FullReads

“Oh, no, Mr. Potter!” the stage-manager protested. “Not that at all! She’s very sorry to go. She asked me to tell you that she felt she was giving up a great honour, and to thank you for all your kindness to her.”

“Go on!” Potter sternly bade him. “Why does she wish to leave my company?”

“Why, it seems she’s very much in love with her husband, sir, Vorley Surbilt–“

“It doesn’t seem possible,” said Potter, shaking his head. “I know him, and it sounds like something you’re making up as you go along, Packer.”

“Indeed, I’m not, Mr. Potter!” the stage-manager cried, in simple distress. “I wouldn’t know how.”

“Go on!”

“Well, sir, it seems Vorly Surbilt was to go out with Mrs. Romaley, and it seems that when Miss Lyston left rehearsal she drove around till she found him–“

“Ah! I knew she was fooling me! I knew she wasn’t sick! Went to drive with her husband, and I pay the cab bill!”

“No, no, sir! I forgot to tell you; she wouldn’t let me pay it. She took him home and put him to bed–and from what I heard on Broadway it was time somebody did! It seems they’d had an offer to go into a vaudeville piece together, and after she got him to bed she telephoned the vaudeville man, and had him bring up a contract, and they signed it, though she had to guide Vorley’s hand for him. Anyway, he’s signed up all right, and so is she. That’s why she was so anxious about fixing it up with us. I told her it would be all right.”

Potter relapsed into his chair in an attitude of gloom. “So they’ve begun to leave Talbot Potter’s company!” he said, nodding his head with bitter melancholy. “For vaudeville! I’d better go to farming at once; I often think of it. What sort of an act is it that Miss Lyston prefers to remaining with me? Acrobatic?”

“It’s a little play,” said Packer. “It’s from the Grand Guignol.”

“French!” Potter this simply as an added insult on the part of Miss Lyston. “French!”

“They say it’s a wonderful little thing,” said Packer innocently, but it was as if he had run a needle into his sensitive employer. Potter instantly sprang up again with a cry of pain.

“Of course it’s wonderful! It’s French; everything French is wonderful, magnificent, Supreme! Everything French is HOLY! Good God, Packer! You’ll be telling me what my ‘technique’ ought to be, next!”

He hurled himself again into the chair and moaned, then in a dismal voice inquired; “Miss Lyston struck you as feeling that her condition in life was distinctly improved by this ascent into vaudeville, didn’t she?”

“Oh, not at all, Mr. Potter! But, of course,” Packer explained deprecatingly, “she’s pleased to have Vorly where she can keep an eye on him. She said that though she was all broken up about leaving the company, she expected to be very happy in looking after him. You see, sir, it’s the first time in all their married life they’ve had a chance to be together except one summer when neither of ’em could get a stock engagement.”

Potter made no reply but to shake his head despondently, and Packer sat silent in deference, as if waiting to be questioned further. It was the playwright who presently filled the void. “Why haven’t Mr. and Mrs. Surbilt gone into the same companies, if they care to be together? I should think they’d have made it a point to get engagements in the same ones.”

Packer looked disturbed. “It’s not done much,” he said.

“Besides, Vorly Surbilt plays leading parts with women stars,” old Tinker volunteered. “You see, naturally, it wouldn’t do at all.”

“Jealousy, you mean?”

“Not necessarily the kind you’re thinking of. But it just doesn’t do.”

“Some managers will allow married couples in their companies,” Potter said, adding emphatically: “I won’t! I never have and I never will! Never! There’s just one thing every soul in my support has got to keep working for, and that is a high-tension performance every night in the year. If married people are in love with each other, they’re going to think more about that than about the fact that they’re working for me. If they aren’t in love with each other, there’s the devil to pay. I’d let the best man or woman in the profession go–and they could go to vaudeville, for all I cared!–if I had to keep their wives or husbands travelling with us. I won’t have ’em! My soul! I don’t marry, do I?”