Harlequin and Columbine Part 9

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 ma.n.u.script of her part, and in that absorption had disappeared through a door into the rear pa.s.sageway. 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 pa.s.sageway, studying her ma.n.u.script. 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 d.a.m.ning 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 pa.s.sageway," 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 foolis.h.!.+" 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!"

She clapped her hands together in a gesture of such spirit and fire that Canby could have thrown his hat in the air and cheered, she had lifted him so clear of his timidity.

"Bravo!" he cried again. "Bravo!"

At that she blushed. "What a little goose I am!" she cried. "Playing the orator! Mr. Canby, you mustn't mind--"

"I won't!"

"It's because I'm so happy," she explained--to his way of thinking, divinely. "I'm so happy I just pour out everything. I want to sing every minute. You see, it seemed such a long while that I was waiting for my chance. Some of us wait forever, Mr. Canby, and I was so afraid mine might never come. If it hadn't come now it might never have come. If I'd missed this one, I might never have had another. It frightens me to think of it--and I oughtn't to be thinking of it! I ought to be spending all my time on my knees thanking G.o.d that old Mr. Packer got it into his head that 'The Little Minister' was a play about the Baptists!"

"I don't see--"

"If he hadn't," she said, "I wouldn't be here!"

"G.o.d bless old Mr. Packer!"

"I hope you mean it, Mr. Canby." She blushed again, because there was no possible doubt that he meant it. "It seems a miracle to me that I am here, and that my chance is here with me, at last. It's twice as good a chance as it was yesterday, thanks to you. You've given me such beautiful new things to do and such beautiful new things to say. How I'll work at it! After rehearsal this afternoon I'll learn every word of it in the tunnel before I get to my station in Brooklyn. That's funny, too, isn't it; the first time I've ever been to New York I go and board over in Brooklyn! But it's a beautiful place to study, and by the time I get home I'll know the lines and have all the rest of the time for the real work: trying to make myself into a faraway picture of the adorable girl you had in your mind when you wrote it. You see--"

She checked herself again. "Oh! Oh!" she said, half-laughing, half-ashamed. "I've never talked so much in my life! You see it seems to me that the whole world has just burst into bloom!"

She radiated a happiness that was almost tangible; it was a glow so real it seemed to warm and light that dingy old pa.s.sageway. Certainly it warmed and lighted the young man who stood there with her. For him, too, the whole world was transfigured, and life just an orchard to walk through in perpetual April morning.

The voice of Packer proclaimed: "Two o'clock, ladies and gentlemen!

Rehearsal two o'clock this afternoon!"

The next moment he looked into the pa.s.sageway. "This afternoon's rehearsal, two o'clock, Miss--ahh--Malone. Oh, Mr. Canby, Mr. Potter wants you to go to lunch with him and Mr. Tinker. He's waiting. This way, Mr. Canby."

"In a moment," said the young playwright. "Miss Malone, you spoke of your going home to work at making yourself into 'the adorable girl'

I had in my mind when I wrote your part. It oughtn't"--he faltered, growing red--"it oughtn't to take much--much work!"

And, breathless, he followed the genially waiting Packer.

X