The Real Adventure
play a matinee in the town you were jumping to, you took your suit-case
to the theater, lugged it from there after the performance, to the
station, and spent an indefinite number of hours thereafter, in an
air-tight waiting-room. Waiting, be it observed, for a chance to curl up
in a seat in the day-coach, when the train came along.
But Rose didn't mind this very much. The rooms assigned to her and her
roommate were fully as comfortable as the one she had lived in on Clark
Street, and the meals, as a whole, were rather better than those her
habitual lunch-room had provided. As for riding on the train: it gave
you the sense of doing something and getting somewhere, without imposing
the necessity either for judgment or for resolution. The real
discomforts to Rose were not the material ones.
The piece had been, as she discovered during the one rehearsal she had
attended in Chicago, deliberately cheapened and vulgarized for the road.
The only one of the principals who had a shred of professional
reputation, was a comedian named Max Webber, who played the part of the
cosmetic king. He'd come up in vaudeville and his methods reeked of it.
He was featured in the billing and he arrogated all the privileges of a
real star. He was intensely and destructively jealous of any approbation
he didn't himself arouse, even if it was manifested when he was not on
the stage. He distended his part out of all reasonable semblance, and to
the practical annihilation of the plot, by the injection into it of
musty vaudeville specialties of his, which he assured the weak-kneed
management were knock-outs. And his clowning and mugging made it
impossible to play a legitimate scene with him, with any shadow of
professional self-respect.
The result of this was that the girl who had rehearsed Patricia
Devereux's part, an ambitious, well-equipped young woman who would have
added much-needed strength to the cast, delivered an ultimatum during
the last rehearsal but one, and on having her very reasonable demands
rejected, walked out. Olga Larson, who had understudied Patricia ever
since the Chicago opening, was given the part. The rest of the
principals were either pathetic failures with lamentable stories of
better days, or promising youngsters, like Olga herself, with no
adequate training.
The chorus was similarly constituted. There were fifteen girls in it,
including the sextette, now a trio, part of them worn-out veterans (one
of these was the duchess--do you remember her?--who had applied to
Galbraith for a job the day that Rose got hers) and the others green
young girls, not more than sixteen or seventeen, some of them, who had
never been on the stage before. It was one of these, a tiny, slim,
black-haired little thing, who gave her name as Dolly Darling, but
hadn't memorized it yet herself, obviously a runaway in quest of
romantic adventure, whom Rose adopted as a permanent roommate.
Her doing so opened up the breach between herself and Olga Larson. It
had existed, beneath the surface, ever since the night she had gone to
supper with Galbraith. It wasn't that Olga believed Rose had taken
Galbraith as a lover. She hadn't believed that even when she hurled the
accusation against her. The wounding thing was that Rose seemed not to
care whether she believed it or not; had met her tempestuous pleas for
forgiveness and her offers of unlimited love and faith "whatever Rose
might do and however things might look," with a cold distaste that
hardly differed from the feeling she had shown in response to the
tempest of angry accusation. She told Olga, to be sure, that everything
was all right; that the thing for both of them to do, was to treat the
quarrel as if it hadn't occurred.
This wasn't what Olga wanted at all. She wanted Rose as an emotional
objective, to love passionately and be jealous of, and, for a moment now
and then, hate, as a preliminary to another passionate reconciliation.
Rose had divined that this was so. Indeed, she understood it far better
than Olga did, having had to evade one or two "crushes" of a similar
sort while she was at the university. It was a sort of thing that went
utterly against her instincts, and she was secretly glad that the
quarrel on the opening night had given her a method of resisting this
one that need not seem too utterly heartless.
Since the quarrel, Olga had been distant and dignified. She had a
grievance (that Rose, pretending to forgive her confessed mistake, had
really not done so) but she was bearing it bravely. Rose, when she could
manage the manner, was good-humored and casual, and completely blind to
the existence of the grievance Olga so nobly concealed. But Olga's
wonderful good fortune, coming quite unheralded as it did, an
advancement she had played with in her day-dreams, and never thought of
as a realizable possibility, swept her out of her pose and carried her
with a rush into Rose's arms.
This happened not a quarter of an hour after Rose had secured
Goldsmith's consent to her own transfer to the Number Two company, and
the first thing that registered on her mind was that she, who had taught
Olga to talk, saved her her job, prevailed on Galbraith to dress her
properly, and won her a chance for the space of that one song refrain,
to make her individual appeal to the audience--Rose, who had done all
this, was now going out as a chorus-girl in the company of which Olga
was the leading woman. She didn't regret Olga's promotion, but she did
wish, for herself, that she might have been spared just now, this ironic
little cackle of laughter on the part of the malicious Goddess of
Chance.
She was ashamed of the feeling--was she getting as small as that?--and,
in consequence, she congratulated Olga a good deal more warmly than
otherwise she would have done. But this warmer manner of hers opened
Olga's flood-gates so wide, swamped her in such a torrent of sentiment,
that Rose simply took to flight.
There was an element of real maternal pity in Rose's adoption of little
Dolly Darling as her chum. Dolly was obviously as fragile and ephemeral
as a transparent sand-fly. She had nothing that you could call a mind or
a character, even of the most rudimentary sort. She knew nothing, except
how to dance, and she knew that exactly as a kitten knows how to play
with a ball of string; she dreamed of diamonds and wonderful restaurants
and a sardonic hero nine feet tall with a straight nose and a long chin,
who would clutch her passionately in his arms (there was no more real
passion in her than there is in a soap-bubble) and murmur vows of
eternal adoration in her ears.
She was a soap-bubble; that's the figure for her; just an iridescent
reflection, wondrously distorted, of the tawdry life about her--a
reflection, and then nothing!
But just the thin empty frailness of her, her gaiety in the face of
perfectly inevitable destruction, appealed to Rose. She had Dolly in her
pocket in five minutes, and before the end of the rehearsal, their
treaty was signed and sealed. They were to be chums, bosom friends! The
notion of it gave Rose the most spontaneous smile she'd had in days; the
first one that hadn't had a bitter quirk in it.
When, down at the union station on Sunday morning, as they were leaving,
Olga unfolded her plan that she and Rose should room together, Rose
owned up to herself that there had been another element than maternal
pity in her adoption of Dolly. She'd suspected that Olga would propose
something of this sort, and she had fortified herself against it.
Olga was furious, of course, when she learned what Rose had done, and
accused her, with a measure of justice, of having done it to be rid of
her. If Rose didn't want to remain under this imputation, she could
break with Dolly. When Rose refused to do this, Olga cut her off
utterly; damned her, disowned her. They were the first pair in the
company to begin not to speak.
As I said, the chief discomforts for Rose in those first ten days on the
road, were not the material ones. Olga's absurd way of ignoring her, the
fact that she attributed their quarrel, for the benefit of the company,
to Rose's jealousy of her success; worst of all, the fact that Rose
couldn't be sure she wasn't jealous of Olga's success, didn't feel at
least, contemplating their reversed positions, more like a failure than
she would have felt had the original girl kept the leading part,--all
this contributed to a discomfort that did matter, that tormented,
abraded, rankled.
It became the core of a sensation that she had turned cheap and shabby;
that the distinction, which with her first entrance into this life, she
had built up between herself and most of her colleagues, was breaking
down; that her fiber was coarsening, her fine sensitiveness becoming
calloused. It troubled her that she should feel so languid an
indifference over the vulgarity of the piece, a vulgarity which, under
Webber's infection, grew more blatant every day.
It was obvious to her that this quality was destroying whatever slim
chance for success they had. The lines, with the new ugly twist that had
been imparted to them, might draw a half dozen rude guffaws from
different parts of the audience, but the chill disfavor with which they
were received by the rest of the house, must, she felt, have been
apparent to everybody. There seemed, though, to be a superstition that a
laugh was a sacred thing; something to be fed carefully with more of the
same thing that had originally produced it. This treatment was persisted
in, despite the fact that the audiences shrank and shriveled and the
box-office receipts, she gathered from the gossip of the company, hung
just about at the minimum required to keep them going.
What troubled her was her own apathetic acceptance of it all. Just as
her ear seemed to have grown dull to the offenses that nightly were
committed against it on the stage, and to the leering response, which
was all they ever got from across the footlights, so her spirit
submitted tamely to the prospect of failure. She hardly seemed to
herself the same person who had set to work in a blaze of eager
enthusiasm, on the part she played so mechanically now.
She tried to reassure herself with the reflection that the tour meant
nothing to her, except as it fell in with an ulterior purpose, and that
it was actually serving that purpose well enough. She'd deliberately
turned aside from the main channel of her new life to give mind and soul
a rest they needed. When she'd got that rest and rallied her courage,
she'd take a fresh start. She had, lying safely in the bank in Chicago,
where Galbraith had taken her, something over two hundred dollars; for
she'd lived thriftily during the Chicago engagement and had added a
little every week to her nest-egg of profit from the costuming business.
So she had enough to get her to New York and see her through the process
of finding a new job. What sort of job it would be, she was still too
tired to think, but she was sure she could find something.
Meantime, out there on the road, she was making no effort to save. She
indulged in whatever small ameliorations to their daily discomforts her
weekly wage would run to.
It was thus that matters stood with her, when, with the rest of the
company, she arrived in Dubuque on a Wednesday morning, with an hour or
so to spare before the matinee.
CHAPTER XVI
ANTI-CLIMAX
It was a beastly day. A gusty rain, whipping up from the south, by way
of answer to the challenge of a heavy snowfall the day before, inflicted
a combination of the rigors of winter, with a debilitating, disquieting
hint of spring. The train, for which they had been routed out that
morning at seven o'clock, had been blistering hot and the necessarily
open windows had let in choking clouds of smoke.