The Real Adventure
the whole loathly business. She could scrub floors--starve if she had
to. She couldn't do the thing he demanded of her here out in the middle
of the floor, in her street clothes, without the excuse of music to make
it tolerable--and before that row of leering faces.
"Well?" he asked, turning to her as he finished. He wasn't smiling at
all.
"I'm not dressed to do that," she said.
"I know you're not," he admitted coolly, "but it can be done. Pick up
your skirts and do it as you are,--if you really want a job."
There was just a faint edge of contempt in that last phrase and,
mercifully, it roused her anger. A blaze kindled in her blue eyes, and
two spots of vivid color defined themselves in her cheeks.
She caught up her skirts as he had told her to do, executed without
compromise the stiff-legged skip and the wriggle, and finished with a
horizontal sidewise kick that matched his own. Then, panting, trembling
a little, she stood looking straight into his face.
The first thing she realized when the processes of thought began again
was that even if there had been a hoax, she was not, in the event, the
victim of it. The attitude of her audience told her that. Galbraith was
staring at her with a look that expressed at first, clear astonishment,
but gradually complicated itself with other emotions--confusion, a glint
of whimsical amusement. That gleam, a perfectly honest, kindly one,
decided Rose to take him on trust. He wasn't a brute, however it might
suit his purposes to act like one. And with an inkling of how her blaze
of wrath must be amusing him, she smiled slowly and a little
uncertainly, herself.
"We've been rehearsing this piece two weeks," he said presently, looking
away from her when he began to talk, "and I couldn't take any one into
the chorus now whom I'd have to teach the rudiments of dancing to. I
must have people who can do what I tell them. That's why a test was
necessary. Also, from now on, it would be a serious thing to lose
anybody out of the chorus. I couldn't take anybody who had come down
here--for a lark."
"It's not a lark to me," said Rose.
Now he looked around at her again. "I know it isn't," he said. "But I
thought when you first came in here, that it was."
With that, Rose understood the whole thing. It was evidently a fact that
despite the plain little suit, the beaver hat, the rough ulster she was
wearing, she didn't look like the sort of girl who had to rely on
getting a job in the chorus for keeping a roof over her head. Looks,
speech, manner--everything segregated her from the type. It was all
obvious enough, only Rose hadn't happened to think of it. It accounted,
of course, for the rather odd way in which the landlady, the
ticket-seller at the Globe, and meek little Mr. Quan, the assistant
stage manager, all had looked at her, as at some one they couldn't
classify. John Galbraith, out of a wider experience of life, had
classified her, or thought he had, as a well-bred young girl who, in a
moment of pique, or mischief, had decided it would be fun to go on the
stage. The test he had applied wasn't, from that point of view,
unnecessarily cruel. The girl he had taken her for, would, on being
ordered to repeat that grotesque bit of vulgarity of his, have drawn her
dignity about her like a cloak, and gone back in a chastened spirit to
the world where she belonged.
A gorgeous apparition came sweeping by them just now, on a line from the
dressing-room to the door--a figure that, with regal deliberation, was
closing a blue broadcloth coat, trimmed with sable, over an authentic
Callot frock. The Georgette hat on top of it was one that Rose had last
seen in a Michigan Avenue shop. She had amused herself by trying to
vizualize the sort of person who ought to buy it. It had found its
proper buyer at last--fulfilled its destiny.
"Oh, Grant!" said John Galbraith.
The queenly creature stopped short and Rose recognized her with a jump,
as the sulky chorus-girl. Dressed like this, her twenty pounds of
surplus fat didn't show.
Galbraith walked over to her. "I shan't need you any more, Grant." He
spoke in a quiet impersonal sort of way, but his voice had, as always, a
good deal of carrying power. "It's hardly worth your while trying to
work, I suppose, when you're so prosperous as this. And it isn't worth
my while to have you soldiering. You needn't report again."
He nodded not unamiably, and turned away. Evidently she had ceased to
exist for him as completely as the duchess. She glared after him and
called out in a hoarse throaty voice, "Thank Gawd I don't _have_ to work
for you."
He'd come back to Rose again by this time, and she saw him smile. "When
you do it," he said over his shoulder, "thank Him for me too." Then to
Rose: "She's a valuable girl; had lots of experience; good-looking;
audiences like her. I'm giving you her place because as long as she's
got those clothes and the use of a limousine, she won't get down to
business. I'd rather have a green recruit who will. I'm hiring you
because I think you will be able to understand that what you feel like
doing isn't important and that what I tell you to do is. The next
rehearsal is at a quarter to eight to-night. Give your name and address
to Mr. Quan before you go. By the way, what is your name?"
"Rose Stanton," she said. "But ..." She had to follow him a step or two
because he had already turned away. "But, may I give some other name
than that to Mr. Quan?" He frowned a little dubiously and asked her how
old she was. And even when she told him twenty-two, he didn't look
altogether reassured.
"That's the truth, is it? I mean, there's nobody who can come down here
about three days before we open and call me a kidnaper, and lead you
away by the ear?"
"No," said Rose gravely, "there's no one who'll do that."
"Very good," he said. "Tell Quan any name you like."
The name she did tell him was Doris Dane.
It was a quarter to seven when she came out through the white doors into
North Clark Street. The thing that woke her out of a sort of daze as she
trudged along toward her room in the unrelenting rain was a pleasurable
smell of fried onions; whereupon she realized that she was legitimately
and magnificently hungry. In any other condition, the dingy little
lunch-room she presently turned into, would hardly have invited her. But
the spots on the frayed starchy table-cloth, the streakiness of the
glasses, the necessity of polishing knife and fork upon her damp napkin,
couldn't prevent her doing ample justice to a small thick platter of ham
and eggs, and a plate of thicker wheat-cakes.
It occurred to her as she finished, that a quarter to eight probably
meant the hour at which the rehearsal was to begin. She'd have to be
back at the hail at least fifteen minutes earlier, in order to be
dressed and ready. She had no time to waste; would even have to hurry a
little.
She didn't try to explore for the reason why this discovery pleased her
so much. It was enough that it did. She flew along through the rain to
her tunnel, charged up the narrow stair, and in the unlighted corridor
outside her room, collided with her trunk. Well, it was lucky it had
come anyway. She tugged it into her room after she had lighted the gas.
You might have seen, if you had been there to see, just a momentary
hesitation after she'd got her trunk key out of her purse before she
unlocked it. It was a sort of Jack-in-the-box, that trunk. Would the
emotions with which she'd packed it, spring out and clutch her as she
released the hasp? The saving factor in the situation was that it was a
quarter past seven. In fifteen minutes she must be back at North End
Hall, getting ready to go to work at her job. Suppose she hadn't found a
job this afternoon? The thought turned her giddy.
She plunged into her trunk, rummaged out a middy-blouse, a pair of black
silk bloomers, and her gymnasium sneakers, rolled them all together in a
bundle, got into her rubbers and her ulster again, and--I'm afraid there
is no other word for it--fled.
She was one of the first of the chorus to reach the hail and she had
nearly finished putting on her working clothes before the rest of them
came pelting in. But she didn't get out quickly enough to miss the
sensation that was exciting them all--the news that Grant had been
dropped. A few of them were indignant; the rest merely curious. The
indignant ones allowed themselves a license in the expression of this
feeling that positively staggered Rose; made use in a quite
matter-of-fact way of words she had supposed even a drunken truck-man
would have attempted to refrain from in the presence of a woman. She
made a discovery afterward, that there were many girls in the chorus who
never talked like that; and among those who did, the further distinction
between those who used vile language casually, or even jocularly, and
those who were driven to it only by anger. But for these first few
minutes in the dressing-room, she felt as if she had blundered into some
foul pit abysmally below the lowest level of decency.
One of the girls advanced the theory that Grant hadn't finally been
dropped; it was absurd that she should be. She was one of the most
popular chorus-girls in Chicago. The director was merely trying to scare
her into doing better work for him. She'd come back, all right. She had
reasons of her own, this girl intimated, for wanting to work, despite
the possession of French clothes and the use of a limousine. Her
"friend," it seemed, needed to be taught some sort of lesson. Grant
would come around before to-morrow night, and eat enough humble pie to
induce Galbraith to take her back.
If this theory were sound, and it had a dreadful plausibility to Rose,
her only chance for keeping her job would be to do as well as Grant
could do, to-night, in this very first rehearsal; and she went out on
the stage in a perfect agony of determination. She must see everything,
hear everything; put all she knew and every ounce of energy she had,
into the endeavor to make John Galbraith forget that she was a recruit
at all.
The intensity of this preoccupation was a wonderful protection to her.
It kept away the sick disgust that had threatened her in the
dressing-room; prevented her even glancing ahead to a future that would,
had she taken to guessing about it, utterly have overwhelmed her. The
intensely illuminated present instant kept her mind focused to its
sharpest edge.
It is true that before she had been working fifteen minutes, she had
forgotten all about Grant and the possibility of her return. She'd even
forgotten her resolution not to let John Galbraith remember she was a
recruit. Indeed, she had forgotten she was a recruit. She was nothing at
all but just a reflection of his will. She'd felt that quality strongly
in him even behind his back during the afternoon rehearsal. Now, on the
stage in front of him, she was completely possessed by it.
She didn't know she was tired, panting, wet all over with sweat. Really,
of course, she was pretty soft, judged by her own athletic standards.
She hadn't done anything so physically exacting as this for over a year.
But she had the illusion that she wasn't _doing_ anything now; that she
was just a passive plastic thing, tossed, flung, swirled about by the
driving power of the director's will. It wouldn't have surprised her if
the chairs had danced for him.
It couldn't of course have occurred to her that she was producing her
own effect on the director; she couldn't have surmised that he was
driving his rehearsal at a faster pace and with a renewed energy and
fire because of the presence, there in the ranks of his chorus, of a
glowing, thrilling creature who devoured his intentions half formed, met
them with a blue spark across the poles of their two minds.