The Safety Curtain

Safety Curtain, The

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Title: The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories
Author: Ethel M. Dell
Release Date: September 4, 2005 [EBook #16651]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE SAFETY CURTAIN AND OTHER STORIES
by
ETHEL M. DELL

AUTHOR OF:-
The Hundreth Chance Greatheart The Lamp in the Desert The Tidal
Wave The Top of the World The Obstacle Race The Way of an Eagle
The Knave of Diamonds The Rocks of Valpré The Swindler The
Keeper of the Door Bars of Iron Rosa Mundi Etc.
GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
Made in the United States of America
This edition is issued under arrangement with the publishers
G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York and London
Made in the United States of America
The Knickerbocker Press, New York

CONTENTS
The Safety Curtain
The Experiment
Those Who Wait
The Eleventh Hour
The Place of Honour

The Safety Curtain
CHAPTER I
THE ESCAPE

A great shout of applause went through the crowded hall as the
Dragon-Fly Dance came to an end, and the Dragon-Fly, with quivering,
iridescent wings, flashed away.
It was the third encore. The dance was a marvellous one, a piece of
dazzling intricacy, of swift and unexpected subtleties, of almost
superhuman grace. It must have proved utterly exhausting to any
ordinary being; but to that creature of fire and magic it was no more
than a glittering fantasy, a whirl too swift for the eye to follow or the
brain to grasp.
"Is it a boy or a girl?" asked a man in the front row.
"It's a boy, of course," said his neighbour, shortly.
He was the only member of the audience who did not take part in that
third encore. He sat squarely in his seat throughout the uproar,
watching the stage with piercing grey eyes that never varied in their
stern directness. His brows were drawn above them--thick, straight
brows that bespoke a formidable strength of purpose. He was plainly a
man who was accustomed to hew his own way through life, despising
the trodden paths, overcoming all obstacles by grim persistence.
Louder and louder swelled the tumult. It was evident that nothing but a
repetition of the wonder-dance would content the audience. They yelled
themselves hoarse for it; and when, light as air, incredibly swift, the
green Dragon-Fly darted back, they outdid themselves in the madness
of their welcome. The noise seemed to shake the building.
Only the man in the front row with the iron-grey eyes and iron-hard
mouth made no movement or sound of any sort. He merely watched
with unchanging intentness the face that gleamed, ashen-white, above
the shimmering metallic green tights that clothed the dancer's slim
body.
The noise ceased as the wild tarantella proceeded. There fell a deep
hush, broken only by the silver notes of a flute played somewhere
behind the curtain. The dancer's movements were wholly without sound.

The quivering, whirling feet scarcely seemed to touch the floor, it was a
dance of inspiration, possessing a strange and irresistible fascination, a
weird and meteoric rush, that held the onlookers with bated breath.
It lasted for perhaps two minutes, that intense and trancelike stillness;
then, like, a stone flung into glassy depths, a woman's scream rudely
shattered it, a piercing, terror-stricken scream that brought the rapt
audience back to earth with a shock as the liquid music of the flute
suddenly ceased.
"Fire!" cried the voice. "Fire! Fire!"
There was an instant of horrified inaction, and in that instant a tongue
of flame shot like a fiery serpent through the closed curtains behind the
dancer. In a moment the cry was caught up and repeated in a dozen
directions, and even as it went from mouth to mouth the safety-curtain
began to descend.
The dancer was forgotten, swept as it were from the minds of the
audience as an insect whose life was of no account. From the back of
the stage came a roar like the roar of an open furnace. A great wave of
heat rushed into the hall, and people turned like terrified, stampeding
animals and made for the exits.
The Dragon-Fly still stood behind the footlights poised as if for flight,
glancing this way and that, shimmering from head to foot in the awful
glare that spread behind the descending curtain. It was evident