The Girls of Central High on the Stage: or, The Play That Took The Prize

“Just tell him, Josephine, that we will have it shortly. He needn’t come again. I’ll let you take it around to his house to him when I get it.”

But this did not suit the old man, and he pushed his way, for once, into the presence of the literary lady.

“Now, see here! Now, see here!” he cackled. “This won’t do at all, Widder – this won’t do at all! I want my money, and I want it prompt. And if you can’t pay your present rent prompt, how do you expect to pay it next month, when you must find three dollars more? Now, tell me that, Ma’am?”

“Really, Mr. Chumley! You are too bad,” complained Mrs. Morse. “I am so hard at work. You quite drive the ideas out of my head. I – I don’t know what train of thought I was following.”

Mr. Chumley snorted. “You’d better be huntin’ the advertisement columns of a newspaper for a job, Widder,” he said. “Them ‘trains of thought’ of yours won’t never carry you nowhere. I gotter have my money. How are you going to get it?”

“I have never failed to pay you heretofore, have I?” asked the lady, bringing out her handkerchief now. “I think this is too bad – ”

“But I want money!”

“And you shall have it, I have considerable owing to me – oh, yes! a good deal more than sufficient to pay your rent, Mr. Chumley. You will get it.”

That was a very unsatisfactory interview for the landlord, and particularly so for Mrs. Morse. She complained when he had gone to Jess:

“Now, my day is just spoiled. I’m all at loose ends. It will cost me a day’s work. Really, Josephine, if only people wouldn’t nag me so for money!”

And Jess strove to shield her all that she could from such interviews. Mrs. Morse needed to live alone in a world with her brain-children. Meanwhile her flesh-and-blood child had to fight her battles with the landlord and tradesmen.

It was amid such sordid troubles that Jess evolved the idea for her play. The butterfly is born of the ugly chrysalis; out of this unlovely environment grew a pretty, idyllic comedy which, although crude in spots, and lacking the professional touch which makes a dramatic piece “easy acting,” really showed such promise that Mrs. Morse acclaimed its value loudly.

“Oh, Mother! don’t praise me so much,” begged Jess. “The theme is good, I know. But it scares me. How can I ever dress it up to make it sound like a real play? It sounds so jerky and imperfect – that part that I have written, I mean.”

“There is something a dramatic critic told me once that may be true,” replied her mother. “It was that the piece which reads smoothly seldom acts well; whereas a play that ‘gets over the footlights’ usually reads poorly. You see, action cannot be read aloud; and it is the action that accompanies the words of a dramatic piece that makes those words tell.

“I am not sure that Mr. Sharp and his committee will consider your play the best written, from a literary standpoint; but I understand that they have invited Mr. Monterey, the manager of the Centerport Opera House, to read the plays, too. And you, Josephine, write for him; for they will depend upon his judgment in the choice of the acting qualities of the piece.”

This was good advice, as Jess very well knew. And she could barely keep her mind sufficiently upon her school work to pass the eagle scrutiny of Miss Grace G. Carrington, so wrapped up was she in the play. Not even to Laura did she confide any facts regarding the piece. Some of the girls openly discussed what they had done, and what they hoped; but Jess kept still.

Thursday came and in her mother’s morning mail was a letter with the card of the Centerport Courier in the corner.

“Now, what can that be?” drawled Mrs. Morse, when Jess eagerly brought it to her. “They buy no fugitive matter, and I haven’t sent them anything since having my interview with Mr. Prentice. I really would have been happier to see a letter like that from one of the New York magazines; it might have contained a check in that case,” and she slowly slit the envelope.

But Jess waited in the background with suppressed eagerness in her face and attitude. At once her thought had leaped to Mrs. Prentice. She had not told her mother a word about that lady’s visit on Friday evening, nor her errand to the house. But if Mrs. Prentice was really “the power behind the throne” in the Courier office, she might easily put some regular work in the way of Mrs. Morse.

“Listen to this, child!” exclaimed her mother, having glanced hastily through the letter. “Perhaps I had better take this – for a time, at least. I don’t like the idea of being tied down – it might interfere with my magazine work – ”

“Oh, Mother!” cried Jess. “What is it?”

“Listen: Addressed to me, ‘Dear Madam: – Will reconsider your suggestion of covering Hill section for society news. Can afford at least five dollars’ worth of space through the week, and perhaps something extra on Sunday. Come and see me again. Respectfully, P. S. Prentice.’ Well!”

“Oh, Mother!” repeated Jess. “What a splendid chance!”

“Why, Josephine, not so very splendid,” said her mother, slowly. “He only guarantees me five dollars weekly. That is not much.”

“It will feed us – if we are careful,” gasped Jess.

“Goodness, Josephine! What a horribly practical child you are getting to be. I don’t know what the girls of to-day are coming to. Now, that would never have appealed to me when I was your age. I never knew how papa and mamma got food for us.”

Jess might have told her that conditions had not changed much since her girlhood!

“But five dollars regularly will help us a whole lot, Mother,” she urged.

“And it will necessitate my going out considerably – and appearing at receptions and places. Really – I have refused a number of invitations because of my wardrobe. My excuse of ‘work’ is not always strictly true,” sighed Mrs. Morse.

“But do, do try it, Mother!” cried Jess.

“Well,” said the lady, “it may do no harm. And it may be an opening for something better. But, really, nobody must know that I am a mere society reporter on the Centerport Courier.”

CHAPTER IX – A SKATING PARTY

The girls of the Junior class in modern history were filing out on Friday.

“What do you know about that?” hissed Bobby Hargrew, in the ears of her chums. “Gee Gee is getting meaner and meaner every day she lives.”

“What did she do to you now?” demanded Dora Lockwood, one of the twins.

“Didn’t you notice? She sent Postscript to hunt up Moscow on the map of Russia. Now! you know very well that Moscow was burned in 1812!”

“You ridiculous child!” exclaimed Nellie Agnew. “You will never do anything in school but make jokes and try the patience of your teachers.”

“I am no friend to teachers, I admit,” confided Bobby to Dora and Dorothy. “Don’t you think they ought to be made to earn their money?”

“Any teacher who is so unfortunate as to have you in his, or her, class, is bound to earn all the salary coming to them,” declared Dorothy.

“Bad grammar – but you don’t know any better,” declared the harum-scarum. “You’re just as bad as Freddie Atkinson. Dimple asked him who compiled the dictionary, and Freddie said, ‘Daniel Webster.’

“‘No, sir! Noah!’ snapped Dimple.

“‘Oh, Professor!’ exclaimed Fred. ‘I thought Noah compiled the Ark?’”

As the girls were laughing over this story of Bobby Hargrew’s, Eve Sitz came up briskly. Laura and Jess were near at hand, and in a moment a group of the Juniors who always “trained together” were in animated discussion.

“Yes. It’s frozen hard. Otto was on it with a pair of horses and our pung,” declared Eve, who came in every morning from the country on the train, and whose father owned a big farm over beyond Robinson’s Woods.

“What’s frozen?” demanded Dora.

“Peveril Pond. It’s as smooth as glass. I want you to all come over on Saturday afternoon; we’ll have a lot of fun,” declared Eve.

“You’re always inviting us to the farm, Evangeline,” said Nellie Agnew; “I should think your father and mother would be tired of having us overrun the place.”

“Never you mind about them,” declared Evangeline, smiling. “They love to have young folks around. Now, remember! Saturday at noon the autos will start from the Beldings’ front door – if it doesn’t snow.”

“Oh, snow!” cried Bobby. “I hope not yet.”

“‘Beautiful snow! he may sing whom it suits —
I object to the stuff, ‘cause it soaks through my boots!’”