Before the curtain went up, Sylvia could think of nothing but the improvisations that she ought to have invented instead of the ones that she had. It was a strain upon her common sense to prevent her from canceling the whole performance and returning its money to the audience. The more she contemplated what she was going to do the more she viewed the undertaking as a fraud upon the public. There had never been any chicane like the chicane she was presently going to commit. What was that noise? Who had given the signal to O’Hea? What in hell’s name did he think he was doing at the piano? The sound of the music was like water running into one’s bath while one was lying in bed—nothing could stop it from overflowing presently. Nothing could stop the curtain from rising. At what a pace he was playing that Debussy! He was showing off, the fool! A ridiculous joke came into her mind that she kept on repeating while the music flowed: “Many a minim makes a maxim. Many a minim makes a maxim.” How cold it was in the dressing-room, and the music was getting quicker and quicker. There was a knock at the door. It was Arthur. How nice he looked with that red carnation in his buttonhole.
“How nice you look, Arthur, in that buttonhole.”
The flower became tremendously important; it seemed to Sylvia that, if she could go on flattering the flower, O’Hea would somehow be kept at the piano.
“Well, don’t pull it to pieces,” said Arthur, ruthfully. But it was too late; the petals were scattered on the floor like drops of blood.
“Oh, I’m sorry! Come along back to my dressing-room. I’ll give you another flower.”
“No, no; there isn’t time now. Wait till you come off after your first set.”
Now it was seeming the most urgent thing in the world to find another flower for Arthur’s buttonhole. At all cost the rise of that curtain must be delayed. But Arthur had brought her on the stage and the notes were racing toward the death of the piece. It was absurd of O’Hea to have chosen Debussy; the atmosphere required a ballade of Chopin, or, better still, Schumann’s Noveletten. He could have played all the Noveletten. Oh dear, what a pity she had not thought of making that suggestion. The piano would have been scarcely half-way through by now.
Suddenly there was silence. Then there followed the languid applause of an afternoon audience for an unimportant part of the program.
“He’s stopped,” Sylvia exclaimed, in horror. “What has happened?”
She turned to Arthur in despair, but he had hurried off the stage. Lucian Hope’s painted city seemed to press forward and stifle her; she moved down-stage to escape it. The curtain went up and she recoiled as from a chasm at her feet. Why on earth was O’Hea sitting in that idiotic attitude, as if he were going to listen to a sermon, looking down like that, with his right arm supporting his left elbow and his left hand propping up his chin? How hot the footlights were! She hoped nothing had happened, and looked round in alarm; but the fireman was standing quite calmly in the wings. Just as Sylvia was deciding that her voice could not possibly escape from her throat, which had closed upon it like a pair of pincers, the voice tore itself free and went traveling out toward that darkness in front, that nebulous darkness scattered with hands and faces and programs. Like Concetta in a great city, Sylvia was lost in that darkness; she was Concetta. It seemed to her that the applause at the end was not so much approval of Concetta as a welcome to Mrs. Gainsborough; when isolated laughs and volleys of laughter came out of the darkness and were followed sometimes by the darkness itself laughing everywhere, so that O’Hea looked up very personally and winked at her, then Sylvia fell in love with her audience. The laughter increased, and suddenly she recognized at the end of each volley that Sylvius and Rose were supplementing its echoes with rapturous echoes of their own. She could not see them, but their gurgles in the darkness were like a song of nightingales to Sylvia. She ceased to be Mrs. Gainsborough, and began to say three or four of the poems. Then the curtain fell, and came up again, and fell, and came up again, and fell, and came up again.