Like many another rich man, Starr had his hobby. The newspapers and the critics had scoffed and railed when he opened the Thelma and dedicated it to the uplift of dramatic art. He held the Broadway productions in lofty contempt, declaring that they catered only to the vulgar tastes of the rabble. Admission to the Thelma was by invitation only, and the auditorium seated exactly ninety-nine persons, for it was Starr’s firm opinion that out of the city’s five million only an infinitesimal few were able to appreciate true histrionic art. Members of the daily press were never admitted, and the only critics present at the performances were the representatives of two or three obscure journals who shared Starr’s esthetic views.
The owner and director of the Thelma was prejudiced against music at theatrical performances, and where the orchestra pit should have been was an exquisite statue in marble representing Aphrodite springing out of a foaming sea. Along the walls were friezes picturing the nine muses, the work of a famous mural painter, and the domed ceiling showed colorful glimpses of Dionysian festivals. Scattered throughout the auditorium and in niches in the walls were superb vases containing flowers whose fragrance filled the air.
The effect of the whole was sumptuous rather than harmonious, and it was characteristic of Vincent Starr’s freakish tastes and clashing impulses. And among the audience at the première of “His Soul’s Master” there was not one but thought that the brilliant and fanciful setting lent a touch of incongruity to the tragic byplay enacted off stage.
The moment she stepped into the box reserved for her father and herself, Helen Hardwick felt she was in a strange and somewhat oppressive atmosphere. The faces in the audience were unfamiliar, and everybody stared at her in a way she could not understand until she suddenly remembered that among these people she was something of a celebrity. Vincent Starr, who sneered at the biggest dramatic successes of the year, had not only accepted her play for production at the Thelma, but was himself playing the principal rôle, and he was indulging in much self-flattery over having discovered a budding genius in the author of “His Soul’s Master.” That explained the curious glances turned in her direction.
It was both amusing and bewildering, she thought. Nothing but a whim had caused her to enter her play in the prize contest conducted by Starr to obtain suitable material for his theater, and its acceptance had been the greatest surprise of her twenty-three years. Her only other serious attempt had been a sketch produced by a dramatic society at Barnard in her junior year. “His Soul’s Master” had been a slightly more ambitious effort, and it had been inspired by vague emotions which she herself could hardly understand, but for all that it was a simple, artless thing with a theme as old as the story of the Garden of Eden. It was nothing more than an allegorical fantasy depicting the forces of evil and good struggling for possession of a man’s soul. How a play of that kind could have appealed to an eccentric and highly sophisticated genius like Vincent Starr was beyond her.
But the curtain had been up only a few minutes when she began to understand. In the part of Marius, the mortal for whose soul the spirits of light and darkness were contending, Starr had found a rôle that matched his temperament to perfection. The opening monologue, in which Marius revealed himself as tiring of a life of refined villainy and roguish adventures, had not proceeded far before she saw that the rôle had so gripped and stirred him that he was living the part rather than acting it. The lines throbbed and sparkled with life and passion, and Starr was completely submerging his own emotions in those of the hero.
It did not take Helen long to see that it was the character of Marius, rather than the flimsy fancy woven around it, that had caused Starr to accept her play. She had heard he was vain and egotistical, and no doubt he reveled in the opportunity for self-exaltation that the rôle afforded him. As the play went on from scene to scene, another impression began to take root in her mind. Here and there in the lines she noted an odd cynical twist or a bit of ambiguous phrasing that she was sure had not been in the manuscript. The tempting voices and gestures of the spirits of darkness were more appealing than she had intended, and the exhortations of the spirit of light were correspondingly feebler. She thought she understood why Starr had found excuses for not admitting her to any of the rehearsals.
She was inclined to resent the liberties he had taken with her lines, but again she was carried away by his impassioned rendition of Marius. The very lifeblood of the character seemed to pulse in Starr’s veins. Marius had seemed very real to her while she was writing the play, but not so real by far as she now saw him on the stage of the Thelma Theater. She leaned forward and watched him with growing interest and wonder. It was as if a being that had existed only in her thoughts and in her heart had suddenly materialized in flesh and blood.
It was weird. Now and then there came a touch of subtlety, an odd turn of speech, or a telling gesture that she instantly recognized, although she knew it was interpolated by the actor. She had heard and seen them all in imagination, but not clearly enough to reproduce them on paper. The gestures impressed her most. She knew and recognized them all, from the slightest to the most elaborate, although she had visualized only a few of them clearly enough to be able to put them into the play. It seemed as though the actor, in expanding and vivifying his rôle, had made use of material that had existed only in the playwright’s mind.
Impulsively she reached out her hand and placed it over her father’s. Mr. Hardwick, curator of the Cosmopolitan Museum and an authority on Assyrian relics, started as if his mind had been roving among prehistoric scenes.