"Rose!" cried a strained voice, and Rose Euclid wrenched herself from him and tumbled with half a sob into the clasping arms of Elsie April.
"You've saved the intellectual theatah for London, my boy! That's what you've done!" Marrier was now gripping his hand. And Edward Henry was convinced that he had.
The strident vigour of the applause showed no diminution. And through the thick heavy rain of it could be heard the monotonous insistent detonations of one syllable:
Mechanically Edward Henry lit a cigarette. He had no consciousness of doing so.
Carlo Trent appeared up a staircase at the back of the stage.
"You've got to go on," said Marrier. "Now, pull yourself togethah. The Great Beast is calling for you. Say a few wahds."
Carlo Trent in his turn seized the hand of Edward Henry, and it was for all the world as though he were seizing the hand of an intellectual and poetic equal, and wrung it.
"Come now!" Mr. Marrier, beaming, admonished him, and then pushed.
A man in a dirty white apron, drew back the heavy mass of the curtain about eighteen inches, and, Carlo Trent stepping forward, the glare of the footlights suddenly lit his white face. The applause, now multiplied fivefold and become deafening, seemed to beat him back against the curtain. His lips worked. He did not bow.
And Carlo Trent stepped back into safe shelter.
"I c-couldn't," murmured the greatest dramatic poet in the world; and began to cry.
"Here!" said Edward Henry gruffly. "Get out of my way! I'll settle 'em. Get out of my way!" And he riddled Carlo Trent with a fusillade of savagely scornful glances.
The man in the apron obediently drew back the curtain again, and the next second Edward Henry was facing an auditorium crowded with his patrons. Everybody was standing up, chiefly in the aisles and crowded at the entrances, and quite half the people were waving, and quite a quarter of them were shouting. He bowed several times. An age elapsed. His ears were stunned. But it seemed to him that his brain was working with marvellous perfection. He perceived that he had been utterly wrong about "The Orient Pearl." And that all his advisers had been splendidly right. He had failed to catch its charm and to feel its power. But this audience--this magnificent representative audience drawn from London in the brilliant height of the season--had not failed.