Evening Republican, Volume 59, Number 96, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 May 1917 — THE REAL ADVENTURE [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

THE REAL ADVENTURE

ROSE GETS A JOB AS CHORUS GIRL IN A MUSICAL SHOW BUT THE TEST SHE HAS TO UNDERGO IS SOMEWHAT EMBARRASSING •

Synopsis.—Rose Stanton, a young woman living in modest circumstances, marries wealthy Rodney Aldrich and for more than a year lives in luxury and laziness. This life disgusts her. She hopes that when her baby comes, the job of being a mother will keep her happy and busy. But she has twins and their care is put into the hands of a trained niirse. Intense dissatisfaction with the useless life of luxury returns to Rose. She determines to go out and earn her living, to make good on her own hook. She and Rodney have some bitter scenes wrangling over this so-called whim. Rose leaves home, however, moves into a cheap rooming house district and gets a job in a theater.

“We’ve been rehearsing this piece two weeks,” he said presently, looking away from her when he began to talk, “and I couldn’t take anyone into the chorus now whom I’d have to teach the rudiments of' dancing to. That’s why a test was necessary. Also, I couldn’t take anybody who had come down here —for a lark.” With that, Rose understood the whole thing. John Galbraith had classified her, .or thought he had, as a well-bred young girl who, in a moment of pique or mischief, had decided it would be fun to go on the stage. The test he had applied wasn’t, from that point of view, unnecessarily cruel. The girl he had taken her for would, on being ordered to repeat the grotesque bit of vulgarity of his, have drawn her dignity, about her like a cloak and gone back In a chastened spirit to the world' where she belonged. A gorgeous apparition came sweeping by them just now, on a line from the dressing room to the door —a figure that, with regal deliberation, was closing a blue broadcloth coat, trimmed with sable, over an authentic Callot frock. The georgette hat on top of it was one that Rose had last seen In a Michigan avenue shop. It had found its proper buyer—fulfilled its destiny. “Oh, Grant!” said John Galbraith. The queenly creature stopped short and Rose recognized her with a jump as the sulky chorus girl. Galbraith walked over to her. “I sha’n’t need you any more, Grant.” He spoke in a quiet, impersonal sort of way, but his voice had, as always, a good deal of carrying power. “It’s hardly worth your while trying To work, I suppose, when you’re as prosperous as this. And It Isn’t worth my while to have you soldiering. You needn’t report again.” He nodded, not unamiably, and turned away. She glared after him and called out In a hoarse, throaty voice, “Thank my stars I don’t have to work for you.” He’d come back to Rose again by this time, and she saw him smile. “When you do It,” he said over his shoulder, “thank them for me too.” Then to Rose: “She’s a valuable girl; I’m giving you her place because she won’t get down to business. I’d rather have a green recruit who will. The next rehearsal is at a quarter to eight tonight. Give your name and address to Mr. Quan before you go. By the way, what is your name?” “Rose Stanton," she said. “But . . ' She had to follow him a step or two because he had already turned away. “But tnay I give some other name than that to Mr. He frowned a little dubiously and asked her how old she was. And even when she told him twen*;-two, he didn’t look altogether reassured. “That’s the truth, is It? I mean, there’s nobody who can comj down here about .three days before wo open and call lie a kidnaper, and lead you away by the ear?” “No,” said Rose gravely, “there’s no one who’ll do that." “Very well," he said. “Tell Quan any name you like.” The name she did tell him was Doris Dane. At the appointed time for rehearsal she was on hand. She was one of the first of the chorus to reach the hall, and she had nearly finished putting on her working clothes before the rest of them came pelting In. But, she didn’t get out quickly enough to miss the sensation that was exciting then) all —the news that Grant had been dropped. A few were indignant; the rest merely curious. Before she had been working fifteen minutes, she had forgotten all about Grant. She’d even forgotten her resolution not to let John Galbraith remember she was a recruit. She didn’t know she was tired, panting, wet all over with sweat. She hadn’t done anything so physically exacting as this for over a year. But she had the Illusion that she wasn’t doing anything now.;, that she was just a passive, plastic thing tossed, flung, swirled about by the driving power of the director’s will. She realized, when the rehearsal was over, that it had gone well and that it -couldn’t have-gone- so if her own part had been done badly. But she didn’t understand the look which he sent after her as she walked off —she didn’t

By HENRY KITCHELL WEBSTER

• know that it was the highest encomium he was capable of.

CHAPTER XVII. 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." During the entire period 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 rather a timorous/throaty little contralto that contrasted oddly with the fine, free thrill of her speaking voice. But nobody had asked her whether she could sing at all. • Sjjhe picked up the tune quickly enough by ear, but the words she was always a little uncertain about. She finally questioned one of her colleagues in the chorus about this haphazardness, and was told that back at the beginning of things, they had had their voices tried by the musical director. They -had never had any music to sing from; there had been half a dozen mimeograph copies of the words to the songs, which the girls had put their heads together over, and more or less learned. What had become of this dope the girl didn’t know. She was a pale-haired girl, whom Rose thought she had heard addressed as Larson. Rose made a surprising discovery when, with a friendly pat on the sofa beside her, for an invitation to sit down, the girl began answering her question. She was a real beauty. Only you had to look twice at her to perceive that this was so; and what she lacked was just the unanalyzable qual-. ity that makes one look twice. “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 Tve 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 doubted, whether Rose I 'had spoken in good faith. “You’ve got as good a chance of losing your j 06,” she said, “as Galbraith has of losing his. Dave tells me Galbraith’s going to put you with us in the sextette.” Dave was the thick pianist, whoni Rose had found in the highest degree obnoxious. His announcement was entitled to consideration, even though it couldn’t be banked upon. There were three mediums and three big girls in the sextette (Edna 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. 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. “I haven’t heard anything about being put in the sextette,” she said quickly, “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; 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 forebore 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. The chorus was probably unanimous, in its view of this promotion. 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. The only way she had of refuting the assumption would be by making good so intensely 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. At its end Galbraith 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 X»f 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. The impetus and direction of Rose’s career derived from two incidents which might just as well not have happened—two of the flukiest of small chances. The first of these chances concerned itself with Edna Larson and her bad vbice. It was a bad voice only when she talked. When she sang it had a gorgeous, thrilling ring, and volume enough for four. Besides, she had an

infallible ear and sang squarely in tune. But when she spoke it sounded like someone who didn’t know how, trying to play the slide trombone. She was simply deaf, it seemed, to the subtleties of inflection. Daily, she reduced Galbraith to helpless wrath. Evidently he didn’t mean to be a brute about it. He began every one of his tussles to improve her reading of a line with a gentleness that would have done credit to a kindergartener. But after three attempts, each more ominously gentle than the last, his temper would suddenly fly all to pieces. The girl, queerly, didn’t seem to care. But in the dressing room one night, after one of these rehearsals, Rose got a different view. As she sal down on a bench to unlace her shoes, she looked straight into Edna Larson’s sac face sunken with a despair that turned Rose cold. The tearless, tragic eyes were staring, without recognition, straight into Rose’s own. Rose delayed her dressing till the other girls were gone, then sat down beside Edna. “You’re all right,” she said, feeling very inadequate. “I’m going to help you.” “It’s always like this,” the girl said. “It’s no use. He’ll put me back in the chorus again." “Not if I can help it,” Rose said. “But the first thing to do is to come along and get something to eat.” During the next hour Rose learned, for the first time, what the weight of an immense melancholy inertia can be. The girl was like one paralyzed—paralyzed by repeated failures and disasters, of which she told Rose freely. When Galbraith had put her into the sextette, a hope, just about dead, had been reawakened. She’d learned to dance well enough to escape censure, and she’d seen for herself how indispensable her singing voice was to the sextette. And then it had appeared she’d have to talk! And her talking wasn’t right. “Look here!” said Rose, when the story w’as told. (This was across the table in a dingy little lunch room.) “You’re going to say your lines before tomorrow’s rehearsal so that Galbraith won’t stop you once. We’re going to my room now, and I’m going to teach you. Come along.” Ha a sort of daze, the girl went Rose put her into a chair, sat down opposite her, took the first phrase of her first speech, and said it very slowly, very quietly, half a dozen times. That was at half-past eleven o’clock at night By midnight Edna could say those first three words to'Bose’s satisfaction. They worked like that straight through the night, except that two or three times the girl broke down; said it was hopeless. She got up once and said that she was going home, whereupon Rose locked the door and pot the key in her stocking.

(TO BE CONTINUEDj

“I’m Going to Help You."