Held to Answer/Chapter 9
Every chair in the orchestra of the People's Theater was taken; the boxes were occupied, and as for the odd rectangular horseshoe of a gallery, with its advancing arms reaching forward almost to the proscenium arch, while its rearward tiers rose and faded into distance like some vast enclosed bleachers, it seemed a solid mass of humanity. The curtain rose on critical silence. The repetition of the overture had given a hint that all was not running smoothly, and at the first spoken word a jeer came from the gallery. The actor stammered and made the foolish attempt to repeat his words, but the attempt was lost in a clamor of voices. Feet were stamped, hats were waved, peanuts and popcorn balls were thrown. The actors braced themselves and went on doggedly, but so did the balconies, and it presently appeared that something like a demonstration was in progress. Swiftly an explanation of the great masses in the gallery and their behavior was passed from mouth to mouth behind the scenes. It said they were six hundred south-of-Market-Street hoodlums who had been hired by a rival theatrical manager to come and break up the performance. Whether this was true, or whether the outbreak in the gallery was merely the unsuppressible spirit of turbulent youth, it stormed on like a simoon, gaining in volume as it proceeded.
For a while the people down-stairs, having paid their thirty cents to witness a theatrical performance, protested; but they appeared soon to conclude that the show in the gallery was the more worth while. Ceasing to protest, they began to applaud the trouble-makers and even to abet them.
Behind the scenes panic reigned. The actors at their exits bounded off, panting in terror, as if pelted by bullets. Those whose cues for entrance came, snatched at them excitedly, and like gladiators rushing into the arena, plunged desperately upon the stage. The face of the leading lady was white beneath her make-up as she almost tottered upon the scene. Some instinct of chivalry led the mob to desist for a minute while she delivered her opening lines. But the demonstration broke out afresh as the leading man entered, though he wore the uniform of a lieutenant in the navy. His every speech was jeered. The excitement grew wilder; not a word spoken upon the stage was heard, even by the leader of the orchestra.
"My God, what they will do to you, Hampstead!" exclaimed Halson fiercely, as a detachment in the gallery began to march up and down the aisle, the rhythm of their heavy steps making the old house shiver like a ship in a storm.
Yet of all the actors trembling behind the scenes, it is possible that Hampstead was the very coolest. He had been the most perturbed, the most distraught; but this counter-disturbance made his own distressing situation forgotten. No eyes were riveted on him now. No thoughts were on him and the terrible humiliation he had publicly endured or the wretched failure he was going to make. The best, the most experienced, were in the most complete distress—clear out of themselves. The leading man had become angry, had lost his lines, and did not know what he was saying.
"Stanley's lost; he's ad-libbing to beat the band," John heard Page remark.
Ad-libbing! It was a new word. In the midst of all this confusion, John took note of it and next day learned of Parks that it was a stage-participle made from ad libitum. An actor ad-libbing was an actor talking on and on to fill space in some kind of a stage wait or because, as with Stanley, he had forgotten his lines.
Neumeyer, the "angel", came in from the front and added his white, agitated face to the awed groups standing about the wings.
"They've lost half the first act," he groaned, through chattering teeth. "Even when they wear 'emselves out, the piece is ruined because the people down-stairs have missed the key to the plot."
"Your cue is coming," bawled Page to John.
"Don't worry, though," croaked Halson in Hampstead's ear, still fearful that his man would collapse. "The piece is going so rotten you can't make it any worse. Cut in!"
But to his surprise, Hampstead's eye glinted with the light of battle.
"Worry?" he exclaimed excitedly. "Watch me. I'm going to get 'em!"
Halson gazed in pure pity.
"Get 'em," he gutturaled. "You poor, God-forsaken amateur!"
But the cue had come. Colonel Delaro, his sword clattering, his buttons flashing, his tall figure aglow with color, leaped through the entrance and took the center of the stage—so clumsily that he trod on Stanley's favorite corn and hooked a spur in the mantilla trailing from the arm of Miss Constance Beverly, the mislaid daughter of a millionaire yachtsman; but nevertheless, Hampstead was on. He had seized the center of the stage and he filled it full, as with an ostentatious gesture, he swept off his gold lace cap before Miss Beverly.
"What star's this?" shrieked a voice on one side the gallery.
"No star at all. It's a comet!" bawled a man from the other side, cupping his hands to carry his second-hand wit around the auditorium.
The Spanish War was not then so far back in memory that the sight of the uniform did not speedily kindle a little popular wrath upon its own account, and the demonstration began again and rose higher, but Hampstead became neither flustered nor angry. He maintained his character and his dignity. He remembered his speeches, and delivered them in stentorian tones that sounded vibrantly above the general clamor. When the gallery discovered to its surprise that here was a voice it could not entirely drown, it stopped out of sheer curiosity to see what the voice was like and found it as attractive as it was forceful. Moreover, there was a kind of special appeal in it. It was the voice of a real man; if they had only known it,—of a man at bay. He was not Colonel Delaro, plotting against the liberty and affections of a lady. He was John Hampstead, fighting,—with his back to the wall,—fighting for his opportunity, for an accredited position in this poor, cheap misfit company,—a position which seemed to him just now the most desired thing in all the world. Furthermore, he was fighting to justify his own faith in himself and the faith of Dick and Tayna; yes, and the faith of Bessie.
Hampstead was, moreover, used to rough houses. He had faced them more than once on his own barn-storming one-night appearances.
The way to get an audience like this he knew was to play it like a fish, to get the first nibble of interest and then hold it motionless with the lure of some kind of dramatic story. The situation called for a skilled, dramatic raconteur, and in truth that was what Hampstead was,—not an actor but a recitationist. Also his talks in church circles had given him skill in extemporaneous speaking. It happened that his speeches in this first act completed the introduction of the plot, but they were meaningless without a clear knowledge of what already had been said. Now Hampstead began, at first instinctively and then deliberately, as he played, to gather up these lost lines of half a dozen actors and weave them into his own. The fever of composition seized him. He used the people on the stage like puppets. He made them help him re-lay the plot while he struggled to grasp the attention of the mass child-mind out there in front and enthrall it with a story.
No better way could have been devised of making Hampstead overcome his terrible faults of action and delivery. With marvelous intensity came more repose. His eyes had been changed by the deft hand of Halson till they no longer looked like holes in a blanket; and he shot out his speeches, never once in that rhythmic, preaching tone, but rapidly, jerkily, plausible or menacing by turns, but all the while convincingly.
Within a few minutes the audience was captured. It lost its enthusiasm for riot and sat silent, following first the story as Hampstead had retold it and then the action which thereafter began to unfold. It was the sheer strength of the personality of the man which made this possible. In his strength, too, the other players took courage; and soon the action was tightly keyed and moving forward to a better conclusion of the act than any rehearsal had ever promised.
At the fall of the curtain, an avalanche leaped upon Hampstead, an avalanche which consisted solely of Halson. He seemed to have a thousand hands. He was slapping John on the back with all of them, in fierce, congratulatory blows.
"Man!" he exclaimed. "Man! You saved it! You saved it!"
Neumeyer was capering about deliriously, while tears of joy were trickling from his eyes. Others crowded round: Stanley, who had the lead, amiable old Parks, Lindsay, Bordwell, Miss Harlan, and the rest.
The audience, too, was excitedly expressing itself with hand-clappings and foot-stampings.
"Scatter!" bawled Page.
The stage swiftly cleared of people as the curtain began to rise.
"Miss Harlan!" Page was shouting. "Mr. Stanley! Mr. Hampstead!"
In the order named, the three emerged and took their calls, but the heartiest applause was for the big man in yellow and red, who, quite ignoring the orchestra circle, showed all his teeth in a cordial and understanding grin to the galleries, which thereupon broke out in that hurricane of hisses which is the heavy's hoped-for tribute.
Throughout the remainder of the performance, the yellow and scarlet figure of Delaro, with his great, sweeping gestures and his vast, bellowing voice, moved, a unique and dominating figure; no doubt the first and last time in which a villain who as a character was without one redeeming quality was made the hero of the gallery gods.
With the final fall of the curtain, Hampstead climbed to his dressing room, tired but gloriously happy. All the company knew his shame, the shame of being an amateur; but all, too, knew his power, the power of a man who could rise to emergency, who had commanding presence and constructive force.
The dressing rooms were mere partitions open at the top, so that everybody could hear what everybody else was saying, or could have heard, if only they had stopped to listen. But apparently nobody listened. The strain was over, and everybody talked as if the joy were in the talking and not in being heard. Yet after the first few minutes of excited blowing-off of steam, there came a lull, as if all had stopped for breath at once.
Into this lull, Dick Bordwell, the juvenile man, as he wiped the grease paint from his face, lifted his fine tenor voice in the first half of a queer antiphonal chant, by inquiring loudly above his four wooden walls toward the common ceiling over all:
"Who is the greatest leading woman on the American stage?"
"Louise Harlan!" chanted every voice on the floor, their tones mingling merrily, as if they were playing a familiar game.
"Right-o," sang Dick, and chanted next: "Who is the greatest leading man on the American stage?"
"Billie Stanley!" chorused the voices, with shrieks of laughter.
"And who," inquired Dick, with an insinuating change in his voice, "who is the greatest juvenile man in America?"
"Rich-a-r-r-r-d Bordwell!" screamed the magpies.
"Right-o-right!" echoed Dick, with a grunt of immense satisfaction; and then he went on piping his interrogatories, as to the rest of the company, desiring to be informed who was the greatest character old man, character old lady, soubrette, light comedian and stage manager, concluding yet more loudly with:
"And who is the greatest amateur heavy on the American stage?"
As if they had been waiting for it, the voices burst out like a college yell:
"John Hampstead! John Hampstead, is the greatest amateur heavy on the American stage!"
The spirit of fun and hearty good will with which this initiation ceremony had been performed was salve to the bruised, excited soul of John. Besides an ever present sense of meanness and hypocrisy from the concealment he had practiced, John had suffered a feeling of extreme loneliness that had at no time been so great as now, when, the strain of the play over, all these children of the stage were romping joyously together. Now they had included him in the circle of their magic fellowship. True, they had used the hateful word amateur, but that was in play, and he was sure they would never use it again.
And he was right—from that hour some of them who liked him showed it; some who disliked him showed that; some merely revealed themselves as cool toward him or appeared ill at ease in his presence; but never one of them, by word or act, failed from that moment to recognize his standing as a man entitled to all the free masonry of their unique and fascinating profession.
But the climax of this climactic night for John was reached when, descending the stairway, Halson honored him with an astounding confidence.
"Marien Dounay joins the People's to-morrow," he whispered excitedly.
"Fact!" he affirmed in response to John's look of sheer incredulity. "She's a spitfire and a genius. She can do what she likes. She's quarreled with Mowrey. She's coming here to spite him. Pie for us while it lasts, huh? She opens as Isabel in East Lynne."
John knew that Mowrey had come up from Los Angeles and was just opening a long season at the Grand Opera House; but Marien Dounay—almost a star!—in that thread-bare play, East Lynne, in this out-at-elbows company, and in this old barn of a house! Impossible!
This was what John was thinking, but he was too weak to give it utterance. He wanted Halson's information to be true whether it was or not. Yet in the midst of the elation which began to kindle swiftly, he remembered what Halson had said to Neumeyer on Saturday in the dark of the orchestra: that a new man had been engaged to play the heavies.
A wave of bitterness surged over him; and yet, he reflected, things must be changed. They would scarcely let him go after to-night, so he mustered courage to inquire:
"By the way, Halson, what do I play in East Lynne?"
"You play the lead," affirmed Halson, with dramatic emphasis.
"The lead?" John gulped, struggling as if a cobblestone had just been tossed into his throat.
"Sure! You'll get away with it, too," declared the stage manager with over-enthusiasm, slapping John heavily upon the back as the big man turned away quickly, utterly unwilling that any save two or three not there to look should see into his face.
It would scarcely have diminished his joy to know that he was getting the lead simply because Archibald Carlyle was such an unredeemed mollycoddle that the leading man usually chose to enact the villain, Levison.