The Destroying Angel

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.

The voice of Sara Law broke and fell. She stood trembling and unstrung. Max without a word turned on his heel and swung out of sight into the wings. Four other actors on the stage, aside from Sara Law, hesitated and drew together in doubt and bewilderment. And then abruptly, with no warning whatever, the illusion of gloom in the auditorium and moonlight in the postscenium was rent away by the glare of the full complement of electric lights installed in the house.

A thought later, while still all were blinking and gasping with surprise, Max strode into view just behind the footlights. Halting, he swept the array of auditors with an ominous and truculent stare.

So quickly was this startling change consummated that Whitaker had no more than time to realize the reappearance of the manager before he caught his wrathful and venomous glance fixed to his own bewildered face. And something in the light that flickered wildly behind Max's eyes reminded him so strongly of a similar expression he had remarked in the eyes of Drummond, the night the latter had been captured by Ember and Sum Fat, that in alarm he half rose from his seat.

Simultaneously he saw Max spring toward the box, with a distorted and snarling countenance. He was tugging at something in his pocket. It appeared in the shape of a heavy pistol.

Instantly Whitaker was caught and tripped by Ember and sent sprawling on the floor of the box. As this happened, he heard the voice of the firearm, sharp and vicious – a single report.

Unhurt, he picked himself up in time to catch a glimpse of Max, on the stage, momentarily helpless in the embrace of a desperate and frantic woman who had caught his arms from behind and, presumably, had so deflected his arm. In the same breath Ember, who had leaped to the railing round the box, threw himself across the footlights with the lithe certainty of a beast of prey and, seemingly in as many deft motions, knocked the pistol from the manager's hand, wrested him from the arms of the actress, laid him flat and knelt upon him.

With a single bound Whitaker followed him to the stage; in another he had his wife in his arms and was soothing her first transports of semi-hysterical terror…

It was possibly a quarter of an hour later when Ember paused before a door in the ground floor dressing-room gangway of the Theatre Max – a door distinguished by the initials "S L" in the centre of a golden star. With some hesitation, with even a little diffidence, he lifted a hand and knocked.

At once the door was opened by the maid, Elise. Recognizing Ember, she smiled and stood aside, making way for him to enter the small, curtained lobby.

"Madam – and Monsieur," she said with smiling significance, "told me to show you in at once, Monsieur Ember."

From beyond the curtains, Whitaker's voice lifted up impatiently: "That you, old man? Come right in!"

Nodding to the maid, Ember thrust aside the portières and stepped into the brightly-lighted dressing-room, then paused, bowing and smiling his self-contained, tolerant smile: in appearance as imperturbable and well-groomed as though he had just escaped from the attentions of a valet, rather than from a furious hand-to-hand tussle with a vicious monomaniac.

Mary Whitaker, as yet a little pale and distrait and still in costume, was reclining on a chaise-longue. Whitaker was standing close beside his wife; his face the theatre of conflicting emotions; Ember, at least, thought with a shrewd glance to recognize a pulsating light of joy beneath a mask of interest and distress and a flush of embarrassment.

"I am intruding?" he suggested gravely, with a slight turn as if offering to withdraw.

"No."

The word faltering on the lips of Mary Whitaker was lost in an emphatic iteration by Whitaker.

"Sit down!" he insisted. "As if we'd let you escape, now, after you'd kept us here in suspense!"

He offered a chair, but Ember first advanced to take the hand held out to him by the woman on the chaise-longue.

"You are feeling – more composed?" he inquired.

Her gaze met his bravely. "I am – troubled, perhaps – but happy," she said.

"Then I am very glad," he said, smiling at the delicate colour that enhanced her exquisite beauty as she made the confession. "I had hoped as much." He looked from the one to the other. "You … have made up your minds?"

The wife answered for both: "It is settled, dear friend: I can struggle no longer. I thought myself a strong woman; I have tried to believe myself a genius bound upon the wheel of an ill-starred destiny; but I find I am" – the glorious voice trembled slightly – "only a woman in love and no stronger than her love."

"I am very glad," Ember repeated, "for both your sakes. It's a happy consummation of my dearest wishes."

"We owe you everything," Whitaker said with feeling, dropping an awkward hand on the other's shoulder. "It was you who threw us together, down there on the Great West Bay, so that we learned to know one another…"

"I plead guilty to that little plot – yes," Ember laughed. "But, best of all, this comes at just the right time – the rightest time, when there can no longer be any doubts or questions or misunderstandings, no ground for further fears and apprehensions, when 'the destroying angel' of your 'ill-starred destiny,' my dear" – he turned to the woman – "is exorcised – banished – proscribed – "

"Max – !" Whitaker struck in explosively.

" – is on his way to the police-station, well guarded," Ember affirmed with a nod and a grim smile. "I have his confession, roughly jotted down but signed, and attested by several witnesses… I'm glad you were out of the way; it was rather a painful scene, and disorderly; it wouldn't have been pleasant for Mrs. Whitaker… We had the deuce of a time clearing the theatre: human curiosity is a tremendously persistent and resistant force. And then I had some trouble dealing with the misplaced loyalty of the staff of the house… However, eventually I got Max to myself – alone, that is, with several men I could depend on. And then I heartlessly put him through the third degree – forestalling my friends, the police. By dint of asserting as truths and personal discoveries what I merely suspected, I broke down his denials. He owned up, doggedly enough, and yet with that singular pride which I have learned to associate with some phases of homicidal mania… I won't distress you with details: the truth is that Max was quite mad on the subject of his luck; he considered it, as I suspected, indissolubly associated with Sara Law. When poor Custer committed suicide, he saved Max from ruin and innocently showed him the way to save himself thereafter, when he felt in peril, by assassinating Hamilton and, later, Thurston. Drummond only cheated a like fate, and you" – turning to Whitaker – "escaped by the narrowest shave. Max hadn't meant to run the risk of putting you out of the way unless he thought it absolutely necessary, but the failure of his silly play in rehearsal to-night, coupled with the discovery that you were in the theatre, drove him temporarily insane with hate, chagrin and jealousy."

Concluding, Ember rose. "I must follow him now to the police-station… I shall see you both soon again – ?"

The woman gave him both her hands. "There's no way to thank you," she said – "our dear, dear friend!"

"No way," Whitaker echoed regretfully.

"No way?" Ember laughed quietly, holding her hands tightly clasped. "But I see you together – happy – Oh, believe me, I am fully thanked!"

Bowing, he touched his lips gently to both hands, released them with a little sigh that ended in a contented chuckle, exchanged a short, firm grasp with Whitaker, and left them…

Whitaker, following almost immediately to the gangway, found that Ember had already left the theatre.

For some minutes he wandered to and fro in the gangway, pausing now and again on the borders of the deserted stage. There were but few of the house staff visible, and those few were methodically busy with preparations to close up. Beyond the dismal gutter of the footlights the auditorium yawned cavernous and shadowy, peopled only by low rows of chairs ghostly in their dust-cloths. The street entrances were already closed, locked and dark. On the stage a single cluster-stand of electric bulbs made visible the vast, gloomy dome of the flies and the whitewashed walls against which sections of scenery were stacked like cards. An electrician in his street clothes lounged beside the door-keeper's cubicle, at the stage entrance, smoking a cigarette and conferring with the doorman while subjecting Whitaker to a curious and antagonistic stare. The muffled rumble of their voices were the only sounds audible, aside from an occasional racket of boot-heels in the gangways as one actor after another left his dressing-room and hastened to the street, keen-set for the clash of gossiping tongues in theatrical clubs and restaurants.

Gradually the building grew more and more empty and silent, until at length Whitaker was left alone with the shadows and the two employees. These last betrayed signs of impatience. He himself felt a little sympathy for their temper. Women certainly did take an unconscionable time to dress!..

At length he heard them hurrying along the lower gangway, and turned to join his wife at the stage-entrance. Elise passed on, burdened with two heavy hand-bags, and disappeared into the rain-washed alleyway. The electrician detached his shoulders from the wall, ground his cigarette under heel and lounged over to the switchboard.

Mary Whitaker turned her face, shadowy and mystical, touched with her faint and inscrutable smile, up to her husband's.

"Wait," she begged in a whisper. "I want to see" – her breath checked – "the end of it all."

They heard hissings and clickings at the switchboard. The gangway lights vanished in a breath. The single cluster-stand on the stage disappeared – and the house disappeared utterly with its extinguishment. There remained alight only the single dull bulb in the doorman's cubicle.

Whitaker slipped an arm round his wife. She trembled within his embrace.

"Black out," she said in a gentle and regretful voice: "the last exit: Curtain – End of the Play!"

"No," he said in a voice of sublime confidence – "no; it's only the prologue curtain. Now for the play, dear heart … the real play … life … love…"