Local Color Part 19

Veritably he did stand in the presence of death. The place looked dead and smelled dead and was dead. The air was heavy-laden with bone-yard scents--rot and corrosion and rust and dust. With the taints of moulded leather and gangrened metal, of worm-gnawed woodwork and moth-eaten fabrics, arose also from beneath their feet that other stench which inevitably is begotten of neglect and lonesomeness within any spot inclosed by walls and a roof, provided sun and wind and human usage are excluded from it long enough. Offutt sniffed and, over Verba's shoulder, looked about him.

He could make out his immediate surroundings fairly well, for the curtains that had guarded the windows in the hip roof and round one upper side of the building were turned by decay into squares of lace-work, patterned with rents and with cracks; and in some instances they had fetched away from their fastenings altogether.

Through the gla.s.s panes, and through the grime that bleared the gla.s.s, a measure of daylight filtered, slanting in pale bluish streaks, like spilt skim milk; on vistas of the faded red-plush chairs; on the scrolled and burdened decorations of the proscenium arch; on the seamy, stained curtain; on the torn and musty hangings of the boxes; on an enormous gas chandelier which, swinging low over the pit from the domed ceiling above, was so clumped with swathings of cobweb that it had become a great, dangling grey coc.o.o.n.

Curving in wide swings from above their heads to the opposite side ran three balconies, rising one above the other, and each supported by many fat pillars. The s.p.a.ces beneath these galleries were shadowy and dark, seeming to stretch away endlessly. So, too, was the perspective of the lower floor, at the back, elaborated by the gloom into a vast, yawning mouth which fairly ached with its own emptiness. But at the front the screened angles of sunlight, stippled as they were with billions of dancing motes, brought out clearly enough the stage of the old theatre and, down under the lip of the stage, the railed inclosure of the orchestra and, at either side, the scarred bulkheads and fouled drapings of the stage boxes, upper tier and lower tier.

Close at hand Offutt was aware of crawling things which might be spiders, and a long grey rat which scuffled across the floor almost beneath his feet, dragging its scaled tail over the boards with a nasty rasping sound. He heard other rats squealing and gnawing in the wainscoting behind him. He was aware, also, of the dirt, which scabbed and crusted everything. And he felt as though he had invaded the vault of an ancient tomb. Sure enough, in a manner of speaking, he had done just that.

"Some place--huh, mister?" said the small gutter-sparrow proudly, and, though he spoke in a whisper, Offutt jumped. "Stick yere, yous two,"

ordered the child. "Somethin'll be comin' off in a minute."

Seemingly he had caught a signal or a warning not visible to the older intruders. Leaving them, he ran briskly down a side aisle, and apparently did not care now how much noise he might make, for he whooped as he ran. He flung his papers aside and perched himself in a chair at the very front of the pit. He briskly rattled the loose back of the chair in front of him, and, inserting two dirty fingers at the corners of his mouth, emitted the shrill whistle by which a gallery G.o.d, since first gallery G.o.ds were created into an echoing world, has testified to his impatient longings that amus.e.m.e.nt be vouchsafed him.

As though the whistle had been a command, the daubed old curtain shivered and swayed. A dead thing was coming to life. Creaking dolefully, it rolled up and up until it had rolled up entirely out of sight.

A back drop, lowered at a point well down front, made the stage shallow.

Once upon a time this back drop had been intended to represent a stretch of beach with blue rollers breaking on beyond. Faded as it was, and stained and cracked and scaly as it was now, the design of the artist who painted it was yet discernible; for he plainly had been one who held by the pigmented principle that all sea sands be very yellow and all sea waves be very blue.

Out of the far wings came a figure of a man, crossing the narrowed s.p.a.ce to halt midway of the stage, close up to the tin gutter where the tipless p.r.o.ngs of many gas-jet footlights stood up like the tines in a garden rake. Verba's hand tightened on Offutt's arm, dragging him farther back into the shadows, and Verba's voice spoke, with a soft, tense caution, in Offutt's ear: "Lord! Lord!" Verba almost breathed the words out. "'Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your----' Look yonder, Offutt! It's him!"

He might have spared the urging. Offutt was looking and, without being told, knew the man at whom he looked was the man the two of them had come here to find. The lone gamin in the pit clapped his talons of hands together, making a feeble, thin sound. To this applause, as to a rousing greeting, the figure behind the footlights bowed low, then straightened.

And Offutt could see, by one of the slanting bars of tarnished daylight, which stabbed downward through the dusk of the place, that the man up there on the stage was a very old man, with a heavy, leonine face and heavy brows and deep-set, big grey eyes, and a splendid ma.s.sive head mopped with long, coa.r.s.e white hair; and he was dressed as a fop of sixty years ago and he carried himself so.

The slash of indifferent sunshine, slicing into the gloom like a dulled sword blade, rested its lowermost tip full upon him. It brought out the bleached pallor of his skin, for his face was free from any suggestion of make-up, and it showed the tears and frays in his costume, and the misshapen shoes that were on his feet, and the high-shouldered, long-tailed coat and the soiled, collarless shirt which he wore beneath the once gorgeous velvet waistcoat.

In one hand he held, by a dainty grip on the brim, a flat-crowned derby hat, and between the fingers of the other hand twirled a slender black walking stick, with the shreds of a silken ta.s.sel adhering to it. And everything about him, barring only the shoes and the shirt, which plainly belonged to his everyday apparel, seemed fit to fall apart with age and with shabbiness.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said--and his voice filled all the empty house by reason of its strength and its toned richness--"with your kind indulgence I shall begin this entertainment with an attempt at an imitation of the elder Sothern in his famous role of Lord Dundreary, depicting him as he appeared in one of the scenes from that sterling and popular comedy, Our American Cousin, by Tom Taylor, Esquire."

With that, instantly stepping into character, he took a mincing, jaunty pace or two sideways. Half turning toward an imaginary confrere and addressing that mythical listener, he began a speech which, being pieced together with other speeches, at once lengthened into a kind of monologue. But he knew the lines--that was plain; and he knew the part, too, and for the moment lived and breathed it, and in all regards veritably was it. That, likewise, the watching pair of eavesdroppers could realise, though neither of them was of sufficient age to remember, even had he seen, the great craftsman whose work old Bateman now was counterfeiting.

The interlopers looked on and, under the spell of a wizardry, forgot indeed they were interlopers. For before their eyes they saw, wonderfully re-created, a most notable conception, and afterward would have sworn, both of them, that all of it--the drawl and the lisp, the exaggerated walk, the gestures, the play of leg and arm, the swing of body, the skew of head, the lift of eyebrow even--was as true and as faithful to the original as any mirrored image might be to the image itself.

How long they stood and watched neither Verba nor Offutt was subsequently able to say with any reasonable exact.i.tude. It might have been four minutes; it might have been six, or even eight. When later, taking counsel together, they sought to reckon up the time, the estimates varied so widely they gave up trying to reconcile them.

This much, though, they were sure of--that, in his mumming, old Bateman rose magically triumphant above the abundant handicaps of his own years and his own physique, his garb and his environment. Doing the undoable, he for the moment threw aside his years as one might throw aside the weight of a worn-out garment, and for that moment, to suit his own designs of mimicry, made floods of strength and youthfulness course through those withered arteries.

The old man finished with a whimsical turn of his voice and a flirt of his cane to match it. He bowed himself off with the hand which held the hat at his breast, and promptly on the second he disappeared the ancient curtain began to descend, Blinky meanwhile clapping with all his puny might.

Offutt turned to his companion. Behind the shelter of the box Verba's lean, dark face was twitching.

"Is he there? Can he act? Was I right?" Verba asked himself each question, and himself answered each with a little earnest nod. "Gee, what a find!"

"Not a find, Verba," whispered Offutt--"a resurrection--maybe. We've seen a genius in his grave."

"And we're going to dig him up." In his intentness Verba almost panted it. "Wait! Wait!" he added warningly then, though Offutt had not offered to stir. "This is going to be a Protean stunt, I take it. Let's let him show some more of his goods; for, by everything that's holy, he's got 'em!"

Up once more the curtain lifted, seemingly by its own motive power; and now the seaside drop was raised, and they beheld that, behind it, the stage had been dressed for another scene--a room in a French house. A secretaire, sadly battered and marred, stood at one side; a bookcase with broken doors and gaping, empty shelves stood at the other, balancing it off. Down stage was an armchair. Its tapestry upholstering was rotted through and a freed spiral of springs upcoiled like a slender snake from its cushioned seat. All three pieces were of a pattern--"Louie-the-Something stuff," Verba would have called them.

A table, placed fronting the chair but much nearer the right lower entrance than the chair was, and covered with a faded cloth that depended almost to the floor, belonged evidently to the same set. The scenery at the back showed a balcony, with a wide French window, open, in the middle. Beyond the window dangled a drop, dingy and discoloured as all the rest was, but displaying dimly a jumble of painted housetops and, far away in the simulated distance, the Arc de Triomphe. The colours were almost obliterated, but the suggestion of perspective remained, testifying still to the skill of the creator.

From the wings where they had seen him vanish Bateman reappeared. The trousers and the shoes were those he had worn before; but now, thrown on over his shirt, was the melancholy wreck of what once had been a blue uniform coat, with huge epaulets upon the shoulders and gold braid upon the collar and the cuffs, and bra.s.s b.u.t.tons to fasten it in double-breasted fashion down the front. Now, though, it hung open. Some of the b.u.t.tons were missing, and the gold lacings were mere blackened wisps of rags.

Bateman came on slowly, with dragging feet, his arms and legs and head quivering in a violent palsy. He stared out of the window as he let himself down carefully into the ruined armchair. His first movement proved that he played a venerable, very decrepit man--a man near death from age and ailments; yet by his art he managed to project, through the fleshly and physical weaknesses of the character, a power of dignity, of dominance, and of mental authority. He rolled his head back weakly.

"'My child,'" he said, addressing a make-believe shape before him, "'I must help to receive our brave, victorious troops. See! I am fittingly dressed to do them honour.'"

His tones were pitched in the cracked cackle of senility. He paused, as though for an answer out of s.p.a.ce. His inflection told as he, in turn, replied that this answer had been a remonstrance:

"'No, no, no!'" he said almost fiercely. "'You must not seek to dissuade me.'"

The words stung Verba's memory, raising a welt of recollection there.

"I've got it!" he said exultantly, not forgetting, though, to keep his voice down. "Siege of Berlin, by that French fellow--what's his name?--Daudet!"

"I remember the story," answered Offutt.

"I remember the play," said Verba. "Somebody dramatised it--Lord knows who--and Scudder put it on here as a curtain raiser. I saw it myself, Offutt--think of that! Sitting up yonder in the old peanut roost--a kid no bigger than that kid down there--I saw it. And now I'm seeing it again; seeing Burt Bateman play the part of the old paralytic--you know, the old French officer who was fooled by his doctor and his granddaughter into believing the French had licked the Germans, when all the time 'twas the other way and----"

"Sh-h!" counselled Offutt.

After another little wait Bateman was going on with his scene:

"'Listen! Listen!'" he cried, cupping a tremulous palm behind his ear.

"'Do you not hear them far away?--the trumpets--the trumpets of victorious France! Our forces have entered Berlin! Thank G.o.d! Thank G.o.d!

All Paris will celebrate. I must greet them from the balcony.'"

With a mighty effort he reared himself to his feet, straightening his slanted shoulders, erecting his lolled head. His fingers fumbled at b.u.t.ton and b.u.t.tonhole, fastening his coat at the throat. He swung one arm imperiously, warding off imaginary hands.

"'The trumpets! The trumpets! Hark! They come nearer and nearer! They sound for the victory of France--for a heroic army. I will go! Doctor or no doctor, I pay my homage this day to our glorious army. Stand back, _ma cherie_!'"

Offutt, fifty feet away, caught himself straining his ears to hear those trumpets too. A rat ran across his foot and Offutt never knew it.

"'They come! They come!'" chuckled Bateman.

He dragged himself up stage, mounted the two stairs to the balcony, and stood in the window, at attention, to salute the tri-coloured flag. Nor did he forget to keep his face half turned to the body of the house.

He smiled; and the two unseen spies, staring at that profiled head, saw the joy that was in the smile. Then, in the same moment, the expression changed. Dumb astonishment came first--an unbelieving astonishment; then blank stupefaction; then the shock of horrified understanding; then unutterable rage.

Offutt recalled the tale from which the playlet had been evolved, and Verba, for his part, recalled the playlet; but, had neither known what they knew, the both of them, guided and informed only by the quality of Bateman's acting, still could have antic.i.p.ated the climax now impending; and, lacking all prior acquaintance with the plot of it, yet would have read that the cripple, expecting to cheer his beloved French, saw advancing beneath the Arc de Triomphe the heads of the conquering Germans, and heard, above the calling bugles, not the Ma.r.s.eillaise, but the strains of a Teuton marching song. His back literally bristled with his hate. He spun about full face, a mortally stricken man. His clenched fists rose above his head in a command.

"'To arms! To arms!'" he screamed impotently, with the rattle already in his throat. "'The Prussians! The Prus----'"

He choked, tottered down the steps, reeled forward and fell headlong out into the room, rolling in the death spasm behind the draped table; and as, ten seconds later, the curtain began to unroll from above and lengthen down, Offutt found himself saying over and over again, mechanically:

"Why, he's gone, isn't he?"