figure attired impeccably yet with an elusive sense of carelessness, his
head on one side and a twinkle of amusement in his eyes. The twinkle was
momentarily reflected in the managerial gaze as he replied with an air
of impulsive candour: "One never can tell when the most unlikely-looking
material may prove useful. I may want to borrow money from you before
long. If I put you under sufficient obligation to me, you can't well
refuse.... Shoot, James!"
The latter phrase was Max's way of ordering the driver to move on. The
car snorted resentfully, then pulled smoothly and swiftly away. Max
waved a jaunty farewell with a lemon-coloured hand, over the back of the
tonneau.
Whitaker went up to his room in a reflective mood in which the
theatrical man had little place, and began leisurely to prepare his
person for ceremonious clothing--preparations which, at first, consisted
in nothing more strenuous than finding a pipe and sitting down to stare
out of the window. He was in no hurry--he had still an hour and a half
before he was due at the Knickerbocker--and the afternoon's employment
had furnished him with a great deal of material to stimulate his
thoughts.
Since his arrival in New York he had fallen into the habit of seeking
the view from his window when in meditative humour. The vast sweep of
gullied roofs exerted an almost hypnotic attraction for his eyes. They
ranged southward to the point where vision failed against the false
horizon of dull amber haze. Late sunlight threw level rays athwart the
town, gilding towering westerly walls and striking fire from all their
windows. Between them like deep blue crevasses ran the gridironed
streets. The air was moveless, yet sonorously thrilled with the measured
movement of the city's symphonic roar. Above the golden haze a drift of
light cloud was burning an ever deeper pink against the vault of
robin's-egg blue.
A view of ten thousand roofs, inexpressibly enchaining....
Somewhere--perhaps--in that welter of steel and stone, as eternal and as
restless as the sea, was the woman Whitaker had married, working out her
lonely destiny. A haphazard biscuit tossed from his window might fall
upon the very roof that sheltered her: he might search for a hundred
years and never cross her path.
He wondered....
More practically he reminded himself not to forget to write to Mrs.
Pettit. He must try to get the name of the firm of private detectives
she had employed, and her permission to pump them; it might help him, to
learn the quarters wherein they had failed.
And he must make an early opportunity to question Drummond more closely;
not that he anticipated that Drummond knew anything more than he had
already disclosed--anything really helpful at all events.
His thoughts shifted to dwell temporarily on the two personalities newly
introduced into his cosmos, strikingly new, in spite of the fact that
they had been so well known to him of old. He wondered if it were
possible that he seemed to them as singularly metamorphosed as they
seemed to him--superficially if not integrally. He had lost altogether
the trick of thinking in their grooves, and yet they seemed very human
to him. He thought they supplemented one another somewhat weirdly: each
was at bottom what the other seemed to be. Beneath his assumption, for
purposes of revenue only, of outrageous eccentricities, Jules Max was as
bourgeois as Cesar Birotteau; beneath his assumption of the
steady-going, keen, alert and conservative man of affairs, Drummond was
as romantic as D'Artagnan. But Max had this advantage of Drummond: he
was not his own dupe; whereas Drummond would go to his grave believing
himself bored to extinction by the commonplaceness of his fantastical
self....
Irresponsibly, his reverie reembraced the memory he had of the woman who
alone held the key to his matrimonial entanglement. The business bound
his imagination with an ineluctable fascination. No matter how far his
thoughts wandered, they were sure to return to beat themselves to
weariness against that hard-faced mystery, like moths bewitched by the
light behind a clouded window-glass. It was very curious (he thought)
that he could be so indifferent and so interested at one and the same
time. The possibility that she might have married a second time did not
disturb his pulse by the least fraction of a beat. He even contemplated
the chance that she might be dead with normal equanimity. Fortunate,
that he didn't love her. More fortunate still, that he loved no one
else.
It occurred to him suddenly that it would take a long time for a letter
to elicit information from Berlin.
Incontinently he wrote and despatched a long, extravagant cablegram to
Mrs. Pettit in care of the American Embassy, little doubting that she
would immediately answer.
Then he set whole-heartedly about the business of making himself
presentable for the evening.
When eventually he strode into the white room, Max was already
established at the famous little table in the southeast corner. Whitaker
was conscious of turning heads and guarded comment as he took his place
opposite the little fat man.
"Make you famous in a night," Max assured him importantly. "Don't happen
to need any notoriety, do you?"
"No, thanks."
"Dine with me here three nights hand-running and they'll let you into
the Syndicate by the back door without even asking your name. P.T.A.'s
one grand little motto, my boy."
"P.T.A.?"
"Pays to advertise. Paste that in your hat, keep your head small enough
to wear it, and don't givadam if folks do think you're an addle-pated
village cut-up, and you'll have this town at heel like a good dog as
long as--well," Max wound up with a short laugh, "as long as your luck
lasts."
"Yours seems to be pretty healthy--no signs of going into a premature
decline."
"Ah!" said Max gloomily. "Seems!"
With a morose manner he devoted himself to his soup.
"Look me over," he requested abruptly, leaning back. "I guess I'm some
giddy young buck, what?"
Whitaker reviewed the striking effect Max had created by encasing his
brief neck and double chin in an old-fashioned high collar and black
silk stock, beneath which his important chest was protected by an
elaborately frilled shirt decorated with black pearl studs. His waist
was strapped in by a pique waistcoat edged with black, and there was a
distinctly perceptible "invisible" stripe in the material of his evening
coat and trousers.
"Dressed up like a fool," Max summed up the ensemble before his guest
could speak. "Would you believe that despair could gnaw at the vitals of
any one as wonderfully arrayed?"
"I would not," Whitaker asserted.
"Nobody would," said Max mournfully. "And yet, 'tis true."
"Meaning--?"
"Oh, I'm just down in the mouth because this is Sara's last appearance."
Max motioned the waiter to remove the debris of a course. "I'm as
superstitious as any trouper in the profession. I've got it in my knob
that she's my mascot. If she leaves me, my luck goes with her. I never
had any luck until she came under my management, and I don't expect to
have any after she retires. I made her, all right, but she made me, too;
and it sprains my sense of good business to break up a paying
combination like that."
"Nonsense," Whitaker contended warmly. "If I'm not mistaken, you were
telling me this afternoon that you stand next to Belasco as a producing
manager. The loss of one star isn't going to rob you of that prestige,
is it?"
"You never can tell," the little man contended darkly; "I wouldn't bet
thirty cents my next production would turn out a hit."
"What will it cost--your next production?"
"The show I have in mind--" Max considered a moment then announced
positively: "between eighteen and twenty thousand."
"I call that big gambling."
"Gambling? Oh, that's just part of the game. I meant a side bet. If the
production flivvers, I'll need that thirty cents for coffee and sinkers
at Dennett's. So I won't bet.... But," he volunteered brightly, "I'll
sell you a half interest in the show for twelve thousand."
"Is that a threat or a promise?"
"I mean it," Max insisted seriously; "though I'll admit I'm not crazy
about your accepting--yet. I've had several close calls with Sara--she's
threatened to chuck the stage often before this; but every time
something happened to make her change her mind. I've got a hunch maybe
something will happen this time, too. If it does, I won't want any
partners."
Whitaker laughed quietly and turned the conversation, accepting the
manager's pseudo-confidences at their face value--that is, as pure
bluff, quite consistent with the managerial pose.
They rose presently and made their way out into the crowded, blatant
night of Broadway.
"We'll walk, if you don't mind," Max suggested. "It isn't far, and I'd
like to get a line on the house as it goes in." He sighed affectedly.
"Heaven knows when I'll see another swell audience mobbing one of my
attractions!"
His companion raised no objection. This phase of the life of New York
exerted an attraction for his imagination of unfailing potency. He was
more willing to view it afoot than from the windows of a cab.
They pushed forward slowly through the eddying tides, elbowed by a
matchless motley of humanity, deafened by its thousand tongues, dazzled
to blindness by walls of living light. Whitaker experienced a sensation
of participating in a royal progress: Max was plainly a man of mark; he
left a wake of rippling interest. At every third step somebody hailed
him, as a rule by his first name; generally he responded by a curt nod
and a tightening of his teeth upon his cigar.
They turned east through Forty-sixth Street, shouldered by a denser
rabble whose faces, all turned in one direction, shone livid with the
glare of a gigantic electric sign, midway down the block:
THEATRE MAX
SARA LAW'S
FAREWELL
It was nearly half-past eight; the house had been open since seven; and
still a queue ran from the gallery doors to Broadway, while still an
apparently interminable string of vehicles writhed from one corner to
the lobby entrance, paused to deposit its perishable freight, and
streaked away to Sixth Avenue. The lobby itself was crowded to
suffocation with an Occidental durbar of barbaric magnificence, the
city's supreme manifestation of its religion, the ultimate rite in the
worship of the pomps of the flesh.
"Look at that," Max grumbled through his cigar. "Ain't it a shame?"
"What?" Whitaker had to lift his voice to make it carry above the
buzzing of the throng.
"The money I'm losing," returned the manager, vividly disgusted. "I
could've filled the Metropolitan Opera House three times over!"
He swung on his heel and began to push his way out of the lobby. "Come
along--no use trying to get in this way."
Whitaker followed, to be led down a blind alley between the theatre and
the adjoining hotel. An illuminated sign advertised the stage door,
through which, _via_ a brief hallway, they entered the postscenium--a
vast, cavernous, cluttered, shadowy and draughty place, made visible for
the most part by an unnatural glow filtering from the footlights through
the canvas walls of an interior set. Whitaker caught hasty glimpses of
stage-hands idling about; heard a woman's voice declaiming loudly from
within the set; saw a middle-aged actor waiting for his cue beside a
substantial wooden door in the canvas walls; and--Max dragging him by
the arm--passed through a small door into the gangway behind the boxes.
"Curtain's just up," Max told him; "Sara doesn't come on till near the
middle of the act. Make yourself comfortable; I'll be back before long."
He drew aside a curtain and ushered his guest into the right-hand
stage-box, then vanished. Whitaker, finding himself the sole occupant of
the box, established himself in desolate grandeur as far out of sight as
he could arrange his chair, without losing command of the stage. A
single glance over the body of the house showed him tier upon tier of
dead-white shirt-bosoms framed in black, alternating with bare gleaming
shoulders and dazzling, exquisite gowns. The few empty stalls were
rapidly filling up. There was a fluent movement through the aisles. A
subdued hum and rustle rose from that portion of the audience which was
already seated. The business going on upon the stage was receiving
little attention--from Whitaker as little as from any one. He was
vaguely conscious only of a scene suggesting with cruel cleverness the
interior of a shabby-genteel New York flat and of a few figures peopling
it, all dominated by a heavy-limbed, harsh-voiced termagant. That to
which he was most sensitive was a purely psychological feeling of
suspense and excitement, a semi-hysterical, high-strung, emotional state
which he knew he shared with the audience, its source in fact. The
opening scene in the development of the drama interested the gathering
little or not at all; it was hanging in suspense upon the unfolding of
some extraordinary development, something unprecedented and extraneous,
foreign to the play.
Was it due simply to the fact that all these people were present at the
last public appearance--as advertised--of a star of unusual popularity?
Whitaker wondered. Or was there something else in their minds, something
deeper and more profoundly significant?
Max slipped quietly into the box and handed his guest a programme.
"Better get over here," he suggested in a hoarse whisper, indicating a
chair near the rail. "You may never have another chance to see the
greatest living actress."
Whitaker thanked him and adopted the suggestion, albeit with reluctance.
The manager remained standing for a moment, quick eyes ranging over the
house. By this time the aisles were all clear, the rows of seats
presenting an almost unbroken array of upturned faces.
Max combined a nod denoting satisfaction with a slight frown.
"Wonderful house," he whispered, sitting down behind Whitaker. "Drummond
hasn't shown up yet, though."
"That so?" Whitaker returned over his shoulder.
"Yes; it's funny; never knew him to be so late. He always has the aisle
seat, fourth row, centre. But he'll be along presently."
Whitaker noted that the designated stall was vacant, then tried to fix
his attention upon the stage; but without much success; after a few
moments he became aware that he had missed something important; the
scene was meaningless to him, lacking what had gone before.
He glanced idly at his programme, indifferently absorbing the
information that "Jules Max has the honour to present Miss Sara Law in
her first and greatest success entitled JOAN THURSDAY--a play in three
acts--"
The audience stirred expectantly; a movement ran through it like the
movement of waters, murmurous, upon a shore. Whitaker's gaze was drawn
to the stage as if by an implacable force. Max shifted on the chair
behind him and said something indistinguishable, in an unnatural tone.
A woman had come upon the stage, suddenly and tempestuously, banging a
door behind her. The audience got the barest glimpse of her profile as,
pausing momentarily, she eyed the other actors. Then, without speaking,
she turned and walked up-stage, her back to the footlights.
Applause broke out like a thunderclap, pealing heavily through the big
auditorium, but the actress showed no consciousness of it. She was
standing before a cheap mirror, removing her hat, arranging her hair
with the typical, unconscious gestures of a weary shop-girl; she was
acting--living the scene, with no time to waste in pandering to her
popularity by bows and set smiles; she remained before the glass,
prolonging the business, until the applause subsided.
Whitaker received an impression as of a tremendous force at work across
the footlights. The woman diffused an effect as of a terrible and
boundless energy under positive control. She was not merely an actress,
not even merely a great actress; she was the very soul of the drama of
to-day.
Beyond this he knew in his heart that she was his wife. Sara Law was the
woman he had married in that sleepy Connecticut town, six years before
that night. He had not yet seen her face clearly, but he _knew_. To find
himself mistaken would have shaken the foundations of his understanding.
Under cover of the applause, he turned to Max.
"Who is that? What is her name?"
"The divine Sara," Max answered, his eyes shining.
"I mean, what is her name off the stage, in private life?"
"The same," Max nodded with conviction; "Sara Law's the only name she's
ever worn in my acquaintance with her."
At that moment, the applause having subsided to such an extent that it
was possible for her to make herself heard, the actress swung round from
the mirror and addressed one of the other players. Her voice was clear,
strong and vibrant, yet sweet; but Whitaker paid no heed to the lines
she spoke. He was staring, fascinated, at her face.
Sight of it set the seal of certainty upon conviction: she was one with
Mary Ladislas. He had forgotten her so completely in the lapse of years
as to have been unable to recall her features and colouring, yet he had
needed only to see to recognize her beyond any possibility of doubt.
Those big, intensely burning eyes, that drawn and pallid face, the
quick, nervous movements of her thin white hands, the slenderness of her
tall, awkward, immature figure--in every line and contour, in every
gesture and inflection, she reproduced the Mary Ladislas whom he had
married.
And yet ... Max was whispering over his shoulder:
"Wonderful make-up--what?"
"Make-up!" Whitaker retorted. "She's not made up--she's herself to the
last detail."
Amusement glimmered in the manager's round little eyes: "You don't know
her. Wait till you get a pipe at her off the stage." Then he checked the
reply that was shaping on Whitaker's lips, with a warning lift of his
hand and brows: "Ssh! Catch this, now. She's a wonder in this scene."
The superb actress behind the counterfeit of the hunted and hungry
shop-girl was holding spell-bound with her inevitable witchery the most
sophisticated audience in the world; like wheat in a windstorm it swayed
to the modulations of her marvellous voice as it ran through a
passage-at-arms with the termagant. Suddenly ceasing to speak, she
turned down to a chair near the footlights, followed by a torrent of
shrill vituperation under the lash of which she quivered like a whipped
thoroughbred.
Abruptly, pausing with her hands on the back of the chair, there came a
change. The actress had glanced across the footlights; Whitaker could
not but follow the direction of her gaze; the eyes of both focussed for
a brief instant on the empty aisle-seat in the fourth row. A shade of
additional pallor showed on the woman's face. She looked quickly,
questioningly, toward the box of her manager.
Seated as he was so near the stage, Whitaker's face stood out in rugged
relief, illumined by the glow reflected from the footlights. It was
inevitable that she should see him. Her eyes fastened, dilating, upon
his. The scene faltered perceptibly. She stood transfixed....
[Illustration: Her eyes fastened, dilating, upon his. The scene faltered
perceptibly]
In the hush Max cried impatiently: "What the devil!" The words broke the
spell of amazement upon the actress. In a twinkling the pitiful
counterfeit of the shop-girl was rent and torn away; it hung only in
shreds and tatters upon an individuality wholly strange to Whitaker: a
larger, stronger woman seemed to have started out of the mask.
She turned, calling imperatively into the wings: "_Ring down!_"
Followed a pause of dumb amazement. In all the house, during the space
of thirty pulse-beats, no one moved. Then Max rapped out an oath and
slipped like quicksilver from the box.
Simultaneously the woman's foot stamped an echo from the boards.
"Ring down!" she cried. "Do you hear? Ring down!"
With a rush the curtain descended as pandemonium broke out on both sides
of it.
VII
THE LATE EXTRA
Impulsively Whitaker got up to follow Max, then hesitated and sank back
in doubt, his head awhirl. He was for the time being shocked out of all
capacity for clear reasoning or right thinking. Uppermost in his
consciousness he had a half-formed notion that it wouldn't help matters
if he were to force himself in upon the crisis behind the scenes.
Beyond all question his wife had recognized in him the man whom she had
been given every reason to believe dead: a discovery so unnerving as to
render her temporarily unable to continue. But if theatrical precedent
were a reliable guide, she would presently pull herself together and go
on; people of the stage seldom forget that their first duty is to the
audience. If he sat tight and waited, all might yet be well--as well as
any such hideous coil could be hoped ever to be....
As has been indicated, he arrived at his conclusion through no such
detailed argument; his mind leaped to it, and he rested upon it while
still beset by a half-score of tormenting considerations.
This, then, explained Drummond's reluctance to have him bidden to the
supper party; whatever ultimate course of action he planned to pursue,
Drummond had been unwilling, perhaps pardonably so, to have his romance
overthrown and altogether shattered in a single day.
And Drummond, too, must have known who Sara Law was, even while denying
knowledge of the existence of Mary Ladislas Whitaker. He had lied, lied
desperately, doubtless meaning to encompass a marriage before Whitaker
could find his wife, and so furnish him with every reason that could
influence an honourable man to disappear a second time.
Herein, moreover, lay the reason for the lawyer's failure to occupy his
stall on that farewell night. It was just possible that Whitaker would
not recognize his wife; and _vice versa_; but it was a chance that
Drummond hadn't the courage to face. Even so, he might have hidden
himself somewhere in the house, waiting and watching to see what would
happen.
On the other hand, Max to a certainty was ignorant of the relationship
between his star and his old-time friend, just as he must have been
ignorant of her identity with the one-time Mary Ladislas. For that
matter, Whitaker had to admit that, damning as was the evidence to
controvert the theory, Drummond might be just as much in the dark as Max
was. There was always the chance that the girl had kept her secret to
herself, inviolate, informing neither her manager nor the man she had
covenanted to wed. Drummond's absence from the house might be due to any
one of a hundred reasons other than that to which Whitaker inclined to
assign it. It was only fair to suspend judgment. In the meantime....
The audience was getting beyond control. The clamour of comment and
questioning which had broken loose when the curtain fell was waxing and
gaining a high querulous note of impatience. In the gallery the gods
were beginning to testify to their normal intolerance with shrill
whistles, cat-calls, sporadic bursts of hand-clapping and a steady,
sinister rumble of stamping feet. In the orchestra and dress-circle
people were moving about restlessly and talking at the top of their
voices in order to make themselves heard above the growing din. Had
there been music to fill the interval, they might have been more calm;
but Max had fallen in with the theatrical _dernier cri_ and had
eliminated orchestras from his houses, employing only a peal of gongs to
insure silence and attention before each curtain.
Abruptly Max himself appeared at one side of the proscenium arch. It was
plain to those nearest the stage that he was seriously disturbed. There
was a noticeable hesitancy in his manner, a pathetic frenzy in his
habitually mild and lustrous eyes. Advancing halfway to the middle of
the apron, he paused, begging attention with a pudgy hand. It was a full
minute before the gallery would let him be heard.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he announced plaintively, "I much regret to
inform you that Miss Law has suffered a severe nervous shock"--his gaze
wandered in perplexed inquiry toward the right-hand stage-box, then was
hastily averted--"and will not be able to continue for a few moments. If
you will kindly grant us your patience for a very few minutes...." He
backed precipitately from view, hounded by mocking applause.