“Your salaries will be paid until the close of the season,” he told them; “and, in addition, each one will receive the percentage of his pension earned by his length of service. Unfortunately, there are no profits to share; but of course I have assumed all losses. And now I want you to do your utmost for our last play—this piece by Mr. Farson. Give it the very best you have in you. It is a strong play, an American play, the sort of play for us to produce. Let us end well!”
Then they had proceeded to the reading of the piece. Afterward, many of the company had come to him to express personally their honest disappointment at the enforced closing of the People’s Theater. They seemed to realize that their loss was more than that of salary.
“And we’ll make _Her Great Adventure_ go!” they all said.
The spirit of the players had been comforting to the embarrassed patron.
“The People’s might have won out in time, with such a company—who knows?” he mused to the secretary.
“We may win out yet!” the young playwright answered, with a certain touch of vanity.
“I hope so, for your sake, I’m sure; but one play, no matter how successful, could not keep the Idea afloat.”
On the eve of failure, a new light had dawned in the enthusiastic mind of the founder. He realized that whatever one man tries to carry through alone, by brute force of will, without regard for the sympathy and the help of others, is destined to fail, especially where it is a matter of art that should appeal to the many. Not Mrs. Donnie Pearmain and her “upper classes” were needed, to be sure, but the People; and the People’s Theater had failed to touch the People. Very likely, Brainard mused, Lorilla was the hand of fate needed to prove this deeper truth to him. He had failed to find his vanished mistress, Melody, and with her inheritance he had tried to achieve the impossible. Now that inheritance might be taken altogether out of his control, and the great Idea vanish into the air from which his will had conjured it. . . .
A page brought Brainard a letter with a foreign postmark just as he was leaving the library for the theater. It was a hasty little scribble from Miss Delacourt—one of the few with which the young lady had favored him. In a hand that galloped unevenly over the paper, she informed him: