Harlequin and Columbine Part 2

"Oh, not at all. I--"

"Ha! She may have fooled you, Packer, or perhaps--perhaps"--he paused, frowning--"perhaps you were trying to fool me, too. I don't know your private life; you may have reasons to help her de--"

"Mr. Potter!" cried the distressed man. "What could be my object? I don't know Miss Lyston off. I was only telling you the simple truth."

"How do I know?" Potter gave him a piercing look. "People are always trying to take advantage of me."

"But Mr. Potter, I--"

"Don't get it into your head that I am too easy, Packer! You think you've got a luxurious thing of it here, with me, but--" He concluded with an ominous shake of the head in lieu of words, then returned to the centre of the stage. "Are we to be all day getting on with this rehearsal?"

Packer flew to the table and seized the ma.n.u.script he had left there.

"All ready, sir! 'Nothing in this world but one thing can defeat'--and so on, so on. All ready, sir!"

The star made no reply but to gaze upon him stonily, a stare which produced another dreadful silence. Packer tried to smile, a lamentable sight.

"Something wrong, Mr. Potter?" he finally ventured, desperately.

The answer came in a voice cracking with emotional strain: "I wonder how many men bear what I bear? I wonder how many men would pay a stage-manager the salary I pay, and then do all his work for him!"

"Mr. Potter, if you'll tell me what's the matter," Packer quavered; "if you'll only tell me--"

"The understudy, idiot! Where is the understudy to read Miss Lyston's part? You haven't got one! I knew it! I told you last week to engage an understudy for the women's parts, and you haven't done it. I knew it, I knew it! G.o.d help me, I knew it!"

"But I did, sir. I've got her here."

Packer ran to the back of the stage, shouting loudly: "Miss-oh, Miss--I forget-your-name! Understudy! Miss--"

"I'm here!"

It was an odd, slender voice that spoke, just behind Talbot Potter, and he turned to stare at a little figure in black--she had come so quietly out of the shadows of the scenery into Miss Lyston's place that no one had noticed. She was indefinite of outline still, in the spa.r.s.e light of that cavernous place; and, with a veil lifted just to the level of her brows, under a shadowing black hat, not much was to be clearly discerned of her except that she was small and pale and had bright eyes. But even the two words she spoke proved the peculiar quality of her voice: it was like the tremolo of a zither string; and at the sound of it the actors on each side of her instinctively moved a step back for a better view of her, while in his lurking place old Tinker let his dry lips open a little, which was as near as he ever came, nowadays, to a look of interest. He had noted that this voice, sweet as rain, and vibrant, but not loud, was the ordinary speaking voice of the understudy, and that her "I'm here," had sounded, soft and clear, across the deep orchestra to the last row in the house.

"Of course!" Packer cried. "There she is, Mr. Potter! There's Miss--Miss--"

"Is her name 'Missmiss'?" the star demanded bitterly.

"No sir. I've forgotten it, just this moment, Mr. Potter, but I've got it. I've got it right here." He began frantically to turn out the contents of his pockets. "It's in my memorandum book, if I could only find--"

"The devil, the devil!" shouted Potter. "A fine understudy you've got for us! She sees me standing here like--like a statue--delaying the whole rehearsal, while we wait for you to find her name, and she won't open her lips!" He swept the air with a furious gesture, and a subtle faint relief became manifest throughout the company at this token that the newcomer was indeed to fill Miss Lyston's place for one rehearsal at least. "Why don't you tell us your name?" he roared.

"I understood," said the zither-sweet voice, "that I was never to speak to you unless you directly asked me a question. My--"

"My soul! Have you got a name?"

"Wanda Malone."

Potter had never heard it until that moment, but his expression showed that he considered it another outrage.

IV

The rehearsal proceeded, and under that cover old Tinker came noiselessly down the aisle and resumed his seat beside Canby, who was uttering short, broken sighs, and appeared to have been trying with fair success to give himself a shampoo.

"It's ruined, Mr. Tinker!" he moaned, and his accompanying gesture was misleading, seeming to indicate that he alluded to his hair. "It's all ruined if he sticks to these horrible lines he's put in--people told me I ought to have it in my contract that nothing could be changed. I was trying to make the audience see the tragedy of egoism in my play--and how people get to hating an egoist. I made 'Roderick Hanscom' a disagreeable character on purpose, and--oh, listen to that!"

Miss Ellsling and Talbot Potter stood alone, near the front of the stage. "Why do you waste such goodness on me, Roderick?" Miss Ellsling was inquiring. "It is n.o.ble and I feel that I am unworthy of you."

"No, Mildred, believe me," Potter read from his ma.n.u.script, "I would rather decline the nomination and abandon my career, and go to live in some quiet spot far from all this, than that you should know one single moment's unhappiness, for you mean far more to me than worldly success."

He kissed her hand with reverence, and lifted his head slowly, facing the audience with rapt gaze; his wonderful smile--that ineffable smile of abnegation and benignity--just beginning to dawn.

Coming from behind him, and therefore unable to see his face, Miss Wanda Malone advanced in her character of ingenue, speaking with an effect of gayety: "Now what are you two good people conspiring about?"

Potter stamped the floor; there was wrenched from him an incoherent shriek containing fragments of profane words and ending distinguishably with: "It's that Missmiss again!"

Packer impelled himself upon Miss Malone, pushing her back. "No, no, no!" he cried. "Count ten! Count ten before you come down with that speech. You mustn't interrupt Mr. Potter, Miss--Miss--"

"It was my cue," she said composedly, showing her little pamphlet of typewritten ma.n.u.script. "Wasn't I meant to speak on the cue?"

Talbot Potter recovered himself sufficiently to utter a cry of despair: "And these are the kind of people an artist must work with!" He lifted his arms to heaven, calling upon the high G.o.ds for pity; then, with a sudden turn of fury, ran to the back of the stage and came mincing forward evidently intending saturnine mimicry, repeating the ingenue's speech in a mocking falsetto: "Now what are you two good people conspiring about?" After that he whirled upon her, demanding with ferocity: "You've got something you can think with in your head, haven't you, Missmiss? Then what do you think of that?"

Miss Malone smiled, and it was a smile that would have gone a long way at a college dance. Here, it made the pitying company shudder for her.

"I think it's a silly, makeshift sort of a speech," she said cheerfully, in which opinion the unhappy playwright out in the audience hotly agreed. "It's a bit of threadbare archness, and if I were to play Miss Lyston's part, I'd be glad to have it changed!"

Potter looked dazed. "Is it your idea," he said in a ghostly voice, "that I was asking for your impression of the dramatic and literary value of that line?"

She seemed surprised. "Weren't you?"

It was too much for Potter. He had brilliant and unusual powers of expression, but this was beyond them. He went to the chair beside the little table, flung himself upon it, his legs outstretched, his arms dangling inert, and stared haggardly upward at nothing.

Packer staggered into the breach. "You interrupted the smile, Miss--Mi--"

"Miss Malone," she prompted.

"You interrupted the smile, Miss Malone. Mr. Potter gives them the smile there. You must count ten for it, after your cue. Ten--slow. Count slow.

Mark it on your sides, Miss--ah--Miss. 'Count ten for smile. Write it down please, Miss--Miss--"

Potter spoke wearily. "Be kind enough to let me know, Packer, when you and Missmiss can bring yourselves to permit this rehearsal to continue."

"All ready, sir," said Packer briskly. "All ready now, Mr. Potter." And upon the star's limply rising, Miss Ellsling, most tactful of leading women, went back to his cue with a change of emphasis in her reading that helped to restore him somewhat to his poise. "It is n.o.ble," she repeated, "and I feel that I am unworthy of you!"

Counting ten slowly proved to be the proper deference to the smile, and Miss Malone was allowed to come down the stage and complete, undisturbed, her ingenue request to know what the two good people were conspiring about. Thereafter the rehearsal went on in a strange, unreal peace like that of a prairie noon in the cyclone season.

"Notice that girl?" old Tinker muttered, as Wanda Malone finished another ingenue question with a light laugh, as commanded by her ma.n.u.script. "She's frightened but she's steady."