Part 8

Behind the scenes panic reigned. The actors at their exits bounded off, panting in terror, as if pelted by bullets. Those whose cues for entrance came, snatched at them excitedly, and like gladiators rushing into the arena, plunged desperately upon the stage. The face of the leading lady was white beneath her make-up as she almost tottered upon the scene. Some instinct of chivalry led the mob to desist for a minute while she delivered her opening lines. But the demonstration broke out afresh as the leading man entered, though he wore the uniform of a lieutenant in the navy. His every speech was jeered. The excitement grew wilder; not a word spoken upon the stage was heard, even by the leader of the orchestra.

"My God, what they will do to you, Hampstead!" exclaimed Halson fiercely, as a detachment in the gallery began to march up and down the aisle, the rhythm of their heavy steps making the old house shiver like a ship in a storm.

Yet of all the actors trembling behind the scenes, it is possible that Hampstead was the very coolest. He had been the most perturbed, the most distraught; but this counter-disturbance made his own distressing situation forgotten. No eyes were riveted on him now. No thoughts were on him and the terrible humiliation he had publicly endured or the wretched failure he was going to make. The best, the most experienced, were in the most complete distress--clear out of themselves. The leading man had become angry, had lost his lines, and did not know what he was saying.

"Stanley's lost; he's ad-libbing to beat the band," John heard Page remark.

_Ad-libbing_! It was a new word. In the midst of all this confusion, John took note of it and next day learned of Parks that it was a stage-participle made from _ad libitum_. An actor ad-libbing was an actor talking on and on to fill space in some kind of a stage wait or because, as with Stanley, he had forgotten his lines.

Neumeyer, the "angel", came in from the front and added his white, agitated face to the awed groups standing about the wings.

"They've lost half the first act," he groaned, through chattering teeth. "Even when they wear 'emselves out, the piece is ruined because the people down-stairs have missed the key to the plot."

"Your cue is coming," bawled Page to John.

"Don't worry, though," croaked Halson in Hampstead's ear, still fearful that his man would collapse. "The piece is going so rotten you can't make it any worse. Cut in!"

But to his surprise, Hampstead's eye glinted with the light of battle.

"Worry?" he exclaimed excitedly. "Watch me. I'm going to get 'em!"

Halson gazed in pure pity.

"Get 'em," he gutturaled. "You poor, God-forsaken amateur!"

But the cue had come. Colonel Delaro, his sword clattering, his buttons flashing, his tall figure aglow with color, leaped through the entrance and took the center of the stage--so clumsily that he trod on Stanley's favorite corn and hooked a spur in the mantilla trailing from the arm of Miss Constance Beverly, the mislaid daughter of a millionaire yachtsman; but nevertheless, Hampstead was on. He had seized the center of the stage and he filled it full, as with an ostentatious gesture, he swept off his gold lace cap before Miss Beverly.

"What star's this?" shrieked a voice on one side the gallery.

"No star at all. It's a comet!" bawled a man from the other side, cupping his hands to carry his second-hand wit around the auditorium.

The Spanish War was not then so far back in memory that the sight of the uniform did not speedily kindle a little popular wrath upon its own account, and the demonstration began again and rose higher, but Hampstead became neither flustered nor angry. He maintained his character and his dignity. He remembered his speeches, and delivered them in stentorian tones that sounded vibrantly above the general clamor. When the gallery discovered to its surprise that here was a voice it could not entirely drown, it stopped out of sheer curiosity to see what the voice was like and found it as attractive as it was forceful. Moreover, there was a kind of special appeal in it. It was the voice of a real man; if they had only known it,--of a man at bay. He was not Colonel Delaro, plotting against the liberty and affections of a lady. He was John Hampstead, fighting,--with his back to the wall,--fighting for his opportunity, for an accredited position in this poor, cheap misfit company,--a position which seemed to him just now the most desired thing in all the world. Furthermore, he was fighting to justify his own faith in himself and the faith of Dick and Tayna; yes, and the faith of Bessie.

Hampstead was, moreover, used to rough houses. He had faced them more than once on his own barn-storming one-night appearances.

The way to get an audience like this he knew was to play it like a fish, to get the first nibble of interest and then hold it motionless with the lure of some kind of dramatic story. The situation called for a skilled, dramatic _raconteur_, and in truth that was what Hampstead was,--not an actor but a recitationist. Also his talks in church circles had given him skill in extemporaneous speaking. It happened that his speeches in this first act completed the introduction of the plot, but they were meaningless without a clear knowledge of what already had been said. Now Hampstead began, at first instinctively and then deliberately, as he played, to gather up these lost lines of half a dozen actors and weave them into his own. The fever of composition seized him. He used the people on the stage like puppets. He made them help him re-lay the plot while he struggled to grasp the attention of the mass child-mind out there in front and enthrall it with a story.

No better way could have been devised of making Hampstead overcome his terrible faults of action and delivery. With marvelous intensity came more repose. His eyes had been changed by the deft hand of Halson till they no longer looked like holes in a blanket; and he shot out his speeches, never once in that rhythmic, preaching tone, but rapidly, jerkily, plausible or menacing by turns, but all the while convincingly.

Within a few minutes the audience was captured. It lost its enthusiasm for riot and sat silent, following first the story as Hampstead had retold it and then the action which thereafter began to unfold. It was the sheer strength of the personality of the man which made this possible. In his strength, too, the other players took courage; and soon the action was tightly keyed and moving forward to a better conclusion of the act than any rehearsal had ever promised.

At the fall of the curtain, an avalanche leaped upon Hampstead, an avalanche which consisted solely of Halson. He seemed to have a thousand hands. He was slapping John on the back with all of them, in fierce, congratulatory blows.

"Man!" he exclaimed. "Man! You saved it! You saved it!"

Neumeyer was capering about deliriously, while tears of joy were trickling from his eyes. Others crowded round: Stanley, who had the lead, amiable old Parks, Lindsay, Bordwell, Miss Harlan, and the rest.

The audience, too, was excitedly expressing itself with hand-clappings and foot-stampings.

"Scatter!" bawled Page.

The stage swiftly cleared of people as the curtain began to rise.

"Miss Harlan!" Page was shouting. "Mr. Stanley! Mr. Hampstead!"

In the order named, the three emerged and took their calls, but the heartiest applause was for the big man in yellow and red, who, quite ignoring the orchestra circle, showed all his teeth in a cordial and understanding grin to the galleries, which thereupon broke out in that hurricane of hisses which is the heavy's hoped-for tribute.

Throughout the remainder of the performance, the yellow and scarlet figure of Delaro, with his great, sweeping gestures and his vast, bellowing voice, moved, a unique and dominating figure; no doubt the first and last time in which a villain who as a character was without one redeeming quality was made the hero of the gallery gods.

With the final fall of the curtain, Hampstead climbed to his dressing room, tired but gloriously happy. All the company knew his shame, the shame of being an amateur; but all, too, knew his power, the power of a man who could rise to emergency, who had commanding presence and constructive force.

The dressing rooms were mere partitions open at the top, so that everybody could hear what everybody else was saying, or could have heard, if only they had stopped to listen. But apparently nobody listened. The strain was over, and everybody talked as if the joy were in the talking and not in being heard. Yet after the first few minutes of excited blowing-off of steam, there came a lull, as if all had stopped for breath at once.

Into this lull, Dick Bordwell, the juvenile man, as he wiped the grease paint from his face, lifted his fine tenor voice in the first half of a queer antiphonal chant, by inquiring loudly above his four wooden walls toward the common ceiling over all:

"_Who is the greatest leading woman on the American stage?_"

"Louise Harlan!" chanted every voice on the floor, their tones mingling merrily, as if they were playing a familiar game.

"Right-o," sang Dick, and chanted next: "_Who is the greatest leading man on the American stage?_"

"Billie Stanley!" chorused the voices, with shrieks of laughter.

"And who," inquired Dick, with an insinuating change in his voice, "_who is the greatest juvenile man in America?_"

"Rich-a-r-r-r-d Bordwell!" screamed the magpies.

"Right-o-right!" echoed Dick, with a grunt of immense satisfaction; and then he went on piping his interrogatories, as to the rest of the company, desiring to be informed who was the greatest character old man, character old lady, soubrette, light comedian and stage manager, concluding yet more loudly with:

"_And who is the greatest amateur heavy on the American stage?_"

As if they had been waiting for it, the voices burst out like a college yell:

"_John Hampstead! John Hampstead, is the greatest amateur heavy on the American stage!_"

The spirit of fun and hearty good will with which this initiation ceremony had been performed was salve to the bruised, excited soul of John. Besides an ever present sense of meanness and hypocrisy from the concealment he had practiced, John had suffered a feeling of extreme loneliness that had at no time been so great as now, when, the strain of the play over, all these children of the stage were romping joyously together. Now they had included him in the circle of their magic fellowship. True, they had used the hateful word amateur, but that was in play, and he was sure they would never use it again.

And he was right--from that hour some of them who liked him showed it; some who disliked him showed that; some merely revealed themselves as cool toward him or appeared ill at ease in his presence; but never one of them, by word or act, failed from that moment to recognize his standing as a man entitled to all the free masonry of their unique and fascinating profession.

But the climax of this climactic night for John was reached when, descending the stairway, Halson honored him with an astounding confidence.

"Marien Dounay joins the People's to-morrow," he whispered excitedly.

"Fact!" he affirmed in response to John's look of sheer incredulity. "She's a spitfire and a genius. She can do what she likes. She's quarreled with Mowrey. She's coming here to spite him. Pie for us while it lasts, huh? She opens as Isabel in _East Lynne_."

John knew that Mowrey had come up from Los Angeles and was just opening a long season at the Grand Opera House; but Marien Dounay--almost a star!--in that thread-bare play, _East Lynne_, in this out-at-elbows company, and in this old barn of a house! Impossible!

This was what John was thinking, but he was too weak to give it utterance. He wanted Halson's information to be true whether it was or not. Yet in the midst of the elation which began to kindle swiftly, he remembered what Halson had said to Neumeyer on Saturday in the dark of the orchestra: that a new man had been engaged to play the heavies.

A wave of bitterness surged over him; and yet, he reflected, things must be changed. They would scarcely let him go after to-night, so he mustered courage to inquire:

"By the way, Halson, what do I play in _East Lynne_?"

"You play the lead," affirmed Halson, with dramatic emphasis.

"The lead?" John gulped, struggling as if a cobblestone had just been tossed into his throat.

"Sure! You'll get away with it, too," declared the stage manager with over-enthusiasm, slapping John heavily upon the back as the big man turned away quickly, utterly unwilling that any save two or three not there to look should see into his face.

It would scarcely have diminished his joy to know that he was getting the lead simply because Archibald Carlyle was such an unredeemed mollycoddle that the leading man usually chose to enact the villain, Levison.

*CHAPTER X*

*A STAGE KISS*

For the strange freak of Miss Marien Dounay in joining The People's Stock Company, the papers found ready explanation in artistic temperament. The brilliant young actress, so the story ran, taking umbrage because Miss Elsie McCloskey, twin star of the Mowrey cast, was chosen to play a part for which Miss Dounay deemed herself specially fitted, had resigned in a huff; and thereupon, to spite Mowrey, had signed with this obscure stock company playing a dozen blocks away, where it was believed her popularity would be sufficient to punish the well-known manager in his one vulnerable spot, the box-office.

But there was one person interested who did not care a rap why Marien Dounay was playing Isabel Carlyle, the wife of Archibald Carlyle at the People's Stock this week, in the time-frazzled drama of _East Lynne_, and that was the man to play Archibald. She was there, and that was enough for him, swimming into his ken at the first rehearsal like a vision of some glory too entrancing to belong to anything but a dream.

Had she changed much in the four months since he had held her in his arms? Not at all, unless to grow more beautiful.

Yet if that crude actor fancied himself on terms of more than bare acquaintance with this exquisite creature, his imagination presumed too far. Miss Dounay's bearing made it instantly apparent that she gave herself airs. One comprehensive glance was bestowed upon the semicircle of the company. Hampstead's portion was more and less, a look and a nod. The nod said: "I know you, puppet." The look warned: "But do not presume. Stand."

John stood, wondering. As rehearsals progressed, his wonder grew into bewilderment. Miss Dounay treated the whole company cavalierly, but she treated him disdainfully. Her feeling for the others was simply negative; for him it appeared to be positive.

As an actress, it developed that she was "up" in the part of Isabel, having played it many times. She had, moreover, ideas of how every other part should be played and was pleased to express them. Nobody protested, Halson least of all. She was a "find" for the People's. As a director, too, Miss Dounay was masterful. A languid glance, a single word, a very slight intonation, had more force than one of Halson's ranting commands. And she was instinctively competent.

Hampstead, despite his own sad experience, watched her open-mouthed. This young woman, it appeared, was an intellectual force as well as a magnetic one. She cut speeches or interpolated them, altered business, and in one instance rearranged an entire scene, while in another she boldly reconstructed the conclusion of an act. The storm center round which much of this cutting, slicing, and fattening took place was Hampstead. She heckled him unmercifully about the reading of his lines, ridiculed his gestures, and badgered him to madness.

On the fourth day of this, John moped out of the theater, head down, reflecting bitterly upon the illusory character of woman, of which he knew so little,--moped so slowly that Parks overtook him on the first corner.

"This woman is a friend of yours," Parks proposed tentatively.

"I thought she was," sighed Hampstead weakly, "but she keeps cutting my speeches. By the end of the week, I won't have any part left at all."

Parks indulged a self-satisfied chuckle at the keenness of his own discernment.

"Don't you see," he explained, "she's cutting the stuff you do badly. She took away from you a situation in which you were awkward and unreal. She changed that scene around and left you with a climax in which you are positively graceful as well as forceful. You'll get a big hand in it. She studies you. I've watched her."

"Old man," blurted Hampstead, with sudden fervor, "it would make me the happiest man in the world if I thought that you were right. But you are wrong, and her badgering has begun to get on my nerves. Say!" and he interrupted himself to ask a question not yet answered to his satisfaction. "Why is she here?--with the People's, I mean?"

"You've heard the stories," answered Parks, with a shrug. "However, I doubt if it's any mere whim. She appears to me to have a cool, good reason for anything she does."

Parks turns off at Ninth Street, and John moved on down Market. "A cold good reason for what she does," he murmured. "What's the answer, I wonder, to what she does to me?"

As the days went on, John's wonder grew.

Now it is according to the method of dramatists that when a husband is to be abandoned by his wife in the second act there shall be certain tender passages between the two in the first act, and this ancient drama was no exception. There were contacts, handclasps, embraces, kisses. Through all of these at rehearsal time the two went mechanically. Miss Dounay apparently treated Hampstead with mere indifference, but actually she found a thousand little ways to show utter repugnance. After the first shock, John's combative instinct and his pride led him to face this situation, so difficult for a gentleman, unflinchingly. Taking her hands, pressing her to him, patting her cheek, playing with the wisps of hair upon her temple, he conscientiously rehearsed the part of the affectionate, doting husband. His very sincerity, it would seem, must have been a rebuke to the woman. She must have seen that his heart was stirred by an unexplained feeling toward her, and might have observed in his determined bearing under the galling fire of her man-baiting something noble.

Here, if she could only perceive it, was a man who had turned his back on at least one of the kingdoms of this world to become an actor; a man who would endure anything, suffer anything to add to his knowledge and skill in that difficult and all demanding art; which, indeed, was why he laid himself open to her polished ridicule by over-playing every scene, overemphasizing every word, over-expressing every gesture and emotion.

But she never relented, not even on the night of the first performance. Instead she became more aggressive in her antagonism, her method changing from subtle scorn to open derision.

Now among experienced actors there are a great many things which may take place upon the stage unsuspected of the audience. On this night, all through the tender exchanges of that first act, Miss Dounay seized upon intervals when her back was to the front to throw a grimace at John,--to do, or _sotto voce_ to say, something irritating or ludicrous that would throw him out of character, or, as the profession puts it, "break him up." John steeled himself against all of this and went on playing with that dignity of earnestness which seemed to characterize all his life, until it would appear the climax of malice was reached when, as Miss Dounay hung about his neck, she laughed in the midst of one of his tenderest speeches, and whispered:

"There is a daub of smut on the end of your nose."

To John this communication was an arrow poisoned by the subtle power of suggestion. Was there smut upon his nose? If there were and he touched it with a finger, it would smear and ruin his make-up. If he did not remove it, the audience would observe it the first time he came down stage and laugh. On the other hand, he did not believe that there was smut upon his nose. How could it get there? In no way unless some joker had doctored the peephole in the curtain just before he peered out at the audience.

Smutted or not smutted? To touch his nose or let it alone? That was the maddening question. The puzzle and the doubt disconcerted him. His memory faltered, his tongue stumbled, and a feeling of awful helplessness came over him. He _was_ breaking up! He _was_ out of character! This devilish woman had succeeded. She saw it, too. John read the exultation in her eyes, and it filled him with indignation until a wave of wrath surged over his great frame like a storm. Miss Dounay saw his eyes grow suddenly stern with a light she had never noticed in them. One arm was encircling her in a caress, the other hand rested upon her shoulders. For one instant she felt this embrace tighten into a python grip that was terrifying. The man's position had not changed. To the audience it was still a mere pose, an expression of endearment.

But to Marien Dounay it was an ominous hint that this great amiable child had in him the primal elements of a brutal strength. A look of alarm shot into her face, and she whispered:

"Don't, John! Don't."

The tone of her voice was pleading. She, the proud, had cringed. She had called him John. She had surrendered.

"It was just a mean little fib," she whispered, and for a moment clung to him helplessly.

John, greatly surprised, was not too much surprised to feel the exultant surge of victory. For one moment he had lost control of himself, but in that moment he appeared to have gained control of Marien.

The strangest thing was that Miss Dounay seemed rather happy about it herself; and the wide range of the woman's capacity was revealed by her swift transition to a mood of purring contentment and a spirit of affectionate camaraderie that presently reached a surprising climax.

The act ended in the garden, with Isabel seated on a rustic bench, and Archibald bending over her. As the curtain descended, he was to stoop and print a kiss of tenderest respect upon her forehead. But now, as the curtain trembled, Miss Dounay lifted not her forehead but her lips, and held them, warm and clinging, to his for an instant that to Hampstead seemed a delicious, thrilling eternity, from which he emerged like a man newborn.

But the male instinct to gloat was the first clear thought.

"You do like me, don't you?" he breathed exultantly, while the curtain was down for an instant. Marien answered with her eyes and a quick affirmative nod, before the curtain bounded upward again for a last picture of husband and wife gazing into each other's eyes with a look expressing an infinitude of fondness. But John had ceased to be Archibald. What his look expressed was an infinitude of mystery and joy.

"And they say there is no satisfaction in a stage kiss!" he whispered to himself as he leaped up the stairs to his dressing room.

*CHAPTER XI*

*SEED TO THE WIND*

The next night Miss Dounay gave John her forehead instead of her lips to kiss, but she heckled him no more, and it was perfectly obvious to him, as to Parks, that she helped him deliberately and had been helping him all along by her stage direction.

"If you've got her interested in you, you're fixed for life," grumbled Parks wistfully. "That girl's going up the line, and she's got stuff enough to take somebody else with her."

There was a suggestion in this which John resented.

"I'm going up, too," he rejoined with the defiant exuberance of youth, "but on my own steam."