The Real Adventure
go by. The thing must be in rehearsal now.
Granted that she was going to be a chorus-girl for a while, she could
hardly find a better place than one of the Globe productions to be one
in. According to Jimmy Wallace, it was a decent enough little place, and
yet it possessed the advantage of being spiritually as well as actually,
west of Clark Street. Rodney's friends were less likely to go there, and
so have a chance of recognizing her, than to any other theater in the
city, barring of course the flagrantly and shamelessly vulgar ones of
the purlieus.
Among her older friends of school and college days, the chances were of
course worse. But even if she were seen on the stage by people who knew
her, even though they were to say to each other that that girl looked
surprisingly like Rose Aldrich, this would be a very different thing
from full recognition. She would be well protected by the utter
unlikelihood of her being in such a place; by the absence of anybody's
knowledge that she had flown off at a tangent from the orbit of Rodney's
world. Then, too, she'd be somewhat disguised no doubt, by make-up. Of
course with all those considerations weighed at their full value, there
remained a risk that she would be fully discovered and recognized. But
it was a risk that couldn't be avoided, whatever she did.
She entertained for a while, the notion of taking Jimmy Wallace into her
confidence--he had as many depositors of confidences on his books, as a
savings bank, and he was just as safe. It was altogether likely that he
could get her a job out of hand. He was still on the best of terms with
the Globe people, and he was a really influential critic. But even if he
didn't get her a job outright, he could at least tell her how to set
about getting one for herself--where to go, whom to ask for, the right
way to phrase her request, which makes such an enormous difference in
things of that kind.
But she wasn't long in abandoning the notion of appealing to Jimmy at
all. The corner-stone of her new adventure must be that she was doing
things for herself; that she was through being helped, having ways
smoothed for her, things done for her. If she owed her first job even
indirectly to Jimmy, all the rest of her structure would be out of
plumb. Whatever success she might have would be tainted by the misgiving
that but for somebody else's help, she might have failed. Rose Stanton
who had rented that three-dollar room was going to be beholden to
nobody!
The news item in the paper gave her really all she needed. It told her
that a production was in rehearsal and it mentioned the name of the
director, John Galbraith, referring to him as one of the three most
prominent musical-comedy directors in the country; imported from New
York at vast expense, to make this production unique in the annals of
the Globe, and so forth.
They hadn't rehearsed Jimmy's piece, she knew, in the theater itself,
but in all sorts of queer out-of-the-way places--in theaters that
happened for the moment to be "dark," in dance-halls; pretty much
anywhere. This was because there was another show running at the time at
the Globe. She had looked in the theater advertisements to see whether a
show was running there now. Yes, there was. Well, that gave her her
formula.
When she asked at the box office at the Globe Theater, where they were
rehearsing _The Girl Up-stairs_ to-day, the nicely manicured young man
inside, answered automatically, "North End Hall."
Evidently Jimmy Wallace couldn't have phrased the question better
himself. But the quality of the voice that asked it had, even to his not
very sensitive ear, an unaccustomed flavor. So, almost simultaneously
with his answer, he looked up from his finger-nails and shot an
inquiring glance through the grille.
What he saw betrayed him into an involuntary stare. He didn't mean to
stare; he meant to be respectful. But he was surprised. Rose, in the
plainest suit that she could hope would seem plausible to her servants
for a traveling costume to California, an ulster and a little beaver hat
with a quill in it, had no misgivings about looking the part of a
potentially hard-working young woman renting a three-dollar room on
North Clark Street and seeking employment in a musical-comedy chorus. A
realization that her neat black seal dressing-case wasn't quite in the
picture, helped to account for the landlady's puzzlement about her. But
it hadn't been introduced in evidence here. And yet the young man behind
the grille seemed as surprised as the landlady.
He repeated his answer to her question with the lubricant of a few more
words and a fatuous sort of smile. "I believe they rehearse in the North
End Hall this afternoon."
Rose couldn't help smiling a little herself. "I'm afraid," she said,
"I'll have to ask where that is."
"Not at all," said the young man idiotically, and he told her the
address; then cast about for a slip of paper to write it down on,
racking his thimbleful of brains all the while to make out who she could
be. She wasn't one of the principals in the company. They'd all reported
and he hadn't heard that any of them was to be replaced.
"Oh, you needn't write it," said Rose. "I can remember, thank you." She
gave him a pleasant sort of boyish nod that didn't classify at all with
anything in his experience, and walked out of the lobby.
He stared after her almost resentfully, feeling all mussed up, somehow,
and inadequate; as if here had been a situation that he had failed
signally to make the most of. He sat there for the next half-hour
gloomily thinking up things he might have said to her.
CHAPTER II
THE EVENING AND THE MORNING WERE THE FIRST DAY
With her umbrella over her shoulder, Rose set sail northward again
through the rain, absurdly cheered; first by the fact that the opening
skirmish had distinctly, though intangibly, gone her way; secondly by
the small bit of luck that North End Hall would be, judging by its
number on North Clark Street, not more than a block or two from her
three-dollar room.
The sight of the entrance to it gave her a pang of misgiving. A pair of
white painted doors opened from the street level upon the foot of a
broadish stair which took you up rather suddenly; there was space enough
between the foot of the stair and the doors for a ticket-window, but it
was too small to be called a lobby; an arc lamp hung there though, and
two more--all three were extinct--hung just outside. What gave the place
its air of vulgarity, a suggestion of being the starting and finishing
point for lewd, drink sodden revels, she couldn't determine. It did
suggest this plainly. But, in the light of what Jimmy Wallace had told
her, she didn't think it likely there'd be any reveling to speak of at
rehearsal.
At the head of the stairway, tilted back in a kitchen chair beneath a
single gas-jet whose light he was trying to make suffice for the perusal
of a green newspaper, sat a man, under orders no doubt, to keep
intruders away.
Rose cast about as she climbed for the sort of phrase that would
convince him she wasn't an intruder. She would ask him, but in the
manner of one who seeks a formal assurance merely, if this was where
they were rehearsing _The Girl Up-stairs_. Three steps from the top, she
changed her tactics, as a result of a glance at his unshaven face. The
thing to do was to go by as if he weren't there at all--as if, for such
as she, watchmen didn't exist. The rhythmic pounding of feet and the
frayed chords from a worn-out piano, convinced her she was in the right
place.
Her stratagem succeeded, but not without giving her a bad moment. The
man glanced up and, though she felt he didn't return to his paper again,
he made no attempt to stop her. But right before her was another pair of
big white doors, closed with an effect of permanence--locked, she
suspected. A narrower door to the left stood open, but over it was
painted the disconcerting legend "Bar," flanked on either side, to make
the matter explicit even to the unlearned, by pictorial representations
of glasses of foaming beer. She hadn't time to deliberate over her
choice. The watchman's eyes were boring into her back. If she chose
wrong, or if she visibly hesitated, she knew she'd hear a voice say,
"Here! Where you going!"
She caught a quick breath, turned to the left and walked steadily
through the narrower door into the bar. It proved to be a deserted,
shrouded, sinister-looking place, with an interminable high mahogany
counter at one side, and with a lot of little iron tables placed by
pairs, their tops together, so that half of them had their legs in the
air. Its lights were fled, its garlands dead all right, but there wasn't
anything poetic about it. However, there was another open door at the
far end of the room, through which sounds and light came in. And the
watchman hadn't interfered with her. Evidently she had chosen right.
She paused for a second steadying breath before she went through that
farther door, her eyes starry with resolution, her cheeks, just for the
moment, a little pale. If the comparison suggests itself to you of an
early Christian maiden about to step out into an arena full of wild
beasts, then you will have mistaken Rose. The arena was there, true
enough. But she was stepping out into it with the intention of, like
Androcles, taming the lion.
The room was hot and not well lighted--a huge square room with a very
high ceiling. In the farther wall of it was a proscenium arch and a
raised stage somewhat brighter than the room itself, though the stained
brick wall at the back, in the absence of any scenery, absorbed a good
deal of the light. On the stage, right and left, were two irregular
groups of girls, with a few men, awkwardly, Rose thought, disposed among
them. All were swaying a little to mark the rhythm of the music
industriously pounded out by a sweaty young man at the piano--a swarthy,
thick young man in his undershirt. There were a few more people, Rose
was aware without exactly looking at any of them, sprawled in different
parts of the hall, on sofas or cushioned window-seats.
It was all a little vague to her at first, because her attention was
focused on a single figure--a compact, rather slender figure, and tall,
Rose thought--of a man in a blue serge suit, who stood at the exact
center of the stage and the extreme edge of the footlights. He was
counting aloud the bars of the music--not beating time at all, nor
yielding to the rhythm in any way; standing, on the contrary, rather
tensely still. That was the quality about him, indeed, that riveted
Rose's attention and held her as still as he was, in the doorway--an
exhilarating sort of intensity that had communicated itself to the
swaying groups on the stage. You could tell from the way he counted that
something was gathering itself up, getting ready to happen. "Three ...
Four ... Five ... Six ... Seven ... _Now!_" he shouted on the eighth
bar, and with the word, one of the groups transformed itself. One of the
men bowed to one of the girls and began waltzing with her; another
couple formed, then another.
Rose watched breathlessly, hoping the maneuver wouldn't go wrong;--for
no reason in the world but that the man, there at the footlights, was so
tautly determined that it shouldn't.
Determination triumphed. The number was concluded to John Galbraith's
evident satisfaction. "Very good," he said. "If you'll all do exactly
what you did that time from now on, I'll not complain." Without a pause
he went on, "Everybody on the stage--big girls--all the big girls!" And,
to the young man at the piano, "We'll do _Afternoon Tea_." There was a
momentary pause then, filled with subdued chatter, while the girls and
men re-alined themselves for the new number--a pause taken advantage of