“That happens to be just what they do, Mr. Carlson. That’s why Richard the Third doesn’t make as much money as Camille or East Lynne. Women come to a play to see other women wear clothes they wouldn’t be seen in and do things they wouldn’t dream of doing. Please try to eat something.”
“You’re all wrong,” Carlson said, chewing a pepsin tablet.
Mr. Fitch shrugged, arranged his moustaches and mentioned a dozen actresses whose success was built on the art of enchanting their own sex. Carlson had a respect for this playwright’s opinion and while the two early acts of “Nicoline” played he saw from his box that Cora Boyle’s swagger carried some message to the female part of the audience. For her, women laughed loudly. They merely sniffled over the well bred woes of the heroine. The heroine’s antics were insupportable. The second curtain fell and Carlson descended to the dressing room of this unsatisfactory gentlewoman, gave a rasping lecture that scared her maid away. He had to help hook her gown and yelled over the powder of her advertised shoulders, “If you want that sassy Boyle gal to be the hit of the show, go on! You act like you’d lost your last cent on the races and had sand in your shoes. Now, you!” A feeling of heated blades in his stomach stopped the speech. He heard the stage manager knock on the dressing room door. The actress moved weeping past his anguish. He leaned on the table and saw his sweating face in the tilted mirror. The thin, remote music of the orchestra began behind the curtain. This third act was set in the rowdy café of a small French city. If it went well, the play was safe, would last out the winter, make him richer. He should go up to his box and show himself unperturbed to rival managers civilly tranquil in their free seats. But he leaned, looking at his wet, bald head with a sick weariness. What was the use of this trade? He wore down his years trying to teach silly women and sillier men to act. He got nothing from living but stomach trouble and money. The money would go to his sister in Stockholm when he died. He had never liked his sister, hadn’t seen her in thirty years. He pitied himself so extremely that tears wriggled down the spread of seams in his yellow face. Life was an iniquity contrived for his torture. Carlson deeply enjoyed his woe for five minutes. Then Mr. Fitch came in to urge that Cora Boyle be corrected before her present entrance.
“What’s the good, Clyde? She ain’t any sense. She’s a actress, ain’t she?”
“She’ll spoil the act if she carries on too much,” said Mr. Fitch and at once Carlson thrilled with an automatic anxiety; the act mustn’t be spoiled. He hurried up the iron stairs to the platform, wiping his face. Cora Boyle was standing ten feet back from the canvas arch that was, for the audience, the street door of the Café Printemps. She patted the vast sleeves of her gaudy frock and whispered to a fellow in blue clothes. Carlson had to pull her from these occupations and gave his orders in a hiss.
“Don’t you laugh too loud when Miss Leslie’s tellin’ about her mother or talk as loud as you’ve been doin’, neither. This ain’t a camp meetin’, hear?”
The black haired girl grinned at him, nodding. She spat out a fold of chewing gum and patted her pink sleeves again. She said, “All right, boss, but, say, don’t the folks like me, though?”
Fitch chuckled behind the manager. Carlson wouldn’t be bested by an impudent hussy who was paid thirty-five dollars a week and didn’t earn it. He stared at Cora Boyle, biting his lips and hunting words wherewith to blast her. She let him stare unchecked. A false diamond on its thin chain glittered and slid when she breathed into the cleft of her breasts. She was excellently made and highly perfumed. Her black eyes caught a vague point of red from the rim of a jaunty hat that slanted its flowers on the mass of her hair. She had rouged her chin to offset a wide mouth. Carlson jeered, “Better get somebody to show you a good makeup, sister, and quit talkin’ through your nose. You sound like you’re out of New Jersey!”
Cora Boyle giggled. She glanced at the fellow in blue and said, “I was boardin’ at Fayettesville, New Jersey, all summer. Wasn’t I, Mark?”
The fellow bobbed his head, shuffling his feet. His feet were bare and by that sign Carlson knew him for the supposed peasant lad who would bring the heroine news of her dear mother’s death at the end of the act. Cora Boyle gave this unimportant creature a long, amorous look, then told Carlson, “I was boardin’ with Mark’s folks. He—”