“But what are we going to do about—him?” Offutt indicated who he meant with a wave of his arm toward the stage.
It was Verba’s turn. Verba knew the stage and its people and its ways as Offutt would never know them. He had been an actor, Verba had, before he turned managing director for Cohalan & Hymen.
“What are we going to do about him?” he repeated; and then, as though surprised that the other should be asking the question: “Why, nothing! Offutt, every haunted house is entitled to its ghost. This is a haunted house if ever there was one; and there’s its ghost, standing out there. You mentioned an extinct species, didn’t you? Well, you were dead right, [244] son. So take your good-by look now, before we go, at the last of a great breed. There’ll be no more like him, I’m thinking.”
“But we can’t leave him here like this!” said Offutt. “His mind is gone—you admit it yourself. They’ve got hospitals and asylums in this state—and homes too. It would be a mercy to take him with us.”
“Mercy? It would be the dam’dest cruelty on earth!” snapped Verba. “How long do you suppose he’d live in an asylum if we tore him up by the roots and dragged him away from this place? A week? I tell you, a week would be a blamed long time. No, sir; we leave him right here. And we’ll keep our mouths shut about this too. Come on!”
He tiptoed to the iron door and opened it softly. Then, with his hand on the latch, he halted.
Bateman was just finishing. He spoke the mad king’s mad tag-line and got himself off the stage. He unreeled the stay rope from its chock. The curtain rumbled down. Through it the insistent smacking of Blinky’s skinny paws could be heard.
Smiling proudly the old man listened to the sound. He forgot their presence behind him. He stood waiting. Blinky kept on applauding—Blinky was wise in his part too. Then, still smiling, Bateman stripped off his beard, and, putting forth a bony white hand, he plucked aside the flapping curtain and stepped forth once more.
[245]
Scrouging up behind him and holding the curtain agape, they saw him bow low to the pit where Blinky was, and to the empty boxes, and to the yawning emptiness of each balcony; and they knew that to him this was not a mangy cavern of dead memories and dead traditions and dead days, peopled only by gnawing rats and crawling vermin and one lone little one-eyed street boy, but a place of living grandeurs and living triumphs. And when he spoke, then they knew he spoke, not to one but to a worshipping, clamorous host.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, with a bearing of splendid conceit, “I thank you for the ovation you have given me. To an artist—to an artist who values his art—such moments as this are most precious——”