In Chicago, as no doubt elsewhere, the theater curtains rise at two-thirty for the Wednesday matinées. It is not an immutable law, but the practice is followed with commendable unanimity.
In anticipation of the event, a sardonic Director of Mundane Activities (Chicago Division) contrives, upon alternate Wednesdays, to tie up traffic in the streets in such fashion that hundreds of customers reach their destinations late.
“Only in the third city in the world,” as John Rainfall disgustedly observed to his taxi driver, “is it possible for a bridge to rise politely at two twenty-three and allow thirty cents worth of mud to pass up the river while a million dollars’ worth of business waits at the bridgehead.”
Catching the ironic purport of the communication, the taxi man nodded his head. “You said something that time, brother.”
The democracy of the fellow had been notable throughout the drive.
After a moment he contributed a secret thought of his own. “Look at that big sunflower in the middle, will you! He stands there like he don’t know what it’s all about.”
The traffic policeman, damp and desperate, was some feet beyond the reach of the speaker’s voice. He could not have heard the insult, however, had it been shouted at him, so great was the din.
A block behind, new motor cars were adding themselves to the collection in the street and adding their raucous bellowings to the symphony. It was apparently the belief of all concerned that a traffic tangle is best straightened out by a continuous staccato shrieking of motor horns. In the intervals of the uproar, the warning bell at the bridgehead could be faintly heard, either in competition or collusion.
The light mist continued to fall drearily.
Rainfall—John Rainfall—Dr. John Rainfall of the Gatacre Memorial Hospital—leaned back cynically in his seat and lighted his third cynical cigarette. If he was going to be late, he was going to be late; that was all. Saxon, he hoped, would have sense enough to go to his seat without waiting.
But the noise at length was subsiding. Rainfall glanced at his wrist watch, then at the clock in the Wrigley Building doorway. The bridge was on its way down. The tall tug, dragging after it its train of barges, was slowly leaving the neighborhood with a last derisive hoot. The big sunflower was endeavoring, godlike, to bring order out of chaos.
He caught the doctor’s eye and waved a blue arm in cheery greeting.
“Grand weather for ducks, Doctor,” he roared, coming alongside.
“And for sunflowers,” smiled Rainfall, handing him the habitual cigar.
In a moment now, he noted, the stream would be in motion and the bridge would be choked,
Rainfall dug quickly into his pocket. “I’m getting out here,” he said. “I can do it better on foot.”
In spite of his limp, which was aggravated in damp weather, he was one of the first to pass the barrier. Cutting across Wacker Drive, he reached the thoroughfare called Wabash, where he flagged another taxi, headed west, and in five minutes was at his destination. The sidewalk in front of the theater was deserted, save for a seven-foot doorman. He was exactly twelve-and-a-half minutes late.
The curtain was already up, and with a feeling of guilt he trod softly in the wake of an attractive usher, who looked like a boy and was a girl. The shifting impact of her torchlight on the carpeted aisle conjured queer figures in the pattern underfoot; then it remained stationary upon a pair of gray spats under a seat that was beside his own. He smiled down into the face of Howard Saxon.
His own seat was on the aisle. With a murmured apology for his tardiness, he seated himself, pinched his companion’s knee, and gave himself over to contemplation of the play. His overcoat he had hurled at a check boy as he entered the theater.
On the stage a reedy made was saying: “Quite true, Mrs. Caldwell. By all means let us bring the offender to justice. Yet if we all got justice, which of us, I wonder, would escape!”
It was the stage detective, Halleck, vouchsafing his epigrammatic philosophy of life.
“At fifty-two,” replied the woman addressed as Mrs. Caldwell, “one’s ambitions are modest. I no longer yearn even for justice. Like charity, it is only a word—in the dictionary.”
Terrible!
Her voice, too, was thick and annoying. “Adenoying,” it occurred to the cynical physician. He screwed his head around and stole a glance at Saxon, wondering what his friend was thinking of the stage detective. Saxon, he recalled, loathed detective stories and read them for the enjoyment of laughing at them. That, at any rate, was Saxon’s story.
The outline of the play was already known to Rainfall. Patrick Lear had told him all about it. Saxon, the doctor assumed, was unacquainted with its ramifications.
The sporting editor of the Telegram was studying the stage detective with amused attention. The idea, apparently, had been to create something intellectual as a contrast to the roughneck police captain who, no doubt, would shortly appear. The fellow’s real name was Ridinghood, as betrayed by the program, which also struck the newspaper man as humorous.
Saxon was glad that Rainfall had arrived before anything of interest had occurred. Rainfall and Lear, he knew, were old friends. How far out into the audience, he wondered, could an actor see? It was a point that had never come up in his reading. Would Pat Lear be able to pick out his friends ten rows back? Probably not.
A tall, clean-shaven woman, striding like a man, walked onto the stage from the right. Or was it the left? Was the right hand of an audience the left hand of the actors, so to speak? She asserted loudly that she didn’t know what was coming over the Master, these days, that she didn’t, what with his goings-on with that outlandish foreign gentleman and his looking under the bed the way he did every night before he retired. Oh, she had seen him, she said, even though perhaps she shouldn’t have been looking; but now that Miss Miriam was at home, bless her dear heart, she looked at a lot of things she never had thought of looking at before; and what was more she would go on looking, too, rather than that any harm should come to that dear lamb. Family curse indeed! she said. She could tell a story about that, too, if she had a mind to; and it was a good thing for some folks that she wasn’t one to talk much [laughter], for if she ever got started the Lord only knew where she’d end or who would be hit.
She looked very hard at Mrs. Caldwell as she said this, and Saxon grinned happily. Fifty per cent of the morons in the audience, he knew, would at once begin to suspect Mrs. Caldwell of whatever misdemeanor was to follow. The other fifty per cent, slightly more cunning, would suspect the loose-tongued housekeeper.
Mrs. Caldwell’s name was Beulah, it appeared, and when there were harder eyes and faces, thought Saxon, Beulah would have them.
Lear was about due for an appearance. A grand fellow, and certainly a very popular actor. The house would roar its applause as he came on, and Lear would pause in his entrance and bow, ever so slightly, to his massed admirers.
“I come on at the second ‘Sh-h!’” he had said, the afternoon before. The first was just leaving the lips of Mrs. Caldwell. “I think Mr. Carraway is coming now,” she continued warningly.
Then a curious silence fell upon the stage. It was as if a signal from the wings had frozen the second “Sh-h!” upon her tongue.
Was it conceivable that the woman had forgotten her lines? That Lear had forgotten his cue?
The silence continued. After a moment, and quite suddenly, it was unbearable. Saxon leaned forward in his seat. There was an odd menace in the situation that he felt but could not name. A sense of impending revelation. Something had happened—something not upon the boards.
The sporting editor of the Telegram half rose from his seat, so sure was he of his intuitions. The silence, brief as it had been, was now almost intolerable. The stage detective and Mrs. Caldwell were faking a voiceless conversation. They were stalling for time.
A puzzled murmur became apparent in the audience. Then slowly the curtain began to come down.
Rainfall sprang to his feet. His hand was on Saxon’s shoulder. “What do you make of it, Howard?” he asked in a whisper. “If Lear has had another heart attack … I”
“Wait!” said his friend.
A man had stepped from the wings and now stood before the curtain in silence. The long vista of a painted street was immediately behind him. He raised a hand to hush the rising murmur of the house. His voice was low but clear, and every ear was bending to catch his announcement.
“I regret to have to tell you that Mr. Lear has been suddenly taken ill. He is unable to go on, and, unfortunately, no understudy is available. Obviously the performance cannot proceed. If you will turn in your seat checks at the box office …”
He almost dragged his companion to his feet. As they hurried to the rear of the auditorium and around to a side aisle the voice of the announcer on the stage continued to issue instructions. The public, at any rate, was to get its money back.
Passing through a door behind the lower tier of boxes, Saxon and the doctor traversed a short corridor and climbed a narrow flight of steps. They passed another door and found themselves, with some suddenness, behind the scenes. A number of men and women, some of them in costume, were whispering together, with occasional glances toward a room whose door opened a few feet beyond. At close quarters their greased faces looked strangely inhuman.
“Where is Mr. Lear?” asked the physician.
They pointed silently to the door of the room beyond. The thin youth who had played the part of the stage detective added dryly: “In his dressing room.”
Rainfall pushed into the dressing room, with Saxon at his heels. Then both stopped motionless.
Patrick Lear, surrounded by managers, assistant managers, stage managers, and house detectives, sat quietly in a chair before his dressing table. He did not turn as they entered. His eyes, widely open, stared with mild surprise at his own face looking out at him from the mirror. He seemed to be pondering, whimsically, the unaccustomed experience of being dead.
In another chair, some distance removed from the futile group, a white-faced woman was sobbing quietly, unobtrusively. In her Saxon recognized with surprise the actress known in the play as Mrs. Caldwell.
Rainfall stepped forward and seized the wrist of the dead man. He tore open the actor’s shirt at a spot above the heart and placed a hand inside. He bent down and for an instant stared fixedly into the blank eyes. Useless gestures, all of them. The doctor knew a corpse when he saw one.
Then again, quickly, the group about the dead man turned. The elderly stage housekeeper, who had garrulously prattled about the Master, had just stepped into the room. As she did so, she stooped suddenly and came up with a square of white paper. It had been lying in the corridor, just across the doorsill—ignored.
“Let me see that,” snapped Sultan, the house manager. He snatched the paper from the woman’s hand.
Again he cried out, and they crowded toward him in a body. Over his shoulder they read the words blocked upon the paper.