Joan Thursday: A Novel

"As I thought: you are on at the opening for about ten minutes, and near the end of the act for a two-minute scene. Twelve minutes' work a day for, say, twenty-five dollars a week: that isn't bad. You'll be out of the theatre by half-past nine every night… You see the point I've been trying to make?"

"Yes," Joan assented. "It seems very easy. I hope I can do it."

"I'm sure you can," said Matthias. "But – how are you going to live between now and the opening?"

Joan's eyes were blank.

"Have you any money?" he insisted.

"A very little," she faltered – "eighteen dollars – "

"You won't get pay for rehearsals; and they'll last three weeks; after we open it will be another week before the ghost walks. That's – say – six weeks you've got to scrape through somehow. Eighteen dollars won't cover that. Perhaps you'd better go back to your old job until we start."

"I was fired from the last, and it would take more than two weeks for me to find anything like it, I know."

"And there you are!"

Matthias tossed the manuscript back to the table, waved his hands eloquently and threw himself into a chair, regarding her with his whimsical, semi-apologetic smile.

"I'm afraid," he added after a minute, "I've reached the end of my string. Further suggestions will have to come from you."

"I don't know," said the girl doubtfully. "Maybe I can think of something – maybe something will turn up."

"I hope so. Perhaps even I may invent something. If I do, I'll let you know, Miss Thursday."

He arose, his manner an invitation to go, to which she couldn't be blind.

She got up, moved slowly toward the door.

"I hope I haven't bothered you much – put you out of your writing – "

"Oh, that's all right," he interrupted insincerely.

"And you have been awful' good to me."

"Please don't think of it that way."

He was holding the door for her, but on the threshold she hesitated.

"Unless," she ventured half-heartedly – "unless I could help you some way with your work."

"Help me?" he exclaimed, at once amazed and amused.

"I mean, copying – if you ever have any."

"Type-writing?"

She nodded, with a flush of hope. "When I was a kid – I mean, before I left school – I studied a while at a business college – nights, you know. They taught me type-writing by the touch system, but I couldn't seem to get the hang of shorthand, and so had to give it up and go to work in a store."

"Now that is a helpful thought!" he cried, turning back into the room. "Wait a minute. There may be something in this. Let me think."

But his deliberation was very brief.

"It can be done!" he announced in another moment. "I have got a lot of stuff to be copied. You see, about a month ago I…"

He checked, his eyes clouding without cause apparent to the girl.

"Well!" he went on with a nervous laugh – "I didn't feel much like work. Guess I must've done too much of it, for a while. Anyway, I found I had to quit, and went out of town for a while. Of course I couldn't stop work really – a man can't, if he likes his job – and so I took some manuscripts along and revised them in long-hand. Now they ought to be copied – I'd been thinking of sending them out to some public stenographer – but if you want the work, it's yours."

XV

Never had any of her difficulties been adjusted in a manner more satisfactory to Joan. She rose at once from an abyss of discouragement to sunlit peaks of happiness. Installing a rented type-writing machine in the room adjoining her own (temporarily without a tenant and willingly loaned by Madame Duprat) she tapped away industriously from early morning till late at night, sedulously transcribing into clean type-script the mangled manuscripts given her by Matthias. By no means a rapid worker, after renewing acquaintance with the machine she made up for slowness by diligence and long hours. And the work interested her: she thought the plays magnificent; and a novel which Matthias gave her when his stock of old plays ran low she considered superb. It was his first and only book, and had not as yet been submitted to the mercies of a publisher. But to Joan it was something more than a book; it was a revelation, her primal introduction to the world of the intellect. From poring over its pages, she grew hungry for more, thrilled by the discovery that she could find interest and pleasure in reading.

She began to borrow extensively from the circulation branch of the Public Library in Forty-second Street, and to read late into the night, defying the prejudices of Madame Duprat on the question of gas consumption…

Refusing an offer of public stenographer rates, she had asked for ten dollars a week. This Matthias paid her, under protest that the work was worth more to him. The arrangement was, however, a fortunate one; for though at first Joan earned more than she received, after rehearsals of "The Jade God" had started she was seldom able to give more than two or three hours a day to the copying.

These rehearsals furnished her with impressions vastly different from those garnered through her experience with "The Convict's Return."

The company assembled for the first time on a mid-August morning, in the author's study. There were present eight men, aside from Matthias and the manager, his producing director and his press agent, and four women, including Joan. After brief introductions, the gathering disposed itself to attention, and Matthias, rocking nervously in his revolving desk-chair, read the play aloud. To most of those present the work was new and unfamiliar; they listened with intense interest, keenly alive to the possibilities of the various parts for which they had been cast.

But Joan was not of these; she had typed all the parts and knew not only the story but her own slight though significant rôle (as she would have said) "backwards." Sitting in a shadowed corner, she devoted herself to studying those with whom her lines were to be cast.

The leading lady was an actress who, after several attempts to star at the head of her own company, was reduced to playing second to the young and handsome matinée hero of several seasons ago, planning to return in triumph to the stage after an unsuccessful effort to retire from it into the contented estate of well-financed matrimony. Through their widely published photographs Joan was familiar with the features of both.

She thought the star charming; good-humoured, good-looking, well-mannered, slight and graceful, he had all the assurance of a Charlie Quard and none of his vain swagger.

But Joan decided on sight to detest the leading woman. She was a pale, ashen blonde, with a skin as colourless as snow, level dark brows, sharp blue eyes set close to the bridge of her pointed nose, and a thin-lipped, violent mouth. The first impression she conveyed was one of dangerous temper; the second, that she had been happy in her choice of photographers. Throughout the reading, she sat negligently on the arm of a chair, swinging a foot and staring out of the window with an air of immitigable disdain.

Of the other women, one was a grey-haired, sweet-faced lady of perhaps fifty years, whose eyes softened winningly whenever they encountered Joan's, the other an unlovely creature of middle-age and long stage experience, who seemed to have no interest in life aside from her unfolding part. The remainder of the company, of a caste hall-marked by the theatre, offered nothing novel to Joan's eyes – aside from a fat, red-faced lump of a youth who was to act a thick-witted, sentimental office-boy, in love with the stenographer (Joan). This one she decided to tolerate on suspicion; he resembled a type which she had found difficult, apt to impertinence and annoying attentions.

Rideout, the man financially responsible for the production, was an English actor of reputation and considerable ability. Carrying his stoutish body with an ease that almost suggested slenderness: with his plump, blowsy face, twinkling eyes and fat nose of a comedian: the insuppressible staginess of his gesture would have betrayed his calling anywhere. Now and again Joan surprised an anxious expression lurking beneath his humorous smile; she had inferred from some casual remark made by Matthias that Rideout was staking all he possessed on the success of this play.

The producing manager, Wilbrow, was a short, lean-bodied American, with lantern jaws, large intent eyes, and a nervous frown. Joan was impressed with the aloof pleasantness of his manner: she was to know him better.

The reading over, the company was dismissed with instructions to report at ten the next morning at an obscure dance-hall masquerading under the name of an opera house, situate in the immediate neighbourhood, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Several lingered to affix signatures to contracts – Joan of their number; and when these were gone, there remained in conference the star, the leading woman, Matthias, Rideout, and Wilbrow.

Going out to dinner that night, Joan passed Matthias bidding good-bye to the leading woman in the hallway. He seemed tired and wore a harassed look; and later, when the girl delivered the outcome of her day's copying, he had a manner new to her, of weary brusqueness.

The first rehearsal proper was held in a stuffy and ill-ventilated room, so dark that it was necessary to use the electric lights even at high noon. The day was fortunately cool, otherwise the place had been insufferable. There was little attempt at acting; the company devoted itself, under Wilbrow's patient direction, to blocking in the action. They had no stage – simply that bare, four-square room. Half a dozen chairs and a few long benches were dragged about to indicate entrances and properties. Nobody pretended to know his part – not even Joan, who knew hers perfectly. The example of the others, who merely mumbled from the manuscripts in their hands, made the girl fear to betray amateurishness by discovering too great an initial familiarity with her lines. So she, too, carried her "'script," and read from it. When not thus engaged, she sat watching and noting down what was going on with eager attention.

But she took away with her a depressing sense of having engaged in something formless and incoherent.

But succeeding rehearsals – beginning with the second – corrected this misapprehension. That afternoon developed Wilbrow suddenly into a mild-mannered, semi-apologetic, and humorous tyrant. He discovered an individual comprehension of what was required for the right development of the play, and an invincible determination to get it. He never lost either temper or patience, neither swore nor lifted his voice; but having indicated his desire, wrought patiently with its subject, sometimes for as long as an hour, until he had succeeded in satisfying it. He worked coatless, with his long black hair straggling down over his forehead and across his glasses: an incredibly thin, energetic, and efficient figure, dominated by a penetrating and masterful intelligence. Not infrequently, taking the typed part from the hands of one of his puppets, he would himself give a vivid sketch of its requirements through the medium of intonation, gesture, and action. And to Joan, at least, the effects he created by these means were as striking in the feminine rôles as in the masculine. Utterly devoid of self-consciousness, he had the faculty of seeming for the moment actually to be what he sought to suggest: one forgot the man, saw only what he had in mind.

Another thing that surprised the girl more than a little was the docility with which her associates submitted to his dictation and even invited it. She had heard of actors "creating" rôles; but in this company no one but the producer seemed to be creating anything. The others came to rehearsals with minds so open that they seemed vacuous; not one, whether the star, his leading woman, or any of their supporting players, indicated the least comprehension of what they were required to portray or the slightest symptom of original conception. What Wilbrow told them and then showed them how to do, they performed with varying degrees of success. So that Joan at last came to believe the best actors those most susceptible to domination, least capable of independent thought. As he gradually became acquainted with his lines and the business Wilbrow mapped out for him, the star began to give more compelling impersonations at each rehearsal; but to the girl he never seemed more than a carbon filament of a man, burning bright with incandescence only when impregnated with the fluid genius of a superior mentality. So, likewise, with the leading woman…

As for herself, Joan was hardly happy in her endeavour to please. Having unwisely formed her own premature conception of her part, and lacking totally the technical ability to express it, she ran constantly afoul of Wilbrow's notions. She was called upon first to erase her own personality, next to forget the personality which she had meant to delineate, and finally to substitute for both these one which Wilbrow alone seemed able to see and understand. She strove patiently and without complaint, but in a stupefying welter of confusion. While on the pretended stage she was constantly terrified by Wilbrow's mild but predominant regard, which rendered her only awkward, witless, and ill-at-ease. Then, too, her attempts to imitate his brilliant and colourful acting were received with amusement, not always wholly silent, by the rest of the company. She seemed quite unable to follow his lead; and toward the end of the first week, throughout the whole of which (she was aware from the calm resignation of Wilbrow's attitude) she had improved not one whit, she began to despair.