In the ante-room were the outposts, the pickets of the enemy. In one corner a girl was hammering energetically and with great speed on a typewriter; a second girl, seated at a switchboard, was having an argument with Central which was already warm and threatened to descend shortly to personalities; on a chair tilted back so that it rested against the wall, a small boy sat eating sweets and reading the comic page of an evening newspaper. All three were enclosed, like zoological specimens, in a cage formed by a high counter terminating in bra.s.s bars.
Beyond these watchers on the threshold was the door marked "Private."
Through it, as Jill reached the outer defences, filtered the sound of a piano.
Those who have studied the subject have come to the conclusion that the boorishness of New York theatrical managers" office-boys cannot be the product of mere chance. Somewhere, in some sinister den in the criminal districts of the town, there is a school where small boys are trained for these positions, where their finer instincts are rigorously uprooted and rudeness systematically inculcated by competent professors. Of this school the Cerberus of Messrs. Goble and Cohn had been the star scholar. Quickly seeing his natural gifts, his teachers had given him special attention. When he had graduated, it had been amidst the cordial good wishes of the entire staff. They had taught him all they knew, and they were proud of him. They felt that he would do them credit.
This boy raised a pair of pink-rimmed eyes to Jill, sniffed, bit his thumb-nail, and spoke. He was a snub-nosed boy. His ears and hair were vermilion. His name was Ralph. He had seven hundred and forty-three pimples.
"Woddyerwant?" enquired Ralph, coming within an ace of condensing the question into a word of one syllable.
"I want to see Mr. Goble."
"Zout!" said the Pimple King, and returned to his paper.
There will, no doubt, always be cla.s.s distinctions. Sparta had her kings and her helots, King Arthur"s Round Table its knights and its scullions, America her Simon Legree and her Uncle Tom. But in no nation and at no period of history has any one ever been so brutally superior to any one else as is the Broadway theatrical office-boy to the caller who wishes to see the manager. Thomas Jefferson held these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Theatrical office-boys do not see eye to eye with Thomas. From their pinnacle they look down on the common herd, the _canaille_, and despise them. They coldly question their right to live.
Jill turned pink. Mr. Brown, her guide and mentor, foreseeing this situation, had, she remembered, recommended "pushing the office-boy in the face": and for a moment she felt like following his advice.
Prudence, or the fact that he was out of reach behind the bra.s.s bars, restrained her. Without further delay she made for the door of the inner room. That was her objective, and she did not intend to be diverted from it. Her fingers were on the handle before any of those present divined her intention. Then the stenographer stopped typing and sat with raised fingers, aghast. The girl at the telephone broke off in mid-sentence and stared round over her shoulder. Ralph, the office-boy, outraged, dropped his paper and const.i.tuted himself the spokesman of the invaded force.
"Hey!"
Jill stopped and eyed the lad militantly.
"Were you speaking to me?"
"Yes, I _was_ speaking to you!"
"Don"t do it again with your mouth full," said Jill, turning to the door.
The belligerent fire in the office-boy"s pink-rimmed eyes was suddenly dimmed by a gush of water. It was not remorse that caused him to weep, however. In the heat of the moment he had swallowed a large, jagged sweet, and he was suffering severely.
"You can"t go in there!" he managed to articulate, his iron will triumphing over the flesh sufficiently to enable him to speak.
"I _am_ going in there!"
"That"s Mr. Goble"s private room."
"Well, I want a private talk with Mr. Goble."
Ralph, his eyes still moist, felt that the situation was slipping from his grip. This sort of thing had never happened to him before. "I tell ya he _zout_!"
Jill looked at him sternly.
"You wretched child!" she said, encouraged by a sharp giggle from the neighbourhood of the switchboard. "Do you know where little boys go who don"t speak the truth? I can hear him playing the piano. Now he"s singing! And it"s no good telling me he"s busy. If he was busy, he wouldn"t have time to sing. If you"re as deceitful as this at your age, what do you expect to be when you grow up? You"re an ugly little boy, you"ve got red ears, and your collar doesn"t fit! I shall speak to Mr. Goble about you."
With which words Jill opened the door and walked in.
"Good afternoon," she said brightly.
After the congested and unfurnished discomfort of the landing, the room in which Jill found herself had an air of cosiness and almost of luxury. It was a large room, solidly upholstered. Along the further wall, filling nearly the whole of its s.p.a.ce, stood a vast and gleaming desk, covered with a litter of papers which rose at one end of it to a sort of mountain of play-scripts in buff covers. There was a bookshelf to the left. Photographs covered the walls. Near the window was a deep leather lounge; to the right of this stood a small piano, the music-stool of which was occupied by a young man with untidy black hair that needed cutting. On top of the piano, taking the eye immediately by reason of its bold brightness, was balanced a large cardboard poster. Much of its surface was filled by a picture of a youth in polo costume bending over a blonde G.o.ddess in a bathing-suit.
What s.p.a.ce was left displayed the legend:
ISAAC GOBLE AND JACOB COHN
PRESENT
THE ROSE OF AMERICA
(A Musical Fantasy)
BOOK AND LYRICS BY OTIS PILKINGTON
MUSIC BY ROLAND TREVIS
Turning her eyes from this, Jill became aware that something was going on at the other side of the desk, and she perceived that a second young man, the longest and thinnest she had ever seen, was in the act of rising to his feet, length upon length like an unfolding snake. At the moment of her entry he had been lying back in an office-chair, so that only a merely nominal section of his upper structure was visible.
Now he reared his impressive length until his head came within measurable distance of the ceiling. He had a hatchet face and a receding chin, and he gazed at Jill through what she a.s.sumed were the "tortoise-sh.e.l.l cheaters" referred to by her recent acquaintance, Mr.
Brown.
"Er...?" said this young man enquiringly in a high, flat voice.
Jill, like many other people, had a brain which was under the alternating control of two diametrically opposite forces. It was like a motor-car steered in turn by two drivers, the one a dashing, reckless fellow with no regard for the speed limits, the other a timid novice. All through the proceedings up to this point the dasher had been in command. He had whisked her along at a break-neck pace, ignoring obstacles and police regulations. Now, having brought her to this situation, he abruptly abandoned the wheel and turned it over to his colleague, the shrinker. Jill, greatly daring a moment ago, now felt an overwhelming shyness.
She gulped, and her heart beat quickly. The thin man towered over her.
The black-haired pianist shook his locks at her like Banquo.
"I...." she began.
Then, suddenly, womanly intuition came to her aid. Something seemed to tell her that these men were just as scared as she was. And, at the discovery, the dashing driver resumed his post at the wheel, and she began to deal with the situation with composure.
"I want to see Mr. Goble."
"Mr. Goble is out," said the long young man, plucking nervously at the papers on the desk. Jill had affected him powerfully.
"Out!" She felt she had wronged the pimpled office-boy.
"We are not expecting him back this afternoon. Is there anything I can do?"
He spoke tenderly. This weak-minded young man was thinking that he had never seen anything like Jill before. And it was true that she was looking very pretty, with her cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkling.
She touched a chord in the young man which seemed to make the world a flower-scented thing, full of soft music. Often as he had been in love at first sight before in his time, Otis Pilkington could not recall an occasion on which he had been in love at first sight more completely than now. When she smiled at him, it was as if the gates of heaven had opened. He did not reflect how many times, in similar circ.u.mstances, these same gates had opened before; and that on one occasion when they had done so it had cost him eight thousand dollars to settle the case out of court. One does not think of these things at such times, for they strike a jarring note. Otis Pilkington was in love. That was all he knew, or cared to know.
"Won"t you take a seat, Miss...."
"Mariner," prompted Jill. "Thank you."
"Miss Mariner. May I introduce Mr. Roland Trevis?"
The man at the piano bowed. His black hair heaved upon his skull like seaweed in a ground swell.