Chapter 32

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."

This was a possibility Rose hadn't thought of. "But--that isn't fair!" she said.

The other girl laughed grimly. "Fair!" she echoed. "What they want to print that word in the dictionary for, I don't see. Because what it means don't exist. Not where I live, anyway. But what's the good of making a fuss about it? We've got to take our chance like everybody else."

"I don't believe this piece will fall, though," said Rose. "I don't think Mr. Galbraith would let it. I think he's a perfect wonder, don't you?"

The Larson girl looked at her again. "He's supposed to be about the best in the business," she said, "and I guess he is." She added, "Dave tells me he's going to put you with us in the sextette."

Dave was the thick pianist, and Rose had found him in the highest degree obnoxious. He seemed to occupy an indeterminate social position in their ship's company, between the forecastle, which was the chorus, and the quarter-deck, which comprised Galbraith (you might call him the pilot), the baby-faced man with the tortoise-shell spectacles, reputed to be the author, two awesome intermittent gentlemen identified in the dressing-room as the owners of the piece, and the musical director, together with one or two more as yet unclassified. The principals, when they should appear, would, Rose assumed, belong on the quarter-deck too. The social gap between this afterguard and Rose and her colleagues in the chorus, was not so very wide, but it was abysmally deep. Nevertheless, the pianist, buoyed up on the wings of a boundless effrontery, seemed to manage to remain unaware of it.

He had started rehearsals with this piece, it appeared, as a chorus-man, and had become a pianist, thanks to the interposition of Fate (the real pianist had fallen suddenly and desperately ill), and to his own irresistible assurance that he could do anything. He could keep time and he hit perhaps a third of the notes right.

The chorus liked him. The girls all called him Dave, seemed to appreciate his notion of humor, and accepted his hugs and pawings as a matter of course. But he took his jokes, his familiarities, and his apparently impregnable self-esteem, upon the quarter-deck--slapped the author on the back now and then, and had even been known to address John Galbraith as "Old man." Incidentally, he hung about within ear-shot during conferences of the powers, freely offered his advice, and brought all sorts of interesting tidbits of gossip and prophecy back to the chorus.

His announcement that Rose was going to be put into the sextette was entitled to consideration, even though it couldn't be banked on. There were three mediums and three big girls in the sextette. (Olga Larson was one of the mediums and so needn't fear replacement by Rose, who was a big girl.) Besides appearing in two numbers as a background to one of the principals, they had one all to themselves, a fact which constituted them a sort of super-chorus. Galbraith used to keep them for endless drills after the general rehearsal was dismissed.

But the intimation that Rose was to be promoted to this select inner circle, didn't, as it first came to her, give her any pleasure. Somehow, as Larson told her about it, she could fairly see the knowing greasy grin that would have been Dave's comment on this prophecy. And in the same flash, she interpreted the Larson girl's look, half incredulous, half satirical, and her, "You've got as good a chance of losing your job as Galbraith has of losing his."

"I haven't heard anything about being put in the sextette," she said quietly, "and I don't believe I will be."

"Well, I don't know why not." There was a new warmth in the medium's voice. Rose had won a victory here, and she knew it. "You've got the looks and the shape, and you can dance better than any of the big girls, or us mediums, either. And if he doesn't put that big Benedict lemon into the back line where she belongs, and give you her place in the sextette, it will be because he's afraid of her drag."

Rose forbore to inquire into the nature of the Benedict girl's drag. Whatever it may have been, John Galbraith was evidently not afraid of it, because as he dismissed that very rehearsal, calling the rest of the chorus for twelve the following morning, and the sextette for eleven, he told Rose to report at the earlier hour. And a moment later, she heard Dave say to the big show girl named Vesta Folsom (some one with a vein of playful irony must have been responsible for this christening), "Well, maybe I didn't call that turn."

"You're the original wise guy, all right," Vesta admitted. "You're Joseph to all the sure things."

Barring Olga Larson, the chorus was probably unanimous, Rose reflected, in looking at it like that. They accounted for her having got a job in the first place at Grant's expense, and a promotion so soon thereafter to the sextette, by assuming that John Galbraith had a sentimental interest in her. Whether his reward had been collected in advance, or was still unpaid, was an interesting theme for debate. But that, past or present, the reward was his actuating motive, it wouldn't occur to anybody to question.

There was no malice in this. Rose didn't lose caste with any of them on account of it. But a chorus-girl is the most sentimental person in the world. If there's anybody who really believes that love makes the world go round, she is that one. It's love that actuates men to deeds of heroism or of crime; it's love that makes men invest good money in musical comedies; love that makes stars out of her undeserving sisters in the chorus; love that is always waiting round the corner to open the door to wealth and fame for her.

So when Grant came back and ate her humble pie in vain, and later, when Benedict was relegated to a place in the back line, the natural explanation was that Galbraith was crazy about the new girl.

Of course it set Rose all ablaze with wrath when she became aware of this. It was precisely because she had rebelled against the theory that love was what made the world go round, that she was here in the chorus. Had she been content to let it make her world go round, she never would have left Rodney. The only way she had of refuting the assumption in this case would be by making good so demonstrably and instantaneously, that they'd be compelled to see that her promotion had been inevitable.

It was in this spirit, with blazing cheeks and eyes, that she attacked the next morning's rehearsal. She was only dimly aware of Benedict out in the hall in front, viperishly waiting for the arrival of one of the owners to make an impassioned plea for reinstatement. Her tears or her tantrums were matters of supremely little importance. But that John Galbraith should see that he had promoted her on merit and on nothing but merit, mattered enormously.

Lacking the clue, he watched her in a sort of amused perplexity. Her way of snatching his instructions, her almost viciously determined manner of carrying them out, would have been natural had she been working under the spur of some stinging rebuke, instead of under the impetus of an unexpected promotion.

"Don't make such hard work of it, Dane," he said at last. "You're all right, but have a little fun out of it. There are eight hundred people out there," he waved his arm out toward the empty hall, "who have paid their hard-earned money to feel jolly and have a good time. If you go on looking like that, they'll think this piece was produced by Simon Legree."

There came the same gleaming twinkle in his eye that had disarmed her resentment once before, and as before, she found herself feeling rather absurd. What mattered the microcephalic imaginings of greasy Dave and his friends among the chorus? John Galbraith wasn't the sort of man to get infatuated with a chorus-girl. The gleam in his eye was enough, all by itself, to make that plain.

So, flushing up a little, she grinned back at him, gave him a nod of acquiescence, and fell back to her place for the beginning of the next evolution.

"If she smiles like that," thought John Galbraith, "she'll break up the show." At the end of the rehearsal, he said to her, "You're doing very well indeed, Dane. If I could have caught you ten years ago, I could have made a dancer out of you."

It was a very real, unqualified compliment, and as such Rose understood it. Because, by a dancer, he meant something very different from a prancing chorus-girl. The others giggled and exchanged glances with Dave at the piano. They didn't understand. To them, the compliment seemed to have been delivered with the left hand. And somehow, an amused recognition of the fact that they didn't understand, as well as of the fact that she did, flashed across from John Galbraith's eyes to hers.

"Just a minute," he said as they all started to leave the stage, and they came back and gathered in a half-circle around him. "We'll rehearse the first act to-night with the principals. You six girls are supposed to be young millionairesses, very up-to-date-bachelor-girl type, intimate friends of the leading lady, who is a multi-millionairess that's run away from home. You've all got a few lines to say. Go to Mr. Quan and get your parts and have them up by to-night."

At half past four that afternoon, when the regular chorus rehearsal was over, Rose asked John Galbraith if she might speak to him for a minute. He had one foot on a chair and was in the act of unlacing his dancing shoes, so he seemed to be, for him, comparatively permanent. He had a disconcerting way, she had noticed, of walking away on some business of his own in the middle of other people's sentences, intending to come back, no doubt, in time to hear the end of them, but forgetting to.

"Fire away," he said, looking around at her over his shoulder. Then, with reference to the blue-bound pair of sides she held in her hand, "What's the matter? Isn't the part fat enough for you?"

"Fat enough?" Rose echoed inquiringly. "Oh, you mean long enough." She smiled in good-humored acknowledgment of his joke, and let that do for an answer.

John Galbraith hadn't been sure that it would be a joke to Rose. He'd been a musical-comedy producer so long that no megalomaniacal absurdity could take him by surprise. There were chorus-girls no doubt in this very company, who, on being promoted to microscopic parts, would be capable of complaining because they weren't bigger.

"All the same," said Rose, "I'm afraid I've got to tell you that I can't take this, and to ask you to put me back into the regular chorus."

He wasn't immune to surprise after all, it seemed. He straightened up in a flash and stared at her. "What on earth are you talking about?" he asked.

"If I have words to say, even only a few, wouldn't anybody who happened to be in the audience, know who I was?--I mean if they knew me already."

"Of course they would. What of it?"

"I told you," said Rose, "the day you gave me a job, that it wasn't a lark. I had to begin earning my own living suddenly, and without any training for it at all, and this seemed to be the best way. That's--all true, and it's true that no one could come and, as you say, lead me away by the ear. Nobody's responsible for me but myself. But there are people who'd be terribly shocked and hurt if they found out I'd gone on the stage. They know I'm earning my own living, but they don't know how I'm doing it. I thought that as just one of the chorus, made up and all, I'd be safe. But with these lines to say ..."

"Now listen to me," said John Galbraith; "listen as hard as you can. Because when I've done talking, you will have to make up your mind. In the first place you wouldn't be 'safe,' as you said, even in the chorus. A make-up isn't a disguise. You will be rouged and powdered, your eyelashes blackened, your lips reddened and so on, not to make you look different, but to keep you looking the same under the strong lights. You're not the sort of person to escape notice. That's the reason I made up my mind to hire you before I knew you could dance. I saw you standing back there in the doorway. You've got the quality about you that makes people see you. That's one of your assets.

"So, if you're ashamed of being recognized in this business, you'd better get out of it altogether. On the other hand, it seems to me that if you've got to earn your living, it's nobody's business but your own how you do it. You're the one who'll go hungry if you don't earn it, not these friends of yours. So, if it seems a legitimate way of earning a living to you, if you don't feel disgraced or degraded by being in it, you'd better forget your friends and go ahead. You've made an excellent start; you've earned a legitimate promotion. It will mean that instead of getting twenty dollars a week when the show opens, you will get twenty-five. It's a long time since I've given a person without experience a chance like that. I gave it to you because you seemed ambitious and intelligent--the sort who'd see me through. But if you aren't ambitious, if the game doesn't look worth playing to you, and you aren't willing to play it for all it's worth--why, good as you are, I don't want you at all. So that's your choice!"

His manner wasn't quite so harsh as his words, but it convinced her that he meant every one of them right to the foot of the letter.

She couldn't answer for a moment. She hadn't guessed that the choice he was going to offer her would be between taking the little part he had given her and playing it for all it was worth, defiant of Rodney's feelings and of the scandal of the Lake Shore Drive--and going back to her three-dollar room this afternoon, out of a job and without even a glimmering chance of finding another.

"Take your time," he said. "I don't want to be a brute about it, but look here! Try to see it my way for a minute. Here are my employers, the owners of this piece. They're putting thousands of dollars into the production of it. They've hired me to make that production a success. Well, I don't know about other games, but this game's a battle. If we win, it will be because we put every bit of steam and every bit of confidence we've got into it and _make_ it win. That goes for me, and for the principals, and right down through to the last girl in the chorus. Every night there'll be a new audience out there that you will have to fight--shake up out of the grouch they get when they pay for their tickets; persuade to laugh and loosen up and come and play with you.

"Will you be able to do your share, do you suppose, if you're slinking around, afraid of being recognized? We don't care whether your pussy-cat friends get their fur rubbed the wrong way or not. The only thing we care about is putting this show across. Well, if you feel the way we do about it, if you can make it the one thing you do care about, too--why, come along. Let the pussy-cats go ..." He finished with a snap of his fingers.

"The only one that really matters isn't a pussy-cat," said Rose, with a reluctant wide smile, "and--he'd agree with you altogether, if he didn't know you were talking to me. And I'm really very much obliged to you."

"You will come along then?"

"Yes," said Rose, "I'll come."

"No flutters?" questioned Galbraith. "No eleventh-hour repentance?"

"No," said Rose, "I'll see it through."

John Galbraith went away satisfied. Rose had the same power that he had, of making a simple unemphatic statement irresistibly convincing. When she said that she would go through, he knew that unless struck by lightning, she would. But there had been something at once ironic and tender about the girl's smile, when she had spoken of the only one who really mattered, that he couldn't account for. Who was the only one that really mattered, anyway? Her husband? He didn't think it likely. Young women who quarreled with their husbands and ran away from them to go on the stage, wouldn't, as far as his experience went, be likely to smile over them like that. More probably a brother--a younger brother, perhaps, fiercely proud as such a boy would be of such a sister.

She certainly had sand, that girl. He was mighty glad his bluff that he would put her out of the chorus altogether, unless she took the little part in the sextette, had worked. He'd have felt rather a fool if she had called it.

Of course the thing that had got Rose was the echo, through everything John Galbraith had said, of Rodney's own philosophy; his dear, big, lusty, rather remorseless way. And now again, as before when she had left him, it was his view of life that was recoiling upon his own head.

She was really grateful to Galbraith. What had she left Rodney for, except to build a self for herself; to acquire, through whatever pains might be the price of it, a life that didn't derive from him; that was, at the core of it, her own? Yet here, right at the beginning of her pilgrimage, she'd have turned down the by-path of self-sacrifice; have begun ordering her life with reference to Rodney, rather than herself, if John Galbraith hadn't headed her back.