Mummers in Mufti/Chapter 18

HE swinging door closed behind him, and Bellsmith, blinking at the sudden light of the main lobby, found himself faced with a strangely enlivened scene, for the hour of quiet was long since over and the brisk movement of the evening had begun. A line of half a dozen people was forming in front of the box-office window. Others were coming in from the street, shuffling and laughing and taking their tickets from envelopes. The usual unattached individuals, mostly women, waiting for "friends with the tickets," were lined up along the wall searching anxiously each face as it entered the door. The door-man was in his position beside the tall boxes while, on the other side of the lobby, stood a stolid fireman in uniform.

With an attitude unconsciously but ludicrously professional, Bellsmith found himself settling back to watch the entering crowd, strangely feeling himself already an official part of the scene.

The door behind him opened and he turned expectantly, but it was only the electrician with a coil of lighting wire over his arm.

"Excuse me a minute," he said and, as Bellsmith moved aside, he reached up and turned a bulb over his head, found it dead, and replaced it with another.

The line in front of the box-office melted away for a moment and an anxious-looking young woman with a heightened complexion under a heavy veil came bustling in, stopped in front of the window, and was handed a telegram. It was not hard for Bellsmith to recognize her as one of the company. Which one? he wondered.

The young woman opened her yellow envelope, looked at it casually, and then bustled toward the door in front of which he was standing. For a fraction of a second he caught her eye as he passed through the door, and something seemed to telegraph between them a sort of honest community of interest. Bellsmith knew that, standing there, she had taken him for some one connected with the "house." The idea was rather thrilling.

A second time the swinging door behind him opened, and this time, as Bellsmith turned, he found Israels waiting him with a hardly concealed air of excitement on his face. "Well, Mr. Bellsmith," he hailed, "I guess that we 're ready to talk business."

"Good enough!" replied Bellsmith.

He turned to follow the other man into the darkened and unused part of the lobby, but, despite himself, there had been a frightened catch in his voice. Despite the strange ease with which everything had progressed up to that moment, he had still more than half felt that something would come up to stop the grotesque negotiations before they really reached a serious point. But now the word had been spoken. The verdict had been given. "Jacta est alea!" Yes, the alea was jacta'd, all right, but what made him keep suddenly thinking of his Latin, after all these years? Inconsequentially he remembered what Dr. MacVickar had said about the vividness of his dreams—all of scenes and persons recalled from far in the past.

Israels took his former seat in the little office. As before he threw one leg over the desk and shoved back his hat.

"Well, Mr. Bellsmith," he began, rubbing his hands, "at first, Mr. Gay was as much bowled off his pins as I was. It took me an age to get it over to him that you were serious, but when I told him who you were and that you knew some of the people here in the show, the idea sort of appealed to his sporting blood, the way it did to mine. Normally he would n't listen to selling out any of his interests, but, to tell the truth, between you and I, Mr. Gay has a weakness for one thing. He is all for New York attractions. He wants to see a show right there under his nose, and no matter how good the show is doing, like this one, he loses interest in it when it goes out on the road. He's already got more in town than he can handle, and so, when he found that you really meant it, he said he might sell—for a price."

He waited expectantly and Bellsmith cleared his throat.

"Er—er, what is the price?"

Israels stiffened himself into the attitude which such a negotiation demanded.

"Harcourt & Gay will sell you the show to-night for forty-five thousand dollars—in cash."

Bellsmith's face fell. Just what the price would be he had never really considered. Whatever it might be, he had known that he could meet it, but forty-five thousand dollars, said as abruptly as that, sounded ominously and frighteningly big, even to him. Israels observed instantly the look of alarm in his face, and his own face hardened a bit cynically.

"Forty-five thousand," repeated Bellsmith absently, as if he were trying to make a mental inventory. "Just what would that include?"

"Everything. Copyright, exhibition rights, costumes, scenery, transfer of the company, booking; in fact full rights subject to previous contracts."

"Previous contracts?" asked Bellsmith. "What are those?"

"The usual ones," replied Israels, glibly, "three per cent. of the gross to the author, three to the composer, fifty dollars a week for the privilege of certain interpolated songs. Then of course the contracts with the principals. Most of those last during the termination of the present tour unless cancelled by mutual consent of both parties, breach of contract, or inability to appear."

Bellsmith smiled wanly. "As a matter of fact," he confessed, "I suppose it's perfectly useless for me to ask any of these details. I would n't understand them even if you told me."

"Oh, we 're not cheating you, Mr. Bellsmith," affirmed the manager stoutly.

"No," agreed Bellsmith, slowly, "I think you can safely say that. When could I—as it were—take possession? Move in?"

"Any time you like," grinned Israels. "At the conclusion of this performance?"

Bellsmith thought a moment, his eyes on the floor and Israels suddenly changed to milder tactics.

"It may sound large to you," he said, encouragingly, "but forty-five thousand dollars is nothing for a show of this kind. We 're perfectly willing to keep it at that price."

"Oh, that's not the point," replied Bellsmith, still slowly, his eyes still on the floor. "It was n't that that was worrying me. When you come right down to that, it would be just as foolish for me to buy this show for one dollar as it would for forty-five thousand."

He looked up quietly. "All right. I 'll take it."

"For forty-five thousand dollars?" asked Israels, nervously.

"For forty-five thousand dollars," affirmed Bellsmith.

There was an instant of tense silence, then Israel's hand shot across the desk.

"Mr. Bellsmith, you 're on," he exclaimed. "The show is yours."

Bellsmith smiled uncertainly. "Now comes the awful problem of what I'm going to do with the ghastly thing."

"Don't let that worry you," encouraged Israels. "The organization will run along just like silk. Now, er—you spoke about completing this thing this evening. That price is for to-night only."

"Why, certainly," replied Bellsmith, but with a little faintness in his voice.

He looked at his watch to give himself strength. "I can give you my check now. To-morrow I suppose I ought to get in a lawyer."

"Get ten if you want to," exclaimed Israels heartily. "Harconrt & Gay will probably send one up from New York."

"In the meantime," continued Bellsmith, "can you continue as my manager?"

"I don't see any reason why not," replied Israels. "If you are a man who buys forty-five-thousand-dollar shows out of his vest pocket I think that I want to work for you. Don't worry yourself a bit, Mr. Bellsmith. I 'll run it on just as I have."

With a hand which still trembled Bellsmith drew a blank check from his pocket-book, and by way of exchange of courtesies it was now Israels who got up and walked out into the lobby.

The crowd was now well inside the house. The orchestra was already playing its overture, and the lobby was becoming empty again. Two or three late comers still came and went before the grilled window, but Israels pushed boisterously into the tiny box-office and slapped Oliver on the shoulder.

"Well, boy!" he exclaimed. "He's done it! Forty-five thousand in cash. He's in there now writing his check."

Oliver looked, startled, over his shoulder, still counting change.

"Go on! Not really?" he exclaimed incredulously.

"Fact!" gloated Israels. "The poor man's crazy, I suppose, but I take off my hat to him just the same. He's a real sport! Well, see you later. I 've got to get back. I don't dare leave him alone. I'm afraid, he 'll wake up."

Still grinning exultantly, Israels crowded out of the tiny box-office into the lobby, and, from his conversation as well as from the whole incredible transaction, it will not be hard to guess that Arnold Bellsmith had just purchased one of the theater's famous white elephants, one of the season's classic "lemons," a show which had indeed cost a fortune to produce but which had been losing five or six thousand dollars a week since its first night and which the incredulous Gay, standing in evening clothes in his New York office, stunned by this unbelievable stroke of fortune, had instructed Israels to unload on the unknown "angel" for anything he could get over twenty thousand dollars—and not even to hold out too hard for twenty.

As for Israels himself, it had been easy for him to promise that he would continue as Bellsmith's manager. He had seen stage-struck young millionaires before, and he knew that in two months at the most he would be back in Harcourt & Gay's employ with a bonus of not less than five thousand dollars and all the prestige of having saved them the cost of a failure.

When Israels returned to the little office under the stairs Bellsmith was waving his damp check helplessly in the air, the private office apparently not boasting a blotter. He blew on it two or three times and handed it over.

"I don't know just how much money I 've got in the bank but I think that you 'll find this is good."

"Well, if it is n't," replied Israels, "we 've still got the show."

Bellsmith rose and the two men passed together through the lobby to the door of the auditorium. As they reached the tin boxes by the door the house lights went dark, the orchestra suddenly switched from its listless overture into a lively chorus, and, with a slow swish, the curtain went rolling up.

Standing on tiptoe, Israels looked past the door-man at the widening stretch of warm, yellow light under the rising curtain. He turned to Bellsmith, not, for his own part, without a certain elation.

"Well, Mr. Bellsmith, there goes your show!"