第35章

It was the first dress rehearsal of "The Ukelele Girl," to be produced "under the personal direction of Stanwood Mosely." The piece had been in rehearsal for eleven weeks.

The curtain had been up on the second act for an hour.Scene designers, scene painters and scene shifters were standing about with a stage director, whose raucous voice cut the fuggy atmosphere incessantly in what was intended to represent the exterior of a hotel at Monte Carlo.It more nearly resembled the materialization of a dope fiend's dream of an opium factory.What might have been a bank building in Utopia, an old Spanish galleon in drydock, or the exterior of a German beer garden according to the cover of Vogue occupied the center of the scene.The bricks were violet and old gold, sprayed with tomato juice and marked by the indeterminate silver tracks of snails.Pillars, modeled on the sugar-stick posts that advertise barber's shops, ran up and lost themselves among the flies.A number of wide stairs, all over wine stains, wandered aimlessly about, coming to a conclusion between gigantic urns filled with unnatural flowers of all the colors of a diseased rainbow.

Jotted about here and there on the stage were octopus-limbed trees with magenta leaves growing in flower pots all covered with bilious blobs.Stan Mosely didn't profess to understand it, but having been assured by the designer that it was art nouveau, which also he didn't understand, he was wholly satisfied.

Not so the stage director, whose language in describing the effect it had upon him would have done credit to a gunman under the influence of cheap brandy and fright.The rehearsal, which had commenced at eight o'clock, had been hung up for a time considerable enough to allow him to give vent to his sentiments.The pause enabled Mosely, squatting frog-wise in the middle of the orchestra stalls, to surround himself with several women whose gigantic proportions were horribly exposed to the eye.The rumble of his voice and the high squeals of their laughter clashed with the sounds of the vitriolic argument on the stage, and the noises of a bored band, in which an oboe was giving a remarkable imitation of a gobbling turkey cock, and a cornet of a man blowing his nose.The leader of the band was pacing up and down the musicians' room, saying to himself: "Zis is ze last timer.Zis is ze last timer,"well knowing that it wasn't.The poor devil had a wife and children to feed.

Bevies of weary and spirit-broken chorus girls in costume were sprawling on the chairs in the lower boxes, some sleeping, some too tired to sleep, and some eating ravenously from paper bags.Chorus men and costumers, wig makers and lyric writers, authors and friends of the company, sat about singly and in pairs in the orchestra seats.They were mostly bored so far beyond mere impatience by all this super-inefficiency and chaos as to have arrived at a state of intellectual coma.The various men out of whose brains had originally come the book and lyrics no longer hated each other and themselves; they lusted for the blood of the stage director or saw gorgeous mental pictures of a little fat oozy corpse surrounded by the gleeful faces of the army of people who had been impotent to protest against the lash of his whip, the impertinence of his tongue or the gross dishonesty of his methods.

One other man in addition to the raucous, self-advertising stage director, Jackrack, commonly called "Jack-in-office," showed distinct signs of life--a short, overdressed, perky person with piano fingers and baldish head much too big for his body, who flitted about among the chorus girls, followed by a pale, drab woman with pins, and touched their dresses and sniggered and made remarks with a certain touch of literary excellence in a slightly guttural voice.This was Poppy Shemalitz, the frock expert, the man milliner of the firm, who was required to make bricks out of straw, or as he frequently said to the friends of his "bosom," "make fifteen dollars look like fifty." Self-preservation and a sense of humor encouraged him through the abusive days of a dog's life.

Sitting in the last row of the orchestra, wearing the expression of interest and astonishment of a man who had fallen suddenly into another world, was Martin.He had been there since eight o'clock.

For over six hours he had watched banality emerge from chaos and had listened to the blasphemy and insults of Jackrack.He would have continued to watch and listen until daylight peered upbraidingly through the chinks in the exit doors but for the sudden appearance of Susie Capper, dressed for the street.

"Hello, Tootles! But you're not through, are you?""Absobloominlootely," she said emphatically.

"I thought you said your best bit was in the second act?""'Was' is right.Come on outer here.I can't stand the place a minute longer.It'll give me apoplexy."Martin followed her into the foyer.The tragic rage on the girl's little, pretty, usually good-natured face worried him.He knew that she had looked forward to this production to make her name on Broadway.

"My dear Tootles, what's happened?"

She turned to him and clutched his arm.Tears welled up into her eyes, and her red lips began to tremble."What did I look like?" she demanded.

"Splendid!"

"Didn't I get every ounce of comedy out of my two scenes in Act One?""Every ounce."

"I know I did.Even the stage hands laughed, and if you can do that there's no argument.And didn't my number go over fine? Wasn't it the best thing in the act? I don't care what you say.I know it was.

Even the orchestra wanted it over again.""But it was," said Martin, "and I heard one of the authors say that it would be the hit of the piece.""Oh, Martin, I've been sweating blood for this chance for five years, and I'm not going to get it.I'm not going to get it.I wish I was dead." She put her arms against the wall and her face down on her arms and burst into an agony of tears.