FullReads

He found a play at last. A comedy, with music. It was frankly built for Mizzi. He called Wallie Ascher into his office.

“I wouldn’t try her out here for a million. New York’s too fly. Some little thing might be wrong–you know how they are. And all the rest would go for nothing. The kindest audience in the world–when they like you. And the cruelest when they don’t. We’ll go on the road for two weeks. Then we’ll open at the Blackstone in Chicago. I think this girl has got more real genius than any woman since–since Bernhardt in her prime. Five years from now she won’t be singing. She’ll be acting. And it’ll be acting.”

“Aren’t you forcing things just a little?” asked Wallie, coolly.

“Oh, no. No. Anyway, it’s just a try-out. By the way, Wallie, I’ll probably be gone almost a month. If things go pretty well in Chicago I’ll run over to French Lick for eight or ten days and see if I can’t get a little of this stiffness out of my old bones. Will you do something for me?”

“Sure.”

“Pack a few clothes and go up to my place and live there, will you? The Jap stays on, anyway. The last time I left it alone things went wrong. You’ll be doing me a favour. Take it and play the piano, and have your friends in, and boss the Jap around. He’s stuck on you, anyway. Says he likes to hear you play.”

He stayed away six weeks. And any one who knows him knows what hardship that was. He loved New York, and his own place, and his comfort, and his books; and hotel food gave him hideous indigestion.

Mizzi’s first appearance was a moderate success. It was nothing like the sensation of her later efforts. She wasn’t ready, and Hahn knew it. Mizzi and her middle-aged woman companion were installed at the Blackstone Hotel, which is just next door to the Blackstone Theatre, as any one is aware who knows Chicago. She was advertised as the Polish comedienne, Mizzi Markis, and the announcements hinted at her royal though remote ancestry. And on the night the play opened, as Mizzi stepped from the entrance of her hotel on her way to the stage door, just forty or fifty feet away, there she saw stretched on the pavement a scarlet path of soft-grained carpet for her feet to tread. From the steps of the hotel to the stage door of the theatre, there it lay, a rosy line of splendour.

The newspapers played it up as a publicity stunt. Every night, while the play lasted, the carpet was there. It was rolled up when the stage door closed upon her. It was unrolled and spread again when she came out after the performance. Hahn never forgot her face when she first saw it, and realized its significance. The look was there on the second night, and on the third, but after that it faded, vanished, and never came again. Mizzi had tasted of the golden fruit and found it dry and profitless, without nourishment or sweetness.

The show closed in the midst of a fairly good run. It closed abruptly, without warning. Together they came back to New York. Just outside New York Hahn knocked at the door of Mizzi’s drawing room and stuck his round, ugly face in at the opening.

“Let’s surprise Wallie,” he said.

“Yes,” said Mizzi, listlessly.

“He doesn’t know the show’s closed. We’ll take a chance on his being home for dinner. Unless you’re too tired.”

“I’m not tired.”

The Jap admitted them, and Hahn cut off his staccato exclamations with a quick and smothering hand. They tiptoed into the big, gracious, lamp-lighted room.

Wallie was seated at the piano. He had on a silk dressing gown with a purple cord. One of those dressing gowns you see in the haberdashers’ windows, and wonder who buys them. He looked very tall in it, and rather distinguished, but not quite happy. He was playing as they came in. They said, “Boo!” or something idiotic like that. He stood up. And his face!