II

II

The rehearsal had started when she reached the theatre. As she entered the dark auditorium, voices came to her with that thin and reedy effect which is produced by people talking in an empty building. She sat down at the back of the house, and, as her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, was able to see Gerald sitting in the front row beside a man with a bald head fringed with orange hair whom she took correctly to be Mr. Bunbury, the producer. Dotted about the house in ones and twos were members of the company whose presence was not required in the first act. On the stage, Elsa Doland, looking very attractive, was playing a scene with a man in a bowler hat. She was speaking a line, as Sally came in.

“Why, what do you mean, father?”

“Tiddly-omty-om,” was the bowler-hatted one’s surprising reply. “Tiddly-omty-om⁠ ⁠… long speech ending in ‘find me in the library.’ And exit,” said the man in the bowler hat, starting to do so.

For the first time Sally became aware of the atmosphere of nerves. Mr. Bunbury, who seemed to be a man of temperament, picked up his walking-stick, which was leaning against the next seat, and flung it with some violence across the house.

“For God’s sake!” said Mr. Bunbury.

“Now what?” inquired the bowler hat, interested, pausing hallway across the stage.

“Do speak the lines, Teddy,” exclaimed Gerald. “Don’t skip them in that sloppy fashion.”

“You don’t want me to go over the whole thing?” asked the bowler hat, amazed.

“Yes!”

“Not the whole damn thing?” queried the bowler hat, fighting with incredulity.

“This is a rehearsal,” snapped Mr. Bunbury. “If we are not going to do it properly, what’s the use of doing it at all?”

This seemed to strike the erring Teddy, if not as reasonable, at any rate as one way of looking at it. He delivered the speech in an injured tone and shuffled off. The atmosphere of tenseness was unmistakable now. Sally could feel it. The world of the theatre is simply a large nursery and its inhabitants children who readily become fretful if anything goes wrong. The waiting and the uncertainty, the loafing about in strange hotels in a strange city, the dreary rehearsing of lines which had been polished to the last syllable more than a week ago⁠—these things had sapped the nerve of the Primrose Way Company and demoralization had set in. It would require only a trifle to produce an explosion.

Elsa Doland now moved to the door, pressed a bell, and, taking a magazine from the table, sat down in a chair near the footlights. A moment later, in answer to the ring, a young woman entered, to be greeted instantly by an impassioned bellow from Mr. Bunbury.

“Miss Winch!”

The new arrival stopped and looked out over the footlights, not in the pained manner of the man in the bowler hat, but with the sort of genial indulgence of one who has come to a juvenile party to amuse the children. She was a square, wholesome, good-humoured looking girl with a serious face, the gravity of which was contradicted by the faint smile that seemed to lurk about the corner of her mouth. She was certainly not pretty, and Sally, watching her with keen interest, was surprised that Fillmore had had the sense to disregard surface homeliness and recognize her charm. Deep down in Fillmore, Sally decided, there must lurk an unsuspected vein of intelligence.

“Hello?” said Miss Winch, amiably.

Mr. Bunbury seemed profoundly moved.

“Miss Winch, did I or did I not ask you to refrain from chewing gum during rehearsal?”

“That’s right, so you did,” admitted Miss Winch, chummily.

“Then why are you doing it?”

Fillmore’s fiancée revolved the criticized refreshment about her tongue for a moment before replying.

“Bit o’ business,” she announced, at length.

“What do you mean, a bit of business?”

“Character stuff,” explained Miss Winch in her pleasant, drawling voice. “Thought it out myself. Maids chew gum, you know.”

Mr. Bunbury ruffled his orange hair in an overwrought manner with the palm of his right hand.

“Have you ever seen a maid?” he asked, despairingly.

“Yes, sir. And they chew gum.”

“I mean a parlourmaid in a smart house,” moaned Mr. Bunbury. “Do you imagine for a moment that in a house such as this is supposed to be the parlourmaid would be allowed to come into the drawing-room champing that disgusting, beastly stuff?”

Miss Winch considered the point.

“Maybe you’re right.” She brightened. “Listen! Great idea! Mr. Foster can write in a line for Elsa, calling me down, and another giving me a good comeback, and then another for Elsa saying something else, and then something really funny for me, and so on. We can work it up into a big comic scene. Five or six minutes, all laughs.”

This ingenious suggestion had the effect of depriving the producer momentarily of speech, and while he was struggling for utterance, there dashed out from the wings a gorgeous being in blue velvet and a hat of such unimpeachable smartness that Sally ached at the sight of it with a spasm of pure envy.

“Say!”

Miss Mabel Hobson had practically every personal advantage which nature can bestow with the exception of a musical voice. Her figure was perfect, her face beautiful, and her hair a mass of spun gold; but her voice in moments of emotion was the voice of a peacock.

“Say, listen to me for just one moment!”

Mr. Bunbury recovered from his trance.

“Miss Hobson! Please!”

“Yes, that’s all very well⁠ ⁠…”

“You are interrupting the rehearsal.”

“You bet your sorrowful existence I’m interrupting the rehearsal,” agreed Miss Hobson, with emphasis. “And, if you want to make a little easy money, you go and bet somebody ten seeds that I’m going to interrupt it again every time there’s any talk of writing up any darned part in the show except mine. Write up other people’s parts? Not while I have my strength!”

A young man with butter-coloured hair, who had entered from the wings in close attendance on the injured lady, attempted to calm the storm.

“Now, sweetie!”

“Oh, can it, Reggie!” said Miss Hobson, curtly.

Mr. Cracknell obediently canned it. He was not one of your brutal cavemen. He subsided into the recesses of a high collar and began to chew the knob of his stick.

“I’m the star,” resumed Miss Hobson, vehemently, “and, if you think anybody else’s part’s going to be written up⁠ ⁠… well, pardon me while I choke with laughter! If so much as a syllable is written into anybody’s part, I walk straight out on my two feet. You won’t see me go, I’ll be so quick.”

Mr. Bunbury sprang to his feet and waved his hands.

“For heaven’s sake! Are we rehearsing, or is this a debating society? Miss Hobson, nothing is going to be written into anybody’s part. Now are you satisfied?”

“She said⁠ ⁠…”

“Oh, never mind,” observed Miss Winch, equably. “It was only a random thought. Working for the good of the show all the time. That’s me.”

“Now, sweetie!” pleaded Mr. Cracknell, emerging from the collar like a tortoise.

Miss Hobson reluctantly allowed herself to be reassured.

“Oh, well, that’s all right, then. But don’t forget I know how to look after myself,” she said, stating a fact which was abundantly obvious to all who had had the privilege of listening to her. “Any raw work, and out I walk so quick it’ll make you giddy.”

She retired, followed by Mr. Cracknell, and the wings swallowed her up.

“Shall I say my big speech now?” inquired Miss Winch, over the footlights.

“Yes, yes! Get on with the rehearsal. We’ve wasted half the morning.”

“Did you ring, madam?” said Miss Winch to Elsa, who had been reading her magazine placidly through the late scene.

The rehearsal proceeded, and Sally watched it with a sinking heart. It was all wrong. Novice as she was in things theatrical, she could see that. There was no doubt that Miss Hobson was superbly beautiful and would have shed lustre on any part which involved the minimum of words and the maximum of clothes: but in the pivotal role of a serious play, her very physical attributes only served to emphasize and point her hopeless incapacity. Sally remembered Mr. Faucitt’s story of the lady who got the bird at Wigan. She did not see how history could fail to repeat itself. The theatrical public of America will endure much from youth and beauty, but there is a limit.

A shrill, passionate cry from the front row, and Mr. Bunbury was on his feet again. Sally could not help wondering whether things were going particularly wrong today, or whether this was one of Mr. Bunbury’s ordinary mornings.

“Miss Hobson!”

The action of the drama had just brought that emotional lady on left centre and had taken her across to the desk which stood on the other side of the stage. The desk was an important feature of the play, for it symbolized the absorption in business which, exhibited by her husband, was rapidly breaking Miss Hobson’s heart. He loved his desk better than his young wife, that was what it amounted to, and no wife can stand that sort of thing.

“Oh, gee!” said Miss Hobson, ceasing to be the distressed wife and becoming the offended star. “What’s it this time?”

“I suggested at the last rehearsal and at the rehearsal before and the rehearsal before that, that, on that line, you should pick up the paper-knife and toy negligently with it. You did it yesterday, and today you’ve forgotten it again.”

“My God!” cried Miss Hobson, wounded to the quick. “If this don’t beat everything! How the heck can I toy negligently with a paper-knife when there’s no paper-knife for me to toy negligently with?”

“The paper-knife is on the desk.”

“It’s not on the desk.”

“No paper-knife?”

“No paper-knife. And it’s no good picking on me. I’m the star, not the assistant stage manager. If you’re going to pick on anybody, pick on him.”

The advice appeared to strike Mr. Bunbury as good. He threw back his head and bayed like a bloodhound.

There was a momentary pause, and then from the wings on the prompt side there shambled out a stout and shrinking figure, in whose hand was a script of the play and on whose face, lit up by the footlights, there shone a look of apprehension. It was Fillmore, the Man of Destiny.