Books: Harlequin and Columbine
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Booth Tarkington >> Harlequin and Columbine
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"Oh, yes." Potter smiled negligently. "Where did you find that
little Miss Malone? At the agents'?"
Packer echoed him: "Where did I find her?" He scratched his
head. "Miss"--he said ruminatively, repeating the word slowly,
like a man trying to work out the solution of a puzzle--"Miss--"
"Miss Malone. I suppose you got her at an agent's?"
"Let's see," said Packer. "At an agent's? No. No, it wasn't.
Come to think of it, it wasn't."
"Then where did you get her?" Tinker inquired.
"That's what I just asked him," Potter said, placing his glass
upon a table without having tasted the liqueur. "What's the
matter, Packer? Gone to sleep?"
"I remember now," said Packer, laughing deferentially. "Of course!
No. It wasn't through any of the agents. Now I remember--come to
think of it--I sort of ran across her myself, as a matter of fact. I
wasn't just sure who you meant at first. You mean the understudy,
the one that's to play Miss Lyston's part, that Miss--Miss--" He
snapped a finger and thumb to spur memory and then, as in triumphant
solution of his puzzle, cried, "Ma-- Malone! Miss Malone!"
"Yes," said Potter, looking upon him darkly. "Where did you sort
of run across her, come to think of it, as a matter of fact?"
"Oh, I remember all about it, now," said Packer brightly. "Why,
she was playing last summer in stock out at Seeleyville,
Pennsylvania. That's only about six miles from Packer's Ridge,
where my father lives. I spent a couple of weeks with him, and
we trolleyed over one evening to see 'The Little Minister,'
because father got it in his head some way that it was about the
Baptists, and I couldn't talk him out of it. It wasn't as bad a
performance as you'd think, and this little girl was a pretty
fair 'Babbie.' Father forgot all about the Baptists and kept
talking about her after we got home, until nothing would do but
we must go over and see that show again. He wanted to take her
right out to the farm and adopt her--or something; he's a
widower, and all alone out there. Fact is, I had all I could do
to keep him from going around to ask her, and I was pretty near
afraid he'd speak to her from the audience. Well, to satisfy
him, I did go around after the show, and gave her my card, and
told her if I could do anything for her in New York to let me
know. Of course, naturally, when I got back to town I forgot all
about it, but I got a note from her that she was here, looking
for an engagement, the very day you told me to scare up an
understudy. So I thought she might do as well as anybody I'd get
at the agent's, and I let her have it." He drew a breath of
relief, like that of a witness leaving the stand, and with
another placative laugh, letting his eyes fall humbly under the
steady scrutiny of his master, he concluded: "Of course I
remember all about it, only at first I wasn't sure which one you
meant; it's such a large company."
"I see," said Potter grimly. "You engaged her to please your
father."
"Oh, Mr. Potter!" the stage-manager protested. "If you don't
like her--"
"That will do!" Potter cut him off, and paced the floor,
virulently brooding. "And so Talbot Potter's company is to be
made up of actors engaged to suit the personal whims of L. Smith
Packer's father, old Mister Packer of Baptist Ridge, near
Seeleyville, Pennsylvania!"
"But, Mr. Potter, if you don't--"
"I said that would DO!" roared Potter. "Good-night!"
"Good-night, sir," said the stage-manager humbly, and humbly got
himself out of the room, to be heard, an instant later, bidding
the Japanese an apologetic good-night at the outer door of the
apartment.
Canby rose to take his own departure, promising to have the new
dialogue "worked out" by morning.
"He is, too!" said Potter, not heeding the playwright, but
confirming an unuttered thought in his own mind. He halted at
the table, where he had set his tiny glass, and gulped the
emerald at a swallow. "I always thought he was!"
"Was what?" inquired old Tinker.
"A hypocrite!"
"D'you mean Packer?" said Tinker incredulously.
"He's a hypocrite!" Potter shouted fiercely. "And I shouldn't be
surprised if his father was another! Widower! I never saw the
man in my life, but I'd swear it on oath! He is a hypocrite!
Packer's father is a damned old Baptist hypocrite!"
VIII
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:
ALES WINES LIQUORS AND CIGARS
TIM MALONE
At that, somewhere in his inside, he cried out, in a kind of
anguish: "Isn't there anything--anywhere--any more--except Wanda
Malone!"
IX
"Second act, ladies and gentlemen!" cried Packer, at precisely
ten o'clock the next morning.
About a dozen actors were chatting in small groups upon the
stage; three or four paced singly, muttering and mildly
gesticulating, with the fretful preoccupation of people trying
to remember; two or three, seated, bent over their typewritten
"sides," studying intently; and a few, invisible from the
auditorium, were scattered about the rearward rooms and
passageways. Talbot Potter, himself, was nowhere to be seen,
and, what was even more important to one tumultuously beating
heart "in front," neither was Wanda Malone. Mr. Stewart Canby in
a silvery new suit, wearing a white border to his waistcoat
collar and other decorations proper to a new playwright, sat in
the centre of the front row of the orchestra. Yesterday he had
taken a seat about nine rows back.
He bore no surface signs of the wear and tear of a witches'
night; riding his runaway play and fighting the enchantment that
was upon him. Elastic twenty-seven does not mark a bedless
session with violet arcs below its eyes;--what violet a witch
had used upon Stewart Canby this morning appeared as a dewey
boutonniere in the lapel of his new coat; he was that far gone.
Miss Ellsling and a youth of the company took their places near
the front of the stage and began the rehearsal of the second act
with a dialogue that led up to the entrance of the star with the
"ingenue," both of whom still remained out of the playwright's
range of vision.
As the moment for their appearance drew near, Canby became, to
his own rage, almost uncontrollably agitated. Miss Ellsling's
scene, which he should have followed carefully, meant nothing to
him but a ticking off of the seconds before he should behold
with his physical eyes the living presence of the fairy ghost
that had put a spell upon him. He was tremulous all over.
Miss Ellsling and her companion came to a full stop and stood
waiting. Thereupon Packer went to the rear of the stage, leaned
through an open doorway, and spoke deferentially:
"Mr. Potter? All ready, sir. All ready, Miss--ah--Malone?"
Then he stepped back with the air of an unimportant person
making way for his betters to pass before him, while Canby's
eyes fixed themselves glassily upon the shabby old doorway
through which an actual, breathing Wanda Malone was to come.
But he was destined not to see her appear in that expectant
frame. Twenty years before--though he had forgotten it--in a
dazzling room where there was a Christmas tree, he had uttered a
shriek of ecstatic timidity just as a jingling Santa Claus began
to emerge from behind the tree, and he had run out of the room
and out of the house. He did exactly the same thing now, though
this time the shriek was not vocal.
Suffocating, he fled up the aisle and out into the lobby. There
he addressed himself distractedly but plainly:
"Jackass!"
Breathing heavily, he went out to the wide front steps of the
theatre and stood, sunlit Broadway swimming before him.
"Hello, Canby!"
A shabby, shaggy, pale young man, with hot eyes, checked his
ardent gait and paused, extending a cordial, thin hand, the
fingers browned at the sides by cigarettes smoked to the bitter
end. "Rieger," he said. "Arnold Rieger. Remember me at the old
Ink Club meetings before we broke up?"
"Yes," said Canby dimly. "Yes. The old Ink Club. I came out for
a breath of air. Just a breath."
"We used to settle the universe in that little back restaurant
room," said Rieger. "Not one of use had ever got a thing into
print--and me, I haven't yet, for that matter. Editors still
hate my stuff. I've kept my oath, though; I've never
compromised--never for a moment."
"Yes," Canby responded feebly, wondering what the man was
talking about. Wanda Malone was surely on the stage, now. If he
turned, walked about thirty feet, and opened a door, he would
see her--hear her speaking!
"I've had news of your success," said Rieger. "I saw in the
paper that Talbot Potter was to put on a play you'd written. I
congratulate you. That man's a great artist, but he never seems
to get a good play; he's always much, much greater than his
part. I'm sure you've given him a real play at last. I remember
your principles: Realism; no compromise! The truth; no shirking
it, no tampering with it! You've struck out for that--you've
never compro--"
"No. Oh, no," said Canby, waking up a little. "Of course you've
got to make a little change or two in plays. You see, you've got
to make an actor like a play or he won't play it, and if he
won't play it you haven't got any play--you've only got some
typewriting."
Rieger set his foot upon the step and rested his left forearm
upon his knee, and attitude comfortable for street debate.
"Admitting the truth of that for the sake of argument, and only
for the moment, because I don't for one instant accept such a
jesuitism--"
"Yes," said Canby dreamily. "Yes." And, with not only apparent
but genuine unconsciousness of this one-time friend's existence,
he turned and walked back into the lobby, and presently was
vaguely aware that somebody near the street doors of the theatre
seemed to be in a temper. Somebody kept shouting "Swell-headed
pup!" and "Go to the devil!" at somebody else repeatedly, but
finally went away, after reaching a vociferous climax of even
harsher epithets and instructions.
The departure of this raging unknown left the lobby quiet; Canby
had gone near to the inner doors. Listening fearfully, he heard
through these a murmurous baritone cadencing: Talbot Potter
declaiming the inwardness of "Roderick Hanscom"; and then--oh,
bells of Elfland faintly chiming!--the voice of Wanda Malone!
He pressed, trembling, against the doors, and went in.
Talbot Potter and Wanda Malone stood together, the two alone in
the great hollow space of the stage. The actors of the company,
silent and remote, watched them; old Tinker, halfway down an
aisle, stood listening; and near the proscenium two workmen,
tools in their hands, had paused in attitudes of arrested
motion. Save for the voices of the two players, the whole vast
cavern of the theatre was as still as the very self of silence.
And the stirless air that filled it was charged with necromancy.
Rehearsal is like the painted canvas without a frame; it is more
like a plaster cast, most like of all to the sculptor's hollow
moulds. It needs the bronze to bring a statue to life, and it
needs the audience to bring a play to life. Some glamour must
come from one to the other; some wind of enchantment must blow
between them--there must be a magic spell. But these two actors
had produced the spell without the audience.
And yet they were only reading a wistful little love-scene that
Stewart Canby had written the night before.
Two people were falling in love with each other, neither
realizing it. And these two who played the lovers had found some
hidden rhythm that brought them together in one picture as a
chord is one sound. They played to each other and with each
other instinctively; Talbot Potter had forgotten "the smile" and
all the mechanism that went with it. The two held the little
breathless silences of lovers; they broke these silences
timidly, and then their movements and voices ran together like
waters in a fountain. A radiance was about them as it is about
all lovers; they were suffused with it.
To Stewart Canby, watching, they seemed to move within a
sorcerer's circle of enchantment. Upon his disturbed mind there
was dawning a conviction that these inspired mummers were beings
apart from him, knowing things he never could know, feeling
things he never could feel, belonging to another planet whither
he could never voyage, where strange winds blew and all things
lived and grew in a light beyond his understanding. For the
light that shone in the faces of these two was "the light that
never was, on sea or land."
It had its blessing for him. From that moment, if he had known
it, this play, which was being born of so many parents, was
certain of "success," of "popularity," and of what quality of
renown such things may bring. And he who was to be called its
author stood there a Made Man, unless some accident befell.
Miss Ellsling spoke and came forward, another actor with her.
The scene was over. There was a clearing of throats; everybody
moved. The stage-carpenter and his assistant went away blinking,
like men roused from deep sleep. The routine of rehearsal
resumed its place; and old Tinker, who had not stirred a muscle,
rubbed the back of his neck suddenly, and came up the aisle to
Canby.
"Good business!" he cried. "Did you see that little run off the
stage she made when Miss Ellsling came on? And you saw what he
can do when he wants to!"
"He?" Canby echoed. "He?"
"Played for the scene instead of himself. Oh, he can do it! He's
an old hand--got too many tricks in the bag to let her get the
piece away from him--but he's found a girl that can play with
him at last, and he'll use every value she's got. He knows good
property when he sees it. She's got a pretty good box of tricks
herself; stock's the way to learn 'em, but it's apt to take the
bloom off. It hasn't taken off any of hers, the darlin'! What do
you think, Mr. Canby?"
To Canby, who hardly noticed that this dead old man had come to
life, the speech was jargon. The playwright was preoccupied with
the fact that Talbot Potter was still on the stage, would
continue there until the rather distant end of the act, and that
the "ingenue," after completing the little run at her exit, had
begun to study the manuscript of her part, and in that
absorption had disappeared through a door into the rear
passageway. Canby knew that she was not to be "on" again until
the next act, and he followed a desperate impulse.
"See a person," he mumbled, and went out through the lobby,
turned south to the cross-street, proceeded thereby to the
stage-door of the theatre, and resolutely crossed the path of
the distrustful man who lounged there.
"Here!" called the distrustful man.
"I'm with the show," said Canby, an expression foreign to his
lips and a clear case of inspiration. The distrustful man waved
him on.
Wanda Malone was leaning against the wall at the other end of
the passageway, studying her manuscript. She did not look up
until he paused beside her.
"Miss Malone," he began. "I have come--I have come--I have-ah--"
These were his first words to her. She did nothing more than
look at him inquiringly, but with such radiance that he
floundered to a stop. There were only two things within his
power to do: he had either to cough or to speak much too
sweetly.
"There's a draught here," she said, Christian anxiety roused by
the paroxysm which rescued him from the damning alternative.
"You oughtn't to stand here perhaps, Mr. Canby."
"'Canby?'" he repeated inquiringly, the name seeming new to him.
"Canby?"
"You're Mr. Canby, aren't you?"
"I meant where--who--" he stammered. "How did you know?"
The stage-manager pointed you out to me yesterday at rehearsal.
I was so excited! You're the first author I ever saw, you see.
I've been in stock where we don't see authors."
"Do you--like it?" he said. "I mean stock. Do you like stock?
How much do you like stock? I ah--" Again he fell back upon the
faithful old device of nervous people since the world began.
"I'm sure you oughtn't to stand in this passageway," she urged.
"No, no!" he said hurriedly. "I love it! I love it! I haven't
any cold. It's the air. That's what does it." He nodded
brightly, with the expression of a man who knows the answer to
everything. "It's bad for me."
"Then you--"
"No," he said, and went back to the beginning. "I have come--I
wanted to come--I wished to say that I wi--" He put forth a
manful effort which made him master of the speech he had
planned. "I want to thank you for the way you play your part.
What I wrote seemed dry stuff, but when you act it, why, then,
it seems to be--beautiful!"
"Oh! Do you think so?" she cried, her eyes bedewing ineffably.
"Do you think so?"
"Oh--I--oh!--" He got no further, and, although a stranger to
the context of this conversation might have supposed him to be
speaking of a celebrated commonwealth, Mother of Presidents, his
meaning was sufficiently clear to Wanda Malone.
"You're lovely to me," she said, wiping her eyes. "Lovely! I'll
never forget it! I'll never forget anything that's happened to
me all this beautiful, beautiful week!"
The little kerchief she had lifted to her eyes was wet with
tears not of the stage. "It seems so foolish!" she said bravely.
"It's because I'm so happy! Everything has come all at once,
this week. I'd never been in New York before in my life. Doesn't
that seem funny for a girl that's been on the stage ever since
she left school? And now I am here, all at once I get this
beautiful part you've written, and you tell me you like it--and
Mr. Potter says he likes it. Oh! Mr. Potter's just beautiful to
me! Don't you think Mr. Potter's wonderful, Mr. Canby?"
The truth about Mr. Canby's opinion of Mr. Potter at this moment
was not to the playwright's credit. However, he went only so
far as to say: "I didn't like him much yesterday afternoon."
"Oh, no, no!" she said quickly. "That was every bit my fault. I
was frightened and it made me stupid. And he's just beautiful to
me to-day! But I'd never mind anything from a man that works
with you as he does. It's the most wonderful thing! To a woman
who loves her profession for its own sake--"
"You do, Miss Malone?"
"Love it?" she cried. "Is there anything like it in the world?"
"I might have known you felt that, from your acting," he said,
managing somehow to be coherent, though it was difficult.
"Oh, but we all do!" she protested eagerly. "I believe all
actors love it more than they love life itself. Don't think I
mean those that never grew up out of their 'show-off' time in
childhood. Those don't count, in what I mean, any more than the
'show-girls' and heaven knows what not that the newspapers call
'actresses'. Oh, Mr. Canby, I mean the people with the art and
the fire born in them: those who must come to the stage and who
ought to and who do. It isn't because we want to be 'looked at'
that we go on the stage and starve to stay there! It's because
we want to make pictures--to make pictures of characters in
plays for people in audiences. It's like being a sculptor or
painter; only we paint and model with ourselves--and we're
different from sculptors and painters because they do their work
in quiet studios, while we do ours under the tension of great
crowds watching every stroke we make--and, oh, the exhilaration
when they show us we make the right stroke!"
"Bravo!" he said. "Bravo!"
"Isn't it the greatest of all the arts? Isn't it?" she went on
with the same glowing eagerness. "We feed our nerves to it, and
our lives to it, and are glad! It makes us different from other
people. But what of that? Don't we give ourselves? Don't we live
and die just to make these pictures for the world? Oughtn't the
world to be thankful for us? Oughtn't it? Oh, it is, Mr. Canby;
it is thankful for us; and I, for one, never forget that a Prime
Minister of England was proud to warm Davy Garrick's breeches at
the grate for him!"
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