Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “Of course it’s wonderful! It’s French; everything French is wonderful, magnificent, Supreme! Everything French is HOLY! Good God, Packer! You’ll be telling me what my ‘technique’ ought to be, next!”

  He hurled himself again into the chair and moaned, then in a dismal voice inquired; “Miss Lyston struck you as feeling that her condition in life was distinctly improved by this ascent into vaudeville, didn’t she?”

  “Oh, not at all, Mr. Potter! But, of course,” Packer explained deprecatingly, “she’s pleased to have Vorly where she can keep an eye on him. She said that though she was all broken up about leaving the company, she expected to be very happy in looking after him. You see, sir, it’s the first time in all their married life they’ve had a chance to be together except one summer when neither of ’em could get a stock engagement.”

  Potter made no reply but to shake his head despondently, and Packer sat silent in deference, as if waiting to be questioned further. It was the playwright who presently filled the void. “Why haven’t Mr. and Mrs. Surbilt gone into the same companies, if they care to be together? I should think they’d have made it a point to get engagements in the same ones.”

  Packer looked disturbed. “It’s not done much,” he said.

  “Besides, Vorly Surbilt plays leading parts with women stars,” old Tinker volunteered. “You see, naturally, it wouldn’t do at all.”

  “Jealousy, you mean?”

  “Not necessarily the kind you’re thinking of. But it just doesn’t do.”

  “Some managers will allow married couples in their companies,” Potter said, adding emphatically: “I won’t! I never have and I never will! Never! There’s just one thing every soul in my support has got to keep working for, and that is a high-tension performance every night in the year. If married people are in love with each other, they’re going to think more about that than about the fact that they’re working for me. If they aren’t in love with each other, there’s the devil to pay. I’d let the best man or woman in the profession go — and they could go to vaudeville, for all I cared! — if I had to keep their wives or husbands travelling with us. I won’t have ’em! My soul! I don’t marry, do I?”

  Packer rose. “Is there anything else for me, Mr. Potter?”

  “Yes. Take this interlined script, get some copies typewritten, and see that the company’s sides are changed to suit it. Be especially careful about that young Miss — ah — Miss Malone’s. You’ll find her part is altered considerably, and will be even more, when Mr. Canby gets the dialogue for other changes finished. He’ll let you have them to-morrow. By the way, Packer, where did you find—” He paused, stretched out his hand to the miniature sedan chair of liqueurs, took a decanter and tiny glass therefrom, and carefully poured himself a sparkling emerald of creme de menthe. “Will you have something, Mr. Canby?” he asked. “You, Tinker?”

  Both declined in silence; they seemed preoccupied.

  “Where did I what, Mr. Potter?” asked the stage-manager, reminding him of the question left unfinished.

  “What?”

  “You said: ‘By the way, where did you find—’”

  “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.