MRS. GOLDSMITH'S TASTE
If there was a profession in the world which Rose had never either idly
or seriously considered as a possible one for herself, that of a teacher
was it. And yet, the first money she ever earned in her life was the
twenty dollars the management paid her for teaching the other four girls
in the sextette to say their lines. She was a born teacher, too. And the
born teacher is a rare bird.
One must know something in the first place, of course, before one can
teach it--a fact that has resulted in the fitting of an enormous number
of square pegs into round holes. Most of the people in the world who are
trying to teach, are those whose aptitude is for learning. But the
scholar's temper and the teacher's are antipodal; a salient, vivid
personality that can command attention, the unconscious will to
conquer--to enforce (a very different thing from the wish to do these
things) that is the _sine qua non_ for a real teacher. And that, of
course, was Rose all over.
Those four sulky, rather supercilious chorus-girls, coming to Rose under
a threat of dismissal, for lessons in the one last thing that a
free-born American will submit to dictation about, might not want to
learn, nor mean to learn, but they couldn't help learning. You couldn't
be unaware of Rose and, being aware of her, you couldn't resist doing
things as she wanted you to.
Informally, too, she taught them other things than speech. "Here,
Waldron!" Galbraith would say. "This is no cake-walk. All you've got to
do is to cross to that chair and sit down in it like a lady. Show her
how to do it, Dane." And Rose, with her good-humored disarming smile at
the infuriated Waldron, would go ahead and do it.
I won't pretend that she was a favorite with the other members of the
sextette, barring Olga. But she managed to avoid being cordially hated,
which was a very solid personal triumph.
I have said that there were two small incidents destined to have a
powerful influence at this time, in Rose's life. One of them I have told
you about--the chance that led her to teach Olga Larson to talk. The
other concerned itself with a certain afternoon frock in a Michigan
Avenue shop.
The owners of _The Girl Up-stairs_ were very inadequately experienced in
the business of putting on musical comedies. Galbraith spoke of them as
amateurs, and couldn't, really, have described them better. Your
professional gambler--for musical-comedy producing is an especially
sporting form of gambling and nothing else--assesses his chances in
advance, decides coolly whether they are worth taking or not, and then,
with a steely indifference awaits the event. The amateur, on the
contrary, is always fluttering between an insane confidence and a
shuddering despair; between a reckless disregard of money and a foolish
attempt to save it. It had been in one of their hot fits that the owners
of _The Girl Up-stairs_ had retained Galbraith. The news item Rose had
read had not exceeded truth in saying that he was one of the three
greatest directors in the country. They couldn't have got him out to
Chicago at all but for the chance that he was, just then, at the end of
a long-time contract with the Shumans and holding off for better terms
before he signed a new one. The owners were staggered at the prices they
had to pay him, at that, but they recovered and were still blowing warm
when they authorized him to engage Devereux, Stewart, Astor and McGill
(McGill was the chief comedian, the Cosmetic King) for all of these were
high-priced people.
But by the time the question of costumes came up, they were shivering in
a perfect ague of apprehension. Was there no limit to the amount they
were to be asked to spend? This figure that Galbraith indicated as the
probable cost of having a first-class brigand in New York design the
costumes and a firm of pirates in the same neighborhood execute them,
was simply insane. New York managers might be boobs enough to submit to
such an extortion, but they, believe them, were not. Many of the
costumes could be bought, ready made, on State Street or Michigan
Avenue. Some of the fancy things could be executed by a competent
wardrobe mistress, if some one would give her the ideas. And ideas--one
could pick them up anywhere. Mrs. Goldsmith, now,--she was the wife of
the senior of the two owners--had splendid taste and would be glad to
put it at their service. There was no reason why she should not at once
take the sextette down-town and fit them out with their dresses.
Galbraith shrugged his shoulders, but made no further complaint. It was,
he admitted, as they had repeatedly pointed out, their own money. So a
rendezvous was made between Mrs. Goldsmith and the sextette for
Lessing's store on Michigan Avenue at three o'clock on an afternoon when
Galbraith was to be busy with the principals. He might manage to drop in
before they left to cast his eye over and approve the selection.
It was with some rather uncomfortable misgivings that Rose set out to
revisit a part of town so closely associated with the first year of her
married life. The particular shop wasn't, luckily, one that she had
patronized in that former incarnation. But it was in the same block with
a half dozen that were, and she hadn't been east of Clark Street since
the day Otto had driven her to the Polk Street Station.
The day was cold and blustery--a fact that she was grateful for, as it
gave her an excuse for wearing a thick white veil, which was almost as
good as a mask. It was with a rather breathless excitement that
persisted in feeling like guilt--her heart wouldn't have beaten any
faster, she believed, if she had just robbed a jewelry store and were
walking away with the swag in her pocket--that she debouched out of Van
Buren Street, around the corner of the Chicago Club, and into the
avenue. Unconsciously, she had been expecting to meet every one she
knew, beginning with Frederica, in the course of the two blocks or so
she had to walk. Very naturally, she didn't catch even a glimpse of any
one she even remotely knew. Suppose there should be any one in the
store! But this, she realized, wasn't likely.
It wasn't a really smart shop. It paid an enormous rent there in that
neighborhood in order to pretend to be, and the gowns on the wax figures
in its windows, were taken on faith by pleasurably scandalized
pedestrians as the very latest scream of fashion. The prices on these
confections were always in the process of a violent reduction, as large
exclamatory placards grievously testified. The legend eighty-eight
dollars crossed out in red lines, with thirty-nine seventy-five written
below, for a sample. The most exclusive smartness for the economy-loving
multitude. This was the slogan.
Rose, arriving promptly at the hour agreed on, had a wait of fifteen
minutes before any of her sisters of the sextette, or Mrs. Goldsmith
arrived. She told the suave manager that she was waiting for friends,
but this didn't deter him from employing a magnificent wave of the hand
to summon one of the saleswomen and consigning Rose almost tenderly, to
her care. He didn't know her, but he knew that that ulster of hers had
come straight over from Paris, had cost not less than two hundred
dollars, and had been selected by an excellently discriminating eye; and
that was enough for him.
"I don't want anything just now," Rose told the saleswoman. But she
hadn't, in these few weeks of Clark Street, lost the air of one who will
buy if she sees anything worth buying. In fact, the saleswoman thought,
correctly, that she knew her and was in for a shock a little later when
Mrs. Goldsmith and the other five members of the sextette arrived.
Meanwhile, she showed Rose the few really smart things they had in the
store--a Poiret evening gown, a couple of afternoon frocks from Jennie,
and so on. There wasn't much, she admitted, it being just between
seasons. Their Palm Beach things weren't in yet.
Rose made a few appreciative, but decidedly respect-compelling comments,
and faithfully kept one eye on the door.
The rest of the sextette arrived in a pair and a trio. One of them
squealed, "Hello, Dane!" The saleswoman got her shock on seeing Rose nod
an acknowledgment of this greeting and just about that time, they heard
Mrs. Goldsmith explaining who she was and the nature of her errand, to
the manager. The necessary identifications got themselves made somehow.
They weren't in any sense introductions, everybody in the store felt
that plainly. Mrs. Goldsmith was touching the skirts of musical comedy
with a very long pair of tongs. There was absolutely no connection,
social or personal, between herself and the young persons who were to
wear the frocks she was going to buy.
She stood them up and stared at them through her eye-glasses, discussed
their various physical idiosyncrasies with candor, and, one by one,
packed them off to try on haphazard selections from the mounds which
three industrious saleswomen piled up before her. You couldn't deny her
the possession of a certain force of character, for not one of the six
girls uttered a word of suggestion or of protest.
And the sort of gowns she was exclaiming over with delight and ordering
put into the heap of possibilities, were horrible enough to have drawn a
protest from the wax figures in the windows. The more completely the
fundamental lines of a frock were disguised with sartorial scroll-saw
work, the more successful this lady felt it to be. An ornament, to Mrs.
Goldsmith, did not live up to its possibilities, unless it in turn were
decorated with ornaments of its own; like the fleas on the fleas on the
dog.
It is a tribute to one of the qualities that made John Galbraith a
successful director, that Rose spent a miserable half-hour worrying over
these selections of the wife of the principal owner of the show, feeling
she ought to put up some sort of fight and hardly deterred by the patent
futility of such a course. To rest her esthetic senses from the delirium
of fussiness that was giving Mrs. Goldsmith so much pleasure, she began
thinking about that Poiret frock--the superb simple audacity of it! It
had been made by an artist who knew where to stop. And he had stopped
rather incredibly soon. Just suppose ... And then her eyes lighted up,
gazed thoughtfully out the window across the wind-swept desert of the
avenue, and, presently she grinned--widely, contentedly.
For the next hour and a half, during the intervals of her own trying on,
she entertained herself very happily with the day-dream that she herself
had a commission to design the costumes for _The Girl Up-stairs_. She
had always done that more or less, she realized, when she went to
musical-comedy shows with Rodney, especially when they were badly
costumed. But this time she did it a good deal more vividly, partly
because her interest in the piece was more intense, partly because her
imagination had a blank canvas to work on.
All the while, like Sister Anne in the tower, she kept one eye on the
door and prayed for the arrival of John Galbraith.
He came in just as Mrs. Goldsmith finished her task--just when, by a
process of studious elimination, every passable thing in the store had
been discarded and the twelve most utterly hopeless ones--two for each
girl--laid aside for purchase. The girls were despatched to put on the
evening frocks first, and were then paraded before the director.
He was a diplomat as I have said (possibly I spoke of him before as an
acrobat. It comes to the same thing), and he was quick on his feet.
Rose, watching his face very closely, thought that for just a split
second, she caught a gleam of ineffable horror. But it was gone so
quickly she could almost have believed that she had been mistaken. He
didn't say much about the costumes, but he said it so promptly and
adequately that Mrs. Goldsmith beamed with pride. She sent the girls
away to put on the other set--the afternoon frocks, and once more the
director's approbation, though laconic, was one hundred per cent. pure.
"That's all," he said in sudden dismissal of the sextette. "Rehearsal at
eight-thirty."
Five of them scurried like children let out of school, around behind the
set of screens that made an extemporaneous dressing-room, and began
changing in a mad scramble, hoping to get away and to get their dinners
eaten soon enough to enable them to see the whole bill at a movie show
before the evening's rehearsal.
But Rose didn't avail herself of her dismissal--remained hanging about,
a couple of paces away from where Galbraith was talking to Mrs.
Goldsmith. The only question that remained, he was telling her, was
whether her selections were not too--well, too refined, genteel, one
might say, for the stage. Regretfully he confessed he was a little
afraid they were. It needed a certain crudity to withstand the glare of
the footlights and until these gowns had been submitted to that glare,
one couldn't be sure.
He wasn't looking at her as he talked, and presently, as his gaze
wandered about the store, it encountered Rose's face. She hadn't
prepared it for the encounter, and it wore, hardly veiled, a look of
humorous appreciation. His sentence broke, then completed itself. She
turned away, but the next moment he called out to her, "Were you waiting
for me, Dane?"
"I'd like to speak to you a minute," she said, "when you have time."
"All right. Go and change your clothes first," he said.
Out of the tail of her eye as she departed, she saw him shaking hands
with the owner's wife and thanking her effusively for her help.
Incidentally, he was leading her toward the door as he did it. And at
the door, he declined an offer to be taken anywhere he might want to go
in her electric.
She found the other girls on the point of departure. But Olga offered to
wait for her.
"No, you run along," Rose said. "I've some errands and I don't feel like
seeing a movie to-night, anyway."
Olga looked a little odd about it, but hurried along after the others.
A saleswoman--the same one the manager assigned to Rose under the
misconception which that smart French ulster of hers had created when
she came into the store--now came around behind the screen to gather up
the frocks the girls had shed.
"Will you please bring me," said Rose, "that Poiret model you showed me
before the others came in? I'll try it on."
The saleswoman's manner was different now and she grumbled something
about its being closing time.
"Then, if you'll bring it at once ..." said Rose. And the saleswoman
went on the errand.
Five minutes later, Galbraith from staring gloomily at the mournful heap
of trouble Mrs. Goldsmith had left on his hands, looked up to confront a
vision that made him gasp.
[Illustration: "It isn't quite so much your style, is it?"]
"I wanted you to see if you liked this," said Rose.
"If I liked it!" he echoed. "Look here! If you know enough to pick out
things like that, why did you let that woman waste everybody's time with
junk like this? Why didn't you help her out?"
"I couldn't have done much," Rose said, "even if my offering to do
anything hadn't made her angry--and I think it would have. You see,
she's got lots of taste, only it's bad. She wasn't bewildered a bit. She
knew just what she wanted and she got it. It's the badness of these
things she likes. And I thought ..." She hesitated a little over this.
"I thought as long as they couldn't be good, perhaps the next best thing
would be to have them as bad as possible. I mean that it would be easier
to throw them all out and get a fresh start."
He stared at her with a frown of curiosity. "That's good sense," he
said. "But how did you come to think of it?--Oh, I don't mean that!" he
went on impatiently. "Why should you bother to think of it?"
Her color came up perceptibly as she answered. "Why--I want the piece to
succeed, of course. I was awfully miserable when I saw the sort of
things she was picking out and I spent half an hour trying to think what
I could do about it. And then I saw that the best thing I could do, was
nothing."
"You didn't do nothing though," he said. "That thing you've got on is a
start."
Rose turned rather suddenly to the saleswoman. "I wish you'd get that
little Empire frock in maize and corn-flower," she said. "I'd like Mr.
Galbraith to see that, too." And the saleswoman, now placated, bustled
away.
"This thing that I've got on," said Rose swiftly, "costs a hundred and
fifty dollars, but I know I can copy it for twenty. I can't get the
materials exactly of course, but I can come near enough."
"Will you try this one on, miss?" asked the saleswoman, coming on the
scene again with the frock she had been sent for.
"No," said Rose. "Just hold it up."
Galbraith admitted it was beautiful, but wasn't overwhelmed at all as
he had been by the other.
"It's not quite so much your style, is it? Not drive enough?"
"It isn't for me," said Rose. "It's for Olga Larson to wear in that _All
Alone_ number for the sextette."
"Why Larson especially?" he asked. "Except that she's a friend of
yours."
"She isn't," said Rose, "particularly. And anyway, that wouldn't be a
reason. But--did you ever really look at her? She's the one really
beautiful woman in the company."
"Larson?" said John Galbraith incredulously.
And Rose, with a flush and a smile partly deprecatory over her
presumption in venturing to say such things to a formidable authority
like the director, and partly the result of an exciting conviction that
she was right, told him her mind on the subject, while Galbraith, half
fascinated, half amused, listened.
"I don't happen to remember the portrait of the Honorable Mrs. Graham
that you speak about," he said, "but I won't deny that you may be right
about it."
It was well after closing time by now--a fact that the manager, coming
to reinforce the saleswoman, contrived, without saying so, to indicate.
"Put on your street things," said Galbraith bruskly. "I'll wait."