“That will do,” said Darley after the rehearsal next day. “Miss Arden will stay behind. You can go on to-night,” he told her as the rest went up the stairs. “You’ve got the tunes if you haven’t got the words and they’re damn fool enough not to matter though you’ll know them by Saturday. You’ve got a clumsy notion of the movements, but you don’t know how to move. Your idea of walking is to put one foot in front of the other. You’re as God made you, but he’s sent you to a good contractor for the alterations. He’s sent you to me. Did you get Dolly Chandler to answer that question?”
She failed to meet his eye. Telling herself she was a coward, she tried and failed.
“I see,” he said. “She answered it the way they’ll all answer it. I’m going to put in four hours a day with you and Dolly’s told you what they’ll think of you. Thought’s free and it’s mostly dregs and I don’t mind. What about you, Rosalind?”
“You mean it won’t be true?” There was a hope and she clutched at it with words that came unbidden to her lips.
“True?” he roared. “You—papoose, you whippet! Don’t cry, you whelp. I asked you a question. I asked you if you mind their thoughts?”
“No,” she said.
“Then we start fair,” he said. “I’m having you on the stage and I’m coming to see you at your rooms, and if you’d like to know your name in this company, it’s Dar-ley’s Darling. Only you and I’ll know we meet for work, not play. I’m stage manager of a rotten musical comedy on a scrubby tour, but I’m a servant of the theater and I’ll prove it on you.”
He was, disinterestedly, the theater’s servant, and service purged of self-interest is rare though there is plenty of voluntary work done in the theater. An actor rehearses for weeks and performs without fee in a special production: he may have an enthusiasm for the play he is to act, he may feel that such a play must, at all costs, come to birth, but somewhere self-interest lurks. The play may succeed at its special performance; it may be taken for a run, and, if not, the actor still has the hope that his acting will focus on him the attention of critics and managers. And if the part he plays is so inconsiderable that he cannot hope to attract notice to himself, his hope is that the organizers of special productions will note him as a willing volunteer to be rewarded, next time, with a distinctive part.
For Darley, proposing to spend laborious hours in molding Mary Ellen, there was nothing concrete to be gained; no credit from the Rossiter headquarters and the positive loss of a reputation for asceticism which had been a shield against the advances of aspirants who believed that success in the theater was reached by the road Dolly had indicated to Mary. He did not flatter his company by supposing that his reputation for austerity would survive association with Mary. But, intimately, he would have his incomparable gain, the matchless joy of the creative artist working on apt material.
“You can take the rest of this week in getting used to jigging about in the chorus,” he said. “Then we’ll begin to work. Only you needn’t despise musical comedy. There are as many great actresses who came out of a musical comedy training as out of Shakespeare. Perhaps for the same reason that white sheep eat more than black ones.”