Harlequin and Columbine Part 7

"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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 j.a.panese 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 gla.s.s, 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 d.a.m.ned old Baptist hypocrite!"

VIII

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 att.i.tude 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 hea.r.s.e.

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, a.s.sertive, 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 b.u.t.ter. Not much bread and b.u.t.ter 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 ma.n.u.script 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.