Joan Thursday Part 19

"Oh, you did the white thing: I'm not disputing that. But what I'm worried about now is whether you're as good a sport as you seem."

"Meaning--?"

Marbridge nodded significantly toward the sidewalk, where he had put his late companion into the cab. "About today: you won't find it necessary to--?"

"By G.o.d!" Matthias's indignation brimmed over. "If you're so solicitous of the woman's good name, why the devil do you allow her to be seen in your company?"

"It isn't that," Marbridge persisted, keeping himself well in hand.

"After all, what's a lunch at the Knick?"

"Well--?"

"The trouble is, she's supposed to be at Newport. Majendie doesn't know--"

"You just can't help being a blackguard, can you, Marbridge?" Matthias enquired curiously. "You ought to have bitten off your tongue before you named a name in a public place like this." He rose, meeting with steady eyes the vicious glare of the other. "One word more: if I hear of your accepting another invitation to Tanglewood, I'll forget to be what you call 'a good sport'."

Marbridge jumped up hotly. "Look here!" he said in accents that, though guarded, trembled, "I've been mighty patient with your insolence, and I'm certainly not going to forget myself here. But if you want to make a book on it, I'll lay you any odds you like that I'll be received at Tanglewood within the year, and you won't say one single d.a.m.n' word. Do you make me?"

Matthias looked him up and down, smiled quietly, swung on his heel, and moved across the lobby to greet Rideout and Wilbrow.

His instinctive inclination to dismiss altogether from his mind a subject so distasteful was helped out by a conference which outlasted luncheon, involved dinner with the two men of the theatre, and was only concluded in Matthias's rooms shortly after midnight.

Wilbrow, considering the play from the point of view of him upon whom devolved all responsibility for the manner of its presentation (the scene painting alone excepted) and gifted with that intuitive sense _du theatre_ singular to men of his vocation, who very nearly monopolize the intelligence concerned with the American stage today--Wilbrow had uncovered a slight, by no means d.a.m.ning, flaw in the construction of the third act, and had a remedy to suggest. This, adopted without opposition from the playwright, suggested further alterations which Matthias could not deny were calculated to strengthen the piece. In consequence, when at length they left him, he found himself committed to a virtual rewriting of the last two acts entire.

Groaning in resignation, he resolved to accomplish the revision in one week of solid, uninterrupted labour, and went to bed, rising the next morning to deny himself his correspondence and the newspapers and to make arrangements with Madame Duprat to furnish all his meals until his task was finished. These matters settled, and his telephone temporarily silenced, he began work and, forgetful of the world, plodded faithfully on by day and night until late Thursday afternoon, when he drew the final page from his typewriter, thrust it with its forerunners into an envelope addressed to Rideout, entrusted this last to a messenger, and threw himself upon the couch to drop off instantly into profound slumbers of exhaustion.

At ten o'clock that night he was awakened and sat up, dazed and blinking in a sudden glare of gas-light.

Stupidly, bemused with the slowly settling dust of dreams, he stared, incredulous of the company in which he found himself.

Madame Duprat, having shown his callers in and made a light for them, was discreetly departing. George Tankerville, whose vigorous methods had roused Matthias, stood over him, with a look of deep and sympathetic anxiety clouding his round, commonplace, friendly countenance. Wearing a dinner jacket together with linen motor-cap and duster, oil-stained gauntlets on his hands, with an implacable impatience betrayed in his very pose, he cut a figure sufficiently striking instantly to engage attention--the unexpectedness of his call aside. Furthermore, he was accompanied by his wife: Helena, in a costume as unconventional as her husband's, stood at a little distance, regarding Matthias with much the same look of consternation and care.

"Great Scott!" Matthias exclaimed, pulling his wits together. "You are a sudden pair of people!" With a shrug and a sour smile he deprecated his clothing, which consisted solely of a shirt, linen trousers, and a pair of antiquated slippers. "If you'd only given me some warning, I'd've tried to dress up to your elegance," he went on.

"d.a.m.n your clothes!" Tankerville exploded. He dropped a hand on Matthias's shoulder and swung him round to the light. "Tell us you're all right--that's all we want to know!"

"All right?" Matthias looked from one to the other, deeply perplexed.

"Why, of course I'm all right. Why not?"

With a little gasp of relief, Helena dropped into a chair. Tankerville removed his hand and leaned against the table, smiling foolishly.

"That's all right, then," he said. "We tried to get you on the telephone all afternoon, failed, were afraid you'd done something foolish, and took a run in to town to make sure."

"What the d.i.c.kens are you driving at?" Matthias demanded. "I had my telephone cut off the other day because I was working and didn't want to be interrupted. I do that frequently. Why not? What's got into you two, anyway? Have you gone dotty?"

"No," Helena replied with a grim, pale smile; "We're sane enough--and thank Heaven you are! But Venetia--"

"Venetia!" Matthias cried. "What about Venetia?"

Tankerville avoiding his eye, it devolved upon Helena to respond to Matthias's frantic and imperative look.

"Venetia," she said reluctantly--"Venetia eloped with Marbridge day before yesterday--Tuesday. She came in town in the morning to do some shopping, met him and was married to him at the City Hall. They sailed on the Mauretania yesterday. The papers didn't get hold of it--_we_ knew nothing!--till this afternoon. I was afraid she might have written you and you--in despair--"

Her voice broke.

After a little, Matthias turned to a heap of unopened correspondence on a side table and ran rapidly through it, examining only the addresses.

"No," he said presently, in a level tone: "no--she didn't trouble to write me."

XI

For several days the girl had haunted the stairs, the hall, and door-step, alert to waylay Matthias, before suddenly she became aware that it was long since she had either caught a glimpse of him or heard the syncopated murmuring of the typewriter behind the closed door to his back-parlour.

It required the lapse of another day or two before she found courage to question (with laboured indifference) the dilapidated chambermaid who sedulously neglected her room for lack of a tip. From this far from garrulous source she learned that Matthias had packed up and gone out of town very suddenly, without mentioning where he might be addressed during his absence.

Alone at the window of her tiny cell, Joan stared down at the uninspiring vista of back-yards and disconsolately recapitulated her sorry fortunes.

She was now close upon the end of the fortnight's residence in the hall bedroom; before long she would have to surrender another four dollars--a week's rent in advance. Of the twenty-two dollars she had received from Butch, eight remained in her purse. By dint of adhering to a diet largely vegetarian, she had managed without serious discomfort to keep within an expenditure of four dollars per week for food. And twice Maizie Dean had saved her the cost of an evening meal by inviting her to dine out--at the expense of friends in "the profession." But a continuance of such favours was not to be counted upon; and the problem of living a fourth week away from home was one serious and importunate--always a.s.suming she should fail to secure work before her money ran out. She had no resources in any degree dependable: Butch, even if willing, would probably not be able to extend her another loan; she possessed nothing worth p.a.w.ning; and Maizie Dean had taken prompt occasion to make it clear that, while she was willing to do anything inexpensive for a budding sister _artiste_, her tolerance would stop short of financial aid.

"Take it from me, dear," she announced soon after their first meeting: "there ain't no people in the world quicker to slip you a live tip than folks in the business; but you gotta make up your mind to pay your own keep. They work too hard for their coin to give up any without a howl you could hear from here to Hollum; and anyway, everybody's always broke in the summer. If you don't land somewhere before your cash runs low, you might just's well make up your mind to slip back into the chain-gang behind the counter."

She had developed--or changed--amazingly in the brief period of her public career. Joan experienced difficulty in recognizing in her the warm-hearted Irish girl who had initiated her into the duties of saleswoman in the stocking department. She had hardened more than superficially; she was now as artificial as her make-up, as the hue of her ashen hair. The world to her was a desert threaded by "circuits,"

life an arid waste of "open time" punctuated with oases of "booking"; and the fountainhead of temporal power was located in the innermost sanctum of the United Booking Offices.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, she crossed her knees frankly, sucked thoughtfully at a cigarette, and waved an explanatory hand:

"Here's me and Mame, thinking we was all fixed for the nex' six weeks, and then somethin' puts a crimp into our bookin' and we're out for Gawd knows how long--till next Fall, sure. That's unless we want to take a trip over the meal-ticket circuit--fillin' in between filums, yunno. And if we do that it's goin' to crab us with the Orpheum people, sure; we'd never get back into the real money cla.s.s. So we gotta hold onto what little we got until we kin see more time headed our way...."

On the other hand, she had been liberal with sage and trustworthy counsel as to the best way to go about "breaking into the game." It was thanks to her that Joan was now able to enter a theatrical employment agency without fear and trembling, and to back her application for chorus work with a glib and unblushing statement that she had had experience "in summer stock out on the Coast." And to the Sisters Dean, likewise, Joan owed her growing acquaintance with the intricate geography of the theatrical districts of New York, her ability to discriminate between players "resting" and the average run of Broadway loungers who cluttered the shady side of that thoroughfare, from Twenty-fifth Street north to Forty-seventh, those shimmering summer afternoons, and her slowly widening circle of nodding acquaintances among the lesser peoples of the vaudeville world.

As a rule she was awake before anybody else in the establishment of Madame Duprat; not yet could she slough the habit of early rising. Her breakfast she was accustomed to get at the same dairy restaurant which had supplied her first meal away from home, and at the same moderate expense--ten cents. By ten o'clock she would be on Broadway, beginning her round of the agencies: a courageous, shabby figure in the withering sun-blast, patient and indomitable through long hours of waiting in crowded anterooms, undiscouraged by the brevity and fruitlessness of the interviews with which her persistence was sometimes rewarded, ignoring disappointment with the same studied calm with which she had long since learned to ignore the advances of loafers of the streets.

Her lunches she would purchase wherever she might happen to be at the noon hour--or go without. By five o'clock at the latest--frequently much earlier--she would turn back to West Forty-fifth Street. For dinner she sought again the establishment that provided her breakfast. Her idle hours, both day and evening, she grew accustomed to waste in the double bedroom ("second floor front") occupied by the Dancing Deans.

At such times the _soi-disant_ sisters were rarely without company. They were lively and agreeable creatures, by no means unattractive, and so thoroughly theatric in every effect of manner, speech, gesture, person, and thought, that the most case-hardened member of the profession could not but feel at home in their company. Consequently, they were popular with both s.e.xes of their a.s.sociates. Seldom did a day pa.s.s but they entertained several callers, with all of whom they seemed to be on terms of the most candid intimacy.

So Joan grew accustomed to being hailed, whenever she opened the door of the sisters' room, with a formula that varied little with repet.i.tion:

"Why, if it _ain't_ the kid! h.e.l.lo, dearie--come right in and stop awhile. Say, lis'n: I want you to shake hands with my friend, Charlie Quard. I guess you know who Charlie is, all right; you must of seen him of'n--played leading juveniles with the Spangler Stock, I dunno how long. Charlie, this is my little friend, Miss Thursday."

"In the business, I trust?"

"Goin' to be before long. Just lookin' round."

"Well, I wish you luck, Miss Thursday. This is the rottenest season _I_ ever struck. There's eighty people for every job that blooms. Why, yunno, Maizie, I was talking only yesterday to Percy Williams, and Percy said--"