"I enclose a ticket for the manager's box. I hope you can come. I want to talk about your play. I will send my brother to bring you in back to see me. I have been rehearsing all the afternoon, but I re-read the play this morning while in bed. I like it better and better, but you can do more with it—I feel that you have suppressed the poetry here and there. My quarrel with you realists is that you are afraid to put into your representations of life the emotions that make life a dynamic thing. But it is stirring and suggestive as it is. Come in and talk with me, for I am full of it and see great possibilities in the final act."
His hands were tremulous and his eyes glowing as he put the note down and faced himself in the glass. The pleasure of meeting her again under such conditions made him forget, for the moment, the rôle she was to play—a part he particularly detested. Truly he was the most fortunate and distinguished of men—to be thus taken by the hand and lifted from nameless obscurity to the most desired position beside a great star.
He dressed with unusual care, and was a [noticeably handsome figure] as he sat alone in the box; and elated, tense, self-conscious. When she came on and walked close down to the foot-lights nearest him, flashing a glance of recognition into his eyes, his breath quickened and his face flushed. A swift interchange of light and fire took place at the moment, her eyelids fell. She recoiled as if in dismay, then turned and apparently forgot him and every one else in the fervor of her art.
A transforming readjustment of all the lines of her face took place. She became sinister, mocking, and pitiless. An exultant cruelty croaked in her voice. Minute, repulsive remodellings of her neck and cheeks changed her to a harpy, and seeing these evidences of her great genius Douglass grew bitterly resentful, and when she laughed, with the action of a vulture thrusting her head forward from the shoulders, he sickened and turned away. It was marvellous work, but how desecrating to her glorious womanhood. Coming so close on that moment of mystic tenderness it was horrible. "My God! She must not play such parts. They will leave their mark upon her."
When the curtain fell he did not applaud, but drew back into the shadow, sullen, brooding, sorrowful. In the tableau which followed the recall, her eyes again sought for him (though she still moved in character), and the curtain fell upon the scene while yet she was seeking him.
Here now began a transformation in the man. He had come to the theatre tremulous with eagerness to look upon her face, to touch her hand, but when her brother entered the box, saying, "Mr. Douglass, this is the best time to see my sister," he rose slowly with a curious reluctance.
Through devious passages beneath the theatre, Hugh led the way, while with greater poignancy than ever before the young playwright sensed the vulgarity, the immodesty, and the dirt of the world behind and below the scenes. It was all familiar enough to him, for he had several friends among the actors, but the thought of one so sovereign as Helen in the midst of a region so squalid stung him. He was jealous of the actors, the scene-shifters, who were permitted to see her come and go.
He was reserved and rather pale, but perfectly self-contained, as he entered the little reception-hall leading to her dressing-room. He faced her with a sense of dread—apprehensive of some disenchantment. She met him cordially, without the slightest reference to her make-up, which was less offensive than he had feared; but he winced, nevertheless, at the vulgarity of her part so skilfully suggested by paint and powder. She gave him her hand with a frank gesture. "You didn't applaud my scenes to-night," she said, with a smile as enigmatic as the one she used in The Baroness.
His voice was curt with emotion as he replied, "No, I did not; I couldn't. They saddened me."
"What do you mean?" she asked, with a startled, anxious paling beneath her rouge.