One other man in addition to the raucous, self-advertising stage director, Jackrack, commonly called "Jack-in-office," showed distinct signs of life--a short, overdressed, perky person with piano fingers and baldish head much too big for his body, who flitted about among the chorus girls, followed by a pale, drab woman with pins, and touched their dresses and sniggered and made remarks with a certain touch of literary excellence in a slightly guttural voice. This was Poppy Shemalitz, the frock expert, the man milliner of the firm, who was required to make bricks out of straw, or as he frequently said to the friends of his "bosom," "make fifteen dollars look like fifty." Self-preservation and a sense of humor encouraged him through the abusive days of a dog's life.
Sitting in the last row of the orchestra, wearing the expression of interest and astonishment of a man who had fallen suddenly into another world, was Martin. He had been there since eight o'clock. For over six hours he had watched banality emerge from chaos and had listened to the blasphemy and insults of Jackrack. He would have continued to watch and listen until daylight peered upbraidingly through the chinks in the exit doors but for the sudden appearance of Susie Capper, dressed for the street.
"Hello, Tootles! But you're not through, are you?"
"Absobloominlootely," she said emphatically.
"I thought you said your best bit was in the second act?"
"'Was' is right. Come on outer here. I can't stand the place a minute longer. It'll give me apoplexy."
Martin followed her into the foyer. The tragic rage on the girl's little, pretty, usually good-natured face worried him. He knew that she had looked forward to this production to make her name on Broadway.
"My dear Tootles, what's happened?"
She turned to him and clutched his arm. Tears welled up into her eyes, and her red lips began to tremble. "What did I look like?" she demanded.
"Splendid!"
"Didn't I get every ounce of comedy out of my two scenes in Act One?"
"Every ounce."
"I know I did. Even the stage hands laughed, and if you can do that there's no argument. And didn't my number go over fine? Wasn't it the best thing in the act? I don't care what you say. I know it was. Even the orchestra wanted it over again."
"But it was," said Martin, "and I heard one of the authors say that it would be the hit of the piece."
"Oh, Martin, I've been sweating blood for this chance for five years, and I'm not going to get it. I'm not going to get it. I wish I was dead." She put her arms against the wall and her face down on her arms and burst into an agony of tears.
Martin was moved. This plucky, struggling, hardworking atom of a remorseless world deserved a little luck for a change. Hitherto it had eluded her eager hands, although she had paid for it in advance with something more than blood and energy. "Dear old Tootles," he said, "what's happened? Try and tell me what's happened? I don't understand."
"You don't understand, because you don't know the tricks of this rotten theater. For eleven weeks I've been rehearsing. For eleven weeks--time enough to produce a couple of Shakespeare's bally plays in Latin,--I've put up with the brow-beating of that mad dog Jackrack. For eleven weeks, without touching one dirty little Mosely cent, I've worked at my part and numbers, morning, noon and night; and now, on the edge of production, he cuts me out and puts in a simpering cow with a fifteen-thousand-dollar necklace and a snapping little Pekinese to oblige one of his angels, and I'm reduced to the chorus. I wish I was dead, I tell you--I wish I was dead and buried and at peace. I wish I could creep home and get into bed and never see another day of this cruel life. Oh, I'm just whipped and broke and out. Take me away, take me away, Martin. I'm through."
Martin put his arm round the slight, shaking form, led her to one of the doors and out into a narrow passage that ran up into the deserted street. To have gone down into the stalls and hit that oily martinet in the mouth would have been to lay himself open to a charge of cruelty to animals. He was so puny and fat and soft. Poor little Tootles, who had had a tardy and elusive recognition torn from her grasp! It was a tragedy.
It was not much more than a stone's-throw from the theater to the rabbit warren in West Forty-sixth Street, but Martin gave a shout at a prowling taxi. Not even policemen and newspaper boys and street cleaners must see this girl as she was then, in a collapse of smashed hopes, sobbing dreadfully, completely broken down. It wasn't fair. In all that city of courageous under-dogs and fate-fighters, there was not one who pretended to careless contentment with a chin so high as Tootles. He half carried her into the cab, trying with a queer blundering sympathy to soothe and quiet her. And he had almost succeeded by the time they reached the brownstone house of sitters, bedrooms and baths, gas stoves, cubby-holes, the persistent reek of onions, cigarettes and hot cheese. The hysteria of the artistic temperament, or the natural exaggeration of an artificial life, had worn itself out for the time being. Rather pathetic little sobs had taken its place, it was with a face streaked with the black stuff from her eyelashes that Tootles turned quickly to Martin at the foot of the narrow, dirty staircase.
"Let's go up quiet," she said. "If any of the others are about, I don't want 'em to know tonight. See?"
"I see," said Martin.
And it was good to watch the way in which she took hold of herself with a grip of iron, scrubbed her face with his handkerchief, dabbed it thickly with powder from a small silver box, threw back her head and went up two stairs at a time. On the second floor there was a cackle of laughter, but doors were shut. On the third all was quiet. But on the fourth the tall, thin, Raphael-headed man was drunk again, arguing thickly in the usual cloud of smoke, which drifted sullenly into the passage through the open door.
With deft fingers Tootles used her latchkey, and they slipped into the apartment like thieves. And then Martin took the pins out of her little once-white hat, drew her coat off, picked her up as if she were a child and put her on the sofa.
"There you are, Tootles," he said, without aggressive cheerfulness, but still cheerful. "You lie there, young 'un, and I'll get you something to eat. It's nearly a day since you saw food."
And after a little while, humanized by the honest kindness of this obvious man, she sat up and leaned on an elbow and watched him through the gap in the curtains that hid her domestic arrangements. He was scrambling some eggs. He had made a pile of chicken sandwiches and laid the table. He had put some flowers that he had brought for her earlier in the evening in the middle of it, stuck into an empty milk bottle. In her excitement and joy about the play, she had forgotten to put them in water. They were distinctly sad.
"Me word!" she said to herself, through the aftermath of her emotion. "That's some boy. Gee, that's some good boy." Even her thoughts were conducted in a mixture of Brixton and Broadway.
"Now, then," he said, "all ready, marm," and put his handiwork in what he hoped was an appetizing manner on the table. The hot eggs were on a cold plate, but did that really matter?
Not to Tootles, who was glad to get anything, anyhow. That room was the Ritz Hotel in comparison with the slatterly tenement in which she had won through the first unsoaped years of a sordid life. And Martin--well, Martin was something out of a fairy tale.
Between them they made a clean sweep of everything, falling back finally on a huge round box of candies contributed the previous day by Martin.
They made short work of several bottles of beer, also contributed by Martin. He knew that Tootles was not paid a penny during rehearsals. She laughed several times and cracked one or two feeble jokes--poor little soul with the swollen eyes and powder-dabbed face! Her bobbed hair glistened under the light like the dome of the Palace of Cooch Behar under the Indian sun.
"Boy," she said presently, putting her hand on his knees and closing her tired eyes, "where's that magic carpet? If I could sit on it with you and be taken to where the air's clean and the trees are whisperin' and all the young things hoppin' about--I'd give twenty- five years of me life, s'elp me Bob, I would."
"Would you, Tootles?" A sudden thought struck Martin. Make use of that house in the country, make use of it, lying idle and neglected!
"Oh," she said, "to get away from all this for a bit--to shake Broadway and grease paint and slang and electric light, if only for a week. I'm fed up, boy. I'm all out, like an empty gasoline tin. I want to see something clean and sweet."
Martin had made up his mind. Look at that poor little bruised soul, as much in need of water as those sad flowers in the milk bottle. "Tootles," he said, "pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, and be ready for me in the morning."
"What d'yer mean, boy?"
"What I say. At eleven o'clock to-morrow--to-day, I'll have a car here and drive you away to woods and birds and all clean things. I'll give you a holiday in a big cathedral, and you shall lie and listen to God's own choir."
"Go on--ye're pullin' me leg!"
She waved her hand to stop him. It was all too good to joke about.
"No, I'm not. I've got a house away in the country. It was my father's. We shall both be proud to welcome you there, Tootles."
She sprang up, put her hands on his face and tilted it back and looked into his eyes. It was true! It was true! She saw it there. And she kissed him and gave a great sobbing sigh and went into her bedroom and began to undress. Was there anything like life, after all?
Martin cleared the table and drew the curtains over the domestic arrangements. He didn't like domestic arrangements. Then he sat down and lighted a cigarette. His head was all blurred with sleep.
And presently a tired voice, called "Boy!" and he went in. The all- too-golden head was deep into the pillow and long lashes made fans on that powdered face.
"Where did you pinch the magic carpet?" she asked, and smiled, and fell into sleep as a stone disappears into water.
As Martin drew the clothes over her thinly clad shoulder, something touched him. It was like a tap on the heart. Before he knew what he was doing, he had turned out the light, gone into the sitting room, the passage, down the stairs and into the silent street. At top speed he ran into Sixth Avenue, yelled to a cab that was slipping along the trolley lines and told the driver to go to East Sixty- seventh Street for all that he was worth.
Joan wanted him.
Joan!
Joan heard the cab drive up and stop, heard Martin sing out "That's all right," open and shut the front door and mount the stairs; heard him go quickly to her room and knock.
She went out and called "Marty, Marty," and stood on the threshold of his dressing room, smiling a welcome. She was glad, beyond words glad, and surprised. There had seemed to be no chance of seeing him that morning.
Martin came along the passage with his characteristic light tread and drew up short. He looked anxious.
"You wanted me?" he said.
And Joan held out her hand. "I did and do, Marty. But how did you guess?"
"I didn't guess; I knew." And he held her hand nervously.
She looked younger and sweeter than ever in her blue silk dressing gown and shorter in her heelless slippers. What a kid she was, after all, he thought.
"How amazing!" she said. "I wonder how?"
He shook his head. "I dunno--just as I did the first time, when I tore through the woods and found you on the hill."
"Isn't that wonderful! Do you suppose I shall always be able to get you when I want you very much?"
"Yes, always."
"Why?"
She had gone back into the dressing room. The light was on her face. Her usual expression of elfish impertinence was not there. She was the girl of the stolen meetings once more, the girl whose eyes reflected the open beauty of what Martin had called the big cathedral. For all that, she was the girl who had hurt him to the soul, shown him her door, played that trick upon him at the Ritz and sent him adrift full of the spirit of "Who cares?" which was her fetish. It was in his heart to say: "Because I adore you! Because I am so much yours that you have only to think my name for me to hear it across the world as if you had shouted it through a giant megaphone! Because whatever I do and whatever you do, I shall love you!" But she had hurt him twice. She had cut him to the very core. He couldn't forget. He was too proud to lay himself open to yet another of her laughing snubs.
So he shook his head again. "I dunno," he said. "It's like that. It's something that can't be explained."
She sat on the arm of the chair with her hands round a knee. A little of her pink ankle showed. The pipe that she had dropped when his voice had come up from the street lay on the floor.
His answer had disappointed her; she didn't quite know why. The old Marty would have been franker and more spontaneous. The old Marty might have made her laugh with his boyish ingenuousness, but he would have warmed her and made her feel delightfully vain. Could it be that she was responsible for this new Marty? Was Alice too terribly right when she had talked about armor turning into broadcloth because of her selfish desire to remain a kid a little longer? She was afraid to ask him where he was when he had felt that she wanted him, and she hated herself for that.
There was a short silence.
These two young things had lost the complete confidence that had been theirs before they had come to that great town. What a pity!
"Well," he asked, standing straight like a man ready to take orders, "why did you call?"
And then an overwhelming shyness seized her. It had seemed easy enough in thought to tell Martin that she was ready to cross the bridge and be, as Alice had called it, honest, and as Gilbert had said, to play the game. But it was far from easy when he stood in the middle of the room in the glare of the light, with something all about him that froze her words and made her self-conscious and timid. And yet a clear, unmistakable voice urged her to have courage and make her confession, say that she was sorry for having been a feather-brained little fool and ask him to forgive--to win him back, if--if she hadn't already lost him.
