He turned as several members of the company strolled in and greeted each with a hearty handshake. With a smile for every one and an ear ready to listen, the Cleeburg of to-day had the same enthusiasm as the pudgy newsboy who years before had run fat little legs off to procure for a patron his favorite daily.
“Hello there, glad to see you! Well, they tell me we’ve got a knock-out. Let’s have a look.”
He made for the rear of the house with his stage director who had accompanied the play on tour.
The curtain up, he leaned against the seat in front, a long black cigar jerking from corner to corner of his mouth like a propeller. Not a gesture, not an intonation escaped him. His concentration ignored any world but this. Had the building burned down, that stage before him would still have been the pivotal point of interest.
When Gloria appeared between the black drapes, eyes luminous under the untamed hair, and the thrill of her voice came over the footlights, he sighed and a smile of anticipation spread across his face. It was the look of one whose senses are about to be lulled by rare music.
The play had all the quality of delicately written French drama, its big scene at the end of the second act [174] ]being calculated to bring even a New York audience straight out of its seat. Gloria and John Brooks were as finely teamed as a pair of high-stepping thoroughbreds. He had been her leading man two seasons. Little ’Dolph, with an eye to the future, had him tied up on a five-year contract.
You would never have taken John Brooks for an actor. There was about his clothes no suggestion of the extreme that Broadway is tempted to affect. They were cut by a conservative tailor and he wore them with the ease of not caring particularly what he had on. Critics called him distinguished. When he walked into a stage drawing-room one knew instinctively that more exclusive drawing-rooms had opened to him. He never talked shop outside and never brought his social activities into the theater. But it was generally known that his friends numbered scientists and men of big business.
On the stage he suggested a clean-cut Britisher, tall and well groomed, easy of manner, clipped of speech, yet with a more intense vitality and that gleam of humor under the straight black brows that is peculiarly, blessedly, of, by, and for America.
The manager sat back, eyes half closed, lapping up the charm of it as a kitten laps cream. When the curtain fell he licked his lips and purred as he turned to the director, Lewis.
“You’re right, Lewy! Never saw a pair to touch ’em. Gad, that give and take, that playing into each other’s hands—nothing like it in this old berg, I tell you!” He sprang up, bounded down the aisle like a rubber ball. “Immense!” he shouted. “That act runs on [175] ]greased wheels. It’s sure fire! They’ll eat it alive.”