Van Bibbers Life | Page 5

but to disturb some more interested one in the
front row. And so, in time, the company became so well accustomed to
him that he moved in and about as unnoticed as the stage-manager
himself, who prowled around hissing "hush" on principle, even though
he was the only person who could fairly be said to be making a noise.
The second act was on, and Lester came off the stage and ran to the
dressing-room and beckoned violently. "Come here," he said; "you
ought to see this; the children are doing their turn. You want to hear
them. They're great!"
Van Bibber put his cigar into a tumbler and stepped out into the wings.
They were crowded on both sides of the stage with the members of the
company; the girls were tiptoeing, with their hands on the shoulders of
the men, and making futile little leaps into the air to get a better view,
and others were resting on one knee that those behind might see over
their shoulders. There were over a dozen children before the footlights,
with the prima donna in the centre. She was singing the verses of a
song, and they were following her movements, and joining in the
chorus with high piping voices. They seemed entirely too much at
home and too self-conscious: to please Van Bibber; but there was one
exception. The one exception was the smallest of them, a very, very
little girl, with long auburn hair and black eyes; such a very little girl
that every one in the house looked at her first, and then looked at no
one else. She was apparently as unconcerned to all about her, excepting
the pretty prima donna, as though she were by a piano at home
practising a singing lesson. She seemed to think it was some new sort
of a game. When the prima donna raised her arms, the child raised hers;
when the prima donna courtesied, she stumbled into one, and
straightened herself just in time to get the curls out of her eyes, and to
see that the prima donna was laughing at her, and to smile cheerfully
back as if to say, "WE are doing our best anyway, aren't we?" She had
big, gentle eyes and two wonderful dimples, and in the excitement of
the dancing and the singing her eyes laughed and flashed, and the
dimples deepened and disappeared and reappeared again. She was as

happy and innocent looking as though it were nine in the morning and
she were playing school at a kindergarten. From all over the house the
women were murmuring their delight, and the men were laughing and
pulling their mustaches and nudging each other to "look at the littlest
one."
The girls in the wings were rapturous in their enthusiasm, and were
calling her absurdly extravagant titles of endearment, and making so
much noise that Kripps stopped grinning at her from the entrance, and
looked back over his shoulder as he looked when he threatened fines
and calls for early rehearsal. And when she had finished finally, and the
prima donna and the children ran off together, there was a roar from the
house that went to Lester's head like wine, and seemed to leap clear
across the footlights and drag the children back again.
"That settles it!" cried Lester, in a suppressed roar of triumph. "I knew
that child would catch them."
There were four encores, and then the children and Elise Broughten, the
pretty prima donna, came off jubilant and happy, with the Littlest Girl's
arms full of flowers, which the management had with kindly
forethought prepared for the prima donna, but which that delightful
young person and the delighted leader of the orchestra had passed over
to the little girl.
"Well," gasped Miss Broughten, as she came up to Van Bibber
laughing, and with one hand on her side and breathing very quickly,
"will you kindly tell me who is the leading woman now? Am I the
prima donna, or am I not? I wasn't in it, was I?"
"You were not," said Van Bibber.
He turned from the pretty prima donna and hunted up the wardrobe
woman, and told her he wanted to meet the Littlest Girl. And the
wardrobe woman, who was fluttering wildly about, and as delighted as
though they were all her own children, told him to come into the
property-room, where the children were, and which had been changed
into a dressing-room that they might be by themselves. The six little

girls were in six different states of dishabille, but they were too little to
mind that, and Van Bibber was too polite to observe it.
"This is the little girl, sir," said the wardrobe woman, excitedly, proud
at being the means of bringing together two such