CHAPTER XI
AN ILLUSTRATION
So far as externals went, her life, that spring, was immensely
simplified. The social demands on her, which had been so insistent all
winter, stopped almost automatically. The only exception was the Junior
League show in Easter week, for which she put in quite a lot of work.
She was to have danced in it.
This is an annual entertainment by which Chicago sets great store. All
the smartest and best-looking of the younger set take part in it, in
costumes that would do credit to Mr. Ziegfeld, and as much of Chicago as
is willing and able to pay five dollars a seat for the privilege is
welcome to come and look. Delirious weeks are spent in rehearsal, under
a first-class professional director, audience and performers have an
equally good time, and Charity, as residuary legatee, profits by
thousands.
Rose dropped in at a rehearsal one day at the end of a solid two hours
of committee work, found it unexpectedly amusing, and made a point
thereafter of attending when she could. Her interest was heightened if
not wholly actuated by some things Jimmy Wallace had been telling her
lately about how such things were done on the real stage.
He had written a musical comedy once, lived through the production of
it, and had spent a hard-earned two-weeks vacation trouping with it on
the road, so he could speak with authority. It was a wonderful Odyssey
when you could get him to tell it, and as she made a good audience she
got the whole thing--what everybody was like, from the director down,
how the principals dug themselves in and fought to the last trench for
every line and bit of business in their parts, and sapped and mined
ahead to get, here or there, a bit more;--how insanely hard the chorus
worked....
The thing got a sociological twist eventually, of course, when Jane
wanted to know if it were true, as alleged by a prominent woman writer
on feminism, that the chorus-girls were driven to prostitution by
inadequate pay. Jimmy demolished this assertion with more warmth than he
often showed. He didn't know any other sort of job that paid a totally
untrained girl so well. There were initial requirements, of course. She
had to have reasonably presentable arms and legs and a rudimentary sense
of rhythm. But it took a really accomplished stenographer, for instance,
to earn as much a week as was paid the average chorus-girl. The trouble
was that the indispensable assets in the business were not character and
intelligence and ambition, but just personal charms.
Rose grinned across at Rodney. "That's like wives, isn't it?" she
observed.
"And then," Jimmy went on, "the work isn't really hard enough, except
during rehearsals, to keep them out of mischief." Rose smiled again, but
didn't press her analogy any further. "But a girl who's serious about
it, who doesn't have to be told the same thing more than once, and
catches on, sometimes, without being told at all,--why, she can always
have a job and she can be as independent as anybody. She can get
twenty-five dollars a week or even as high as thirty. It's surprising
though," he concluded, "considering what a bunch of morons most of them
are, that they work as well as they do; turn up on time for rehearsals
and performances, even when they're feeling really seedy, stand the
awful bawling out they get every few minutes--because some directors are
downright savages--and keep on going over and over a thing till they're
simply reeling on their pins, without any fuss at all."
"They can always lose their job," said Barry. "There's great merit in
that."
The latter part of this conversation was what she was to remember
afterward, but the thing which impressed Rose at the time, and that held
her for hours looking on at the League show rehearsals, was what Jimmy
had told her about the technical side of the work of production, the
labors of the director, and so on.
The League was paying their director three hundred dollars a week, and
by the end of the third rehearsal Rose decided that he earned it. The
change he could make, even with one afternoon's work, in the
effectiveness, the carrying power, of a dance number was astonishing. It
wasn't at all a question of good taste. There stood Bertie Willis simply
awash with good taste and oozing suggestions whose hopeless futility was
demonstrated, even to him, the moment an attempt was made to put them
into effect. The director was concerned with matters of fact. There were
ascertained methods of getting a certain range of effects and he knew
what they were and applied them--as well as the circumstances admitted.
He was working under difficulties, poor chap! Rose, enlightened by Jimmy
Wallace, could see that. A man habituated to bawling at a girl, when the
spirit so moved him, "Here, you Belmont! What do you think you're trying
to do? You try sleeping at night and staying awake at rehearsal. See how
it works!"--accustomed to the liberty of saying things like that, and
then finding himself under the necessity of swallowing hard and counting
ten, and beginning with an--"I think, if you don't mind ...!" was in a
hard case.
Bertie Willis had his usefulness here. Sometimes Rose heard the director
whisper hoarsely, "For God's sake, don't let her do that! She _can't_ do
that!" and then Bertie would intervene and accomplish wonders by
diplomacy.
But it must be wonderfully exhilarating, Rose thought, to know exactly
why that girl was ridiculous and what to do to make her look right. And
to be able to sell your knowledge for three hundred dollars a week. This
was the sort of thing Rodney did, when one came to think of it. She
wondered whether he could sell his special sort of knowledge for as
much. That must be: the sort of possession Simone Gréville had had in
mind when she said that nothing worth having could be bought cheap.
Neither Rodney nor the director had found his specialty growing on a
bush!
But her specialty, which in her life was to fill the place a knowledge
of stage dancing filled in the director's, was to come in a different
way. You paid a price, of course, for motherhood, in pain and peril, but
it remained a miraculous gift, for all that.