The Real Adventure
getting the job she said she wanted--had turned on him blazing with
indignation; but right in the full blaze of it, at something she must
have seen, and understood, in his own face, in deprecation of her own
wrath, she had, slowly and widely, smiled.
And then the way she worked for him in rehearsal! He'd seen girls work
hard before--desperately, frantically hard, under the fear that they
weren't good enough to hold their jobs. That wasn't the spirit in which
this girl worked. She seemed possessed by a blazing determination that
the results he wanted should he obtained. It seemed she couldn't devour
his intentions quickly enough, and her little unconscious nod of
satisfaction after he had corrected a mistake and she felt sure that now
she knew exactly what he wanted, was like nothing in his previous
experience.
The wonderful thing about it was that she carried that eagerness beyond
the confines of her own job. And she put it to good effect too. She had
taken that Larson girl and, by the plain force of personal dominance,
made her talk right. Well, why? That was the question. Who was she
anyway? Where had she come from? Who was "the only person who really
mattered" to her--the person who wasn't a pussy-cat?
He had tried hard to convince himself that these were all professional
questions. It was true they had a bearing on the more important and
perfectly legitimate question whether he had, in this altogether
extraordinary personality, discovered a new star. He had, during the
last quarter century, discovered a number--one or two of them
authentically of the first magnitude.
It would have simplified matters immensely if he could have seen Rose in
this category. But the stubborn fact was, he couldn't. She couldn't sing
a bit, and marked as her natural talent was for dancing, she hadn't
begun young enough ever to master the technique of it. That left acting;
but he doubted if she could ever go very far at that. Salient as her
personality was, she hadn't the instinct for putting it over. Or, if she
had it, she distrusted it. She was handicapped, too, by her sense of
humor. A real star in the egg, wouldn't have stopped in the middle of
that first fine blaze of wrath he'd seen, to join him in smiling at it.
A real actress wouldn't have spent her energies teaching another woman
to talk, nor persuading him to buy another woman a beautiful frock. The
focus had to be sharper than that. The only way you got the drive it
took to spell your name in electric lights, was by subordinating
everything else to the projection of yourself, treating your
surroundings, with irresistible conviction, merely as a background. This
girl could never do that.
Yet the notion wouldn't leave his mind that she could do something, and
do it more than commonly well. She must have an instinct of her own for
effects to enable her to understand so instantaneously what he was
trying to do. And once in a while, especially lately, he'd seen, over
some experiment of his, a flash of dissent across her eager face which
gave him the preposterous idea that by asking her--asking a
chorus-girl!--he might get a suggestion worth thinking about.
Certainly she had helped him in another way, there was no doubt of that.
That sextette, thanks to her teaching, would be the smartest, best
mannered bunch of chorus-girls that had adorned a production of his in a
long, long time.
And here, perhaps, he came closer than anywhere else to an understanding
of the source of the girl's attraction for him. John Galbraith could
remember the time when, a nameless little rat of a cockney, he had slept
under London bridges, opened cab doors for half-pence, carried links on
foggy nights. By the clear force of genius he had made his way up from
that;--from throwing cart-wheels for the amusement of the queues waiting
at the pit entrances of theaters, from the ribald knock-about of East
End halls, from the hilarity of Drury Lane pantomimes. Professionally
his success was a solid indubitable thing. If he weren't actually
preeminent in his special field, at least there was no one who was
accorded a preeminence over him.
But another ambition, quite apart from the professional one, was hardly
so well satisfied. From the time of his very earliest memories he had
felt a passionate admiration for good breeding, and a consuming envy of
the lucky unconscious possessors of it. Since ten years old, he had
been possessed by the great desire to be acknowledged a gentleman. There
was nothing of vulgar veneer about this. It was the real interior thing
he wanted; that invisible yet perfectly palpable hall-mark which without
explanations or credentials, classified you. His profession had not
brought him in contact more than very infrequently with people of this
sort, and his personal interests never could be made to do so with
results perfectly satisfactory to himself. There it was,--the thing
those lucky elect possessed without a thought or an effort. It was an
indestructible possession, apparently, too. You couldn't throw it away.
Dissipation, dishonesty, even a total collapse that brought its victim
down to the sink that he himself had sprouted from, seemed powerless to
efface that hall-mark.
He learned to suppose that if it were indestructible, it was also
unattainable, though perhaps he himself failed of attaining it only in
the consciousness of having failed--in the inability to stop trying for
it, straining all his actions through a sieve in the effort to conform
to a standard not his own.
Well, this girl, whose own life must have collapsed under her in a
peculiarly cruel and dramatic fashion so that she had had to come to him
and ask him for a job in the chorus--she had the hall-mark. She had
besides a lot of the qualities that traditionally went with it, but
often didn't. She was game--game as a fighting-cock. What must it not
have meant to her to come down into that squalid dance-hall in the first
place and submit to the test he had subjected her to! How must the
dressing-room conversation of her colleagues in the chorus have revolted
and sickened her? What must it mean to her to take his orders--sharp
rasping orders, with the sting of ridicule in the tail of them when they
had to be repeated;--to be addressed by her last name like a servant?
Why, this very afternoon, how must she have felt, standing there like a
manikin, ordered to put on this dress and that, by a fussy fat woman who
wouldn't have touched her with tongs? But from not one of these
experiences had he ever seen her flinch or protest. Oh, yes, she was
game, and she was simple, as they always were; a fine type of the real
thing.
And, somehow, he felt, she treated him as if he were hall-marked too.
He hadn't much to go by--absurdly little things really. But, after all,
it was the little things that counted;--a fine distinction in the
cadence of a voice, in the sort of nod of greeting or farewell one gave.
She never nodded at him in that curt telegraphic sort of way without
warming him up a bit inside.
And all the while he was a director and she was a chorus-girl and an
unyielding etiquette of their respective professions forbade a word of
human intercourse between them! He had violated it, as both of them had
been aware, when he shook hands with her and thanked her for having
taught Olga Larson to talk. And just because he recognized quite well
how necessary the barrier was in all but one out of a thousand cases,
its existence in this one case baffled and irritated him.
Up to the hour when he had turned into Lessing's store this afternoon,
for a look at the dresses Mrs. Goldsmith had been picking out for the
sextette, this feeling of baffled curiosity and of irritation over the
etiquette that forbade his satisfying it, would have summed up,
adequately enough, all the emotions he was conscious of toward the girl.
His professional admiration for her was another thing of course--a
perfectly legitimate thing. But with her appearance from behind the
screen, in that French evening gown--a gown she wore with the
indescribable air of belonging in it--with all her vibrant, irregular,
fascinating, eupeptic beauty fully revealed, his mood of impatient
acquiescence had fallen away. The basis of his feeling toward her
shifted in a manner that James Randolph wouldn't have had a moment's
difficulty in explaining, although Galbraith didn't understand it
himself.
The thing he was conscious of was, when she made that offer to copy this
gown herself for twenty dollars and so leave him leeway for the purchase
of the Empire frock for Olga--offering to go to that trouble not for
herself or her friend, but to further the accomplishment of what he
wanted; namely, the success of his production--what he was conscious of
then, was an overpowering desire to make a confidante of her; to talk
matters out with her, show her some of the major strategy of the game
that he had to consider, and find out how the thing would look to her.
It was all against the rules, of course. But to this case--the one in a
thousand certainly, in ten thousand maybe--the rules manifestly did not
apply.
If it hadn't been for that opaque white veil, the glow of light and
eagerness in her face would probably have conquered his resistance
finally and for good, while they stood there in the entry to the store.
As it was, he was still hanging on a dead center as they walked down the
east side of the avenue together.
Ahead of them, and to the right, over in Grant Park, was the colossal
municipal Christmas tree, already built, and getting decorated against
the celebration of Christmas Eve, now only two days away.
"Shall we rehearse on Christmas Day?" Rose asked.
He came out of his preoccupation a little vaguely. "Why, yes. Yes, of
course," he said absently. Then, coming a little further, and with a
different intonation, he went on: "We're really getting pressed for
time, you see. And the opening won't wait for anybody. It's hard luck
though, isn't it?"
"I suppose it is, for the others;" Rose said, "but--I'm glad."
It wouldn't have needed so sensitive an ear as his to catch the girl's
full meaning. Christmas--this Christmas, the first since that mysterious
collapse of her life, whose effect he had seen, but whose cause he
couldn't guess--was going to be a terrible day for her. She had dreaded
lest it should be empty. He wanted to say, "You poor child!" But--this
was the simple fact--he was afraid to.
There was another momentary silence, and again Rose broke it.
"Do you think you'll be able to convince Mrs. Goldsmith," she asked,
"that her gowns don't look well on the stage?"
"Probably not," he said in quick relief. Rose had decided the issue for
herself; brought up the very topic he'd wanted to bring up; got him off
his dead center at last. Back of Rose, of course, was the municipal
Christmas tree with its power of suggesting a lot of ideas she must
fight out of her mind.
"Certainly not," he went on, "if you're right about her, and I fancy you
are, that her taste isn't negative, but bad, and that it's the very
hideousness of the things she likes. No, she won't be convinced, and if
I know Goldsmith, he'll say his wife's taste is good enough for him. So
if we want a change, we've a fight on our hands."
The way he had unconsciously phrased that sentence startled him a
little.
"The question is," he went on, "whether they're worth making a fight
about. Are they so bad as I think they are?"
"Oh, yes," said Rose. "They're dowdy and fourth-class and ridiculous. Of
course I don't know how many people in the audience would know that."
"And I don't care." said John Galbraith with a flash of intensity that
made her look round at him. "That's not a consideration I'll give any