Читать книгу The Girl From His Town - Van Vorst Marie - Страница 7

Ruggles, from his stall, for the fourth time saw the curtain go up on Mandalay and heard the temple bells ring. One of the stage boxes was not occupied until after the first act and then the son of his friend came in alone and sat far back out of sight of any eyes but the keenest, and those eyes were Ruggles’. Letty Lane, delicious, fantastic, languishing, sang to Dan; that was evident to Ruggles. He was a large man and filled his stall comfortably. He sat through the performance peacefully, his hands in his pockets, his big face thoughtful, his shirt front ruffled. To look at him, one must have wondered why he had come to Mandalay. He scarcely lost any of the threads of his own reflections, though when Miss Lane, in response to a call from the house, sang her cradle song three times, he seemed moved. The tones of her pure voice, the cradling in her arms of an imaginary child, her apparent dovelike purity, her grace and sweetness, and her cooing, gentle tone, to judge by the softening of the Westerner’s face, touched very much the big fellow who listened like a child. At the end he drew his handkerchief slowly across his eyes, but the tears, or rather moisture, that rose there was not all due to Miss Lane’s song, for Ruggles was extremely warm.

He could see that in his box the boy sat transfixed and absorbed. Dan went out in the second entr’acte and was absent when the curtain went down. Ruggles, as well, left before the performance was over, to make his way outside the theater to the stage exit, where there was already gathered a little group, looked after by a couple of policemen. Close to the curb a gleaming motor waited, the footman at its door. Ruggles buttoned his coat up to his chin and took his place close to the door, over which the electric light showed the words “Stage Entrance.” A poor woman elbowed him, her shabby hat adorned by a scraggly plume, a gray shawl wrapped round her shoulders. A girl or two, who might have been flower sellers in Piccadilly in the daytime, a couple of toughs, a handful of other vagrants smelling of gin, a decent man in working clothes, a child in his arms, formed the human hedge Letty Lane was to pass between – a singular group of people to spend an hour hanging about the streets at the exit of a theater well toward midnight. So the naïve Ruggles thought, and better understood the appearance of the young fellows in evening clothes who hovered on the extreme edge of the little crowd. Dan, however, was not of these.

“Look sharp, Cissy,” the workingman spoke to his child, holding her well up. “When she comes hout she’ll pass close to yer, and you sing hout, ‘God bless yer.’”

“Yes, Dad, I will,” shrilled the child.

The woman in the gray shawl drew it close about her. “Aw she’s a true lidy, all right, ain’t she? I expect you’ve had some kindness off her as well?”

The man nodded over the child’s shoulder. “Used to be a scene shifter, and Miss Lane found out about my little girl last year – not this lass, not Cissy, Cissy’s sister – and she sent ’er to a place where it costs the eyes out of yer head. She’s gettin’ well fast, and we, none of us, has seen her or spoken to Miss Lane. She doesn’t know our names.”

And the woman answered: “She does a lot like that. She’s got a heart bigger’n her little body.”

And a big boy in the front row said back to the others: “Well, she makes a mint of money.”

And the woman who had spoken before said: “She gives it nearly all to the poor.”

Ruggles was evidently on the poor side of the waiting crowd; the handful of riffraff around him with its stench of dirt and gin. A better looking set collected opposite and there was the gleam of white shirt fronts.

“Now, there she comes,” the father saw her first. “Sing out, Cissy.”

The door opened and a figure quickly floated from it, like a white rose blown out into the foggy darkness. It floated down the few steps to the street between the double row of spectators. A white cloak entirely covered the actress. Her head was hidden by a white scarf, and she almost ran the short gantlet to her motor, between the cries of “God bless you!” – “Three cheers for Letty Lane” – “God bless you, lady!” She didn’t speak or heed, however, or turn her head, but held her scarf against her face, and the man who slowly lounged behind her to the car, and put her in and got in after her, was not the man Joshua Ruggles had waited there to see. He hung about until the footman had sprung up and the car moved softly away, the stage entrance door shut, then he followed along with the crowd, with the few faithful ones who had waited an hour in the cold mist to cry out their applause, not to a singer in Mandalay but to a woman’s heart.