In the taxicab, en route to the Theatre Max, he contrived even to distil a good omen from the driving autumnal downpour itself.... The rain-swept pavements, their polished blackness shot with a thousand strands of golden brilliance; the painted bosom of the lowering, heavy sky; the tear-drenched window-panes; even the incessant crepitation on the roof of the scurrying, skidding cab seemed to lend a colour of assurance to his thoughts.
"On such a day as this," he told his doubting friend, "I won her first; on such a day I shall win her anew, finally and for all time!..."
From Broadway to Sixth Avenue, Forty-sixth Street was bright with the yellow glare of the huge sign in front of the Theatre Max. But this night, unlike that other night when he had approached the stage of his wife's triumphs, there was no crawling rank of cabs, no eager and curious press of people in the street; but few vehicles disputed their way; otherwise the rain and the hurrying, rain-coated wayfarers had the thoroughfare to themselves.... And even this he chose to consider a favourable omen: there was not now a public to come between him and his love—only Max and her frightened fancies.
The man at the door recognized Ember with a cheerful nod; Whitaker he did not know.
"Just in time, Mr. Ember; curtain's been up about ten minutes...."
The auditorium was in almost total darkness. A single voice was audible from the stage that confronted it like some tremendous, moonlight canvas in a huge frame of tarnished gold. They stole silently round the orchestra seats to the stage-box—the same box that Whitaker had on the former occasion occupied in company with Max.
They succeeded in taking possession without attracting attention, either from the owners of that scanty scattering of shirt-bosoms in the orchestra—the critical fraternity and those intimates bidden by the manager to the first glimpse of his new revelation in stage-craft—or from those occupying the stage.
The latter were but two. Evidently, though the curtain had been up for some minutes, the action of the piece had not yet been permitted to begin to unfold. Whitaker inferred that Max had been dissatisfied with something about the lighting of the scene. The manager was standing in mid-stage, staring up at the borders: a stout and pompous figure, tenacious to every detail of that public self which he had striven so successfully to make unforgettably individual; a figure quaintly incongruous in his impeccable morning-coat and striped trousers and flat-brimmed silk hat, perched well back on his head, with his malacca stick and lemon-coloured gloves and small and excessively glossy patent-leather shoes, posed against the counterfeit of a moonlit formal garden.
Aside from him, the only other occupant of the stage was Sara Law. She sat on a stone bench with her profile to the audience, her back to the right of the proscenium arch; so that she could not, without turning, have noticed the entrance of Ember and her husband. A shy, slight, deathlessly youthful figure in pale and flowing garments that moulded themselves fluently to her sweet and girlish body, in a posture of pensive meditation: she was nothing less than adorable. Whitaker could not take his eyes from her, for sheer wonder and delight.
He was only vaguely conscious that Max, at length satisfied, barked a word to that effect to an unseen electrician off to the left, and waving his hand with a gesture indelibly associated with his personality, dragged a light cane-seated chair to the left of the proscenium and sat himself down.