The Red Book Magazine/Volume 10/Number 1/Those who Sit Up-stairs

by Inez Haynes Irwin

 

Those Who Sit Up-stairs

BY INEZ HAYNES GILLMORE

Author of “Cupid Ex Machina,” etc.

THE theater was cheerless. The asbestos curtain was still down. The big central chandelier showed the pin-pricks of a furtive economical glimmer. But the spawn of lesser ones that, with it, made a geometric dazzle of the roof, were not even lighted. The first balcony disclosed neither color nor movement, neither light nor sound. The boxes were pits of murky gloom. The orchestra gaped, untenanted. The floor was still vacant, desolate, dumb as any ruined amphitheater. But upstairs in the gallery all was different.

The doors had just been thrown open. The crowd had rushed frantically up the corkscrewing, narrowing stairs. From the door the gallery inclined at a dizzy angle. But with no perceptible lessening of their speed, they deployed and made for the first row.

Miss Carr and Mr. Embler, among the first to enter the theater, managed to secure their favorite places—the first row and a little around to the left.

“Isn't it something awful,” Miss Carr said indignantly. “There'll be an accident some day, and then I guess the management will have to number the tickets. I'm getting pretty sick of running up those stairs.

“Thank Heaven!”she thought inwardly, “I wont have to do it again in one while.”

This statement had been made to Mr. Embler in the same form every time they had “rushed” together. He received it with the words, grimly prophetic, with which, invariably, he had answered it in the past. “They'll have to come to numbering the tickets sometime; public feeling will make them.”

He helped Miss Carr off with her coat. He held it while she removed her gloves, put them in the little sack from which she had previously extracted her opera glasses, removed and rolled up her veil, removed her hat and stabbed it, by the four hatpins, into the cushioned rail in front. The she held his hat while he took off his heavy coat, folded it over the back of his seat and placed his hat in the rack under the seat. They did not hurry because it was now half an hour before the play would begin and fifteen minutes before the orchestra would appear.

In the meantime, the crowd that had flooded at their heels were beginning to get seated. The laughter and screaming was now accented by staccato cries and comments. From all over the gallery came the calls of the swift to the halt.

“Here I am, Mame, over here.”

“Sade, Sade, these are better seats than you've got—come over, wont you?”

“Julia, Julia—look—I got seats in the second row.”

Through this confusion, the snapping of seats sounded like explosions. Gradually the noise died down to a steady murmur. There was a flutter of programs and occasional exclamations of delight as enthusiasts identified favorites in the cast. Candy-boxes appeared. The crowd settled down to an amicable wait.

Miss Carr surveyed the gallery.

“That crowd from Mellen & Black's here,” she informed Mr. Embler, “over to the right—third row from the end.”

Mr. Embler glanced back interestedly. “They've got a new girl with them to-night, haven't they?”

“No—that's that Miss Murphy's sister—she comes with them once in a while—she's a bright one—I like her. She looks like her sister—don't she?”

Mr. Embler admitted that she did.

“They have an awful nice time together—those girls—they always lunch in a crowd like that. Whenever I get in the same place they always invite me to their table. I tell you, they're up and a-coming. You have to keep your wits sharpened to keep up with them.”

Mr. Embler made an inarticulate exclamation of assent.

“There's Miss Morrow over by the post—she didn't get a very good seat to night, did she?”

Time was, Miss Carr reflected, that she herself had been compelled occasionally to take a seat behind a post. But that was before the eventful night when, forced to stand throughout a crowded performance, she had suddenly keeled over into the arms of the man beside her. That man was Mr. Embler. It was he also, who, with the help of a pair of ushers, bore her outside. After she recovered, he had hovered with her on the outskirts of the crowd, dismayed by her intention to see the play out. He had accompanied her to the car; he had offered to see her home. She had refused to permit that—although she let him find out that she always “rushed” the last night of every production at that theater.

After that they got into the habit of sitting together. This was the extent of their intimacy, for she never saw him outside. Before she met Mr. Embler she always made it a point to get near the head of the line. To accomplish that, she sometimes had to wait an hour in freezing weather, in the little alley through which the less-favored financially were admitted to the theater. This was no longer necessary. Mr. Embler was sure to be among the first ten. She could depend on him to hold a seat in the front row if there were a hundred in the line ahead of her. It had made her theater-going a good deal easier.

She did not know much about Mr. Embler except that he was a bookkeeper, a single man, and apparently friendless. Like her, the theater was his one passion and only extravagance. Miss Carr had a scrap-book in which she pasted her programs. Mr. Embler always made a point of picking up, in the foyer, one of the downstairs programs so that her book could have as splendid an appearance as possible. She also had a collection of pictures of actresses in which she was inordinately interested. Most of them were cut from magazines—Mr. Embler kept on the look-out for them and he had contributed scores. He always had a pocket full of theatrical clippings for her to devour at her leisure and, occasionally, he brought her a theatrical magazine.

It was Miss Carr who, initially, laid down these dicta; Mr. Embler listened to her with a great deal of respect. He treated her always with a delicate mixture of awe and admiration. It was the tribute that those whose life has been a dead-level of hard work is apt to accord to the heroine of “better days.” It soothed Miss Carr to pour into the ears of sympathy high-colored reminiscences of the epoch before she had had to learn typewriting. His social humility flattered her. If his attitude had been that of the suitor, she often told herself, she would have to break the friendship off.

Mr. Embler was short and stout. His legs were so fat and stiff that they looked as if they had exploded from his thick body. He was not middle-aged but he was soon going to be. He had solemn dark eyes, a mustache, black and uneven, that drooped walrus-like. He wore his hair “roached” on one side and a good deal of enigmatic,masonic-jewelry hanging from a substantial gold watchchain.

Miss Carr was no longer young, and she never could have been pretty. Her features were a little sharp, and her uplifted nose seemed to pull a short upper lip away from a full lower one. There were two spots of flaring color on her high cheek-bones. But she had fine dark eyes, a remarkable head of hair, and her figure made quite the most of her clothes.

She was a cheerful person, with none of the having-seen-better-days attitude, once that fact had been revealed and paid tribute. In fact, she was so free from snobbishness, that a certain prideful announcement that she had presently to make came more diffidently from her lips than she expected.

“Oh, I sha'n't be here next Saturday night.”

She put her glass to her eyes and surveyed the house with an appearance of carelessness.

“You're not going to miss, 'The Other Way,'” Mr. Embler protested in alarm.

“Mercy, I should say I wasn't. Grace Grimshaw is my favorite actress, you know, now that Rosina Vokes is dead. I guess I wouldn't miss her for forty red apples. But, you see, the nicest thing has just happened. My cousin Ellen has—remember hearing me speak of her?”

It would have been strange if Mr. Embler had forgotten. Descriptions of the splendors of Cousin Ellen's existence were star features of Miss Carr's conversational exhibit

“Yes.”

“Well, she wrote me the other day that she hated to think of me rushing up these stairs every week or so—she knows 1ow crazy I am about the theater—and she said that her Christmas gift this year was going to be money and she hoped I'd spend it in buying good seats although she wouldn't bind me to anything. And so for the rest of the year I'm going to sit in the orchestra

“Isn't it lovely? I've always hated to rush. I hate everything about it—the cheap people and the programs and the noise and—and—everything. I don't feel at home here. I wasn't brought up that way. I don't know what my parents would think if they could see me here. Isn't it lovely that I haven't got to do it any more?”

“Great!” said Mr. Embler. But he spoke without enthusiasm. “Why, I suppose you wont ever come up here again.”

This was what Miss Carr dreaded. “I suppose not,” she said vaguely

There was a long pause. Miss Carr had been, as she put it to herself, “in mortal terror” for fear he would propose to call on her. For, of course, she couldn't allow that. But she soon saw that he was going to suggest nothing of the sort. He knew his place, evidently. She was much relieved—there was almost a suggestion of pique in her feeling.

“Don't forget your friends in the peanut gallery,” he said jocosely, after a while

“Of course I wont,” Miss Carr declared.

She wanted to turn the subject but, suddenly, she was shy. It was Mr. Embler who did it, at last.

“Pretty girl—that one in the blue cape,” he said in a detached way.

“Lovely!” Miss Carr was enthusiastic. unnecessarily so, perhaps. “Why, that's the one that sat in the box with the two men—don't you remember—the night Mansfield made that funny sarcastic speech. Don't you recall. She was flirting with both of them; we couldn't decide which one she liked best

“Sure, she's the one,” Mr. Embler responded uninterestedly. “Well, she's got a new one to-night.”

Miss Carr surveyed the party. “Yes, that's a new man. But she's real pretty, isn't she. She's got those same pearl sidecombs in. I wonder where she gets her hair marcelled. Most probably though she's got a lady's maid of her own.”

The house was beginning to wake up. The big central chandelier leaping into a ball of white fire, noiselessly exploded the darkness. Its satellites sparkled like diamond sunbursts; electric-flora pricked into brilliant life along the side-walls; the boxes snapped into rosy bloom; the house became a blooming marvel of red and blue and gold. Nymphs smiled, sup porting the curtain-frame. Satyrs grinned in corners. Cupids played, in inextricable groups, along the edge of the boxes. Masks gazed eyelessly from cornices. People began to stream down the aisles—beautiful carriage-people, the women with bare heads, with trailing gowns, with wonderful wraps,the men in sleeved capes and collapsible hats. Pretty groups arranged and re-arranged themselves in the boxes. The ushers were skimming noiselessly down the aisles, snapping down seats, receiving and handing back the ragged squares of paper that meant admittance to all these splendors, flying with velvet footsteps back up the aisle deftly dodging the avalanches of femininity.

A member of the orchestra poked a tentative head out from under the stage. He withdrew it. In an instant he re-appeared. His confrères, bent like gnomes under the weight of unwieldly instruments, followed through the slit, took their seats, turned on to their music the cylinders of white light that topped the stands and began re-arranging the sheets. The leader appeared. Leisurely, dégagé, he climbed to his perch. He surveyed his music. He examined the house. He gave a preliminary tug to a scornful mustache. Producing baton, he cast an oblique glance to left, another to the right. He scowled at the printed page, tapped on the iron-stand, and raised a preëmptory left hand. At the magic of his signal the music poured out. Simultaneously the asbestos curtain was drawn with swiftness upwards

A glowing scene—not less beautiful to Miss Carr because she could see every detail of it with her eyes shut—unrolled the splendors of a court-dance in mediæval Italy. And all the time the steady stream of beautiful women in the four aisles. From the gallery all this was færy.

Miss Carr and Mr. Embler were respectfully silent during the overture and through the breathless pause that brought up its close. Then there was the tinkle of a bell, the intoxicating flare of the footlights, the retreat of the house-lights until everything back of the orchestra was phantasm; then another pause, more tingling, the slow rise and stately disappearance of the Italian dance—an—and—and then—

There they were, the old familiar pair—Maggie the housemaid and James the butler—discussing intimate household affairs in the sunny, lawn-encircled breakfast-room.

It was a fine act. On that Miss Carr and Mr. Embler were unanimous. And the play grew even finer as it developed. But, somehow, the evening was not so pleasant as many Miss Carr had known. She was sorry for that, for it was likely to be their last. For one thing, Mr. Embler seemed to make fewer than usual of his droll remarks about the people down-stairs. Her quick eye picked out several who, from a gallery point of view, they knew very well. But he was not especially interested in them. He said good-by to her in abrupt, matter-of-fact words, still making no allusion to possible future meetings.

 

She dressed with careful precision the night she went to the closing performance of “The Other Way.” She put on a gown so important that it would never have occurred to her to jeopard its freshness by wearing it to the “rush.” It was of a foulard silk, brown with little white figures in it, a yoke of white chiffon and bows of brown velvet ribbon. And for the occasion, she had bought a pair of white gloves, a new veil, and a modest bunch of violets. She had no evening wrap, but her loose brown coat did not look like a rain-coat; she felt well dressed when she started for the theater.

It was a windy night and the walk from the car ruffled her hair. Before going to her seat, she went into a room portièred off from the foyer and marked “Ladies Parlor.” It seemed a very beautiful place to her with its puffy, upholstered furniture, its little dressing-tables, making a brilliant display of silver toilet articles, its smart black-gowned and white-capped maids. There were several mirrors, but it was not so easy to get close to them. A crowd of women was before them removing wraps, re-adjusting hair ornaments, drawing on long-gloves. They peacocked before the glass, taking all the time they wanted, elbowing and shoving in so unconscious a way that it actually seemed as if they did not see each other. Miss Carr could not bring herself to join the maelstrom and push with the rest. She stood a moment contemplating the scene in perplexity. The music warned her presently that the curtain would soon go up. Without waiting longer, she checked her coat and hat and was conducted down the aisle to the fifth row. With a sigh of rapture, she sank down on a soft cushiony seat that mysteriously adjusted itself to her weight. She looked about her.

There was a good deal of confusion. People were crowding down the aisles laughing, talking, bowing, and chatting with acquaintances, picking out friends in the boxes, adjusting glasses, wielding beautiful fans.

Presently the bell tinkled and the curtain went up. Again the pair, to whom tradition has deputed the effort to hold the plot back until the audience gets seated, were discovered working vigorously. The play, being English, this time they were Miggs and Horrocks.

It seemed to Mary Carr that the audience never would settle down. And they kept coming. In her ears was a surge of sound made up of the rustling of fabrics, the snapping of programs, the whispered directions of ushers. Not that alone! The people already seated in comfort, lazily continued their conversation after a perfunctory glance at the setting. Until the appearance of the star, a pair just back of her briskly exchanged opinions in regard to a dance they had both attended. In vain Miss Carr, to whom the utterances of Miggs and Horrocks were as sacred as the peroration of the star, strained her ears. They were merely a gesticulating, mumbling pair of manikins until Grace Grimshaw's entrance compelled consideration.

It promised to be a beautiful play. In the first intermission her enthusiasm demanded an outlet. She wished lonesomely that she had a somebody with whom to talk it over. For one thing, she had jumped to a certain astute conclusion in regard to the heroine's past life. But it would not have occurred to her to address either of the women who sat near her. One, though gray-haired, was magnificent. She was chaperoning a party of buds. The other, in a sequined gown that made her flexible figure positively contortionistic, was red-haired and languishingly inaccessible.

She tried to entertain herself with the little entr'acte episodes, with the boys selling Miss Grimshaw's pictures, the little groups that gathered in the aisles, the animation in the boxes. She couldn't find the courage to signal to an usher flying by with glasses of water, held in an enormous castor. It meant that the glass would have to travel through five pairs of white-gloved hands to hers—it seemed too much to ask.

She studied the women about her. They were all exquisitely dressed and some of them were charming to watch. Their jewelry and hair-ornaments, in particular, fascinated her. A careful survey of her vicinity proved to her that she was the only unescorted woman in sight.

She kept turning her glass towards the gallery where she found Mr. Embler in their regular seat. He had apparently not found her. At any rate, whenever she looked up, he seemed to be examining some other part of the house. There was a woman, who appeared to be alone, sitting on one side of him. She wondered inconsequently if they would get acquainted before the evening was over

The second act unveiled a thrilling climax but the applause of the orchestra was polite rather than enthusiastic. Miss Carr continued to clap after everybody in her vicinity had stopped. The gallery took it up and threw it against the curtain with such spirit and vigor that Miss Grimshaw had to come out and bow and bow and bow again.

In the intermission she was compelled to listen to comments on her beloved Miss Grimshaw that were cruelly sarcastic. She did look old—Miss Carr who would have hated to acknowledge that to anybody else, had to acknowledge it to herself. In the half-light of the first act she had seemed to vibrate with girlishness, but in the glaring sunshine of the second act, her forty-odd years were painfully apparent in her thin, muscle-drawn throat and in the crows-feet about her eyes. Miss Carr had never seen these blemishes from her seat in the gallery; she regretted to have to see them now. In addition, she had to undergo the painful disillusion of finding that Maynadier, the leading-man, although young enough, was not handsome at all, as she had always supposed. He was not only ugly but mean and unpleasant-looking. The talk all about her irritated her. One man referred to the play as “a beastly bore.” She devoted herself finally to the opulent program with which the management favored the orchestra. There were many pleasing jokes in it. She examined the advertisements with interest.

She tried to catch Mr. Embler's eye at the close of the last act, but he left the theater at once. She wondered if he had been looking for her and had missed her because of her different gown. She recalled with amused feminine tolerance that she had never been able to locate any girl to his vision by a mere description of her clothes. It always had to be something as definite as “third-row from the front, left, second seat in.”

When she came out, her desire to unburden herself about the play impelled her to stand several minutes in front of the theater. She was hoping she would see Mr. Embler. She knew that his judgment would agree with hers. But he was nowhere in sight. As she walked to the car, her head dispiritedly down, she felt somebody give her a quick glance, then hurry on. She turned. It was Mr. Embler making off through the crowd.

Miss Carr felt queer when she went to bed that night—so queer that she kept wondering if she were coming down with an illness.

The next two weeks were restless ones. Everything went wrong: things mixed themselves unaccountably at the office, the weather was bad, and she was conscious all the time of a nervous, dissatisfied feeling. Again and again it occurred to her that she needed a tonic. She found herself fretting and fuming over the slow passage of time. It seemed as if the closing night of “Mistress Dorothy,” the new colonial play, never would come. She did not, however, buy her ticket several days in advance as she had planned. She could get quite as good a seat, she kept assuring herself, the night of the performance.

She dressed in her foulard gown and with a great many anxious glances into the glass. But when she reached the theater, she bought a rush seat, as if she had been intending it all the time, and joined the mob packed in the alley. Through the crowd she could catch an occasional glimpse of Mr. Embler standing close to the door. He did not glance back and she could not signal her presence to him. This was a matter of regret at first. At last she alternately hoped that he would and would not see her. Presently the door opened.

The rush upstairs left her unexpectedly dizzy: it was true, she concluded, she was not well. For a moment's rest she went into the room, curtly marked “Women.” It was a small, faded, smelly place, as crowded as the grander one downstairs. She sat on the very humpy, red-plush lounge to which Mr. Embler had borne her the night she fainted in his arms. She watched the women coming and going. There was only one meager mirror, but the girls reflected in its green depths, busy re-pompadouring blond or brune heads and re-forming in them, unbroken tiers of sidecombs, moved over to give each other a chance.

One of their number—it was Miss Murphy's little sister—stopped to tell her that she had missed her two weeks ago. “Your steady aint saved a seat for you to-night—I guess he dont know you're coming,” she concluded.

“I didn't expect to come,” said Miss Carr forlornly.

She took a seat in the unfilled back row. Mr. Embler was in his usual place, raking the orchestra with his glass. She suddenly felt homesick; she hated to spend the evening alone. But in another moment she saw the little girl with whom she had just spoken catch Mr. Embler's eye and signal in her direction.

Mr. Embler turned and caught her glance. His eye lighted up. Seizing his coat and hat he came bounding up the steep incline, two steps at a time.

“I'm real glad to see you,” he said as he seated himself, “I missed you an awful lot. I didn't suppose you'd ever come up here again.

Miss Carr looked down in her lap. “I guess I'm never going to sit anywhere else if I want a good time,” she faltered.

“Is that so?” Mr. Embler asked. “Is that so?” He fixed her hard with his steady eyes.

“I guess it is,” Miss Carr said.

She looked up into his face. There were tears shining under her lashes. But she smiled.

The lights went down. The music came up.

Under the coat in her lap his hand suddenly reached over and seized hers in a clasp that said a great deal. But the pressure with which she returned it revealed perhaps as much.

“I never felt so lonesome in my life,” he said soberly, “when I looked down into the orchestra that night and saw—”

But just then the bell tinkled. The music drifted away toward silence. The curtain disappeared. And there was Delia the housemaid dusting the drawing-room while she slanged John the butler.

The hush of a happy anticipation fell upon those who sit up-stairs.