For several days the girl had haunted the stairs, the hall, and door-step, alert to waylay Matthias, before suddenly she became aware that it was long since she had either caught a glimpse of him or heard the syncopated murmuring of the typewriter behind the closed door to his back-parlour.
It required the lapse of another day or two before she found courage to question (with laboured indifference) the dilapidated chambermaid who sedulously neglected her room for lack of a tip. From this far from garrulous source she learned that Matthias had packed up and gone out of town very suddenly, without mentioning where he might be addressed during his absence.
Alone at the window of her tiny cell, Joan stared down at the uninspiring vista of back-yards and disconsolately recapitulated her sorry fortunes.
She was now close upon the end of the fortnight\'s residence in the hall bedroom; before long she would have to surrender another four dollars—a week\'s rent in advance. Of the twenty-two dollars she had received from Butch, eight remained in her purse. By dint of adhering to a diet largely vegetarian, she had managed without serious discomfort to keep within an expenditure of four dollars per week for food. And twice Maizie Dean had saved her the cost of an evening meal by inviting her to dine out—at the expense of friends in "the profession." But a continuance of such favours was not to be counted upon; and the problem of living a fourth week away from home was one serious and importunate—always assuming she should fail to secure work before her money ran out. She had no resources in any degree dependable: Butch, even if willing, would probably not be able to extend her another loan; she possessed nothing worth pawning; and Maizie Dean had taken prompt occasion to make it clear that, while she was willing to do anything inexpensive for a budding sister artiste, her tolerance would stop short of financial aid.
"Take it from me, dear," she announced soon after their first meeting: "there ain\'t no people in the world quicker to slip you a live tip than folks in the business; but you gotta make up your mind to pay your own keep. They work too hard for their coin to give up any without a howl you could hear from here to Hollum; and anyway, everybody\'s always broke in the summer. If you don\'t land somewhere before your cash runs low, you might just\'s well make up your mind to slip back into the chain-gang behind the counter."
She had developed—or changed—amazingly in the brief period of her public career. Joan experienced difficulty in recognizing in her the warm-hearted Irish girl who had initiated her into the duties of saleswoman in the stocking department. She had hardened more than superficially; she was now as artificial as her make-up, as the hue of her ashen hair. The world to her was a desert threaded by "circuits," life an arid waste of "open time" punctuated with oases of "booking"; and the fountainhead of temporal power was located in the innermost sanctum of the United Booking Offices.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she crossed her knees frankly, sucked thoughtfully at a cigarette, and waved an explanatory hand:
"Here\'s me and Mame, thinking we was all fixed for the nex\' six weeks, and then somethin\' puts a crimp into our bookin\' and we\'re out for Gawd knows how long—till next Fall, sure. That\'s unless we want to take a trip over the meal-ticket circuit—fillin\' in between filums, yunno. And if we do that it\'s goin\' to crab us with the Orpheum people, sure; we\'d never get back into the real money class. So we gotta hold onto what little we got until we kin see more time headed our way...."
On the other hand, she had been liberal with sage and trustworthy counsel as to the best way to go about "breaking into the game." It was thanks to her that Joan was now able to enter a theatrical employment agency without fear and trembling, and to back her application for chorus work with a glib and unblushing statement that she had had experience "in summer stock out on the Coast." And to the Sisters Dean, likewise, Joan owed her growing acquaintance with the intricate geography of the theatrical districts of New York, her ability to discriminate between players "resting" and the average run of Broadway loungers who cluttered the shady side of that thoroughfare, from Twenty-fifth Street north to Forty-seventh, those shimmering summer afternoons, and her slowly widening circle of nodding acquaintances among the lesser peoples of the vaudeville world.
As a rule she was awake before anybody else in the establishment of Madame Duprat; not yet could she slough the habit of early rising. Her breakfast she was accustomed to get at the same dairy restaurant which had supplied her first meal away from home, and at the same moderate expense—ten cents. By ten o\'clock she would be on Broadway, beginning her round of the agencies: a courageous, shabby figure in the withering sun-blast, patient and indomitable through long hours of waiting in crowded anterooms, undiscouraged by the brevity and fruitlessness of the interviews with which her persistence was sometimes rewarded, ignoring disappointment with the same studied calm with which she had long since learned to ignore the advances of loafers of the streets.
Her lunches she would purchase wherever she might happen to be at the noon hour—or go without. By five o\'clock at the latest—frequently much earlier—she would turn back to West Forty-fifth Street. For dinner she sought again the establishment that provided her breakfast. Her idle hours, both day and evening, she grew accustomed to waste in the double bedroom ("second floor front") occupied by the Dancing Deans.
At such times the soi-disant sisters were rarely without company. They were lively and agreeable creatures, by no means unattractive, and so thoroughly theatric in every effect of manner, speech, gesture, person, and thought, that the most case-hardened member of the profession could not but feel at home in their company. Consequently, they were popular with both sexes of their associates. Seldom did a day pass but they entertained several callers, with all of whom they seemed to be on terms of the most candid intimacy.
So Joan grew accustomed to being hailed, whenever she opened the door of the sisters\' room, with a formula that varied little with repetition:
"Why, if it ain\'t the kid! Hello, dearie—come right in and stop awhile. Say, lis\'n: I want you to shake hands with my friend, Charlie Quard. I guess you know who Charlie is, all right; you must of seen him of\'n—played leading juveniles with the Spangler Stock, I dunno how long. Charlie, this is my little friend, Miss Thursday."
"In the business, I trust?"
"Goin\' to be before long. Just lookin\' round."
"Well, I wish you luck, Miss Thursday. This is the rottenest season I ever struck. There\'s eighty people for every job that blooms. Why, yunno, Maizie, I was talking only yesterday to Percy Williams, and Percy said—"
At about this point Joan would ordinarily be forgotten, and the gossip would rattle on through a stifling cloud of cigarette smoke, while she sat and listened with grave, if not always comprehending, attention.
And in this manner she met and grew familiar with the personalities of an astonishing crew of minor vaudeville folk, jugglers, dancers, patter comedians, balladists, coon shouters, performers on weird musical instruments, monologists, and an unclassified host of others, including a liberal sprinkling of plain actors and actresses, the pendulums of whose life alternated between small parts in popular-price stock companies and smaller parts in so-called dramatic sketches presented in vaudeville houses.
To them all (if they remembered her at all) she was Joan Thursday. The translation from Thursby had been almost inevitable. Thursday was by far the easier word to remember; Joan soon grew tired of correcting the friends of the Dancing Deans; and accepted the change the more readily since it provided her with a real "stage name", and so, in some measure, identified her with the business to which her every aspiration was devoted.
Of all the population of this new world, perhaps the most prominent in her eyes, aside from the saltatory sisters, was Mr. Quard; or, to give him the fullest benefit of the printed cards which (detaching them dexterously from the perforated edges by which they were held in an imitation-leather cover) he distributed regardless of expense:
Mr. Chas. Harborough Quard
Spangler Stock Co. Variety Artists Club
Brooklyn New York
He was a long, rangy animal, robustious, romantical; with a taste in the question of personal decoration that created compelling effects. His face was large, open, boldly featured, his smile genial, his laugh constant and unctuous. Something less than thirty, he had been on the stage since childhood; with the training of an actor of the old school, he combined immense vitality, an ample, dashing air, enviable self-sufficiency, the temperament of a tom-cat.
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 ac............