There were only three people in the shallow lobby, yet Basil recognized each face as one he had seen on the stage that season in a minor part. He gave his name at the desk and asked if Mr. Hutchins could see him. The message was relayed through a switchboard operator, and a moment later he was in a rheumatic elevator creaking up to the twelfth floor and room 1243.
Perhaps nothing is more revealing of character than the condition of a hotel room when you descend on the occupant without warning. Hutchins passed the test with flying colors. It was a large double room with a bay window and bathroom. There was no kitchenette and no evidence of those furtive attempts at housekeeping with a small electric stove in defiance of the Fire Department that most elderly women living alone in hotel rooms seem unable to resist. Nor was there any pathetic assumption that a bedroom can be turned into a living room accessible to both sexes without impropriety by keeping combs and brushes in a bureau drawer and substituting a hard, narrow couch with a dingy cretonne cover for a wide, comfortable bed with an immaculate white counterpane and pillow slips. The moment Basil saw that bed he concluded that Seymour Hutchins was a man who had an intelligently selfish interest in his own comfort and a refreshingly candid indifference to the comfort of others. He had supplied himself with one large armchair, a case for his own books, and a powerful radio. But there was no armchair for visitors, and Basil was not offered any such feminine amenity as weak tea hastily brewed in the bathroom or any such bachelor refreshment as rye whisky in a tooth glass.
The window opened on a courtyard, but it was high enough to look over the roof of a lower building opposite to a wide view of skyscrapers massed irregularly which seemed oddly familiar. The rain had stopped now, and the sun was already far down the western hemisphere of the sky in a pool of saffron light that washed the tall buildings with a roseate glow making them unnaturally radiant under the dull, gray clouds overhead. Basil had seen the same appearance in the mountains at sunset on a rainy day, and once again he realized how closely the skyscrapers approximated a range of hills in their scenic effect.
“I hope I’m not intruding,” he said to Hutchins, “but there are some things I can learn from you in this case that I could not learn from anyone else involved.”
“Not at all.” With his usual ambassadorial dignity, Hutchins waved Basil to the lone armchair beside the bay window and perched himself on a narrow window seat. “I’m glad to help you if I can. But frankly I can’t imagine how. If it’s that line of mine about Vladimir—He cannot escape now, every hand is against him—there’s nothing more I can tell you. I’ve thought it over carefully, and it has no special significance for me.”
Basil took a sheet of paper from his pocket—the time table of the first act that Rod had prepared for him that morning. “There’s one thing I forgot to ask. Have you any idea of the approximate time when you spoke that line?”
Hutchins bent his white head as if he were looking down into the question. “I can only give you a very rough approximation,” he answered finally. “Curtain rises at 8:40, I go on at 8:51. That line comes about twenty minutes later—about four or five minutes after nine.”
“Well, an approximation is better than nothing.” Basil jotted down the hour on the margin of Rod’s time table.
“You can do better than an approximation.” Suddenly Hutchins lifted his eyes, searching Basil’s face. “Have you heard that Sam Milhau is going to go on with Fedora? He’s called a rehearsal for tomorrow morning at nine-thirty. If you’d care to come to the theater as my guest—” Another touch of ambassadorial urbanity—“you can time the whole thing exactly yourself.”
“I’d like to very much.” Basil saw that Hutchins was troubled. “You don’t like the idea of a revival?”
The answer came in a roundabout way. “Have you ever heard of the doctrine of ‘eternal recurrence?’”
“You mean the idea that time has latitude as well as longitude?”
“Roughly, yes. We all think and speak of the length of time, but some philosophers have suggested that it may have width as well—that there is more than one twentieth century and that we recur in all of them, repeating all the mistakes and misfortunes in our lives throughout eternity.”
Basil smiled. “That idea of lateral time is an amusing intellectual exercise, but I doubt if the universe is organized in quite that way. Certainly, I hope not. A hell of fire and brimstone would be a cozy summer resort in comparison, and it makes the annihilation of the atheist seem like Paradise.”
“Perhaps. But such an idea must appeal to an actor, because he spends so much of his life doing the same thing over and over again. No one understands better the enormous impulsive force of habit.”
“It has a certain appeal for a psychiatrist, too,” admitted Basil. “The Viennese School collected a good bit of evidence suggesting that a man who fails to meet one situation in life adequately will go on through his whole life repeating the same failure each time he is confronted with a similar situation. In most cases habit is far stronger than the lessors of experience, possibly because the psychic factors that formed the habit in the first place are always there to support it and continue it. Of course this tendency to repeat is even more marked in neurotics and criminals.”
“And in murderers?” Hutchins’ smile had a fine edge. “Now you see why I don’t like the idea of going on with Fedora. I certainly wouldn’t care to take Ingelow’s place as Vladimir!”
“I understand that Vladimir will be played by some actor who was not in the original company,” replied Basil. “That ought to eliminate any motive for a second murder, and it would certainly involve great risk to the murderer.”
“That’s entirely reasonable but—I still don’t like the idea. People say we stage folk are superstitious. How can we help it when our success depends so much on chance? You can never predict whether a play will succeed or not until after the first night, and sometimes not even then. It’s all a gamble, and we all have a gambler’s psychology.”
Basil saw an opportunity to ask another question without appearing to attach much importance to it. “It seems all the more strange that Milhau should revive Fedora this season,” he said in his most casual voice. “So far as I could tell from the first act, the play has nothing in it to appeal to a modern audience. Do you know what first put it into his head?”
“I believe that Wanda wanted to play the part.” Hutchins answered as if he saw no significance in the question. “I don’t know just where she got the idea. But I don’t agree with you that the play is dead. I think it has far more vitality than some of the modern amorphous tripe—” He stopped himself with a smile. “I don’t suppose tripe can be called amorphous.” His glance went to Basil’s hat lying on the bed. “What do you call that?”
“A gray felt hat.”
“Yes, and what else?”
“A soft felt hat.”
“And?”
Basil laughed. “A fedora!”
“Exactly. That gives you some idea of how popular the play was originally. If you could have seen Bernhardt do it you might understand.”