2.
When Jill arrived at the theatre at four o’clock for the chorus rehearsal, the expected blow had not fallen. No steps had apparently been taken to eliminate the thirteenth girl whose presence in the cast preyed on Mr. Goble’s superstitious mind. But she found her colleagues still in a condition of pessimistic foreboding. “Wait!” was the gloomy watchword of “The Rose of America” chorus.
The rehearsal passed off without event. It lasted until six o’clock, when Jill, the Cherub, and two or three of the other girls went to snatch a hasty dinner before returning to the theatre to make up. It was not a cheerful meal. Reaction had set in after the overexertion of the previous night, and it was too early for first-night excitement to take its place. Everybody, even the Cherub, whose spirits seldom failed her, was depressed, and the idea of an overhanging doom had grown. It seemed now to be merely a question of speculating on the victim, and the conversation gave Jill, as the last addition to the company and so the cause of swelling the ranks of the chorus to the unlucky number, a feeling of guilt. She was glad when it was time to go back to the theatre.
The moment she and her companions entered the dressing-room, it was made clear to them that the doom had fallen. In a chair in the corner, all her pretence and affectation swept away in a flood of tears, sat the unhappy Duchess, the center of a group of girls anxious to console but limited in their ideas of consolation to an occasional pat on the back and an offer of a fresh pocket-handkerchief.
“It’s tough, honey!” somebody was saying as Jill came in.
Somebody else said it was fierce, and a third girl declared it to be the limit. A fourth girl, well-meaning but less helpful than she would have liked to be, was advising the victim not to worry.
The story of the disaster was brief and easily told. The Duchess, sailing in at the stage-door, had paused at the letter-box to see if Cuthbert, her faithful auto-salesman, had sent her a good-luck telegram. He had, but his good wishes were unfortunately neutralized by the fact that the very next letter in the box was one from the management, crisp and to the point, informing the Duchess that her services would not be required that night or thereafter. It was the subtle meanness of the blow that roused the indignation of “The Rose of America” chorus, the cunning villainy with which it had been timed.
“Poor Mae, if she’d opened tonight, they’d have had to give her two weeks’ notice or her salary. But they can fire her without a cent just because she’s only been rehearsing and hasn’t given a show!”
The Duchess burst into fresh flood of tears.
“Don’t you worry, honey!” advised the well-meaning girl, who would have been in her element looking in on Job with Bildad the Shuhite and his friends. “Don’t you worry!”
“It’s tough!” said the girl, who had adopted that form of verbal consolation.
“It’s fierce!” said the girl who preferred that adjective.
The other girl, with an air of saying something new, repeated her statement that it was the limit. The Duchess cried forlornly throughout. She had needed this engagement badly. Chorus salaries are not stupendous, but it is possible to save money by means of them during a New York run, especially if you have spent three years in a milliner’s shop and can make your own clothes, as the Duchess, in spite of her air of being turned out by Fifth Avenue modistes, could and did. She had been looking forward, now that this absurd piece was to be rewritten by someone who knew his business and had a good chance of success, to putting by just those few dollars that make all the difference when you are embarking on married life. Cuthbert, for all his faithfulness, could not hold up the financial end of the establishment unsupported for at least another eighteen months; and this disaster meant that the wedding would have to be postponed again. So the Duchess, abandoning that aristocratic manner criticized by some of her colleagues as “up-stage” and by others as “Ritz-y,” sat in her chair and consumed pocket-handkerchiefs as fast as they were offered to her.