Ember opened his eyes wide.
"You've been to see her?"
"On the contrary."
"The devil you say!"
"She called this morning--"
But Ember interrupted, thrusting a ready and generous hand across the
table:
"My dear man, I _am_ glad!"
Whitaker took the proffered hand readily and firmly. "Thank you.... I
was saying: she called this morning to inform me that, though wedded
once, we must be strangers now--and evermore!"
"But you--of course--you argued that nonsense out of her head."
"To the contrary--again."
"But--my dear man!--you said you were celebrating; you permitted me to
congratulate you just now--"
"The point is," said Whitaker, with a bland and confident grin; "I've
succeeded in arguing that nonsense out of my head--not hers--_mine_."
Ember gave a helpless gesture. "I'm afraid this is one of my stupid
nights...."
"I mean that, though Mary ran away from me, wouldn't listen to reason, I
have, in the course of an afternoon's hard tramping, come to the
conclusion that there is nothing under the sun which binds me to sit
back and accept whatever treatment she purposes according me by courtesy
of Jules Max."
Whitaker bent forward, his countenance discovering a phase of
seriousness hitherto masked by his twisted smile. He emphasized his
points with a stiff, tapping forefinger on the cloth.
"I mean, I'm tired of all this poppycock. Unless I'm an infatuated ass,
Mary loves me with all her heart. She has made up her mind to renounce
me partly because Max has worked upon her feelings by painting some
lurid picture of his imminent artistic and financial damnation if she
leaves him, partly because she believes, or has been led to believe, in
this 'destroying angel' moonshine. Now she's got to listen to reason.
So, likewise, Max."
"You're becoming more human word by word," commented Ember with open
approval. "Continue; elucidate; I can understand how a fairly resolute
lover with the gift of gab can talk a weak-minded, fond female into
denying her pet superstition; but how you're going to get round Max
passes my comprehension. The man unquestionably has her under
contract--"
"But you forgot his god is Mammon," Whitaker put in. "Max will do
anything in the world for money. Therein resides the kernel of my plan.
It's simplicity itself: I'm going to buy him."
"Buy Max!"
"Body--artistic soul--and breeches," Whitaker affirmed confidently.
"Impossible!"
"You forget how well fixed I am. What's the use of my owning half the
gold in New Guinea if it won't buy me what I already own by every moral
and legal right?"
"He won't listen to you; you don't know Max."
"I'm willing to lay you a small bet that there will be no first
performance at the Theatre Max to-morrow night."
"You'll never persuade him--"
"I'll buy the show outright and my wife's freedom to boot--or else Max
will begin to accumulate the local colour of a hospital ward."
Ember smiled grimly. "You're beginning to convince even me. When, may I
ask, do you propose to pull off this sporting proposition?"
"Do you know where Max can be found to-night?"
"At the theatre--"
"Then the matter will be arranged at the theatre between this hour and
midnight."
"I doubt if you succeed in getting the ear of the great man before
midnight; however, I'm not disposed to quibble about a few hours."
"But why shouldn't I?"
"Because Max is going to be the busiest young person in town to-night.
And that is why I've been looking for you.... Conforming to his custom,
he's giving an advance glimpse of the production to the critics and a
few friends in the form of a final grand dress-rehearsal to-night.
Again, in conformance with his custom, he has honoured me with a bid.
I've been chasing you all day to find out if you'd care to go--"
"Eight o'clock and a bit after," Whitaker interrupted briskly,
consulting his watch. "Here, boy," he hailed a passing page; "call a
taxicab for me." And then, rising alertly: "Come along; I've got to
hustle home and make myself look respectable enough for the occasion;
but at that, with luck, I fancy we'll be there before the first
curtain."
This mood of faith, of self-reliance and assured optimism held unruffled
throughout the dash homewards, his hurried change of clothing and the
ride to the theatre. Nothing that Ember, purposely pessimistic, could
say or do availed to diminish the high buoyancy of his humour. He
maintained a serene faith in his star, a spirited temper that refused to
recognize obstacles in the way of his desire.
In the taxicab, en route to the Theatre Max, he contrived even to distil
a good omen from the driving autumnal downpour itself.... The rain-swept
pavements, their polished blackness shot with a thousand strands of
golden brilliance; the painted bosom of the lowering, heavy sky; the
tear-drenched window-panes; even the incessant crepitation on the roof
of the scurrying, skidding cab seemed to lend a colour of assurance to
his thoughts.
"On such a day as this," he told his doubting friend, "I won her first;
on such a day I shall win her anew, finally and for all time!..."
From Broadway to Sixth Avenue, Forty-sixth Street was bright with the
yellow glare of the huge sign in front of the Theatre Max. But this
night, unlike that other night when he had approached the stage of his
wife's triumphs, there was no crawling rank of cabs, no eager and
curious press of people in the street; but few vehicles disputed their
way; otherwise the rain and the hurrying, rain-coated wayfarers had the
thoroughfare to themselves.... And even this he chose to consider a
favourable omen: there was not now a public to come between him and his
love--only Max and her frightened fancies.
The man at the door recognized Ember with a cheerful nod; Whitaker he
did not know.
"Just in time, Mr. Ember; curtain's been up about ten minutes...."
The auditorium was in almost total darkness. A single voice was audible
from the stage that confronted it like some tremendous, moonlight canvas
in a huge frame of tarnished gold. They stole silently round the
orchestra seats to the stage-box--the same box that Whitaker had on the
former occasion occupied in company with Max.
They succeeded in taking possession without attracting attention, either
from the owners of that scanty scattering of shirt-bosoms in the
orchestra--the critical fraternity and those intimates bidden by the
manager to the first glimpse of his new revelation in stage-craft--or
from those occupying the stage.
The latter were but two. Evidently, though the curtain had been up for
some minutes, the action of the piece had not yet been permitted to
begin to unfold. Whitaker inferred that Max had been dissatisfied with
something about the lighting of the scene. The manager was standing in
mid-stage, staring up at the borders: a stout and pompous figure,
tenacious to every detail of that public self which he had striven so
successfully to make unforgettably individual; a figure quaintly
incongruous in his impeccable morning-coat and striped trousers and
flat-brimmed silk hat, perched well back on his head, with his malacca
stick and lemon-coloured gloves and small and excessively glossy
patent-leather shoes, posed against the counterfeit of a moonlit formal
garden.
Aside from him, the only other occupant of the stage was Sara Law. She
sat on a stone bench with her profile to the audience, her back to the
right of the proscenium arch; so that she could not, without turning,
have noticed the entrance of Ember and her husband. A shy, slight,
deathlessly youthful figure in pale and flowing garments that moulded
themselves fluently to her sweet and girlish body, in a posture of
pensive meditation: she was nothing less than adorable. Whitaker could
not take his eyes from her, for sheer wonder and delight.
He was only vaguely conscious that Max, at length satisfied, barked a
word to that effect to an unseen electrician off to the left, and waving
his hand with a gesture indelibly associated with his personality,
dragged a light cane-seated chair to the left of the proscenium and sat
himself down.
"All ready?" he demanded in a sharp and irritable voice.
The woman on the marble seat nodded imperceptibly.
"Go ahead," snapped the manager....
An actor advanced from the wings, paused and addressed the seated woman.
His lines were brief. She lifted her head with a startled air,
listening. He ceased to speak, and her voice of golden velvet filled the
house with the flowing beauty of its unforgettably sweet modulations.
Beyond the footlights a handful of sophisticated and sceptical habitues
of the theatre forgot for the moment their ingrained incredulity and
thrilled in sympathy with the wonderful rapture of that voice of eternal
Youth. Whitaker himself for the time forgot that he was the husband of
this woman and her lover; she moved before his vision in the guise of
some divine creature, divinely unattainable, a dream woman divorced
utterly from any semblance of reality.
That opening scene was one perhaps unique in the history of the stage.
Composed by Max in some mad, poetical moment of inspired plagiarism, it
not only owned a poignant and enthralling beauty of imagery, but it
moved with an almost Grecian certitude, with a significance
extraordinarily direct and devoid of circumlocution, seeming to lay bare
the living tissue of immortal drama.
But with the appearance of other characters, there came a change: the
rare atmosphere of the opening began to dissipate perceptibly. The
action clouded and grew vague. The auditors began to feel the
flutterings of uncertainty in the air. Something was failing to cross
the footlights. The sweeping and assured gesture of the accomplished
playwright faltered: a clumsy bit of construction was damningly exposed;
faults of characterization multiplied depressingly. Sara Law herself
lost an indefinable proportion of her rare and provoking charm; the
strangeness of failing to hold her audience in an ineluctable grasp
seemed at once to nettle and distress her. Max himself seemed suddenly
to wake to the amazing fact that there was something enormously and
irremediably wrong; he began with exasperating frequency to halt the
action, to interrupt scenes with advice and demands for repetition. He
found it impossible to be still, to keep his seat or control his
rasping, irritable voice. Subordinate characters on the stage lost their
heads and either forgot to act or overacted. And then--intolerable
climax!--of a sudden somebody in the orchestra chairs laughed in
outright derision in the middle of a passage meant to be tenderly
emotional.
The voice of Sara Law broke and fell. She stood trembling and unstrung.
Max without a word turned on his heel and swung out of sight into the
wings. Four other actors on the stage, aside from Sara Law, hesitated
and drew together in doubt and bewilderment. And then abruptly, with no
warning whatever, the illusion of gloom in the auditorium and moonlight
in the postscenium was rent away by the glare of the full complement of
electric lights installed in the house.
A thought later, while still all were blinking and gasping with
surprise, Max strode into view just behind the footlights. Halting, he
swept the array of auditors with an ominous and truculent stare.
So quickly was this startling change consummated that Whitaker had no
more than time to realize the reappearance of the manager before he
caught his wrathful and venomous glance fixed to his own bewildered
face. And something in the light that flickered wildly behind Max's eyes
reminded him so strongly of a similar expression he had remarked in the
eyes of Drummond, the night the latter had been captured by Ember and
Sum Fat, that in alarm he half rose from his seat.
Simultaneously he saw Max spring toward the box, with a distorted and
snarling countenance. He was tugging at something in his pocket. It
appeared in the shape of a heavy pistol.
Instantly Whitaker was caught and tripped by Ember and sent sprawling on
the floor of the box. As this happened, he heard the voice of the
firearm, sharp and vicious--a single report.
Unhurt, he picked himself up in time to catch a glimpse of Max, on the
stage, momentarily helpless in the embrace of a desperate and frantic
woman who had caught his arms from behind and, presumably, had so
deflected his arm. In the same breath Ember, who had leaped to the
railing round the box, threw himself across the footlights with the
lithe certainty of a beast of prey and, seemingly in as many deft
motions, knocked the pistol from the manager's hand, wrested him from
the arms of the actress, laid him flat and knelt upon him.
With a single bound Whitaker followed him to the stage; in another he
had his wife in his arms and was soothing her first transports of
semi-hysterical terror....
* * * * *
It was possibly a quarter of an hour later when Ember paused before a
door in the ground floor dressing-room gangway of the Theatre Max--a
door distinguished by the initials "S L" in the centre of a golden star.
With some hesitation, with even a little diffidence, he lifted a hand
and knocked.
At once the door was opened by the maid, Elise. Recognizing Ember, she
smiled and stood aside, making way for him to enter the small, curtained
lobby.
"Madam--and Monsieur," she said with smiling significance, "told me to
show you in at once, Monsieur Ember."
From beyond the curtains, Whitaker's voice lifted up impatiently: "That
you, old man? Come right in!"
Nodding to the maid, Ember thrust aside the portieres and stepped into
the brightly-lighted dressing-room, then paused, bowing and smiling his
self-contained, tolerant smile: in appearance as imperturbable and
well-groomed as though he had just escaped from the attentions of a
valet, rather than from a furious hand-to-hand tussle with a vicious
monomaniac.
Mary Whitaker, as yet a little pale and distrait and still in costume,
was reclining on a chaise-longue. Whitaker was standing close beside his
wife; his face the theatre of conflicting emotions; Ember, at least,
thought with a shrewd glance to recognize a pulsating light of joy
beneath a mask of interest and distress and a flush of embarrassment.
"I am intruding?" he suggested gravely, with a slight turn as if
offering to withdraw.
"No."
The word faltering on the lips of Mary Whitaker was lost in an emphatic
iteration by Whitaker.
"Sit down!" he insisted. "As if we'd let you escape, now, after you'd
kept us here in suspense!"
He offered a chair, but Ember first advanced to take the hand held out
to him by the woman on the chaise-longue.
"You are feeling--more composed?" he inquired.
Her gaze met his bravely. "I am--troubled, perhaps--but happy," she
said.
"Then I am very glad," he said, smiling at the delicate colour that
enhanced her exquisite beauty as she made the confession. "I had hoped
as much." He looked from the one to the other. "You ... have made up
your minds?"
The wife answered for both: "It is settled, dear friend: I can struggle
no longer. I thought myself a strong woman; I have tried to believe
myself a genius bound upon the wheel of an ill-starred destiny; but I
find I am"--the glorious voice trembled slightly--"only a woman in love
and no stronger than her love."
"I am very glad," Ember repeated, "for both your sakes. It's a happy
consummation of my dearest wishes."
"We owe you everything," Whitaker said with feeling, dropping an awkward
hand on the other's shoulder. "It was you who threw us together, down
there on the Great West Bay, so that we learned to know one another...."
"I plead guilty to that little plot--yes," Ember laughed. "But, best of
all, this comes at just the right time--the rightest time, when there
can no longer be any doubts or questions or misunderstandings, no ground
for further fears and apprehensions, when 'the destroying angel' of your
'ill-starred destiny,' my dear"--he turned to the woman--"is
exorcised--banished--proscribed--"
"Max--!" Whitaker struck in explosively.
"--is on his way to the police-station, well guarded," Ember affirmed
with a nod and a grim smile. "I have his confession, roughly jotted down
but signed, and attested by several witnesses.... I'm glad you were out
of the way; it was rather a painful scene, and disorderly; it wouldn't
have been pleasant for Mrs. Whitaker.... We had the deuce of a time
clearing the theatre: human curiosity is a tremendously persistent and
resistant force. And then I had some trouble dealing with the misplaced
loyalty of the staff of the house.... However, eventually I got Max to
myself--alone, that is, with several men I could depend on. And then I
heartlessly put him through the third degree--forestalling my friends,
the police. By dint of asserting as truths and personal discoveries what
I merely suspected, I broke down his denials. He owned up, doggedly
enough, and yet with that singular pride which I have learned to
associate with some phases of homicidal mania.... I won't distress you
with details: the truth is that Max was quite mad on the subject of his
luck; he considered it, as I suspected, indissolubly associated with
Sara Law. When poor Custer committed suicide, he saved Max from ruin and
innocently showed him the way to save himself thereafter, when he felt
in peril, by assassinating Hamilton and, later, Thurston. Drummond only
cheated a like fate, and you"--turning to Whitaker--"escaped by the
narrowest shave. Max hadn't meant to run the risk of putting you out of
the way unless he thought it absolutely necessary, but the failure of
his silly play in rehearsal to-night, coupled with the discovery that
you were in the theatre, drove him temporarily insane with hate, chagrin
and jealousy."
Concluding, Ember rose. "I must follow him now to the police-station....
I shall see you both soon again--?"
The woman gave him both her hands. "There's no way to thank you," she
said--"our dear, dear friend!"
"No way," Whitaker echoed regretfully.
"No way?" Ember laughed quietly, holding her hands tightly clasped. "But
I see you together--happy--Oh, believe me, I am fully thanked!"
Bowing, he touched his lips gently to both hands, released them with a
little sigh that ended in a contented chuckle, exchanged a short, firm
grasp with Whitaker, and left them....
Whitaker, following almost immediately to the gangway, found that Ember
had already left the theatre.
For some minutes he wandered to and fro in the gangway, pausing now and
again on the borders of the deserted stage. There were but few of the
house staff visible, and those few were methodically busy with
preparations to close up. Beyond the dismal gutter of the footlights the
auditorium yawned cavernous and shadowy, peopled only by low rows of
chairs ghostly in their dust-cloths. The street entrances were already
closed, locked and dark. On the stage a single cluster-stand of electric
bulbs made visible the vast, gloomy dome of the flies and the
whitewashed walls against which sections of scenery were stacked like
cards. An electrician in his street clothes lounged beside the
door-keeper's cubicle, at the stage entrance, smoking a cigarette and
conferring with the doorman while subjecting Whitaker to a curious and
antagonistic stare. The muffled rumble of their voices were the only
sounds audible, aside from an occasional racket of boot-heels in the
gangways as one actor after another left his dressing-room and hastened
to the street, keen-set for the clash of gossiping tongues in theatrical
clubs and restaurants.
Gradually the building grew more and more empty and silent, until at
length Whitaker was left alone with the shadows and the two employees.
These last betrayed signs of impatience. He himself felt a little
sympathy for their temper. Women certainly did take an unconscionable
time to dress!...
At length he heard them hurrying along the lower gangway, and turned to
join his wife at the stage-entrance. Elise passed on, burdened with two
heavy hand-bags, and disappeared into the rain-washed alleyway. The
electrician detached his shoulders from the wall, ground his cigarette
under heel and lounged over to the switchboard.
Mary Whitaker turned her face, shadowy and mystical, touched with her
faint and inscrutable smile, up to her husband's.
"Wait," she begged in a whisper. "I want to see"--her breath
checked--"the end of it all."
They heard hissings and clickings at the switchboard. The gangway lights
vanished in a breath. The single cluster-stand on the stage
disappeared--and the house disappeared utterly with its extinguishment.
There remained alight only the single dull bulb in the doorman's
cubicle.
Whitaker slipped an arm round his wife. She trembled within his embrace.
"Black out," she said in a gentle and regretful voice: "the last exit:
Curtain--End of the Play!"
"No," he said in a voice of sublime confidence--"no; it's only
the prologue curtain. Now for the play, dear heart ... the real
play ... life ... love...."