The stage director, with a nod of the head intended to imply that he must be patient and all would come right in the future, recovered the paper, and scribbled another sentence. Mr Miller perused it.
“Because Mae D’Arcy has got her notice?” he queried, amazed. “But the girl can’t dance a step.”
The stage director, by means of a wave of the hand, a lifting of both eyebrows, and a wrinkling of the nose, replied that the situation, unreasonable as it might appear to the thinking man, was as he had stated and must be faced. What, he enquired—through the medium of a clever drooping of the mouth and a shrug of the shoulders—was to be done about it?
Mr Miller remained for a moment in meditation.
“I’ll go and talk to them,” he said.
He flitted off, and the stage director leaned back against the asbestos curtain. He was exhausted, and his throat was in agony, but nevertheless he was conscious of a feeling of quiet happiness. His life had been lived in the shadow of the constant fear that some day Mr Goble might dismiss him. Should that disaster occur, he felt, there was always a future for him in the movies.
Scarcely had Mr Miller disappeared on his peace-making errand, when there was a noise like a fowl going through a quickset hedge, and Mr Saltzburg, brandishing his baton as if he were conducting an unseen orchestra, plunged through the scenery at the left upper entrance and charged excitedly down the stage. Having taken his musicians twice through the overture, he had for ten minutes been sitting in silence, waiting for the curtain to go up. At last, his emotional nature cracking under the strain of this suspense, he had left his conductor’s chair and plunged down under the stage by way of the musician’s bolthole to ascertain what was causing the delay.
“What is it? What is it? What is it? What is it?” enquired Mr Saltzburg. “I wait and wait and wait and wait and wait. … We cannot play the overture again. What is it? What has happened?”
Mr Goble, that overwrought soul, had betaken himself to the wings, where he was striding up and down with his hands behind his back, chewing his cigar. The stage director braced himself once more to the task of explanation.
“The girls have struck!”