HE swinging door closed behind him, and Bellsmith, blinking at the sudden light of the main lobby, found himself faced with a strangely enlivened scene, for the hour of quiet was long since over and the brisk movement of the evening had begun. A line of half a dozen people was forming in front of the box-office window. Others were coming in from the street, shuffling and laughing and taking their tickets from envelopes. The usual unattached individuals, mostly women, waiting for "friends with the tickets," were lined up along the wall searching anxiously each face as it entered the door. The door-man was in his position beside the tall boxes while, on the other side of the lobby, stood a stolid fireman in uniform.
With an attitude unconsciously but ludicrously professional, Bellsmith found himself settling back to watch the entering crowd, strangely feeling himself already an official part of the scene.
The door behind him opened and he turned expectantly, but it was only the electrician with a coil of lighting wire over his arm.
"Excuse me a minute," he said and, as Bellsmith moved aside, he reached up and turned a bulb over his head, found it dead, and replaced it with another.
The line in front of the box-office melted away for a moment and an anxious-looking young woman with a heightened complexion under a heavy veil came bustling in, stopped in front of the window, and was handed a telegram. It was not hard for Bellsmith to recognize her as one of the company. Which one? he wondered.
The young woman opened her yellow envelope, looked at it casually, and then bustled toward the door in front of which he was standing. For a fraction of a second he caught her eye as he passed through the door, and something seemed to telegraph between them a sort of honest community of interest. Bellsmith knew that, standing there, she had taken him for some one connected with the "house." The idea was rather thrilling.
A second time the swinging door behind him opened, and this time, as Bellsmith turned, he found Israels waiting him with a hardly concealed air of excitement on his face.
"Well, Mr. Bellsmith," he hailed, "I guess that we 're ready to talk business."
"Good enough!" replied Bellsmith.
He turned to follow the other man into the darkened and unused part of the lobby, but, despite himself, there had been a frightened catch in his voice. Despite the strange ease with which everything had progressed up to that moment, he had still more than half felt that something would come up to stop the grotesque negotiations before they really reached a serious point. But now the word had been spoken. The verdict had been given. "Jacta est alea!" Yes, the alea was jacta'd, all right, but what made him keep suddenly thinking of his Latin, after all these years? Inconsequentially he remembered what Dr. MacVickar had said about the vividness of his dreams—all of scenes and persons recalled from far in the past.
Israels took his former seat in the little office. As before he threw one leg over the desk and shoved back his hat.
"Well, Mr. Bellsmith," he began, rubbing his hands, "at first, Mr. Gay was as much bowled off his pins as I was. It took me an age to get it over to him that you were serious, but when I told him who you were and that you knew some of the people here in the show, the idea sort of appealed to his sporting blood, the way it did to mine. Normally he would n't listen to selling out any of his interests, but, to tell the truth, between you and I, Mr. Gay has a weakness for one thing. He is all for New York attractions. He wants to see a show right there under his nose, and no matter how good the show is doing, like this one, he loses interest in it when it goes out on the road. He's already got more in town than he can handle, and so, when he found that you really meant it, he said he might sell—for a price."
He waited expectantly and Bellsmith cleared his throat.
"Er—er, what is the price?"
Israels stiffened himself into the attitude which such a negotiation demanded.
"Harcourt & Gay will sell you the show to-night for forty-five thousand dollars—in cash."
Bellsmith's face fell. Just what the price would be he had never really considered. Whatever it might be, he had known that he could meet it, but forty-five thousand dollars, said as abruptly as that, sounded ominously and frighteningly big, even to him. Israels observed instantly the look of alarm in his face, and his own face hardened a bit cynically.
"Forty-five thousand," repeated Bellsmith absently, as if he were trying to make a mental inventory. "Just what would that include?"