Delphi Complete Works of Booth Tarkington (Illustrated), page 573
“You mean in there just now — —”
“Why, yes,” she said, and seemed a little surprised at his tone of astonishment. “But of course afterwards it was easy to go on, because Isabelle was so sweet.” She put her handkerchief away, smiled and patted his arm. “Now I’m ready. Let’s go.”
He took her to the stage, then went to his usual seat in the body of the house. The rehearsal was encouraging; life seemed restored to the play and light to the stage. Moreover, in none of the groupings of the actors not “on” and during none of the intervals of consultation between Hurley and Monk, were the ingénue and the leading man seen to approach each other or even to appear aware of each other’s presence. At five, when the rehearsal was over, Lily went away with Miss Lebrun without having spoken a word to Eugene Allan during the whole afternoon; Isabelle looked sweetly benevolent and Owen felt a warm approval of his ward’s discretion.
This feeling, glowing pleasantly in his breast, lasted until after he had finished an early dinner at the Players’ and was wondering what theatre would most enrapture her that evening; then he was called to the telephone and the voice of Eugene said urgently, “Old boy; do get this straight, will you? If Isabelle talks to you to-morrow be sure to remember I came down to the club, had dinner with you and then we went to your room and sat up till all hours going over the play together. Isabelle or George Hurley either. In heaven’s name don’t fail me, old boy!”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE MAN-FOR-MAN LOYALTY thus invoked, however, was not put to trial the next day. Isabelle, serene, made no inquiries, but chided the playwright amiably, on the stage, before Pinkney Monk began the morning’s rehearsal. “You authors! Making your actors rewrite your plays for you nowadays, are you? What are you trying to do, wear ‘Gene out? You look something in that line yourself this morning, by the way. What’s the matter?” She laughed with pointed archness. “Worrying too much over your play — or too much over your girl?”
“I’d never worry over anything if you’d be that,” he contrived to say; but to his dismay felt his face growing warm and then growing warmer as Isabelle tapped his cheek with a too humorous finger.
“I thought so,” she said, as she turned away. “You’ll have your hands full!”
Lily came to him, put a gentle hand upon his arm. “You aren’t speaking to me this morning? I’ve been sitting over there the longest time, waiting for you to look at me. You’ve talked to almost all the others and never came near me. What have I done? It couldn’t be about last night because I knew you wouldn’t mind — —”
“No? But I do.”
“Oh, no,” she said hurriedly. “He told me she wouldn’t get upset, because if she spoke to you about it you’d tell her — —”
“Lily! It won’t do.”
She seemed gently surprised. “But if we’re careful not to let her get upset again? Of course I knew you didn’t mind on your own account — we’d said something about going somewhere last night, hadn’t we? but not definitely — because I’d told you how I felt about him and you were so darlingly sympathetic. I knew you had almost that same feeling about him, Owen. Oh, everybody would! And you knew how happy I’d be. You and I could go somewhere to-night, though? I’d love to see ‘The Paradox’. He thought we’d better not try it again to-night and he’s going to take her there. We could ask them to supper with us, after?”
“No, we couldn’t,” Owen said, and, in a necessarily lowered voice but with as much severity as he could command, gave her a brief lecture upon what he felt should be her proper conduct under the circumstances. “You can use your mother to cry about when you have occasion,” he said, concluding. “Perhaps you’d better give a thought now and then to what would happen to her in case next time Mr. Hurley doesn’t change his mind.”
She gave him a troubled look of inquiry. “You think I shouldn’t do that? I shouldn’t think of Mother when I want to bring tears into my eyes?”
“Oh, murder!” he groaned. “I’m not talking about that. I do the same thing myself in a manner; I’ve used hints for plays out of my own mother’s emotions. It’s a dreadful business and we violate all that’s sacred and dearest for it. I’m not in a position to blame you. Can’t you understand I’m not blaming you for anything? I’m warning you, warning you as seriously and earnestly as — —”
“Oh, no; you’re blaming me, too — in your heart.” Her look became a softly reproachful one. “But I told you. I told you I might do anything — anything. You knew that. I told you I was like an automobile that didn’t have any driver and couldn’t know, itself, where it was going.”
“You’d better!” he advised her sharply. “If you want to keep your sick sister out of Vance’s — —”
Lily put a frightened hand to her cheek. “Ah, I didn’t know you could be cruel!”
Pinkney Monk rapped upon a table at the front of the stage. “First act, ladies and gentlemen, please. Let’s put all we can into it to-day, if you please. Mr. Hurley asks me to announce that we open this play next Monday evening at Somerville, New York, and that means stepping lively from now on for all of us. First act, ladies and gentlemen, please.”
Lily’s saddened eyes glowed instantly. “Somerville! Where is it?”
“I don’t think that matters,” Owen said angrily. “Have you listened to me at all?”
“Ord! Joe Ord!” Monk called. “Ord on; Tom and Jack up left. Stand by, Miss Hedrington, please. ‘Myra’ ready for entrance.”
“Somerville! Heavenly Somerville wherever it is!” Lily whispered, and, clutching Owen’s arm, delayed yet another moment before going to her place. “Ah, if you’d climb up into the driver’s seat the poor little car would go wherever you liked. I love to have you rough with me!”
Monk was rapping upon the table. “ ’Myra’! Where’s Miss — —”
“I’m there!” Lily cried, and, laughing excitedly, ran across the stage to her post.
In the free and graceful action of this short flight she was all lovely in the playwright’s eyes, and, despite his better reason, his spirits rose once more in a familiar exhilaration. Naturally there was also some effervescence of remorse; he was not a man to speak harshly to anyone, least of all to his best loved, without subsequent self-reproach. It seemed to him that he was always critical of her and, worse, always pecking at her, sometimes even sneering at her, and it hurt him to realize that she had never an ungentle word for him in return. Nay, she had no really ungentle words at all for anybody, and under sharpest punishment would weep yet still was unresentful. For the rest, had she no right to be young and girlish and foolish?
Moved by the mere justice done her in this thought, he vowed to himself that he would pester her no more with either advice or sarcasm, and for three days and evenings with her kept his word. He had his reward; she was like a tremulous ecstatic worshipful new little slave of the seraglio to whom the great Sultan displays the opened coffers of his treasure room, letting her play with huge rubies, carved emeralds, and diamonds beyond price. Her impression seemed to be that he was the proprietor of New York and in particular of its theatres and restaurants wherein she gloriously moved and shone, an actress about to “open” a new play in the celebrated city of Somerville somewhere in the State of New York. It was not indeed until the day before the “Catalpa House” company left town that uneasiness beset him again and ended this happy interval.
On Friday afternoon Lily had told him reluctantly that she felt anticipatory qualms of stage-fright and dared not trifle with them; she would remain in her room that evening to go over and over her “lines” until no possible tremors could shake them out of her head. He assented approvingly; but in the morning, on the stage of the Netherlands just before the last rehearsal in that theatre, Isabelle Hedrington drew him aside and asked him sharply and unexpectedly where he had spent the previous evening.
Her brow was dark; foreboding smote him. “I, Isabelle?”
“Yes. Where were you and who was with you?”
“If you’ll tell me why you want to know — —”
“I see!” She became contemptuous. “You’ll tell me after you find out whether you’d be giving ’em away or not. Very well; I know I can’t get anything out of you. Eugene’s got an old aunt in Bronxville and said he had to go out there and dine and spend the evening with her before he left town. I know her very well and it just happens she called me up this morning and said she’s seen in a paper that our company was leaving for Somerville immediately and wanted me to use my influence with Eugene to be nicer to her when we came back, because she knew he’d been here all this week and he hadn’t been to see her or paid her the slightest attention. You see?”
“Then why don’t you ask Eugene — —”
“Oh, I will! If he tells me again that he was working on the play with you, I suppose you’ll back him up.” She laughed bitterly. “You don’t seem to care as much about what happens to your girl as I do about my man.”
“I’m afraid I must ask you not to speak like that again,” Owen said. “You know that Miss Mars isn’t my ‘girl’.”
Isabelle laughed a little more loudly. “No! I suspect she isn’t! That’s why you’d better tell her to look out!”
She left him and Owen turned toward Lily; but she was talking merrily with old Ord, Vokes and young Jack Lancey, and in a moment the rehearsal began. With a fresh sting in his heart and a renewed fear upon his shoulders he had to go out to his watcher’s post in the house, and later he found no opportunity to be alone with Lily or to draw her aside for even a moment. “Ah, let it go,” he said to himself with a sad pride; and then, ruefully logical, he added, “Since that’s all the weight I have with her what else is there to do but let it go?”
Half an hour before the morning’s rehearsal closed he drove away from the theatre with Hurley just in time for their train to Somerville. The actors of the company were to remain for a final session with the costumers and Pinkney Monk in the afternoon and would not leave New York until the following morning; but the manager and the playwright preceded them to “rehearse the scenery” for “Catalpa House” in the theatre at Somerville, and with these two went the designer of the “sets” and a crew of electricians, carpenters and stage-hands.
It was a journey of five hours. Hurley roamed restlessly up and down the train; but at times stopped and sat beside Owen in the smoking-car. “Getting the fidgets,” he explained, during one of these nervous intervals. “If I sit down I keep tapping my foot and if I walk round I want to sit down. If I smoke a cigar I want to throw it away and if I’m not smoking I want to light one. Can’t help it. Getting near an opening’ll always do that to me if I live a thousand years! We’ll be lucky if we’re not up half the night getting the sets into working shape and straightening out the lighting. Company’ll reach Somerville at noon to-morrow. Won’t rehearse ’em in the theatre. Just let ’em rest and run over their lines in one of the hotel parlors for their Sunday afternoon job. Dress rehearsal’ll probably last all Sunday night, so there’s two nights up for you and me. For my part I couldn’t sleep anyhow. Nice town, Somerville.”
“Is it? I’ve never — —”
“Ninety or a hundred thousand maybe. Good hotel, too. It’s a nice natural town; get a nice natural audience. They’ll laugh when they feel like it, not when they think it’s the wise guy thing to do. I’ll sit back Monday night, you watch from the balcony, and we can locate the spots in the script that ought to be cut or changed. It’ll be easy enough to see where we don’t hold ’em; you can tell by the coughs. One good thing; it isn’t a soft-coal town and you won’t get so many laughs killed by the big horse-cough. There are more laughs in the piece than I expected when I read it. More than I thought when we began rehearsing it.” He paused, then went on in a thoughtful tone, “Another thing about this girl, talking to her ordinarily you wouldn’t suspect she had any special sense of humor, yet I’m pretty sure she’s going to get three or four laughs that nobody else saw were in the script. At that, I’ve got a suspicion she’s misplaced as an ingénue.”
“Misplaced?” Owen said. “But I think she — —”
“Certainly she does,” Hurley agreed. “Even as an ingénue she’s rather a find, I think, and I suspect Monday night’ll show I owe your mother those orchids. What I mean, I’ve kind of an idea she might have more than ingénue parts call for. We’ll know better about it after we see her with an audience; but it’s struck me lately we might have something there really rather important. See what I mean? I mean really rather important.” His tone was becoming enthusiastic and he modified it, with the air of a man pleased by a rosy prospect but determined not to be foolish about it. “Well, maybe; you can’t tell. You’re going to get a fine performance from Joe Ord Monday night and from Vokes and Rita Carlin. Joe Ord’ll be colossal as the father. Colossal. One of those old-timers you can always depend on, drunk or sober.”
“More than on the new-timers — like Eugene?” the nervous playwright asked. “You think — —”
“Listen! Madeleine Ord was the best low-comedy woman on the stage, bar none, Joe’s sister and he thought the world of her. She was playing the slavey and Joe the cockney thief in ‘The Yellow Slum’. She got despondent and called it all off with laudanum on a Friday night. They put the understudy in for the Saturday matinée and old Will Hatch, their company manager, told me he never saw a better performance than Joe gave. An old story; but how are you going to get that from an actor who just plays himself? If he feels limp, he acts limp. Joe ought to’ve been a star years ago; but he never will.”
“Why not?”
Hurley laughed musingly. “I don’t know. Probably because he’s just old Joe Ord. Everybody’s always known he’s good and lets it go at that. Got a big mind, too. Maybe he isn’t up higher because he’d always take any part you’d give him, no matter what, and of course all that’s going out now. If I want a man in a play who’s to be seven feet tall and’s got one green eye and the other glass I call up an agent and he’ll send me one. Ten years from now you won’t have a real actor on the stage; they’ll all be just people that won’t even change the way they part their hair. Look at ‘Gene Allan; he’s that way now. If he’s too much upset about anything, he just walks through his part. Old Joe could be dying but he’d play his. If we’d had to put your play on the first of this week God knows what would have happened to it!”
Owen sighed heavily, not in reminiscence but with apprehension. “Then if ‘Gene’s mood — —”
“Both of ’em, both of ’em!” Hurley interrupted impatiently. “If Isabelle lets down, the whole play goes down maybe even more than if ‘Gene does it. Lucky she had her tantrum and got over it last Monday instead of next. She’ll give you a good performance now and so’ll ‘Gene; he’s really shown sense since that talk I had with him. Lord, what a play’s life hangs on! What a gamble!”
“Yes — for all of us.”
Hurley seemed to become reflective as he lighted a fresh cigar. “Another thing about her. I never rehearsed anybody that caught what you wanted of ’em in rehearsal quicker. For acting, she’s got a mind like lightning.”
“Isabelle? But I thought she — —”
“No,” Hurley said absently. “This girl of your mother’s. Start up to the stage to show her something and half the time she’s got it before you can get up there.” His reflectiveness vanished under a renewed pressure of enthusiasm. “No, sir! Never in my whole life did I see anybody who’d get it so quickly and on top of that give you better than what you meant, yourself. She knows every word of your play, too — heard her giving Jack Lancey his line this morning when he slipped up, and she wasn’t even on in that scene. Well — we’ll see, we’ll see. Won’t even know whether we’ve got a play or anything else until Monday night.” He slapped his knee; then rose abruptly. “Hi-yi! Got the fidgets till we pass that bridge! I’ll be calmer to-night when we can get down to work on those sets in the theatre.”
The prediction failed to convince his colleague, however, and later proved to have been unwarranted. After dining together in the small, pleasant and surprisingly expensive hotel, they had no more than fifty yards to go to reach the theatre, and that distance the manager traversed with a leisurely step and the appearance of serenity; but upon the sidewalk as they were about to enter the lobby he halted abruptly, stamped his foot and began to swear.
“What’s the matter, George?”
“Look at that billboard!”
Owen looked at the billboard and found nothing amiss; though when he saw one name upon it his heart quickened. For the first time seeing this name upon a theatrical billboard he was queerly startled and had a confused impression that something portentous impended.
Mon. Tues. Wed, and Wed. Matinée
ADLER AND COMPANY
Present
CATALPA HOUSE
A Romantic Comedy by Owen Gilbert
with
Eugene Allan and Isabelle Hedrington
and a Distinguished Cast Including
Joseph Ord
Rita Carlin
Jeanne Lebrun
T. R. Worthington
John Lancey
Harry Vokes
James Morton
Lily Mars
“What’s the matter with it?” the playwright asked, a little breathlessly.
“Matter! Where’s Pink? That’s it, leave one doggone thing to anybody else and it’s always done wrong. Then if you want to do anything about it your hands are tied. I’d throw Frank Williams out of my office to-morrow for this; but how can you do it when a man’s got a fool wife who keeps him head over heels in debt, with one boy in college and the other one just barely out on bail for embezzlement? All I can do’s give him the devil for not having sense enough to put in ‘Under the direction of Pinkney Monk’. Fine! Everything’s wrong right from the start! Let’s get in and see what else is bungled. Come on! Come on!”
