds of charities every day. They don't know what my company costs me in money like this—absolutely thrown away so far as any benefit to me is concerned. And often I find I've been taken advantage of, too. I shouldn't be at all surprised to find that Miss Lyston has comfortable investments right now, and that she's only scheming to—Packer, don't you know whether she's been saving her salary or not? If you don't you ought to.”
“I came to tell you, sir. I thought you might be relieved to know. We don't have to bother about her, Mr. Potter. I've been to see her at her flat, this evening, and she's as anxious to get away from us, Mr. Potter, as we are to—”
The star rose to his feet, his face suffusing. “You sit there,” he exclaimed, “and tell me that a member of my company finds the association so distasteful that she wants to get away!”
“Oh, no, Mr. Potter!” the stage-manager protested. “Not that at all! She's very sorry to go. She asked me to tell you that she felt she was giving up a great honour, and to thank you for all your kindness to her.”
“Go on!” Potter sternly bade him. “Why does she wish to leave my company?”
“Why, it seems she's very much in love with her husband, sir, Vorley Surbilt—”
“It doesn't seem possible,” said Potter, shaking his head. “I know him, and it sounds like something you're making up as you go along, Packer.”
“Indeed, I'm not, Mr. Potter!” the stage-manager cried, in simple distress. “I wouldn't know how.”
“Go on!”
“Well, sir, it seems Vorly Surbilt was to go out with Mrs. Romaley, and it seems that when Miss Lyston left rehearsal she drove around till she found him—”
“Ah! I knew she was fooling me! I knew she wasn't sick! Went to drive with her husband, and I pay the cab bill!”
“No, no, sir! I forgot to tell you; she wouldn't let me pay it. She took him home and put him to bed—and from what I heard on Broadway it was time somebody did! It seems they'd had an offer to go into a vaudeville piece together, and after she got him to bed she telephoned the vaudeville man, and had him bring up a contract, and they signed it, though she had to guide Vorley's hand for him. Anyway, he's signed up all right, and so is she. That's why she was so anxious about fixing it up with us. I told her it would be all right.”
Potter relapsed into his chair in an attitude of gloom. “So they've begun to leave Talbot Potter's company!” he said, nodding his head with bitter melancholy. “For vaudeville! I'd better go to farming at once; I often think of it. What sort of an act is it that Miss Lyston prefers to remaining with me? Acrobatic?”
“It's a little play,” said Packer. “It's from the Grand Guignol.”
“French!” Potter this simply as an added insult on the part of Miss Lyston. “French!”
“They say it's a wonderful little thing,” said Packer innocently, but it was as if he had run a needle into his sensitive employer. Potter instantly sprang up again with a cry of pain.
“Of course it's wonderful! It's French; everything French is wonderful, magnificent, Supreme! Everything French is HOLY! Good God, Packer! You'll be telling me what my 'technique' ought to be, next!”
He hurled himself again into the chair and moaned, then in a dismal voice inquired; “Miss Lyston struck you as feeling that her condition in life was distinctly improved by this ascent into vaudeville, didn't she?”
“Oh, not at all, Mr. Potter! But, of course,” Packer explained deprecatingly, “she's pleased to have Vorly where she can keep an eye on him. She said that though she was all broken up about leaving the company, she expected to be very happy in looking after him. You see, sir, it's the first time in all their married life they've had a chance to be together except one summer when neither of 'em could get a stock engagement.”
Potter made no reply but to shake his head despondently, and Packer sat silent in deference, as if waiting to be questioned further. It was the playwright who presently filled the void. “Why haven't Mr. and Mrs. Surbilt gone into the same companies, if they care to be together? I should think they'd have made it a point to get engagements in the same ones.”
Packer looked disturbed. “It's not done much,” he said.
“Besides, Vorly Surbilt plays leading parts with women stars,” old Tinker volunteered. “You see, naturally, it wouldn't do at all.”
“Jealousy, you mean?”
“Not necessarily the kind you're thinking of. But it just doesn't do.”
“Some managers will allow married couples in their companies,” Potter said, adding emphatically: “I won't! I never have and I never will! Never! There's just one thing every soul in my support has got to keep working for, and that is a high-tension performance every night in the year. If married people are in love with each other, they're going to think more about that than about the fact that they're working for me. If they aren't in love with each other, there's the devil to pay. I'd let the best man or woman in the profession go—and they could go to vaudeville, for all I cared!—if I had to keep their wives or husbands travelling with us. I won't have 'em! My soul! I don't marry, do I?”
Packer rose. “Is there anything else for me, Mr. Potter?”
“Yes. Take this interlined script, get some copies typewritten, and see that the company's sides are changed to suit it. Be especially careful about that young Miss—ah—Miss Malone's. You'll find her part is altered considerably, and will be even more, when Mr. Canby gets the dialogue for other changes finished. He'll let you have them to-morrow. By the way, Packer, where did you find—” He paused, stretched out his hand to the miniature sedan chair of liqueurs, took a decanter and tiny glass therefrom, and carefully poured himself a sparkling emerald of creme de menthe. “Will you have something, Mr. Canby?” he asked. “You, Tinker?”
Both declined in silence; they seemed preoccupied.
“Where did I what, Mr. Potter?” asked the stage-manager, reminding him of the question left unfinished.
“What?”
“You said: 'By the way, where did you find—'”
“Oh, yes.” Potter smiled negligently. “Where did you find that little Miss Malone? At the agents'?”
Packer echoed him: “Where did I find her?” He scratched his head. “Miss”—he said ruminatively, repeating the word slowly, like a man trying to work out the solution of a puzzle—“Miss—”
“Miss Malone. I suppose you got her at an agent's?”
“Let's see,” said Packer. “At an agent's? No. No, it wasn't. Come to think of it, it wasn't.”
“Then where did you get her?” Tinker inquired.
“That's what I just asked him,” Potter said, placing his glass upon a table without having tasted the liqueur. “What's the matter, Packer? Gone to sleep?”
“I remember now,” said Packer, laughing deferentially. “Of course! No. It wasn't through any of the agents. Now I remember—come to think of it—I sort of ran across her myself, as a matter of fact. I wasn't just sure who you meant at first. You mean the understudy, the one that's to play Miss Lyston's part, that Miss—Miss—” He snapped a finger and thumb to spur memory and then, as in triumphant solution of his puzzle, cried, “Ma—Malone! Miss Malone!”
“Yes,” said Potter, looking upon him darkly. “Where did you sort of run across her, come to think of it, as a matter of fact?”
“Oh, I remember all about it, now,” said Packer brightly. “Why, she was playing last summer in stock out at Seeleyville, Pennsylvania. That's only about six miles from Packer's Ridge, where my father lives. I spent a couple of weeks with him, and we trolleyed over one evening to see 'The Little Minister,' because father got it in his head some way that it was about the Baptists, and I couldn't talk him out of it. It wasn't as bad a performance as you'd think, and this little girl was a pretty fair 'Babbie.' Father forgot all about the Baptists and kept talking about her after we got home, until nothing would do but we must go over and see that show again. He wanted to take her right out to the farm and adopt her—or something; he's a widower, and all alone out there. Fact is, I had all I could do to keep him from going around to ask her, and I was pretty near afraid he'd speak to her from the audience. Well, to satisfy him, I did go around after the show, and gave her my card, and told her if I could do anything for her in New York to let me know. Of course, naturally, when I got back to town I forgot all about it, but I got a note from her that she was here, looking for an engagement, the very day you told me to scare up an understudy. So I thought she might do as well as anybody I'd get at the agent's, and I let her have it.” He drew a breath of relief, like that of a witness leaving the stand, and with another placative laugh, letting his eyes fall humbly under the steady scrutiny of his master, he concluded: “Of course I remember all about it, only at first I wasn't sure which one you meant; it's such a large company.”
“I see,” said Potter grimly. “You engaged her to please your father.”
“Oh, Mr. Potter!” the stage-manager protested. “If you don't like her—”
“That will do!” Potter cut him off, and paced the floor, virulently brooding. “And so Talbot Potter's company is to be made up of actors engaged to suit the personal whims of L. Smith Packer's father, old Mister Packer of Baptist Ridge, near Seeleyville, Pennsylvania!”
“But, Mr. Potter, if you don't—”
“I said that would DO!” roared Potter. “Good-night!”
“Good-night, sir,” said the stage-manager humbly, and humbly got himself out of the room, to be heard, an instant later, bidding the Japanese an apologetic good-night at the outer door of the apartment.
Canby rose to take his own departure, promising to have the new dialogue “worked out” by morning.
“He is, too!” said Potter, not heeding the playwright, but confirming an unuttered thought in his own mind. He halted at the table, where he had set his tiny glass, and gulped the emerald at a swallow. “I always thought he was!”
“Was what?” inquired old Tinker.
“A hypocrite!”
“D'you mean Packer?” said Tinker incredulously.
“He's a hypocrite!” Potter shouted fiercely. “And I shouldn't be surprised if his father was another! Widower! I never saw the man in my life, but I'd swear it on oath! He is a hypocrite! Packer's father is a damned old Baptist hypocrite!”