"How is Bob doing?" Mazie asked.
Bob was the Chorus. He was no actor; but the part only required someone with a voice, and he had a really beautiful high sweet tenor. All he must do was to appear in season and out of season and jodel, which he did to admiration, with a perfectly grave face, for as I have said, he was of a sober disposition, and to tell the truth saw nothing comic in it. But about the seventh or eighth jodel the audience fell into paroxysms of laughter and so continued whenever the Chorus came on. Bob made one of the hits of the evening, to his own great confusion and the frank surprise of everyone else in the cast.
"Bob? Oh, all right. But that's one of the things they're laughing at; isn't that funny?"
"Why not, if he's funny?" said Muriel, puzzled.
"Oh, I don't mean funny that way, you know, I mean funny. Why don't you come and look on a while, Maze? Bob'll do better if you're there."
"Oh, I guess I don't care to," said Mazie with indolent emphasis. "I'd tear my dress or something. It's all full of ropes and nails and pegs behind there." She leaned back in her rocker, contemplating the sweeping breadths of her dull red silk train, spangled with jets; the front of her low corsage darted light from innumerable facets of jet and diamonds. In the absence of an actual tiara, her mother's diamond necklace had been fastened on a symmetrical frame of silver wire, and gleamed abroad from Mazie's dead-black hair, arranged in a forest of bangs. Without a single pretty feature, she wrought a curious illusion of dark and brilliant beauty; and Kitty gave her the tribute of an unwilling admiration. A girl, and not a handsome girl at that, who was too lazy or too stiff-necked to walk half-a-dozen steps to show herself when she was looking her best to a man, who as we all knew was in love with her, and who would be no poor match either—such a girl, I say, commanded all the respect of which Kitty's small soul was capable.
Then I adventured again, alone; and harvested a sensation. For, while I was standing in the left wings, between two blocks of scenery, with my skirts furled as close as the fashion of the day would allow, to avoid casual tacks, Teddy Johns came off, followed by a gratifying, yet somehow a little awesome, burst of applause. He stood close beside me breathing hard, for his humour was largely acrobatic, and dabbing the perspiration from his forehead and cheeks with a corner of handkerchief, daintily so as not to mar his paint. And the audience clamoured a recall. I suppose there were not more than a couple of hundred people in the ballroom, yet the noise they made was deafening in so contracted a space; there was something formidable and pitiless in that great insistent voice. Sudden comprehension of what stage-fright might be came to me, and I looked at Teddy with admiring wonder. What must it be to face that hydra of a creature, that thing of many souls fused into one unthinkable whole out there beyond the footlights!
"Weren't you frightened?" I whispered.
He turned towards me—and it was not Teddy Johns at all! It was a man I had never seen before.
I was so startled I could only gasp and stutter; the light was good enough, yet I thought it must have misled me, and peered into his face anxiously, expecting his familiar chuckle. His features were a mask of paint, apparently laid on at random, but as I know now, with real skill and knowledge of effect; he wore false eyebrows and a wig with a grotesque "slat" sunbonnet pushed halfway off, and held by the strings knotted under his chin. His body was padded shapelessly. And while I strove to find Teddy under this disguise, he suddenly bestowed on me a grin so vicious and repellent, that I almost screamed aloud. Whether that expression of amusement was involuntary on Huddesley's part, or whether he feigned it out of deliberate deviltry, I have often wondered. I must have uttered some sort of queer noise, for he said in a biting whisper: "Hold your tongue, you—fool!" and in the same breath was back on the stage, bowing to the tumult. He made the leader of the orchestra a sign, the instruments crashed out the opening bars of his song, and he began over again.