The Real Adventure
that would have done credit to a kinder-gartener. But, after three
attempts, each more ominously gentle and deliberate than the last, his
temper would suddenly fly all to pieces. "--No--no--no!" he would roar
at her, and the similes his exasperation would supply him with, for a
description of what her speech was like, were as numerous as the acids
in a chemical laboratory; and they all bit and burned just as hard.
Rose looked on with rather tepid feelings. She sympathized with
Galbraith on the whole. The poor man was doing his best; and the girl,
queerly, didn't seem to care. She confronted him in a sort of stockish
stupidity, saying her lines, when he told her to try again, with the
same frightful whang he was doing his best to correct, so that he was
justified, Rose felt, in accusing her of not trying, or even listening
to him.
It was in the dressing-room one night, after one of these rehearsals,
that she caught a different view of the situation. She sat down on a
bench to unlace her shoes and looked straight into Olga Larson's face--a
face sunken with a despair that turned Rose cold all over. The tearless
tragic eyes were staring, without recognition, straight into Rose's own.
It must be with faces like this that people mounted the rails on the
high bridge in Lincoln Park, intent on leaving a world that had become
intolerable. Packed in all around her in the inadequate dressing-room,
the other girls were chattering, squealing, scrambling into their
clothes, as unaware of her tense motionless figure, as if it had been a
mere inanimate lump. She couldn't have been more alone if she had been
sitting out on the rock of Juan Fernandez.
Rose invented various pretexts to delay her own dressing until the other
girls were gone. She could no more have abandoned that hopeless creature
there, than she could have left a person drowning. When they had the
room to themselves, she sat down on the bench beside her.
"You're all right," she said, feeling rather embarrassed and inadequate
and not knowing just how to begin. "I'm going to help you."
"It's always like this," the girl said. "It's no use. He'll put me back
in the chorus again."
"Not if I can help it," Rose said. "But the first thing to do is to put
on your clothes. Then we'll go out and get something to eat."
Even that little beginning involved a struggle--a conscious exertion of
all the power Rose possessed. She learned, for the first time, what the
weight of an immense melancholy inertia like that can be. The girl was
like one paralyzed. She was willing enough to talk. She told Rose the
whole story of her life; not as one making confidences to a friend;
rather with the curious detachment of a melancholy spectator discussing
an unfortunate life she had no concern with.
She knew how good her voice was, and, equally, how badly it needed
training. She'd had, always, a passionate desire to sing and a belief in
her possibilities. If she could get a chance, she could succeed. She'd
undergone heartbreaking privations, trying to save money enough out of
her earnings at one form of toil after another, to take lessons. But,
repeatedly, these small savings had, by some disaster, been swept away:
stolen once, by a worthless older brother; absorbed on another occasion
by her mother's fatal illness. Two years ago she had drifted into the
chorus, but had been altogether unlucky in her various ventures. She
wasn't naturally graceful--had been slow learning to dance. Again and
again, she'd been dropped at the end of three or four weeks of rehearsal
(gratuitous of course) and seen another girl put in her place. When this
hadn't happened, the shows she had been in had failed after a few weeks'
life.
When Galbraith had put her into the sextette in _The Girl Up-stairs_, a
hope, just about dead, had been awakened. She'd at last learned to dance
well enough to escape censure and she had seen for herself how
indispensable her singing voice was to the group. And then it had
appeared she'd have to talk! And, inexplicably to herself, her talking
wasn't right. The thing had just been another mirage. It was hopeless.
Galbraith would put her back into the chorus--drop her, likely enough,
altogether.
The thing that at first exasperated Rose and later, as she came vaguely
to understand it, aroused both her pity and her determination, was the
girl's strange, dully fatalistic acquiescence in it all. The sort of
circumstances that in Rose herself set the blood drumming through her
arteries, keyed her will to the very highest pitch, quickened her brain,
made her feel in some inexplicable way, confident and irresistible, laid
on this girl a paralyzing hand. It wasn't her fault that she didn't meet
her difficulties half-way with a vicious, driving offensive--rout them,
demoralize them. It was her tragedy.
"All right," Rose apostrophized them grimly. "This time you're up
against me."
"Look here!" she said to Olga, when the story was told (this was across
the table in the dingy lunch-room where, as Doris Dane, she had had her
first meal, and most of her subsequent ones), "look here, and listen to
what I'm going to tell you. I know what I'm talking about. You're going
to learn to say your lines before to-morrow's rehearsal, so that Mr. ...
So that Galbraith won't stop you once." (This was a trick of speech that
came hard to Rose, but she was gradually learning it.) "We're going up
to my room now, and I'm going to teach you. We've got lots of time.
Rehearsal to-morrow isn't till twelve o'clock. You're going to stay in
the sextette, and when the piece opens, you're going to make a hit."
She hesitated a moment, then added in the same blunt matter-of-fact way,
"You're one of the most beautiful women in Chicago. Did you know that?
Dressed right and with your hair done right, you could make them stare.
Have you finished your coffee? Then come along. Here! Give me your part.
You don't want to lose it."
For the girl, pitiably, almost ludicrously, was staring at Rose in a
sort of somnambulistic daze. She hadn't been hypnotized, but she might
about as well have been, for any real resistance her mind, or her will,
could offer to her new friend's vibrant confidence.
She went with Rose up to the little three-dollar room. Rose put her into
a chair, sat down opposite her, took the first phrase of her first
speech, and said it very slowly, very quietly, half a dozen times. That
was at half past eleven o'clock at night. By midnight, Olga could say
those first three words, if not to Rose's complete satisfaction, at
least a lot better. She went on and finished the sentence. They worked
straight through the night, except that two or three times the girl
broke down; said it was hopeless. She got up once and said that she was
going home, whereupon Rose locked the door and put the key in her
stocking. She sulked once, and for fifteen minutes wouldn't say a word.
But by seven o'clock in the morning, when they went back to the
lunch-room and ate an enormous breakfast, Olga's sluggish blood was
fired at last. It was a profane thought, but you _could_ take the Fatal
Sisters by the hair and coerce a change in the pattern they were
weaving.
And Rose, by that time, by the plain brute force of necessity, was a
teacher of phonetics. She'd discovered how she made sounds herself and
had, with the aid of a hand mirror, developed a rough-and-ready
technique for demonstrating how it was done. She remembered, with bitter
regret, a course she had dozed through at the university, dreaming about
the half-back, which, had she only listened to the professor instead,
would be doing her solid service now. Had there been other courses like
that, she wondered vaguely? Had the education she had spent fifteen
years or so on an actual relation to life after all? It was a startling
idea.
She walked Olga out to the park and back at seven-thirty, and at eight
they were up in her room again. They raided the delicatessen at eleven
o'clock, and made an exiguous meal on the plunder. And at twelve, husky
of voice, but indomitable of mind, they, with the others, confronted
Galbraith upon the stage in North End Hall.
"Do you suppose," Olga said during the preliminary bustle of getting
started, "that he's put any one else in my part already?"
It was a fear Rose had entertained, but had avoided suggesting to her
pupil.
"I don't believe so," she said. "If he has, I'll talk to him."
"No, you won't!" said Olga. "I'll talk to him myself."
There was a ring to that decision that did Rose's heart good. It took a
long time to get that northern blood on fire, but when you did, you
could count on its not going cold again overnight.
It got pretty exciting of course, as the scene between Sylvia and the
sextette drew near, and when it came, Rose could hardly manage her own
first line--hung over it a second, indeed, before she could make her
voice work at all, and drew a sharp look of inquiry from Galbraith. But
on Olga's first cue, her line was spoken with no hesitation at all, and
in tone, pitch and inflection, it was almost a phonographic copy of the
voice that had served it for a model.
There was a solid two seconds of silence. For once in her life Patricia
Devereux had missed a cue!
John Galbraith had been an acrobat as well as a dancer, and he was
quick on his feet. He had just turned, unexpectedly, an intellectual
somersault, but he landed cleanly and without a stagger. "Come, Miss
Devereux," he said, "that's your line." And the scene went on.
But when, about four o'clock that afternoon, the rehearsal was over,
Galbraith called Olga out to him and allowed himself a long incredulous
stare at her. "Will you tell me, Larson," he asked, "why in the name of
Heaven, if you could do that, you didn't do it yesterday?"
"I couldn't do it yesterday," she said. "Dana taught me."
"Taught you!" he echoed. "Beginning after last night's rehearsal?...
Dane!" he called to Rose, who had been watching a little anxiously to
see what would happen.
"You've learned it very well indeed," he said with a nod of dismissal to
Olga, as Rose came up. "Don't try to change it. Stick to what you've
got."
Then, to Rosa, "Larson tells me you taught her. How did you do it?"
"Why, I just--taught her," said Rosa. "I showed her how I said each
line, and I kept on showing her until she could do it."
"How long did it take you--all night?"
"All the time there's been since last rehearsal," said Rosa, "except for
three meals."
"Good God!" said Galbraith. "Devereux said it couldn't be done, and I
agreed with her. Well, live and learn. Look here! Will you teach the
others--the other four in the sextette? I'll see you're paid for it."
"Why, yes,--of course," said Rose, hesitating a little.
"Oh, I don't mean overnight," he said, "but mornings--between
rehearsals--whenever you can."
"I wasn't thinking of that," said Rose. "I was just wondering if they'd
want to be taught--I mean, by another chorus-girl, you know."
"They'll want to be taught if they want to keep their jobs," said
Galbraith. And then, to her astonishment, and also perhaps to his, for
the thing was radically out of the etiquette of the occasion, he reached
out and shook hands with her. "I'm very much obliged to you," he said.
CHAPTER V
MRS. GOLDSMITH'S TASTE
If there was a profession in the world which Rose had never either idly
or seriously considered as a possible one for herself, that of a teacher
was it. And yet, the first money she ever earned in her life was the
twenty dollars the management paid her for teaching the other four girls
in the sextette to say their lines. She was a born teacher, too. And the
born teacher is a rare bird.
One must know something in the first place, of course, before one can