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Harlequin And Columbine
by
“Always–always at top pitch, that is, and always unexpected. You’ll see as you get to know him. You won’t know him any better than you do now, Mr. Canby; you’ll only know him more. I’ve been with him for four years–stage-manager–hired man–maid-of-all-work–order his meals for him in hotels–and I guess old Tinker and I know him as well as anybody does, but it’s a mighty big job to handle him just right. It keeps us hopping, but that’s bread and butter. Not much bread and butter anywhere these days unless you do hop! We all have to hop for somebody!” He chuckled again, and then unexpectedly became so serious he was almost truculent. “And I tell you, Mr. Canby,” he cried, “by George! I’d sooner hop for Talbot Potter than for any other man that ever walked the earth!”
He took a yellow walking-stick from under his arm, thrust the manuscript Potter had given him into the pocket of his light overcoat, and bade his companion good-night with a genial flourish of the stick. “Subway to Brooklyn for mine. Your play will go, all right; don’t worry about that, Mr. Canby. Good-night and good luck, Mr. Canby.”
Canby went the other way, marvelling.
It was eleven; and for half an hour the theatres had been releasing their audiences to the streets;–the sidewalks were bobbing and fluttering; automobiles cometed by bleating peevishly. Suddenly, through the window of a limousine, brilliantly lighted within, Canby saw the face of Wanda Malone, laughing, and embowered in white furs. He stopped, startled; then he realized that Wanda Malone’s hair was not red. The girl in the limousine had red hair, and was altogether unlike Wanda Malone in feature and expression.
He walked on angrily.
Immediately a slender girl, prettily dressed, passed him. She clung charmingly to the arm of a big boy; and to Canby’s first glance she was Wanda Malone. Wrenching his eyes from her, he saw Wanda Malone across the street getting into a taxicab, and then he stumbled out of the way of a Wanda Malone who almost walked into him. Wherever there was a graceful gesture or turn of the head, there was Wanda Malone.
He wheeled, and walked back toward Broadway, and thought he caught a glimpse of Packer going into a crowded drug-store near the corner. The man he took to be Packer lifted his hat and spoke to a girl who was sitting at a table and drinking soda-water, but when she looked up and seemed to be Wanda Malone with a blue veil down to her nose, Canby turned on his heel, face-about, and headed violently for home.
When he reached quieter streets his gait slackened, and he walked slowly, lost in deep reverie. By and by he came to a halt, and stood still for several minutes without knowing it. Slowly he came out of the trance, wondering where he was. Then he realized that his staring eyes had halted him automatically; and as they finally conveyed their information to his conscious mind, he perceived that he was standing directly in front of a saloon, and glaring at the sign upon the window:
ALES WINES LIQUORS AND CIGARS
TIM MALONE
At that, somewhere in his inside, he cried out, in a kind of anguish: “Isn’t there anything–anywhere–any more–except Wanda Malone!”
IX
“Second act, ladies and gentlemen!” cried Packer, at precisely ten o’clock the next morning.
About a dozen actors were chatting in small groups upon the stage; three or four paced singly, muttering and mildly gesticulating, with the fretful preoccupation of people trying to remember; two or three, seated, bent over their typewritten “sides,” studying intently; and a few, invisible from the auditorium, were scattered about the rearward rooms and passageways. Talbot Potter, himself, was nowhere to be seen, and, what was even more important to one tumultuously beating heart “in front,” neither was Wanda Malone. Mr. Stewart Canby in a silvery new suit, wearing a white border to his waistcoat collar and other decorations proper to a new playwright, sat in the centre of the front row of the orchestra. Yesterday he had taken a seat about nine rows back.