Calvary Alley

Chapter XVII. Behind the Twinkling Lights

The gaiety, with its flamboyant entrance, round which the lights flared enticingly at night, had always seemed to Nance an earthly paradise into which the financially blessed alone were privileged to enter. At the "Star" there were acrobats and funny Jews with big noses and Irishmen who were always falling down; but the Gaiety was different. Twice Nance had passed that fiery portal, and she knew that once inside, you drifted into states of beatitude, which eternity itself was too short to enjoy. The world ceased to exist for you, until a curtain, as relentless as fate, descended, and you reached blindly for your hat and stumbled down from the gallery to the balcony, and from the balcony to the lobby, and thence out into the garish world, dazed, bewildered, unreconciled to reality, and not knowing which way to turn to go home.

But to-day as she passed the main entrance and made her way through a side-passage to the stage-door, she tingled with a keener thrill than she had ever felt before.

"Is Miss Smelts here?" she asked a man who was going in as she did.

"Smelts?" he repeated. "What does she do?"

"She dances."

He shook his head.

"Nobody here by that name," he said, and hurried on.

Nance stood aside and waited, with a terrible sinking of the heart. She waited a half hour, then an hour, while people came and went. Just as she was about to give up in despair, she saw a tall, handsome girl hurry up the steps and come toward her. She had to look twice before she could make sure that the imposing figure was Birdie.

"Hello, kid," was Birdie's casual greeting. "I forgot all about you. Just as cute looking as ever, eh! Where did you get that hat?"

"Ten-cent store," said Nance, triumphantly.

"Can you beat that?" said Birdie. "You always did have a style about you. But your hair's fixed wrong. Come on down to the dressing-room while I change. I'll do it over before you see Reeser."

Nance followed her across a barn of a place where men in shirt-sleeves were dragging scenes this way and that.

"Mind the steps; they are awful!" warned Birdie, as they descended into a gas-lit region partitioned off into long, low dressing-rooms.

"Here's where I hang out. Sit down and let me dude you up a bit. You always did wear your hair too plain. I'll fix it so's it will make little Peroxide Pierson green with envy."

Nance sat before the mirror and watched Birdie's white fingers roll and twist her shining hair into the elaborate style approved at the moment.

"Gee! it looks like a horse-collar!" she said, laughing at her reflection. "What you going to do to me next?"

"Well, I haven't got much to do on," said Birdie, "but you just wait till I get you over to my room! I could fit you out perfect if you were just a couple of sizes bigger."

She was putting on a pair of bloomers herself as she spoke, and slipping her feet into her dancing slippers, and Nance watched every movement with admiring eyes.

"Come on now," Birdie said hurriedly. "We got to catch Reeser before rehearsal. He's the main guy in this company. What Reeser says goes."

At the head of the steps they encountered a gaunt, raw-boned man, with an angular, expressive face, and an apple in his long neck that would have embarrassed Adam himself.

"Well! Well!" he shouted at them, impatiently, "come on or else go back! Don't stand there in the way."

"Mr. Reeser, please, just a minute," called Birdie, "It's a new girl wants to get in the chorus."

The stage-manager paused and looked her over with a critical eye.

"Can she sing?"

"No," said Nance, "but I can dance. Want to see me?"

"Well, I think I can live a few minutes without it," said Reeser dryly. "Ever been on before?"

"No; but everybody's got to start some time." Then she added with a smile, "I wish you'd give me a chance."

"She's a awful cute little dancer," Birdie recommended. "She knows all the steps in the Red-Bird chorus. I taught her when I was here before. If you'd say a word to Mr. Pulatki he might try her out at rehearsal this morning."

Nance held her breath while Reeser's quizzical eyes continued to study her.

"All right!" he said suddenly. "She's pretty young, but we'll see what she can do. Now clear the way. Lower that drop a little, boys. Hurry up with the second set."

The girls scurried away to the wings where they found a narrow space in which Nance was put through the half-forgotten steps.

"It's all in the team work," Birdie explained. "You do exactly what I do, and don't let old Spagetti rattle you. He goes crazy at every rehearsal. Keep time and grin. That's all there is to it"

"I can do it!" cried Nance radiantly. "It's easy as breathing!"

But it proved more difficult than she thought, when in a pair of property bloomers she found herself one of a party of girls advancing, retreating, and wheeling at the arbitrary command of an excitable little man in his shirt-sleeves, who hammered out the time on a rattling piano.

Pulatki was a nervous Italian with long black hair and a drooping black mustache, both of which suffered harsh treatment in moments of dramatic frenzy. His business in life was to make forty lively, mischievous girls move and sing as one. The sin of sins to him, in a chorus girl, was individuality.

"You! new girl!" he screamed the moment he spied Nance, "you are out of ze line. Hold your shoulders stiff, so! Ah, Dio! Can you not move wiz ze rest?"

The girls started a stately number, diagonal from down-stage left toward upper center.

"Hold ze pose!" shouted the director. Then he scrambled up on the stage and seized Nance roughly by the arm. "You are too quick!" he shouted. "You are too restless. We do not want that you do a solo! Can you not keep your person still?"

And to Nance's untold chagrin she found that she could not. The moment the music started, it seemed to get into her tripping feet, her swinging arms, her nodding head; and every extra step and unnecessary gesture that she made evoked a storm from the director.

Just when his irritation was at his height, Reeser joined him from the wings.

"Here's a howdy-do!" he exclaimed. "Flossy Pierson's sprained her ankle."

"Ze leetle bear?" shrieked Pulatki; then he clutched his hair in both hands and raved maledictions on the absent Flossy.

"See here," said Reeser, "this is no time for fireworks. Who in the devil is to take her place?"

"Zere is none," wailed Pulatki. "She make her own part. I cannot teach it."

"It's not the part that bothers me," said Reeser. "It's the costume. We've got to take whoever will fit it. Who's the smallest girl in the chorus?"

The eyes of the two men swept the double column of girls until they rested on the one head that, despite its high coiffure, failed to achieve the average height.

"Come here!" called Reeser to Nance.

"But, no!" protested the director, throwing up his hands. "She is impossible. A cork on ze water! A leaf in ze wind! I cannot teach her. I vill not try!"

"It's too late to get anybody else for to-night," said Reeser, impatiently. "Let her walk through the part, and we'll see what can be done in the morning." Then seeing Nance's indignant eyes on the director, he added with a comical twist of his big mouth, "Want to be a bear?"

"Sure!" said Nance, with spirit, "if the Dago can't teach me to dance, maybe he can teach me to growl."

The joke was lost upon the director, but it put Reeser into such a good humor that he sent her down to the dressing-room to try on the costume. Ten minutes later, a little bear, awkward but ecstatic, scrambled madly up the steps, and an excited voice called out:

"Look, Mr. Reeser, it fits! it fits!"

For the rest of the morning Nance practised her part, getting used to the clumsy suit of fur, learning to adjust her mask so that she could see through the little, round, animal eyes, and keeping the other girls in a titter of amusement over her surreptitious imitation of the irascible Pulatki.

When the rehearsal was over there was much good-natured hustling and raillery as the girls changed into their street costumes. At Birdie's invitation Nance went with her to the rooming-house around the corner, where you had to ring a bell to get in, a convention which in itself spelt elegance, and up one flight, two flights, three flights of carpeted steps to a front-hall bedroom on the fourth floor.

"Gee, it's a mess!" said Birdie, tossing some beribboned lingerie from a chair into an open trunk. "There's a bag of rolls around here some place. We can make some tea over the gas."

Nance darted from one object to another with excited cries of admiration. Everything was sweet and wonderful and perfectly grand! Suddenly she came to a halt before the dresser, in the center of which stood a large, framed photograph.

"That's my High Particular," said Birdie, with an uneasy laugh, "recognize him?"

"It's Mac Clarke!" exclaimed Nance, incredulously, "how on earth did you ever get his picture?"

"He give it to me. How do you reckon? I hadn't laid eyes on him for a couple of years 'til I ran across him in New York about a month ago."

"Where'd you see him?"

"At the theater. He come in with a bunch of other college fellows and recognized me straight off. He stayed in New York two or three days, and maybe we didn't have a peach of a time! Only he got fired from college for it when he went back."

"Where's he now?"

"Here in town. Liable to blow in any minute. If he does, you don't want to let on you ever saw him before. He won't remember you if you don't remind him. He never thinks of anybody twice."

Nance, poring over every detail of the photograph, held her own counsel. She was thinking of the night she had stood in the drug-store door, and he had kept the motor waiting while he smiled at her over his shoulder. That was a smile that remembered!

"You want to be careful what you say to anybody," Birdie continued, "there ain't any use airing it around where you live, or what you been doing. There ain't a girl in the chorus knows my real name, or where I come from."

The allusion to home stirred Nance's conscience, and reminded her that over there beyond the cathedral spire, dimly visible from the window, lay a certain little alley which still had claims upon her.

"I ain't said a thing to 'em at home about this," she said. "Suppose they don't let me do it?"

"Let nothing!" said Birdie. "Write a note to Mrs. Snawdor, and tell her you are spending the night down-town with me. You'll know by morning whether Reeser is going to take you on or not. If he does, you just want to announce the fact that you are going, and go."

Nance looked at her with kindling eyes. This high-handed method appealed to her. After all wasn't she past eighteen? Birdie hadn't been that old when she struck out for herself.

"What about Miss Bobinet?" she asked ruefully.

"The wiggy old party up in Cemetery Street? Let her go hang. You've swallowed her frizzes long enough."

Nance laughed and gave the older girl's arm a rapturous squeeze. "And you think maybe Mr. Reeser'll take me on?" she asked for the sixteenth time.

"Well, Flossie Pierson has been shipped home, and they've got to put somebody in her place. It's no cinch to pick up a girl on the road, just the right size, who can dance even as good as you can. If Reeser engages you, it's fifteen per for the rest of the season, and a good chance for next."

"All right, here goes!" cried Nance, recklessly, seizing paper and pen.

When the hard rolls and strong tea which composed their lunch had been disposed of, Nance curled herself luxuriously on the foot of the bed and munched chocolate creams, while Birdie, in a soiled pink kimono that displayed her round white arms and shapely throat, lay stretched beside her. They found a great deal to talk about, and still more to laugh about. Nance loved to laugh; all she wanted was an excuse, and everything was an excuse to-day; Birdie's tales of stage-door Johnnies, the recent ire of old Spagetti, her own imitation of Miss Bobinet and the ossified Susan. Nance loved the cozy intimacy of the little room; even the heavy odor of perfumes and cosmetics was strange and fascinating; she thought Birdie was the prettiest girl she had ever seen. A thrilling vista of days like this, spent with her in strange and wonderful cities, opened before her.

"I'll rig you up in some of my clothes, until you get your first pay," Birdie offered, "then we can fit you out right and proper. You got the making of an awful pretty girl in you."

Nance shrieked her derision. Her own charms, compared with Birdie's generous ones, seemed absurdly meager, as she watched the older girl blow rings from the cigarette which she held daintily between her first and second finger.

Nance had been initiated into smoking and chewing tobacco before she was ten, but neither appealed to her. Watching Birdie smoke, she had a sudden desire to try it again.

"Give us a puff, Birdie," she said.

Birdie tossed the box over and looked at her wrist-watch.

"We ought to be fixing something for you to wear to-night," she said. "Like as not Mac and Monte 'll turn up and ask us to go somewhere for supper."

"Who is Monte?" asked Nance with breathless interest.

"He's a fat-headed swell Mac runs with. Spends dollars like nickels. No rarebit and beer for him; it's champagne and caviar every time. You cotton to him, Nance; he'll give you anything you want."

"I don't want him to give me anything," said Nance stoutly. "Time I'm earning fifteen dollars a week, I'll be making presents myself."

Birdie lifted her eyebrows and sighed.

"You funny kid!" she said, "you got a heap to learn."

During the early part of the afternoon the girls shortened one of Birdie's dresses and tacked in its folds to fit Nance's slender figure. Birdie worked in fits and starts; she listened every time anything stopped in the street below, and made many trips to the window. By and by her easy good humor gave place to irritability. At five o'clock she put on her hat, announcing that she had to go over to the drug store to do some telephoning.

"Lock the door," she counseled, "and if anybody knocks while I'm gone, don't answer."

Nance, left alone, sewed on for a while in a flutter of happy thoughts; then she got up and turned her chair so she would not have to crane her neck to see the photograph on the dresser.

"The making of an awful pretty girl!" she whispered; then she got up and went over to the mirror. Pulling out the hairpins that held the elaborate puffs in place, she let her shining mass of hair about her shoulders and studied her face intently. Her mouth, she decided, was too big, her eyes too far apart, her neck too thin. Then she made a face at herself and laughed:

"Who cares?" she said.

By and by it got too dark to sew; the match box refused to be found, and she decided it was time to stop anyhow. She opened the window and, gaily humming the music of the Little Bear dance, leaned across the sill, while the cool evening air fanned her hot cheeks.

Far away in the west, over the housetops, she could see the stately spire of the cathedral, a brown silhouette against a pale, lemon sky. Down below, through the dull, yellow dusk, faint lights were already defining the crisscross of streets. The whispers of the waking city came up to her, eager, expectant, like the subdued murmur of a vast audience just before the curtain ascends. Then suddenly, written on the twilight in letters of fire, came the familiar words, "You get what you pay for."

Nance's fingers ceased to drum on the window-sill. It was the big sign facing Post-Office Square, old Post-Office Square, with its litter of papers, its battered weather kiosk, and the old green bench where she and Dan had sat so many evenings on their way home from the factory. Dan! A wave of remorse swept over her. She had forgotten him as completely as if he had never existed. And now that she remembered what was she to do? Go to him and make a clean breast of it? And run the risk of having him invoke the aid of Mrs. Purdy and possibly of Miss Stanley? Not that she was afraid of their stopping her. She repeated to herself the words of defiance with which she would meet their objections and the scorn which she would fling at their "nice girl jobs." No; it was Dan himself she was afraid of. Her imagination quailed before his strong, silent face, and his deep, hurt eyes. She had always taken Dan's part in everything, and something told her she would take it now, even against herself.

The only safe course was to keep away from him, until the great step was taken, and then write him a nice long letter. The nicest she had ever written to anybody. Dear old Dan--dear, dear old Dan.

A long, low whistle from the sidewalk opposite made her start, and look down. At first no one was visible; then a match was struck, flared yellow for a second, and went out, and again that low, significant whistle. Nance dropped on her knees beside the window and watched. A man's figure emerged from the gloom and crossed the street. A moment later she heard the ringing of the doorbell. Could Dan have heard of her escapade and come after her? But nobody knew where she was; the note to Mrs. Snawdor still lay on the corner of the dresser.

She heard a step on the stairs, then three light taps on the door. She scrambled to her feet before she remembered Birdie's caution, then stood motionless, listening.

Again the taps and, "I say, Bird!" came in a vibrant whisper from without.

It seemed to Nance that whoever it was must surely hear the noisy beating of her heart. Then she heard the steps move away and she sighed with relief.

Birdie, coming in later, dismissed the matter with gay denial.

"One of your pipe-dreams, Nance! It must have been one of the other boarders, or the wash woman. Stop your mooning over there by the window and get yourself dressed; we got just thirty-five minutes to get down to the theater."

Nance shook off her misgivings and rushed headlong into her adventure. It was no time to dream of Dan and the letter she was going to write him, or to worry about a disturbing whistle in the street, or a mysterious whisper on the other side of the door. Wasn't it enough that she, Nance Molloy, who only yesterday was watching funerals crawl by in Cemetery Street, was about to dance to real music, on a real stage, before a great audience? She had taken her first mad plunge into the seething current of life, and in these first thrilling, absorbing moments she failed to see the danger signals that flashed across the darkness.