Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  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!”

  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 God 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!”

  “God 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 passageway. 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 passageway. “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

  “YOUR OVERCOAT, MR. Potter!” called that faithful servitor as Potter was going out through the theatre with old Tinker and Canby. “You’ve forgotten your overcoat, sir.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Yes sir; but it’s a little raw to-day.” He leaped down into the orchestra from the high stage, striking his knee upon a chair with violence, but, pausing not an instant for that, came running up the aisle carrying the overcoat. “You might want it after you get out into the air, Mr. Potter. I’m sure Mr. Tinker or Mr. Canby won’t mind taking charge of it for you until you feel like putting it on.”

  “Lord! Don’t make such a fuss, Packer. Put it on me — put it on me!”

  He extended his arms behind him, and was enveloped solicitously and reverently in the garment.

  “Confound him!” said Potter good-humouredly, as they came out into the lobby. “It is chilly; he’s usually right, the idiot!”

  Turning from Broadway, at the corner, they went over to Fifth Avenue, where Potter’s unconsciousness of the people who recognized and stared at him was, as usual, one of the finest things he did, either upon the stage or “off.” Superb performance as it was, it went for nothing with Stewart Canby, who did not even see it, for he walked entranced, not in a town, but through orchards in bloom.

  If Wanda Malone had remained with him, clear and insistent after yesterday’s impersonal vision of her at rehearsal, what was she now, when every tremulous lilt of the zither-string voice, and every little gesture of the impulsive hands, and every eager change of the glowing face, were fresh and living, in all their beautiful reality, but a matter of minutes past? He no longer resisted the bewitchment; he wanted all of it. His companions and himself were as trees walking, and when they had taken their seats at a table in the men’s restaurant of a hotel where he had never been, he was not roused from his rapturous apathy even by the conduct of probably the most remarkable maitre d’hotel in the world.

  “You don’t git ’em!” said this personage briefly, when Potter had ordered chops and “oeufs a la creole” and lettuce salad, from a card. “You got to eat partridge and asparagus tips salad!”

  And he went away, leaving the terrible Potter resigned and unrebellious.

  The partridge was undeniable when it came; a stuffed man would have eaten it. But Talbot Potter and his two guests did little more than nibble it; they neither ate nor talked, and yet they looked anything but unhappy. Detached from their surroundings, as they sat over their coffee, they might have been taken to be three poetic gentlemen listening to a serenade.

  After a long and apparently satisfactory silence, Talbot Potter looked at his watch, but not, as it proved, to see if it was time to return to the theatre, his ensuing action being to send a messenger to procure a fresh orchid to take the place of the one that had begun to droop a little from his buttonhold. He attached the new one with an attentive gravity shared by his companions.

  “Good thing, a boutonniere,” he explained. “Lighten it up a little. Rehearsal’s dry work, usually. Thinking about it last nig
ht. Why not lighten it up a little? Why shouldn’t an actor dress as well for a company of strangers at a reception? Ought to make it as cheerful as we can.”

  “Yes,” said Tinker, nodding. “Something in that. I believe they work better. I must say I never saw much better work than those people were doing this morning. It was a fine rehearsal.”

  “It’s a fine company,” Potter said warmly. “They’re the best people I ever had. They’re all good, every one of them, and they’re putting their hearts into this play. It’s the kind of work that makes me proud to be an actor. I am proud to be an actor! Is there anything better?” He touched the young playwright on the arm, a gesture that hinted affection. “Stewart Canby,” he said, “I want to tell you I think we’re going to make a big thing out of this play. It’s going to be the best I’ve ever done. It’s going to be beautiful!”

  From the doorway into the lobby of the hotel there came a pretty sound of girlish voices whispering and laughing excitedly, and, glancing that way, the three men beheld a group of peering nymphs who fled, delighted.

  “Ladies stop to rubber at Mr. Potter,” explained the remarkable headwaiter over the star’s shoulder. “Mr. Potter, it’s time you got marrit, anyhow. You git marrit, you don’t git stared at so much!” He paused not for a reply, but hastened away to countermand the order of another customer.

  “Married,” said Potter musingly. “Well, there is such a thing as remaining a bachelor too long — even for an actor.”

  “Widower, either,” assented Mr. Tinker as from a gentle reverie. “A man’s never too old to get married.”