She had the same little habit of balancing up and down on her toes, impatient for the music to give her her cue. Her little chuckling laugh of sheer enjoyment in herself and in life was just the same. She was still the very spirit of life and joy she had been yonder, two years ago—two centuries ago it seemed to David Joslin! Then he had been another man. And now—he was again that other man!
As to the play, so-called, it was nothing to him, and he knew not how long it endured. The concordance of the strings and brasses meant naught to-night, though otherwise they might have meant much indeed, new as they were to his acquaintance. He sat mute, his eyes fixed steadily upon one figure upon the stage, the sum total of the sensuous appeal lost for him in the charm of its central figure.
And then, electric, a clash in the music touched him to the marrow. The orchestra leader waved his baton. A few violins, a flute or two, struck into the opening bars of an air that David Joslin knew!
Polly Pendleton was at that moment off-stage, but now ran tripping from the wings, smiling, shrugging up her scant shoulder strap as she came. Her violin was under her arm. She waved a hand to quiet the enthusiasm, and played with the orchestra a few staves of the air.
“You’re the Only Man for Me”—that was what Polly Pendleton would play, of course. Did not David Joslin know?
When she came to the chorus, she stepped down to the footlights and extended her two round, white arms, bare to the shoulder—her slender, up-curved little fingers reaching almost to the face of the bald-headed leader of the orchestra, himself of a family of eight. To him she sang, her eyes dark and pleading, her little feet tiptoeing, her voice no less than blandishment itself—“For you are my Baby—you are my Baby—you’re the only, only, only man for me!” And then Polly Pendleton laughed with her audience at the jest of it.
She ran off-stage, but must come back again, to be sure. This time she raised her hands and her eyes to a solid-looking citizen, who sat in a proscenium box—a banker and a leading figure of the town, it chanced, well known to all in the audience. To him also, pleadingly, bewitchingly, she asserted, “You’re the only, only, only man for me!”
And so in time Polly Pendleton hitched up her shoulder-strap once more, and ran off in her final exit.
David Joslin found himself, slightly reeling, passing out to the open air with the others. Some men whistled, others bore copies of a song, which they had purchased from the ushers at the door. He never could remember how or why he went to the principal hotel. Certainly it was not to find quarters for himself. Aimlessly he walked down the cross hall of the lobby to another entrance; and so sheer accident favored him.
He knew that the rustle of skirts at the door of the “ladies’ parlor” meant the presence of the woman he sought—knew it by some strange super-sense that came to him. A moment later Polly Pendleton herself appeared at the door, looking across the hall to the open door of the café upon the other side.