And so the second performance came; and in the theatre were some two hundred people, and the occasion was the most awful "frost" that ever froze the heart of an unhappy partisan of the "drama of ideas". After which, according to schedule, the play moved to another manufacturing town; and in the theatre were some two hundred and fifty people--and a frost some ten degrees lower yet!
Section 11. So at twelve o"clock that night there was a consultation in a room at the hotel, attended by Thyrsis and Miss Lewis and Mr. Tapping and Mr. Jones.
"You see," said the last named; "the play is a failure."
"Absolutely!" said Mr. Tapping.
"I knew it would be!" cried Miss Lewis.
"And you?" asked Mr. Jones of Thyrsis.
"It has not succeeded in these towns," said Thyrsis. "But then--how could it succeed, except where there are intellectual people? You promised to take it to New York."
"It"s no use!" declared Jones. "New York would laugh it dead in one night."
"It would," said Mr. Tapping, decisively.
"I knew it all along," cried Miss Lewis.
So they went on for ten minutes; and then, "What are you going to do?"
asked Thyrsis, in terror.
"The play must be altered," said Jones.
"How altered?"
"It must be altered as Miss Lewis asked you at first."
Thyrsis sprang up. "What!" he cried.
"It must be done!" said Mr. Jones.
"It must," said Mr. Tapping.
"I knew it all along!" cried Miss Lewis again.
"But I won"t stand for it!" exclaimed Thyrsis, wildly.
"It must be done!" said Mr. Jones, in his heaviest steam-roller tone.
"But I won"t have it!"
"What"ll you do?"
"I"ll go to law! I"ll get an injunction."
"What is there in our contract to prevent our altering the play?"
demanded the man.
"What!" gasped Thyrsis. "You know what our understanding was!"
"Humph!" said the other. "Can you prove it?"
"And do you mean that you would go back on that understanding?"
"And do you mean that you expect me to see this money wasted and the play sent to pot?"
Thyrsis, in his agony, turned to Miss Lewis. "Will you let him break our bargain?" he cried.
"But what else is there to be done?" she answered.
"Don"t you see that the play is a failure? And don"t you see the plight you"ve got me in?"
Thyrsis was dumb with dismay. He stared from one of these people to another, and his heart went down--down. He saw that his case was hopeless. He had no one to help him or to advise him, and he had less than eleven dollars in his pocket.
"What do you propose to do?" he asked, weakly.
"I have already telegraphed to Richard Haberton," said Jones. "He will meet us and see the next two performances; and then we"ll lay the company off until we get some kind of a practical play."
And so the steam-roller rolled and the matter was settled; and Thyrsis, broken-hearted, bid the trio farewell, and took an early train back to New York.
He never saw any member of the company again--and he never saw the "practical play" which Mr. Richard Haberton made out of "The Genius".
What was done he gathered from the press-clippings that came to him--the famous author of "The Rajah"s Diamond" caused Helena to fall into Lloyd"s arms at the end of the second act, and had them safely if not happily married at the beginning of the third. Also he wrote several "charming" scenes for Ethelynda Lewis, and two weeks later the play had a second opening in another manufacturing town of New England--where the critics, awed by the name of the distinguished dramatist upon the play-bills, were moved to faint praise. But perhaps it was that Mr.
Richard Haberton required more than two weeks" time for the evolving of real "charm"; at any rate the audience came in no larger numbers to see this new version, and the misbegotten production lived for another six performances, and died a peaceful death at the very gates of the metropolis.
And such was the end of Thyrsis" career as a play-wright. In return for all his labors and his agonies he received some weeks later a note from Robertson Jones, Inc., to the effect that the books of "The Genius"
showed a total deficit of six thousand seven hundred and forty-two dollars and seventeen cents; and accordingly, under the contract, there was nothing due to the author.
BOOK XI
THE TORTURE-HOUSE
_They sat in the darkness, watching where the starlight gleamed upon the water.
"We had always hope," she was saying. "How endlessly we hoped!"
"Could we do it now?" he asked; and after a pause, he quoted from the poem--
"Unbreachable the fort Of the long-batter"d world uplifts its wall; And strange and vain the earthly turmoil grows, And near and real the charm of thy repose, And night as welcome as a friend would fall!"_