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."

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