The Real Adventure
and making her mistakes at their expense, she could think of nothing
better than the scheme she chose.
She came to the conclusion afterward that even apart from the
consideration of expense, her own plan was better. You got more vigor
somehow, into the actual construction of the thing, if you could make it
express something quite independently of color and texture.
Rehearsal was dismissed a little early that first night, and she was
back in her room by eleven. Arrived there, she took off her outer
clothes, sat down cross-legged on the floor, and went to work. When at
last, with a little sigh, and a tremulously smiling acknowledgment of
fatigue, she got up and looked at her watch, it was four o'clock in the
morning. She'd had one of those experiences that every artist can
remember a few of in his life, when it is impossible for anything to go
wrong; when each tentative experiment accomplishes not only its purpose,
but another unsuspected purpose as well; when the vision miraculously
betters itself in the execution; when the only difficulty is that which
the hands have in the purely mechanical operation of keeping up.
She was destined later, of course, even during the achievement of this
first success, to learn the comparative rarity of those hours. Though,
as she looked back on it afterward, the whole of this first job seemed
to have been done with a kind of miraculous facility she couldn't
account for.
And all through those five hours, fast as her mind flew, utterly
absorbed as it seemed to be, she never once lost the consciousness of
the almost palpable presence of Rodney Aldrich there in the room with
her. Once she laughed outright over the memory of a girl who had tried
to win her husband's friendship by studying law. Fancy Rodney trying to
study costumes! But he would understand what it meant to conceive them
and the sort of work it took, once they were conceived, to project them
as something objective to herself--something that had to challenge
expert opinion; meet the exactions of criticism. He'd understand the
thrill, too, of seeing them come up for judgment--the triumph of getting
them accepted and paid for.
And, in the confidence born of that understanding, he'd be able to offer
for her to understand, the fundamentals of his own work. Not the dry
husks of technical considerations. What did they amount to anyway,
except as they formed the boundaries of the live thing he meant? But the
live thing itself--the thing that spelled challenge and work and victory
for him,--that thing, since at last she'd grown to deserve it, he'd
give her. Freely, fully,--just because he couldn't help giving it.
Tired as she was, she could hardly bear to stop work. The half finished
thing on the manikin lured her on from one moment to another. It was
really insane not to stop. She must get up at seven-thirty, three hours
or so from now, in order to get to the shops ahead of the crowds and
begin the selection of her fabrics. At last, with a single movement of
resolution she turned out the gas and undressed, or rather, finished
undressing, in the dark, amid a litter of pins and paper cambric.
And now, for the first time in this squalid, mean little room, the dark
had balm in it, became a fragrant miracle, obliterating the harsh
actualities of her immediate yesterdays and to-morrows, winging her
spirit for a breathless flight straight to the end she sought,--to the
time when the long pilgrimage before her should be accomplished.
What a wonderful thing Rodney's cool firm friendship would be! Worth
anything, anything in the world it might cost to win it. But ... But....
She drew in a long unsteady breath and pressed her cooling hands down
upon her face.
What a thing his love would be, when it should come, free of its tasks
and obligations; no longer in the treadmill making her world go round,
but given its wings again!
CHAPTER VIII
SUCCESS--AND A RECOGNITION
There is a kaleidoscopic character about the events of the ten days or
so preceding the opening performance of most musical comedies which
would make a sober chronicle of them seem fantastically incredible; and
this law of Nature made no exception in the case of _The Girl
Up-stairs_. There were rehearsals which ran so smoothly and swiftly that
they'd have done for performances; there were others so abominably bad
that the bare idea of presenting the mess resulting from six weeks'
toil, before people who had paid money to see it, was a nightmare.
As the nervous pressure mounted, people took to exploding all over the
place in the most grotesquely inconceivable ways and from totally
unpredictable causes. Freddy France, who played the comic detective
(like most comedians he had no sense of humor whatever and treated his
"art" with a sort of sacrificial solemnity), developed delusions of
persecution, proclaimed himself the victim of a conspiracy to which the
owners, the author, Galbraith and most of the principals were parties,
and finally, when the director cut out a little scene that he had two
feeble jokes in, reached up unexpectedly and hit McGill on the nose,
flung his part on the stage, stamped on it and left the theater. Quan
read his lines in a painstaking manner for two days and then, after a
three-hour session in the Sherman House bar, Freddy was induced to come
back.
Stewart Lester, one day, at the end of a long patient effort of
Galbraith's to improve his acting (he acted like a tenor; one needn't
say more than that), licked his thin red lips, and in a feline fury,
announced his indifference as to whether the management accepted his
resignation or that of Miss Devereux. As long as she insisted on
treating her vis-a-vis like a chorus-man, she'd perhaps be happier if a
chorus-man were given the part; and he would he only too happy, in case
the management agreed with her, to make the substitution possible.
Whereupon Miss Devereux remarked that even having been a failure in
grand opera didn't necessarily assure a man success in musical comedy,
and that possibly a chorus-man would be an improvement. Galbraith had a
long private conference with each of them--the fact that they would not
speak at all off stage guaranteed him against their comparing notes as
to what he'd said--and while the thing he effected could not be called a
reconciliation, it amounted to a sort of armed truce. They went through
their love scenes without actually scratching and biting.
Even little Anabel Astor, whose good humor for a long time had seemed
invincible, tempestuously left the stage one day in the middle of one of
her scenes with her dancing partner, and could be heard sobbing loudly
in the wings through all that remained of that rehearsal.
Queer things began happening to the plot, resulting sometimes from the
violent transposition of song numbers from one act to another, sometimes
from the interpolation of songs or specialties. Two or three scenes,
which the author regarded with special pride and was prepared to die in
the defense of, were pronounced by Galbraith to be junk. He had made
superhuman efforts, he told Goldsmith and Block, to put a little life
into them, and had demonstrated that this miracle was impossible of
performance. They were dead and they'd got to be buried before they
became, to the olfactory sense, any more unpleasant.
There was an ominous breathlessness in the air after this ultimatum had
been delivered, and at the next rehearsal, when the director announced
the cut of six solid pages of manuscript, the voice of the author was
heard from back of the hall proclaiming in a hollow Euripidean bellow
that it was all over. He was going to his lawyer to get an injunction
against the production of the piece.
Of all the persons directly, or even remotely, affected by this
nerve-shattering confusion, Rose was perhaps the least perturbed. The
only thing that really mattered to her, was the successful execution of
those twelve costumes. The phantasmagoria at North End Hall was a
regrettable, but necessary, interruption of her more important
activities. The interruption didn't interfere so seriously as at first
she thought it would. The routine of rehearsal as Galbraith developed
it, began with special scenes--isolated bits that needed modification or
polishing. The general rehearsals, taking this act or that and going
through with it from beginning to end, and involving, of course, the
presence of everybody in the company, didn't, as a rule, begin till
three in the afternoon; sometimes till as late as five. Of course when
they did begin, they lasted until all hours.
But the labors of the chorus, and even of the sextette, shrank very much
in proportion to the work of the principals. Nearly all the changes that
were made were in the direction of compressing the chorus and giving the
principals more room. So that for long stretches of time, during which,
dressed in her working clothes and curled up in one of the remoter of
the cushioned window-seats, but ready to answer a summons to the stage
as promptly as a fireman, she could let her mind run without
interruption on the solution of some of her own problems, and then be
ready when she went back to her room, to fall into bed and asleep (the
two acts had become practically simultaneous) secure in the possession
of a clearly thought out program for the morrow.
She wakened automatically at half past seven and was down-town by half
past eight, to do whatever shopping the work of the previous day
revealed the need of. The fact that it was, for the greater part, John
Galbraith's money she was spending (she had managed to put in a little
herself by calculating down to a fine point the necessary margin for
existence) worked to her advantage in these operations. She could not,
but for that fact, have forced herself to hunt down bargains so
persistently nor to keep the incidental expense for findings and such,
so low.
At nine-thirty in the morning--an unheard of hour in the theater--the
watchman at the Globe let her in the stage door, and Rose had half an
hour before the arrival of the wardrobe mistress and her assistant, for
looking over the work done since she had left for rehearsal the day
before.
She liked this quiet, cavernous old barn of a place down under the Globe
stage; liked it when she had it to herself before the two sewing women
came and later, when, with a couple of sheets spread down on the floor
she cut and basted according to her cambric patterns, keeping ahead of
the flying needles of the other two. After her own little room, the mere
spaciousness of it seemed almost noble. She even liked it, when, about
half past one in the afternoon, on matinee days, the chorus-girls of the
show now drawing to the end of its run, began dawdling in, passing
shrill jokes with Bill Flynn, the fireman, rummaging through the mail in
the letter-box, casually unfastening their clothes all the while,
preliminary to kimonos and make-up, gathering in little knots about the
sewing-machines and exclaiming in profane delight over the costumes. She
wondered at herself, sometimes, for having ceased to mind their
language, their shameless way of going half-clad, their general
atmosphere of moth-like worthlessness--and then laughed at herself for
wondering!
How would her own quality be finer, her soul a more ample thing, for the
keeping, on one of the shelves of it, of a pot of carefully preserved
horror? If she could succeed with these costumes, her success, she
hoped, would lead her directly into the business of designing other
costumes for the stage. And if she became a professional stage costumer,
this rather loose, ramshackle, down-at-the-heel morality of back-stage
musical comedy would be a permanent fact in her life, just as the