I found that I was dressing. Well, let "T. B." do his worst. He could tear me and my play to tatters, he could disband the company and disrupt the universe, if only for a few blessed hours he could keep me from seeing that shadowy room, that still, helpless figure. But he couldn't. "The—crisis—is—expected—to-night. The—crisis—is—expected—to-night." And when it came, while the great battle was waged that I now knew meant life to me, too, I would be in an up-town theater, listening to petty human beings recite the petty lines of a petty play, to which in my incredible blindness I had given my time for months, shutting myself away from my friends, shutting myself away from Godfrey. How many times had he telephoned and written? Half a dozen at least. He had urged me to go to a concert or two, to a play or two, but I had been "too busy." It was monstrous, it was unbelievable, but it was true. "The—crisis—is—expected—to-night."
I was at the theater now. How I had reached it was not quite clear. The members of the company were there before me, scattered about in the wings and on the big empty stage, lit by a single "bunch" light. The information that "T. B." himself was to conduct had fallen upon them like a pall. Under its sable influence they whispered together in stricken groups of three or four. Near the right first entrance Elman and Miss Merrick sat, their heads close, the star talking softly but rapidly, Elman listening with his tired, courteous air. They nodded across the stage at me when I appeared, but I did not join them. Instead I slipped down into the dark auditorium and took my place in an orchestra seat, where I could be alone. The whole thing was a nightmare, of course. I could not possibly be sitting there when only a few blocks away that sick-room held its watching group, its silent, helpless patient. "The—crisis—is—expected—to-night."
There was a sudden stir on the stage, a quick straightening of every figure there, a business-like bustle, and much scurrying to and fro. "T. B." had entered the theater by the front door and was striding down the middle aisle. I saw a huge bulk that loomed grotesque for an instant as it leaned toward the dark footlights for a word with Mr. Elman, and dropped with a grunt into a chair in the third row. Other figures—I did not know how many—had entered the dark theater and taken their places around me. From where I sat, half a dozen rows behind him, I had a view of "T. B.'s" hair under the slouch hat he kept on his head, the bulge of his jaw as he turned his profile toward me, the sharp upward angle of the huge cigar in his mouth. The company were in their places in the wings and on the stage. I heard Elman's quick word, "Curtain." The rehearsal had begun. The familiar words of the opening scene rolled over the footlights as cold and vague as a fog that rolls in from the sea. "The—crisis—is—expected—to-night." No, that was not what the office boy on the stage had just said. It was what Gibson had said that afternoon, a thousand years ago, when he had called me on the telephone.
Things were going badly up there on the stage. Like a patient coming out of ether during an operation, and vaguely conscious of what was passing around her, I had moments of realizing this. Boyce did not know his lines; he was garbling them frightfully, and, by failing to give his associates their cues, was adding to the panic into which "T. B.'s" presence had already thrown them. There! He had ruined Miss Merrick's opening scene, which was flattening out, going to pieces. It seemed as if some one should do something. Yet, what could be done? "The—crisis—is—expected—to-night." What difference did it make what happened on that stage? The conscious interval was over. The babble that came over the footlights meant nothing.
From his orchestra seat, into which he seemed to be sinking deeper as the moments passed, "T. B." sent forth a sardonic croak. It was a horrible noise—nerve-racking. It reached down to where I was submerged, caught me, drew me up to the surface again. I saw the company cringe under it, heard Elman's reprimand of Boyce, and his sharp command to begin the scene again. Confusion, confusion, so much confusion over such little things, when only a few blocks away was that shadowy sick-room in which the great battle between life and death was being fought with hardly a sound.
It was midnight. "T. B." was conducting the rehearsal. For three hours he had poured upon the company the vitriol of his merciless tongue. For three hours he had raced up and down the aisles of the theater, alternately yelping commands and taking flying leaps across the footlights to the stage to go through a scene himself. He had laughed, he had wept, he had pleaded, he had sworn, he had cooed, he had roared. He had been strangely gentle with the white-haired old man of the company, and wholly brutal to a young girl who was doing beautiful work. He had reduced every woman to tears and every man to smothered and stuttering profanity. And all the time, sitting in my seat in the auditorium, I had watched him as dispassionately and with almost as detached an interest as if he were a manikin pulled by invisible wires and given speech by some ventriloquist. It was all a bad dream. He did not exist. We were not really there. The things he said to the company swept by my ears like the wail of a winter wind, leaving an occasional chill behind them. The remarks he addressed directly to me touched some cell of my brain which mechanically but clearly responded. I struck out lines and gave him new speeches, scrawling them with a pencil on a pad upon my knee; I "rebuilt" the curtain speech of the second act according to his sudden notion and to his momentary content; I transferred scenes and furnished new cues while he waited for the copy with impatiently extended hand. All the time the hush of the sick-room lay around me; I saw the still figure in the great four-poster bed.
I had never seen Godfrey Morris's bedroom, though his sister had shown me his study. But now it was clear in every detail—the polished, uncarpeted floor, the carved pineapple tops of the four-poster, the great windows, open at top and bottom, the logs on the brass andirons in the grate, the brass-bound wood-box near it, the soft glow of the night lamps, the portrait of his mother which Sargent had painted ten years ago and which Godfrey had hung in his own room at the front of his bed. Yes, I remembered now, he had told me about the portrait. That was why I saw it so plainly, facing him as he lay unconscious. He had told me about the four-poster, too, and the high-boys in the room, and some chests of drawers he had picked up. He was interested in old mahogany. No, he was not interested now in anything. He was "in a stupor-like," Crumley had said. "The—crisis—is—expected—to-night."
"Great Scott, Miss Merrick!" shouted "T. B." "Don't you realize that the woman would have hysterics at this point? First she'd whimper, then she'd cry, then she'd shriek and find she couldn't stop. Like this—"
The theater filled with strange sounds—the wail of a banshee, the yelps of a suffering dog, a series of shrieks like the danger-blasts of a locomotive whistle. Something in me lent an ear to them and wondered what they meant. Surely they could not mean that my heroine was to have an attack of hysteria at that moment in my play. That was all wrong—wholly outside of the character and the scene; enough, indeed, to kill the comedy, to turn it into farce.
"That's the idea," I heard "T. B." say. "Now you try it. Here, we'll do it together."