Harlequin and Columbine | Page 4

look of people watching a mysterious sealed packet from which a muffled ticking is heard. The bellowing and the sawing and the hammering increased in fury.
In the orchestra a rusty gleam of something like mummified pleasure passed unseen behind the spectacles of old Carson Tinker. "Stage-hands are the devil," he explained to the stupefied Canby. "Rehearsals bore them and they love to hear what an actor says when his nerves go to pieces. If Potter blows up they'll quiet down to enjoy it and then do it again pretty soon. If he doesn't blow up he'll take it out on somebody else later."
Potter stood silent in the centre of the stage, expressionless, which seemed to terrify the stage-manager. "Just one second, Mr. Potter!" he screamed, his brow pearly with the anguish of apprehension. "Just one second, sir!"
He went hotfoot among the disturbers, protesting, commanding, imploring, and plausibly answering severe questions. "Well, when do you expect us to git this work done?" "We got our work to do, ain't we?" until finally the tumult ceased, the saw slowing down last of all, tapering off reluctantly into a silence of plaintive disappointment; whereupon Packer resumed his place, under a light at the side of the stage, turning the pages of his manuscript with fluttering fingers and keeping his eyes fixed guiltily upon it. The company of actors also carefully removed their gaze from the star and looked guilty.
Potter allowed the fatal hush to continue, while the culpability of Packer and the company seemed mysteriously to increase until they all reeked with it. The stage-hands had withdrawn in a grieved manner somewhere into the huge rearward spaces of the old building. They belonged to the theatre, not to Potter, and, besides, they had a union. But the actors were dependent upon Potter for the coming winter's work and wages; they were his employees.
At last he spoke: "We will go on with the rehearsal," he said quietly.
"Ah!" murmured old Tinker. "He'll take it out on somebody else." And with every precaution not to jar down a seat in passing, he edged his way to the aisle and went softly thereby to the extreme rear of the house. He was an employee, too.

III
It was a luckless lady who helped to fulfil the prediction. Technically she was the "ingenue"; publicly she was "Miss Carol Lyston"; legally she was a Mrs. Surbilt, being wife to the established leading man of that ilk, Vorly Surbilt. Miss Lyston had come to the rehearsal in a condition of exhausted nerves, owing to her husband's having just accepted, over her protest, a "road" engagement with a lady-star of such susceptible gallantry she had never yet been known to resist falling in love with her leading-man before she quarrelled with him. Miss Lyston's protest having lasted the whole of the preceeding night, and not at all concluding with Mr. Surbilt's departure, about breakfast-time, avowedly to seek total anaesthesia by means of a long list of liquors, which he named, she had spent the hours before rehearsal interviewing female acquaintances who had been members of the susceptible lady's company--a proceeding which indicates that she deliberately courted hysteria.
Shortly after the outraged rehearsal had been resumed, she unfortunately uttered a loud, dry sob, startlingly irrelevant to the matter in hand. It came during the revelation of "Roderick Hanscom's" secret, and Potter stopped instantly.
"Who did that?"
"Miss Lyston, sir," Packer responded loyally, such matters being part of his duty.
The star turned to face the agitated criminal. "Miss Lyston," he said, delaying each syllable to pack it more solidly with ice, "will you be good enough to inform this company if there is anything in your lines to warrant your breaking into a speech of mine with a horrible noise like that?"
"Nothing."
"Then perhaps you will inform us why you do break into a speech of mine with a horrible noise like that?"
"I only coughed, Mr. Potter," said Miss Lyston, shaking.
"Coughed!" he repeated slowly, and then with a sudden tragic fury shouted at the top of his splendid voice, "COUGHED!" He swung away from her, and strode up and down the stage, struggling with emotion, while the stricken company fastened their eyes to their strips of manuscript, as if in study, and looked neither at him nor Miss Lyston.
"You only coughed!" He paused before her in his stride. "Is it your purpose to cough during my speeches when this play is produced before an audience?" He waited for no reply, but taking his head woefully in his hands, began to pace up and down again, turning at last toward the dark auditorium to address his invisible manager:
"Really, really, Mr. Tinker," he cried, despairingly, "we shall have to change some of these people. I can't act with--Mr. Tinker! Where's Mr. Tinker? Mr. Tinker! My soul! He's gone! He always is