§ 1.
THE offices of Messrs Goble and Cohn were situated, like everything
else in New York that appertains to the drama, in the neighborhood of
Times Square. They occupied the fifth floor of the Gotham Theatre on
West Forty-second Street. As there was no elevator in the building
except the small private one used by the two members of the firm, Jill
walked up the stairs, and found signs of a thriving business beginning
to present themselves as early as the third floor, where half a dozen
patient persons of either sex had draped themselves like roosting fowls
upon the banisters. There were more on the fourth floor, and the
landing of the fifth, which served the firm as a waiting-room, was
quite full. It is the custom of theatrical managers—the lowest order of
intelligence, with the possible exception of the _limax maximus_ or
garden slug, known to science—to omit from their calculations the fact
that they are likely every day to receive a large number of visitors,
whom they will be obliged to keep waiting; and that these people will
require somewhere to wait. Such considerations never occur to them.
Messrs Goble and Cohn had provided for those who called to see them one
small bench on the landing, conveniently situated at the intersecting
point of three draughts, and had let it go at that.
Nobody, except perhaps the night-watchman, had ever seen this bench
empty. At whatever hour of the day you happened to call, you would
always find three wistful individuals seated side by side with their
eyes on the tiny ante-room where sat the office-boy, the
telephone-girl, and Mr Goble’s stenographer. Beyond this was the door
marked “Private,” through which, as it opened to admit some careless,
debonair, thousand-dollar-a-week comedian who sauntered in with a
jaunty “Hello, Ike!” or some furred and scented female star, the rank
and file of the profession were greeted, like Moses on Pisgah, with a
fleeting glimpse of the promised land, consisting of a large desk and a
section of a very fat man with spectacles and a bald head or a younger
man with fair hair and a double chin.
The keynote of the mass meeting on the landing was one of determined,
almost aggressive smartness. The men wore bright overcoats with bands
round the waist, the women those imitation furs which to the
uninitiated eye appear so much more expensive than the real thing.
Everybody looked very dashing and very young, except about the eyes.
Most of the eyes that glanced at Jill were weary. The women were nearly
all blondes, blondness having been decided upon in the theatre as the
color that brings the best results. The men were all so much alike that
they seemed to be members of one large family,—an illusion which was
heightened by the scraps of conversation, studded with “dears,” “old
mans,” and “honeys,” which came to Jill’s ears. A stern fight for
supremacy was being waged by a score or so of lively and powerful young
scents.
For a moment Jill was somewhat daunted by the spectacle, but she
recovered almost immediately. The exhilarating and heady influence of
New York still wrought within her. The Berserk spirit was upon her, and
she remembered the stimulating words of Mr Brown, of Brown and Widgeon,
the best jazz-and-hokum team on the Keith Circuit. “Walk straight in!”
had been the burden of his inspiring address. She pushed her way
through the crowd until she came to the small ante-room.
In the ante-room were the outposts, the pickets of the enemy. In one
corner a girl was hammering energetically and with great speed on a
typewriter: a second girl, seated at a switchboard, was having an
argument with Central which was already warm and threatened to descend
shortly to personalities: on a chair tilted back so that it rested
against the wall, a small boy sat eating candy and reading the comic
page of an evening newspaper. All three were enclosed, like zoological
specimens, in a cage formed by a high counter terminating in brass
bars.
Beyond these watchers on the threshold was the door marked “Private.”
Through it, as Jill reached the outer defences, filtered the sound of a
piano.
Those who have studied the subject have come to the conclusion that the
boorishness of theatrical managers’ office-boys cannot be the product
of mere chance. Somewhere, in some sinister den in the criminal
districts of the town, there is a school where small boys are trained
for these positions, where their finer instincts are rigorously
uprooted and rudeness systematically inculcated by competent
professors. Of this school the candy-eating Cerberus of Messrs Goble
and Cohn had been the star scholar. Quickly seeing his natural gifts,
his teachers had given him special attention. When he had graduated, it
had been amidst the cordial good wishes of the entire faculty. They had
taught him all they knew, and they were proud of him. They felt that he
would do them credit.
This boy raised a pair of pink-rimmed eyes to Jill, sniffed—for like
all theatrical managers’ office-boys he had a permanent cold in the
head—bit his thumb-nail, and spoke. He was a snub-nosed boy. His ears
and hair were vermilion. His name was Ralph. He had seven hundred and
forty-three pimples.
“Woddyerwant?” enquired Ralph, coming within an ace of condensing the
question into a word of one syllable.
“I want to see Mr Goble.”
“Zout!” said the Pimple King, and returned to his paper.
There will, no doubt, always be class distinctions. Sparta had her
kings and her helots, King Arthur’s Round Table its knights and its
scullions, America her Simon Legree and her Uncle Tom. But in no nation
and at no period of history has any one ever been so brutally superior
to any one else as is the Broadway theatrical office-boy to the caller
who wishes to see the manager. Thomas Jefferson held these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by
their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these rights
are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Theatrical office-boys
do not see eye to eye with Thomas. From their pinnacle they look down
on the common herd, the _canaille_, and despise them. They coldly
question their right to live.
Jill turned pink. Mr Brown, her guide and mentor, foreseeing this
situation, had, she remembered, recommended “pushing the office-boy in
the face”: and for a moment she felt like following his advice.
Prudence, or the fact that he was out of reach behind the brass bars,
restrained her. Without further delay she made for the door of the
inner room. That was her objective, and she did not intend to be
diverted from it. Her fingers were on the handle before any of those
present divined her intention. Then the stenographer stopped typing and
sat with raised fingers, aghast. The girl at the telephone broke off in
mid-sentence and stared round over her shoulder. Ralph, the office-boy,
outraged, dropped his paper and constituted himself the spokesman of
the invaded force.
“Hey!”
Jill stopped and eyed the lad militantly.
“Were you speaking to me?”
“Yes, I _was_ speaking to you!”
“Don’t do it again with your mouth full,” said Jill, turning to the
door.
The belligerent fire in the office-boy’s pink-rimmed eyes was suddenly
dimmed by a gush of water. It was not remorse that caused him to weep,
however. In the heat of the moment he had swallowed a large, jagged
piece of candy, and he was suffering severely.
“You can’t go in there!” he managed to articulate, his iron will
triumphing over the flesh sufficiently to enable him to speak.
“I _am_ going in there!”
“That’s Mr Goble’s private room.”
“Well, I want a private talk with Mr Goble.”
Ralph, his eyes still moist, felt that the situation was slipping from
his grip. This sort of thing had never happened to him before.
“I tell ya he _zout!_”
Jill looked at him sternly.
“You wretched child!” she said, encouraged by a sharp giggle from the
neighborhood of the switchboard. “Do you know where little boys go who
don’t speak the truth? I can hear him playing the piano. Now he’s
singing! And it’s no good telling me he’s busy. If he was busy, he
wouldn’t have time to sing. If you’re as deceitful as this at your age,
what do you expect to be when you grow up? You’re an ugly little boy,
you’ve got red ears, and your collar doesn’t fit! I shall speak to Mr
Goble about you.”
With which words Jill opened the door and walked in.
“Good afternoon,” she said brightly.
After the congested and unfurnished discomfort of the landing, the room
in which Jill found herself had an air of cosiness and almost of
luxury. It was a large room, solidly upholstered. Along the further
wall, filling nearly the whole of its space, stood a vast and gleaming
desk, covered with a litter of papers which rose at one end of it to a
sort of mountain of play-scripts in buff covers. There was a bookshelf
to the left. Photographs covered the walls. Near the window was a deep
leather lounge: to the right of this stood a small piano, the
music-stool of which was occupied by a young man with untidy black hair
that needed cutting. On top of the piano, taking the eye immediately by
reason of its bold brightness, was balanced a large cardboard poster.
Much of its surface was filled by a picture of a youth in polo costume
bending over a blonde goddess in a bathing-suit. What space was left
displayed the legend:
ISAAC GOBLE AND JACOB COHN
PRESENT
THE ROSE OF AMERICA
(A Musical Fantasy)
BOOK AND LYRICS BY OTIS PILKINGTON
MUSIC BY ROLAND TREVIS
Turning her eyes from this, Jill became aware that something was going
on at the other side of the desk: and she perceived that a second young
man, the longest and thinnest she had ever seen, was in the act of
rising to his feet, length upon length like an unfolding snake. At the
moment of her entry he had been lying back in an office-chair, so that
only a merely nominal section of his upper structure was visible. Now
he reared his impressive length until his head came within measurable
distance of the ceiling. He had a hatchet face and a receding chin, and
he gazed at Jill through what she assumed were the “tortoiseshell
cheaters” referred to by her recent acquaintance, Mr Brown.
“Er … ?” said this young man enquiringly in a high, flat voice.
Jill, like many other people, had a brain which was under the
alternating control of two diametrically opposite forces. It was like
an automobile steered in turn by two drivers, the one a dashing,
reckless fellow with no regard for the speed limits, the other a timid
novice. All through the proceedings up to this point the dasher had
been in command. He had whisked her along at a break-neck pace,
ignoring obstacles and police regulations. Now, having brought her to
this situation, he abruptly abandoned the wheel and turned it over to
his colleague, the shrinker. Jill, greatly daring a moment ago, now
felt an overwhelming shyness.
She gulped, and her heart beat quickly. The thin man towered over her.
The black-haired pianist shook his locks at her like Banquo.
“I …” she began.
Then, suddenly, womanly intuition came to her aid. Something seemed to
tell her that these men were just as scared as she was. And, at the
discovery, the dashing driver resumed his post at the wheel, and she
began to deal with the situation with composure.
“I want to see Mr Goble.”
“Mr Goble is out,” said the long young man, plucking nervously at the
papers on the desk. Jill had affected him powerfully.
“Out!” She felt she had wronged the pimpled office-boy.
“We are not expecting him back this afternoon. Is there anything I can
do?”
He spoke tenderly. This weak-minded young man—at school his coarse
companions had called him Simp—was thinking that he had never seen
anything like Jill before. And it was true that she was looking very
pretty, with her cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkling. She touched a
chord in the young man which seemed to make the world a flower-scented
thing, full of soft music. Often as he had been in love at first sight
before in his time, Otis Pilkington could not recall an occasion on
which he had been in love at first sight more completely than now. When
she smiled at him, it was as if the gates of heaven had opened. He did
not reflect how many times, in similar circumstances, these same gates
had opened before; and that on one occasion when they had done so it
had cost him eight thousand dollars to settle the case out of court.
One does not think of these things at such times, for they strike a
jarring note. Otis Pilkington was in love. That was all he knew, or
cared to know.
“Won’t you take a seat, Miss …”
“Mariner,” prompted Jill. “Thank you.”
“Miss Mariner. May I introduce Mr Roland Trevis?”
The man at the piano bowed. His black hair heaved upon his skull like
seaweed in a ground swell.
“My name is Pilkington. Otis Pilkington.”
The uncomfortable silence which always follows introductions was broken
by the sound of the telephone-bell on the desk. Otis Pilkington, who
had moved out into the room and was nowhere near the desk, stretched
forth a preposterous arm and removed the receiver.
“Yes? Oh, will you say, please, that I have a conference at present.”
Jill was to learn that people in the theatrical business never talked:
they always held conferences. “Tell Mrs Peagrim that I shall be calling
later in the afternoon, but cannot be spared just now.” He replaced the
receiver. “Aunt Olive’s secretary,” he murmured in a soft aside to Mr
Trevis. “Aunt Olive wanted me to go for a ride.” He turned to Jill.
“Excuse me. Is there anything I can do for you, Miss Mariner?”
Jill’s composure was now completely restored. This interview was
turning out so totally different from anything she had expected. The
atmosphere was cosy and social. She felt as if she were back in
Ovington Square, giving tea to Freddie Rooke and Ronny Devereux and the
rest of her friends of the London period. All that was needed to
complete the picture was a tea-table in front of her. The business note
hardly intruded on the proceedings at all. Still, as business was the
object of her visit, she felt that she had better approach it.
“I came for work.”
“Work!” cried Mr Pilkington. He, too, appeared to be regarding the
interview as purely of a social nature.
“In the chorus,” explained Jill.
Mr Pilkington seemed shocked. He winced away from the word as though it
pained him.
“There is no chorus in ‘The Rose of America,’” he said.
“I thought it was a musical comedy.”
Mr Pilkington winced again.
“It is a musical _fantasy!_” he said. “But there will be no chorus. We
shall have,” he added, a touch of rebuke in his voice, “the services of
twelve refined ladies of the ensemble.”
Jill laughed.
“It does sound much better, doesn’t it!” she said. “Well, am I refined
enough, do you think?”
“I shall be only too happy if you will join us,” said Mr Pilkington
promptly.
The long-haired composer looked doubtful. He struck a note up in the
treble, then whirled round on his stool.
“If you don’t mind my mentioning it, Otie, we have twelve girls
already.”
“Then we must have thirteen,” said Otis Pilkington firmly.
“Unlucky number,” argued Mr Trevis.
“I don’t care. We must have Miss Mariner. You can see for yourself that
she is exactly the type we need.”
He spoke feelingly. Ever since the business of engaging a company had
begun, he had been thinking wistfully of the evening when “The Rose of
America” had had its opening performance—at his aunt’s house at Newport
last Summer—with an all-star cast of society favorites and an ensemble
recruited entirely from debutantes and matrons of the Younger Set. That
was the sort of company he had longed to assemble for the piece’s
professional career, and until this afternoon he had met with nothing
but disappointment. Jill seemed to be the only girl in theatrical New
York who came up to the standard he would have liked to demand.
“Thank you very much,” said Jill.
There was another pause. The social note crept into the atmosphere
again. Jill felt the hostess’ desire to keep conversation circulating.
“I hear,” she said, “that this piece is a sort of Gilbert and Sullivan
opera.”
Mr Pilkington considered the point.
“I confess,” he said, “that, in writing the book, I had Gilbert before
me as a model. Whether I have in any sense succeeded in …”
“The book,” said Mr Trevis, running his fingers over the piano, “is as
good as anything Gilbert ever wrote.”
“Oh come, Rolie!” protested Mr Pilkington modestly.
“Better,” insisted Mr Trevis. “For one thing, it is up-to-date.”
“I _do_ try to strike the modern tone,” murmured Mr Pilkington.
“And you have avoided Gilbert’s mistake of being too fanciful.”
“He was fanciful,” admitted Mr Pilkington. “The music,” he added, in a
generous spirit of give and take, “has all Sullivan’s melody with a
newness of rhythm peculiarly its own. You will like the music.”
“It sounds,” said Jill amiably, “as though the piece is bound to be a
tremendous success.”
“We hope so,” said Mr Pilkington. “We feel that the time has come when
the public is beginning to demand something better than what it has
been accustomed to. People are getting tired of the brainless trash and
jingly tunes which have been given them by men like Wallace Mason and
George Bevan. They want a certain polish. … It was just the same in
Gilbert and Sullivan’s day. They started writing at a time when the
musical stage had reached a terrible depth of inanity. The theatre was
given over to burlesques of the most idiotic description. The public
was waiting eagerly to welcome something of a higher class. It is just
the same today. But the managers will not see it. ‘The Rose of America’
went up and down Broadway for months, knocking at managers’ doors.”
“It should have walked in without knocking, like me,” said Jill. She
got up. “Well, it was very kind of you to see me when I came in so
unceremoniously. But I felt it was no good waiting outside on that
landing. I’m so glad everything is settled. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Miss Mariner.” Mr Pilkington took her outstretched hand
devoutly. “There is a rehearsal called for the ensemble at—when is it,
Rolie?”
“Eleven o’clock, day after tomorrow, at Bryant Hall.”
“I’ll be there,” said Jill. “Good-bye, and thank you very much.”
The silence which had fallen upon the room as she left it, was broken
by Mr Trevis.
“Some pip!” observed Mr Trevis.
Otis Pilkington awoke from day-dreams with a start.
“What did you say?”
“That girl … I said she was some pippin!”
“Miss Mariner,” said Mr Pilkington icily, “is a most charming, refined,
cultured, and vivacious girl, if you mean that.”
“Yes,” said Mr Trevis. “That was what I meant!”
§ 2.
Jill walked out into Forty-second Street, looking about her with the
eye of a conqueror. Very little change had taken place in the aspect of
New York since she had entered the Gotham Theatre, but it seemed a
different city to her. An hour ago, she had been a stranger, drifting
aimlessly along its rapids. Now she belonged to New York, and New York
belonged to her. She had faced it squarely, and forced from it the
means of living. She walked on with a new jauntiness in her stride.
The address which Nelly had given her was on the east side of Fifth
Avenue. She made her way along Forty-second Street. It seemed the
jolliest, alivest street she had ever encountered. The rattle of the
Elevated as she crossed Sixth Avenue was music, and she loved the
crowds that jostled her with every step she took.
She reached the Fifth Avenue corner just as the policeman out in the
middle of the street swung his Stop-and-Go post round to allow the
up-town traffic to proceed on its way. A stream of automobiles which
had been dammed up as far as the eye could reach began to flow swiftly
past. They moved in a double line, red limousines, blue limousines,
mauve limousines, green limousines. She stood waiting for the flood to
cease, and, as she did so, there purred past her the biggest and
reddest limousine of all. It was a colossal vehicle with a polar-bear
at the steering-wheel and another at his side. And in the interior,
very much at his ease, his gaze bent courteously upon a massive lady in
a mink coat, sat Uncle Chris.
For a moment he was so near to her that, but for the closed window, she
could have touched him. Then the polar-bear at the wheel, noting a gap
in the traffic, stepped on the accelerator and slipped neatly through.
The car moved swiftly on and disappeared.
Jill drew a deep breath. The Stop-and-Go sign swung round again. She
crossed the avenue, and set out once more to find Nelly Bryant. It
occurred to her, five minutes later, that a really practical and
quick-thinking girl would have noted the number of the limousine.