The Real Adventure
for the principals, and right down through to the last girl in the
chorus. Every night there'll be a new audience out there that you will
have to fight--shake up out of the grouch they get when they pay for
their tickets; persuade to laugh and loosen up and come and play with
you.
"Will you be able to do your share, do you suppose, if you're slinking
around, afraid of being recognized? We don't care whether your pussy-cat
friends get their fur rubbed the wrong way or not. The only thing we
care about is putting this show across. Well, if you feel the way we do
about it, if you can make it the one thing you do care about, too--why,
come along. Let the pussy-cats go ..." He finished with a snap of his
fingers.
"The only one that really matters isn't a pussy-cat," said Rose, with a
reluctant wide smile, "and--he'd agree with you altogether, if he didn't
know you were talking to me. And I'm really very much obliged to you."
"You will come along then?"
"Yes," said Rose, "I'll come."
"No flutters?" questioned Galbraith. "No eleventh-hour repentance?"
"No," said Rose, "I'll see it through."
John Galbraith went away satisfied. Rose had the same power that he had,
of making a simple unemphatic statement irresistibly convincing. When
she said that she would go through, he knew that unless struck by
lightning, she would. But there had been something at once ironic and
tender about the girl's smile, when she had spoken of the only one who
really mattered, that he couldn't account for. Who was the only one that
really mattered, anyway? Her husband? He didn't think it likely. Young
women who quarreled with their husbands and ran away from them to go on
the stage, wouldn't, as far as his experience went, be likely to smile
over them like that. More probably a brother--a younger brother,
perhaps, fiercely proud as such a boy would be of such a sister.
She certainly had sand, that girl. He was mighty glad his bluff that he
would put her out of the chorus altogether, unless she took the little
part in the sextette, had worked. He'd have felt rather a fool if she
had called it.
Of course the thing that had got Rose was the echo, through everything
John Galbraith had said, of Rodney's own philosophy; his dear, big,
lusty, rather remorseless way. And now again, as before when she had
left him, it was his view of life that was recoiling upon his own head.
She was really grateful to Galbraith. What had she left Rodney for,
except to build a self for herself; to acquire, through whatever pains
might be the price of it, a life that didn't derive from him; that was,
at the core of it, her own? Yet here, right at the beginning of her
pilgrimage, she'd have turned down the by-path of self-sacrifice; have
begun ordering her life with reference to Rodney, rather than herself,
if John Galbraith hadn't headed her back.
CHAPTER IV
THE GIRL WITH THE BAD VOICE
The Girl Up-stairs had quite a miscellaneous lot of plot; indeed a plot
fancier might have detected nearly all the famous strains in its
lineage. Its foci were Sylvia Huntington, the beautiful
multi-millionairess, and Richard Benham, nephew of Minim, the Cosmetic
King and head of the Talcum Trust. Sylvia, tired of being sought for her
wealth, and yearning to be loved for herself alone, has run away to
Bohemia and installed herself in an attic over a studio occupied by two
penniless artists, one a poet, the other a musician. Only they aren't
penniless any more, having leaped to wealth and fame with an immensely
successful musical comedy they have just written. And, like Nanki Poo,
the musician isn't really a musician, but is the talented, rebellious
nephew of the Cosmetic King, none other than Dick Benham himself, a
truant from his tyrannical uncle's determination to make him into a
rouge and talcum salesman. He falls in love with Sylvia, not knowing her
as Sylvia, of course, but only as the girl up-stairs, a poor little
wretch to whom in the goodness of his heart, he is giving singing
lessons. And she falls in love with him, knowing him neither as Dick
Benham, nor as the successful composer (because his authorship of the
musical comedy has been kept a secret from her), but only as a poor
struggling musician. Poor Dick's affections are temporarily led astray
by the mercenary seductions of the leading lady in his opera, who has
learned the secret of his true identity and vast wealth, and means to
marry him under the cloak of disinterested affection. He gets bad advice
from his poet friend, too, who has dishonorable designs on the girl
up-stairs and so warns Dick against throwing himself away on a nobody,
of, possibly, doubtful virtue. It is, of course, essential to Sylvia
that Dick should ask her to marry him before he learns who she really
is, in order that she may be sure it isn't for her wealth that he is
seeking her.
This was the general lie of the land, though the thing was complicated,
of course, by minor intrigues, as for instance in the first act, when
Minim, the uncle, came to inquire of the successful composer what his
terms would be for introducing a song into his opera, extolling the
merits of Minim's newest brand of liquid face-powder. Then there was the
comic detective, whom Sylvia's frantic father had given the job of
finding her, and who, considering that he was the typical idiot
detective of musical comedy, came unaccountably close to doing it.
Then in the second act, there was the confusion produced by the fact
that Dick and his poet friend gave a midnight party on the roof, unaware
of the fact that Sylvia made it a practise, during these hot nights, to
crawl out from her attic, on to this same roof and sleep there. And on
this particular night, she had invited her six bachelor-girl friends,
who were in her confidence, to come and share its hospitalities with
her. The mutual misunderstandings, by this time piled mountain high,
were projected into the third act by the not entirely unprecedented
device of a mask ball in the palatial Fifth Avenue mansion of Sylvia's
father, in celebration of her return home--a ball whose invitation list
was precisely coincident, even down to the detective, with the persons
who had appeared in the first two acts. One minute before the last
curtain, Dick and Sylvia manage to thread their way out of the tangle of
scandal and misconception, and satisfy each other as to the
disinterested quality of their mutual adoration, falling into each
other's arms just as the curtain starts down.
It was not, of course, until after a good many rehearsals that Rose
could have given a connected account of it like that. They worked for
three hours on this first occasion, merely getting through the first
act--a miserable three hours, too, for Rose, owing to a little
misfortune that befell her right at the beginning.
The glow of determination Galbraith had inspired her with, to put her
own shoulder to the wheel and do her very topmost best, for the one
great desideratum, the success of the show, had kept her studying her
little handful of lines long after she supposed she knew them perfectly.
They weren't very satisfactory lines to study--just the smallest of
conversational small change, little ejaculations of delight or dismay,
acquiescence or dissent. But the trouble with them was, they were, for
the most part, exactly the last expressions that a smart young woman of
the type she was supposed to represent would use.
So, remembering what Galbraith had said about everybody down to the last
chorus-man doing the best he knew for the success of the show, Rose
sought him out, for a minute, just before the rehearsal began, and asked
if she might change two of her lines a little.
Galbraith grinned at her, turned and beckoned to the baby-faced man in
spectacles who stood a dozen paces away. "Oh, Mr. Mills!" he called.
"Can you come over here a minute?"
"He's the author," Galbraith then explained to Rose, "and we can't
change this book of his without his permission."
Then, "This is Miss Dane of the sextette," he said to Mills, "and she
tells me she'd like to make one or two changes in her lines."
It didn't need a sensitive ear to detect a note of mockery in this
speech, though Galbraith's face was perfectly solemn. But the face of
the author went a delicate pink all over, and his round eyes stared. "My
God!" he said.
The exclamation was explosive enough to catch the ear of an extremely
pretty young woman who stood near by with her hands in her pockets. She
wore a Burberry raglan and an entirely untrimmed soft felt hat, and she
came over unceremoniously and joined the group.
"Miss Devereux," said the author, with hard-fetched irony, "here's a
chorus-girl in perfect agreement with you. She's got about six lines to
say, and she wants to change two of them."
"What are your changes, Dane?" Galbraith asked.
Queerly enough, the curt seriousness of his speech was immensely
grateful to her--suggested that she perhaps hadn't been, wholly anyhow,
the object of his derision before.
"I only thought," said Rose, "that if instead of saying, 'My gracious,
Sylvia!' I said, 'Sylvia, _dear_!' or something like that, it would
sound a little more natural. And if I said, 'I _do_ wish, Sylvia'
instead of, 'I wish to goodness, Sylvia ...'"
She had said it all straight to the author.
"I suppose," he said, sneering very hard, "that your own personal
knowledge of the way society women talk is what leads you to believe
that your phrases are better than mine?"
"Yes," said Rose, serenely matter-of-fact, "it is."
Sarcasm is an uncertain sort of pop-gun. You never can tell from which
end it's going to go off.
"I don't know," said Miss Devereux, turning now a deadly smile on him,
"whether Miss--what's-her-name--agrees with me or not. But, do you know,
I agree with her."
"Oh, I don't care a _damn_!" said Mr. Harold Mills. "Go as far as you
like. I don't recognize the piece now. What it'll be when you--butchers
get through with it ...!" He flung out his hands and stalked away.
"Go find Mr. Quan," said Galbraith to Rose, "and tell him to mark those
changes of yours in the book. Tell him I said so."
It was, though, a pretty unsatisfactory victory. Everybody was grinning;
for the tale spread fast, and while Rose knew it wasn't primarily at
her, her sensations were those of a perfectly serious, well-meaning
child, in adult company, who, in all innocence has just made a remark
which, for some reason incomprehensible to him, has convulsed one member
of it with fury, and the others with laughter. More or less she could
imagine where the joke lay. Harold had evidently been quarreling with
pretty much all of the principals, over more or less necessary changes
in his precious text, until everybody was rather on edge about it,
loaded and primed for all sorts of explosions; when, cheerfully along
came Rose, a perfectly green young chorus-girl, unsuspectingly carrying
the match for the mine, or the straw for the camel, whichever way you
wanted to put it.
She wouldn't have minded the way she had blundered into the focus of
public attention, if, in other particulars, the rehearsal had been
going well with her. Unluckily, though, she started off wrong foot
foremost in the very first of their numbers, with a mistake that snarled
up everything and brought down an explosion of wrath from Galbraith.
Even if she'd been trying, he groaned, to make mistakes, he didn't see
how she'd managed that one. But the real nightmare didn't begin till the
first of her scenes with Sylvia, where she had to talk.
She'd said her lines over about a thousand times apiece, and practised
their inflection and phrasing in as many ways as she could think of, but
she had neglected to memorize her cues. Not altogether, of course; she