Joan Thursday Part 22

But once with head on pillow, it was not her role that she remembered, but the man: his coa.r.s.ely musical tones, his eloquent white hands, the overt admiration that shone in his eyes whenever he forgot his sketch and remembered momentarily Joan the woman. She felt sure he liked her.

And she liked him well. Of the merits of his enterprise she knew nothing, but he had succeeded in inspiring her with confidence that he knew what he was about.

She drifted off into sleep, comforted by the conviction that she had found a friend.

By the time of her return from breakfast, the next morning, Quard was waiting for her at the lodging-house. He had already arranged with Madame Duprat for the use of the front parlour for rehearsals, pending its lease to some fortuitous tenant; and here he proceeded to work out the physical action of the sketch. His grat.i.tude to Joan for knowing her part was almost affecting; he himself was by no means familiar with his own and her prompt response to cues he read from ma.n.u.script facilitated his task considerably. When they adjourned for luncheon he announced himself persuaded that they would be ready to "open" within a week.

Within that period Joan learned many things. She was a tractable and docile student, keen-set to profit by the sc.r.a.ps of dramatic chicanery which formed the major part of Quard's stage intelligence. He himself had a very fair memory and had been drilled by more than one competent stage-director whose instructions had stuck in his mind, forming a valuable addition to his professional equipment. Joan soon learned to speak out clearly; to infuse some little semblance of human feeling into several of her turgid lines; to suffer herself to be dragged by one wrist round the room on her knees, by the romantical convict; to time her actions by mental counting; to "feed lines" to her partner in a rapid patter through the pa.s.sages of putative comedy. She learned also to answer to "dearie" as to her given name, and to submit to being handled in a way she did not like but which, from all that she could observe, was considered neither familiar nor objectionable as between people of the stage. And she learned, furthermore, that May Dean's opinion of the venture was never to be drawn beyond a mildly derisive "My Gawd!" while Maizie's ran to the sense that it was all a chance and Joan a little fool if she didn't grab it--and anyway Joan was old enough to take care of herself with Charlie Quard or any man living!

And it was Maizie who was responsible for insisting that Joan wheedle an advance of ten dollars from Quard, ostensibly toward the purchase of costume and make-up. But when this had been successfully negotiated, the dancers advised Joan to save it against an emergency, and between them provided her with an outfit composed of cast-offs: a black satin decollete bodice, an accordion-pleated short skirt of the period of 1890, wear-proof silk stockings, a pair of broken-down satin slippers with red heels, a j.a.panned tin make-up box with a broken lock, and a generous supply of cheap grease-paint and cold cream.

Joan's debut occurred within the time-limit set by Quard and before an audience of two, not counting a few grinning stage-hands. The two were the agent Schneider, and the manager of a small moving-picture house in the Twenty-third Street shopping district; on the half-lighted stage of which their "try-out" took place at half-past ten of a rainy and disheartening morning. The judges sat in the darkened auditorium, staring apathetically and chewing large cigars. Joan, though a little self-conscious, was not at all nervous, and remembered her lines perfectly; better than this, she looked very fetching indeed in her makeshift costume. Quard forgot several of his speeches, floundered all over the stage, and in a frantic effort to redeem himself clowned his part outrageously. Nevertheless they were engaged.

Convinced of their failure, Joan had only succeeded in removing her make-up and struggling into her shabby street clothing, when Quard knocked at the door of her dressing-room. He had played without make-up, and consequently had been able to catch the manager and agent before they could escape. Lounging in the doorway, he breathed a spirit of congratulation strongly tainted with fumes of whiskey.

"We're on!" he declared exultantly. "What'd I _tell_ you? You needn't have changed, because we're going to stick here, and open today. One of the turns on this week's bill fell down at the last minute, and so we cop this chance to fill in. We go on after the first films--about a quarter of one; and then at four-thirty, seven-thirty, ten-forty-five.

Now whadda yunno about that?"

Joan gulped and shook her head, her eyes a little misty. For the first time she began to perceive that she had counted desperately on success.

"I think--we're awful' lucky!" she said faintly.

"Lucky nothing! I knew I could get away with it--always providing I had you to play up to."

"Me!"

"That's right. After we'd fixed things up I took Schneider down to the corner and bought him a drink. He said--I dunno as I ought to tell you this, but anyway--he said the sketch was punk (G.o.d knows it is) and never would've gone if it hadn't been for you. He said all the women would go crazy about you--you'd got the prettiest shape he'd seen in a month of Sundays. Yunno they get most of their afternoon houses from the women shoppers down here."

He paused and after a moment added meditatively: "Of course, you can't _act_ for shucks."

Joan, looking down, said nothing. Quard dropped a hand intimately across her shoulder and infused a caressing note into his voice.

"I guess I'm a bad little guesser--eh, dearie?"

Joan stood motionless for an instant. His hand seemed as if afire, as if burning through her shirtwaist the flesh of her shoulder. And she resented pa.s.sionately the intimacy of his tone. Of a sudden she shook his hand off and moved a pace or two away.

"Let me alone," she said sullenly.

Quard started and jerked out a "What?"

"I said, let me alone," she repeated in the same manner, looking him steadily in the face.

He coloured darkly, mumbled something indistinguishable, and flashed into a short-lived fit of temper.

"What's the matter with you, anyway?" he demanded hotly.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "What's the matter with you, anyway?" he demanded, hotly.]

"Nothing," she replied quietly; "only I don't want to be pawed."

"No?" he exclaimed with sarcasm. "Is that straight?"

"Yes, that's straight--and so'm I!"

Recollecting himself, Quard attempted to carry off his discomfiture with a shrug and a laugh: "Oh, all right. Don't get huffy. I didn't mean anything."

"I know you didn't, but don't do it again."

He turned out into the corridor; hesitated. "Well--let it go at that, can't you?"

"All right," she said sulkily: "_you_ let it go at that."

Quard tramped off without saying anything more, and, whatever his resentment and disappointment, schooled himself to control them, and met her half-way to a reconciliation when the approaching hour of their first public appearance brought them together in the wings.

And by this time Joan had been sufficiently diverted by other experiences to have regained her normal poise. The dingy, stuffy, and evil-smelling dressing-room to which she had been a.s.signed had suffered an invasion of three other women: two worn and haggard clog-dancers and a matronly ballad-singer who, having donned an excessively soiled but showy evening gown, had settled down calmly to her knitting: an occupation which had interfered not in the least with her flow of animated and not unkindly gossip. Joan gathered that her voice was the main support of a small family, consisting of a shiftless husband and three children, for the younger of whom the mother was knitting a pair of small, pink bootees. These last had immediately enlisted the sympathetic interest of the clog-dancers, one of whom boasted of the precocity of her only child, a boy of eight living with his grandmother in Omaha, while the other told simply of the death of two children, due to neglect on the part of those to whom she had been obliged to entrust them while on the road....

Joan was the first to reach the entrance to the dingy "kitchen-set"

which was to figure as a star dressing-room for the purposes of their sketch (and, for the purposes of subsequent offerings, as the drawing-room of a mansion on Fifth Avenue and the palm room of a fashionable hotel). About ten times the size of any dressing-room ever constructed, it was still atmospherically cheerless and depressing. She looked it over momentarily to make sure that the various simple properties were in place, and turned to find Quard approaching. Beneath the jaunty a.s.surance which even his hang-dog make-up couldn't wholly disguise, she was able to detect traces of some uneasiness and anxiety.

It was a fact that he had grown a trifle afraid of her.

The discovery impressed her as so absurd that she smiled; and instantly the man was himself again. He thrust out a hand, to which with covert reluctance she entrusted her own.

"All right now?" he asked cheerfully.

She nodded: "All right."

"Good enough. Let's see what kind of a house we've got."

He found a peep-hole near the proscenium arch and peered intently through it for a moment or two; then beckoned Joan to take his place.

But she could make but little of what seemed a dark well filled with flickering shadows. She turned away.

"Only a handful out there," Quard a.s.sured her. "It's too early for much of a crowd. No good getting nervous about this bunch."

"I'm not," she a.s.serted quietly.

And she wasn't; no less to her own surprise than to Quard's, she was conscious of no trace of the stage-fright she had heard so much about.

Indeed a singular feeling of indifference and disappointment oppressed her; it was all so unlike what she had looked forward to as the setting for her first appearance in public. The dreary and tawdry atmosphere behind the scenes of the dilapidated little theatre; the weary and subdued accents in which her dressing-room a.s.sociates had discussed their offspring; the _tinkle-tankle-tinkle-whang_ of a painfully automatic piano in the orchestra-pit; her own shabby second-hand costume; the brutal grotesqueness of Quard's painted countenance at close range--these owned little in common with those antic.i.p.ations roused by the glitter and glamour of that fleshy show on the New York Theatre roof garden. She felt cheated; in perspective, even the stocking-counter seemed less uninviting....

A m.u.f.fled outbreak of laughter and brief murmur of applause filtered through the curtain. The piano stopped with a crash. Quard nodded and, touching her elbow, urged her toward the entrance.

"Film's finished. Ready and steady, old girl."

"I'm all right," she said sullenly. "Don't you worry about me."

She heard the curtain rise with a rustling as of mighty wings penetrated by the shrill squeal of an ungreased block; held back a moment; and walked on, into a dazzling glare of footlights, conscious of no emotion whatever beyond desire to get finished with her part and return to the dressing-room. At the designated spot, near the centre of the stage, she paused, faced the audience with her trained smile and mouthed the opening lines with precisely the proper intonation....

The curtain fell at length amid a few, scattering hand-claps that sounded much like faint-hearted firecrackers exploding at a distance.

Joan rose from the chair in which she had been seated in a posture simulating abandonment to tears of joy, and walked soberly off the stage--barely antic.i.p.ating a few stage-hands, who rushed on to make the changes necessary for the next act.