With this sonorous bit of character reading still ringing in his
ears, Canby emerged from the cream-coloured apartment to find the
stoop-shouldered figure of the also hypocritical son leaning wearily
against the wall, waiting for a delaying elevator. The attitude was
not wholly devoid of pathos, to Canby's view of it. Neither was
the careworn, harried face, unharmoniously topped by a green hat so
sparklingly jaunty, not only in colour but in its shape and the angle
of its perch, that it was outright hilarious, and, above the face of
Packer, made the playwright think pityingly of a St. Patrick's Day party
holding a noisy celebration upon a hearse.
Its wearer nodded solemnly as the elevator bounced up, flashing, and
settled to the level of the floor; but the quick drop through the long
shaft seemed to do the stage-manager a disproportionate amount of good.
Halfway down he emitted a heavy “Whew!” of relief and threw back his
shoulders. He seemed to swell, to grow larger; lines verged into the
texture of his face, disappearing; and with them went care and seeming
years. Canby had casually taken him to be about forty, but so radical
was the transformation of him that, as the distance from his harrowing
overlord increased, the playwright beheld another kind of creature. In
place of the placative, middle-aged varlet, troubled and hurrying
to serve, there stepped out of the elevator, at the street level, a
deep-chested, assertive, manly adventurer, about thirty, kindly eyed,
picturesque, and careless. The green hat belonged to him perfectly.
He gave Canby a look of burlesque ruefulness over his shoulder, the
comedy appeal of one schoolboy to another as they leave a scolding
teacher on the far side of the door. “The governor does keep himself
worked up!” he laughed, as they reached the street and paused. “If it
isn't one thing, it's some thing!”
“Perhaps it's my play just now,” said Canby. “I was afraid, earlier this
evening, he meant to drop it. Making so many changes may have upset his
nerves.”
“Lord bless your soul! No!” exclaimed the new Packer. “His nerves are
all right! He's always the same! He can't help it!”
“I thought possibly he might have been more upset than usual,” Canby
said. “There was a critic or something that--”
“No, no, Mr. Canby!” Packer chuckled. “New plays and critics, they don't
worry him any more than anything else. Of course he isn't going to be
pleased with any critics. Most of them give him splendid notices, but
they don't please him. How could they?”
“He's always the same, you think?” Canby said blankly.
“Always--always at top pitch, that is, and always unexpected. You'll see
as you get to know him. You won't know him any better than you do
now, Mr. Canby; you'll only know him more. I've been with him for four
years--stage-manager--hired man--maid-of-all-work--order his meals for
him in hotels--and I guess old Tinker and I know him as well as anybody
does, but it's a mighty big job to handle him just right. It keeps us
hopping, but that's bread and butter. Not much bread and butter anywhere
these days unless you do hop! We all have to hop for somebody!” He
chuckled again, and then unexpectedly became so serious he was almost
truculent. “And I tell you, Mr. Canby,” he cried, “by George! I'd
sooner hop for Talbot Potter than for any other man that ever walked the
earth!”
He took a yellow walking-stick from under his arm, thrust the manuscript
Potter had given him into the pocket of his light overcoat, and bade
his companion good-night with a genial flourish of the stick. “Subway to
Brooklyn for mine. Your play will go, all right; don't worry about that,
Mr. Canby. Good-night and good luck, Mr. Canby.”
Canby went the other way, marvelling.
It was eleven; and for half an hour the theatres had been releasing
their audiences to the streets;--the sidewalks were bobbing and
fluttering; automobiles cometed by bleating peevishly. Suddenly, through
the window of a limousine, brilliantly lighted within, Canby saw the
face of Wanda Malone, laughing, and embowered in white furs. He stopped,
startled; then he realized that Wanda Malone's hair was not red. The
girl in the limousine had red hair, and was altogether unlike Wanda
Malone in feature and expression.
He walked on angrily.
Immediately a slender girl, prettily dressed, passed 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: