Joan Thursday: A Novel

Any competent stage-director could have made much of him; but in an age when managers cast their productions with types who "look" their parts in preference to players who can act them, he found few chances to demonstrate his ability outside the cheaper stock organizations; for the only character he was physically fitted to portray was that of an actor.

An ill-starred impulse had led him to resign his latest stock connection in order to adventure in vaudeville with a one-act sketch written to his order by a hack manufacturer of such trash. Its "try-out week" in a provincial town had elicited no offers from other managers, and in the meantime his place in the stock company had been filled. At present he had a little money saved up, no immediate prospects of an engagement, good-humour, no illusions whatever.

"It's no good," he informed Miss May Dean on the occasion of their first meeting: "I know where I get off, all right. I can play anything they slip me, but these Broadway guys can't see my kind of actor. Give me a part I can sink my teeth into, and I'll shake it until the house climbs on the seats and howls. But that ain't what they're after, these days."

"The movies'll get you, if you don't watch out," May suggested cheerfully.

"That's right; and I'd be a knock-out in a film gang, too; I'm just their kind. That's what's become of all the old boys who still think Fourteenth Street's the Rialto, yunno. But me, I'm too strong for the noise an audience makes when they like you, or don't: I'd just as lief be hissed as get every hand in the house. Don't believe I could stand acting for a one-eyed box that didn't say anything but 'clickety-click.' I'd rather travel with the Uncle Tommers – honest'."

He was publicly morose for a moment or two. Then he roused: "Cheer up! The worst is yet to come. Maybe I can stick out till next spring, when Grady makes his next all-star revival. Wonder what he'll exhume this time? If it's only something like 'The Silver King,' or 'East Lynne,' I may yet cop out a chance to play to a two-dollar house… Now, lis'n: I'm going down on the stoop and smoke a cigarette while you girls colour your maps for artificial light. The eats are on me tonight."

"Does that take in my little friend?" demanded Maizie, with a nod toward Joan.

Quard threw Joan a kindly glance: "Sure. Now, get a hustle on."

"But I can't," Joan protested. "I'm sorry – I'd love to – but I've got nothing fit to wear."

"You look pretty good to me as you stand," returned Quard. "Forget it, kid, and kick in."

"That's right," Maizie insisted. "Besides, I'll lend you a hat and a fresh fichu; you don't need any coat tonight, it's too rotten warm."

"Anyway," Quard said over his shoulder as he left the room, "we ain't booked for Sherry's."

In witness whereof, he introduced the girls to an obscure Italian boarding-house in Twenty-seventh Street, the proprietress of which admitted them only after examination through a grille in the front door. Quard explained to Joan that this precaution was necessary because the house served "red ink" with the meals and without benefit of a liquor license; hence, only friends could be admitted.

They dined by gas-light in the back-yard, under an awning which served the double purpose of excluding observation from the neighbouring dwellings and compressing the heated air. Perhaps two dozen tables crowded the enclosure. The male guests by common consent removed their coats and hung them on nails in the fence. The ladies emulated by discarding hats and all conventionalities of a nature to impede free expression of their temperaments. Maizie Dean even did without her English accent.

The meal was of a sort only to be consumed with impunity by optimists and Italians: a heavy soup, and all one could eat of it, spaghetti without end, a minute section of lukewarm blotting paper with a remote flavour of chicken, a salad, cheese and coffee, a half-bottle of atrocious red wine. Joan enjoyed it immensely; it has been said that her powers of digestion were exceptional.

Everybody seemed to know everybody else. Conversation was free between tables. Personalities were bandied back and forth amid intense glee. Quard, consuming enormous quantities of wine, proved himself a general favourite, a leading spirit. After dinner he called for a virulent green cordial (which Joan tasted but could not drink) and later returned to the wine. Before the end of the evening he became semi-maudlin, and on leaving exploited a highly humorous inability to walk a straight line. On the corner of Broadway he halted suddenly, bade the three women a slurred good night, and without other ceremony swung himself aboard a Broadway car.

His rudeness excited no comment from the Dancing Deans. They walked all the way home with Joan, unescorted. Joan was surprised to see by the clock in the Herald building that it was almost eleven. She thought she had never known an evening to pass so quickly and so pleasantly. What little wine she had consumed seemed to have affected her not at all, beyond rendering her keenly appreciative of this novel experience.

But she suffered the next morning from a slight and, to her, inexplicable headache.

It was four or five days later before she saw Quard again. He called early in the evening – but after dinner – and sat chatting amiably with the women for upwards of an hour before the real purpose of his visit transpired.

"I was talking to Reinhardt about an idea I got for a sketch, day before yesterday," he announced suddenly. "But he wanted fifty cash before he'd touch it, and seeing as it was him slipped me that other lemon, I told him merrily where he could go and went home and wrote it myself."

"You didn't!" Maizie exclaimed admiringly.

"You bet your life I did," the actor asseverated with conscious modesty. "Why not? It's no great stunt, writing; and besides it's all old junk I've done before, only hashed up a new way. All I had to do was to cop lines out of shows I've played in – sure-fire stuff, yunno – and write in names of characters. That's nothing."

"Oh, no, nothin' at all!" commented May Dean from her perch on the window-sill. "What's an author, anyway? Eight to five, girls, he's got the 'script on him. Get ready to duck."

"Wel-l!" Quard laughed – "you beat me to it, all right." He produced a sheaf of folded papers, smoothing them out upon his knee. "I just thought I'd see what you thought of it. If it's any good I'm going to read it to Schneider tomorrow and see what he'll offer me."

"Who's Schneider?" Maizie asked blankly.

"Agent for the film circuits," Quard replied.

"You don't mean you're thinkin' of fallin' for the four-a-day!"

"I'll try anything once; I'm not too proud to earn my bed and board in the dull season, anyhow. Besides, this thing would break into the Orpheum Circuit only over the dead body of Martin Beck. I'm no Georgie Cohan. But it oughta sandwich in between the pictures without anybody asking his ten cents back."

"You've got your nerve with you," Maizie commented darkly.

"Let him rave," May advised, exhaling cigarette smoke voluminously. "Shoot!"

Taking this for consent, Quard rattled the sheets of paper, tilted back his chair, and began to read.

His voice was flexible and sonorous; instinctively he declaimed the lines, extracting from each its full value. Now and again he lent emphasis to a phrase with an eloquent hand. But to Joan the composition was quite incoherent. She attended with wonder and a feeling of impatience because of her inability to understand what Quard seemed to relish with so much enthusiasm. It was, in fact, a worthless farrago of nonsense. None the less the two dancers laughed at encouraging intervals.

Flattered, Quard rose, removed his coat and began to act the lines, striding up and down the narrow space between the foot of the double-bed and the marble mantelpiece. The night was hot; a single gas-jet illumined the centre of the room; Quard perspired freely. For all that, his stenographic acting gave the thing some slight accent of humanity. It became a trifle, a mere trifle, more intelligible.

Seated on the window-sill, en profile to the room, her slight, wiry body attired sketchily in a kimono and short skirt, May Dean swung her legs and stared out into the darkness, an ironic smile hovering round her thin lips. Maizie lounged on the bed, tracing a meaningless pattern on the counterpane with a thin and rouge-stained forefinger. Joan occupied the only chair other than that at the disposal of the actor. She was very tired, and her attention wandered, even though Quard managed to draw it back now and then by some vivid trick of elocution or gesture. Vaguely sensitive to the magnetism of the man, her thoughts were occupied more with indefinite speculations about his personality than with the semi-plagiaristic and wholly commonplace concoction of cheap sentiment and tried-and-true "gags" which he professed to have written.

Physically he attracted her. Divested of his coat, his chest swelled impressively beneath a pink-striped silk shirt. When he lifted an arm, the clinging sleeve moulded itself to an admirable biceps. As he strode to and fro the stuff of his thin summer trousers shaped itself to legs that might have proved enviable to Sir Willoughby Patterne himself. His wide-lipped mouth disclosed an excellent outfit of large, white, strong teeth. His jet-black hair curled engagingly at his temples and over his generous pink ears. She liked his big, muscular, mobile hands…

She started suddenly, to discover that he had concluded and was facing her with an expectant expression, and sat up and smiled faintly, with embarrassment, trying to remember what it had all been about.

From the window, May Dean drawled languidly: "Is that the finish?"

Quard waved an arm. "Curtain!" he said; and sat down.

"My Gawd!" observed May thoughtfully.

He laughed uncomfortably: "As bad as all that?"

"It'd make a wonderful chaser," Maizie commented without lifting her eyes from the counterpane.

Quard turned desperately back to Joan. "What do you think of it, Miss Thursday?"

"I think so too," she said with all the animation she could muster. The other women laughed aloud. She flushed and added: "I mean, I think it's wonderful. I don't know what a chaser is."

"A chaser, dearie," Maizie explained in tones of acute commiseration, "is an act put on in the continuous houses to chase out the chair-warmers and make room for more."

"Well," said Quard, shuffling the manuscript, "I don't care if it is a chaser, so long as it stakes me to the eats till something else turns up."

XII

On that day when she discovered the disappearance of John Matthias, Joan left the house later than had been her wont, and returned earlier, after a faint-hearted and abortive attempt to interview the stage-manager of a new musical production then being assembled to rehearse against an early opening in the Autumn.

The Deans were out. She had no place to go other than to her bare and lonely room, and she felt uncommonly hopeless and friendless. Subconsciously she had been holding in reserve, as a last hope, an appeal to the generosity of Matthias. He was a playwright, an intimate of managers: surely he would be able to suggest something, no matter how poorly paid or inconspicuous. Now, with the date of his return indefinite, she felt unjustly bereft of that last resource.

She spent two weary, wretched hours on her bed, harassed by a singularly fresh and clear perception of her unfitness, for the first time made conscious that she had actually possessed no reasonable excuse for her determination to go on the stage. Her qualifications, which hitherto might have been expressed, according to her own estimate, by the algebraic X, now assumed a value only to be indicated by a cipher. She had a good strong voice, it's true, but no ear whatever for music; she didn't "know steps" (Maizie's term, denoting ability for eccentric dancing) and of the art of acting she was completely ignorant. In fact, her theatrical ambitions had been founded more upon need of money than upon any real or fancied passion for the stage. Other girls had done likewise and bettered themselves: Joan knew no reason why she should fall short of their enviable achievements; but she was innocent of dramatic feeling and even of any real yearning for applause. Only her looks, of which she was confident, were to be counted upon to carry her beyond the stage doors.

She thought of her home, of her mother, her father, Edna and Butch, with a dull and temperate regret. Since that first afternoon she had never attempted to revisit them, and she felt now no inclination toward returning. Still, her thoughts yearned back to the miserable flat as to an assured shelter: there, at least, she had been safe from rude weather and positive hunger.