Harlequin and Columbine | Page 3

I see, sir, I see!" said Packer with piteous eagerness, taking the manuscript the star handed him. "Now, then, Miss Ellsling, if you please--"
"I will have my tea indoors," Miss Ellsling began promptly, striking an imaginary bell. "I will have my tea indoors, to-day, I think, Pritchard. It is cooler indoors, to-day, I think, on the whole, and so it will be pleasanter to have my tea indoors to-day. Strike bell again. Do you hear, Pritchard?"
Out in the dimness beyond the stage the thin figure of the new playwright rose dazedly from an orchestra chair.
"What--what's this?" he stammered, the choked sounds he made not reaching the stage.
"What's the matter?" The question came from Carson Tinker, but his tone was incurious, manifesting no interest whatever. Tinker's voice, like his pale, spectacled glance, was not tired; it was dead.
"Tea!" gasped Canby. "People are sick of tea! I didn't write any tea!"
"There isn't any," said Tinker. "The way he's got it, there's an interruption before the tea comes, and it isn't brought in."
"But she's ordered it! If it doesn't come the audience will wonder--"
"No," said Tinker. "They won't think of that. They won't hear her order it."
"Then for heaven's sake, why has he put it in? I wrote this play to begin right in the story--"
"That's the trouble. They never hear the beginning. They're slamming seats, taking off wraps, looking round to see who's there. That's why we used to begin plays with servants dusting and 'Well-I-never-half-past-nine-and-the-young-master-not-yet- risen!"
"I wrote it to begin with a garden scene," Canby protested, unheeding. "Why--"
"He's changed this act a good deal."
"But I wrote--"
"He never uses garden sets. Not intimate enough; and they're a nuisance to light. I wouldn't worry about it."
"But it changes the whole signifi--"
"Well, talk to him about it," said Tinker, adding lifelessly, "I wouldn't argue with him much, though. I never knew anybody do anything with him that way yet."
Miss Ellsling, on the stage, seemed to be supplementing this remark. "Roderick Hanscom is a determined man," she said, in character. "He is hard as steel to a treacherous enemy, but he is tender and gentle to women and children. Only yesterday I saw him pick up a fallen crippled child from beneath the relentless horses' feet on a crossing, at the risk of his very life, and then as he placed it in the mother's arms, he smiled that wonderful smile of his, that wonderful smile of his that seems to brighten the whole world! Wait till you meet him. But that is his step now and you shall judge for yourselves! Let us rise, if you please, to give him befitting greeting."
"What--what!" gasped Canby.
"Sh!" Tinker whispered.
"But all I wrote for her to say, when Roderick Hanscom's name is mentioned, was 'I don't think I like him.' My God!"
"Sh!"
"The Honourable Robert Hanscom!" shouted Packer, in a ringing voice as a stage-servant, or herald.
"It gives him an entrance, you see," murmured Tinker. "Your script just let him walk on."
"And all that horrible stuff about his 'wonderful smile!'" Canby babbled. "Think of his putting that in himself."
"Well, you hadn't done it for him. It is a wonderful smile, isn't it?"
"My God!"
"Sh!"
Talbot Potter had stepped to the centre of the stage and was smiling the wonderful smile. "Mildred, and you, my other friends, good friends," he began, "for I know that you are all true friends here, and I can trust you with a secret very near my heart--"
"Most of them are supposed never to have seen him before," said Canby, hoarsely. "And she's just told them they could judge for themselves when--"
"They won't notice that."
"You mean the audience won't--"
"No, they won't," said Tinker.
"But good heavens! it's 'Donald Gray,' the other character, that trusts him with the secret, and he betrays it later. This upsets the whole--"
"Well, talk to him. I can't help it."
"It is a political secret," Potter continued, reading from a manuscript in his hand, "and almost a matter of life and death. But I trust you with it openly and fearlessly because--"
At this point his voice was lost in a destroying uproar. Perceiving that the rehearsal was well under way, and that the star had made his entrance, two of the stage-hands attached to the theatre ascended to the flies and set up a great bellowing on high. "Lower that strip!" "You don't want that strip lowered, I tell you!" "Oh, my Lord! Can't you lower that strip!" Another workman at the rear of the stage began to saw a plank, and somebody else, concealed behind a bit of scenery, hammered terrifically upon metal. Altogether it was a successful outbreak.
Potter threw his manuscript upon the table, a gesture that caused the shoulders of Packer to move in a visible shudder, and the company, all eyes fixed upon the face of the star, suddenly wore the