The Real Adventure
thought she'd learned them, but they were terribly scanty little cues
anyway, just a single word, usually, and never more than two, and
nothing short of absolutely automatic memorization was any good. So she
sat serene through a five-second stage wait while Quan frantically spun
the pages of his book to find the place--he ought to have been following
of course, but he'd yielded to the temptation of trying to do something
else at the same time and had got lost--and then dry-throated, incapable
of a sound for a couple of seconds more--hours they seemed--after she
had been identified as the culprit who had failed to come in on a cue.
The sight of the author out in the hall invoking his gods to witness
that this girl who had presumed to change his lines, was an idiot
incapable of articulate speech, brought her out of her daze. But even
then she couldn't get anything quite right. There seemed to be no golden
mean between the bellow of a fireman and a tone which Galbraith assured
her wouldn't be audible three rows back. And when they came to one of
the lines she'd been allowed to change, in her panic over the thing, she
mixed the two versions impartially together into a sputter of words that
meant nothing at all, whereupon the author, out at the back of the hall,
laughed maniacally.
She would have gone on stuttering at it until she got it straight, if
Galbraith hadn't put her out of her misery by striding over, snatching
the book from Quan, and reading the line himself. She hadn't anything
more to say in the first act, and she managed to get through the rest of
the song numbers without disaster, if equally without confidence or
dash. She felt as limp as if she had been boiled and put through the
clothes-wringer. And when, as he dismissed the rehearsal Galbraith told
her to wait a minute, she expected nothing less than ignominious
reduction to the ranks.
"That matter of putting your voice over, Dane," he said, to her
amazement quite casually, "is just a question of thinking where you want
it to go. If you'll imagine a target against the back wall over there,
and will your voice to hit it, whatever direction you're speaking in,
and however softly you speak, you will be heard. If you forget the
target and think you're talking to the person on the stage you're
supposed to be talking to, you won't be heard. Say your lines over to me
now, without raising your voice or looking out there. But keep the
target in mind."
Rose said all the lines she had in the whole three acts. It didn't take
a minute. He nodded curtly. "You've got the idea." He added, just as she
turned away, "You were quite right to suggest those changes. They're an
improvement."
That rehearsal marked the nadir of Rose's career at the Globe. From then
on, she was steadily in the ascendent, not only in John Galbraith's good
graces, which was all of course that mattered. She won, it appeared, a
sort of tolerant esteem from some of the principals, and even the owners
themselves spoke to her pleasantly.
They entertained her vastly, now that a confidence in her ability to do
her own part left her leisure to look around a bit. The contrast between
the two leading women, Patricia Devereux, who played the title part, and
little Anabel Astor, who played the mercenary seductress, was a piquant
source of speculation. As far as speech and manners went, Miss Devereux
might have been a born citizen of the world Rose had been naturalized
into by her marriage with Rodney; in fact, she reminded her rather
strikingly of Harriet. She was cool, brusk, hard finished, and, as was
evident from Galbraith's manifest satisfaction with her, thoroughly
workmanly and competent. Yet she never seemed really to work in
rehearsal. She gave no more than a bare outline of what she was going to
do. But the outline, in all its salient angles, was perfectly
indicated. She rehearsed in her ordinary street clothes, with her hat
on, and as often as not, with a wrist-bag in one hand. She neither
danced, sang, nor acted. But she had her part letter perfect before any
of the other principals. She never missed a cue, and though she sang off
the top of her voice, and let the confines of a very scant little tailor
skirt mark the limits of her dancing, she sang her songs in perfect
tempo and always made it completely clear to Galbraith and the musical
director, just how much of the stage in every direction, her dances were
going to occupy and precisely the _tempi_ at which they were to be
executed. In a word, if her work had no more emotional value than a
mechanical drawing, it did have the precision of one.
Rose mightn't have appreciated tins, had she not seen and admired Miss
Devereux from the front in a production she and Rodney had been two or
three times to see the season before.
Little Anabel Astor presented as striking a contrast to all this as it
would be possible to imagine. She, too, had attained a good deal of
celebrity in the musical-comedy world--was to be one of the features of
the cast. She'd come up from the ranks of the chorus. She'd been one of
the ponies, years ago, in some of George M. Cohan's productions, and she
was still just a chorus-girl. But a chorus-girl raised to the third, or
fourth, or, if you like, the _n_th power. She had an electric grin, and
a perfectly boundless vitality, which she spent as freely on rehearsals
as on performances. She always dressed for rehearsals just as the chorus
did, in a middy-blouse and bloomers, and she worked as hard as they did,
and even more ungrudgingly.
She was a pretty little thing, with nothing very feminine about
her--even her voice had a harsh boyish quality--and she never looked
prettier to Rose than when, her face flushed with an hour's honest toil,
she would wipe the copious sweat of it off with her sleeve, and panting,
look up with a smile at John Galbraith and an expectant expression,
waiting for his next command, which reminded Rose of the look of a
terrier alert for the stick his master means to throw for him. Her
speech was unaffectedly that of a Milwaukee Avenue gamin, and it served
adequately and admirably as a vehicle for the expression of her emotions
and ideas.
She formed her likes and dislikes with a complete disregard of the
social or professional importance of the objects of them. She took an
immediate liking to Rose; gave her some valuable hints on dancing, took
to calling her "dearie" before the end of the second rehearsal and, with
her arm around her, confided to her in terms of blood-curdling
profanity, her opinion of Stewart Lester, the tenor, who played the part
of Dick Benham in the piece.
The queer thing was that she and Patricia were on the best of terms.
They didn't compete, that was it, Rose supposed, and they were both good
enough cosmopolites to bridge across the antipodal distances between
their respective traditions and environments. Patricia hated the tenor
as bitterly as Anabel. And, in her own way, she was as pleasantly
friendly to Rose. There were no endearments or caresses, naturally, but
her brusk nods of greeting and farewell seemed to have real good feeling
behind them.
The men principals--this was rather a surprise to Rose--weren't nearly
so pleasant nor so friendly. Most of them professed to be totally
unaware of her existence and the one or two who showed an
awareness--Freddy France, who played the comic detective, was chief of
these offenders--did it in a way that brought the fighting blood into
her cheeks.
My astronomical figure for the expression of Rose's rise in her
profession is, in one important particular, misleading. There was
nothing precalculable about it, as there is about the solemn swing of
the stars. The impetus and direction of Rose's career derived from two
incidents that might just as well not have happened--two of the flukiest
of small chances.
The first of these chances concerned itself with Olga Larson and her bad
voice. Olga, as I think I have told you, was one of the sextette. And,
oddly enough, she owed her membership in this little group of quasi
principals, to her voice and nothing else. Because it was a bad voice
only when she talked. When she sang, it had a gorgeous thrilling ring to
it that made Patricia Devereux, when she heard it, clench her hands and
narrow her eyes. She'd never been taught what to do with it, but then,
for what Galbraith wanted of her she needed no teaching. Her ear was
infallible; let her hear a tune once and she could reproduce it
accurately, squarely up to time, squarely, always, in the middle of the
pitch. When she opened her rather dainty-looking mouth and sang, she
could give you across the footlights the impression that at least four
first-class sopranos were going uncommon strong. She hadn't a salient or
commonplace enough sort of beauty to have singled her out from the
chorus and she was no better a dancer than passable. But none of the
girls who would be picked out by a committee of automobile salesmen as
the prettiest and the best dancers in the chorus could sing a note, and
the sextette would have been dumb without her voice.
It was natural enough that Patricia didn't like it. She owed her own
position as a leading light-opera soprano to the cultivation to its
highest possible perfection of a distinctly second-rate voice, to a
precise knowledge of its limitations and to a most scrupulous economy in
its effects. Inevitably, then, the raw splendors that Olga Larson
dispensed so prodigally gave Patricia the creeps.
Inevitably, too, without any conscious malice about it, she made up her
clear, hard little mind the moment she heard Olga talk, that she was
utterly impossible for the sextette. "Really, my dear man," she told
Galbraith after the first rehearsal, "you'll have to find some one else.
American audiences will stand a good deal, I know, in the way of
atrocious speech, but positively she'll be hooted. They'll all sound
frightful enough, especially because that Dane girl, if that's her name,
talks like a lady, but this one ...!" She gave a cruelly adequate little
imitation of Olga's delivery of one of her lines. "Like some one who
doesn't know how, trying to play the slide trombone," she commented.
Galbraith couldn't pretend that she exaggerated the horrors of it, but
explained why the girl was indispensable. The explanation didn't please
Patricia any too well, either.
"Sing!" she cried hotly. "But she sings detestably!"
"No doubt," Galbraith admitted, "but she makes a great big noise always
on the right note, and that's what that bunch of penny whistlers can't
do without. Give her a little time," he concluded diplomatically, "and
I'll try to teach her."
"It can't be taught," said Patricia. "That's too much even for you."
So it happened that when Rose came out of her own nightmare, got her
breath and found leisure to look around, she found some one else whose
troubles weren't so transitory. The little scene in the first act,
between Sylvia and the sextette, was held up again and again, endlessly,
it seemed to Rose,--and what must it have seemed to the poor
victim?--while Galbraith bellowed Larson's lines after her, sometimes in
grotesque imitation of her own inflections, sometimes in what was meant
as a pattern for her to follow. The girl whose ear was so wonderfully
sensitive to pitch and rhythm, was simply deaf, it seemed, to the
subtleties of inflection. She reduced Galbraith to helpless wrath, in
her panic, by mistaking now and again, his imitations for his models.
The chorus tittered; the spectators suffocated their guffaws as well as
they could. Patricia grew more and more acutely and infuriatingly ironic
all the while.
Evidently Galbraith didn't mean to be a brute about it. He began every
one of these tussles to improve her reading of a line, with a gentleness