Books: Harlequin and Columbine
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Booth Tarkington >> Harlequin and Columbine
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6 Harlequin and Columbine
Booth Tarkington
I
For a lucky glimpse of the great Talbot Potter, the girls who
caught it may thank that conjunction of Olympian events which
brings within the boundaries of one November week the Horse
Show and the roaring climax of the football months and the more
dulcet, yet vast, beginning of the opera season. Some throbbing
of attendant multitudes coming to the ears of Talbot Potter, he
obeyed an inward call to walk to rehearsal by way of Fifth
Avenue, and turning out of Forty-fourth Street to become part
of the people-sea of the southward current, felt the eyes of
the northward beating upon his face like the pulsing
successions of an exhilarating surf. His Fifth Avenue knew its
Talbot Potter.
Strangers used to leisurely appraisals upon their own
thoroughfares are apt to believe that Fifth Avenue notices
nothing; but they are mistaken; it is New York that is
preoccupied, not Fifth Avenue. The Fifth Avenue eye, like a
policeman's, familiar with a variety of types, catalogues you
and replaces you upon the shelf with such automatic rapidity
that you are not aware you have been taken down. Fifth Avenue
is secretly populous with observers who take note of
everything.
Of course, among these peregrinate great numbers almost in a
stupor so far as what is closest around them is concerned; and
there are those, too, who are so completely busied with either
the consciousness of being noticed, or the hope of being
noticed, or the hatred of it, that they take note of nothing
else. Fifth Avenue expressions are a filling meal for the
prowling lonely joker; but what will most satisfy his cannibal
appetite is the passage of the self-conscious men and women.
For here, on a good day, he cannot fail to relish some extreme
cases of their whimsical disease: fledgling young men making
believe to be haughty to cover their dreadful symptoms, the
mask itself thus revealing what it seeks to conceal; timid
young ladies, likewise treacherously exposed by their defenses;
and very different ladies, but in similar case, being
retouched ladies, tinted ladies; and ladies who know that they
are pretty at first sight, ladies who chat with some obscured
companion only to offer the public a treat of graceful
gestures; and poor ladies making believe to be rich ladies; and
rich ladies making believe to be important ladies; and many
other sorts of conscious ladies. And men--ah, pitiful!--pitiful
the wretch whose hardihood has involved him in cruel and
unusual great gloss and unsheltered tailed coat. Any man in his
overcoat is wrapped in his castle; he fears nothing. But to
this hunted creature, naked in his robin's tail, the whole
panorama of the Avenue is merely a blurred audience, focusing
upon him a vast glare of derision; he walks swiftly, as upon
fire, pretends to careless sidelong interest in shop-windows
as he goes, makes play with his unfamiliar cane only to be
horror-stricken at the flourishings so evoked of his wild
gloves; and at last, fairly crawling with the eyes he feels all
over him, he must draw forth his handkerchief and shelter
behind it, poor man, in the dishonourable affectation of a
sneeze!
Piquant contrast to these obsessions, the well-known expression
of Talbot Potter lifted him above the crowd to such high
serenity his face might have been that of a young Pope, with a
dash of Sydney Carton. His glance fixed itself, in its benign
detachment, upon the misty top of the Flatiron, far down the
street, and the more frequent the plainly visible recognitions
among the north-bound people, the less he seemed aware of them.
And yet, whenever the sieving current of pedestrians brought
momentarily face to face with him a girl or woman, apparently
civilized and in the mode, who obviously had never seen him
before and seemed not to care if it should be her fate never to
repeat the experience, Talbot Potter had a certain desire. If
society had established a rule that all men must instantly obey
and act upon every fleeting impulse, Talbot Potter would have
taken that girl or woman by the shoulders and said to her:
"What's the matter with you!"
At Forty-second Street he crossed over, proceeded to the middle
of the block, and halted dreamily on the edge of the pavement,
his back to the crowd. His face was toward the Library, with
its two annoyed pet lions, typifying learning, and he appeared
to study the great building. One or two of the passersby had
seen him standing on that self-same spot before;--in fact, he
always stopped there whenever he walked down the Avenue.
For a little time (not too long) he stood there; and thus
absorbed he was, as they say, a Picture. Moreover, being such a
popular one, he attracted much interest. People paused to
observe him; and all unaware of their attention, he suddenly
smiled charmingly, as at some gentle pleasantry in his own
mind--something he had remembered from a book, no doubt. It was
a wonderful smile, and vanished slowly, leaving a rapt look;
evidently he was lost in musing upon architecture and sculpture
and beautiful books. A girl whisking by in an automobile had
time to guess, reverently, that the phrase in his mind was: "A
Stately Home for Beautiful Books!" Dinner-tables would hear,
that evening, how Talbot Potter stood there, oblivious of
everything else, studying the Library!
This slight sketch of artistic reverie completed, he went on,
proceeding a little more rapidly down the Avenue; presently
turned over to the stage door of Wallack's, made his way
through the ensuing passages, and appeared upon the vasty stage
of the old theatre, where his company of actors awaited his
coming to begin the rehearsal of a new play.
II
"First act, please, ladies and gentlemen!"
Thus spake, without emotion, Packer, the stage-manager; but out
in the dusky auditorium, Stewart Canby, the new playwright,
began to tremble. It was his first rehearsal.
He and one other sat in the shadowy hollow of the orchestra,
two obscure little shapes on the floor of the enormous cavern.
The other was Talbot Potter's manager, Carson Tinker, a neat,
grim, small old man with a definite appearance of having long
ago learned that after a little while life will beat anybody's
game, no matter how good. He observed the nervousness of the
playwright, but without interest. He had seen too many.
Young Canby's play was a study of egoism, being the portrait of
a man wholly given over to selfish ambitions finally attained,
but "at the cost of every good thing in his life," including
the loss of his "honour," his lady-love, and the trust and
affection of his friends. Young Canby had worked patiently at
his manuscript, rewriting, condensing, pouring over it the
sincere sweat of his brow and the light of his boarding-house
lamp during most of the evenings of two years, until at last he
was able to tell his confidants, rather huskily, that there was
"not one single superfluous word in it," not one that could
possibly be cut, nor one that could be changed without
"altering the significance of the whole work."
The moment was at hand when he was to see the vision of so many
toilsome hours begin to grow alive. What had been no more than
little black marks on white paper was now to become a living
voice vibrating the actual air. No wonder, then, that tremors
seized him; Pygmalion shook as Galatea began to breathe, and to
young Canby it was no less a miracle that his black marks and
white paper should thus come to life.
"Miss Ellsling!" called the stage-manager. "Miss Ellsling,
you're on. You're on artificial stone bench in garden, down
right. Mr. Nippert, you're on. You're over yonder, right cen---"
"Not at all!" interrupted Talbot Potter, who had taken his seat
at a small table near the trough where the footlights lay
asleep, like the row of night-watchmen they were. "Not at all!"
he repeated sharply, thumping the table with his knuckles.
"That's all out. It's cut. Nippert doesn't come on in this
scene at all. You've got the original script there, Packer.
Good heavens! Packer, can't you ever get anything right? Didn't
I distinctly tell you-- Here! Come here! Not garden set, at
all. Play it interior, same as act second. Look, Packer, look!
Miss Ellsling down left, in chair by escritoire. In heaven's
name, can you read, Packer?"
"Yessir, yessir. I see, sir, I see!" said Packer with piteous
eagerness, taking the manuscript the star handed him. "Now,
then, Miss Ellsling, if you please--"
"I will have my tea indoors," Miss Ellsling began promptly,
striking an imaginary bell. "I will have my tea indoors,
to-day, I think, Pritchard. It is cooler indoors, to-day,
I think, on the whole, and so it will be pleasanter to have
my tea indoors to-day. Strike bell again. Do you hear, Pritchard?"
Out in the dimness beyond the stage the thin figure of the new
playwright rose dazedly from an orchestra chair.
"What--what's this?" he stammered, the choked sounds he made
not reaching the stage.
"What's the matter?" The question came from Carson Tinker, but
his tone was incurious, manifesting no interest whatever.
Tinker's voice, like his pale, spectacled glance, was not
tired; it was dead.
"Tea!" gasped Canby. "People are sick of tea! I didn't write
any tea!"
"There isn't any," said Tinker. "The way he's got it, there's
an interruption before the tea comes, and it isn't brought in."
"But she's ordered it! If it doesn't come the audience will
wonder--"
"No," said Tinker. "They won't think of that. They won't hear
her order it."
"Then for heaven's sake, why has he put it in? I wrote this
play to begin right in the story--"
"That's the trouble. They never hear the beginning. They're
slamming seats, taking off wraps, looking round to see who's
there. That's why we used to begin plays with servants dusting
and 'Well-I-never-half-past-nine-and-the-young-master-not-yet-
risen!"
"I wrote it to begin with a garden scene," Canby protested,
unheeding. "Why--"
"He's changed this act a good deal."
"But I wrote--"
"He never uses garden sets. Not intimate enough; and they're a
nuisance to light. I wouldn't worry about it."
"But it changes the whole signifi--"
"Well, talk to him about it," said Tinker, adding lifelessly,
"I wouldn't argue with him much, though. I never knew anybody
do anything with him that way yet."
Miss Ellsling, on the stage, seemed to be supplementing this
remark. "Roderick Hanscom is a determined man," she said, in
character. "He is hard as steel to a treacherous enemy, but he
is tender and gentle to women and children. Only yesterday I
saw him pick up a fallen crippled child from beneath the
relentless horses' feet on a crossing, at the risk of his very
life, and then as he placed it in the mother's arms, he smiled
that wonderful smile of his, that wonderful smile of his that
seems to brighten the whole world! Wait till you meet him. But
that is his step now and you shall judge for yourselves! Let us
rise, if you please, to give him befitting greeting."
"What--what!" gasped Canby.
"Sh!" Tinker whispered.
"But all I wrote for her to say, when Roderick Hanscom's name
is mentioned, was 'I don't think I like him.' My God!"
"Sh!"
"The Honourable Robert Hanscom!" shouted Packer, in a ringing
voice as a stage-servant, or herald.
"It gives him an entrance, you see," murmured Tinker. "Your
script just let him walk on."
"And all that horrible stuff about his 'wonderful smile!'"
Canby babbled. "Think of his putting that in himself."
"Well, you hadn't done it for him. It is a wonderful smile,
isn't it?"
"My God!"
"Sh!"
Talbot Potter had stepped to the centre of the stage and was
smiling the wonderful smile. "Mildred, and you, my other
friends, good friends," he began, "for I know that you are all
true friends here, and I can trust you with a secret very near
my heart--"
"Most of them are supposed never to have seen him before,"
said Canby, hoarsely. "And she's just told them they could
judge for themselves when--"
"They won't notice that."
"You mean the audience won't--"
"No, they won't," said Tinker.
"But good heavens! it's 'Donald Gray,' the other character,
that trusts him with the secret, and he betrays it later. This
upsets the whole--"
"Well, talk to him. I can't help it."
"It is a political secret," Potter continued, reading from a
manuscript in his hand, "and almost a matter of life and death.
But I trust you with it openly and fearlessly because--"
At this point his voice was lost in a destroying uproar.
Perceiving that the rehearsal was well under way, and that the
star had made his entrance, two of the stage-hands attached to
the theatre ascended to the flies and set up a great bellowing
on high. "Lower that strip!" "You don't want that strip
lowered, I tell you!" "Oh, my Lord! Can't you lower that
strip!" Another workman at the rear of the stage began to saw a
plank, and somebody else, concealed behind a bit of scenery,
hammered terrifically upon metal. Altogether it was a
successful outbreak.
Potter threw his manuscript upon the table, a gesture that
caused the shoulders of Packer to move in a visible shudder,
and the company, all eyes fixed upon the face of the star,
suddenly wore the look of people watching a mysterious sealed
packet from which a muffled ticking is heard. The bellowing and
the sawing and the hammering increased in fury.
In the orchestra a rusty gleam of something like mummified
pleasure passed unseen behind the spectacles of old Carson
Tinker. "Stage-hands are the devil," he explained to the
stupefied Canby. "Rehearsals bore them and they love to hear
what an actor says when his nerves go to pieces. If Potter
blows up they'll quiet down to enjoy it and then do it again
pretty soon. If he doesn't blow up he'll take it out on
somebody else later."
Potter stood silent in the centre of the stage, expressionless,
which seemed to terrify the stage-manager. "Just one second,
Mr. Potter!" he screamed, his brow pearly with the anguish of
apprehension. "Just one second, sir!"
He went hotfoot among the disturbers, protesting, commanding,
imploring, and plausibly answering severe questions. "Well,
when do you expect us to git this work done?" "We got our work
to do, ain't we?" until finally the tumult ceased, the saw
slowing down last of all, tapering off reluctantly into a
silence of plaintive disappointment; whereupon Packer resumed
his place, under a light at the side of the stage, turning the
pages of his manuscript with fluttering fingers and keeping his
eyes fixed guiltily upon it. The company of actors also
carefully removed their gaze from the star and looked guilty.
Potter allowed the fatal hush to continue, while the
culpability of Packer and the company seemed mysteriously to
increase until they all reeked with it. The stage-hands had
withdrawn in a grieved manner somewhere into the huge rearward
spaces of the old building. They belonged to the theatre, not
to Potter, and, besides, they had a union. But the actors were
dependent upon Potter for the coming winter's work and wages;
they were his employees.
At last he spoke: "We will go on with the rehearsal," he said
quietly.
"Ah!" murmured old Tinker. "He'll take it out on somebody
else." And with every precaution not to jar down a seat in
passing, he edged his way to the aisle and went softly thereby
to the extreme rear of the house. He was an employee, too.
III
It was a luckless lady who helped to fulfil the prediction.
Technically she was the "ingenue"; publicly she was "Miss Carol
Lyston"; legally she was a Mrs. Surbilt, being wife to the
established leading man of that ilk, Vorly Surbilt. Miss Lyston had
come to the rehearsal in a condition of exhausted nerves, owing to
her husband's having just accepted, over her protest, a "road"
engagement with a lady-star of such susceptible gallantry she had
never yet been known to resist falling in love with her leading-man
before she quarrelled with him. Miss Lyston's protest having lasted
the whole of the preceeding night, and not at all concluding with
Mr. Surbilt's departure, about breakfast-time, avowedly to seek
total anaesthesia by means of a long list of liquors, which he
named, she had spent the hours before rehearsal interviewing female
acquaintances who had been members of the susceptible lady's
company--a proceeding which indicates that she deliberately courted
hysteria.
Shortly after the outraged rehearsal had been resumed, she
unfortunately uttered a loud, dry sob, startlingly irrelevant to
the matter in hand. It came during the revelation of "Roderick
Hanscom's" secret, and Potter stopped instantly.
"Who did that?"
"Miss Lyston, sir," Packer responded loyally, such matters being
part of his duty.
The star turned to face the agitated criminal. "Miss Lyston," he
said, delaying each syllable to pack it more solidly with ice,
"will you be good enough to inform this company if there is
anything in your lines to warrant your breaking into a speech of
mine with a horrible noise like that?"
"Nothing."
"Then perhaps you will inform us why you do break into a speech
of mine with a horrible noise like that?"
"I only coughed, Mr. Potter," said Miss Lyston, shaking.
"Coughed!" he repeated slowly, and then with a sudden tragic
fury shouted at the top of his splendid voice, "COUGHED!" He
swung away from her, and strode up and down the stage,
struggling with emotion, while the stricken company fastened
their eyes to their strips of manuscript, as if in study, and
looked neither at him nor Miss Lyston.
"You only coughed!" He paused before her in his stride. "Is it
your purpose to cough during my speeches when this play is
produced before an audience?" He waited for no reply, but taking
his head woefully in his hands, began to pace up and down again,
turning at last toward the dark auditorium to address his
invisible manager:
"Really, really, Mr. Tinker," he cried, despairingly, "we shall
have to change some of these people. I can't act with--Mr.
Tinker! Where's Mr. Tinker? Mr. Tinker! My soul! He's gone! He
always is gone when I want him! I wonder how many men would bear
what I--" But here he interrupted himself unexpectedly. "Go on
with the rehearsal! Packer, where were we?"
"Here, sir, right here," brightly responded Packer, ready finger
upon the proper spot in the manuscript. "You had just begun,
'Nothing in this world but that one thing can defeat my certain
election and nothing but that one thing shall de--"
"That will do," thundered his master. "Are you going to play the
part? Get out of the way and let's get on with the act, in
heaven's name! Down stage a step, Miss Ellsling. No; I said
down. A step, not a mile! There! Now, if you consent to be
ready, ladies and gentlemen. Very well. 'Nothing in this world
but that one thing can defeat my certain election and noth--'"
Again he interrupted himself unexpectedly. In the middle of the
word there came a catch in his voice; he broke off, and whirling
once more upon the miserable Miss Lyston, he transfixed her with
a forefinger and a yell.
"It wasn't a cough! What was that horrible noise you made?"
Miss Lyston, being unable to reply in words, gave him for answer
an object-lesson which demonstrated plainly the nature of the
horrible noise. She broke into loud, consecutive sobs, while
Potter, very little the real cause of them, altered in
expression from indignation to the neighborhood of lunacy.
"She's doing this in purpose!" he cried. "What's the matter
with her? She's sick! Miss Lyston, you're sick! Packer, get her
away--take her away. She's sick! Send her home--send her home in
a cab! Packer!"
"Yes, Mr. Potter, I'll arrange it. Don't be disturbed."
The stage-manager was already at the sobbing lady's side, and
she leaned upon him gratefully, continuing to produce the
symptoms of her illness.
"Put her in a cab at once," said the star, somewhat recovered
from his consternation. "You can pay the cabman," he added.
"Make her as comfortable as you can; she's really ill. Miss
Lyston, you shouldn't have tried to rehearse when you're so ill.
Do everything possible for Miss Lyston's comfort, Packer."
He followed the pair as they entered the passageway to the stage
door; then, Miss Lyston's demonstrations becoming less audible,
he halted abruptly, and his brow grew dark with suspicion. When
Packer returned, he beckoned him aside. "Didn't she seem all
right as soon as she got out of my sight?"
"No, sir; she seemed pretty badly upset."
"What about?"
"Oh, something entirely outside of rehearsal, sir," Packer
answered in haste. "Entirely outside. She wanted to know if I'd
heard any gossip about her husband lately. That's it, Mr.
Potter."
"You don't think she was shamming just to get off?"
"Oh, not at all. I--"
"Ha! She may have fooled you, Packer, or perhaps--perhaps"--he
paused, frowning--"perhaps you were trying to fool me, too. I
don't know your private life; you may have reasons to help her
de--"
"Mr. Potter!" cried the distressed man. "What could be my
object? I don't know Miss Lyston off. I was only telling you the
simple truth."
"How do I know?" Potter gave him a piercing look. "People are
always trying to take advantage of me."
"But Mr. Potter, I--"
"Don't get it into your head that I am too easy, Packer! You
think you've got a luxurious thing of it here, with me, but--"
He concluded with an ominous shake of the head in lieu of words,
then returned to the centre of the stage. "Are we to be all day
getting on with this rehearsal?"
Packer flew to the table and seized the manuscript he had left
there. "All ready, sir! 'Nothing in this world but one thing can
defeat'--and so on, so on. All ready, sir!"
The star made no reply but to gaze upon him stonily, a stare
which produced another dreadful silence. Packer tried to smile,
a lamentable sight.
"Something wrong, Mr. Potter?" he finally ventured, desperately.
The answer came in a voice cracking with emotional strain: "I
wonder how many men bear what I bear? I wonder how many men
would pay a stage-manager the salary I pay, and then do all his
work for him!"
"Mr. Potter, if you'll tell me what's the matter," Packer
quavered; "if you'll only tell me--"
"The understudy, idiot! Where is the understudy to read Miss
Lyston's part? You haven't got one! I knew it! I told you last
week to engage an understudy for the women's parts, and you
haven't done it. I knew it, I knew it! God help me, I knew it!"
"But I did, sir. I've got her here."
Packer ran to the back of the stage, shouting loudly: "Miss-oh,
Miss--I forget-your-name! Understudy! Miss--"
"I'm here!"
It was an odd, slender voice that spoke, just behind Talbot
Potter, and he turned to stare at a little figure in black--she
had come so quietly out of the shadows of the scenery into Miss
Lyston's place that no one had noticed. She was indefinite of
outline still, in the sparse light of that cavernous place; and,
with a veil lifted just to the level of her brows, under a
shadowing black hat, not much was to be clearly discerned of her
except that she was small and pale and had bright eyes. But even
the two words she spoke proved the peculiar quality of her
voice: it was like the tremolo of a zither string; and at the
sound of it the actors on each side of her instinctively moved a
step back for a better view of her, while in his lurking place
old Tinker let his dry lips open a little, which was as near as
he ever came, nowadays, to a look of interest. He had noted that
this voice, sweet as rain, and vibrant, but not loud, was the
ordinary speaking voice of the understudy, and that her "I'm
here," had sounded, soft and clear, across the deep orchestra to
the last row in the house.
"Of course!" Packer cried. "There she is, Mr. Potter! There's
Miss--Miss--"
"Is her name 'Missmiss'?" the star demanded bitterly.
"No sir. I've forgotten it, just this moment, Mr. Potter, but
I've got it. I've got it right here." He began frantically to
turn out the contents of his pockets. "It's in my memorandum
book, if I could only find--"
"The devil, the devil!" shouted Potter. "A fine understudy
you've got for us! She sees me standing here like--like a
statue--delaying the whole rehearsal, while we wait for you to
find her name, and she won't open her lips!" He swept the air
with a furious gesture, and a subtle faint relief became
manifest throughout the company at this token that the newcomer
was indeed to fill Miss Lyston's place for one rehearsal at
least. "Why don't you tell us your name?" he roared.
"I understood," said the zither-sweet voice, "that I was never
to speak to you unless you directly asked me a question. My--"
"My soul! Have you got a name?"
"Wanda Malone."
Potter had never heard it until that moment, but his expression
showed that he considered it another outrage.
IV
The rehearsal proceeded, and under that cover old Tinker came
noiselessly down the aisle and resumed his seat beside Canby,
who was uttering short, broken sighs, and appeared to have been
trying with fair success to give himself a shampoo.
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