She groped her way to a steel door, stumbling down two unsuspected steps, and was suddenly in the carpeted silence of an aisle. Robert Visigoth came toward her, the electric bulb held high and dragging the yards of cord behind him.

"I'm from the agency," she said at once, the little beating quality that she was feeling all over her in her voice, and holding out the slip.

"Come out here," he said, "where I can see you."

Some daylight flowed in through a slightly open fire exit and she caught at a last moment of darkness to straighten her hat.

"Sing?"

"Yes."

He shoved open the iron door so that more light flowed over her.

"Why," he said, "you're a big girl, aren't you?"

"I don't know," she said, through a little laugh of embarra.s.sment, and noticing that, regarding her, he wetted his lips.

"That part's all right. What I need is a good refined ballad voice.

Understand? The kind that can sing 'The Suwanee River' as if the only thing in the world that mattered is that old plantation down there.

Understand?"

"I see."

He spoke through a slight patois, New-Yorkese, but which she misjudged for Virginian. He was in inverse ratio to her stock idea of theatrical manager. Both brothers were to become more and more subject to this soft indictment.

Born in one of those old morose houses in lower Lexington Avenue, each had lived there until he obtained his degree of LL.D. from a state university. It had been a sedate, a mildly prosperous, even an historic home. A Vice President of the United States had once owned it. Then a Major O. Higginbothom, and finally, for fifteen years of tenancy, the Visigoths. One of the kind whose genteel hall light had burned through the fanlight decade after decade, and then suddenly, overnight, as it were, disintegrated into a furnished-room house with a sign over the door bell.

One evening Horace R. Visigoth, of the law firm of Visigoth, Visigoth & Higginbothom, did not answer his wife's soft question to him across the green-shaded reading lamp of their library table. His head was quite sunk forward in a sheaf of proofs. He was dead. One month later his wife failed to awaken to Pauline Visigoth's frenzied attempts or to even a dexterous physician's respiratory methods. The year following Pauline Visigoth married the dexterous physician and moved to Chicago.

The Lexington Avenue house succ.u.mbed to a quick sale, and in attempting to divert the law business out of the clayey rut of quiet old conservatism, the Enterprise Amus.e.m.e.nt Company was ultimately to be born.

Robert Visigoth, twenty-nine at the time, betrayed little of the heritage his name suggested. His Teutonic blood pretty well laid, he was a trifle too short and a trifle too heavy, and with none of his mother's lean patrician quality to which both his younger brother and older sister had fallen heir.

Suggesting future rotundities and a reddishness of complexion that was presently to purple, at this stage his chin was undoubted and as square as a spade, and, as so often happens to chins of this potentiality, punctuated absurdly with a dimple, and he wore a little clipped edge of black mustache which he tried to twirl.

Busy at the mannerism, if not the act, of twirling that hirsute adornment of upper lip, he continued to observe Lilly.

"You understand? What I need is a real heart-to-heart voice."

"I'm quite good at ballads."

"Quite good or darn good?"

"Darn."

"Experience?"

"I'm just in from as far west as--Dallas."

"Now what I want is a turn that hasn't struck the West yet. Understand?

It originated right here in this theater. There is a firm of music publishers in this town makes up slides of its songs, and all you have to do is stand beside the screen and sing to the stereopticon ill.u.s.trations. Understand? You don't have to follow the pictures. The pictures follow you. It is sure fire if it is handled right, only the girl we had on last week must have wrapped her vocal cords in sandpaper.

The secret of the whole thing is to make them--out there--live the song.

Understand?"

"I see."

"Every woman in the audience has to be the sweetheart and every man the lover you are singing to them about. And to do that the first one to live that song must be you. Believe in yourself before you expect the world to. If you come in here and tell me you sing _quite_ good, it won't be easy to convince me of more if you begin to warble like Melba.

Now you go up there and let me hear a bar or two. Take care of the last row gallery and the first row orchestra will take care of itself. Shoot!"

"I--haven't my music with me--my repertoire--"

"Nonsense! Just a bar or two--'Suwanee River'--anything with heart in it. Give us some lights up there, Bob."

Through the blackness Lilly moved as if she were sleep-walking in it.

Little needles of nervousness were out all over her, and, absurdly enough, there walked across her vision the utterly irrelevant spectacle of old black Willie with her feet bound in gunny sacks and the pencil nubs in her hair, and just as irrelevantly her mind began to pop with a little explosive ejaculative prayer: "O G.o.d, make him take me! O G.o.d, make him take me!"

The bunch light had been dragged down center stage. She stood beside it, opening her mouth as if to muster voice, then closing it. It was as if water were swirling around and around her, the unseen presence in the back of the house surging at her like a mult.i.tude.

"Shoot!"

She looked appealingly in the direction of the hammering down of the seats.

"Never mind that. Sing to the top row of the gallery."

A fearful recurrence of yesterday's train-sickness rushed over her; she could have crumpled to her knees, had even a sense of wanting to faint, but instead she opened her lips again, her eyes fixed on the unseen last two tows of the unseen top gallery, and by miracle finding a pitch that left her plenty of range.

"Way down upon the Suwanee River-"

"Louder!"

"Far, far away, There's where my heart is turning ever, There's where the old folks stay.

All the world am sad and dreary, Everywhere I roam.

Oh, darkies, how my heart grows weary--"

The lay of Page Avenue was before her, swollen through tears. Her mother sewing beside Katy Stutz. The patient back of her father's gray head.

Her parents on their knees, far back there somewhere beside her bed of fever. Albert! Their wedding night when the door had closed behind them! "O G.o.d, make him take me! Please!

"Far from the o-old folks--at ho--"

"That will do."

She stood with her mouth an O on the unfinished note, hand to the little rise of her bosom.

"Meet me around in my office back stage." His voice was like a call in a fog, retreating and retreating. She followed it. They met in a narrow patch of broad daylight.

"I'm afraid," she began, her voice breaking on a gulp--"I'm afraid I didn't--"

"You did very well," he said, kindly. "Little off key and your voice won't set the world on fire, and it has a tremolo quality that may be rotten-bad singing, but it's the right stuff for the act."