Rope Part 12

He held up his hand in warning. "That's _all_ right, young lady. If you're his daughter, you oughter keep on the right side o' the law. It won't do you no good to bicker about it neither--you go in there an'

tell your audience to get their money back, an' go on home."

Henry picked up his cigarette. He had no craving to smoke, but he didn't want Anna to see that his lips were trembling. "Well," he said, "there goes the old ball-game. And we've sold every seat in the house, and thrown away three hundred dollar's worth of souvenirs, and the sidewalk's full of people waiting for the second show.... Knockout Mix beats Battling Devereux in the first round." He did his best to smile, but the results were poor. "And when we held off three days just so we could start on Sunday with a grand smash!"

"Get a move on, young feller. If the show begins, you're pinched, see?

You go in there and do what I told you."

From within there was a sudden rattle of applause. Anna gripped her husband's arm. "It's ... it's begun already," she said, breathlessly.

The policeman stepped forward. "You heard me tell you to stop it, didn't you? What are you tryin' to do--play horse with me? Now you go in there an' _stop_ it, and then you come along with me an' explain it to the Judge. See? Now, get a wiggle on."

CHAPTER IX

From the moment that he went out upon the little stage of his theatre until he came wearily into his own apartment at five o'clock, Henry lived upon a mental plane so far removed from his usual existence that he was hardly aware of any bodily sensations at all. A brand-new group of emotions had picked him out for their play-ground, and Henry had no time to be self-conscious.

In the first place, he was too stunned to remember that he hated to be conspicuous, and that he had never made a public speech in all his life. He was paralyzed by the contrast between last night and today.

Consequently, he made a very good speech indeed, and it had some acrid humour in it, too, and the audience actually cheered him--although later, when he reviewed the incident in his mind, he had to admit that the cheers were loudest just after he had told the audience to keep the souvenirs.

Then, when in the custody of the patrolman, he went out to the street, his mood was still so concentrated, his anger and depression so acute, that he was transported out of the very circ.u.mstances which caused him to be angry and depressed. He realized, with a hazy sort of perception, that a tail of small boys had attached itself to the lodestar of the policeman's uniform; but even at this indignity, his reaction was curiously impersonal. It was as though the spiritual part of him and the material part had got a divorce; and the spiritual part, which was the plaintiff, stood coldly aloof, watching the material part tramping down Main Street, with a flat-footed policeman beside it, a voluntary escort behind, and rumour flying on ahead to all the newspapers. He was actually too humiliated to suffer from the humiliation.

To be sure, this wasn't by any means his first entanglement with the law, but heretofore his occasions had been marked by a very different ritual. He recalled, phlegmatically, that whenever, in the old days, a member of the motorcycle squad had shot past him, and signalled to him to stop, the man had always treated him more or less fraternally, in recognition of the fellowship of high speed. The traffic officers had cheerfully delivered a summons with one hand, and accepted a cigar with the other. There was a sort of sporting code about it; and even in Court, a gentleman who had been arrested for speeding was given the consideration which belonged to his rank, and the fine was usually doubled on the a.s.sumption that a gentleman could afford it. But this was different. A Devereux--which was almost the same thing as a Starkweather--was haled along the highway like a common prisoner. And if the Devereux hadn't been engaged in that two-for-a-cent, low-cla.s.s, revolting business,--and if Aunt Mirabelle hadn't been Aunt Mirabelle--it couldn't have happened. The spiritual part of him looked down at the material part, and wondered how Henry Devereux could be so white-hot with pa.s.sion, and yet so calm.

What would his friends say now? What would Bob Standish say, and Mr.

Archer and Judge Barklay? And what would Aunt Mirabelle _not_ say?

This was a grim reflection.

During the journey he spoke only once, and that was to say, brusquely, to his captor: "Court isn't open today, is it?"

"Nope. But we're goin' to a Justice o' the Peace. Might save you a night in the hoosegow. Can't tell. Orders, anyway."

The Justice of the Peace (or, as he took some pains to inform Henry, the Most Honourable Court of Special Sessions) was a grizzled dyspeptic who held forth in the back room of a shoemaker's shop, while the rabble waited outside, flattening their noses against the window-gla.s.s. The dyspeptic had evidently been coached for the proceeding; on his desk he had a copy of the ordinance, and as soon as he had heard the charge, he delivered a lecture which he seemed to have by heart, and fined Henry twenty-five dollars and costs. Henry paid the fine, and turning to go, stumbled against two more policemen, each with his quarry. "Just out of curiosity," said Henry, speaking to no one in particular, and in a voice which came so faintly to his ears that he barely heard it, "Just out of idle curiosity, when the justice gets half the fine, isn't this court open on Sunday for G.o.dless profit, too?" And in the same, enduring haze of unreality, he paid an additional twenty dollars for contempt, and went out to the sidewalk.

He emerged as the focus of interest for a large, exuberant crowd of loiterers. A camera clicked, and Henry saw that the man at the shutter was one of the _Herald's_ staff photographers. A youthful reporter caught up with him, and asked him what he had to say for publication.

"Say for publication?" repeated Henry, dully. "Why, you can say--" He walked half a block before he completed the sentence. "You can say if I said it, you couldn't print it anyway."

And although the reporter paced him for a quarter of a mile, Henry never opened his mouth again. He was curiously obsessed, as men under heavy mental pressure are so often obsessed, by a ridiculously trivial detail. How was he going to enter that forty-five dollars on his books?

He had intended to go straight home to Anna, but automatically his steps led him to the Orpheum, where he went into his tiny office and sat down at his desk. There were two envelopes on his blotter; he slit them, diffidently, and found a bill from the novelty house which had supplied the souvenirs, and a supplementary statement from the decorator.

He opened a fat ledger, took up a pencil, and began to jot down figures on the back of one of the envelopes. Already, by remodelling the the theatre, he had lost two month's headway, and spent three times too much money, and if Sunday performances were to be eliminated.... He threw down the pencil, and sat back spiritless. The good-wishes of all his friends, last night, had turned sour in his possession. To reach his goal, he should have to contrive, somehow, to fill nearly every seat at nearly every performance for the balance of the year. It was all well enough to have self-confidence, and courage, but it was better to look facts in the face. He had come to an impa.s.se. Not only that, but overnight his property, by virtue of this Sunday enforcement and its effect upon the trade, had seriously depreciated in value. If it had been worth thirty-seven thousand five hundred yesterday, it wasn't worth a penny more than twenty today. And he could have had Standish's certified check, and got out from under.

And he had thrown away in improvements almost every cent that he had borrowed against the original value. He was hardly better off, today, than if he had carried through his first bargain with Mr. Mix.

He would have to go home to Anna, and confess that he was beaten by default. He would have to explain to her, as gently as he could, that the road which led to the end of the rainbow was closed to traffic. He would have to admit to her that as far as he could see, he was destined to go on living indefinitely in a jerry-built apartment, with the odour of fried onions below, and the four children and the phonograph overhead. And Anna would have to go on pinch-hitting for cook, and waitress, and chambermaid, and bottle-washer--she would have to go on with the desecration of her beautiful hands in dish-water, and the ruin of her complexion over the kitchen-stove. The clothes that he had planned to buy for her, the jewels, the splendid car--the cohort of servants he had planned for her--the social prestige! And instead of that, he was nothing but a fragment of commercial driftwood, and he couldn't afford, now, to buy her so much as a new hat, without a corresponding sacrifice.

And yet--involuntarily, he stiffened--and yet he'd be hanged if he went back and acted like a whipped pup. No, he was supposed to be a man, and his friends and Anna believed in him, an he'd be hanged if he went back and confessed anything at all, admitted anything. It was all well enough to look facts in the face, but it was better still to keep on fighting until the gong rang. And when he was fighting against the cant purity and goodness of Mr. Mix, and the cold astigmatism of Aunt Mirabelle, he'd be hanged if he quit in the first round. No, even if Henry himself knew that he was beaten, n.o.body else was going to know it, and Anna least of all.

At five o'clock, he came blithely into his living-room: and as he saw Anna's expression, his own changed suddenly. He had thought to find her in tears; but she was coming to him with her usual welcome, her usual smile.

Henry didn't quite understand himself, but he was just the least bit offended, regardless of his relief. You simply couldn't tell from one minute to the next what a woman was going to do. By all precedent, Anna should have been enjoying hysterics, which Henry had come prepared to treat.

"Well," he said, "you'd better cancel that order for golden pheasants, old dear." She stopped short, and stared at him curiously, as though the remark had come from a stranger.

"We've got lamb chops tonight," said Anna, with whimsical relevance, "and fresh strawberry ice-cream. And pheasants are awfully indigestible, anyway."

Henry returned her stare. "What have you been doing all the afternoon--reading Marcus Aurelius?"

"No, I haven't been reading anything at all. I tidied up the kitchen.

What happened to _you_?"

There were two different ways of presenting the narrative, and Henry chose the second. He made it a travesty: and all the time that he was talking, Anna continued to gaze at him in that same curious, thoughtful fashion, as if she were noting, for the first time, a subtle variation in his character.

"And--aren't you even _mad_?" she demanded. "I thought you'd be furious. I thought you'd be tearing your hair and--and _every_thing."

Henry laughed explosively. "Impatience, as I've pointed out so often to Aunt Mirabelle, dries the blood more than age or sorrow. Yes, I'm mad, but I've put it on ice. I'm trying to work out some scheme to keep us in the running, and not give Mix too good an excuse to hoot at us. No--they say it's darkest just before the dawn, so I'm trying to fix it so we'll be sitting on the front steps to see the sunrise. Only so far I haven't had a mortal thought."

"As a matter of fact," she confided, "I loathed the idea of our running the Orpheum on Sundays. Didn't you?"

"Naturally. Also on Thursdays, Sat.u.r.days, Mondays, Fridays, Wednesdays and Tuesdays. But Sundays did sort of burrow a little further under my tough hide. And you know that's quite an admission for anybody that was brought up by Aunt Mirabelle." He smiled in reminiscence. "She used to make virtue so darned scaly and repulsive that it's a wonder I've got a moral left. As it is, my conscience may be all corrugated like a raisin, but I'm almost glad we _can't_ run Sundays. That is, I would be if my last remaining moral weren't going to be so expensive."

"Don't you think they'll probably change that ordinance now, though?

Don't you think people will insist on it? After today?"

"Guess work," said Henry. "Pure guesswork. But _my_ guess is that we're ditched."

"Well, why don't you join the Exhibitors a.s.sociation, and fight?"

He shook his head. "No, because that's just what Mix and Aunt Mirabelle expect me to do. This campaign of theirs is impersonal towards everybody else, but it's slightly personal towards me. I mean, Aunt Mirabelle's sore on general principles, and Mix is sore because I wouldn't come up and eat out of his hand and get myself sheared. We won't fight. We'll outwit 'em."

"But _how_?"

"Now that question," he said reproachfully, "was mighty tactless. _I_ don't know how. But I know I'm not going to stick my head over the ramparts for 'em to shoot at. I'm no African Dodger--I'm an impresario. Maybe they'll hit me in the eye, all right, but I'm not going to give 'em a good cigar for it."

"I know, dear, but how are we going to make up all that tremendous loss?"

"Sheer brilliance," said Henry, easily. "Which is what I haven't got nothing but, of. So I'm banking on you.... And in the meantime, let's go ahead with the orgy of lamb chops you were talking about. I'm hungry."

They spent the evening in a cheerful discussion of ways and means, during which she was continually impressed by Henry's att.i.tude. From earlier circ.u.mstances she had gathered that when he was under fire, his rash impulsiveness would remain constant, and that only his jocular manner would disappear; furthermore, she knew that in spite of that manner, he was a borrower of trouble. And yet Henry, who had a pretty legitimate reason to be bristling with rancour, sat and talked away as a.s.suredly as though this hadn't been his doomsday.

She left him, once, to answer the telephone, and when she came back, she caught him off guard, and saw his face in repose. Henry wasn't aware of it; and when he heard her footsteps, he looked up with an instantaneous re-arrangement of his features. But Anna had seen, and Anna had understood; she sensed that Henry, for a generous purpose, had merely adopted a pose. Secretly, he was quite as tormented, quite as desperate, as she had expected him to be.

Her heart contracted, but for Henry's sake, she closed her eyes to the revelation, and resumed the discourse in the same key which Henry had set for it. Far into the night they exchanged ideas, and half-blown inspirations, but when Henry finally arose, with the remark that it was time to wind the clock and put out the cat, they had come to no conclusion except that something would certainly have to be done about it. "Oh, well," said Henry, indulgently, "a pleasant evening was reported as having been had by all, and nothing was settled--so it was just as valuable as a Cabinet Meeting."

The sight of the silver tea-service, however, sent him to bed with renewed determination.

In the morning, he dreaded to open his newspaper, but when he had read through the story twice, he conceded that it wasn't half as yellow as he feared. No, it was really rather conservative, and the photograph of him wasn't printed at all; he read, with grim satisfaction, that another culprit, somewhat more impetuous, had smashed the camera, and attempted to stage a revival of his success upon the photographer.