A REHEARSAL OF “DECEIVERS EVER”
“Well, I butted in all right,” said Balcomb, cheerfully. “I suppose
you’re saying to yourself that it’s another case of the unfailing
Balcomb cheek. Welladay! as Prexy used to say in the good old
summer-time of our college days. The good Lord has to give everybody
something, and if he gave me an asbestos-lined, Bessemer-covered
outside to my face, it’s not my fault.”
“You’re a peach, Jack, and no mistake, as I’ve said before. I wish I
had your nerve,--”
“But say, they just _had_ to have me in this show! It proves how every
little thing helps as we toil onward and upward. You know I was tenor
on the glee club at college, and you’ll remember that when we came over
to town and gave that concert for the benefit of the athletic fund I
was a winner, all right. Well, I’m going to throw my whole immortal
soul into this thing,--”
“You’ll leave an aching void if you do.”
“Thanks, kindly. As I was saying, I’m going to do myself and Mrs. Carr
proud. She’s one of the grandest women we ever had in this state. Most
of these women that preside at meetings are N. G. They haven’t any
sense of humor. But Mrs. Carr knows that all this woman’s suffrage
business is so much Thomas Rot. She works her sisters just for fun,
and they never catch on a little bit. She just has to be president of
things, and she’s an ornament to the community, by gum.”
Leighton thanked his stars that Mrs. Carr had discovered her tenor
without his help. He and Balcomb were standing in the Carr library,
where the last undress rehearsal of _Deceivers Ever_ was about to
begin. Leighton, who was stage manager, also sang in the chorus,
which appeared in one act as foresters and in the other as soldiers.
Mrs. Carr always had a reason for everything she did. Her reason for
insisting that the Dramatic Club, of which she was the president,
should give a comic opera was thoroughly adequate, for at this time she
was exploiting a young musician who had lately appeared in Mariona, and
who was not, let it be remembered, a mere instructor in vocal music,
but a composer as well. He was a very agreeable young man, who wished
to build up a permanent orchestra in Mariona, and Mrs. Carr was backing
this project with her accustomed enthusiasm. Nothing could help matters
forward so well as a social success for Max Schmidt. He had written an
opera, which many managers had declined for the reason that the music
was too good and the book too bad.
_Deceivers Ever_ was the name of the work, and Mrs. Carr was preparing
to produce an abridged version of it on the night before Thanksgiving.
The scene was set in Germany, and there were six men--the gay
deceivers--all of them officers in the army. The chief girl character
was the daughter of a new commandant of a post, but at a ball given in
his honor she changed places with her maid, and no end of confusion
resulted. Mrs. Carr had urged Zelda to take the principal rôle, and
Zelda had consented, with the understanding that Olive Merriam was to
be elected a member of the club and given a part in the opera. Zelda
saw only perfection in Olive; she declared that Olive’s voice was far
superior to her own; and so Olive, who had never moved in the larger
currents of Mariona social life, found herself unexpectedly enrolled in
the Dramatic Club and a member of the cast of _Deceivers Ever_.
While Leighton and Balcomb stood talking in the library, Herr
Schmidt, in the drawing-room, lectured the rest of the company in his
difficult English. He now fell upon the piano with a crash and nodded
to Zelda, who began one of her solos. When this had been sung to his
satisfaction, the director called for Olive and Captain Pollock.
Pollock was greatly liked by the people he had begun to know in
Mariona. The men about the Tippecanoe Club had the reputation of
scrutinizing new-comers a little superciliously, in the way of old
members of a small club, who resent the appearance of strangers at the
lounging-room fireside. But Pollock fitted into places as though he had
always been used to them. He told a good story or he sang a song well,
when called on to do something at the grill-room Saturday nights. Mrs.
Carr had given him one of the best parts in the opera.
The young officer and Olive carried off with great animation a dialogue
in song into which Herr Schmidt had been able to get some real humor.
“You haven’t told me how much you like my cousin,” said Zelda to
Leighton, when he sat down by her in an interval of parley between the
director and Mrs. Carr. “I expect something nice.”
“Nothing could be easier. She’s a great hit! She’s a discovery! She’s
an ornament to society!”
“Humph! That sounds like sample sentences from a copy-book. A man with
a reputation as an orator to sustain ought to be able to do better than
that.”
“Not having such a reputation--”
“Not even thinking one has--”
“Oh, I’m conceited, am I?”
“I hadn’t thought of it before, but no doubt it’s true,” said Zelda,
looking across the room to where Jack Balcomb was talking with his
usual vivacity to a girl in the chorus whom he had never met before.
He was perfectly at ease, as though leaning against grand pianos in
handsome drawing-rooms and talking to pretty girls had always been his
mission in life.
Morris did not follow Zelda’s eyes; he was watching her face gravely.
He had tried in many ways to please her, but she maintained an attitude
toward him that was annoying, to say the least.
“There’s Mr. Balcomb over there,” Zelda remarked casually. “He sings
divinely, doesn’t he? Don’t you think he sings divinely?” and she
looked at Morris suddenly, with a provoking air of gravity.
“I’m sure he was a De Reszke in some former incarnation,” said Morris,
savagely.
“That was just what I was thinking, only I hadn’t the words to express
it,” said Zelda, with a mockery of joy at finding they were in accord.
“I’m glad, then, that we can agree about something, even when we’re
both undoubtedly wrong.”
“I don’t like to think that I can be wrong,” said Zelda. “And it isn’t
in the least flattering for you to suggest such a thing. I shall have
to speak to my Uncle Rodney about you.”
“Any interest you may take in me will be appreciated. I had not hoped
that you would--”
“Would what?” she asked, when he hesitated.
“I’ve forgotten now what we were talking about.”
“That is really most flattering! Oh, Mr. Balcomb.”
Jack had crossed the room, giving what he called the cheering jolly to
several young women on the way, and he turned quickly:
“At your service, Miss Dameron,”--and he bowed impressively.
“Mr. Leighton is crazy about your singing. He is just waiting for a
chance to congratulate you. But he’s very unhappy to-night. Words fail
him.” And she shook her head and looked into Balcomb’s grinning face as
though this were a great grief between them.
“What kind of a jolly is this? I say, Morris, you look like first and
second grave-digger done into one. We’re not playing _Hamlet_ now. But
I can tell you, Miss Dameron, that when Brother Leighton--he belongs
to my frat, hence the brother--did Hamlet over at our dear old alma
mater, the gloom that settled down on that township could have been cut
up into badges of mourning enough to have supplied Spain through her
little affair with these states. That’s Walt Whitman,--‘these states.’
Do you know, I was Ophelia to his Hamlet, and if I do say it myself, I
was a sweet thing in Ophelias.”
“I don’t doubt you were, Mr. Balcomb,” said Zelda.
“There was just one thing lacking in your impersonation,” declared
Leighton: “you ought to have been drowned in the first scene of the
first act to have made it perfect.”
“No violence, gentlemen, I beg of you!” And Zelda hurried across the
room to where Herr Schmidt was assembling the principals.
“Say, that girl has got the art of stringing down fine. She seems
to have you going all right. You look like twenty-nine cents at a
thirty-cent bargain counter. But you take it too hard. I wish she’d
string me! They’re never so much interested as when they throw you on
your face and give you the merry tra la. I tell you I’ve had experience
with the sect all right, and I know!”
“Yes, I remember your flirtations with the girls that waited on table
at the college boarding-house. You had a very cheering way with them.”
Balcomb’s eyes were running restlessly over the groups of young people.
He was appraising and fixing them in his mind as he talked. His joy in
being among them,--these representative young people of the city, whose
names he knew well from long and diligent perusal of the personal and
society column of the daily papers,--amused Leighton; but the fellow’s
self-satisfaction irritated him, too.
“What? Yes!” and Balcomb turned to him again. “I wouldn’t have you
think for a minute that the past’s blood-rusted key has any horrors for
me. I’ll bet you I did raise the high perpendicular hand to those poor
orphans as they passed the pickled pigs’ feet and the stewed rhubarb
at Mrs. Fassett’s boarding-house. And I’m glad I did. My office in the
world is to make two cheerful jays where none has been before. Say,
that little Merriam girl is a most delicious peach, isn’t she? Miss
Dameron’s cousin or something of the kind. About as much alike as the
Queen of Sheba and Come into the Garden Maud! I’m going to play up
to that little girl; but say, I don’t care for that strutting little
captain. I’ve got to cut him out. These West Pointers always did make
me tired. Think the earth is theirs and the fullness thereof; and I’m
unalterably opposed to militarism, social and political.”
Morris said nothing, and Balcomb went on, in his usual breathless
fashion:
“I must cultivate Mrs. Carr. She’s certainly a good thing. I really
think she rates me above par owing to a strong position I took with her
a few evenings ago _ad interim_, so to speak, while Dutchy Schmidt got
mad and talked through his hair. The strong position, as I was saying,
was apropos of Ibsen. When I remarked, quite casually, that Ibsen was
the great soul photographer, you should have seen her eyes light up!
I have visions of being much seen in these parlors hereafter. I guess
Mike, the hubbyhub, isn’t so much on soul himself, but she has him
hypnotized, all right. Just look at that sawed-off Pollock playing up
to my girl! The infinitesimal projectile of dynastic imperialism! I see
his finish. Ah! Watch me lift my velvety tenor.”
Herr Schmidt whirled on the piano stool and glared in Balcomb’s
direction through his shaggy mane; and the young promoter sprang into
the middle of the floor and began acting and singing with the utmost
_sang-froid_. He was easily the best man in the company, and Mrs. Carr
was delighted with the spirit that he brought to rehearsals.
The chorus had been drilled apart, and this was the first time Morris
had heard the principals sing. He had joined the chorus under protest,
but Mrs. Carr had insisted and when he learned that Zelda was to be
the star it had not been difficult to comply. She began now one of her
songs, as Gretchen, the commandant’s daughter:
“O deep dark woods of fatherland,
Thy boughs stretch high above;
O whispering wind in woodlands deep,
Thy voice is all of love.”
Until to-night, he had not heard her sing since the evening of Rodney
Merriam’s lobster, and he felt again the thrill that her voice had
awakened in him then. She stood within the circle that the others of
the company made for her, and he fancied that a great distance lay
between her and every other human thing. When a contralto voice is
pure and true, it is one of the surest vehicles of passion there is in
the world. It has a gathering power that seems to sweep all before it;
it touches the heights but never lets go of the depths; it becomes,
when it rises greatly, something that is not of this world and that
yet speaks of every joy and every grief that the world has known. It
was a song of farewell,--the song of a girl singing to her lover who
was going away to war; and it seemed to Morris Leighton that it was a
good-by to everything that a girl might know and hold good.
When the last notes died away, Balcomb stepped out at the director’s
nod and began the answering song. Balcomb usually amused Morris; but
the fellow struck upon him discordantly now. Zelda was laughing at
Balcomb’s antics as he began to sing with fervor and a real sense of
the dramatic requirements. As he neared the end, where Zelda and he
sang together the duet that ended the first half of the opera, Zelda
put up her hands, and he took them, gazing into her eyes with a fine
lover-like air. Their voices soared into the climax without a break,
while the director threw himself into strange contortions as he struck
the last bars leading to the high note which they gained and held
perfectly.
The dress rehearsal was fixed for the next night.
“It simply can’t fail!” declared Mrs. Carr to Leighton. “Miss Dameron
could carry it alone if every one else should break down.”
“That is altogether true,” said Morris. He was glaring at Balcomb,
whose joy in being a member of the cast was hard to bear.
Copeland, the lawyer who never practised, joined Leighton and twitted
him for appearing so gloomy. Copeland and his wife were on the
committee that had _Deceivers Ever_ in charge.
“I’ll give you anything I own, if you will tell me how I came to be on
this committee,” said Copeland.
“It wouldn’t be right to take the money. It’s too easy. You’re in
because Mrs. Carr asked you to be in,” replied Morris.
“Yes; and that damned Ogden boy has got typhoid fever, and I’m going to
sing the raging father’s part. I’m an awful ass, Leighton. If there’s a
larger or more industrious, hard-working ass anywhere than I am--” At
this point Jack Balcomb made himself conspicuous by laughing out in a
harsh discordant tone at something Herr Schmidt had said. “I take it
all back,” said Copeland, sadly. “I’ll admit myself,--regretfully, but
still I’ll admit,--that J. Arthur Balcomb can give me a big handicap
and still beat me. At the risk of appearing unduly humble I’ll say that
I never started in his class.”