"I don't believe you, Mr. Bachmann," said Harry.
"Ah?" said the manager, without the slightest apparent interest. "Why not, Mr. Vimbourne?"
"Well, you turned straight to the best scene in it just now, for one thing.... Beside, you wouldn't keep me hanging on this way if you didn't see something in it, and if you see anything in it of course you've read it. And I don't mind telling you, Mr. Bachmann, that isn't my idea of business."
Mr. Bachmann's next remark was so unexpected that Harry nearly swooned in his chair. "I read it the day after it came," he said softly.
"Then why on earth didn't you say so in the first place?" stammered Harry.
The manager made no reply for some moments, but sat silently puffing and turning over the pages of Harry's manuscript.
"I like to know people," he murmured at last, very gently and with apparent irrelevance. Harry, however, saw the bearing of the remark and suddenly felt extraordinarily small. He had been rather proud of his little burst of spirit and independence; he now saw that Leo Bachmann had drawn it from him with the ease and certainty of touch with which a musician produces a note from a flute. He wondered, abjectly, how many other self-satisfied young authors had sat where he sat and been played upon by that great puffing mass of pulp.
Bachmann was the next to speak. "I like your play very much, Mr. Vimbourne," he said. "It is very nice--some things in it not so good, but on the whole, it is very nice. I think I vill try to produce it, Mr. Vimbourne, but not yet--not till I see how my September plays go. I shall keep yours in reserve, and then, later, we may try it. About the first of November, when the Fifth Avenue crowd comes back to town...." He smiled slightly. "They are the people that vill vant to see it. Not Harlem. Not Brooklyn. The four hundred. Even so," he continued, ruminatively, "even so, I shall not make on it."
This seemed to Harry a good opening for a proposition he had been longing to make since the very first but had never quite dared. "If you want me to put anything up on it, Mr. Bachmann, why--I...."
"No," said Mr. Bachmann gently; "I never do that, I produce my own plays, for my own reasons. I vill pay you a sum, down. And a small royalty, perhaps--after the hundredth performance."