"Is he suffering?" I asked, almost in a whisper.
"Suffering, Miss?" echoed Crumley. "No, Miss, I think not. He's very
quiet indeed--in a stupor-like."
I hung up the receiver with a steadier hand and sat down, staring
straight before me. As I had rallied to Elman's words half an hour
ago, so now I tried to meet this new demand upon me. There was nothing
I could do for Godfrey; but a few hours later there might be much to
do for the manager and the company who were giving my work to the
public. I must stand by them and it--that was the one clear fact in a
reeling world. I must be very cool, very clear-headed, very alert. I
must have, Elman had told me, all my nerve, "and then some." All this,
as I repeated it to myself, was quite plain, yet it meant nothing
vital to me. It was as if one side of me had lashed with these
reminders of duty another side which remained unmoved. The only thing
of which I was vividly conscious was a scene which I suddenly
visualized--a sick-room, large and cool and dim, a silent figure in a
big bed, doctors and nurses bending over it. At the foot of the bed
sat a figure I recognized, Godfrey's mother. Of course she would be
there. I saw the gleam of her white hair, the look in the gray eyes
which were so like her son's.
"_The crisis is expected to-night._" The old clock in my hall seemed
to be ticking off the words, over and over. The hammering blood in my
brain was making them into a refrain which I found myself dully
repeating.
With a start I pulled myself together. I was on my feet again, walking
back and forth, back and forth, across my study. It was growing late.
Through my dark windows the lights of surrounding buildings glowed in
at me like evil eyes. I must get ready for my work. Resolutely I held
my thoughts to that point for an instant, then they swung away. "_The
crisis is expected to-night. The--crisis--is--expected--to-night.
Time--to--get--to--work. The crisis is expected to-night._"
I found that I was dressing. Well, let "T. B." do his worst. He could
tear me and my play to tatters, he could disband the company and disrupt
the universe, if only for a few blessed hours he could keep me from
seeing that shadowy room, that still, helpless figure. But he couldn't.
"_The--crisis--is--expected--to-night. The--crisis--is--expected--
to-night._" And when it came, while the great battle was waged that I
now knew meant life to me, too, I would be in an up-town theater,
listening to petty human beings recite the petty lines of a petty
play, to which in my incredible blindness I had given my time for
months, shutting myself away from my friends, shutting myself away
from Godfrey. How many times had he telephoned and written? Half a
dozen at least. He had urged me to go to a concert or two, to a play
or two, but I had been "too busy." It was monstrous, it was
unbelievable, but it was true. "_The--crisis--is--expected--to-night._"
I was at the theater now. How I had reached it was not quite clear.
The members of the company were there before me, scattered about in
the wings and on the big empty stage, lit by a single "bunch" light.
The information that "T. B." himself was to conduct had fallen upon
them like a pall. Under its sable influence they whispered together in
stricken groups of three or four. Near the right first entrance Elman
and Miss Merrick sat, their heads close, the star talking softly but
rapidly, Elman listening with his tired, courteous air. They nodded
across the stage at me when I appeared, but I did not join them.
Instead I slipped down into the dark auditorium and took my place in
an orchestra seat, where I could be alone. The whole thing was a
nightmare, of course. I could not possibly be sitting there when only
a few blocks away that sick-room held its watching group, its silent,
helpless patient. "_The--crisis--is--expected--to-night._"
There was a sudden stir on the stage, a quick straightening of every
figure there, a business-like bustle, and much scurrying to and fro.
"T. B." had entered the theater by the front door and was striding
down the middle aisle. I saw a huge bulk that loomed grotesque for an
instant as it leaned toward the dark footlights for a word with Mr.
Elman, and dropped with a grunt into a chair in the third row. Other
figures--I did not know how many--had entered the dark theater and
taken their places around me. From where I sat, half a dozen rows
behind him, I had a view of "T. B.'s" hair under the slouch hat he
kept on his head, the bulge of his jaw as he turned his profile toward
me, the sharp upward angle of the huge cigar in his mouth. The company
were in their places in the wings and on the stage. I heard Elman's
quick word, "Curtain." The rehearsal had begun. The familiar words of
the opening scene rolled over the footlights as cold and vague as a
fog that rolls in from the sea. "_The--crisis--is--expected--to-night._"
No, that was not what the office boy on the stage had just said. It
was what Gibson had said that afternoon, a thousand years ago, when he
had called me on the telephone.
Things were going badly up there on the stage. Like a patient coming
out of ether during an operation, and vaguely conscious of what was
passing around her, I had moments of realizing this. Boyce did not
know his lines; he was garbling them frightfully, and, by failing to
give his associates their cues, was adding to the panic into which "T.
B.'s" presence had already thrown them. There! He had ruined Miss
Merrick's opening scene, which was flattening out, going to pieces. It
seemed as if some one should do something. Yet, what could be done?
"_The--crisis--is--expected--to-night._" What difference did it make
what happened on that stage? The conscious interval was over. The
babble that came over the footlights meant nothing.
From his orchestra seat, into which he seemed to be sinking deeper as
the moments passed, "T. B." sent forth a sardonic croak. It was a
horrible noise--nerve-racking. It reached down to where I was
submerged, caught me, drew me up to the surface again. I saw the
company cringe under it, heard Elman's reprimand of Boyce, and his
sharp command to begin the scene again. Confusion, confusion, so much
confusion over such little things, when only a few blocks away was
that shadowy sick-room in which the great battle between life and
death was being fought with hardly a sound.
* * * * *
It was midnight. "T. B." was conducting the rehearsal. For three
hours he had poured upon the company the vitriol of his merciless
tongue. For three hours he had raced up and down the aisles of the
theater, alternately yelping commands and taking flying leaps across
the footlights to the stage to go through a scene himself. He had
laughed, he had wept, he had pleaded, he had sworn, he had cooed, he
had roared. He had been strangely gentle with the white-haired old man
of the company, and wholly brutal to a young girl who was doing
beautiful work. He had reduced every woman to tears and every man to
smothered and stuttering profanity. And all the time, sitting in my
seat in the auditorium, I had watched him as dispassionately and with
almost as detached an interest as if he were a manikin pulled by
invisible wires and given speech by some ventriloquist. It was all a
bad dream. He did not exist. We were not really there. The things he
said to the company swept by my ears like the wail of a winter wind,
leaving an occasional chill behind them. The remarks he addressed
directly to me touched some cell of my brain which mechanically but
clearly responded. I struck out lines and gave him new speeches,
scrawling them with a pencil on a pad upon my knee; I "rebuilt" the
curtain speech of the second act according to his sudden notion and to
his momentary content; I transferred scenes and furnished new cues
while he waited for the copy with impatiently extended hand. All the
time the hush of the sick-room lay around me; I saw the still figure
in the great four-poster bed.
I had never seen Godfrey Morris's bedroom, though his sister had shown
me his study. But now it was clear in every detail--the polished,
uncarpeted floor, the carved pineapple tops of the four-poster, the
great windows, open at top and bottom, the logs on the brass andirons
in the grate, the brass-bound wood-box near it, the soft glow of the
night lamps, the portrait of his mother which Sargent had painted ten
years ago and which Godfrey had hung in his own room at the front of
his bed. Yes, I remembered now, he had told me about the portrait.
That was why I saw it so plainly, facing him as he lay unconscious. He
had told me about the four-poster, too, and the high-boys in the room,
and some chests of drawers he had picked up. He was interested in old
mahogany. No, he was not interested now in anything. He was "in a
stupor-like," Crumley had said. "_The--crisis--is--expected--to-night._"
"Great Scott, Miss Merrick!" shouted "T. B." "Don't you realize that
the woman would have hysterics at this point? First she'd whimper,
then she'd cry, then she'd shriek and find she couldn't stop. Like
this--"
The theater filled with strange sounds--the wail of a banshee, the
yelps of a suffering dog, a series of shrieks like the danger-blasts
of a locomotive whistle. Something in me lent an ear to them and
wondered what they meant. Surely they could not mean that my heroine
was to have an attack of hysteria at that moment in my play. That was
all wrong--wholly outside of the character and the scene; enough,
indeed, to kill the comedy, to turn it into farce.
"That's the idea," I heard "T. B." say. "Now you try it. Here, we'll
do it together."
Something flamed within me, instinctive, intense. I half rose, then
sank numbly back into my chair. What did it matter? The only thing
that disturbed me was the noise. The uproar beat against my eardrums
in waves of sound that threatened to burst them. My nightmare was
growing worse. Was it taking me to Bedlam? Was I shrieking, too? I
must not shriek in the big, quiet room where the silent figure lay "in
a stupor-like."
The chair beside me creaked. Gibson had dropped into it. "T. B." and
Miss Merrick were on the top notes of their hysteria, but suddenly I
ceased to hear them. Every sense I had hung on the new-comer's words.
"No change," said Gibson, briefly. "None expected till three or four
o'clock. Thought I'd drop in, anyway. Say"--a wraith of his wide and
boyish grin appeared--"what's going on? Is _this_ your rehearsal?"
The question meant nothing to me.
"Did you see any of the family?" I whispered.
Gibson nodded.
"Miss Morris came in for a minute at midnight," he told me, "while I
was having supper. I opened the door of Godfrey's room an inch, too,
and saw him through the crack."
"See here!" "T. B." was bellowing to a frightened boy on the stage.
"You're not giving an imitation of Corbett entering the ring; you're
supposed to be a gentleman coming into a drawing-room. See? Hook in
your spine an' try it. And now you're not havin' a hair-cut. You're
greeting a lady. And you're not makin' a face at her, either. You're
smiling at her. Smile, smile--my God, man, smile! Try it. T-r-y-y it!"
His voice broke. He seemed about to burst into tears. I caught
Gibson's arm.
"Oh, Billy," I gulped, "how did he look?"
Gibson patted my hand glancing away from me as he answered.
"Very quiet," he said. "He's unconscious. The nurse said he was
'resting comfortably.' That's their pet formula, you know.
Occasionally he mutters something--a few disconnected words. By Jove,
what _is_ that fellow doing now?"
I followed the direction of his eyes. "T. B." had taken one of his
flying leaps over the footlights, assisted midway by a chair in the
aisle which served the purpose of a spring-board in this acrobatic
feat. Now he was at the right first entrance, swaggering through the
open door, his hands deep in his pockets, every tooth in his head
revealed in a fixed and awful grin. Yet, strangely, through the
swagger, under the grin, one detected for an instant something
resembling a well-bred college boy entering a drawing-room--something,
too, of radiant youth, irresponsible and charming.
"Jove," breathed Gibson, "he gets it, somehow, doesn't he? One sees
exactly what he's driving at."
But the little scene had faded as I looked at it, like a negative
dimming in the light. The door that opened was the door of the
sick-room, and the man who had entered was one of the specialists who
watched over Godfrey to-night. I saw him approach the bed and lean
over the patient, looking at him in silence for a moment, his finger
on the pulse of the thin hand that lay so still. Somewhere near a
woman was sobbing. Was it Mrs. Morris, or the young girl in the wings?
I did not know. "T. B.'s" voice was cutting its way to me like the
blast of a steam siren through a fog.
"Miss Iverson," he yelled. "Cut out that kid's love scene. He can't do
it, and no one wants it there, anyway. You've got some drama here now,
and, by Heaven, it's about time you had! Don't throw it away. Keep to
it." His voice broke on the last words. Again he seemed to be on the
verge of tears. "_Keep--to--it_," he almost sobbed.
I carried my manuscript to a point in the wings where, vaguely aided
by one electric light hanging far above me, I could make the changes
for which "T. B." had asked. They meant new cues for several
characters and a number of verbal alterations in their lines. Far
down within me something sighed over the loss of that love
scene--sighed, and then moaned over the loss of something else. "T.
B.," his chin on his chest, his eyes on the floor, brooded somberly in
an orchestra seat until we were ready to go over the revised scene. As
I finished, Stella Merrick leaned over me, her hand clutching my left
shoulder in a grip that hurt. Her teeth were chattering with
nervousness.
"How _can_ you be so calm?" she gasped. "I've never seen him as
devilish as he is to-night. If you hadn't kept your nerve we'd all
have gone to smash. As it is, I have a temperature of a hundred and
four!"
I wondered what Godfrey's temperature was. Gibson had not told me.
There must be a fever-chart in the sick-room. It seemed almost as if I
could read it. Certainly I could see the jagged peaks of it, the last
point running off in a long wavering line of weakness. Perhaps Gibson
knew what the temperature was. But when I returned to my seat in the
orchestra Gibson was no longer there.
"Open some of those windows," ordered "T. B.," irritably. "It's like a
furnace in here."
Was that an ice-cap on Godfrey's head? Of course. The nurse was
changing it for a fresh one. For a moment, the first in that endless
night, I seemed to see his face, waxen, the sensitive nostrils
pinched, the gray eyes open now and staring unseeingly into space.
"No change," said Gibson's voice.
Another period of time had dragged its way past me like a sluggish
snake.
"What o'clock?" I heard myself ask.
Gibson looked at his watch.
"Quarter of two," he told me, snapping the case shut. "I saw Dr.
Weymarth just before I left."
"What did he say?"
Gibson's eyes shifted from mine, which vainly tried to hold them.
"No change," he repeated.
"Was that all?"
Gibson's eyes returned to mine for an instant and shifted again.
"Tell me," I insisted.
"He's disappointed in the heart. It's been holding its own, though the
temperature has been terrific from the first. But since midnight--"
"Yes, since midnight--"
"It's not quite so strong."
Gibson's words came slowly, as if against his will. There was a
strange silence over the theater. Through it the voice of "T. B."
ripped its way to us.
"Now we'll run through that scene again. And if the author and the
ladies and gentlemen of the company will kindly remember that this is
a rehearsal, and not an afternoon tea, perhaps we'll get somewhere."
"Billy," I whispered, "I can't bear it."
"I know." Gibson patted my hand. "Sit tight," he murmured. "I'm off
again. I'll be back in an hour or so. By then they ought to know."
I watched him slip like a shadow through the dark house, along the
wall, and back toward the stage-door. The voice of Stella Merrick was
filling the theater. I heard my name.
"Miss Iverson doesn't agree with me," she was saying, "but I think
that in this scene, when we are reconciled and I say to my husband,
'My boy,' he ought to answer, 'My mumsey!'"
"T. B.'s" reply sounded like a pistol-shot.
"What for?" he exploded. "Want to turn this play into a farce?"
"Certainly _not_!"
"Then follow the lines."
It was the settlement for all time of an argument which Miss Merrick
and I had waged for weeks. One scene at least, the final, vital scene,
would be spared to me. I felt a throb of gratitude, followed by a
sudden sick, indescribable sinking of the heart. Had I for one instant
forgotten? I remembered again. Nothing mattered. Nothing would ever
matter.
Some one sat down beside me, smiled at me, then stared frankly. "Good
Heaven, Miss Iverson, did I frighten you?" cried Elman. "You look like
a ghost!"
Before I could answer, "T. B." approached us both. Leaning over Elman,
he nodded toward the youth who was still vainly trying to act like a
gentleman.
"Get rid of him."
"But we open in Atlantic City to-morrow night--" began Elman.
"Get rid of him." "T. B.'s" tones permitted no argument. "Get rid of
Haskins, too, and of Miss Arnold."
"But, great Scott, Governor--"
Elman's voice, usually so controlled, was almost a wail. "T. B."
strolled away. To "open" the next night with three new members in the
company seemed impossible. Probably we wouldn't open at all. By
to-morrow night I would know. Godfrey would be out of danger, or
Godfrey would be--Why didn't Gibson come? Elman murmured something to
me about "not taking it so hard," but I caught only a few words. He
said it could be done--that he had the right people at hand. He would
see them the first thing in the morning, and go over the lines with
them and have them word-perfect by night.
My eyes were strained in the direction of the stage-door. My ears were
awaiting the sound of Gibson's quick footsteps. For now, I knew, in
the sick-room, where my mind and heart had been all night, the crisis
was near. Through the open windows the blue-gray dawn was visible. The
shaded lights were taking on a spectral pallor. Nurse and doctors were
close to the bed, watching, listening for the change that meant life
or death.
"Good--mighty good!" whispered Elman.
On the stage Miss Merrick and Peyton, the leading man, were going
through their final scene. The familiar words, over which I had
labored for months, came to me as if out of a life I had lived on some
other planet ages back.
"You seem so far away," said the man. "I feel as if I'd have to call
across the world to make you hear me. But I love you. Oh, Harriet,
can't you hear that?"
The voice of his wife, who was forgiving him and taking him back,
replied with the little break in its beautiful notes which Stella
Merrick always gave to her answer.
"Yes, dear; I guess I'd hear that anywhere." And then, as she drew his
head to her breast, "My boy!"
Within me something alive, suffering and struggling, cried out in sick
revolt. What did these puppets know about love? What had I known about
it when I wrote so arrogantly? But I knew now. Oh yes, I knew now.
Love and suspense and agony--I knew them all.
On the dim stage the leading man and woman melted into the embrace
that accompanied the slow fall of the curtain. In the wings, but well
in view, the members of the company clustered, watching the final
scene and wiping their wet eyes. They invariably cried over that
scene, partly because the leading man and woman set the example, but
more because they were temperamental and tired. Even the brilliant
eyes of Elman, who still sat beside me, took on a sudden softness. He
smiled at "T. B.," who had dropped into a seat near us.
"No change there, I guess," he hazarded.
"T. B." looked at his watch.
"Quarter of four," he said, with surprise. Then he yawned, and,
rising, reached for his light overcoat which lay on the back of a
chair.
"That's all," he called, as he struggled into it. "Boyce, study your
lines to-morrow, or you're going to have trouble. Peyton, you and Miss
Mason better go over that scene in the second act in the morning.
So-long, Miss Merrick."
He started to go, then stopped at my seat.
"Good night, Miss Iverson," he said, kindly. "You've got the right
nerve for this business. Of course we can't make predictions, but I
shouldn't wonder if we're giving the public what they want in this
play."
He nodded and was gone. I had barely caught his words. Over his big
shoulders I saw Gibson approaching, his face one wide, expansive grin.
Never before had anything seemed so beautiful to me as that familiar
Gibson smile. Never had I dreamed I could be so rapturously happy in
seeing it.
"Good news," he said, as soon as he came within speaking-distance; and
he added when he reached me, "He's better. The doctors say they'll
pull him through."
At the first glimpse of him I had risen to my feet with some vague
impulse to take, standing, whatever was coming. For a moment I stood
quite still. Then the thing of horror that had ridden me through the
night loosened its grip slowly, reluctantly, and I drew a deep, deep
breath. I wanted to throw myself in Gibson's arms. I wanted to laugh,
to cry, to shout. But I did none of these things. I merely stood and
looked at him till he took my hand and drew it through his arm.
"Rehearsal's over, I see," he said. "I'm going to hunt up a taxi and
take you home."
Together we went out into the gray morning light, and I stood on the
curb, full-lunged, ecstatic, until Gibson and the taxi-cab appeared.
He helped me into the cab and took the seat beside me.
"You ought to go home," I murmured, with sudden compunction. "You must
be horribly tired."
They were my first words. I had made no comment on the message he
brought, and it was clear that he had expected none. Now he smiled at
me--the wide, kind, understanding smile that had warmed the five years
of our friendship.
"Let me do this much for you, May," he said. "You see, it's all I can
do."
Our eyes met, and suddenly I understood. An irrepressible cry broke
from me.
"Oh, Billy," I said. "Not _you_! Not _me_!"
He smiled again.
"Yes," he replied. "Just that. Just you and me. But it's all right.
I'd rather be your friend than the husband of any other woman in the
world."
The taxi-cab hummed on its way. The east reddened, then sent up a
flaming banner of light. I should have been tired; I should have been
hungry; I should, perhaps, have been excited over "T. B.'s" final
words. I was none of those things. I was merely in a state of supreme
content. Nothing mattered but the one thing in life which mattered
supremely. Godfrey was better; Godfrey would live!