“Mine.”
“Oh, yours! I thought as much!”
“Well,” said Jill, “I’ll go back and tell them that you will not do what we ask. We will keep our make-up on in case you change your mind.”
She turned away.
“Come back!”
Jill proceeded toward the staircase. As she went, a husky voice spoke in her ear.
“Go to it, kid! You’re all right!”
The head-carpenter had broken his Trappist vows twice in a single evening, a thing which had not happened to him since the night three years ago, when, sinking wearily onto a seat in a dark corner for a bit of a rest, he found that one of his assistants had placed a pot of red paint there.
4.
To Mr Goble, fermenting and full of strange oaths, entered Johnson Miller. The dance-director was always edgey on first nights, and during the foregoing conversation had been flitting about the stage like a white-haired moth. His deafness had kept him in complete ignorance that there was anything untoward afoot, and he now approached Mr Goble with his watch in his hand.
“Eight twenty-five,” he observed. “Time those girls were on stage.”
Mr Goble, glad of a concrete target for his wrath, cursed him in about two hundred and fifty rich and well-selected words.
“Huh?” said Mr Miller, hand to ear.
Mr Goble repeated the last hundred and eleven words, the pick of the bunch.
“Can’t hear!” said Mr Miller, regretfully. “Got a cold.”
The grave danger that Mr Goble, a thick-necked man, would undergo some sort of a stroke was averted by the presence-of-mind of the stage-director, who, returning with the hat, presented it like a bouquet to his employer, and then his hands being now unoccupied, formed them into a funnel and through this flesh-and-blood megaphone endeavored to impart the bad news.
“The girls say they won’t go on!”
Mr Miller nodded.
“I said it was time they were on.”
“They’re on strike!”
“It’s not,” said Mr Miller austerely, “what they like, it’s what they’re paid for. They ought to be on stage. We should be ringing up in two minutes.”
The stage director drew another breath, then thought better of it. He had a wife and children, and, if dadda went under with apoplexy, what became of the home, civilization’s most sacred product? He relaxed the muscles of his diaphragm, and reached for pencil and paper.
Mr Miller inspected the message, felt for his spectacle-case, found it, opened it, took out his glasses, replaced the spectacle-case, felt for his handkerchief, polished the glasses, replaced the handkerchief, put the glasses on, and read. A blank look came into his face.
“Why?” he enquired.
The stage director, with a nod of the head intended to imply that he must be patient and all would come right in the future, recovered the paper, and scribbled another sentence. Mr Miller perused it.
“Because Mae D’Arcy has got her notice?” he queried, amazed. “But the girl can’t dance a step.”
The stage director, by means of a wave of the hand, a lifting of both eyebrows, and a wrinkling of the nose, replied that the situation, unreasonable as it might appear to the thinking man, was as he had stated and must be faced. What, he enquired—through the medium of a clever drooping of the mouth and a shrug of the shoulders—was to be done about it?
Mr Miller remained for a moment in meditation.
“I’ll go and talk to them,” he said.
He flitted off, and the stage director leaned back against the asbestos curtain. He was exhausted, and his throat was in agony, but nevertheless he was conscious of a feeling of quiet happiness. His life had been lived in the shadow of the constant fear that some day Mr Goble might dismiss him. Should that disaster occur, he felt, there was always a future for him in the movies.
Scarcely had Mr Miller disappeared on his peace-making errand, when there was a noise like a fowl going through a quickset hedge, and Mr Saltzburg, brandishing his baton as if he were conducting an unseen orchestra, plunged through the scenery at the left upper entrance and charged excitedly down the stage. Having taken his musicians twice through the overture, he had for ten minutes been sitting in silence, waiting for the curtain to go up. At last, his emotional nature cracking under the strain of this suspense, he had left his conductor’s chair and plunged down under the stage by way of the musician’s bolthole to ascertain what was causing the delay.