"A new play?"
"No. My curtain speech for to-morrow night. It's the last night of the season, and they expect it of me, you know. I've vowed, time and again, I would never make another curtain-speech in my life, but they will have them, they will have them!" He sighed, in submission to his fate. Then he returned to a previous thought. "I wish, though," he said, "that I could persuade you to do a play for me. Think it over! Think of the name it would give you. Or you might try managing me. Eh, how does that strike you? Such a relief to me if I could deal with a gentleman. You have no idea—the cads there are in the theatre! They resent my being a man who tries to prove a little better educated than themselves. They hate me because I am college-bred, you know; they prefer actors who never read. How many books do you think I read before I attempted Voltaire? A little library, I tell you. And then the days I spent in noting the portraits! I traveled France in my search. For the actor who takes historic characters there cannot be too many documents. Imagination alone is not enough. And then the labor of making the play presentable; I wish you could see the thing as it first came to me! You would think a man like O'Deigh would have taken into consideration the actor? But no; the play, as O'Deigh left it, might have been for a stock company. Frederick the Great was as fine a part as my own. Oh, they are numbskulls. And the rehearsals! Actors are sheep, simply sheep. The papers say I am a brute at rehearsals. My dear Vane, I swear to you that if Nero were in my place he would massacre all the minor actors in the land. And they expect the salaries of intelligent persons!"
Vane, listening, wondered why Wantage, under such an avalanche of irritations, continued such life. Gradually it dawned on him that all this fume and fret was merely part of the man's mummery; it was his appeal to the sympathy of his audience; his argument against the reputation his occasional exhibitions of rage and waywardness had given him.
Vane's desire to penetrate the surface of this conscious imitator, this fellow who slipped off this character to assume that, grew keener and keener. Where, under all this crust of alien form and action, was the individual, human thought and feeling? Or was there any left? Had the constant corrosion of simulated emotions burnt out all the original character of the mind?
Vane could not sufficiently hasten the end for which he had invited Wantage.
"You are," he said presently, as a lull in the other's monologue allowed him an opening, "something of an amateur of tapestry, of pictures, of bijouterie. I have a little thing or two, in my dressing-room, that I wish you would give me an opinion on."
They took their cigarettes into the adjoining dressing-room. Wantage went, at once, to the mirrors.
"Ah, Florence, I see." He frowned, in critical judgment; he went humming about the room, singing little German phrases to the pictures, snatches of chansonettes to the tapestries. He was very enjoyable as a spectacle, Vane told himself. He tiptoed over the room, now in the mode of his earliest success, "The King of Dandies," now in the half limping style of his "Rigoletto."
"You should have seen the Flemish things I had!" he declared. That was his usual way of noting the belongings of others; they reminded him of his own superior specimens. "I sold them for a song, at auction. Don't you think one tires of one's surroundings, after a time? People go to the hills and the seashore, because they tire of town. I have the same feeling about pictures, and furniture, and bric-a-brac. After a time, they tire me. I have to get rid of them. I sell them at auction. People are always glad to bid for something that has belonged to Arthur Wantage. But everything goes for a song. Oh, it is ruinous, ruinous." He peered, and pirouetted about the corners. "Ah," he exclaimed, "and here is something covered up! A portrait? Something rare?" He posed in front of it, affecting the most devouring curiosity.
"A sort of portrait," said Vane, touching the cord at back of the mirror.