Harlequin and Columbine Part 8

He walked on angrily.

Immediately a slender girl, prettily dressed, pa.s.sed him. She clung charmingly to the arm of a big boy; and to Canby's first glance she was Wanda Malone. Wrenching his eyes from her, he saw Wanda Malone across the street getting into a taxicab, and then he stumbled out of the way of a Wanda Malone who almost walked into him. Wherever there was a graceful gesture or turn of the head, there was Wanda Malone.

He wheeled, and walked back toward Broadway, and thought he caught a glimpse of Packer going into a crowded drug-store near the corner. The man he took to be Packer lifted his hat and spoke to a girl who was sitting at a table and drinking soda-water, but when she looked up and seemed to be Wanda Malone with a blue veil down to her nose, Canby turned on his heel, face-about, and headed violently for home.

When he reached quieter streets his gait slackened, and he walked slowly, lost in deep reverie. By and by he came to a halt, and stood still for several minutes without knowing it. Slowly he came out of the trance, wondering where he was. Then he realized that his staring eyes had halted him automatically; and as they finally conveyed their information to his conscious mind, he perceived that he was standing directly in front of a saloon, and glaring at the sign upon the window:

ALES WINES LIQUORS AND CIGARS

TIM MALONE

At that, somewhere in his inside, he cried out, in a kind of anguish: "Isn't there anything--anywhere--any more--except Wanda Malone!"

IX

"Second act, ladies and gentlemen!" cried Packer, at precisely ten o'clock the next morning.

About a dozen actors were chatting in small groups upon the stage; three or four paced singly, muttering and mildly gesticulating, with the fretful preoccupation of people trying to remember; two or three, seated, bent over their typewritten "sides," studying intently; and a few, invisible from the auditorium, were scattered about the rearward rooms and pa.s.sageways. Talbot Potter, himself, was nowhere to be seen, and, what was even more important to one tumultuously beating heart "in front," neither was Wanda Malone. Mr. Stewart Canby in a silvery new suit, wearing a white border to his waistcoat collar and other decorations proper to a new playwright, sat in the centre of the front row of the orchestra. Yesterday he had taken a seat about nine rows back.

He bore no surface signs of the wear and tear of a witches' night; riding his runaway play and fighting the enchantment that was upon him.

Elastic twenty-seven does not mark a bedless session with violet arcs below its eyes;--what violet a witch had used upon Stewart Canby this morning appeared as a dewey boutonniere in the lapel of his new coat; he was that far gone.

Miss Ellsling and a youth of the company took their places near the front of the stage and began the rehearsal of the second act with a dialogue that led up to the entrance of the star with the "ingenue,"

both of whom still remained out of the playwright's range of vision.

As the moment for their appearance drew near, Canby became, to his own rage, almost uncontrollably agitated. Miss Ellsling's scene, which he should have followed carefully, meant nothing to him but a ticking off of the seconds before he should behold with his physical eyes the living presence of the fairy ghost that had put a spell upon him. He was tremulous all over.

Miss Ellsling and her companion came to a full stop and stood waiting.

Thereupon Packer went to the rear of the stage, leaned through an open doorway, and spoke deferentially:

"Mr. Potter? All ready, sir. All ready, Miss--ah--Malone?"

Then he stepped back with the air of an unimportant person making way for his betters to pa.s.s before him, while Canby's eyes fixed themselves gla.s.sily upon the shabby old doorway through which an actual, breathing Wanda Malone was to come.

But he was destined not to see her appear in that expectant frame.

Twenty years before--though he had forgotten it--in a dazzling room where there was a Christmas tree, he had uttered a shriek of ecstatic timidity just as a jingling Santa Claus began to emerge from behind the tree, and he had run out of the room and out of the house. He did exactly the same thing now, though this time the shriek was not vocal.

Suffocating, he fled up the aisle and out into the lobby. There he addressed himself distractedly but plainly:

"Jacka.s.s!"

Breathing heavily, he went out to the wide front steps of the theatre and stood, sunlit Broadway swimming before him.

"h.e.l.lo, Canby!"

A shabby, s.h.a.ggy, pale young man, with hot eyes, checked his ardent gait and paused, extending a cordial, thin hand, the fingers browned at the sides by cigarettes smoked to the bitter end. "Rieger," he said. "Arnold Rieger. Remember me at the old Ink Club meetings before we broke up?"

"Yes," said Canby dimly. "Yes. The old Ink Club. I came out for a breath of air. Just a breath."

"We used to settle the universe in that little back restaurant room,"

said Rieger. "Not one of use had ever got a thing into print--and me, I haven't yet, for that matter. Editors still hate my stuff. I've kept my oath, though; I've never compromised--never for a moment."

"Yes," Canby responded feebly, wondering what the man was talking about.

Wanda Malone was surely on the stage, now. If he turned, walked about thirty feet, and opened a door, he would see her--hear her speaking!

"I've had news of your success," said Rieger. "I saw in the paper that Talbot Potter was to put on a play you'd written. I congratulate you.

That man's a great artist, but he never seems to get a good play; he's always much, much greater than his part. I'm sure you've given him a real play at last. I remember your principles: Realism; no compromise!

The truth; no s.h.i.+rking it, no tampering with it! You've struck out for that--you've never compro--"

"No. Oh, no," said Canby, waking up a little. "Of course you've got to make a little change or two in plays. You see, you've got to make an actor like a play or he won't play it, and if he won't play it you haven't got any play--you've only got some typewriting."

Rieger set his foot upon the step and rested his left forearm upon his knee, and att.i.tude comfortable for street debate. "Admitting the truth of that for the sake of argument, and only for the moment, because I don't for one instant accept such a jesuitism--"

"Yes," said Canby dreamily. "Yes." And, with not only apparent but genuine unconsciousness of this one-time friend's existence, he turned and walked back into the lobby, and presently was vaguely aware that somebody near the street doors of the theatre seemed to be in a temper.

Somebody kept shouting "Swell-headed pup!" and "Go to the devil!"

at somebody else repeatedly, but finally went away, after reaching a vociferous climax of even harsher epithets and instructions.

The departure of this raging unknown left the lobby quiet; Canby had gone near to the inner doors. Listening fearfully, he heard through these a murmurous baritone cadencing: Talbot Potter declaiming the inwardness of "Roderick Hanscom"; and then--oh, bells of Elfland faintly chiming!--the voice of Wanda Malone!

He pressed, trembling, against the doors, and went in.

Talbot Potter and Wanda Malone stood together, the two alone in the great hollow s.p.a.ce of the stage. The actors of the company, silent and remote, watched them; old Tinker, halfway down an aisle, stood listening; and near the proscenium two workmen, tools in their hands, had paused in att.i.tudes of arrested motion. Save for the voices of the two players, the whole vast cavern of the theatre was as still as the very self of silence. And the stirless air that filled it was charged with necromancy.

Rehearsal is like the painted canvas without a frame; it is more like a plaster cast, most like of all to the sculptor's hollow moulds. It needs the bronze to bring a statue to life, and it needs the audience to bring a play to life. Some glamour must come from one to the other; some wind of enchantment must blow between them--there must be a magic spell. But these two actors had produced the spell without the audience.

And yet they were only reading a wistful little love-scene that Stewart Canby had written the night before.

Two people were falling in love with each other, neither realizing it.

And these two who played the lovers had found some hidden rhythm that brought them together in one picture as a chord is one sound. They played to each other and with each other instinctively; Talbot Potter had forgotten "the smile" and all the mechanism that went with it. The two held the little breathless silences of lovers; they broke these silences timidly, and then their movements and voices ran together like waters in a fountain. A radiance was about them as it is about all lovers; they were suffused with it.

To Stewart Canby, watching, they seemed to move within a sorcerer's circle of enchantment. Upon his disturbed mind there was dawning a conviction that these inspired mummers were beings apart from him, knowing things he never could know, feeling things he never could feel, belonging to another planet whither he could never voyage, where strange winds blew and all things lived and grew in a light beyond his understanding. For the light that shone in the faces of these two was "the light that never was, on sea or land."

It had its blessing for him. From that moment, if he had known it, this play, which was being born of so many parents, was certain of "success,"

of "popularity," and of what quality of renown such things may bring.

And he who was to be called its author stood there a Made Man, unless some accident befell.

Miss Ellsling spoke and came forward, another actor with her. The scene was over. There was a clearing of throats; everybody moved. The stage-carpenter and his a.s.sistant went away blinking, like men roused from deep sleep. The routine of rehearsal resumed its place; and old Tinker, who had not stirred a muscle, rubbed the back of his neck suddenly, and came up the aisle to Canby.

"Good business!" he cried. "Did you see that little run off the stage she made when Miss Ellsling came on? And you saw what he can do when he wants to!"

"He?" Canby echoed. "He?"

"Played for the scene instead of himself. Oh, he can do it! He's an old hand--got too many tricks in the bag to let her get the piece away from him--but he's found a girl that can play with him at last, and he'll use every value she's got. He knows good property when he sees it. She's got a pretty good box of tricks herself; stock's the way to learn 'em, but it's apt to take the bloom off. It hasn't taken off any of hers, the darlin'! What do you think, Mr. Canby?"