CHAPTER VIII

SUCCESS--AND A RECOGNITION

There is a kaleidoscopic character about the events of the ten days or

so preceding the opening performance of most musical comedies which

would make a sober chronicle of them seem fantastically incredible; and

this law of Nature made no exception in the case of _The Girl

Up-stairs_. There were rehearsals which ran so smoothly and swiftly that

they'd have done for performances; there were others so abominably bad

that the bare idea of presenting the mess resulting from six weeks'

toil, before people who had paid money to see it, was a nightmare.

As the nervous pressure mounted, people took to exploding all over the

place in the most grotesquely inconceivable ways and from totally

unpredictable causes. Freddy France, who played the comic detective

(like most comedians he had no sense of humor whatever and treated his

"art" with a sort of sacrificial solemnity), developed delusions of

persecution, proclaimed himself the victim of a conspiracy to which the

owners, the author, Galbraith and most of the principals were parties,

and finally, when the director cut out a little scene that he had two

feeble jokes in, reached up unexpectedly and hit McGill on the nose,

flung his part on the stage, stamped on it and left the theater. Quan

read his lines in a painstaking manner for two days and then, after a

three-hour session in the Sherman House bar, Freddy was induced to come

back.

Stewart Lester, one day, at the end of a long patient effort of

Galbraith's to improve his acting (he acted like a tenor; one needn't

say more than that), licked his thin red lips, and in a feline fury,

announced his indifference as to whether the management accepted his

resignation or that of Miss Devereux. As long as she insisted on

treating her vis-à-vis like a chorus-man, she'd perhaps be happier if a

chorus-man were given the part; and he would he only too happy, in case

the management agreed with her, to make the substitution possible.

Whereupon Miss Devereux remarked that even having been a failure in

grand opera didn't necessarily assure a man success in musical comedy,

and that possibly a chorus-man would be an improvement. Galbraith had a

long private conference with each of them--the fact that they would not

speak at all off stage guaranteed him against their comparing notes as

to what he'd said--and while the thing he effected could not be called a

reconciliation, it amounted to a sort of armed truce. They went through

their love scenes without actually scratching and biting.

Even little Anabel Astor, whose good humor for a long time had seemed

invincible, tempestuously left the stage one day in the middle of one of

her scenes with her dancing partner, and could be heard sobbing loudly

in the wings through all that remained of that rehearsal.

Queer things began happening to the plot, resulting sometimes from the

violent transposition of song numbers from one act to another, sometimes

from the interpolation of songs or specialties. Two or three scenes,

which the author regarded with special pride and was prepared to die in

the defense of, were pronounced by Galbraith to be junk. He had made

superhuman efforts, he told Goldsmith and Block, to put a little life

into them, and had demonstrated that this miracle was impossible of

performance. They were dead and they'd got to be buried before they

became, to the olfactory sense, any more unpleasant.

There was an ominous breathlessness in the air after this ultimatum had

been delivered, and at the next rehearsal, when the director announced

the cut of six solid pages of manuscript, the voice of the author was

heard from back of the hall proclaiming in a hollow Euripidean bellow

that it was all over. He was going to his lawyer to get an injunction

against the production of the piece.

Of all the persons directly, or even remotely, affected by this

nerve-shattering confusion, Rose was perhaps the least perturbed. The

only thing that really mattered to her, was the successful execution of

those twelve costumes. The phantasmagoria at North End Hall was a

regrettable, but necessary, interruption of her more important

activities. The interruption didn't interfere so seriously as at first

she thought it would. The routine of rehearsal as Galbraith developed

it, began with special scenes--isolated bits that needed modification or

polishing. The general rehearsals, taking this act or that and going

through with it from beginning to end, and involving, of course, the

presence of everybody in the company, didn't, as a rule, begin till

three in the afternoon; sometimes till as late as five. Of course when

they did begin, they lasted until all hours.

But the labors of the chorus, and even of the sextette, shrank very much

in proportion to the work of the principals. Nearly all the changes that

were made were in the direction of compressing the chorus and giving the

principals more room. So that for long stretches of time, during which,

dressed in her working clothes and curled up in one of the remoter of

the cushioned window-seats, but ready to answer a summons to the stage

as promptly as a fireman, she could let her mind run without

interruption on the solution of some of her own problems, and then be

ready when she went back to her room, to fall into bed and asleep (the

two acts had become practically simultaneous) secure in the possession

of a clearly thought out program for the morrow.

She wakened automatically at half past seven and was down-town by half

past eight, to do whatever shopping the work of the previous day

revealed the need of. The fact that it was, for the greater part, John

Galbraith's money she was spending (she had managed to put in a little

herself by calculating down to a fine point the necessary margin for

existence) worked to her advantage in these operations. She could not,

but for that fact, have forced herself to hunt down bargains so

persistently nor to keep the incidental expense for findings and such,

so low.

At nine-thirty in the morning--an unheard of hour in the theater--the

watchman at the Globe let her in the stage door, and Rose had half an

hour before the arrival of the wardrobe mistress and her assistant, for

looking over the work done since she had left for rehearsal the day

before.

She liked this quiet, cavernous old barn of a place down under the Globe

stage; liked it when she had it to herself before the two sewing women

came and later, when, with a couple of sheets spread down on the floor

she cut and basted according to her cambric patterns, keeping ahead of

the flying needles of the other two. After her own little room, the mere

spaciousness of it seemed almost noble. She even liked it, when, about

half past one in the afternoon, on matinée days, the chorus-girls of the

show now drawing to the end of its run, began dawdling in, passing

shrill jokes with Bill Flynn, the fireman, rummaging through the mail in

the letter-box, casually unfastening their clothes all the while,

preliminary to kimonos and make-up, gathering in little knots about the

sewing-machines and exclaiming in profane delight over the costumes. She

wondered at herself, sometimes, for having ceased to mind their

language, their shameless way of going half-clad, their general

atmosphere of moth-like worthlessness--and then laughed at herself for

wondering!

How would her own quality be finer, her soul a more ample thing, for the

keeping, on one of the shelves of it, of a pot of carefully preserved

horror? If she could succeed with these costumes, her success, she

hoped, would lead her directly into the business of designing other

costumes for the stage. And if she became a professional stage costumer,

this rather loose, ramshackle, down-at-the-heel morality of back-stage

musical comedy would be a permanent fact in her life, just as the

dustiness of law-books and the stuffiness of court rooms were permanent

facts in Rodney's.

As the work went on, her confidence in the success of this initiatory

venture became less ecstatic and more reasonable. A few of the costumes

were finished and, seen on live models (a couple of girls in the chorus

in the Globe show had volunteered to try on) were, if Rose knew anything

at all about clothes, without doubt or qualification, good.

She had had just one really bad quarter of an hour over them, and that,

back on Christmas Day as it happened, was when Galbraith, having

detained her after he had dismissed the rehearsal, asked to see her

sketches.

"Sketches!" she echoed, perplexed.

"Oh, I don't mean regular water-colored plates," he said. "Just whatever

rough drafts of the things you will have put down on paper to start

yourself off with. It's simple curiosity, you understand."

"But," she gasped, "I haven't put anything down on paper--not anything

at all! I don't know how to draw."

And now he was perplexed in turn. How could one design a costume without

drawing a picture of it?

She explained her working method to him; though not, she felt, very

successfully. She was perhaps a bit flustered, and he didn't seem to be

giving her his complete attention--seemed to be covering up, with the

pretense of listening, a strong interior abstraction.

This was again a good diagnosis as far as it went. Only it didn't dig in

far enough for even the faintest surmise as to what the nature of his

abstraction was.

"I could bring the patterns down here. Or, if you had time, you could

come up to my room and see them. But I'm afraid you couldn't tell much

from that, because they're all taken apart, you see, and they're just in

paper cambric and not the right colors."

What the man was struggling for--it had been his sole reason for

detaining her in the first place--was some sort of opening that would

make it seem natural to tell her he hoped her Christmas Day had not been

too intolerably unhappy; to shake hands with her and wish her

luck--assure her in one way or another, that she had in him a friend she

could bring her troubles to--any sort of troubles. He'd made up his mind

to do this when the Christmas rehearsal should he over, as long ago as

the night of their walk down the avenue. This resolution had been

reinforced by the look he had caught in her face when she came up to

rehearsal this afternoon--a rather misty, luminous, exalted look,--a

little lack of definition about her eyelids suggesting there had been

tears there.

This was good observation like her own of him. But, again like hers, in

its failure to get the central clue, it only mislead him, the worse. If

he could have guessed that she had been having a Christmas celebration

of her own that day; that there had been unwrapped and displayed, three

little presents she had bought the day before; one for her husband, and

one for each of her two babies, and that, just before starting for

rehearsal, she had wrapped them up and put them into her trunk to await

the day when they could be given, it might have altered matters

somewhat.

The thing that finally made it clearly impossible for Galbraith to

express anything at all of this feeling which he, in good faith, called

friendship for her, was her alternative offer--if he had time, to take

him up to her room for a look at the patterns.

If she's seen him as anything at all but starkly her employer and her

financier; if she's had the faintest glimmer of him as one who held for

her any personal feelings whatever, she never would have suggested as an

alternative to her bringing the patterns here to rehearsal, his coming

up to her room for a look at them.

The thing of all others that irritated Galbraith was the possession of a

divided mind. Just now, disappointed as he was, almost to the point of

pain, though he wouldn't acknowledge to himself that it went as far as

that, over the evident fact that his relation to the girl, in spite of

their partnership, was exactly what it had been from the beginning, he

was still aware that if he'd got the opening he wanted, had managed

another of those warm lithe hand-clasps with her, and had got the notion

across to her that he wanted her to make a friend of him and a

confidant, he'd be going away now, afterward, under the painful

misgiving that he was a bit of an old fool. The product of all this

irritation was, however, that he declined Rose's offer of a view of her

patterns rather bruskly.

"It was just curiosity, as I said. Go along your own way and don't worry

about me. You will be all right."

Rose couldn't feel much conviction behind this expression of

confidence, and she went away, as I have said, in a sort of panic. Was

she all wrong, after all? Couldn't you design stage costumes except by

making pictures of them? She knew what he meant by water-colored plates.

She'd seen them framed in the lobbies at musical shows she'd been to

with Rodney. That was how costume designers worked, was it? Well she

knew she never could do anything like that.

But her fears only lasted until she got back to her room and caught a

reassuring look at the pattern that was assembled on the form. After

all, the pictures in the lobby weren't so important as the costumes on

the stage. And as for Galbraith--well, if he didn't expect too much of

her, that was all the better.

In keeping with the good luck which had attended everything that

happened in connection with this first venture of hers, she was able to

tell Galbraith that both sets of costumes were done and ready to try on,

on the very day he announced that the next rehearsal would be held at

ten to-morrow morning at the Globe. It might very easily have happened,

of course, that Rose's enterprise, together with Galbraith's partnership

in it, had become known here or there, got passed on from one to

another, with modifications and embellishments according to fancy, and

grown to be a monument of scandal and conjecture. But nothing is more

capricious than the heat-lightning of gossip, and it just chanced that,

up to the morning of Rose's little triumph, no one beyond Galbraith and

Rose herself even suspected the identity with Dane of the chorus, of the

costumer who was to submit, on approval, gowns for the sextette. The

fact, of course, was bound to come out on the day the company moved over

for rehearsals to the Globe, and the event was very happily dramatized

for Rose, by her ability to let the costumes appear first and her

authorship of them only after their success was beyond dispute.

She persuaded the girls to wait until all six were dressed in the

afternoon frocks and until she herself had had a chance to give each of

them a final inspection and to make a few last touches and

readjustments. Then they all trooped out on the stage and stood in a

row, turned about, walked here and there, in obedience to Galbraith's

instructions shouted from the back of the theater.

It was dark out there and disconcertingly silent. The glow of two cigars

indicated the presence of Goldsmith and Block in the middle of a little

knot of other spectators.

The only response Rose got--the only index to the effect her labors had

produced--was the tone of Galbraith's voice. It rang on her ear a little

sharper, louder, and with more of a staccato bruskness than the

directions he was giving called for. And it was not his practise to put

more cutting edge into his blade, or more power behind his stroke, than

was necessary to accomplish what he wanted. He was excited, therefore.

But was it by the completeness of her success or the calamitousness of

her failure?

"All right," he shouted. "Go and put on the others."

There was another silence after they had fled out on the stage again,

clad tins time in the evening gowns--a hollow heart-constricting

silence, almost literally sickening. But it lasted only a moment. Then,

"Will you come down here, Miss Dane?" called Galbraith.

There was a slight, momentary, but perfectly palpable shock accompanying

these words--a shock felt by everybody within the sound of his voice.

Because the director had not said, "Dane, come down here." He had said,

"Will you come here, Miss Dane?" And the thing amounted, so rigid is the

etiquette of musical comedy, to an accolade. The people on the stage and

in the wings didn't know what she'd done, nor in what character she was

about to appear, but they did know she was, from now on, something

besides a chorus-girl.

Rose obediently crossed the runway and walked up the aisle to where

Galbraith stood with Goldsmith and Block, waiting for her. She was still

feeling a little numb and empty.

Galbraith, as she came up, held out a hand to her. "I congratulate you,

Miss Dane," he said. "They're admirable. With all the money in the

world, I wouldn't ask for anything handsomer."

Before she could say anything in reply, he directed her attention, with

a nod of the head, to the partners, and walked away. Rose gasped at

that. She'd never thought beyond him--beyond the necessity of pleasing

him; and that he'd carry the details of the business through with

Goldsmith and Block, she'd taken for granted. Now, here she was chucked

into the water and told to swim. She'd never in her life, of course,

tried to sell anything. What her mind first awoke to was that the

partners were looking rather blank. Block, indeed, let his eyes follow

the retreating Galbraith with a momentary look of outraged astonishment.

Her wits, quickened by the emergency, interpreted the look. Galbraith,

chucking her into the water indeed, had thrown her a life-preserver--the

tip that her wares were good.

Goldsmith, quicker and shrewder than his junior, was already smiling

politely. "They really are very good," he said. "If they are not too

expensive for us, we'll consider buying them."

"They'll be," said Rose, "the twelve of them, four hundred and

sixty-five dollars." She had something the same feeling of astonishment

on hearing herself say this, that she'd had when she heard herself

telling Galbraith that she'd design the costumes. Something or other had

spoken without her will--almost without her knowledge. She had one

figure clearly etched in her brain; that was the one hundred and ninety

dollars she must pay back to Galbraith; and she'd put in fifty of her

own. There was also a matter of twenty dollars or so still to be paid to

the wardrobe mistress and her assistant. But this four hundred and

sixty-five dollars had simply come out of the air.

Block pursed his lips and emitted a fine thin whistle of astonishment.

Goldsmith heaved a sigh. "My dear young lady," he protested. "The

inducement held out to us to wait for these costumes of yours, was that

they were to be cheap. But four hundred and sixty-five dollars is

ridiculous! That's a lot of money."

"Quite a lot less," said Rose, "than the ones Mrs. Goldsmith picked out

came to. They were just over six hundred." Goldsmith smiled

indulgently. "By the figures on the tags, yes," he said. "But would we

have paid that, do you think? Those figures represent what they'd like

to get from people who buy one apiece. But from us, buying twelve ..."

He shrugged his shoulders expressively.

Well, this was reasonable and no doubt true and it left Rose rather

aghast. She turned away toward the stage with the best appearance of

indifference she could muster. Her mind was making an agonized effort to

add up one hundred and ninety, fifty and twenty. But in the excitement

of the moment it simply balked--rejected the problem altogether. She

didn't think that the total came to much over three hundred dollars, but

she couldn't be sure. And then there was, sticking burr-like, somewhere,

the consciousness of another hundred unaccounted for in this total.

Until she could discover what the gowns had actually cost her, she

couldn't say anything. Therefore, she just stood where she was and said

nothing whatever.

Goldsmith cleared his throat. "Really," he said in an intensely

aggrieved tone, "you must try to see it from our point of view. This

production's cost us thousands of dollars. If we bankrupt ourselves

before the opening night it will be a bad business for everybody. You

ought to see that. The costumes are very nice, I admit that. But

remember we took a chance on it. We waited for them with the idea that

you'd cooperate with us in saving money."

Rose made a last frantic struggle to induce her figures to add up, but

they were getting more meaningless every minute.

There was another moment of silence. Then Block took up the refrain with

variations. But just as he began to speak, a brilliantly luminous ray of

light struck Rose. She could have answered Goldsmith's arguments--would

have done so, but for her preoccupation with that trifling sum in

arithmetic. But it was incomparably better tactics not to answer at all.

Because if she could answer their arguments, they in turn could answer

hers. She'd be a child in their hands once she began to talk. But her

silence disconcerted them--gave them nothing to go on. Well, then,

she'd let them do the work and see what happened.

But suppose, through her stubborn insistence, they should refuse the

costumes at any price! Well, the world wouldn't come to an end. She'd

live through it somehow, and somehow she'd manage to repay Galbraith.

The partners went on talking alternately with symptoms of rising

impatience.

"Oh, come," said Block at last, "we can't be all day about this! Your

figure is out of all reason. If you'd said even four hundred now ..."

"Oh, yes," said Goldsmith. "We want to be liberal. We appreciate you've

done a good job. Say four hundred and I'll write you a check for it

now." He took a small check-book and a fountain pen out of his pocket.

"That's all right, eh?"

Rose made another effort at addition. A hundred and ninety, and fifty,

and twenty, and the other ghostly hundred that wouldn't account for

itself and yet insisted on coming in and mixing everything up. She

turned on the two partners a look of perfectly genuine distress.

"If you'll let me go away and add it up ..." she began.

Goldsmith's heart was touched. The costumes were a bargain at four

hundred and sixty-five, and he knew it. There was an indescribable sort

of dash to them that would lend tone to the whole production. And then

the face of that pretty young girl who must have worked so desperately

hard to make them and who was so obviously helpless at this bargaining

game, would have moved a harder heart than his.

"Oh, all right!" he said. "We'll give in. Four hundred"--he began making

out the check, but his hand hung over it a moment--"and fifty. How's

that?"

Rose drew in a long breath. "That's all right," she said.

It was just as she turned away with the check made out to Doris Dane in

her wrist-bag, that the mystery of that phantom hundred dollars solved

itself. It was the hundred dollars she'd borrowed from Rodney and could

now return to him!

Galbraith took the first chance he could make to shoot her a low-voiced

question. "How much did you get?" he asked, and his face showed

downright surprise when she told him. "That's a pretty fair price," he

commented. "I was afraid they'd screw you way down on it, and I wanted

to help you out, but ..."

"Oh, you did," said Rose. "Telling me they were good. Of course you

couldn't have done anything more. The first thing I want to do," she

went on, "is to pay you back. But I don't know just how to do it. I

can't go to the bank where they know me and--anyway, the name on the

check isn't right."

He told her how easily that could be fixed. He'd take her to the bank he

used here in town and identify her. Then she could pay him and deposit

the balance to her own account. It was a bank where they didn't mind

small accounts. That would be much better than carrying her money around

with her where it could too easily be stolen.

He was very kind about it all and they put the program through that day.

Yet she was vaguely conscious of a sense that he seemed a little

chilled, as if something about the transaction unaccountably depressed

him.

And indeed it was true that he'd have found his tendency to fall in love

with her a good deal harder to resist if she'd shown herself more

helpless in the hands of Goldsmith and Block. She'd actually driven a

good bargain--an unaccountably good bargain! He wished he'd been on hand

to see how she did it. Well, women were queer, there was no getting away

from that.

But Goldsmith and Block came back the next day and drove, in turn, a

good bargain of their own.

"You've certainly got a good eye for costumes, Miss Dane," Goldsmith

said, "and here's a proposition we'd like to make. A lot of these other

things we've got for the regular chorus don't look so good as they

might. You'll be able to see changes in them that'll improve them maybe

fifty per cent. Well, you take it on, and we'll begin paying you your

regular salary now; you understand, twenty-five dollars a week,

beginning to-day."

Rose accepted this proposition with a warm flush of gratitude. It

indicated, she felt, that they were still friendly toward her, disposed

of certain misgivings she'd experienced the night before, lest in

driving, unwittingly, so good a bargain with them, she had incurred

their enmity.

But, from the moment her little salary began, she found herself

retained, body and soul, exactly as Galbraith himself was. They'd bought

all her ideas, all her energy, all her time, except a few scant hours

for sleep and a few snatched minutes for meals. She gave her employers,

up to the time when the piece opened at the Globe, at a conservative

calculation, about five times their money's worth. Even if she hadn't

been in the company she'd have found something like two days' work in

every twenty-four hours, just in the wardrobe room. Because the costumes

were cheap and the frank blaze of borders, footlights and spots,

pitilessly betrayed the fact. One set for the ponies was so hopelessly

bad that the owners refused to accept them, and Rose, on the spur of the

moment, made up a costume--they were uniform, fortunately--to replace

them. The wardrobe mistress, with two assistants, and under Rose's

intermittent supervision, managed somehow to get them made. And there

wasn't a single costume, outside Rose's own twelve, that hadn't to be

remodeled more or less.

On top of all that, the really terrible grind of rehearsals began;

property rehearsals, curiously disconcerting at first, where instead of

indicating the business with empty hands, you actually lighted the

cigarette, picked up the paper knife, pulled the locket out from under

your dress and opened it--and, in the process of doing these things,

forgot everything else you knew; scenery rehearsals that caused the

stage to seem small and cluttered up and actually made some of the

evolutions you'd been routined in, impossible. At last and ghastliest, a

dress rehearsal, which began at seven o'clock one night and lasted till

four the next morning.

It would all have been so ludicrously easy, Rose used to reflect in

despair, if, like the other girls in the sextette, she'd had only her

own part in the performance to attend to--only to get into her costumes

at the right time, be waiting in the wings for the cue, and then come on

and do the things they'd taught her to do. But, between Goldsmith and

Block, who were now in a state of frantic activity and full of insane

suggestions, and the wardrobe mistress who was always having to be told

how to do something, every minute was occupied. She would try

desperately to keep an ear alert for what was happening on the stage, in

order to be on hand for her entrances. But, in spite of her, it

sometimes happened that she'd be snatched from something by a furious

roar from Galbraith.

"Miss Dane!" And then, when she appeared, bewildered, contrite. "You

_must_ attend to the rehearsal. Those other matters can be attended to

at some other time. If necessary, I can stop the rehearsal and wait till

you're at liberty. But I can't pretend to rehearse and be kept waiting."

She never made any excuses; just took her place with a nod of

acquiescence. But she often felt like doing as some of the rest of them

did; felt it would be a perfectly enormous relief to shriek out

incoherent words of abuse, burst into tears and sobs, and rush from the

stage. Her position--her new position, she fancied, would entitle her to

do that--once. And then the notion that she was saving up that luxurious

possibility for some time when it would do the most good, would bring

back her old smile. And Galbraith, lost in wonder at her already, would

wonder anew.

They followed the traditions of the Globe in giving _The Girl Up-stairs_

its try-out in Milwaukee--four performances; from a Thursday to a

Saturday night, with rehearsals pretty much all the time in between.

About all that this hegira meant to Rose was that she got two solid

hours' sleep on the train going up on Thursday afternoon and another two

hours on the train coming back on Sunday morning. She had domesticated

herself automatically, in the little hotel across from the theater, and

she had gone right on working just as she did at the Globe. Oddly

enough, she didn't differentiate much between rehearsals and the

performances. Perhaps because she was so absorbed with her labors off

the stage; perhaps because the thoroughly tentative nature of everything

they did was so strongly impressed on her.

The piece was rewritten more or less after every performance. They

didn't get the curtain down on the first one until five minutes after

twelve--for even an experienced director like Galbraith can make a

mistake in timing--and the mathematically demonstrated necessity for

cutting, or speeding, a whole hour out of the piece, tamed even the

wild-eyed Mr. Mills. The principals, after having for weeks been

routined in the reading of their lines and the execution of their

business, were given new speeches to say and new things to do at a

moment's notice--literally, sometimes, while the performance was going

on. Ghastly things happened, of course. A tricky similarity of cues

would betray somebody into a speech three scenes ahead; a cut would have

the unforeseen effect of leaving somebody stranded, half-changed, in his

dressing-room when his entrance cue came round; an actor would dry up,

utterly forget his lines in the middle of a scene he could have repeated

in his sleep--and the amazing way in which these disasters were

retrieved, the way these people who hadn't, so far, impressed Rose very

strongly with their collective intelligence, extemporized, righted the

capsizing boat, kept the scene going--somehow--no matter what happened,

gave her a new respect for their claims to a real profession.

This was the great thing they had, she concluded; the quality of coming

up to the scratch, of giving whatever it took out of themselves to meet

the need of the moment. They weren't--her use of this phrase harked back

to the days of the half-back--yellow. If you'd walked through the train

that took them back to Chicago Sunday morning, had seen them, glum,

dispirited, utterly fagged out, unsustained by a single gleam of hope,

you'd have said it was impossible that they should give any sort of

performance that night--let alone a good one. But by eight o'clock that

night, when the overture was called, you wouldn't have known them for

the same people.

There is, to begin with, a certain magic about make-up which lends a

color of plausibility to the paradoxical theory that our emotions spring

from our facial expressions rather than the other way about. Certainly

to an experienced actor, his paint--the mere act of putting it on and

looking at himself in the glass as it is applied--effects for him a

solution of continuity between his real self, if you can call it that,

and his part; so that fatigues, discouragements, quarrels, ailments--I

don't mean to say are forgotten; they are remembered well enough, but

are given the quality of belonging to some one else. But beyond all that

was the feeling, on the edge of this first performance, that they were

now on their own. Harold Mills and the composer, Goldsmith and Block,

John Galbraith, had done their best, or their worst, as the case might

be. But their labors to-night would mean nothing to that rustling

audience out in front. From now on it was up to the company!

The appearance, back on the stage, of John Galbraith in evening dress,

just as the call of the first act brought them trooping from their

dressing-rooms, intensified this sensation. He was going to be,

to-night, simply one of the audience.

As a sample of the new spirit, Rose noted with hardly a sensation of

surprise, that Patricia Devereux nodded amiably enough to Stewart Lester

and observed that she believed the thing was going to go; and that

Lester in reply said, yes, he believed it was.

Rose herself was completely dominated by it. Her nerves--slack, frayed,

numb, an hour ago--had sprung miraculously into tune. She not only

didn't feel tired. It seemed she never could feel tired again. Not even,

going back to her university days, on the eve of a class basket-ball

game, or a tennis match, had she felt that fine thrill of buoyant

confidence and adequacy quite so strongly!

It wasn't until along in the third act that the audience became, for

her, anything but a colloid mass--something that you squeezed and

thumped and worked as you did clay, to get into a properly plastic

condition of receptivity, so that the jokes, the songs, the dances,

even the spindling little shafts of romance that you shot out into it,

could be felt to dig in and take hold. It never occurred to her to think

of it with a plural pronoun; it was "it" simply, an inchoate monster,

which was, as the show progressed, delightfully loosening up, becoming

good-humored, undiscriminating, stupidly infatuate; laughing at things

no human being would consider funny, approving with a percussive roar

things not in the least good; a monster, all the same, whose approbation

gave you an intense, if quite unreasoning, pleasure.

But, along in the third act, as I said, as she came down to the

footlights with the rest of the sextette in their _All Alone_ number,

one face detached itself suddenly from the pasty gray surface of them

that spread over the auditorium; became human--individual--and intensely

familiar. Became the face, unmistakably, of Jimmy Wallace!

It is probable that of all the audience, only two men saw that anything

had happened, so brief was the frozen instant while she stood

transfixed. One of them was John Galbraith, in the back row, and he let

his breath go out again in relief almost in the act of catching it. He

guessed what had happened well enough--that she'd recognized one of

those friends whose potential horror had made her willing to give up her

promotion and her little part--the one she'd spoken of, perhaps, as the

"only one that really mattered." But it was all right. She was going on

as if nothing had happened.

The other man was Jimmy Wallace himself. He released, too, a little sigh

of relief when he saw her off in her stride again after that momentary

falter. But he hardly looked at the stage after that; stared absently at

his program instead, and, presently, availed himself of the dramatic

critic's license and left the theater.

But it wasn't to go to his desk and write his story (he was on an

evening paper and so had no deadline staring him in the face) but to a

quiet corner in his club, where he could, undistractedly, think.

From the moment of Rose's first appearance on the stage he had been

tormented by a curiosity as to whether she was indeed Rose, or merely

some one unbelievably like her. Because the fantastic impossibility that

Rose Aldrich should be a member of the Globe chorus was reinforced by

the fact that her gaze had traveled unconcernedly across his face a

dozen times--his seat was in the fourth row, too--without the slightest

flicker of recognition. Of course the way she stood there frozen for a

second, when at last she did see him, settled that question. She was

Rose Aldrich and she was in the Globe chorus!

But this certainty merely left him with a more insoluble perplexity on

his hands; two, in fact--oh, half a dozen! What was she doing there? Did

Rodney know? Well, those questions, and others in their train, could

wait. But--what was he going to do about it?

As for Rose herself, it was a mere automaton that moved off in the dance

and said the two or three lines that remained to her in the act as if

nothing had happened, because all her mind and all her capacity for

feeling were occupied and tested by something else.

Incredible as it seems, she had utterly overlooked Jimmy--overlooked the

fact that, as a dramatic critic, he'd be certain to be present at the

opening performance of _The Girl Up-stairs_--certain to be sitting close

to the front, and certain, of course, to recognize her the moment she

came on the stage. She hadn't even had him in mind when the fear lest

some one of Rodney's friends might, for a lark, drop in at the Globe and

recognize her, had led her to tell John Galbraith that she couldn't be

in the sextette. Since that question had been settled, she'd hardly

considered the possibility at all. And, during the three weeks before

the opening, since she'd embarked on her career as a costumer, she

literally hadn't given it a thought.

She had dreaded various things as the hour of the opening performance

drew near--reasonable things like the failure of the piece to please,

the reception of their offerings in a chilly silence intensified by

contemptuous little riffles of applause. (She had been in audiences

which had treated plays like that--taken her own part in the expression

of chill disfavor, and she knew now she could never do it again.) She

had dreaded unreasonable things, like the total failure of any audience

to appear and the necessity of playing to empty rows as they had done in

rehearsal; nightmare things, like a total loss of memory, which should

leave her stranded in the middle of a silent stage before a jeering

audience. But it hadn't occurred to her to dread that the rise of the

curtain would reveal to her any of the faces that belonged to a world

which the last six weeks had already made to seem unreal.

So the sight of Jimmy Wallace had something the effect that a sudden

awakening has on a somnambulist--bewilderment at first, and after that a

sort of panic. Her first thought was that she must get word to him,

somehow, before he left the theater. Unless she could do that, what was

to prevent his going straight to Rodney, to-night, and telling him all

about it? He was under no obligation not to do it. He was Rodney's

friend quite as much as he was hers.

It didn't take her long to make up her mind though that he wouldn't do

that. Jimmy was never precipitate. He'd give her a chance. To-morrow

morning would do. She could call him up at his office.

But as she began formulating her request and phrasing the preface of

explanations she'd have to make before she'd be--well, entitled to ask a

favor of him, she found herself in a difficulty. She didn't want to

enter into a secret with him--with any man, this meant, of

course--against Rodney. She couldn't think of any way of stating her

reason for wanting her husband kept in the dark that didn't seem to

slight him, belittle him, make him faintly ridiculous--like the

pussy-cat John Galbraith had snapped his fingers at.

So she came, rather swiftly indeed, to the decision (she had arrived at

it before Jimmy left the theater) that she wouldn't make any appeal to

him at all. She'd do nothing that could lead him to think, either that

she was ashamed of herself, or that she was afraid Rodney would be

ashamed of her. In the absence of any appeal from her, mightn't he

perhaps decide that Rodney was in her confidence and so say nothing

about it? But even if he should tell Rodney ...

In her conscious thoughts she went no further than that; didn't

recognize the hope already beating tumultuously in her veins, that he

would tell Rodney--that perhaps even before she got back to her dismal

little room, Rodney, pacing his, would know.

It was so irrational a hope--so unexpected and so well disguised--that

she mistook it for a fear. But fear never made one's heart glow like

that.

That's where all her thoughts were when John Galbraith halted her on the

way to the dressing-room after the performance was over.