“You know you do.” There was a low, tender note in the voice that would always be wistful. It was an odd voice—one that, breaking with the swift snap of a violin string, brought tears from its audience as one chokes at a broken chord.
[170]
] “H’m, that’s all I want.” He grinned sheepishly. “No fool like an old fool, eh?”
He stepped out as the chauffeur swung open the door, and reached up to help her. Gloria Cromwell—in private life Mrs. Rudolph Cleeburg—was not tall and her intense slenderness made her look frail, yet standing next to her husband she measured a full inch above him. Any passerby taking in the round face, eyes and figure of the well-known manager, his bald pate and prominent features, would have smiled at the information that he was the most artistic producer in America. But then, no passerby would have noticed the hands, key to character, that tapered so incongruously. Even the man himself failed to take count of them. He knew only that he felt beauty like a tangible thing, that he expressed it through the two mediums he loved—the stage and his wife.
He took her arm and they went down the cool dark alley to the stage door. It was a Sunday in September, hazy and languid, the first shadows of twilight creeping into the arms of night.
In almost every building on the block rehearsals were under way. Behind blank front entrances with high iron gates locked fast, throbbed the pulsing life of the theater. No effort too great, no work too intense, to give to the world its most human tonic, amusement.
The dress rehearsal of “Lady Fair” had been called for 8:00 P. M. They were early, having made good time from their place at Great Neck. Gloria crossed the stage set for Act I while Cleeburg paused to suggest to the electrician some experiments with the lights.
“Try a couple of reds, Bill, in the foots for Act II. [171] ]And cut out four or five of the ambers on top. They make her look too yellow, sick around the eyes. Get me? Too much shadow. We want to bring out all the flash in her hair. Light her up. It’s her big scene. And here—have a smoke!”
He followed Gloria. She had tossed her hat on a table and stood taking in the new props he had provided while the company made the customary short tour that precedes a New York première.
With the shadows of the unlighted stage about her and the dusky quiet of the empty house stretching at her feet, she seemed to the man who went toward her deplorably young and tender, with a something yearning from her that he had tried to reach and never even been able to define. Not for the first time he asked himself: Was it the almost childish form under the soft summer dress—or the delicate line of her long throat—or the intense red curve of lip—or her pallor topped by the tawny hair whose lights and shades he was so intent on featuring? No, none of these! It was the look of her eyes. Wide and hungry, with fright in their depths, they had arrested him six years before as he hurried through his outer office; arrested him and found her a job. The fright had gone long since. And the hunger which had been nothing more than actual physical hunger. But the look that was so much like the quality of her voice still lurked there, eluding him.
He came up behind her as she stood examining the heavy black velvet drapes with crests of blue, purple and gold embroidered in the corners.