A boy wearing shirt and slacks of pea-green cotton crossed the back of the stage beyond the garden gate singing in a rather sweet tenor: My girl of the mountains . . .
“What’s he supposed to be?” Basil asked Pauline.
“A Savoyard peasant. The beach costume does mar the effect, doesn’t it? But he’ll be in peasant dress tonight.”
I’m cold . . . Wanda was still dying. Loris, where are you? I can’t see you now. . . .
I’m here, my darling! responded Rod as ardently as a man reading aloud a passage from the Encyclopædia Britannica. Here to give you my forgiveness!
Loris! sighed Wanda. I love you! Their lips met in a kiss that looked like a real one—the first suggestion of realism Rod’s acting had achieved so far.
“She made him do that!” whispered Pauline furiously.
Wanda’s head fell back on the cushions of a garden seat. Rod sobbed aloud—three sobs a minute carefully timed. Hutchins laid a flower beside Wanda’s hand. Other actors—supposed to be Italian servants—knelt and crossed themselves. The electrician off-stage pressed a switch and the sunshine faded into a beautiful lavender twilight.
Again like an echo the voice of the singing peasant was heard off-stage: My girl of the mountains . . . will never come back. . . .
If someone had set off a charge of dynamite the effect could not have seemed more devastating. Wanda, so gracefully dead, sprang to her feet shouting. Basil would not have believed her carefully modulated voice could become so strident: “Damn it, what did you do that for?” was the mildest expression she used. Rod was equally furious. “Haven’t you any sense at all?” Hutchins plunged through the frail garden gate into the wings and reappeared dragging the boy in pea-green slacks with him. “You know you shouldn’t have done that!” Everyone began to talk so furiously that it was impossible to hear a word. Leonard and the other actors in the orchestra seats were as excited as those on stage. Only two people besides Basil himself seemed undismayed—Margot and Adeane. Even Milhau was red with fury. He ran up three shallow steps that bridged the footlights to the stage and confronted the boy in green. “Who told you to do that?”
“Nobody. I just didn’t think. After all, it isn’t an ordinary rehearsal. We’ve already had one first night.”
This was not the happiest excuse he could have offered. At mention of that first night the gabbling tongues died away in silence.
“You’re fired,” said Milhau bitterly. “Get your money and go.”
“Lissen, Mr. Milhau. I got a contract, and—”
Basil leaned toward Pauline. “What is the trouble?”
Her smile was faintly ironic. “You may have heard that stage people are superstitious. One of their pet superstitions is that the last line of a play must never be spoken at rehearsal. I suppose they wouldn’t mind quite so much if they hadn’t been jittery to start with. After all, this production has had its quota of bad luck already.”
“Didn’t the boy in green realize what he was doing?”
“I suppose not. I suppose he thought having had the opening already . . . But that was only one act. The whole production has never been shown in public, so technically this is a pre-production rehearsal.”
“Aw, gee, Mr. Milhau,” the boy was arguing. He was a plump, swarthy youth who had evidently been chosen for the part because his large, moist, black eyes and oily waves of black hair suggested the coarse vitality of a peasant. “It’s just a superstition . . .”
The cackle of voices rose again. A tall, thin figure pushed its way through the crowd of actors on the stage clustered around Milhau and the boy.
“Mr. Milhau!” It was Russell. His voice broke like an adolescent’s. “I’m sorry, but I can’t play Vladimir tonight. I just can’t. Not after that.”
“Well, now, Russell, it’s just a superstition,” Milhau took over the boy’s own argument glibly.
“You may call it superstition, but I believe in good luck and bad. I’m not going to play that part tonight.”
“A hundred a week!” snapped Milhau.
“No,” retorted Russell. “There’s something fishy going on around here, and I don’t like it. Why didn’t you tell me about the murder when I applied for this job? Why did you get a new man like me instead of getting one of the actors who only appears in the last act to play Vladimir in the first? Why were you all so scared when I didn’t move at the end of the first act? No, thank you, Mr. Milhau, you can get somebody else to play Vladimir. I haven’t signed a contract yet, and I’m not going to!”
There was complete silence as Russell stalked down the steps and up the center aisle to the exit.
Before anyone could speak, Adeane left his seat in the orchestra and lounged down to the footlights, hands in his pockets. “I never heard such blasted nonsense in all my life!” he drawled scornfully. “Anybody’d think you were a pack of kids or savages the way you fuss over your taboos. I’m not an actor, thank God—I’m a dramatist just doing a little acting on the side, so I’m not superstitious. I walk under ladders all the time and spill salt whenever I get the chance. I’ll be glad to play Vladimir if somebody else will play Nikola.”
Milhau came down to the footlights. “Thank you, Adeane. I won’t forget this. You’ll get the same salary you’re getting now, and let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.”
“How about reading some of my plays?” responded Adeane with the same smile he had given Margot when he told her she “owed” him something.
Milhau swallowed and steeled himself to make a real sacrifice. “O.K. Give them to my secretary.”
Adeane looked as if he were patting himself on the back. “Thanks, Mr. Milhau. I’ll do that!”
But the rest of the company was uneasy. Wanda spoke. “Sam, do we have to go on with Fedora?”
Margot answered her: “Of course we do! It’s all settled. Mr. Milhau and I between us would make things very unpleasant for anyone who broke a contract at the last moment.”
“You heard the lady,” said Milhau curtly. “The box office is sold out for weeks ahead, and no silly superstition is going to keep me from seeing that curtain rise tonight at 8:40 sharp!”
“What about me?” The boy in pea-green slacks looked at Milhau impudently.
“Oh—go to hell!” Milhau hurried back to his own office—the rehearsal was over.
Chapter Eleven. Behind the Scenes
BASIL HAD ALMOST FORGOTTEN his appointment to meet Lambert, the toxicologist, in Foyle’s office at Police Headquarters late that afternoon. A taxi took him downtown through a twilight that the overcast sky turned into night. All the office buildings were gay with lighted windows, but it was no longer a pleasantly decorative sight to those who realized how ships bringing oil and sugar to New York were silhouetted against the glow of these towers for the benefit of submarines many miles at sea.