bottle of beer, and, forthwith, pencil and note-book in hand:
“Let’s see the program.”
Jimmy, on his side, took a written list from his pocket and laid it on the table.
It goes without saying that the select turns which they were about to discuss had long been engaged for Harrasford’s different music-halls, some of them two or three years ahead, as often happens in the case of the great bill-toppers, and the question was to choose among the best, so as to insure the triumph of the opening night. For Harrasford, who had as yet appointed no one as manager or stage-manager, the thing was to settle a program which would discourage any attempt at competition, to have none appearing except stars, without counting those whom he held in reserve for the following month, before distributing them over his variety-theaters in England, or, later, to any part of Europe, in the “Great Powers Tour” which he proposed to create and of which the Astrarium would be a sort of “commodore” music-hall, or headquarters. Jimmy only gave his opinion, after which Harrasford would decide.
Harrasford’s dream was a model music-hall, something, in its own way, like the Grand Opéra in Paris: a palatial edifice, in a new style of architecture, with friezes displaying bodies in contortion, caryatids, cast from life, supporting the springers of the arches, mixed groups of loins and chests with swelling muscles, under the electric lights, and, in the lobbies, a lavish display of African onyx, Scotch granite and Russian porphyry. The crowd would pass in between Venus and Apollo, holding flowers and lights; and there would be music everywhere; gaiety, noise, red and gold everywhere; all cares would be laid aside and forgotten on entering; it would be a hall containing every modern convenience, like the Iroquois at Buffalo or a ’Frisco sky-scraper: newspapers, café, bars, smoking-room, barbers’ saloon, telegraph-office, telephone-office, messenger-boys, ticket-office, private rooms in which phonographs would shout out the latest news illustrated with telesteriography, from eight o’clock till midnight. The idea was to create, thirty years ahead of its time, the great popular music-hall, with its ball-rooms, as at Blackpool, its side-shows, a palm-garden, a roof-garden; to draw to the theater those who, on getting up from dinner, go to the café and stay there; to give them an atmosphere of mirth and jollity, of comforting lights, a sort of night forum, of People’s Palace, with, in the middle, in the sumptuous hall, facing the furnace that was the stage, a long thrill of three hours’ duration.
And he would realize it next year, but he was in a hurry to open now, to plant his flag of victory:
“Faites vite! Dépêchez!”
Dare Devil had won the place for him and Jimmy was bringing him the sensational attraction, the inspired godsend which would pack the Astrarium for six months and fill its till and spread its name far and wide over Europe.
Harrasford thought of this with a puff at his cigar, after glancing at the photographs on the wall, and then, suddenly:
“Let’s see the program.”