Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Married people -- Fiction
Rose accepted this proposition with a warm flush of gratitude. It
indicated, she felt, that they were still friendly toward her, disposed
of certain misgivings she'd experienced the night before, lest in
driving, unwittingly, so good a bargain with them, she had incurred
their enmity.
But, from the moment her little salary began, she found herself
retained, body and soul, exactly as Galbraith himself was. They'd bought
all her ideas, all her energy, all her time, except a few scant hours
for sleep and a few snatched minutes for meals. She gave her employers,
up to the time when the piece opened at the Globe, at a conservative
calculation, about five times their money's worth. Even if she hadn't
been in the company she'd have found something like two days' work in
every twenty-four hours, just in the wardrobe room. Because the costumes
were cheap and the frank blaze of borders, footlights and spots,
pitilessly betrayed the fact. One set for the ponies was so hopelessly
bad that the owners refused to accept them, and Rose, on the spur of the
moment, made up a costume--they were uniform, fortunately--to replace
them. The wardrobe mistress, with two assistants, and under Rose's
intermittent supervision, managed somehow to get them made. And there
wasn't a single costume, outside Rose's own twelve, that hadn't to be
remodeled more or less.
On top of all that, the really terrible grind of rehearsals began;
property rehearsals, curiously disconcerting at first, where instead of
indicating the business with empty hands, you actually lighted the
cigarette, picked up the paper knife, pulled the locket out from under
your dress and opened it--and, in the process of doing these things,
forgot everything else you knew; scenery rehearsals that caused the
stage to seem small and cluttered up and actually made some of the
evolutions you'd been routined in, impossible. At last and ghastliest, a
dress rehearsal, which began at seven o'clock one night and lasted till
four the next morning.
It would all have been so ludicrously easy, Rose used to reflect in
despair, if, like the other girls in the sextette, she'd had only her
own part in the performance to attend to--only to get into her costumes
at the right time, be waiting in the wings for the cue, and then come on
and do the things they'd taught her to do. But, between Goldsmith and
Block, who were now in a state of frantic activity and full of insane
suggestions, and the wardrobe mistress who was always having to be told
how to do something, every minute was occupied. She would try
desperately to keep an ear alert for what was happening on the stage, in
order to be on hand for her entrances. But, in spite of her, it
sometimes happened that she'd be snatched from something by a furious
roar from Galbraith.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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