Mummers in Mufti/Chapter 22

HERE are certain moments when it is quite possible to go behind the scenes of a theater without disillusionment, but midnight on a Saturday night, on the road, is not one of those moments.

It was midnight, almost to a dot, on Saturday night, as Bellsmith and Israels stood in the dingy space adjoining the wings of the Lyceum. An hour before, the musical comedy 'Eleanor" had rung down its curtain. Whether or not it would ever be rung up again depended wholly on the present conference between Bellsmith and Israels.

In the front of the house, beyond the asbestos curtain, the lights had now been entirely extinguished, and the auditorium was a black void in which even the rows of seats could not be distinguished. From the little door behind the boxes, now propped open, there came back, however, a slow, drifting breath of warm air and a faint sense of vanished humanity. The stage itself, which bulked in a vague, cavernous gloom over Israel's shoulder was lighted only by reflection from the passage in which they stood and from its own looming whitewashed wall, which seemed to lighten the blackness as a white road or a white building will do on a starlit night.

It was cold out there on the stage. The fires in the boiler-room had been banked for the week-end the minute the audience was out of the house, and the narrow space in which the men were standing was tempered only by the electric lights and by the near presence of thirty or forty persons who were waiting in a dull despondency for the final result of the conference between the manager and the man who now only in contempt was known as the "owner."

At Bellsmith's right was the only brilliantly lighted spot in all the surrounding gloom—the corridor which led to the dressing-rooms of the principals. Overhead, the spiral staircase circled up into regions black and echoing, for the members of the chorus had long since finished dressing and packing and, with the minor musicians and the mechanicians, were waiting, bundled in hats and overcoats in various parts of the darkened stage, some sitting on trunks or boxes, some standing in disconsolate groups. Occasionally a thin laugh, a murmuring voice, or a bit of skylarking would come from the gray depths of the empty stage, but for the most part the company waited in dull, stolid silence.

Bellsmith, his collar turned up to his ears, studied a printed form, scrawled over with marks in blue pencil, which had come from the box-office during the last act. He looked up at Israels.

"Well," he said slowly, "what do you suggest?"

Israels shrugged.

"Come on in here," he said suddenly. "There's no use freezing to death while we talk it over."

Glad of any suggestion, Bellsmith followed him slowly down the lighted corridor past the open doors of the tiny dressing-rooms. In each one of them, in a curious isolation, sat one or at most two of the principals, each of whom glanced up eagerly or stolidly as the two men passed. In the first sat Maida Maine, the leading woman—fuming. She was bundled to the ears in her fur coat, her colored maid, with hands in her lap, sitting silently in front of her. Israels paused in the doorway.

"Miss Maine, I'd forgotten that you were still here. I can't tell you anything yet. I 'll let you know the first thing in the morning."

The next dressing-room had been Tilly Marshall's. Poppy Vaughn had been using it for the last week, but Poppy Vaughn was not a person who courted solitude, and the little room stood absolutely stripped and vacant. There was a curious irony for Bellsmith in that poignantly empty room. Tilly Marshall, his only reason for this disastrous adventure, had left the company the day he had entered it.

In the next room Poppy Vaughn was talking in low tones with Elsie Winner. The two girls stopped guiltily as he passed and looked up at him quite as if he had been a stranger. In the next dressing-room Bellony, the tenor, sat smoking his inevitable cigar, appearing much more at home than any of the others in his sullen solitude.

At the end of the corridor Israels pushed without ceremoney [sic] into the dressing-room occupied by Charlie Barnes, the comedian, the only room in the row which suggested anything except desolation, possibly because, alone of the whole company, the comedian had not finished packing. His last-act costume was still draped half in and half out of his trunk, and his tin make-up box was still open under the little square mirror on his dressing-shelf.

The barrack lawyer of the "Eleanor" company had been a very busy and very unpleasant man since the rumor had come to his ears (to his ears first, of course) that the mad young millionaire who had purchased the "Eleanor" show, had got into some sort of rumpus "with his people" and that the show might never go any farther than Leicester. Throughout the Saturday matinée, as the decision had grown more and more certain but had still hung fire, Barnes had been tramping incessantly up and down the circular iron staircase to the chorus rooms, and after the evening performance, half dressed and still in full make-up, he had only come back to his own room when the lights had been turned off in the upper corridors. He was standing now in snuff-colored trousers and waistcoat and pink shirt-sleeves, laboriously folding the grotesque costumes which he might never put on again. As the manager and Bellsmith entered, he glanced over his shoulder but immediately turned again to his packing.

"Still busy, Charlie?" asked Israels.

The comedian grunted a non-committal reply. Very few pleasant remarks had been passed in that corridor that evening, and none of them by Charlie Barnes. Israels was apparently unaffected by the underlying current of hostility, but in Bellsmith it cut.

There have been odd stories told of men dying of thirst in a brackish river, of mountaineers freezing to death within sight of a tropical plain, but for nearly a week now Arnold Bellsmith had known what it was to ramble around his own home city actually a wealthy man and still virtually penniless.

To no one did it appear more incredible than it did to Bellsmith himself. At first, indeed, he had refused to take the legal injunction with any seriousness at all. One can understand, sometimes, the point of view of anarchists, for the fact does remain that to people like Bellsmith the law most often appears as something which applies to any one but themselves. Or, rather, their inclination is to confuse "a lawyer" with the law." A few confidential words with the old family attorney, they feel, and in some mysterious manner the affair is entirely off their hands.

In this case, however, the old family attorney had been entirely on the other side. That was, in fact, the real crux of the whole situation. In a legal system like that of Leicester, where a gentle paternalism still nods on the bench, the right kind of old family lawyer, with a few nods and lifts of his eyebrows, can sew up a wayward son as effectively as, in other circumstances, he can take the worry completely off his shoulders; and, since the "Nero" episode with its various sequels, a growing opinion in Leicester had felt that "Young Bellsmith" needed sewing up very badly indeed.

Whether or not the step that had been taken by Judge Marker had been really legal was one which was argued among lawyers for months afterward, but it had certainly been effective. Although he did not know it, Bellsmith had been under sentence at the very moment at which he had signed the transfer with Israels, for, during the lunch hour, the canny old judge had obtained a session in chambers at which another attorney on behalf of the Pilgrim Trust Co. as holder of important properties, had asked that a temporary committee of the estate be appointed over the affairs of Arnold Bellsmith. At that Judge Marker, recognized for twenty years as the Bellsmith attorney, had entered an appearance and made no objection. After a brief and informal statement of the circumstances behind the action, even the probate judge had not asked the questions which normally he must have asked. It was well enough understood that this was a family affair, the kind of thing to be settled in low-voiced conferences, as much "out of court" as possible. For the Bellsmith estate really was to the older bankers and lawyers much more than a very large holding. It was a landmark, it was a sentimental institution. In the eyes of those city fathers, the excesses of its young owner were not, as the latter had supposed, his private affairs, but dangerous attacks undermining the respectability of their own social order.

Of course Judge Marker knew as well as any one else that his flimsy injunction could not survive any serious attempt to break it down, but he had never intended that it should. All that he asked was that it should hold long enough for "that gang" (meaning Israels) to get out of town and for Bellsmith to come to what the Pilgrim Trust Co. had decided should be his senses. Judge Marker knew that the Fabian methods of court procedure would play sufficiently into his hands. In a week or two the whole thing would "blow over"—"blow over" being a trusted anodyne with men like Judge Marker. So long as any further drains on the estate could be shut off, the thing would be cheap even at forty-five thousand dollars.

But a period of a week or two is a long, long time, a prohibitive time, in the life of a musical comedy booked months ahead and already launched on its schedule. Not that Judge Marker cared anything for that. Judge Marker would have wrecked "Parsifal" rather than alter the sacred routine of the Pilgrim Trust Co., but the result had been to make Bellsmith much more of a victim than he had intended.

Between Tuesday and Saturday night, in short, Bellsmith had found himself in the simple, incontrovertible position of being an employer of fifty-eight highly paid persons and the owner of an extravagant property with only such money as he might earn with the enterprise itself to carry it on.

Of course it could n't be done. Israels knew that it could n't be done. The whole company knew that it could n't be done. Even Harcourt & Gay had not been able to do it. Bellsmith had been welcomed into the company as an unlimited asset, not as a very distinct liability, and, when word began to seep through the company of what had occurred, there set in at once an utter demoralization. Tilly Marshall's collapse had already left a bad gap, and there was even a rumor that he desertion had something to do with her own disillusionment in regard to Bellsmith. Maida Maine, the leading woman, flared up in an instant when she heard of the transfer and proceeded to sulk outright through her remaining performances. Charlie Barnes played with his whole attention back stage, and the organization which, despite Israels's words, had never been "smooth as silk" became in three days what it always had been—most unmistakable shoddy. From actual returns for the first three days of the new ownership, "Eleanor" had shown a deficit of eleven hundred-odd dollars.

For a day or two, Israels had based a faint gambler's hope on the sensational advertising which would result from the announcement that Leicester's own Nero had purchased a musical comedy. Like "The Courier" itself, Israels had a great deal of faith in the drawing power of a sinner. "The Courier" had indeed needed no hint from a press-agent to print the news in display all over its first page on Wednesday morning, but the results had been, if anything, the exact contrary of those which Israels had expected. After all, notoriety is only an illegitimate sister of fame. The effect of the new "Courier" story had been, if anything, to turn patrons away from "Eleanor." The better people in Leicester found it rather repugnant. The rest found it rather stale. At any rate, those ominous back rows in the Lyceum were hardly better filled on Thursday and Friday than they had been on Monday and Tuesday under the waning auspices of Messrs. Harcourt & Gay.

And now it was Saturday night. The salaries had been paid to the minute. For that, at least, Bellsmith could be devoutly thankful, but a long, expensive jump to Troy, New York, had been scheduled for Sunday. To make this jump and face outright expenditures of thousands of dollars a week there remained eighty or ninety dollars in Israels's cash-box and three or four hundred dollars in Bellsmith's private checking-account which was still allowed him as pocket-money by the trust company as conservator pendente lite.

Meanwhile in the dressing-rooms, in the corridors, and on the dark and gloomy stage waited the silent and disconsolate groups in obedience to a notice on the call-board that after the Saturday night performance the whole company would wait at the theater for further orders.