The Destroying Angel

"You've been to see her?"

"On the contrary."

"The devil you say!"

"She called this morning – "

But Ember interrupted, thrusting a ready and generous hand across the table:

"My dear man, I am glad!"

Whitaker took the proffered hand readily and firmly. "Thank you… I was saying: she called this morning to inform me that, though wedded once, we must be strangers now – and evermore!"

"But you – of course – you argued that nonsense out of her head."

"To the contrary – again."

"But – my dear man! – you said you were celebrating; you permitted me to congratulate you just now – "

"The point is," said Whitaker, with a bland and confident grin; "I've succeeded in arguing that nonsense out of my head – not hers —mine."

Ember gave a helpless gesture. "I'm afraid this is one of my stupid nights…"

"I mean that, though Mary ran away from me, wouldn't listen to reason, I have, in the course of an afternoon's hard tramping, come to the conclusion that there is nothing under the sun which binds me to sit back and accept whatever treatment she purposes according me by courtesy of Jules Max."

Whitaker bent forward, his countenance discovering a phase of seriousness hitherto masked by his twisted smile. He emphasized his points with a stiff, tapping forefinger on the cloth.

"I mean, I'm tired of all this poppycock. Unless I'm an infatuated ass, Mary loves me with all her heart. She has made up her mind to renounce me partly because Max has worked upon her feelings by painting some lurid picture of his imminent artistic and financial damnation if she leaves him, partly because she believes, or has been led to believe, in this 'destroying angel' moonshine. Now she's got to listen to reason. So, likewise, Max."

"You're becoming more human word by word," commented Ember with open approval. "Continue; elucidate; I can understand how a fairly resolute lover with the gift of gab can talk a weak-minded, fond female into denying her pet superstition; but how you're going to get round Max passes my comprehension. The man unquestionably has her under contract – "

"But you forgot his god is Mammon," Whitaker put in. "Max will do anything in the world for money. Therein resides the kernel of my plan. It's simplicity itself: I'm going to buy him."

"Buy Max!"

"Body – artistic soul – and breeches," Whitaker affirmed confidently.

"Impossible!"

"You forget how well fixed I am. What's the use of my owning half the gold in New Guinea if it won't buy me what I already own by every moral and legal right?"

"He won't listen to you; you don't know Max."

"I'm willing to lay you a small bet that there will be no first performance at the Theatre Max to-morrow night."

"You'll never persuade him – "

"I'll buy the show outright and my wife's freedom to boot – or else Max will begin to accumulate the local colour of a hospital ward."

Ember smiled grimly. "You're beginning to convince even me. When, may I ask, do you propose to pull off this sporting proposition?"

"Do you know where Max can be found to-night?"

"At the theatre – "

"Then the matter will be arranged at the theatre between this hour and midnight."

"I doubt if you succeed in getting the ear of the great man before midnight; however, I'm not disposed to quibble about a few hours."

"But why shouldn't I?"

"Because Max is going to be the busiest young person in town to-night. And that is why I've been looking for you… Conforming to his custom, he's giving an advance glimpse of the production to the critics and a few friends in the form of a final grand dress-rehearsal to-night. Again, in conformance with his custom, he has honoured me with a bid. I've been chasing you all day to find out if you'd care to go – "

"Eight o'clock and a bit after," Whitaker interrupted briskly, consulting his watch. "Here, boy," he hailed a passing page; "call a taxicab for me." And then, rising alertly: "Come along; I've got to hustle home and make myself look respectable enough for the occasion; but at that, with luck, I fancy we'll be there before the first curtain."

This mood of faith, of self-reliance and assured optimism held unruffled throughout the dash homewards, his hurried change of clothing and the ride to the theatre. Nothing that Ember, purposely pessimistic, could say or do availed to diminish the high buoyancy of his humour. He maintained a serene faith in his star, a spirited temper that refused to recognize obstacles in the way of his desire.

In the taxicab, en route to the Theatre Max, he contrived even to distil a good omen from the driving autumnal downpour itself… The rain-swept pavements, their polished blackness shot with a thousand strands of golden brilliance; the painted bosom of the lowering, heavy sky; the tear-drenched window-panes; even the incessant crepitation on the roof of the scurrying, skidding cab seemed to lend a colour of assurance to his thoughts.

"On such a day as this," he told his doubting friend, "I won her first; on such a day I shall win her anew, finally and for all time!.."

From Broadway to Sixth Avenue, Forty-sixth Street was bright with the yellow glare of the huge sign in front of the Theatre Max. But this night, unlike that other night when he had approached the stage of his wife's triumphs, there was no crawling rank of cabs, no eager and curious press of people in the street; but few vehicles disputed their way; otherwise the rain and the hurrying, rain-coated wayfarers had the thoroughfare to themselves… And even this he chose to consider a favourable omen: there was not now a public to come between him and his love – only Max and her frightened fancies.

The man at the door recognized Ember with a cheerful nod; Whitaker he did not know.

"Just in time, Mr. Ember; curtain's been up about ten minutes…"

The auditorium was in almost total darkness. A single voice was audible from the stage that confronted it like some tremendous, moonlight canvas in a huge frame of tarnished gold. They stole silently round the orchestra seats to the stage-box – the same box that Whitaker had on the former occasion occupied in company with Max.

They succeeded in taking possession without attracting attention, either from the owners of that scanty scattering of shirt-bosoms in the orchestra – the critical fraternity and those intimates bidden by the manager to the first glimpse of his new revelation in stage-craft – or from those occupying the stage.

The latter were but two. Evidently, though the curtain had been up for some minutes, the action of the piece had not yet been permitted to begin to unfold. Whitaker inferred that Max had been dissatisfied with something about the lighting of the scene. The manager was standing in mid-stage, staring up at the borders: a stout and pompous figure, tenacious to every detail of that public self which he had striven so successfully to make unforgettably individual; a figure quaintly incongruous in his impeccable morning-coat and striped trousers and flat-brimmed silk hat, perched well back on his head, with his malacca stick and lemon-coloured gloves and small and excessively glossy patent-leather shoes, posed against the counterfeit of a moonlit formal garden.

Aside from him, the only other occupant of the stage was Sara Law. She sat on a stone bench with her profile to the audience, her back to the right of the proscenium arch; so that she could not, without turning, have noticed the entrance of Ember and her husband. A shy, slight, deathlessly youthful figure in pale and flowing garments that moulded themselves fluently to her sweet and girlish body, in a posture of pensive meditation: she was nothing less than adorable. Whitaker could not take his eyes from her, for sheer wonder and delight.

He was only vaguely conscious that Max, at length satisfied, barked a word to that effect to an unseen electrician off to the left, and waving his hand with a gesture indelibly associated with his personality, dragged a light cane-seated chair to the left of the proscenium and sat himself down.

"All ready?" he demanded in a sharp and irritable voice.

The woman on the marble seat nodded imperceptibly.

"Go ahead," snapped the manager…

An actor advanced from the wings, paused and addressed the seated woman. His lines were brief. She lifted her head with a startled air, listening. He ceased to speak, and her voice of golden velvet filled the house with the flowing beauty of its unforgettably sweet modulations. Beyond the footlights a handful of sophisticated and sceptical habitués of the theatre forgot for the moment their ingrained incredulity and thrilled in sympathy with the wonderful rapture of that voice of eternal Youth. Whitaker himself for the time forgot that he was the husband of this woman and her lover; she moved before his vision in the guise of some divine creature, divinely unattainable, a dream woman divorced utterly from any semblance of reality.

That opening scene was one perhaps unique in the history of the stage. Composed by Max in some mad, poetical moment of inspired plagiarism, it not only owned a poignant and enthralling beauty of imagery, but it moved with an almost Grecian certitude, with a significance extraordinarily direct and devoid of circumlocution, seeming to lay bare the living tissue of immortal drama.

But with the appearance of other characters, there came a change: the rare atmosphere of the opening began to dissipate perceptibly. The action clouded and grew vague. The auditors began to feel the flutterings of uncertainty in the air. Something was failing to cross the footlights. The sweeping and assured gesture of the accomplished playwright faltered: a clumsy bit of construction was damningly exposed; faults of characterization multiplied depressingly. Sara Law herself lost an indefinable proportion of her rare and provoking charm; the strangeness of failing to hold her audience in an ineluctable grasp seemed at once to nettle and distress her. Max himself seemed suddenly to wake to the amazing fact that there was something enormously and irremediably wrong; he began with exasperating frequency to halt the action, to interrupt scenes with advice and demands for repetition. He found it impossible to be still, to keep his seat or control his rasping, irritable voice. Subordinate characters on the stage lost their heads and either forgot to act or overacted. And then – intolerable climax! – of a sudden somebody in the orchestra chairs laughed in outright derision in the middle of a passage meant to be tenderly emotional.