Joan Thursday: A Novel

As things were with her, another week would find her destitute, but there was still the chance that something would turn up within that week. She felt almost sure that something would turn up. In this incurable optimism resided almost her sole endowment for the career of an actress: this, and a certain dogged temper which wouldn't permit her to acknowledge defeat until every possible expedient had been explored…

Toward evening she heard footsteps on the stairs. To her surprise they paused by her door, upon which fell a confident knock. Jumping up from her bed in a flurry, she answered to find Quard on the threshold.

No one had been farther from her thoughts. She stared, agape and speechless.

"Hello, Miss Thursday!" said the actor genially. "Can I come in?"

He entered, cast a comprehensive glance round the poor little room, deposited his hat upon the bed and himself beside it. Leaving the door open, and murmuring some inarticulate response, Joan turned back to her one chair.

"Hope I don't intrude," Quard rattled on cheerfully. "The girl told me the Deans was out and you in, so I took a chance and said I'd come right up."

"I – I'm sorry Maizie isn't home," stammered the girl.

"I ain't." Quard's eyes looked her over with open admiration. "I didn't want to see either of 'em, really. What I wanted was a little confab with you."

"With me!"

"Surest thing you know. I wanta talk business. I don't guess you've landed anything yet?"

Joan shook her head blankly.

"Well, I got a little proposition to make you. Yunno that sketch I wrote and you liked so much the other night?"

"Yes…"

"Well, I got hold of Schneider yesterday, and read it to him, and he says he can get me four or five weeks' booking at least, if I can put it over at the try-out. How does that strike you?"

"Why – I'm glad," Joan faltered, still mystified. "It must be fine to get something to do."

"Well, I haven't got it yet; and of course, maybe I won't get it. One of the first things you gotta learn in this business is, never spend your pay envelope till you got it in your mitt. And in this case, a lot depends on you."

"I don't get you," Joan returned frankly. "What've I got to do with it?"

Quard smiled indulgently, offered her a cigarette, which she refused, and lighted one for himself.

"If I can't get you to play the woman's part," he said, spurting twin jets of smoke through his nostrils, "it's all up – unless I can hitch up with summonelse just like you."

"You mean – you want me to – to act – ?"

"Right, the very first time outa the box! Yunno, it's this way with these cheap houses: they can't afford to pay much for a turn, even a good one – and this one of ours is going to be about as bum as any act that ever broke through: take that from me. So it's up to me to find somebody who'll work with me for little enough money to leave something for myself, after I've squared up with the agent and stage-hands, and all that. You make me now?"

"Yes; but I haven't any experience – "

"That's just it: if you had, I couldn't afford you. But you gotta start sometime, and it won't do you no harm to get wise to what little I can teach you. Now the most I can count on dragging down for this act is sixty a week. I want twenty-five of that for myself. Fifteen, more will fix the agent and the rest. That leaves twenty for you. It ain't much, but it's a long sight better than nothing."

"But – how do you know I can do it?"

"That'll be all right. I know all about acting – anyway, I know enough to show you how to put across anything you'll have to do in this piece. Now how about it?"

"Why, I'll be glad – "

"Good enough. Now here: I've had this dope type-written, and here's your copy. Let's run through it now, and tonight you can start in learning. Tomorrow we'll have a rehearsal, and just as soon's we got our lines pat, we'll let Schneider have a pipe at it. Don't worry. It ain't going to be hard."

Thus reassured, but still a trifle dubious, Joan accepted a duplicate of the manuscript, and composed herself to follow to the best of her ability Quard's second reading.

This time he took less pains with his enunciation, scanned the lines more rapidly, and frequently interrupted himself in order to explain a trick of stage-craft or to detail with genuine gusto some bit of business which he counted upon to prove especially telling.

In consequence of this exposition, Joan acquired a much clearer understanding of the nature of the sketch. It concerned two persons only: a remarkably successful stage dancer, to be played by Joan; her convict husband, fresh from the penitentiary, by Quard. Scene: the dressing-room of the dancer. Time: just after the dancer's "turn." Joan, discovered "on", informs the audience of her fortunate circumstances through the medium of a brief soliloquy. Enter Quard (shambling gait, convict pallor, etc.) to inform her that she has been living in the lap of luxury during the eight years that he has been serving time: "I'm goin' to have my share now!" Comedy business: humorously brutal attitude toward wife; slangy description of prison life. ("They'll simply eat that up!" —Quard.) More comedy business involving a gratuitous box of property cigars and a cuspidor. Suddenly and without shadow of excuse, husband accuses wife of infidelity. Indignant denials; wife exhibits portrait of child born after commitment of husband, and of whose existence he has heretofore been ignorant: "It was for him I fought my way to the top of the ladder: he has your eyes!" Incontinently husband experiences change of heart; kisses photograph; snuffles into cap crushed between hands; slavers over wife's hand; refuses her offer of assistance; announces he will go West to "make a man of myself!" before returning to claim his wife and child. And the Curtain falls upon him in the act of going out, all broken up.

"Of course," Quard admitted, "it's bunk stuff, but we can put it across all right. I'm going to call it The Convict's Return and bill it as by Charles D'Arcy and Company. You'll be the company. I don't want to use my name, because it ain't going to do me any good to have it known I've taken to this graft, and if I'm lucky no one's going to spot me through my make-up."

Suddenly apprised by the failing light that the hour was growing late, he pocketed the manuscript and rose.

"Come on out and eat – business dinner. We'll talk things over, and I'll fetch you home early, so's you can start getting up on your lines."

They dined again at the Italian boarding-house. Quard drank but sparingly, considerably to the relief of Joan…

She was home by half-past eight, her head buzzing with her efforts to remember all he had told her, and sat up till three in the morning, conning the inhuman speeches of her part until she had them by rote; no very wonderful accomplishment, considering that the sketch was to play less than fifteen minutes, and that two-thirds of its lines were to be delivered by Quard.

But once with head on pillow, it was not her rôle that she remembered, but the man: his coarsely musical tones, his eloquent white hands, the overt admiration that shone in his eyes whenever he forgot his sketch and remembered momentarily Joan the woman. She felt sure he liked her. And she liked him well. Of the merits of his enterprise she knew nothing, but he had succeeded in inspiring her with confidence that he knew what he was about.

She drifted off into sleep, comforted by the conviction that she had found a friend.

By the time of her return from breakfast, the next morning, Quard was waiting for her at the lodging-house. He had already arranged with Madame Duprat for the use of the front parlour for rehearsals, pending its lease to some fortuitous tenant; and here he proceeded to work out the physical action of the sketch. His gratitude to Joan for knowing her part was almost affecting; he himself was by no means familiar with his own and her prompt response to cues he read from manuscript facilitated his task considerably. When they adjourned for luncheon he announced himself persuaded that they would be ready to "open" within a week.

Within that period Joan learned many things. She was a tractable and docile student, keen-set to profit by the scraps of dramatic chicanery which formed the major part of Quard's stage intelligence. He himself had a very fair memory and had been drilled by more than one competent stage-director whose instructions had stuck in his mind, forming a valuable addition to his professional equipment. Joan soon learned to speak out clearly; to infuse some little semblance of human feeling into several of her turgid lines; to suffer herself to be dragged by one wrist round the room on her knees, by the romantical convict; to time her actions by mental counting; to "feed lines" to her partner in a rapid patter through the passages of putative comedy. She learned also to answer to "dearie" as to her given name, and to submit to being handled in a way she did not like but which, from all that she could observe, was considered neither familiar nor objectionable as between people of the stage. And she learned, furthermore, that May Dean's opinion of the venture was never to be drawn beyond a mildly derisive "My Gawd!" while Maizie's ran to the sense that it was all a chance and Joan a little fool if she didn't grab it – and anyway Joan was old enough to take care of herself with Charlie Quard or any man living!

And it was Maizie who was responsible for insisting that Joan wheedle an advance of ten dollars from Quard, ostensibly toward the purchase of costume and make-up. But when this had been successfully negotiated, the dancers advised Joan to save it against an emergency, and between them provided her with an outfit composed of cast-offs: a black satin décolleté bodice, an accordion-pleated short skirt of the period of 1890, wear-proof silk stockings, a pair of broken-down satin slippers with red heels, a japanned tin make-up box with a broken lock, and a generous supply of cheap grease-paint and cold cream.

Joan's début occurred within the time-limit set by Quard and before an audience of two, not counting a few grinning stage-hands. The two were the agent Schneider, and the manager of a small moving-picture house in the Twenty-third Street shopping district; on the half-lighted stage of which their "try-out" took place at half-past ten of a rainy and disheartening morning. The judges sat in the darkened auditorium, staring apathetically and chewing large cigars. Joan, though a little self-conscious, was not at all nervous, and remembered her lines perfectly; better than this, she looked very fetching indeed in her makeshift costume. Quard forgot several of his speeches, floundered all over the stage, and in a frantic effort to redeem himself clowned his part outrageously. Nevertheless they were engaged.

Convinced of their failure, Joan had only succeeded in removing her make-up and struggling into her shabby street clothing, when Quard knocked at the door of her dressing-room. He had played without make-up, and consequently had been able to catch the manager and agent before they could escape. Lounging in the doorway, he breathed a spirit of congratulation strongly tainted with fumes of whiskey.

"We're on!" he declared exultantly. "What'd I tell you? You needn't have changed, because we're going to stick here, and open today. One of the turns on this week's bill fell down at the last minute, and so we cop this chance to fill in. We go on after the first films – about a quarter of one; and then at four-thirty, seven-thirty, ten-forty-five. Now whadda yunno about that?"

Joan gulped and shook her head, her eyes a little misty. For the first time she began to perceive that she had counted desperately on success.

"I think – we're awful' lucky!" she said faintly.

"Lucky nothing! I knew I could get away with it – always providing I had you to play up to."

"Me!"

"That's right. After we'd fixed things up I took Schneider down to the corner and bought him a drink. He said – I dunno as I ought to tell you this, but anyway – he said the sketch was punk (God knows it is) and never would've gone if it hadn't been for you. He said all the women would go crazy about you – you'd got the prettiest shape he'd seen in a month of Sundays. Yunno they get most of their afternoon houses from the women shoppers down here."

He paused and after a moment added meditatively: "Of course, you can't act for shucks."

Joan, looking down, said nothing. Quard dropped a hand intimately across her shoulder and infused a caressing note into his voice.