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The Destroying Angel
The Destroying Angelполная версия

Полная версия

The Destroying Angel

Язык: Английский
Год издания: 2017
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And he must make an early opportunity to question Drummond more closely; not that he anticipated that Drummond knew anything more than he had already disclosed – anything really helpful at all events.

His thoughts shifted to dwell temporarily on the two personalities newly introduced into his cosmos, strikingly new, in spite of the fact that they had been so well known to him of old. He wondered if it were possible that he seemed to them as singularly metamorphosed as they seemed to him – superficially if not integrally. He had lost altogether the trick of thinking in their grooves, and yet they seemed very human to him. He thought they supplemented one another somewhat weirdly: each was at bottom what the other seemed to be. Beneath his assumption, for purposes of revenue only, of outrageous eccentricities, Jules Max was as bourgeois as César Birotteau; beneath his assumption of the steady-going, keen, alert and conservative man of affairs, Drummond was as romantic as D'Artagnan. But Max had this advantage of Drummond: he was not his own dupe; whereas Drummond would go to his grave believing himself bored to extinction by the commonplaceness of his fantastical self…

Irresponsibly, his reverie reëmbraced the memory he had of the woman who alone held the key to his matrimonial entanglement. The business bound his imagination with an ineluctable fascination. No matter how far his thoughts wandered, they were sure to return to beat themselves to weariness against that hard-faced mystery, like moths bewitched by the light behind a clouded window-glass. It was very curious (he thought) that he could be so indifferent and so interested at one and the same time. The possibility that she might have married a second time did not disturb his pulse by the least fraction of a beat. He even contemplated the chance that she might be dead with normal equanimity. Fortunate, that he didn't love her. More fortunate still, that he loved no one else.

It occurred to him suddenly that it would take a long time for a letter to elicit information from Berlin.

Incontinently he wrote and despatched a long, extravagant cablegram to Mrs. Pettit in care of the American Embassy, little doubting that she would immediately answer.

Then he set whole-heartedly about the business of making himself presentable for the evening.

When eventually he strode into the white room, Max was already established at the famous little table in the southeast corner. Whitaker was conscious of turning heads and guarded comment as he took his place opposite the little fat man.

"Make you famous in a night," Max assured him importantly. "Don't happen to need any notoriety, do you?"

"No, thanks."

"Dine with me here three nights hand-running and they'll let you into the Syndicate by the back door without even asking your name. P.T.A.'s one grand little motto, my boy."

"P.T.A.?"

"Pays to advertise. Paste that in your hat, keep your head small enough to wear it, and don't givadam if folks do think you're an addle-pated village cut-up, and you'll have this town at heel like a good dog as long as – well," Max wound up with a short laugh, "as long as your luck lasts."

"Yours seems to be pretty healthy – no signs of going into a premature decline."

"Ah!" said Max gloomily. "Seems!"

With a morose manner he devoted himself to his soup.

"Look me over," he requested abruptly, leaning back. "I guess I'm some giddy young buck, what?"

Whitaker reviewed the striking effect Max had created by encasing his brief neck and double chin in an old-fashioned high collar and black silk stock, beneath which his important chest was protected by an elaborately frilled shirt decorated with black pearl studs. His waist was strapped in by a pique waistcoat edged with black, and there was a distinctly perceptible "invisible" stripe in the material of his evening coat and trousers.

"Dressed up like a fool," Max summed up the ensemble before his guest could speak. "Would you believe that despair could gnaw at the vitals of any one as wonderfully arrayed?"

"I would not," Whitaker asserted.

"Nobody would," said Max mournfully. "And yet, 'tis true."

"Meaning – ?"

"Oh, I'm just down in the mouth because this is Sara's last appearance." Max motioned the waiter to remove the débris of a course. "I'm as superstitious as any trouper in the profession. I've got it in my knob that she's my mascot. If she leaves me, my luck goes with her. I never had any luck until she came under my management, and I don't expect to have any after she retires. I made her, all right, but she made me, too; and it sprains my sense of good business to break up a paying combination like that."

"Nonsense," Whitaker contended warmly. "If I'm not mistaken, you were telling me this afternoon that you stand next to Belasco as a producing manager. The loss of one star isn't going to rob you of that prestige, is it?"

"You never can tell," the little man contended darkly; "I wouldn't bet thirty cents my next production would turn out a hit."

"What will it cost – your next production?"

"The show I have in mind – " Max considered a moment then announced positively: "between eighteen and twenty thousand."

"I call that big gambling."

"Gambling? Oh, that's just part of the game. I meant a side bet. If the production flivvers, I'll need that thirty cents for coffee and sinkers at Dennett's. So I won't bet… But," he volunteered brightly, "I'll sell you a half interest in the show for twelve thousand."

"Is that a threat or a promise?"

"I mean it," Max insisted seriously; "though I'll admit I'm not crazy about your accepting – yet. I've had several close calls with Sara – she's threatened to chuck the stage often before this; but every time something happened to make her change her mind. I've got a hunch maybe something will happen this time, too. If it does, I won't want any partners."

Whitaker laughed quietly and turned the conversation, accepting the manager's pseudo-confidences at their face value – that is, as pure bluff, quite consistent with the managerial pose.

They rose presently and made their way out into the crowded, blatant night of Broadway.

"We'll walk, if you don't mind," Max suggested. "It isn't far, and I'd like to get a line on the house as it goes in." He sighed affectedly. "Heaven knows when I'll see another swell audience mobbing one of my attractions!"

His companion raised no objection. This phase of the life of New York exerted an attraction for his imagination of unfailing potency. He was more willing to view it afoot than from the windows of a cab.

They pushed forward slowly through the eddying tides, elbowed by a matchless motley of humanity, deafened by its thousand tongues, dazzled to blindness by walls of living light. Whitaker experienced a sensation of participating in a royal progress: Max was plainly a man of mark; he left a wake of rippling interest. At every third step somebody hailed him, as a rule by his first name; generally he responded by a curt nod and a tightening of his teeth upon his cigar.

They turned east through Forty-sixth Street, shouldered by a denser rabble whose faces, all turned in one direction, shone livid with the glare of a gigantic electric sign, midway down the block:

THEATRE MAXSARA LAW'SFAREWELL

It was nearly half-past eight; the house had been open since seven; and still a queue ran from the gallery doors to Broadway, while still an apparently interminable string of vehicles writhed from one corner to the lobby entrance, paused to deposit its perishable freight, and streaked away to Sixth Avenue. The lobby itself was crowded to suffocation with an Occidental durbar of barbaric magnificence, the city's supreme manifestation of its religion, the ultimate rite in the worship of the pomps of the flesh.

"Look at that," Max grumbled through his cigar. "Ain't it a shame?"

"What?" Whitaker had to lift his voice to make it carry above the buzzing of the throng.

"The money I'm losing," returned the manager, vividly disgusted. "I could've filled the Metropolitan Opera House three times over!"

He swung on his heel and began to push his way out of the lobby. "Come along – no use trying to get in this way."

Whitaker followed, to be led down a blind alley between the theatre and the adjoining hotel. An illuminated sign advertised the stage door, through which, via a brief hallway, they entered the postscenium – a vast, cavernous, cluttered, shadowy and draughty place, made visible for the most part by an unnatural glow filtering from the footlights through the canvas walls of an interior set. Whitaker caught hasty glimpses of stage-hands idling about; heard a woman's voice declaiming loudly from within the set; saw a middle-aged actor waiting for his cue beside a substantial wooden door in the canvas walls; and – Max dragging him by the arm – passed through a small door into the gangway behind the boxes.

"Curtain's just up," Max told him; "Sara doesn't come on till near the middle of the act. Make yourself comfortable; I'll be back before long."

He drew aside a curtain and ushered his guest into the right-hand stage-box, then vanished. Whitaker, finding himself the sole occupant of the box, established himself in desolate grandeur as far out of sight as he could arrange his chair, without losing command of the stage. A single glance over the body of the house showed him tier upon tier of dead-white shirt-bosoms framed in black, alternating with bare gleaming shoulders and dazzling, exquisite gowns. The few empty stalls were rapidly filling up. There was a fluent movement through the aisles. A subdued hum and rustle rose from that portion of the audience which was already seated. The business going on upon the stage was receiving little attention – from Whitaker as little as from any one. He was vaguely conscious only of a scene suggesting with cruel cleverness the interior of a shabby-genteel New York flat and of a few figures peopling it, all dominated by a heavy-limbed, harsh-voiced termagant. That to which he was most sensitive was a purely psychological feeling of suspense and excitement, a semi-hysterical, high-strung, emotional state which he knew he shared with the audience, its source in fact. The opening scene in the development of the drama interested the gathering little or not at all; it was hanging in suspense upon the unfolding of some extraordinary development, something unprecedented and extraneous, foreign to the play.

Was it due simply to the fact that all these people were present at the last public appearance – as advertised – of a star of unusual popularity? Whitaker wondered. Or was there something else in their minds, something deeper and more profoundly significant?

Max slipped quietly into the box and handed his guest a programme. "Better get over here," he suggested in a hoarse whisper, indicating a chair near the rail. "You may never have another chance to see the greatest living actress."

Whitaker thanked him and adopted the suggestion, albeit with reluctance. The manager remained standing for a moment, quick eyes ranging over the house. By this time the aisles were all clear, the rows of seats presenting an almost unbroken array of upturned faces.

Max combined a nod denoting satisfaction with a slight frown.

"Wonderful house," he whispered, sitting down behind Whitaker. "Drummond hasn't shown up yet, though."

"That so?" Whitaker returned over his shoulder.

"Yes; it's funny; never knew him to be so late. He always has the aisle seat, fourth row, centre. But he'll be along presently."

Whitaker noted that the designated stall was vacant, then tried to fix his attention upon the stage; but without much success; after a few moments he became aware that he had missed something important; the scene was meaningless to him, lacking what had gone before.

He glanced idly at his programme, indifferently absorbing the information that "Jules Max has the honour to present Miss Sara Law in her first and greatest success entitled Joan Thursday – a play in three acts – "

The audience stirred expectantly; a movement ran through it like the movement of waters, murmurous, upon a shore. Whitaker's gaze was drawn to the stage as if by an implacable force. Max shifted on the chair behind him and said something indistinguishable, in an unnatural tone.

A woman had come upon the stage, suddenly and tempestuously, banging a door behind her. The audience got the barest glimpse of her profile as, pausing momentarily, she eyed the other actors. Then, without speaking, she turned and walked up-stage, her back to the footlights.

Applause broke out like a thunderclap, pealing heavily through the big auditorium, but the actress showed no consciousness of it. She was standing before a cheap mirror, removing her hat, arranging her hair with the typical, unconscious gestures of a weary shop-girl; she was acting – living the scene, with no time to waste in pandering to her popularity by bows and set smiles; she remained before the glass, prolonging the business, until the applause subsided.

Whitaker received an impression as of a tremendous force at work across the footlights. The woman diffused an effect as of a terrible and boundless energy under positive control. She was not merely an actress, not even merely a great actress; she was the very soul of the drama of to-day.

Beyond this he knew in his heart that she was his wife. Sara Law was the woman he had married in that sleepy Connecticut town, six years before that night. He had not yet seen her face clearly, but he knew. To find himself mistaken would have shaken the foundations of his understanding.

Under cover of the applause, he turned to Max.

"Who is that? What is her name?"

"The divine Sara," Max answered, his eyes shining.

"I mean, what is her name off the stage, in private life?"

"The same," Max nodded with conviction; "Sara Law's the only name she's ever worn in my acquaintance with her."

At that moment, the applause having subsided to such an extent that it was possible for her to make herself heard, the actress swung round from the mirror and addressed one of the other players. Her voice was clear, strong and vibrant, yet sweet; but Whitaker paid no heed to the lines she spoke. He was staring, fascinated, at her face.

Sight of it set the seal of certainty upon conviction: she was one with Mary Ladislas. He had forgotten her so completely in the lapse of years as to have been unable to recall her features and colouring, yet he had needed only to see to recognize her beyond any possibility of doubt. Those big, intensely burning eyes, that drawn and pallid face, the quick, nervous movements of her thin white hands, the slenderness of her tall, awkward, immature figure – in every line and contour, in every gesture and inflection, she reproduced the Mary Ladislas whom he had married.

And yet … Max was whispering over his shoulder:

"Wonderful make-up – what?"

"Make-up!" Whitaker retorted. "She's not made up – she's herself to the last detail."

Amusement glimmered in the manager's round little eyes: "You don't know her. Wait till you get a pipe at her off the stage." Then he checked the reply that was shaping on Whitaker's lips, with a warning lift of his hand and brows: "Ssh! Catch this, now. She's a wonder in this scene."

The superb actress behind the counterfeit of the hunted and hungry shop-girl was holding spell-bound with her inevitable witchery the most sophisticated audience in the world; like wheat in a windstorm it swayed to the modulations of her marvellous voice as it ran through a passage-at-arms with the termagant. Suddenly ceasing to speak, she turned down to a chair near the footlights, followed by a torrent of shrill vituperation under the lash of which she quivered like a whipped thoroughbred.

Abruptly, pausing with her hands on the back of the chair, there came a change. The actress had glanced across the footlights; Whitaker could not but follow the direction of her gaze; the eyes of both focussed for a brief instant on the empty aisle-seat in the fourth row. A shade of additional pallor showed on the woman's face. She looked quickly, questioningly, toward the box of her manager.

Seated as he was so near the stage, Whitaker's face stood out in rugged relief, illumined by the glow reflected from the footlights. It was inevitable that she should see him. Her eyes fastened, dilating, upon his. The scene faltered perceptibly. She stood transfixed…

In the hush Max cried impatiently: "What the devil!" The words broke the spell of amazement upon the actress. In a twinkling the pitiful counterfeit of the shop-girl was rent and torn away; it hung only in shreds and tatters upon an individuality wholly strange to Whitaker: a larger, stronger woman seemed to have started out of the mask.

She turned, calling imperatively into the wings: "Ring down!"

Followed a pause of dumb amazement. In all the house, during the space of thirty pulse-beats, no one moved. Then Max rapped out an oath and slipped like quicksilver from the box.

Simultaneously the woman's foot stamped an echo from the boards.

"Ring down!" she cried. "Do you hear? Ring down!"

With a rush the curtain descended as pandemonium broke out on both sides of it.

VII

THE LATE EXTRA

Impulsively Whitaker got up to follow Max, then hesitated and sank back in doubt, his head awhirl. He was for the time being shocked out of all capacity for clear reasoning or right thinking. Uppermost in his consciousness he had a half-formed notion that it wouldn't help matters if he were to force himself in upon the crisis behind the scenes.

Beyond all question his wife had recognized in him the man whom she had been given every reason to believe dead: a discovery so unnerving as to render her temporarily unable to continue. But if theatrical precedent were a reliable guide, she would presently pull herself together and go on; people of the stage seldom forget that their first duty is to the audience. If he sat tight and waited, all might yet be well – as well as any such hideous coil could be hoped ever to be…

As has been indicated, he arrived at his conclusion through no such detailed argument; his mind leaped to it, and he rested upon it while still beset by a half-score of tormenting considerations.

This, then, explained Drummond's reluctance to have him bidden to the supper party; whatever ultimate course of action he planned to pursue, Drummond had been unwilling, perhaps pardonably so, to have his romance overthrown and altogether shattered in a single day.

And Drummond, too, must have known who Sara Law was, even while denying knowledge of the existence of Mary Ladislas Whitaker. He had lied, lied desperately, doubtless meaning to encompass a marriage before Whitaker could find his wife, and so furnish him with every reason that could influence an honourable man to disappear a second time.

Herein, moreover, lay the reason for the lawyer's failure to occupy his stall on that farewell night. It was just possible that Whitaker would not recognize his wife; and vice versa; but it was a chance that Drummond hadn't the courage to face. Even so, he might have hidden himself somewhere in the house, waiting and watching to see what would happen.

On the other hand, Max to a certainty was ignorant of the relationship between his star and his old-time friend, just as he must have been ignorant of her identity with the one-time Mary Ladislas. For that matter, Whitaker had to admit that, damning as was the evidence to controvert the theory, Drummond might be just as much in the dark as Max was. There was always the chance that the girl had kept her secret to herself, inviolate, informing neither her manager nor the man she had covenanted to wed. Drummond's absence from the house might be due to any one of a hundred reasons other than that to which Whitaker inclined to assign it. It was only fair to suspend judgment. In the meantime…

The audience was getting beyond control. The clamour of comment and questioning which had broken loose when the curtain fell was waxing and gaining a high querulous note of impatience. In the gallery the gods were beginning to testify to their normal intolerance with shrill whistles, cat-calls, sporadic bursts of hand-clapping and a steady, sinister rumble of stamping feet. In the orchestra and dress-circle people were moving about restlessly and talking at the top of their voices in order to make themselves heard above the growing din. Had there been music to fill the interval, they might have been more calm; but Max had fallen in with the theatrical dernier cri and had eliminated orchestras from his houses, employing only a peal of gongs to insure silence and attention before each curtain.

Abruptly Max himself appeared at one side of the proscenium arch. It was plain to those nearest the stage that he was seriously disturbed. There was a noticeable hesitancy in his manner, a pathetic frenzy in his habitually mild and lustrous eyes. Advancing halfway to the middle of the apron, he paused, begging attention with a pudgy hand. It was a full minute before the gallery would let him be heard.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he announced plaintively, "I much regret to inform you that Miss Law has suffered a severe nervous shock" – his gaze wandered in perplexed inquiry toward the right-hand stage-box, then was hastily averted – "and will not be able to continue for a few moments. If you will kindly grant us your patience for a very few minutes…" He backed precipitately from view, hounded by mocking applause.

A lull fell, but only temporarily. As the minutes lengthened, the gallery grew more and more obstreperous and turbulent. Wave upon wave of sound swept through the auditorium to break, roaring, against the obdurate curtain. When eventually a second figure appeared before the footlights, the audience seemed to understand that Max dared not show himself again, and why. It was with difficulty that the man – evidently the stage-manager – contrived to make himself disconnectedly audible.

"Ladies and …" he shouted, sweat beading his perturbed forehead … "regret … impossible to continue … money … box-office…"

An angry howl drowned him out. He retreated at accelerated discretion.

Whitaker, slipping through the stage-door behind the boxes, ran into the last speaker standing beside the first entrance, heatedly explaining to any one who would listen the utter futility of offering box-office prices in return for seat checks which in the majority of instances had cost their holders top-notch speculator prices.

"They'll wreck the theatre," he shouted excitedly, mopping his brow with his coat sleeve, "and damned if I blame 'em! What t'ell'd she wana pull a raw one like this for?"

Whitaker caught his arm in a grasp compelling attention.

"Where's Miss Law?" he asked.

"You tell me and I'll make you a handsome present," retorted the man.

"What's happened to her? Can't you find her?"

"I dunno – go ask Max."

"Where is he?"

"You can search me; last I saw of him he was tearing the star dressin'-room up by the roots."

Whitaker hurried on just in time to see Max disappearing in the direction of the stage-door, at which point he caught up with him, and from the manager's disjointed catechism of the doorkeeper garnered the information that the star had hurried out of the building while Max was making his announcement before the curtain.

Max swung angrily upon Whitaker.

"Oh, it's you, is it? Perhaps you can explain what this means? She was looking straight at you when she dried up! I saw her – "

"Perhaps you'd better find Miss Law and ask her," Whitaker interrupted. "Have you any idea where she's gone?"

"Home, probably," Max snapped in return.

"Where's that?"

"Fifty-seventh Street – house of her own – just bought it."

"Come on, then." Passing his arm through the manager's, Whitaker drew him out into the alley. "We'll get a taxi before this mob – "

"But, look here – what business've you got mixing in?"

"Ask Miss Law," said Whitaker, shortly. It had been on the tip of his tongue to tell the man flatly: "I'm her husband." But he retained wit enough to deny himself the satisfaction of this shattering rejoinder. "I know her," he added; "that's enough for the present."

"If you knew her all the time, why didn't you say so?" Max expostulated with passion.

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