HERE are certain moments when it is quite possible to go behind the scenes of a theater without disillusionment, but midnight on a Saturday night, on the road, is not one of those moments.
It was midnight, almost to a dot, on Saturday night, as Bellsmith and Israels stood in the dingy space adjoining the wings of the Lyceum. An hour before, the musical comedy 'Eleanor" had rung down its curtain. Whether or not it would ever be rung up again depended wholly on the present conference between Bellsmith and Israels.
In the front of the house, beyond the asbestos curtain, the lights had now been entirely extinguished, and the auditorium was a black void in which even the rows of seats could not be distinguished. From the little door behind the boxes, now propped open, there came back, however, a slow, drifting breath of warm air and a faint sense of vanished humanity. The stage itself, which bulked in a vague, cavernous gloom over Israel's shoulder was lighted only by reflection from the passage in which they stood and from its own looming whitewashed wall, which seemed to lighten the blackness as a white road or a white building will do on a starlit night.
It was cold out there on the stage. The fires in the boiler-room had been banked for the week-end the minute the audience was out of the house, and the narrow space in which the men were standing was tempered only by the electric lights and by the near presence of thirty or forty persons who were waiting in a dull despondency for the final result of the conference between the manager and the man who now only in contempt was known as the "owner."
At Bellsmith's right was the only brilliantly lighted spot in all the surrounding gloom—the corridor which led to the dressing-rooms of the principals. Overhead, the spiral staircase circled up into regions black and echoing, for the members of the chorus had long since finished dressing and packing and, with the minor musicians and the mechanicians, were waiting, bundled in hats and overcoats in various parts of the darkened stage, some sitting on trunks or boxes, some standing in disconsolate groups. Occasionally a thin laugh, a murmuring voice, or a bit of skylarking would come from the gray depths of the empty stage, but for the most part the company waited in dull, stolid silence.
Bellsmith, his collar turned up to his ears, studied a printed form, scrawled over with marks in blue pencil, which had come from the box-office during the last act. He looked up at Israels.
"Well," he said slowly, "what do you suggest?"
Israels shrugged.
"Come on in here," he said suddenly. "There's no use freezing to death while we talk it over."
Glad of any suggestion, Bellsmith followed him slowly down the lighted corridor past the open doors of the tiny dressing-rooms. In each one of them, in a curious isolation, sat one or at most two of the principals, each of whom glanced up eagerly or stolidly as the two men passed. In the first sat Maida Maine, the leading woman—fuming. She was bundled to the ears in her fur coat, her colored maid, with hands in her lap, sitting silently in front of her. Israels paused in the doorway.
"Miss Maine, I'd forgotten that you were still here. I can't tell you anything yet. I 'll let you know the first thing in the morning."
The next dressing-room had been Tilly Marshall's. Poppy Vaughn had been using it for the last week, but Poppy Vaughn was not a person who courted solitude, and the little room stood absolutely stripped and vacant. There was a curious irony for Bellsmith in that poignantly empty room. Tilly Marshall, his only reason for this disastrous adventure, had left the company the day he had entered it.
In the next room Poppy Vaughn was talking in low tones with Elsie Winner. The two girls stopped guiltily as he passed and looked up at him quite as if he had been a stranger. In the next dressing-room Bellony, the tenor, sat smoking his inevitable cigar, appearing much more at home than any of the others in his sullen solitude.
At the end of the corridor Israels pushed without into the dressing-room occupied by Charlie Barnes, the comedian, the only room in the row which suggested anything except desolation, possibly because, alone of the whole company, the comedian had not finished packing. His last-act costume was still draped half in and half out of his trunk, and his tin make-up box was still open under the little square mirror on his dressing-shelf.