“What?”
“What you’re doing for me. . . . I’ll make good.”
“I believe you will!”
“Good-by!”
She gave him a lean little hand that gripped his nervously. The last he saw of Louisiana Delacourt as he went over the ship’s side, she was chasing her dog into some stranger’s deck cabin. As he made his way from the dock towards the People’s Theater that morning, his world seemed less gay and amusing with Louisiana out of it.
IX
After the inglorious failure of Lear, they tried She Stoops to Conquer, with Cecilia Pyce, an English actress of advancing years and a large and bony physique, whom MacNaughton much vaunted. Brainard suspected that Cissie, as Mac called her, had been the Scotsman’s sweetheart in her palmier days, and thus he was now paying his sentimental debts by giving her a lucrative position at his patron’s expense. However, nothing better offered at present, and Miss Pyce at least knew how to act in the solid old English fashion. The people came sparingly, and sat in the first four rows of the big auditorium, which was a lonesome sort of place these days.
It was little better when the company essayed an “original American play”—as it was advertised—that Farson had culled from the mass of manuscripts he had examined. May Magic lasted a week, and then fell to pieces before an audience consisting of the author and about twenty of his friends. The management could not even give their tickets away. At May Magic the critics took final leave of the People’s Theater with such parting kicks as this:
What in the name of common sense is the amateurish aggregation at the so-called People’s Theater trying to do? In what sense is it a popular theater? The “people” are conspicuous by their absence. The worthy gentleman who is spending his money giving the public fifth-rate productions of English classics and such rejected modern masterpieces as May Magic had better go over to Broadway and learn his trade.
Brainard was thankful that Louisiana was safe on the high seas on her way to Munich, and would not see this article!