CHAPTER XIII
A REHEARSAL OF “DECEIVERS EVER”
“Well, I butted in all right,” said Balcomb, cheerfully. “I suppose you’re saying to yourself that it’s another case of the unfailing Balcomb cheek. Welladay! as Prexy used to say in the good old summer-time of our college days. The good Lord has to give everybody something, and if he gave me an asbestos-lined, Bessemer-covered outside to my face, it’s not my fault.”
“You’re a peach, Jack, and no mistake, as I’ve said before. I wish I had your nerve,—”
“But say, they just had to have me in this show! It proves how every little thing helps as we toil onward and upward. You know I was tenor on the glee club at college, and you’ll remember that when we came over to town and gave that concert for the benefit of the athletic fund I was a winner, all right. Well, I’m going to throw my whole immortal soul into this thing,—”
“You’ll leave an aching void if you do.”
“Thanks, kindly. As I was saying, I’m going to do myself and Mrs. Carr proud. She’s one of the grandest women we ever had in this state. Most of these women that preside at meetings are N. G. They haven’t any sense of humor. But Mrs. Carr knows that all this woman’s suffrage business is so much Thomas Rot. She works her sisters just for fun, and they never catch on a little bit. She just has to be president of things, and she’s an ornament to the community, by gum.”
Leighton thanked his stars that Mrs. Carr had discovered her tenor without his help. He and Balcomb were standing in the Carr library, where the last undress rehearsal of Deceivers Ever was about to begin. Leighton, who was stage manager, also sang in the chorus, which appeared in one act as foresters and in the other as soldiers. Mrs. Carr always had a reason for everything she did. Her reason for insisting that the Dramatic Club, of which she was the president, should give a comic opera was thoroughly adequate, for at this time she was exploiting a young musician who had lately appeared in Mariona, and who was not, let it be remembered, a mere instructor in vocal music, but a composer as well. He was a very agreeable young man, who wished to build up a permanent orchestra in Mariona, and Mrs. Carr was backing this project with her accustomed enthusiasm. Nothing could help matters forward so well as a social success for Max Schmidt. He had written an opera, which many managers had declined for the reason that the music was too good and the book too bad.
Deceivers Ever was the name of the work, and Mrs. Carr was preparing to produce an abridged version of it on the night before Thanksgiving. The scene was set in Germany, and there were six men—the gay deceivers—all of them officers in the army. The chief girl character was the daughter of a new commandant of a post, but at a ball given in his honor she changed places with her maid, and no end of confusion resulted. Mrs. Carr had urged Zelda to take the principal rôle, and Zelda had consented, with the understanding that Olive Merriam was to be elected a member of the club and given a part in the opera. Zelda saw only perfection in Olive; she declared that Olive’s voice was far superior to her own; and so Olive, who had never moved in the larger currents of Mariona social life, found herself unexpectedly enrolled in the Dramatic Club and a member of the cast of Deceivers Ever.
While Leighton and Balcomb stood talking in the library, Herr Schmidt, in the drawing-room, lectured the rest of the company in his difficult English. He now fell upon the piano with a crash and nodded to Zelda, who began one of her solos. When this had been sung to his satisfaction, the director called for Olive and Captain Pollock.
Pollock was greatly liked by the people he had begun to know in Mariona. The men about the Tippecanoe Club had the reputation of scrutinizing new-comers a little superciliously, in the way of old members of a small club, who resent the appearance of strangers at the lounging-room fireside. But Pollock fitted into places as though he had always been used to them. He told a good story or he sang a song well, when called on to do something at the grill-room Saturday nights. Mrs. Carr had given him one of the best parts in the opera.
The young officer and Olive carried off with great animation a dialogue in song into which Herr Schmidt had been able to get some real humor.
“You haven’t told me how much you like my cousin,” said Zelda to Leighton, when he sat down by her in an interval of parley between the director and Mrs. Carr. “I expect something nice.”
“Nothing could be easier. She’s a great hit! She’s a discovery! She’s an ornament to society!”
“Humph! That sounds like sample sentences from a copy-book. A man with a reputation as an orator to sustain ought to be able to do better than that.”
“Not having such a reputation—”
“Not even thinking one has—”
“Oh, I’m conceited, am I?”
“I hadn’t thought of it before, but no doubt it’s true,” said Zelda, looking across the room to where Jack Balcomb was talking with his usual vivacity to a girl in the chorus whom he had never met before. He was perfectly at ease, as though leaning against grand pianos in handsome drawing-rooms and talking to pretty girls had always been his mission in life.
Morris did not follow Zelda’s eyes; he was watching her face gravely. He had tried in many ways to please her, but she maintained an attitude toward him that was annoying, to say the least.
“There’s Mr. Balcomb over there,” Zelda remarked casually. “He sings divinely, doesn’t he? Don’t you think he sings divinely?” and she looked at Morris suddenly, with a provoking air of gravity.
“I’m sure he was a De Reszke in some former incarnation,” said Morris, savagely.
“That was just what I was thinking, only I hadn’t the words to express it,” said Zelda, with a mockery of joy at finding they were in accord.
“I’m glad, then, that we can agree about something, even when we’re both undoubtedly wrong.”
“I don’t like to think that I can be wrong,” said Zelda. “And it isn’t in the least flattering for you to suggest such a thing. I shall have to speak to my Uncle Rodney about you.”
“Any interest you may take in me will be appreciated. I had not hoped that you would—”
“Would what?” she asked, when he hesitated.
“I’ve forgotten now what we were talking about.”
“That is really most flattering! Oh, Mr. Balcomb.”
Jack had crossed the room, giving what he called the cheering jolly to several young women on the way, and he turned quickly:
“At your service, Miss Dameron,”—and he bowed impressively.
“Mr. Leighton is crazy about your singing. He is just waiting for a chance to congratulate you. But he’s very unhappy to-night. Words fail him.” And she shook her head and looked into Balcomb’s grinning face as though this were a great grief between them.
“What kind of a jolly is this? I say, Morris, you look like first and second grave-digger done into one. We’re not playing Hamlet now. But I can tell you, Miss Dameron, that when Brother Leighton—he belongs to my frat, hence the brother—did Hamlet over at our dear old alma mater, the gloom that settled down on that township could have been cut up into badges of mourning enough to have supplied Spain through her little affair with these states. That’s Walt Whitman,—‘these states.’ Do you know, I was Ophelia to his Hamlet, and if I do say it myself, I was a sweet thing in Ophelias.”
“I don’t doubt you were, Mr. Balcomb,” said Zelda.
“There was just one thing lacking in your impersonation,” declared Leighton: “you ought to have been drowned in the first scene of the first act to have made it perfect.”
“No violence, gentlemen, I beg of you!” And Zelda hurried across the room to where Herr Schmidt was assembling the principals.
“Say, that girl has got the art of stringing down fine. She seems to have you going all right. You look like twenty-nine cents at a thirty-cent bargain counter. But you take it too hard. I wish she’d string me! They’re never so much interested as when they throw you on your face and give you the merry tra la. I tell you I’ve had experience with the sect all right, and I know!”
“Yes, I remember your flirtations with the girls that waited on table at the college boarding-house. You had a very cheering way with them.”
Balcomb’s eyes were running restlessly over the groups of young people. He was appraising and fixing them in his mind as he talked. His joy in being among them,—these representative young people of the city, whose names he knew well from long and diligent perusal of the personal and society column of the daily papers,—amused Leighton; but the fellow’s self-satisfaction irritated him, too.
“What? Yes!” and Balcomb turned to him again. “I wouldn’t have you think for a minute that the past’s blood-rusted key has any horrors for me. I’ll bet you I did raise the high perpendicular hand to those poor orphans as they passed the pickled pigs’ feet and the stewed rhubarb at Mrs. Fassett’s boarding-house. And I’m glad I did. My office in the world is to make two cheerful jays where none has been before. Say, that little Merriam girl is a most delicious peach, isn’t she? Miss Dameron’s cousin or something of the kind. About as much alike as the Queen of Sheba and Come into the Garden Maud! I’m going to play up to that little girl; but say, I don’t care for that strutting little captain. I’ve got to cut him out. These West Pointers always did make me tired. Think the earth is theirs and the fullness thereof; and I’m unalterably opposed to militarism, social and political.”
Morris said nothing, and Balcomb went on, in his usual breathless fashion:
“I must cultivate Mrs. Carr. She’s certainly a good thing. I really think she rates me above par owing to a strong position I took with her a few evenings ago ad interim, so to speak, while Dutchy Schmidt got mad and talked through his hair. The strong position, as I was saying, was apropos of Ibsen. When I remarked, quite casually, that Ibsen was the great soul photographer, you should have seen her eyes light up! I have visions of being much seen in these parlors hereafter. I guess Mike, the hubbyhub, isn’t so much on soul himself, but she has him hypnotized, all right. Just look at that sawed-off Pollock playing up to my girl! The infinitesimal projectile of dynastic imperialism! I see his finish. Ah! Watch me lift my velvety tenor.”
Herr Schmidt whirled on the piano stool and glared in Balcomb’s direction through his shaggy mane; and the young promoter sprang into the middle of the floor and began acting and singing with the utmost sang-froid. He was easily the best man in the company, and Mrs. Carr was delighted with the spirit that he brought to rehearsals.
The chorus had been drilled apart, and this was the first time Morris had heard the principals sing. He had joined the chorus under protest, but Mrs. Carr had insisted and when he learned that Zelda was to be the star it had not been difficult to comply. She began now one of her songs, as Gretchen, the commandant’s daughter:
“O deep dark woods of fatherland,
Thy boughs stretch high above;
O whispering wind in woodlands deep,
Thy voice is all of love.”
Until to-night, he had not heard her sing since the evening of Rodney Merriam’s lobster, and he felt again the thrill that her voice had awakened in him then. She stood within the circle that the others of the company made for her, and he fancied that a great distance lay between her and every other human thing. When a contralto voice is pure and true, it is one of the surest vehicles of passion there is in the world. It has a gathering power that seems to sweep all before it; it touches the heights but never lets go of the depths; it becomes, when it rises greatly, something that is not of this world and that yet speaks of every joy and every grief that the world has known. It was a song of farewell,—the song of a girl singing to her lover who was going away to war; and it seemed to Morris Leighton that it was a good-by to everything that a girl might know and hold good.
When the last notes died away, Balcomb stepped out at the director’s nod and began the answering song. Balcomb usually amused Morris; but the fellow struck upon him discordantly now. Zelda was laughing at Balcomb’s antics as he began to sing with fervor and a real sense of the dramatic requirements. As he neared the end, where Zelda and he sang together the duet that ended the first half of the opera, Zelda put up her hands, and he took them, gazing into her eyes with a fine lover-like air. Their voices soared into the climax without a break, while the director threw himself into strange contortions as he struck the last bars leading to the high note which they gained and held perfectly.
The dress rehearsal was fixed for the next night.
“It simply can’t fail!” declared Mrs. Carr to Leighton. “Miss Dameron could carry it alone if every one else should break down.”
“That is altogether true,” said Morris. He was glaring at Balcomb, whose joy in being a member of the cast was hard to bear.
Copeland, the lawyer who never practised, joined Leighton and twitted him for appearing so gloomy. Copeland and his wife were on the committee that had Deceivers Ever in charge.
“I’ll give you anything I own, if you will tell me how I came to be on this committee,” said Copeland.
“It wouldn’t be right to take the money. It’s too easy. You’re in because Mrs. Carr asked you to be in,” replied Morris.
“Yes; and that damned Ogden boy has got typhoid fever, and I’m going to sing the raging father’s part. I’m an awful ass, Leighton. If there’s a larger or more industrious, hard-working ass anywhere than I am—” At this point Jack Balcomb made himself conspicuous by laughing out in a harsh discordant tone at something Herr Schmidt had said. “I take it all back,” said Copeland, sadly. “I’ll admit myself,—regretfully, but still I’ll admit,—that J. Arthur Balcomb can give me a big handicap and still beat me. At the risk of appearing unduly humble I’ll say that I never started in his class.”