The Real Adventure
Until she could discover what the gowns had actually cost her, she
couldn't say anything. Therefore, she just stood where she was and said
nothing whatever.
Goldsmith cleared his throat. "Really," he said in an intensely
aggrieved tone, "you must try to see it from our point of view. This
production's cost us thousands of dollars. If we bankrupt ourselves
before the opening night it will be a bad business for everybody. You
ought to see that. The costumes are very nice, I admit that. But
remember we took a chance on it. We waited for them with the idea that
you'd cooperate with us in saving money."
Rose made a last frantic struggle to induce her figures to add up, but
they were getting more meaningless every minute.
There was another moment of silence. Then Block took up the refrain with
variations. But just as he began to speak, a brilliantly luminous ray of
light struck Rose. She could have answered Goldsmith's arguments--would
have done so, but for her preoccupation with that trifling sum in
arithmetic. But it was incomparably better tactics not to answer at all.
Because if she could answer their arguments, they in turn could answer
hers. She'd be a child in their hands once she began to talk. But her
silence disconcerted them--gave them nothing to go on. Well, then,
she'd let them do the work and see what happened.
But suppose, through her stubborn insistence, they should refuse the
costumes at any price! Well, the world wouldn't come to an end. She'd
live through it somehow, and somehow she'd manage to repay Galbraith.
The partners went on talking alternately with symptoms of rising
impatience.
"Oh, come," said Block at last, "we can't be all day about this! Your
figure is out of all reason. If you'd said even four hundred now ..."
"Oh, yes," said Goldsmith. "We want to be liberal. We appreciate you've
done a good job. Say four hundred and I'll write you a check for it
now." He took a small check-book and a fountain pen out of his pocket.
"That's all right, eh?"
Rose made another effort at addition. A hundred and ninety, and fifty,
and twenty, and the other ghostly hundred that wouldn't account for
itself and yet insisted on coming in and mixing everything up. She
turned on the two partners a look of perfectly genuine distress.
"If you'll let me go away and add it up ..." she began.
Goldsmith's heart was touched. The costumes were a bargain at four
hundred and sixty-five, and he knew it. There was an indescribable sort
of dash to them that would lend tone to the whole production. And then
the face of that pretty young girl who must have worked so desperately
hard to make them and who was so obviously helpless at this bargaining
game, would have moved a harder heart than his.
"Oh, all right!" he said. "We'll give in. Four hundred"--he began making
out the check, but his hand hung over it a moment--"and fifty. How's
that?"
Rose drew in a long breath. "That's all right," she said.
It was just as she turned away with the check made out to Doris Dane in
her wrist-bag, that the mystery of that phantom hundred dollars solved
itself. It was the hundred dollars she'd borrowed from Rodney and could
now return to him!
Galbraith took the first chance he could make to shoot her a low-voiced
question. "How much did you get?" he asked, and his face showed
downright surprise when she told him. "That's a pretty fair price," he
commented. "I was afraid they'd screw you way down on it, and I wanted
to help you out, but ..."
"Oh, you did," said Rose. "Telling me they were good. Of course you
couldn't have done anything more. The first thing I want to do," she
went on, "is to pay you back. But I don't know just how to do it. I
can't go to the bank where they know me and--anyway, the name on the
check isn't right."
He told her how easily that could be fixed. He'd take her to the bank he
used here in town and identify her. Then she could pay him and deposit
the balance to her own account. It was a bank where they didn't mind
small accounts. That would be much better than carrying her money around
with her where it could too easily be stolen.
He was very kind about it all and they put the program through that day.
Yet she was vaguely conscious of a sense that he seemed a little
chilled, as if something about the transaction unaccountably depressed
him.
And indeed it was true that he'd have found his tendency to fall in love
with her a good deal harder to resist if she'd shown herself more
helpless in the hands of Goldsmith and Block. She'd actually driven a
good bargain--an unaccountably good bargain! He wished he'd been on hand
to see how she did it. Well, women were queer, there was no getting away
from that.
But Goldsmith and Block came back the next day and drove, in turn, a
good bargain of their own.
"You've certainly got a good eye for costumes, Miss Dane," Goldsmith
said, "and here's a proposition we'd like to make. A lot of these other
things we've got for the regular chorus don't look so good as they
might. You'll be able to see changes in them that'll improve them maybe
fifty per cent. Well, you take it on, and we'll begin paying you your
regular salary now; you understand, twenty-five dollars a week,
beginning to-day."
Rose accepted this proposition with a warm flush of gratitude. It
indicated, she felt, that they were still friendly toward her, disposed
of certain misgivings she'd experienced the night before, lest in
driving, unwittingly, so good a bargain with them, she had incurred
their enmity.
But, from the moment her little salary began, she found herself
retained, body and soul, exactly as Galbraith himself was. They'd bought
all her ideas, all her energy, all her time, except a few scant hours
for sleep and a few snatched minutes for meals. She gave her employers,
up to the time when the piece opened at the Globe, at a conservative
calculation, about five times their money's worth. Even if she hadn't
been in the company she'd have found something like two days' work in
every twenty-four hours, just in the wardrobe room. Because the costumes
were cheap and the frank blaze of borders, footlights and spots,
pitilessly betrayed the fact. One set for the ponies was so hopelessly
bad that the owners refused to accept them, and Rose, on the spur of the
moment, made up a costume--they were uniform, fortunately--to replace
them. The wardrobe mistress, with two assistants, and under Rose's
intermittent supervision, managed somehow to get them made. And there
wasn't a single costume, outside Rose's own twelve, that hadn't to be
remodeled more or less.
On top of all that, the really terrible grind of rehearsals began;
property rehearsals, curiously disconcerting at first, where instead of
indicating the business with empty hands, you actually lighted the
cigarette, picked up the paper knife, pulled the locket out from under
your dress and opened it--and, in the process of doing these things,
forgot everything else you knew; scenery rehearsals that caused the
stage to seem small and cluttered up and actually made some of the
evolutions you'd been routined in, impossible. At last and ghastliest, a
dress rehearsal, which began at seven o'clock one night and lasted till
four the next morning.
It would all have been so ludicrously easy, Rose used to reflect in
despair, if, like the other girls in the sextette, she'd had only her
own part in the performance to attend to--only to get into her costumes
at the right time, be waiting in the wings for the cue, and then come on
and do the things they'd taught her to do. But, between Goldsmith and
Block, who were now in a state of frantic activity and full of insane
suggestions, and the wardrobe mistress who was always having to be told
how to do something, every minute was occupied. She would try
desperately to keep an ear alert for what was happening on the stage, in
order to be on hand for her entrances. But, in spite of her, it
sometimes happened that she'd be snatched from something by a furious
roar from Galbraith.
"Miss Dane!" And then, when she appeared, bewildered, contrite. "You
_must_ attend to the rehearsal. Those other matters can be attended to
at some other time. If necessary, I can stop the rehearsal and wait till
you're at liberty. But I can't pretend to rehearse and be kept waiting."
She never made any excuses; just took her place with a nod of
acquiescence. But she often felt like doing as some of the rest of them
did; felt it would be a perfectly enormous relief to shriek out
incoherent words of abuse, burst into tears and sobs, and rush from the
stage. Her position--her new position, she fancied, would entitle her to
do that--once. And then the notion that she was saving up that luxurious
possibility for some time when it would do the most good, would bring
back her old smile. And Galbraith, lost in wonder at her already, would
wonder anew.
They followed the traditions of the Globe in giving _The Girl Up-stairs_
its try-out in Milwaukee--four performances; from a Thursday to a
Saturday night, with rehearsals pretty much all the time in between.
About all that this hegira meant to Rose was that she got two solid
hours' sleep on the train going up on Thursday afternoon and another two
hours on the train coming back on Sunday morning. She had domesticated
herself automatically, in the little hotel across from the theater, and
she had gone right on working just as she did at the Globe. Oddly
enough, she didn't differentiate much between rehearsals and the
performances. Perhaps because she was so absorbed with her labors off
the stage; perhaps because the thoroughly tentative nature of everything
they did was so strongly impressed on her.
The piece was rewritten more or less after every performance. They
didn't get the curtain down on the first one until five minutes after
twelve--for even an experienced director like Galbraith can make a
mistake in timing--and the mathematically demonstrated necessity for
cutting, or speeding, a whole hour out of the piece, tamed even the
wild-eyed Mr. Mills. The principals, after having for weeks been
routined in the reading of their lines and the execution of their
business, were given new speeches to say and new things to do at a
moment's notice--literally, sometimes, while the performance was going
on. Ghastly things happened, of course. A tricky similarity of cues
would betray somebody into a speech three scenes ahead; a cut would have
the unforeseen effect of leaving somebody stranded, half-changed, in his
dressing-room when his entrance cue came round; an actor would dry up,
utterly forget his lines in the middle of a scene he could have repeated
in his sleep--and the amazing way in which these disasters were
retrieved, the way these people who hadn't, so far, impressed Rose very
strongly with their collective intelligence, extemporized, righted the
capsizing boat, kept the scene going--somehow--no matter what happened,
gave her a new respect for their claims to a real profession.
This was the great thing they had, she concluded; the quality of coming
up to the scratch, of giving whatever it took out of themselves to meet
the need of the moment. They weren't--her use of this phrase harked back
to the days of the half-back--yellow. If you'd walked through the train
that took them back to Chicago Sunday morning, had seen them, glum,
dispirited, utterly fagged out, unsustained by a single gleam of hope,
you'd have said it was impossible that they should give any sort of
performance that night--let alone a good one. But by eight o'clock that
night, when the overture was called, you wouldn't have known them for
the same people.
There is, to begin with, a certain magic about make-up which lends a