Mummers in Mufti/Chapter 32

S Bellsmith passed back into the auditorium a glance told him that the last act was almost half over, and a little pang struck him. This had been a special luxury which he had been reserving for himself, the joy of listening to the whole show, undisturbed, on its first night of real success before a metropolitan audience, but even from what remained he found his attention continually wandering, continually turning back to the newer problem which had just been presented to him. This was rather a tough way to have the rule work out. It had been decidedly comforting to learn by experience that trouble tended to lose its force before it actually struck. It was not so agreeable to find that the same was true of success.

Yet the show, without any question, was going magnificently. The strained, intent attitude of the rows of heads in the semi-darkness told him that; the utter silence that reigned in the dim auditorium, broken at just the expected moments by ripples of laughter or by spontaneous waves of applause. With that, certainly, he could not quarrel. He tried to settle deliberately into his planned enjoyment of as much of the act as was left, but the spell had been broken. Like Israels and Harcourt he found himself wandering restlessly away from the stage itelf [sic] and into the lobby. Harcourt had spoken the truth and he knew it. "Eleanor" was at last a success, an artistic success and the only success at which he had seriously aimed, but, just the same, poor "Eleanor's" days were numbered. For all his trials, tribulations, his labor, his risks, and his final victory, "Eleanor" would, in a month at the most, pass completely into oblivion.

Even the lobby offered no consolation as, in truth, it seldom offered much to Harcourt or Israels. Not a soul was in sight except the Boston version of Oliver who was yawning behind his brass grill. With one of those inane impulses which seize men in moments of crowded loneliness Bellsmith wandered over to the little glass window, asked for a telegraph blank, and wrote a message to Dr. MacVickar:

Cheered for a moment by even this long-distance word with the doctor, he went back into the auditorium. On the stage, the scenes were rapidly passing, the songs and dances and carefully grouped tableaux of which he knew every gesture. It was the undercurrent of music that his mind subconsciously followed, but, even in that elaborate structure, he knew every note. Irresistibly his mind would leave the too familiar score and go back to the newer problem.

What, in cold fact, had a partnership with the firm of Harcourt & Gay to offer him? Bellsmith was getting a taint of the Israels in him now, and he had no particular faith in the idea that the offer was as flattering as it might seem. It was not difficult to guess that his reputation as a free-handed young millionaire had more to do with it than his reputation as a musical genius.

On the other hand, Harcourt & Gay was unmistakably a firm of the very highest rank. Work with such producers would undoubtedly be of importance. His mind wandered back to a time when, as Dr. MacVickar had shrewdly guessed, a firm of far less importance had condescendingly returned his first comic opera, unread. That poor little thing! He even had to stop to remember its name. "The Count of Casco," that was it. It did look childish now.

A change in the tempo of the orchestra music made him instinctively glance up at the stage. It seemed almost impossible that things were going so beautifully up there when he himself was possessed by such an unreasoning spirit of doubt.

Charlie Barnes slipped up in one line which had always been fatal for him, since the first rehearsal. He said, "Ah, your Highness, this is too much!" when the joke for which he was "feeding" Mrs. Trip depended on his saying "Ah, your Grace." Three months ago that one word had seemed of vital importance, but now Bellsmith merely grinned at the utterly pointless lines that followed. The mistake seemed more homelike than the correct line would have been.

The lights on the garden wall were steel-blue now with a looming moon creeping up by imperceptible fractions throughout the act. The low music of the orchestra, which had been virtually uninterrupted throughout the two whole sets of the new "Eleanor," began again weaving back into familiar chords; then slowly crept out the air which in its various arrangements was the principal theme of the operetta. Now, toward the final and joyous climax, it was a mocking hilarious, wholly gleeful air, an air full of invitation:

Tommy Knight, the stage lover, now returning from his self-imposed exile, came leaping out on the stage, very boyish and wholly immaculate in evening clothes such as are never seen anywhere except in shop-windows and behind the footlights. He looked around eagerly, then passed on in through the lighted door of the Casino. It was all deliciously artificial, but for that very reason, rather than despite it, Bellsmith had come to love it as one loves for its own sake the studied theatricalness of grand opera.

A minute of evening silence, almost fragrant in its reality, hang over the garden. The big, slow moon rose its last inch over the wall and flooded the garden with its white light. At the same moment Tilly appeared, standing in the gateway, an evening cloak thrown back from her thin, girlish shoulders. A little murmur passed over the audience. Then the girl moved on. Bellsmith turned and walked back to the lobby. That one tableau had been all that he had been waiting to see. Five minutes later the orchestra was banging out its finale and the audience was swarming up the aisles.

Bellsmith lingered with Israels in the lobby for a moment or two watching the departing crowds, then went back to his wife's dressing-room. Tilly was almost ready for him and, even ahead of the chorus, they walked out into the street, still crowded and brisk in the balmy April night air. It is the odd moments off duty that make any profession enjoyable for those that follow it, that linger longest in professional memory, and Bellsmith and Tilly always prolonged this leisurely evening walk from the theater to their hotel. Tilly was wearing a long cape over her street gown and under it their fingers were clasped.

"Tired, dear?" asked Bellsmith.

His wife nodded. He was tired himself but it was still a delicious sort of weariness. He knew that hers was of a more genuine kind. A first night for any one is a terrible ordeal.

"Simon," said Bellsmith, for even after four months the question of names had not been definitely settled, "what do you want to do after this tour?"

It was a moment to which both of them had been looking forward but yet avoiding from a vague sort of superstition. One does not mention future plans in the middle of a whirlpool. "What do I want to do?" repeated Tilly. "I can tell you exactly what I want to do after this tour. I want to find a spot with the ocean on one side and a pine-tree on the other, and I want to sit on a broad piazza with pillows and books and have servants four deep bringing me iced tea and macaroons. And I want you there in very swanky gray tweeds—white riding breeches probably and mahogany boots—looking absolutely useless—just as you used to look. Why did you ask?" she added, a moment later.

"Because," replied Bellsmith slowly, knowing that his answer would not be wholly pleasant news, "A1 Harcourt was in the theater to-night. He and I had a long talk."

As he had feared, he felt his wife's fingers clench nervously over his.

"What did he want?" she demanded, in entirely another tone of voice.

"He wanted me to become a partner in the firm of Harcourt & Gay."

"And you 're not going to do it," snapped Tilly fiercely. Then, almost plaintively she added, "Are you?"

"Why?" asked Bellsmith, "don't you approve of Harcourt & Gay?"

His wife sighed wearily. "Oh, I suppose they 're as good as any one else—better in a way. But it's the same old story. I don't want you in that connection at all. You 're a sweet old thing, but you'd never be a theatrical man in ten thousand years."

"That seems to be agreed by all hands," said Bellsmith. "Is there anything in the world that I can be?"

"Yes, you can be my husband. No one ever did that before—and could n't have done it as well."

But, as for Bellsmith, so for her, a worrying note had been put in the evening of her triumph. Like him, she could not get away from it now.

"What did you tell him?" she demanded, suddenly.

"Tell Harcourt? I did n't tell him anything. I'm going to see him again to-morrow."

They walked on for nearly a block in silence through a side street less crowded.

"Well, dearie," said Tilly at last, "you can do what you like, of course. If it had n't been for the show business I suppose we should never have married, but please don't let Al Harcourt get all your money. I insist that you save out enough to buy me at least eight summer frocks and a pair of white canvas shoes."

"As to that," replied Bellsmith, "you need n't worry. If I go in at all it will be with my eyes wide open—or rather the eyes of the Pilgrim Trust Co. Judge Marker will have his cold scrutiny on all the details."

"In that case," said Tilly, "I shall feel very much relieved."

Bellsmith looked down at her with a rather weak effort at mock irony.

"You think a lot of your husband, don't you—as a man of affairs?"

"Oh, I know," agreed Tilly wearily, "but who wants to marry an adding-machine, anyway?"