Читать книгу Held to Answer - Peter Clark MacFarlane - Страница 6

CHAPTER VII

THE HIGH BID

For an hour and a half at dinner, and for another hour sunk in the depths of a great leather chair in the lounging room of the Pacific Union Club, William N. Scofield had searched the soul of Hampstead, who had not only been led to talk rapturously of his stage ambition but to reveal the metes and bounds of his interest in and knowledge upon many subjects.

"Gad, but you know a lot," ejaculated Scofield, with unfeigned amazement. "Where'd you get it all?"

"I have read a good deal," confessed John, trying to appear much more modest than in his heart he felt; for it was a part of Scofield's whim or of his campaign to flatter him enormously, and he had succeeded.

But for a time now, the Traffic Manager was silent, puffing meditatively at his cigar and staring at the ceiling through loafing rings of smoke in which, as if they were floating letters, he seemed to read the transcript of his thought,—the thought that if, beside employing this enormously able young man, he could also enlist in behalf of the railroad as an institution his capacity for fanatical devotion to an ideal, the prize was one worth bidding high for, high enough to win!

"People like you, Hampstead," Scofield broke out presently, and in his most ingratiating vein. "We all felt that down at the office. You did a difficult thing without making an enemy of one of us. Therefore what your personality can do interests me even more than what you know."

The railroad man interrupted his speech to shoot an exploratory glance from under veiling lids and went on calculatingly:

"The railroad business is going to change. Now we tell the Railroad Commission what to do. The time is coming when it will tell us what to do, and we will do it. But the public attitude toward the railroad has also got to change." Scofield's tone had taken on new emphasis.

"You would make the type of executive that could change it! The successful transportation man of the future has got to be a sort of ambassador of the railroad to the people, and the man who best serves the people tributary to his road will best serve his stockholders."

"Do you know who gave me that point?" the Traffic Manager asked, turning from the vision he was contemplating in the clouds of smoke over his head and looking sharply at Hampstead.

"Naturally not," admitted the younger man.

"Bob Mitchell," said Scofield, and paused while his thin lips coaxed persistently at the cigar which appeared to have gone out. "Bob Mitchell! And I reviled him for his sagacity, told him he was an altruistic fool. But after a while I saw he was right. Then I tried to get him for us, but I didn't succeed. He wasn't as sensible as I hope you will be. Besides, I am going to offer you more than I offered him."

More than he offered Mitchell! There was a sudden jolt somewhere in John's breast, and he wet a dry, parched lip, but did not speak.

"Yes," breathed Scofield softly, almost as if he had been interrupted. "I am going to offer you more. Hampstead!" and the voice was raised quickly, "I want you to be our General Freight Agent!"

If Scofield had leaned over and kissed him, John would not have been more surprised, nor have known less what to say.

"General Freight Agent!" he croaked hoarsely.

"Yes," affirmed the other coolly, almost icily, while he flicked the ashes from his cigar and enjoyed the sensation his proposal had produced.

"At my age?" stumbled John, still groping, but trying to see himself in the position.

"Why, yes," reassured Scofield suavely. "You tell me you're past twenty-five. Paul Morton was Assistant General Freight Agent of the Burlington at twenty-one. Look where he is to-day—in the cabinet of the President of the United States. The salary," Scofield added casually, by way of finally clinching the argument, "will be twelve thousand a year."

Hampstead's lips silently formed the words—twelve thousand! But he did not utter them. They dazed him. They rushed him headlong. They made rejection impossible. No man had a right to throw away such a fortune as that. One thousand dollars a month! He felt himself yielding, helplessly, irresistibly.

And then, suddenly as the photographer's bomb lights up every lineament of every face in the darkened room, for one single moment Hampstead saw things clearly and in their true proportions. This Schofield was not a man. He was a grinning devil, with horns and a barb on his tail. He was tempting, trapping, buying him. He would not be bought. "No, Mrs. Mitchell, I would not sell myself," he had said, not, however, meaning at all what that lady meant.

Leaning back stubbornly, his fist smiting heavy blows upon the cushioned arm of the chair, John muttered through clenched teeth:

"No! No! No—I'll never do it. No, Mr. Scofield, I cannot accept your offer. I thank you for it; but I cannot accept it. The stage is to be the place of my achievement. Why, why, Mr. Scofield, the wonderfully flattering offer you have made to me to-night has come because of the training incident to the cultivation of a stage ambition. If it can bring me so much with so little devotion, is it not reasonable to suppose that it will bring me more—very much more? I will not be so disloyal to that which has been so generous with me."

Scofield's countenance had suddenly and impressively changed. It became a mask of stone, a sphinx-like thing, the brow a knot, the nose a beak, the mouth a stitched scar. The beady gleam of the eyes from beneath drawn lids was sinister. This fanatical young fool was escaping him, and Scofield did not like any one to escape him.

But the young man refused to be swerved by frowns.

"Not to manage railroads," he declared enthusiastically, "but to mould human character is to be my life-work; to depict the virtues and the vices, the weaknesses and the strengths of life, to make men laugh and love and—forget."

Scofield's eyes twinkled, and his mouth became less a scar, but John thought this was a very fine phrase really, and he rushed along:

"Life looks like a tangle, like a mess—drudgeries, disappointments, injustices—the wrong man prospering—the wrong girl suffering! The drama composes life. It grabs out a few people and follows them, compressing into the action of two hours the eventualities of a lifetime and shortening perspectives till men can see the consequences of their acts, whether for good or for ill. The stage teaches the doctrine of the conservation of moral energy—and of immoral energy—that sustained effort, conserved effort is never cheated; it gets its goal at last."

"Say!" broke in Scofield; but John would not be denied what he felt was a final smashing generalization.

"To figure the tariff on human conduct, to grade and classify the acts of life, to quote the rates on happiness and misery in trainload lots. That's what I'm going to do," he concluded, with a glow upon his face.

But by this time a smile of cynic pity had appeared upon the face of the railroad man.

"Hampstead," he exclaimed sharply, with a mimic shudder and a shrug of relief as if he had just escaped something, "you're not an actor. You're a preacher!"

John gasped.

"You're a moralist," asserted Scofield accusingly, "a puritanical, Sunday-school, twaddling moralist. I have misjudged you. I wouldn't want you around at all."

With a look akin to disgust upon his face, the railroad man made a motion with his fingers in the air as if ridding them of something sticky, and arose, not abruptly but decisively, making clear that the interview had proved disappointingly unprofitable and was therefore at an end.

John also arose, bewildered by the sudden change in Scofield's attitude—a change which he resented, and also the ground of it. He a preacher? The idea was ridiculous.

Besides, it makes an astonishing difference when one has been stubbornly refusing an offer to have the offer coolly and decisively withdrawn. Something subtly psychological made him want the offer back. The door of opportunity had been closed behind him with a snap so vicious that he wanted to turn and kick it open.

But the thin, talon-like hand of Scofield was hooking the young man's rather flaccid palm for a moment.

"Remember what I tell you," he barked out in parting. "You're not an actor. You're not a railroad man. You're a preacher!"

The last word was flung bitingly, like an epithet.

John, feeling uncomfortable, walked out and along one side of Union Square, casting a momentary wondering eye on the stabbing, twin towers of the Hotel St. Francis, many windowed and many-lighted; then turned on down Geary into Market and along that wide and cobbled thoroughfare to the doors of the old Palace Hotel. By the time he was in bed, he realized that Scofield had shaken him terribly. His decision was all to make over again.

However, Bessie would be there for three days to help him, and with this thought he felt comforted.

* * * * *

"It's been a great three days," sighed John, on the following Tuesday. Bessie also sighed.

They had clambered down from the parapet below the Cliff House and sat watching the seals at play upon the rocks a stone's throw out from beneath their feet. Their position marked the southern portal of the famous Golden Gate, through which a mile-wide stream of liquid blue was running. Across the Gate rose the sheer gray cliffs of Marin County and beyond those the rugged greens and blues of the mountains, spiked in the center by the peak of Tamalpais.

Before their faces, the ocean, in swells and scoops of ever grayer gray, ran out to catch the horizon as it fell, illumined in its lower reaches by the sun, which was sinking into the haze above the waters like a lustrous orange ball.

Southward, beyond the green head of Golden Gate Park, the yellow gray of the sand dunes and the blue gray of the sea met in a lingering, playful kiss that swept back and forth in a long shimmering line which ran on sinuously, growing fainter and fainter, till lost in the shadow of the distant cliffs.

The hour was five o'clock. At eight that night John was to leave for Los Angeles. His vacation—the only vacation of his hard-driven life—was to end, and an epoch in his existence was also nearing its end. The past was clear as the land behind him; the future was an area of tossing uncertainty. Nothing appeared,—no track, no wake, no sail, no sun even. Only far over, beyond the curve of the horizon, was a kind of strange, unearthly glow, and on this his eye was set.

For three days his soul had ebbed and flowed like that lip of foam upon the beach, now stealing far up on the land,—for him the backward track; now turning and running far out to sea,—for him the way of adventure and advance.

But now the ultimate decision was to be made. Bessie saw it rising like a tide upon that face which once had seemed not to fit, a rapt look which snuggled in the hills and hollows and then began to harden like setting concrete. No one would call that face homely now. Interesting, most likely, would have been the word.

The gray eyes burned brighter, the lips grew tighter. The chin advanced, moved out to sea a little, as it were.

"Follow your star, John," Bessie declared stoutly, though a look of pain momentarily touched her whitening lips. "I shall despise you if you do not."

"The decision is made," John replied solemnly, "and you, Bessie, have helped to make it."

Bessie did not reply; she only looked.

Silence fell between them. Silence, too, was in the heavens; the sun, the waves, the restless wind for the moment appeared to stand still. All nature had paused respectfully. A man, young, inexperienced, but potential, had cast the horoscope of life beyond the power of gods or men to intervene,—and with it had cast some other horoscopes as well.

Hampstead felt the spell his act of will had wrapped about them, but he felt also the substance of his resolution framing like granite in his soul and making him strong with a new kind of strength.

But soon the sun was descending again, the clouds were drifting once more, and a gust of wind nipped sharply, causing the skirts of John's overcoat to flap lustily. Bessie twitched her fur collar closer about the neck, and thrust both hands deep into the pockets of her gray ulster. Hampstead passed his own hand through the curve of the girl's elbow, gripped her forearm possessively, selfishly, absently, and drew her toward him.

Indeed Bessie was closer to him than she had ever been before; and yet she had never felt so far away.

"Oh, but it's great to have a woman by you in a crisis," John chuckled happily.

Bessie looked up startled. John had called her woman. But she recovered from the start,—he had also called her a woman.

"Come to understand each other pretty well, haven't we?" John observed, still looking oceanward, but giving the arm of Bessie what was intended for a meaningful squeeze.

"Not at all," sighed Bessie, also still looking oceanward.

Hampstead, his thoughts bowling rapidly forward, continued motionless until a white-winged, curious-eyed gull sailed between his line of vision and the water. Then, as if abruptly conscious that Bessie's answer was not what it should have been, he turned, and at the same time boldly swung her body round till they stood facing each other. Bessie met this gaze unblinkingly for a moment, with her face set and sober; then something in John's mystified glance touched her keen sense of humor, and she laughed,—her old, roguish laugh,—and flirted the stupid in the face with the end of her boa.

"You great big egoist!" she smiled. "There, that's the first chance I've had to use that word. I only learned the difference between it and another last week."

"Indeed!" retorted Hampstead. "And when did you learn the difference between me and the other word?"

"Well, I'm not sure that there is a difference," she sparred. "Being polite, I just concede it."

"Oh," he chuckled. "But," and he was serious again, "you say we don't understand each other?"

"Nonsense; I was only joking. I do understand you; you great, big, egoistical egotist! You are just now absolutely self-centered—and all, all ambition! And I am secretly—secretly, you understand—proud of you!"

"And you," said Hampstead, drawing her close again, "are just the truest, most understanding friend a man ever, ever had. You know, Bessie, a fellow can talk to you just like a sister,—a pretty little sister!" he subjoined, when Bessie looked less pleased than he thought she should.

"You've changed a lot, too, in a year," he conceded, studying her face critically. "When you came into the hotel that night, you struck fear into my heart, and then kind of made it flutter. I said to myself, 'She's gone—the old Bessie, that could be played with. But here's a young woman, a handsome young woman, taking her place.'"

"Did you say that?" asked Bessie happily.

"An exceedingly beautiful woman," went on John, as if stimulated by the interruption. "By George, a very corker of a woman—look at those eyes, those lips, those dimples. Same old dimples, girl!" he laughed emotionally. "And I said, 'Now, here's a woman, a ripe, wonderful woman, to be made love to—'"

"John!"

There was in Bessie's sudden exclamation the surcharged sense of all the proprieties which their relationship involved.

"Oh, don't be alarmed," exclaimed Hampstead, suddenly very earnest and respectful. "I am not leading up to anything. I do not misunderstand the nature of your goodness to me. I am not presuming anything. I am only telling you what I said to myself."

"Oh," murmured Bessie noncommittally, though she shivered for a moment as if a gust of wind had come again. Hampstead, feeling this, drew her still closer and hunched his broad shoulder to shelter her more, as he explained further:

"But it was I, you know, and there was nothing for me to do but to fly. I was for jumping out the window. And then you suddenly made that wonderful speech about going to the circus with dear old John, and your mother let it out that you wanted me to run around with you here, and I saw that toward me you were the same old Bessie; that for a few days we could be once more just friendly, only two finer friends, because we're both grown up now."

"Yes," Bessie sighed, almost contentedly. "I did want you, John. A girl gets tired of society, of clubs and dances and things, even in High. You know, I get weary of the sight of these slim, pompadoured boys sometimes. I just wanted somehow to feel the arm of a real man, to hear him talk, even if he does nothing but talk about himself, and until this minute in three days has not confessed that I have dimples, and—and a heart."

"Slow, about some things, am I not?" confessed John. "Awfully, awfully slow!"

"I will agree with you," said Bessie, with a mournfulness that literally compelled him to perceive that she was some way disappointed in him.

"But," he inquired reproachfully, "aside from my usefulness as a social escort and a sort of masculine tonic, you do admire me a little, don't you?"

"Oh, yes," she answered frankly. "I admire you a lot."

"But you're disappointed about something?"

"Apprehension is the better word," she confessed soberly.

"Apprehension? Of what?" John was looking at her almost accusingly. Bessie avoided his glance. She could not tell him what she feared nor why she feared it.

"You think I'll fail?" John demanded.

"No," disclaimed Bessie seriously. "I think you will succeed!"

"You think so?" and Hampstead's face lighted brilliantly. "Oh, God bless you for that!" and again he shook her, this time tenderly and drew her closer till her breast was touching his, and she leaned her head far back to look up into his face.

"Yes," she breathed softly, "I think so!"

"And you do not think me silly for turning my back upon solid realities to follow my ideal?"

"No! No!" and she shook her head emphatically, "I honor you for it, John. You have inspired me, John, and thrilled me. I used to think—how good you are! Now I think—how noble you are! You have made my feeling for you one of worshipfulness almost."

The look in her face did express that, and Hampstead noticed it now.

"Ah," he murmured, pressing her arms against her sides, "you dear, impressionable little girl!"

Quite thoughtless of how unnecessarily close he was drawing Bessie, either to shelter her from the wind or for the purpose of conversation, or especially in the fulfillment of his duty to his charge as guide and protector, John was finding a pleasurable sensation in this position of intimacy, and was indeed, just upon the threshold of one very great discovery when he made another, perhaps equally surprising, but vastly less important. Looking into the upturned eyes, which after the canons of Delsarte, he was thinking expressed "devotion" perfectly, a shadow was seen to project itself downward from the upper lids across the iris, as if a storm were gathering on a placid lake. John watched the shadow curiously as it deepened, until it became clear that a mist was congealing in those swimming violet depths.

"Why, Bessie," he exclaimed, amazed, "you are going to cry!"

On the instant two tears trickled from the dark lashes and gleamed for a moment like solitaire diamonds in the setting of two ruby spots that had gathered unaccountably upon her upturned cheeks.

"You are crying," he charged straightly.

Bessie's expression never changed, but her smooth, round chin nodded a trembling and unabashed assent. A sudden impulse seized John. The position of his arms shifted.

"Bessie!" he murmured feelingly, "I am going to kiss you!"

Bessie did not appear half as surprised at this announcement as Hampstead at himself for making it.

"May I?" he persisted.

The expression of devotion in Bessie's swimming orbs remained unstartled, her pose unaltered. Only her lips moved while she breathed a single word: "Yes."

Instantly their ruby and velvet softness yielded to the pressure of John's, planted as tenderly and chastely as was his thought of her,—for that other discovery that he was on the verge of making had been fended off by the coming of the tear.

CHAPTER VIII

JOHN MAKES UP

That night, according to programme, John went back to Los Angeles; and a few weeks later, also according to programme, he was again in San Francisco, no longer a railroad man, but—in his thought—an actor.

Now calling oneself an actor and being one are quite different; but it took an experience to prove this to John. Even the opportunity for this experience was itself hard to get. It was days before he even saw a theatrical manager, weeks before he met one personally, and a month before he got his first engagement.

When he talked of the drama to actors the way he had talked of it to the Reverend Charles Thompson Campbell, they did not comprehend him; when he talked to them as he had to Scofield, they smiled cynically; when he admitted to one manager that he was without professional experience, the admission drew a sneer which froze the stream of hope in his breast.

John thereafter told no other manager this, but learned instead the value of a "front", and inserted in the professional columns of the San Francisco Dramatic Review a card which read:

+------------------+

| |

| JOHN HAMPSTEAD |

| HEAVY |

| AT LIBERTY |

| |

+------------------+

"Heavy" in theatrical parlance means the villain. Modestly confessing himself not quite equal to "leads", though in his heart John scorned to believe his own confession, he had announced himself as a "heavy."

This card appeared for three succeeding weeks, but on the fourth week there was a significant change. It read:

+-----------------------------------+

| |

| JOHN HAMPSTEAD |

| HEAVY |

| With the People's Stock Company |

| |

+-----------------------------------+

The People's Stock Company was new, a "ten-twenty-thirty" organization, got together in a day for a season of doubtful length, in a huge barn of a house that once had been the home of bucket-of-blood melodramas, but for a long time had been given over to cobwebs and prize fights. The promoters had little money. They spent most of it on new paint and gorgeous, twelve-sheet posters. Everything was cheap and gaudy, but the cheapest thing was the company—and the least gaudy.

The opening play was a blood-spiller with thrills guaranteed; the scene was laid in Cuba at a period just preceding the Spanish-American War. Hampstead's part was a Spanish colonel, Delaro by name. Delaro was no ordinary double-dyed villain. He was triple-dyed at the least, and would kick up all the deviltry in the piece from the beginning to the end; he would steal the fair Yankee maiden who had strayed ashore from her father's yacht; he would imprison her in an out-of-the-way fortress; court her, taunt her, threaten her—and then when the audience was wrought to the highest pitch of excitement and the last throb of pity for her impending fate at the hands of this fiend in yellow uniform and brass buttons, the galloping of horses would herald the appearance of Lieutenant Bangster, U.S.N., lover of the maiden and hero of the play. (The Navy on horseback!) A pitched battle would result, pistols, rifles, cannon would be fired, the fortifications would be blown away, and Old Glory go fluttering up the staff to the thundering applause of the gods of the gallery.

Delaro was an enormous opportunity; but it was also an enormous responsibility. John went into rehearsal haunted by fear that the carefully guarded secret of his inexperience would be discovered, knowing that instant humiliation and discharge would follow. He had trudged, hoped, brazened, starved, prayed to get this part. He must not lose it, and he must make good. The sweat of desperation oozed daily from his pores.

Halson, the stage manager, was a tall, tubercular person, with a husk in his throat and a cloudy eye. This eye seemed always to John to be cloudier still when turned on him. On the fourth day of rehearsal, these clouded looks broke out in lightning.

"Stop that preaching!" Halson commanded impatiently. "You are intoning those speeches like a parrot in a pulpit. Colonel Delaro is not a bishop. He is a villain—a damned, detestable, outrageous villain! Play it faster; read those speeches more naturally. My God, you must have been playing— By the way, Hampstead, what were you playing last?"

The shot was a bull's-eye. John felt himself suddenly a monstrous fraud and had a sickening sense of predestined failure. In his soul he suddenly saw the truth. Acting was not bluffing. Acting was an art! The poorest, dullest of these people, bad as they appeared to be, knew how to read their lines more naturally than he. He was not an actor. He never had been an actor. He was only a recitationist.

"What were you playing last, I say?" bullied Halson, as if suddenly suspicious.

But John had rallied. "If I don't get the experience, how will I ever become an actor," was what he said to himself.

"My last season was in Shakespeare," was what he observed to Halson, with deliberate dignity.

"Oh," exclaimed the stage manager, much relieved. "That explains it. I was beginning to think somebody had sawed off a blooming amateur on me."

John had not deemed it prudential to add that this season in Shakespeare lasted one whole evening and consisted of some slices from the Merchant of Venice presented in the parlor of the Hotel Green in Pasadena; and the scorn with which Halson had immediately pronounced the word "amateur" sent a shiver to Hampstead's marrow, while he congratulated himself on his discretion. Nevertheless, he suffered this day many interruptions and much kindergarten coaching from Halson and felt himself humiliated by certain overt glances from the cast.

"The boobs!" thought John. "The pin-heads! They don't know half as much as I do. They never taught a Y.M.C.A. class in public speaking; they never gave a lesson in elocution in all their lives, and here they are staring at me, because I have a little trouble mastering the mere mechanics of stage delivery. It's simple. I'll have it by to-morrow."

But at the end of the rehearsal, John felt weak. Instead of leaving the theater, he slipped behind a curtain into one of the boxes and sank down in the gloom to be alone and think. But he was not so much alone as he thought. A voice came up out of the shadows in the orchestra circle. It was the voice of Neumeyer, the 'angel' of the enterprise, who was even more inexperienced in things dramatic than his "heavy" man.

"How do you think it'll go?" Neumeyer had asked anxiously.

"Oh, it'll go all right," barked the whiskey-throat of Halson. "It'll go. All that's worrying me is this blamed fool Hampstead. How in time I sawed him off on myself is more than I can tell. However, I've engaged a new heavy for next week."

John groped dumbly out into the day. But in the sunshine his spirits rallied. "They can't take this part away from me," he exulted and then croaked resolutely: "I'll show 'em; I'll show 'em yet. They're bound to like me when they see my finished work."

And that was what he kept saying to himself up to the very night of the first performance. But that significant occasion brought him face to face with another problem,—his make-up.

The matter of costume was simple. It had been rented for a week from Goldstein's. It was fearsomely contrived. The trousers were red. Varnished oilcloth leggings, made to slip on over his shoes, were relied upon to give the effect of top boots. The coat was of yellow, with spiked tails, with huge, leaf-like chevrons, with rows of large, superfluous buttons, and coils on coils of cord of gold.

But make-up could not be hired from a costumer and put on like a mask. It was a matter of experience, of individuality, and of skill upon the part of the actor. All John knew of make-up he had read in the books and learned from those experimental daubs in which his features had been presented in his own barn-storming productions. The make-up of Ursus had been almost entirely a matter of excess of hair, acquired by a beard and a wig rented for the occasion. This, therefore, was really to be his first professional make-up, and Hampstead was blissfully determined that it should be a stunning achievement.

In order that he might have plenty of time for experiment, the heavy man entered the dressing rooms at six o'clock, almost an hour and a half before any other actor felt it necessary to appear, and went gravely about his important task.

First treating the pores of his face to a filling of cold cream,—all the books agreed in this,—John chose a dark flesh color from among his grease paints and proceeded to give himself a swarthy Spanish complexion. Judging that this swarthiness was too somber, he proceeded next to mollify it by the over-laying of a lighter flesh tint; but later, in an effort to redden the cheeks, he got on too much color and was under the necessity of darkening it again. Thus alternately lightening and darkening, experimenting and re-experimenting, seven o'clock found him with a layer of grease paint, somewhere about an eighth of an inch thick masking his features into almost complete immobility.

Next he turned attention to the eyes, blackening the lashes and edging the lids themselves with heavy mourning. At the outer corners of the eyes he put on a smear of white to drive the eye in toward the nose; between the corner of the eye and the nose, he was careful to deepen the shadow. This was to make his eyes appear close together. Down the bridge of the nose he drew a straight white stripe to make that organ high and thin and narrow; while in the corner between the cheek and nostril went another smear of white, to drive the nose up still higher and sharper.

In the midst of this artistry, Jarvis Parks, the character man, who had been assigned to dress with Hampstead, entered.

"Hello," said John, with an attempt at unconcern.

"Hard at it," commented Parks, and began with the ease of long practice to arrange his make-up materials about him, after which deftly, and almost without looking at what he was doing, he transformed himself into a youthful, rosy-cheeked, navy chaplain.

"Half hour!" sang the voice of the call boy from below stairs.

John was busy now adjusting a pirate moustache to his upper lip by means of liberal swabbings of spirit gum. As he worked, he hummed a little tune just to show Parks how much at ease and with what satisfied indifference he performed the feat of transposing his fair Saxon features into the cruel scowls of a villainous Spanish colonel.

But catching the eye of Parks upon him for a moment, Hampstead was puzzled by the expression, although he reflected that it was probably admiration, since he certainly had got on ever so much better than he expected. It surely was a fine make-up—a brilliant make-up.

"Fifteen minutes," sang the voice of the call boy.

Hampstead could really contain his self-complacency no longer.

"Well," he exclaimed, turning squarely on Parks, "what do you think of it?"

Now if John had only known, he disclosed his whole amateurish soul to wise old Parks in that single question, for a professional actor never asks another professional what he thinks of his make-up.

"Great!" responded Parks drily, but again there was that look upon his face which Hampstead could not quite interpret.

"Five minutes!" was bellowed up the stairway.

Hampstead drew on his coat of brilliant yellow, buckled on his sword, and had opportunity to survey himself again in the glass and bestow a few more touches to the face before the word "overture", the call boy's final scream of exultation, echoed through the dressing rooms.

The corridor outside John's door was immediately filled with the sound of trampling feet, of voices male and female, some talking excitedly, some laughing nervously, every soul aquiver with that brooding sense of the ominous which sheds itself over the spirits of a theatrical company upon a first night.

Parks, with a final touch to his hair and a sidewise squint at himself, turned and went out. The footsteps and voices in the corridor grew fainter and then came trailing back from the stairway like a chatterbox recessional.

It was quiet in the dressing rooms, except for a droning from across the way, and John knew what that was; for the sweet little ingenue had told him in a moment of confidence: "On first nights I always go down on my knees before I leave my dressing room." There she was now, telling her beads.

"Shall I pray, too?" he asked, and then answered resolutely, "No! Let's wait and see what God'll do to me."

His throat was arid. His lips, from the drying spirit gum and the excess of grease paint, were stiff and unresponsive.

"Eternal Hammering is the Price of Success" he muttered thickly, trying to brace himself. "Now for a great big swing with the hammer." But his spirits sagged unaccountably, and he turned out into the corridor as if for a death march.

At this moment the area between the foot of the stairs and the wings of the stage was a weaving mass of idling scene-shifters, hurrying, nervous, property men, and a horde of supernumeraries made up as American sailors, Spanish soldiers, and Cuban natives. All was movement and confusion.

The principals had drifted to their entrances and taken position in the order in which they would appear; but they too were restless; nobody stood quite still; at every movement, at every loud word, everybody turned or looked or started. The hoarse voice of Halson and his assistant, Page, repeatedly resounded.

As Hampstead descended the stairs upon this strange, moving picture, it appeared to him to organize into a ferocious, misshapen monster that meant him harm; or a python coiling and uncoiling its gigantic, menacing folds. The thing was argus-eyed, too, and every eye stabbed him like a lance.

Emerging upon the floor, John paused uncertainly before this hostile wall of prying scrutiny. Somebody snickered. A woman's voice groaned "My Gawd!" and followed it with a hysterical giggle.

Could it be that they were laughing at him? John felt that this was possible; but he stoutly assured himself that it was not probable.

However, just as his features passed under the rays of a bunch light standing where it was to illumine with the rays of the afternoon sun the watery perspective of a jungle scene, he came face to face with the stage manager. Halson darted one quick glance, and then a look of horror congealed upon his face.

"In the name of God!" he hissed huskily. "Hampstead, what have you been doing to yourself?"

"Doing to myself?" exclaimed John, trying for one final minute to fend off fate. "Why? What do you mean?"

Halson's voice floated up in a half humorous wail of despair, as he rolled his eyes sickly toward the flies.

"What do I mean?" he whined. "The man comes down here with his face daubed up like an Esquimaux totem pole, and he asks me what do I mean?"

But Halson was interrupted by a sudden silence from the front. The orchestra had stopped. The curtain was about to rise.

"Page! Page!" groaned Halson in a frantic whisper, "Hold that curtain! Signal a repeat to the orchestra! Here, you!" to the call boy. "Run for my make-up box. Quick!"

John's knees were trembling, and he felt his cheeks scalding in a sweat of humiliation beneath their blanket of lurid grease, as Halson turned again upon him with:

"You poor, miserable, God-forsaken amateur!"

Amateur! There, the word was out at last, and it was terrible. No language can express the volume of opprobrium which Halson was able to convey in it. To Hampstead it could never henceforth be anything but the most profane of epithets. As a matter of fact, he was never after able to hate any man sufficiently to justify calling him an amateur.

While the orchestra dawdled, while the company of "supers" crowded close, and the principals looked sneeringly on from all distances, Halson made up the heavy's face for the part he was to play, thereby submitting John Hampstead to the bitterest humiliation of his dramatic career.

Yet once engaged upon this work of artistry, the stage manager's wrath appeared to soften. Half cajoling and half pleading, he whined over and over again, "If you had only told me, Mr. Hampstead! If you had only told me, I would have helped you."

"If I only had told him," reflected John, beginning all at once to like Halson, and never suspecting that the man in his heart was hating him like a fiend, and that his fear that the amateur would go absolutely to pieces under the strain of the night was the sole reason for soothing and encouraging and commiserating him by turns.

But now the orchestra grew still again.

"Aw-right," husked Halson, and Hampstead heard that ominous, sliding, rustling sound which to the actor is like no other in all the world.