The Real Adventure
dustiness of law-books and the stuffiness of court rooms were permanent
facts in Rodney's.
As the work went on, her confidence in the success of this initiatory
venture became less ecstatic and more reasonable. A few of the costumes
were finished and, seen on live models (a couple of girls in the chorus
in the Globe show had volunteered to try on) were, if Rose knew anything
at all about clothes, without doubt or qualification, good.
She had had just one really bad quarter of an hour over them, and that,
back on Christmas Day as it happened, was when Galbraith, having
detained her after he had dismissed the rehearsal, asked to see her
sketches.
"Sketches!" she echoed, perplexed.
"Oh, I don't mean regular water-colored plates," he said. "Just whatever
rough drafts of the things you will have put down on paper to start
yourself off with. It's simple curiosity, you understand."
"But," she gasped, "I haven't put anything down on paper--not anything
at all! I don't know how to draw."
And now he was perplexed in turn. How could one design a costume without
drawing a picture of it?
She explained her working method to him; though not, she felt, very
successfully. She was perhaps a bit flustered, and he didn't seem to be
giving her his complete attention--seemed to be covering up, with the
pretense of listening, a strong interior abstraction.
This was again a good diagnosis as far as it went. Only it didn't dig in
far enough for even the faintest surmise as to what the nature of his
abstraction was.
"I could bring the patterns down here. Or, if you had time, you could
come up to my room and see them. But I'm afraid you couldn't tell much
from that, because they're all taken apart, you see, and they're just in
paper cambric and not the right colors."
What the man was struggling for--it had been his sole reason for
detaining her in the first place--was some sort of opening that would
make it seem natural to tell her he hoped her Christmas Day had not been
too intolerably unhappy; to shake hands with her and wish her
luck--assure her in one way or another, that she had in him a friend she
could bring her troubles to--any sort of troubles. He'd made up his mind
to do this when the Christmas rehearsal should he over, as long ago as
the night of their walk down the avenue. This resolution had been
reinforced by the look he had caught in her face when she came up to
rehearsal this afternoon--a rather misty, luminous, exalted look,--a
little lack of definition about her eyelids suggesting there had been
tears there.
This was good observation like her own of him. But, again like hers, in
its failure to get the central clue, it only mislead him, the worse. If
he could have guessed that she had been having a Christmas celebration
of her own that day; that there had been unwrapped and displayed, three
little presents she had bought the day before; one for her husband, and
one for each of her two babies, and that, just before starting for
rehearsal, she had wrapped them up and put them into her trunk to await
the day when they could be given, it might have altered matters
somewhat.
The thing that finally made it clearly impossible for Galbraith to
express anything at all of this feeling which he, in good faith, called
friendship for her, was her alternative offer--if he had time, to take
him up to her room for a look at the patterns.
If she's seen him as anything at all but starkly her employer and her
financier; if she's had the faintest glimmer of him as one who held for
her any personal feelings whatever, she never would have suggested as an
alternative to her bringing the patterns here to rehearsal, his coming
up to her room for a look at them.
The thing of all others that irritated Galbraith was the possession of a
divided mind. Just now, disappointed as he was, almost to the point of
pain, though he wouldn't acknowledge to himself that it went as far as
that, over the evident fact that his relation to the girl, in spite of
their partnership, was exactly what it had been from the beginning, he
was still aware that if he'd got the opening he wanted, had managed
another of those warm lithe hand-clasps with her, and had got the notion
across to her that he wanted her to make a friend of him and a
confidant, he'd be going away now, afterward, under the painful
misgiving that he was a bit of an old fool. The product of all this
irritation was, however, that he declined Rose's offer of a view of her
patterns rather bruskly.
"It was just curiosity, as I said. Go along your own way and don't worry
about me. You will be all right."
Rose couldn't feel much conviction behind this expression of
confidence, and she went away, as I have said, in a sort of panic. Was
she all wrong, after all? Couldn't you design stage costumes except by
making pictures of them? She knew what he meant by water-colored plates.
She'd seen them framed in the lobbies at musical shows she'd been to
with Rodney. That was how costume designers worked, was it? Well she
knew she never could do anything like that.
But her fears only lasted until she got back to her room and caught a
reassuring look at the pattern that was assembled on the form. After
all, the pictures in the lobby weren't so important as the costumes on
the stage. And as for Galbraith--well, if he didn't expect too much of
her, that was all the better.
In keeping with the good luck which had attended everything that
happened in connection with this first venture of hers, she was able to
tell Galbraith that both sets of costumes were done and ready to try on,
on the very day he announced that the next rehearsal would be held at
ten to-morrow morning at the Globe. It might very easily have happened,
of course, that Rose's enterprise, together with Galbraith's partnership
in it, had become known here or there, got passed on from one to
another, with modifications and embellishments according to fancy, and
grown to be a monument of scandal and conjecture. But nothing is more
capricious than the heat-lightning of gossip, and it just chanced that,
up to the morning of Rose's little triumph, no one beyond Galbraith and
Rose herself even suspected the identity with Dane of the chorus, of the
costumer who was to submit, on approval, gowns for the sextette. The
fact, of course, was bound to come out on the day the company moved over
for rehearsals to the Globe, and the event was very happily dramatized
for Rose, by her ability to let the costumes appear first and her
authorship of them only after their success was beyond dispute.
She persuaded the girls to wait until all six were dressed in the
afternoon frocks and until she herself had had a chance to give each of
them a final inspection and to make a few last touches and
readjustments. Then they all trooped out on the stage and stood in a
row, turned about, walked here and there, in obedience to Galbraith's
instructions shouted from the back of the theater.
It was dark out there and disconcertingly silent. The glow of two cigars
indicated the presence of Goldsmith and Block in the middle of a little
knot of other spectators.
The only response Rose got--the only index to the effect her labors had
produced--was the tone of Galbraith's voice. It rang on her ear a little
sharper, louder, and with more of a staccato bruskness than the
directions he was giving called for. And it was not his practise to put
more cutting edge into his blade, or more power behind his stroke, than
was necessary to accomplish what he wanted. He was excited, therefore.
But was it by the completeness of her success or the calamitousness of
her failure?
"All right," he shouted. "Go and put on the others."
There was another silence after they had fled out on the stage again,
clad tins time in the evening gowns--a hollow heart-constricting
silence, almost literally sickening. But it lasted only a moment. Then,
"Will you come down here, Miss Dane?" called Galbraith.
There was a slight, momentary, but perfectly palpable shock accompanying
these words--a shock felt by everybody within the sound of his voice.
Because the director had not said, "Dane, come down here." He had said,
"Will you come here, Miss Dane?" And the thing amounted, so rigid is the
etiquette of musical comedy, to an accolade. The people on the stage and
in the wings didn't know what she'd done, nor in what character she was
about to appear, but they did know she was, from now on, something
besides a chorus-girl.
Rose obediently crossed the runway and walked up the aisle to where
Galbraith stood with Goldsmith and Block, waiting for her. She was still
feeling a little numb and empty.
Galbraith, as she came up, held out a hand to her. "I congratulate you,
Miss Dane," he said. "They're admirable. With all the money in the
world, I wouldn't ask for anything handsomer."
Before she could say anything in reply, he directed her attention, with
a nod of the head, to the partners, and walked away. Rose gasped at
that. She'd never thought beyond him--beyond the necessity of pleasing
him; and that he'd carry the details of the business through with
Goldsmith and Block, she'd taken for granted. Now, here she was chucked
into the water and told to swim. She'd never in her life, of course,
tried to sell anything. What her mind first awoke to was that the
partners were looking rather blank. Block, indeed, let his eyes follow
the retreating Galbraith with a momentary look of outraged astonishment.
Her wits, quickened by the emergency, interpreted the look. Galbraith,
chucking her into the water indeed, had thrown her a life-preserver--the
tip that her wares were good.
Goldsmith, quicker and shrewder than his junior, was already smiling
politely. "They really are very good," he said. "If they are not too
expensive for us, we'll consider buying them."
"They'll be," said Rose, "the twelve of them, four hundred and
sixty-five dollars." She had something the same feeling of astonishment
on hearing herself say this, that she'd had when she heard herself
telling Galbraith that she'd design the costumes. Something or other had
spoken without her will--almost without her knowledge. She had one
figure clearly etched in her brain; that was the one hundred and ninety
dollars she must pay back to Galbraith; and she'd put in fifty of her
own. There was also a matter of twenty dollars or so still to be paid to
the wardrobe mistress and her assistant. But this four hundred and
sixty-five dollars had simply come out of the air.
Block pursed his lips and emitted a fine thin whistle of astonishment.
Goldsmith heaved a sigh. "My dear young lady," he protested. "The
inducement held out to us to wait for these costumes of yours, was that
they were to be cheap. But four hundred and sixty-five dollars is
ridiculous! That's a lot of money."
"Quite a lot less," said Rose, "than the ones Mrs. Goldsmith picked out
came to. They were just over six hundred." Goldsmith smiled
indulgently. "By the figures on the tags, yes," he said. "But would we
have paid that, do you think? Those figures represent what they'd like
to get from people who buy one apiece. But from us, buying twelve ..."
He shrugged his shoulders expressively.
Well, this was reasonable and no doubt true and it left Rose rather
aghast. She turned away toward the stage with the best appearance of
indifference she could muster. Her mind was making an agonized effort to
add up one hundred and ninety, fifty and twenty. But in the excitement
of the moment it simply balked--rejected the problem altogether. She
didn't think that the total came to much over three hundred dollars, but
she couldn't be sure. And then there was, sticking burr-like, somewhere,
the consciousness of another hundred unaccounted for in this total.