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CHAPTER TEN
1.
THE offices of Messrs Goble and Cohn were situated, like everything
else in New York that appertains to the drama, in the neighborhood of
Times Square. They occupied the fifth floor of the Gotham Theatre on
West Forty-second Street. As there was no elevator in the building
except the small private one used by the two members of the firm,
Jill walked up the stairs, and found signs of a thriving business
beginning to present themselves as early as the third floor, where
half a dozen patient persons of either sex had draped themselves like
roosting fowls upon the banisters. There were more on the fourth
floor, and the landing of the fifth, which served the firm as a
waiting-room, was quite full. It is the custom of theatrical
managers--the lowest order of intelligence, with the possible
exception of the _limax maximus_ or garden slug, known to science--to
omit from their calculations the fact that they are likely every day
to receive a large number of visitors, whom they will be obliged to
keep waiting; and that these people will require somewhere to wait.
Such considerations never occur to them. Messrs Goble and Cohn had
provided for those who called to see them one small bench on the
landing, conveniently situated at the intersecting point of three
draughts, and had let it go at that.
Nobody, except perhaps the night-watchman, had ever seen this bench
empty. At whatever hour of the day you happened to call, you would
always find three wistful individuals seated side by side with their
eyes on the tiny ante-room where sat the office-boy, the
telephone-girl, and Mr Goble's stenographer. Beyond this was the door
marked "Private," through which, as it opened to admit some careless,
debonair, thousand-dollar-a-week comedian who sauntered in with a
jaunty "Hello, Ike!" or some furred and scented female star, the rank
and file of the profession were greeted, like Moses on Pisgah, with a
fleeting glimpse of the promised land, consisting of a large desk and
a section of a very fat man with spectacles and a bald head or a
younger man with fair hair and a double chin.
The keynote of the mass meeting on the landing was one of determined,
almost aggressive smartness. The men wore bright overcoats with bands
round the waist, the women those imitation furs which to the
uninitiated eye appear so much more expensive than the real thing.
Everybody looked very dashing and very young, except about the eyes.
Most of the eyes that glanced at Jill were weary. The women were
nearly all blondes, blondness having been decided upon in the theatre
as the color that brings the best results. The men were all so much
alike that they seemed to be members of one large family,--an
illusion which was heightened by the scraps of conversation, studded
with "dears," "old mans," and "honeys," which came to Jill's ears. A
stern fight for supremacy was being waged by a score or so of lively
and powerful young scents.
For a moment Jill was somewhat daunted by the spectacle, but she
recovered almost immediately. The exhilarating and heady influence of
New York still wrought within her. The Berserk spirit was upon her,
and she remembered the stimulating words of Mr Brown, of Brown and
Widgeon, the best jazz-and-hokum team on the Keith Circuit. "Walk
straight in!" had been the burden of his inspiring address. She
pushed her way through the crowd until she came to the small
ante-room.
In the ante-room were the outposts, the pickets of the enemy. In one
corner a girl was hammering energetically and with great speed on a
typewriter: a second girl, seated at a switchboard, was having an
argument with Central which was already warm and threatened to
descend shortly to personalities: on a chair tilted back so that it
rested against the wall, a small boy sat eating candy and reading the
comic page of an evening newspaper. All three were enclosed, like
zoological specimens, in a cage formed by a high counter terminating
in brass bars.
Beyond these watchers on the threshold was the door marked "Private."
Through it, as Jill reached the outer defences, filtered the sound of
a piano.
Those who have studied the subject have come to the conclusion that
the boorishness of theatrical managers' office-boys cannot be the
product of mere chance. Somewhere, in some sinister den in the
criminal districts of the town, there is a school where small boys
are trained for these positions, where their finer instincts are
rigorously uprooted and rudeness systematically inculcated by
competent professors. Of this school the candy-eating Cerberus of
Messrs Goble and Cohn had been the star scholar. Quickly seeing his
natural gifts, his teachers had given him special attention. When he
had graduated, it had been amidst the cordial good wishes of the
entire faculty. They had taught him all they knew, and they were
proud of him. They felt that he would do them credit.
This boy raised a pair of pink-rimmed eyes to Jill, sniffed--for like
all theatrical managers' office-boys he had a permanent cold in the
head--bit his thumb-nail, and spoke. He was a snub-nosed boy. His
ears and hair were vermilion. His name was Ralph. He had seven
hundred and forty-three pimples.
"Woddyerwant?" enquired Ralph, coming within an ace of condensing the
question into a word of one syllable.
"I want to see Mr Goble."
"Zout!" said the Pimple King, and returned to his paper.
There will, no doubt, always be class distinctions. Sparta had her
kings and her helots, King Arthur's Round Table its knights and its
scullions, America her Simon Legree and her Uncle Tom. But in no
nation and at no period of history has any one ever been so brutally
superior to any one else as is the Broadway theatrical office-boy to
the caller who wishes to see the manager. Thomas Jefferson held these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that
among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Theatrical office-boys do not see eye to eye with Thomas. From their
pinnacle they look down on the common herd, the _canaille_, and
despise them. They coldly question their right to live.
Jill turned pink. Mr Brown, her guide and mentor, foreseeing this
situation, had, she remembered, recommended "pushing the office-boy
in the face": and for a moment she felt like following his advice.
Prudence, or the fact that he was out of reach behind the brass bars,
restrained her. Without further delay she made for the door of the
inner room. That was her objective, and she did not intend to be
diverted from it. Her fingers were on the handle before any of those
present divined her intention. Then the stenographer stopped typing
and sat with raised fingers, aghast. The girl at the telephone broke
off in mid-sentence and stared round over her shoulder. Ralph, the
office-boy, outraged, dropped his paper and constituted himself the
spokesman of the invaded force.
"Hey!"
Jill stopped and eyed the lad militantly.
"Were you speaking to me?"
"Yes, I _was_ speaking to you!"
"Don't do it again with your mouth full," said Jill, turning to the
door.
The belligerent fire in the office-boy's pink-rimmed eyes was
suddenly dimmed by a gush of water. It was not remorse that caused
him to weep, however. In the heat of the moment he had swallowed a
large, jagged piece of candy, and he was suffering severely.
"You can't go in there!" he managed to articulate, his iron will
triumphing over the flesh sufficiently to enable him to speak.
"I am going in there!"
"That's Mr Goble's private room."
"Well, I want a private talk with Mr Goble."
Ralph, his eyes still moist, felt that the situation was slipping
from his grip. This sort of thing had never happened to him before.
"I tell ya he _zout!_"
Jill looked at him sternly.
"You wretched child!" she said, encouraged by a sharp giggle from the
neighborhood of the switchboard. "Do you know where little boys go
who don't speak the truth? I can hear him playing the piano. Now he's
singing! And it's no good telling me he's busy. If he was busy, he
wouldn't have time to sing. If you're as deceitful as this at your
age, what do you expect to be when you grow up? You're an ugly little
boy, you've got red ears, and your collar doesn't fit! I shall speak
to Mr Goble about you."
With which words Jill opened the door and walked in.
"Good afternoon," she said brightly.
After the congested and unfurnished discomfort of the landing, the
room in which Jill found herself had an air of cosiness and almost of
luxury. It was a large room, solidly upholstered. Along the further
wall, filling nearly the whole of its space, stood a vast and
gleaming desk, covered with a litter of papers which rose at one end
of it to a sort of mountain of play-scripts in buff covers. There was
a bookshelf to the left. Photographs covered the walls. Near the
window was a deep leather lounge: to the right of this stood a small
piano, the music-stool of which was occupied by a young man with
untidy black hair that needed cutting. On top of the piano, taking
the eye immediately by reason of its bold brightness, was balanced a
large cardboard poster. Much of its surface was filled by a picture
of a youth in polo costume bending over a blonde goddess in a
bathing-suit. What space was left displayed the legend:
ISAAC GOBLE AND JACOB COHN
PRESENT
THE ROSE OF AMERICA
(A Musical Fantasy)
BOOK AND LYRICS BY OTIS PILKINGTON
MUSIC BY ROLAND TREVIS
Turning her eyes from this, Jill became aware that something was
going on at the other side of the desk: and she perceived that a
second young man, the longest and thinnest she had ever seen, was in
the act of rising to his feet, length upon length like an unfolding
snake. At the moment of her entry he had been lying back in an
office-chair, so that only a merely nominal section of his upper
structure was visible. Now he reared his impressive length until his
head came within measurable distance of the ceiling. He had a hatchet
face and a receding chin, and he gazed at Jill through what she
assumed were the "tortoiseshell cheaters" referred to by her recent
acquaintance, Mr Brown.
"Er . . . ?" said this young man enquiringly in a high, flat voice.
Jill, like many other people, had a brain which was under the
alternating control of two diametrically opposite forces. It was like
an automobile steered in turn by two drivers, the one a dashing,
reckless fellow with no regard for the speed limits, the other a
timid novice. All through the proceedings up to this point the dasher
had been in command. He had whisked her along at a break-neck pace,
ignoring obstacles and police regulations. Now, having brought her to
this situation, he abruptly abandoned the wheel and turned it over to
his colleague, the shrinker. Jill, greatly daring a moment ago, now
felt an overwhelming shyness.
She gulped, and her heart beat quickly. The thin man towered over
her. The black-haired pianist shook his locks at her like Banquo.
"I . . ." she began.
Then, suddenly, womanly intuition came to her aid. Something seemed
to tell her that these men were just as scared as she was. And, at
the discovery, the dashing driver resumed his post at the wheel, and
she began to deal with the situation with composure.
"I want to see Mr Goble."
"Mr Goble is out," said the long young man, plucking nervously at the
papers on the desk. Jill had affected him powerfully.
"Out!" She felt she had wronged the pimpled office-boy.
"We are not expecting him back this afternoon. Is there anything I
can do?"
He spoke tenderly. This weak-minded young man--at school his coarse
companions had called him Simp--was thinking that he had never seen
anything like Jill before. And it was true that she was looking very
pretty, with her cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkling. She touched a
chord in the young man which seemed to make the world a
flower-scented thing, full of soft music. Often as he had been in
love at first sight before in his time, Otis Pilkington could not
recall an occasion on which he had been in love at first sight more
completely than now. When she smiled at him, it was as if the gates
of heaven had opened. He did not reflect how many times, in similar
circumstances, these same gates had opened before; and that on one
occasion when they had done so it had cost him eight thousand dollars
to settle the case out of court. One does not think of these things
at such times, for they strike a jarring note. Otis Pilkington was in
love. That was all he knew, or cared to know.
"Won't you take a seat, Miss . . ."
"Mariner," prompted Jill. "Thank you."
"Miss Mariner. May I introduce Mr Roland Trevis?"
The man at the piano bowed. His black hair heaved upon his skull like
seaweed in a ground swell.
"My name is Pilkington. Otis Pilkington."
The uncomfortable silence which always follows introductions was
broken by the sound of the telephone-bell on the desk. Otis
Pilkington, who had moved out into the room and was nowhere near the
desk, stretched forth a preposterous arm and removed the receiver.
"Yes? Oh, will you say, please, that I have a conference at present."
Jill was to learn that people in the theatrical business never
talked: they always held conferences. "Tell Mrs Peagrim that I shall
be calling later in the afternoon, but cannot be spared just now." He
replaced the receiver. "Aunt Olive's secretary," he murmured in a
soft aside to Mr Trevis. "Aunt Olive wanted me to go for a ride." He
turned to Jill. "Excuse me. Is there anything I can do for you, Miss
Mariner?"
Jill's composure was now completely restored. This interview was
turning out so totally different from anything she had expected. The
atmosphere was cosy and social. She felt as if she were back in
Ovington Square, giving tea to Freddie Rooke and Ronny Devereux and
the rest of her friends of the London period. All that was needed to
complete the picture was a tea-table in front of her. The business
note hardly intruded on the proceedings at all. Still, as business
was the object of her visit, she felt that she had better approach
it.
"I came for work."
"Work!" cried Mr Pilkington. He, too, appeared to be regarding the
interview as purely of a social nature.
"In the chorus," explained Jill.
Mr Pilkington seemed shocked. He winced away from the word as though
it pained him.
"There is no chorus in 'The Rose of America,'" he said.
"I thought it was a musical comedy."
Mr Pilkington winced again.
"It is a musical _fantasy!_" he said. "But there will be no chorus.
We shall have," he added, a touch of rebuke in his voice, "the
services of twelve refined ladies of the ensemble."
Jill laughed.
"It does sound much better, doesn't it!" she said. "Well, am I
refined enough, do you think?"
"I shall be only too happy if you will join us," said Mr Pilkington
promptly.
The long-haired composer looked doubtful. He struck a note up in the
treble, then whirled round on his stool.
"If you don't mind my mentioning it, Otie, we have twelve girls
already."
"Then we must have thirteen," said Otis Pilkington firmly.
"Unlucky number," argued Mr Trevis.
"I don't care. We must have Miss Mariner. You can see for yourself
that she is exactly the type we need."
He spoke feelingly. Ever since the business of engaging a company had
begun, he had been thinking wistfully of the evening when "The Rose
of America" had had its opening performance--at his aunt's house at
Newport last Summer--with an all-star cast of society favorites and
an ensemble recruited entirely from debutantes and matrons of the
Younger Set. That was the sort of company he had longed to assemble
for the piece's professional career, and until this afternoon he had
met with nothing but disappointment. Jill seemed to be the only girl
in theatrical New York who came up to the standard he would have
liked to demand.
"Thank you very much," said Jill.
There was another pause. The social note crept into the atmosphere
again. Jill felt the hostess' desire to keep conversation
circulating.
"I hear," she said, "that this piece is a sort of Gilbert and
Sullivan opera."
Mr Pilkington considered the point.
"I confess," he said, "that, in writing the book, I had Gilbert
before me as a model. Whether I have in any sense succeeded in . . ."
"The book," said Mr Trevis, running his fingers over the piano, "is
as good as anything Gilbert ever wrote."
"Oh come, Rolie!" protested Mr Pilkington modestly.
"Better," insisted Mr Trevis. "For one thing, it is up-to-date."
"I _do_ try to strike the modern tone," murmured Mr Pilkington.
"And you have avoided Gilbert's mistake of being too fanciful."
"He was fanciful," admitted Mr Pilkington. "The music," he added, in
a generous spirit of give and take, "has all Sullivan's melody with a
newness of rhythm peculiarly its own. You will like the music."
"It sounds," said Jill amiably, "as though the piece is bound to be a
tremendous success."
"We hope so," said Mr Pilkington. "We feel that the time has come
when the public is beginning to demand something better than what it
has been accustomed to. People are getting tired of the brainless
trash and jingly tunes which have been given them by men like Wallace
Mason and George Bevan. They want a certain polish. . . . It was just
the same in Gilbert and Sullivan's day. They started writing at a
time when the musical stage had reached a terrible depth of inanity.
The theatre was given over to burlesques of the most idiotic
description. The public was waiting eagerly to welcome something of a
higher class. It is just the same today. But the managers will not
see it. 'The Rose of America' went up and down Broadway for months,
knocking at managers' doors."
"It should have walked in without knocking, like me," said Jill. She
got up. "Well, it was very kind of you to see me when I came in so
unceremoniously. But I felt it was no good waiting outside on that
landing. I'm so glad everything is settled. Good-bye."
"Good-bye, Miss Mariner." Mr Pilkington took her outstretched hand
devoutly. "There is a rehearsal called for the ensemble at--when is
it, Rolie?"
"Eleven o'clock, day after tomorrow, at Bryant Hall."
"I'll be there," said Jill. "Good-bye, and thank you very much."
The silence which had fallen upon the room as she left it, was broken
by Mr Trevis.
"Some pip!" observed Mr Trevis.
Otis Pilkington awoke from day-dreams with a start.
"What did you say?"
"That girl . . . I said she was some pippin!"
"Miss Mariner," said Mr Pilkington icily, "is a most charming,
refined, cultured, and vivacious girl, if you mean that."
"Yes," said Mr Trevis. "That was what I meant!"
2.
Jill walked out into Forty-second Street, looking about her with the
eye of a conqueror. Very little change had taken place in the aspect
of New York since she had entered the Gotham Theatre, but it seemed a
different city to her. An hour ago, she had been a stranger, drifting
aimlessly along its rapids. Now she belonged to New York, and New
York belonged to her. She had faced it squarely, and forced from it
the means of living. She walked on with a new jauntiness in her
stride.
The address which Nelly had given her was on the east side of Fifth
Avenue. She made her way along Forty-second Street. It seemed the
jolliest, alivest street she had ever encountered. The rattle of the
Elevated as she crossed Sixth Avenue was music, and she loved the
crowds that jostled her with every step she took.
She reached the Fifth Avenue corner just as the policeman out in the
middle of the street swung his Stop-and-Go post round to allow the
up-town traffic to proceed on its way. A stream of automobiles which
had been dammed up as far as the eye could reach began to flow
swiftly past. They moved in a double line, red limousines, blue
limousines, mauve limousines, green limousines. She stood waiting for
the flood to cease, and, as she did so, there purred past her the
biggest and reddest limousine of all. It was a colossal vehicle with
a polar-bear at the steering-wheel and another at his side. And in
the interior, very much at his ease, his gaze bent courteously upon a
massive lady in a mink coat, sat Uncle Chris.
For a moment he was so near to her that, but for the closed window,
she could have touched him. Then the polar-bear at the wheel, noting
a gap in the traffic, stepped on the accelerator and slipped neatly
through. The car moved swiftly on and disappeared.
Jill drew a deep breath. The Stop-and-Go sign swung round again. She
crossed the avenue, and set out once more to find Nelly Bryant. It
occurred to her, five minutes later, that a really practical and
quick-thinking girl would have noted the number of the limousine.
Content of CHAPTER TEN [P G Wodehouse's novel: The Little Warrior]
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