A \ B \ C \ D \ E \ F \ G \ H \ I \ J \ K \ L \ M \ N \ O \ P \ R \ S \ T \ U \ V \ W \Z

The Real Adventure by Henry Kitchell Webster

H >> Henry Kitchell Webster >> The Real Adventure




The deprecatory young man was talking to him now, about her and the
duchess evidently, for he peered out into the hall to see if they were
still there; then vaulted down from the stage and came toward them.

The duchess got up, and with a good deal of manner, went over to meet
him. Rose felt outmaneuvered here. She should have gone to meet him
herself, but a momentary paralysis kept her in her chair. She didn't
hear what the duchess said. The manner of it was confidential, in marked
protest against the proximity of a handful of other people--the blond
musical director, the thick pianist in his undershirt, a baby-faced man
in round tortoise-shell spectacles, three or four of the chorus people,
each of whom had serious matters to bring before the director's
attention.

But all the confidences, it seemed, were on the side of the duchess.
Because, when John Galbraith answered her, his voice easily filled
the room. "You tell Mr. Pike, if that's his name, that I'm very much
obliged to him, but we haven't any vacancies in the chorus at present.
If you care to, leave your name and address with Mr. Quan, the assistant
stage manager; then if we find we need you, we can let you know."

[Illustration: "I want a job in the chorus."]

He said it not unkindly, but he exercised some power of making it
evident that as he finished speaking, the duchess, for him, simply
ceased to exist. Anything she might say or do thereafter, would be so
much effort utterly wasted.

The duchess drew herself up and walked away.

And Rose? Well, the one thing she wanted passionately to do just then,
was to walk away herself out of that squalid horrible room; to soften
her own defeat by evading the final sledge-hammer blow. What he had said
to the duchess licensed her to do so. If there were no vacancies ... But
she clenched her hands, set her teeth, pulled in a long breath, and
somehow, set herself in motion. Not toward the door, but toward where
John Galbraith was standing.

But before she could get over to him, the pianist and the musical
director had got his attention. So she waited quietly beside him for two
of the longest minutes that ever were ticked off by a clock. Then, with
disconcerting suddenness, right in the middle of one of the musical
director's sentences, he looked straight into her face and said: "What
do you want?"

She'd thought him tall, but he wasn't. He was looking on a perfect level
into her eyes.

"I want a job in the chorus," said Rose.

"You heard what I said to that other woman, I suppose?"

"Yes," said Rose, "but ..."

"But you thought you'd let me say it to you again."

"Yes," she said. And, queerly enough, she felt her courage coming back.
She managed the last "yes" very steadily. It had occurred to her that if
he'd wanted merely to get rid of her, he could have done it quicker than
this. He was looking her over now with a coolly appraising eye.

"What professional experience have you had?" he asked.

"I haven't had any."

He almost smiled when she stopped there.

"Any amateur experience?" he inquired.

"Quite a lot," said Rose; "pageants and things, and two or three little
plays."

"Can you dance?"

"Yes," said Rose.

He said he supposed ballroom dancing was what she meant, whereupon she
told him she was a pretty good ballroom dancer, but that it was
gymnastic dancing she had had in mind.

"All right," he said. "See if you can do this. Watch me, and then
imitate me exactly."

In the intensity of her absorption in his questions and her own answers
to them, she had never given a thought to the bystanders. But now as
they fell back to give him room, she swept a glance across their faces.
They all wore smiles of sorts. There was something amusing about
this--something out of the regular routine. A little knot of
chorus-girls halted in the act of going out the wide doors and stood
watching. Was it just a hoax? The suppressed unnatural silence sounded
like it. But at what John Galbraith did, one of the bystanders guffawed
outright.

It wasn't pretty, the dance step he executed--a sort of stiff-legged
skip accompanied by a vulgar hip wriggle and concluding with a
straight-out sidewise kick.

A sick disgust clutched at Rose as she watched--an utter revulsion from
the whole loathly business. She could scrub floors--starve if she had
to. She couldn't do the thing he demanded of her here out in the middle
of the floor, in her street clothes, without the excuse of music to make
it tolerable--and before that row of leering faces.

"Well?" he asked, turning to her as he finished. He wasn't smiling at
all.

"I'm not dressed to do that," she said.

"I know you're not," he admitted coolly, "but it can be done. Pick up
your skirts and do it as you are,--if you really want a job."

There was just a faint edge of contempt in that last phrase and,
mercifully, it roused her anger. A blaze kindled in her blue eyes, and
two spots of vivid color defined themselves in her cheeks.

She caught up her skirts as he had told her to do, executed without
compromise the stiff-legged skip and the wriggle, and finished with a
horizontal sidewise kick that matched his own. Then, panting, trembling
a little, she stood looking straight into his face.

The first thing she realized when the processes of thought began again
was that even if there had been a hoax, she was not, in the event, the
victim of it. The attitude of her audience told her that. Galbraith was
staring at her with a look that expressed at first, clear astonishment,
but gradually complicated itself with other emotions--confusion, a glint
of whimsical amusement. That gleam, a perfectly honest, kindly one,
decided Rose to take him on trust. He wasn't a brute, however it might
suit his purposes to act like one. And with an inkling of how her blaze
of wrath must be amusing him, she smiled slowly and a little
uncertainly, herself.

"We've been rehearsing this piece two weeks," he said presently, looking
away from her when he began to talk, "and I couldn't take any one into
the chorus now whom I'd have to teach the rudiments of dancing to. I
must have people who can do what I tell them. That's why a test was
necessary. Also, from now on, it would be a serious thing to lose
anybody out of the chorus. I couldn't take anybody who had come down
here--for a lark."

"It's not a lark to me," said Rose.

Now he looked around at her again. "I know it isn't," he said. "But I
thought when you first came in here, that it was."

With that, Rose understood the whole thing. It was evidently a fact that
despite the plain little suit, the beaver hat, the rough ulster she was
wearing, she didn't look like the sort of girl who had to rely on
getting a job in the chorus for keeping a roof over her head. Looks,
speech, manner--everything segregated her from the type. It was all
obvious enough, only Rose hadn't happened to think of it. It accounted,
of course, for the rather odd way in which the landlady, the
ticket-seller at the Globe, and meek little Mr. Quan, the assistant
stage manager, all had looked at her, as at some one they couldn't
classify. John Galbraith, out of a wider experience of life, had
classified her, or thought he had, as a well-bred young girl who, in a
moment of pique, or mischief, had decided it would be fun to go on the
stage. The test he had applied wasn't, from that point of view,
unnecessarily cruel. The girl he had taken her for, would, on being
ordered to repeat that grotesque bit of vulgarity of his, have drawn her
dignity about her like a cloak, and gone back in a chastened spirit to
the world where she belonged.

A gorgeous apparition came sweeping by them just now, on a line from the
dressing-room to the door--a figure that, with regal deliberation, was
closing a blue broadcloth coat, trimmed with sable, over an authentic
Callot frock. The Georgette hat on top of it was one that Rose had last
seen in a Michigan Avenue shop. She had amused herself by trying to
vizualize the sort of person who ought to buy it. It had found its
proper buyer at last--fulfilled its destiny.

"Oh, Grant!" said John Galbraith.

The queenly creature stopped short and Rose recognized her with a jump,
as the sulky chorus-girl. Dressed like this, her twenty pounds of
surplus fat didn't show.

Galbraith walked over to her. "I shan't need you any more, Grant." He
spoke in a quiet impersonal sort of way, but his voice had, as always, a
good deal of carrying power. "It's hardly worth your while trying to
work, I suppose, when you're so prosperous as this. And it isn't worth
my while to have you soldiering. You needn't report again."

He nodded not unamiably, and turned away. Evidently she had ceased to
exist for him as completely as the duchess. She glared after him and
called out in a hoarse throaty voice, "Thank Gawd I don't _have_ to work
for you."

He'd come back to Rose again by this time, and she saw him smile. "When
you do it," he said over his shoulder, "thank Him for me too." Then to
Rose: "She's a valuable girl; had lots of experience; good-looking;
audiences like her. I'm giving you her place because as long as she's
got those clothes and the use of a limousine, she won't get down to
business. I'd rather have a green recruit who will. I'm hiring you
because I think you will be able to understand that what you feel like
doing isn't important and that what I tell you to do is. The next
rehearsal is at a quarter to eight to-night. Give your name and address
to Mr. Quan before you go. By the way, what is your name?"

"Rose Stanton," she said. "But ..." She had to follow him a step or two
because he had already turned away. "But, may I give some other name
than that to Mr. Quan?" He frowned a little dubiously and asked her how
old she was. And even when she told him twenty-two, he didn't look
altogether reassured.

"That's the truth, is it? I mean, there's nobody who can come down here
about three days before we open and call me a kidnaper, and lead you
away by the ear?"

"No," said Rose gravely, "there's no one who'll do that."

"Very good," he said. "Tell Quan any name you like."

The name she did tell him was Doris Dane.

It was a quarter to seven when she came out through the white doors into
North Clark Street. The thing that woke her out of a sort of daze as she
trudged along toward her room in the unrelenting rain was a pleasurable
smell of fried onions; whereupon she realized that she was legitimately
and magnificently hungry. In any other condition, the dingy little
lunch-room she presently turned into, would hardly have invited her. But
the spots on the frayed starchy table-cloth, the streakiness of the
glasses, the necessity of polishing knife and fork upon her damp napkin,
couldn't prevent her doing ample justice to a small thick platter of ham
and eggs, and a plate of thicker wheat-cakes.

It occurred to her as she finished, that a quarter to eight probably
meant the hour at which the rehearsal was to begin. She'd have to be
back at the hail at least fifteen minutes earlier, in order to be
dressed and ready. She had no time to waste; would even have to hurry a
little.

She didn't try to explore for the reason why this discovery pleased her
so much. It was enough that it did. She flew along through the rain to
her tunnel, charged up the narrow stair, and in the unlighted corridor
outside her room, collided with her trunk. Well, it was lucky it had
come anyway. She tugged it into her room after she had lighted the gas.

You might have seen, if you had been there to see, just a momentary
hesitation after she'd got her trunk key out of her purse before she
unlocked it. It was a sort of Jack-in-the-box, that trunk. Would the
emotions with which she'd packed it, spring out and clutch her as she
released the hasp? The saving factor in the situation was that it was a
quarter past seven. In fifteen minutes she must be back at North End
Hall, getting ready to go to work at her job. Suppose she hadn't found a
job this afternoon? The thought turned her giddy.

She plunged into her trunk, rummaged out a middy-blouse, a pair of black
silk bloomers, and her gymnasium sneakers, rolled them all together in a
bundle, got into her rubbers and her ulster again, and--I'm afraid there
is no other word for it--fled.

She was one of the first of the chorus to reach the hail and she had
nearly finished putting on her working clothes before the rest of them
came pelting in. But she didn't get out quickly enough to miss the
sensation that was exciting them all--the news that Grant had been
dropped. A few of them were indignant; the rest merely curious. The
indignant ones allowed themselves a license in the expression of this
feeling that positively staggered Rose; made use in a quite
matter-of-fact way of words she had supposed even a drunken truck-man
would have attempted to refrain from in the presence of a woman. She
made a discovery afterward, that there were many girls in the chorus who
never talked like that; and among those who did, the further distinction
between those who used vile language casually, or even jocularly, and
those who were driven to it only by anger. But for these first few
minutes in the dressing-room, she felt as if she had blundered into some
foul pit abysmally below the lowest level of decency.

One of the girls advanced the theory that Grant hadn't finally been
dropped; it was absurd that she should be. She was one of the most
popular chorus-girls in Chicago. The director was merely trying to scare
her into doing better work for him. She'd come back, all right. She had
reasons of her own, this girl intimated, for wanting to work, despite
the possession of French clothes and the use of a limousine. Her
"friend," it seemed, needed to be taught some sort of lesson. Grant
would come around before to-morrow night, and eat enough humble pie to
induce Galbraith to take her back.

If this theory were sound, and it had a dreadful plausibility to Rose,
her only chance for keeping her job would be to do as well as Grant
could do, to-night, in this very first rehearsal; and she went out on
the stage in a perfect agony of determination. She must see everything,
hear everything; put all she knew and every ounce of energy she had,
into the endeavor to make John Galbraith forget that she was a recruit
at all.

The intensity of this preoccupation was a wonderful protection to her.
It kept away the sick disgust that had threatened her in the
dressing-room; prevented her even glancing ahead to a future that would,
had she taken to guessing about it, utterly have overwhelmed her. The
intensely illuminated present instant kept her mind focused to its
sharpest edge.

It is true that before she had been working fifteen minutes, she had
forgotten all about Grant and the possibility of her return. She'd even
forgotten her resolution not to let John Galbraith remember she was a
recruit. Indeed, she had forgotten she was a recruit. She was nothing at
all but just a reflection of his will. She'd felt that quality strongly
in him even behind his back during the afternoon rehearsal. Now, on the
stage in front of him, she was completely possessed by it.

She didn't know she was tired, panting, wet all over with sweat. Really,
of course, she was pretty soft, judged by her own athletic standards.
She hadn't done anything so physically exacting as this for over a year.
But she had the illusion that she wasn't _doing_ anything now; that she
was just a passive plastic thing, tossed, flung, swirled about by the
driving power of the director's will. It wouldn't have surprised her if
the chairs had danced for him.

It couldn't of course have occurred to her that she was producing her
own effect on the director; she couldn't have surmised that he was
driving his rehearsal at a faster pace and with a renewed energy and
fire because of the presence, there in the ranks of his chorus, of a
glowing, thrilling creature who devoured his intentions half formed, met
them with a blue spark across the poles of their two minds.

She realized, when the rehearsal was over, that it had gone well and
that it couldn't have gone so if her own part had been done badly. She
hesitated a moment after he'd finally dismissed them with a nod, and an,
"Eleven o'clock to-morrow morning, everybody," from a previously formed
intention of asking him if she'd do. But she felt, somehow, that such a
question would be foolish and unnecessary.

He had marked her hesitation and shot her a look that she felt followed
her as she walked off, and she heard him say to the world in general and
in a heartfelt sort of way, "Good God!" But she didn't know that it was
the highest encomium he was capable of, nor that it was addressed to
her.

She carried away, however, a glow that saw her back to her room, and
through the processes of unpacking and getting ready for bed, though it
faded swiftly during the last of these. But when the last thing that she
could think of to do had been done, when there was no other pretext,
even after a desperate search for one, that could be used to postpone
turning out her light and getting into bed, she had to confess to
herself that she was afraid to do it. And with that confession, the
whole pack of hobgoblin terrors she had kept at bay so valiantly since
shutting her husband's door behind her, were upon her back.

Here she was, Rose Aldrich, in a three-dollar-a-week room on North Clark
Street, having deserted her husband and her babies--a loving honest
husband, and a pair of helpless babies not yet three months old--to
become a member of the chorus in a show called _The Girl Up-stairs!_ Was
there a human being in the world, except herself, who would not, as the
most charitable of possible explanations, assume her to be mad? Could
she herself, seeing her act cut out in silhouette like that, be sure she
wasn't mad? Hysterical anyway, the victim of her own rashly encouraged
fancies, just as Rodney had so often declared she was? Oughtn't she to
have let James Randolph explore the subconscious part of her mind and
find the crack there must be in it, that could have driven her to a
crazy act like this?

It didn't matter now. She couldn't go back. She never could go back
after the things she had said to Rodney, until she had made good those
fantastic theories of hers. Probably he wouldn't want her to come back
even then. He'd find out where she was of course--what she was doing.
Why had she been such a fool, going away, as not to have gone far enough
to be safe? He'd feel that she'd disgraced him. Any man would. And he'd
never forgive her. He'd divorce her, perhaps. He'd have a right to, if
she stayed away long enough. And, without her there, with nothing of her
but memories--tormenting memories, he'd perhaps fall in love with some
one else--marry some one else. And her two babies would call that
unknown some one "mother." She must have been crazy! She'd thought she
didn't love them. That had been a delusion anyway. Her heart ached for
them now--an actual physical ache that almost made her cry out. And for
Rodney himself, for his big strong arms around her! Would she ever feel
them again?

She told herself this was a nightmare--something to be fought off, kept
at bay. But how did that help her now, when the armor must be laid
aside? Sometime or other she must turn out that light and lie down in
that bed, defenseless. She had never in her life asked more of her
courage than when, at last, she did that thing. There were nine hours
then ahead of her before eleven o'clock and the next rehearsal.




CHAPTER III

ROSE KEEPS THE PATH


Rose rehearsed twice a day for a solid week without forming the faintest
conception of who "the girl" was or why she was "the girl up-stairs."
She didn't know what sort of scene it was for instance that they burst
in on through the space marked by two of the little folding chairs
brought up from the floor of the dance-hall for the purpose. The group
of iron tables borrowed from the bar and set solidly together in the
upper right-hand corner of the stage whenever they rehearsed a certain
one of their song numbers, might with equal plausibility represent a
mountain in Arizona, the front veranda of a house or a banquet table in
the gilded dining-hall of some licentious multi-millionaire. They got up
on the insecure thing and tried to dance; that was all she knew.

During the entire period, and for that matter, right up to the opening
night she never saw a bar of music except what stood on the piano rack,
nor a written word of the lyrics she was supposed to sing. Rose couldn't
sing very much. She had a rather timorous, throaty little contralto that
contrasted oddly with the fine free thrill of her speaking voice. But
nobody had asked her what her voice was, nor indeed, whether she could
sing at all. She picked up the tunes quickly enough, by ear, but the
words she was always a little uncertain about.

It all seemed too utterly haphazard to be possible, but Rose decided not
to ask any of the authorities about this, because, while the possibility
of Grant's return dangled over her head, she didn't want to remind
anybody how green she was. But she finally questioned one of her
colleagues in the chorus about it, and was told that back at the
beginning of things, they had had their voices tried by the musical
director, who had conducted three or four music rehearsals before John
Galbraith arrived. They had never had any music to sing from but there
had been half a dozen mimeograph copies of the words to the songs, which
the girls had put their heads together over in groups of three or four,
and more or less learned. What had become of this dope, and whether it
was still available for Rose in case she were animated by a purely
supererogatory desire to study it, the girl didn't know.

She was a pale-haired girl, whom Rose thought she had heard addressed as
Larson, and she had emerged rather slowly as an individual personality,
out of the ruck of the chorus; a fact in her favor, really, because the
girls who had first driven themselves home to Rose through the shell of
her intense preoccupation with doing what John Galbraith wanted, had
been the vividly and viciously objectionable ones. The thing that had
prompted her to sit down beside Larson and, with this question about how
one learned the words to the songs, take her first real step toward an
acquaintance, was an absence of any strong dislike, rather than the
presence of a real attraction.

She made a surprising discovery when the girl, with a friendly pat on
the sofa beside her, for an invitation to her to sit down, began
answering her question. She was a real beauty. Or, more accurately, she
possessed the constituent qualities of beauty. She was pure English
eighteenth century; might have stepped down out of a Gainsborough
portrait. Dressed right, and made up a little, with her effects
legitimately heightened (and warned not to speak), she could have gone
to the Charity Ball as the Honorable Mrs. Graham, and Bertie Willis
would have gone mad about her. Only you had to look twice at her to
perceive that this was so; and what she lacked was just the unanalyzable
quality that makes one look twice.

Her speaking voice would have driven Bertie mad, too--foaming, biting
mad. It was disconcertingly loud, in the first place, and it came
out upon the promontories of speech with a flat whang that fairly
made you jump. Its undulations of pitch gave you something the same
sensation as riding rapidly over a worn-out asphalt pavement in a
five-hundred-dollar automobile; unforeseen springs into the air,
descents into unexpected pits. Her grammar wasn't flagrantly bad, though
it had, rather pitiably, a touch of the genteel about it. But now, when
she spoke to Rose, and with the lassitude of fatigue in her voice
besides, Rose heard something friendly about it.

"I don't know what you should worry about any of that stuff for," she
said. "How you sing or what you sing don't make much difference."

Rose admitted that it didn't seem to. "But you see," she said (she
hadn't had a human soul to talk to for more than a week and she had to
make a friend of somebody); "you see, I've just got to keep this job.
And if every little helps, as they say, perhaps that would."

The girl looked at her oddly, almost suspiciously, as if for a moment
she had doubted whether Rose had spoken in good faith. "You've got as
good a chance of losing your job," she said, "as Galbraith has of losing
his."

"I don't worry about it," said Rose, "when I'm up there on the stage at
work. It's too exciting. And then, I feel somehow that it's going all
right. But early in the morning, I get to imagining all sorts of things.
He's so terribly sudden. The girl whose place I got,--she hadn't any
warning, you know. It just happened."

The Larson girl gave a decisive little nod. Not so much, it seemed, in
assent to what Rose had just said, but as if some question in her own
mind had been answered.

"You'll get used to that feeling," she said. "You've got to take a
chance anyway, so why worry? We can work our heads off, but if the piece
is a fliv the opening night, they'll tack up the notice, and there we'll
be with two weeks' pay for eight weeks' work, and another six weeks'
work for nothing in something else if we're lucky enough to get it."

Copyright (c) 2007. bestextbooks.com. All rights reserved.

Various - "The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 44, September 9, 1897"

Harriet S. Caswell - "Walter Harland"

Eden Phillpotts - "Children of the Mist"

F. Marion Crawford - "The Little City Of Hope"