"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 assured her. "It's too early for much
of a crowd. No good getting nervous about this bunch."
"I'm not," she asserted 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 associates 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 anticipations
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 muffled 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 anticipating a few stage-hands, who rushed on to make the
changes necessary for the next act.
Quard was waiting for her.
"Well," he said, "it didn't go so bad, did it?"
"No," she agreed listlessly.
"Anyhow, they didn't throw things at us."
"No." She endeavoured to smile, with indifferent success.
"I got a lot more laughs with that spittoon business than I thought I
would," he continued thoughtfully as they turned back toward the
dressing-rooms.
Joan made no reply, but when she stopped at the door of her
dressing-room, Quard added tentatively:
"Anyway, it beats clerking in a department store, doesn't it?"