The Real Adventure
She realized, when the rehearsal was over, that it had gone well and
that it couldn't have gone so if her own part had been done badly. She
hesitated a moment after he'd finally dismissed them with a nod, and an,
"Eleven o'clock to-morrow morning, everybody," from a previously formed
intention of asking him if she'd do. But she felt, somehow, that such a
question would be foolish and unnecessary.
He had marked her hesitation and shot her a look that she felt followed
her as she walked off, and she heard him say to the world in general and
in a heartfelt sort of way, "Good God!" But she didn't know that it was
the highest encomium he was capable of, nor that it was addressed to
her.
She carried away, however, a glow that saw her back to her room, and
through the processes of unpacking and getting ready for bed, though it
faded swiftly during the last of these. But when the last thing that she
could think of to do had been done, when there was no other pretext,
even after a desperate search for one, that could be used to postpone
turning out her light and getting into bed, she had to confess to
herself that she was afraid to do it. And with that confession, the
whole pack of hobgoblin terrors she had kept at bay so valiantly since
shutting her husband's door behind her, were upon her back.
Here she was, Rose Aldrich, in a three-dollar-a-week room on North Clark
Street, having deserted her husband and her babies--a loving honest
husband, and a pair of helpless babies not yet three months old--to
become a member of the chorus in a show called _The Girl Up-stairs!_ Was
there a human being in the world, except herself, who would not, as the
most charitable of possible explanations, assume her to be mad? Could
she herself, seeing her act cut out in silhouette like that, be sure she
wasn't mad? Hysterical anyway, the victim of her own rashly encouraged
fancies, just as Rodney had so often declared she was? Oughtn't she to
have let James Randolph explore the subconscious part of her mind and
find the crack there must be in it, that could have driven her to a
crazy act like this?
It didn't matter now. She couldn't go back. She never could go back
after the things she had said to Rodney, until she had made good those
fantastic theories of hers. Probably he wouldn't want her to come back
even then. He'd find out where she was of course--what she was doing.
Why had she been such a fool, going away, as not to have gone far enough
to be safe? He'd feel that she'd disgraced him. Any man would. And he'd
never forgive her. He'd divorce her, perhaps. He'd have a right to, if
she stayed away long enough. And, without her there, with nothing of her
but memories--tormenting memories, he'd perhaps fall in love with some
one else--marry some one else. And her two babies would call that
unknown some one "mother." She must have been crazy! She'd thought she
didn't love them. That had been a delusion anyway. Her heart ached for
them now--an actual physical ache that almost made her cry out. And for
Rodney himself, for his big strong arms around her! Would she ever feel
them again?
She told herself this was a nightmare--something to be fought off, kept
at bay. But how did that help her now, when the armor must be laid
aside? Sometime or other she must turn out that light and lie down in
that bed, defenseless. She had never in her life asked more of her
courage than when, at last, she did that thing. There were nine hours
then ahead of her before eleven o'clock and the next rehearsal.
CHAPTER III
ROSE KEEPS THE PATH
Rose rehearsed twice a day for a solid week without forming the faintest
conception of who "the girl" was or why she was "the girl up-stairs."
She didn't know what sort of scene it was for instance that they burst
in on through the space marked by two of the little folding chairs
brought up from the floor of the dance-hall for the purpose. The group
of iron tables borrowed from the bar and set solidly together in the
upper right-hand corner of the stage whenever they rehearsed a certain
one of their song numbers, might with equal plausibility represent a
mountain in Arizona, the front veranda of a house or a banquet table in
the gilded dining-hall of some licentious multi-millionaire. They got up
on the insecure thing and tried to dance; that was all she knew.
During the entire period, and for that matter, right up to the opening
night she never saw a bar of music except what stood on the piano rack,
nor a written word of the lyrics she was supposed to sing. Rose couldn't
sing very much. She had a rather timorous, throaty little contralto that
contrasted oddly with the fine free thrill of her speaking voice. But
nobody had asked her what her voice was, nor indeed, whether she could
sing at all. She picked up the tunes quickly enough, by ear, but the
words she was always a little uncertain about.
It all seemed too utterly haphazard to be possible, but Rose decided not
to ask any of the authorities about this, because, while the possibility
of Grant's return dangled over her head, she didn't want to remind
anybody how green she was. But she finally questioned one of her
colleagues in the chorus about it, and was told that back at the
beginning of things, they had had their voices tried by the musical
director, who had conducted three or four music rehearsals before John
Galbraith arrived. They had never had any music to sing from but there
had been half a dozen mimeograph copies of the words to the songs, which
the girls had put their heads together over in groups of three or four,
and more or less learned. What had become of this dope, and whether it
was still available for Rose in case she were animated by a purely
supererogatory desire to study it, the girl didn't know.
She was a pale-haired girl, whom Rose thought she had heard addressed as
Larson, and she had emerged rather slowly as an individual personality,
out of the ruck of the chorus; a fact in her favor, really, because the
girls who had first driven themselves home to Rose through the shell of
her intense preoccupation with doing what John Galbraith wanted, had
been the vividly and viciously objectionable ones. The thing that had
prompted her to sit down beside Larson and, with this question about how
one learned the words to the songs, take her first real step toward an
acquaintance, was an absence of any strong dislike, rather than the
presence of a real attraction.
She made a surprising discovery when the girl, with a friendly pat on
the sofa beside her, for an invitation to her to sit down, began
answering her question. She was a real beauty. Or, more accurately, she
possessed the constituent qualities of beauty. She was pure English
eighteenth century; might have stepped down out of a Gainsborough
portrait. Dressed right, and made up a little, with her effects
legitimately heightened (and warned not to speak), she could have gone
to the Charity Ball as the Honorable Mrs. Graham, and Bertie Willis
would have gone mad about her. Only you had to look twice at her to
perceive that this was so; and what she lacked was just the unanalyzable
quality that makes one look twice.
Her speaking voice would have driven Bertie mad, too--foaming, biting
mad. It was disconcertingly loud, in the first place, and it came
out upon the promontories of speech with a flat whang that fairly
made you jump. Its undulations of pitch gave you something the same
sensation as riding rapidly over a worn-out asphalt pavement in a
five-hundred-dollar automobile; unforeseen springs into the air,
descents into unexpected pits. Her grammar wasn't flagrantly bad, though
it had, rather pitiably, a touch of the genteel about it. But now, when
she spoke to Rose, and with the lassitude of fatigue in her voice
besides, Rose heard something friendly about it.
"I don't know what you should worry about any of that stuff for," she
said. "How you sing or what you sing don't make much difference."
Rose admitted that it didn't seem to. "But you see," she said (she
hadn't had a human soul to talk to for more than a week and she had to
make a friend of somebody); "you see, I've just got to keep this job.
And if every little helps, as they say, perhaps that would."
The girl looked at her oddly, almost suspiciously, as if for a moment
she had doubted whether Rose had spoken in good faith. "You've got as
good a chance of losing your job," she said, "as Galbraith has of losing
his."
"I don't worry about it," said Rose, "when I'm up there on the stage at
work. It's too exciting. And then, I feel somehow that it's going all
right. But early in the morning, I get to imagining all sorts of things.
He's so terribly sudden. The girl whose place I got,--she hadn't any
warning, you know. It just happened."
The Larson girl gave a decisive little nod. Not so much, it seemed, in
assent to what Rose had just said, but as if some question in her own
mind had been answered.
"You'll get used to that feeling," she said. "You've got to take a
chance anyway, so why worry? We can work our heads off, but if the piece
is a fliv the opening night, they'll tack up the notice, and there we'll
be with two weeks' pay for eight weeks' work, and another six weeks'
work for nothing in something else if we're lucky enough to get it."
This was a possibility Rose hadn't thought of. "But--that isn't fair!"
she said.
The other girl laughed grimly. "Fair!" she echoed. "What they want to
print that word in the dictionary for, I don't see. Because what it
means don't exist. Not where I live, anyway. But what's the good of
making a fuss about it? We've got to take our chance like everybody
else."
"I don't believe this piece will fall, though," said Rose. "I don't
think Mr. Galbraith would let it. I think he's a perfect wonder, don't
you?"
The Larson girl looked at her again. "He's supposed to be about the best
in the business," she said, "and I guess he is." She added, "Dave tells
me he's going to put you with us in the sextette."
Dave was the thick pianist, and Rose had found him in the highest degree
obnoxious. He seemed to occupy an indeterminate social position in their
ship's company, between the forecastle, which was the chorus, and the
quarter-deck, which comprised Galbraith (you might call him the pilot),
the baby-faced man with the tortoise-shell spectacles, reputed to be the
author, two awesome intermittent gentlemen identified in the
dressing-room as the owners of the piece, and the musical director,
together with one or two more as yet unclassified. The principals, when
they should appear, would, Rose assumed, belong on the quarter-deck too.
The social gap between this afterguard and Rose and her colleagues in
the chorus, was not so very wide, but it was abysmally deep.
Nevertheless, the pianist, buoyed up on the wings of a boundless
effrontery, seemed to manage to remain unaware of it.
He had started rehearsals with this piece, it appeared, as a chorus-man,
and had become a pianist, thanks to the interposition of Fate (the real
pianist had fallen suddenly and desperately ill), and to his own
irresistible assurance that he could do anything. He could keep time and
he hit perhaps a third of the notes right.
The chorus liked him. The girls all called him Dave, seemed to
appreciate his notion of humor, and accepted his hugs and pawings as a
matter of course. But he took his jokes, his familiarities, and his
apparently impregnable self-esteem, upon the quarter-deck--slapped the
author on the back now and then, and had even been known to address John
Galbraith as "Old man." Incidentally, he hung about within ear-shot
during conferences of the powers, freely offered his advice, and
brought all sorts of interesting tidbits of gossip and prophecy back to
the chorus.