He drilled her on a dozen stages as the tour went on, in a dozen walks from the Parisian’s to the peasant’s (“You’ve never heard of pedestrian art,” he said, “but this is it”), and for dancing, “You’re too old, but we’ll get a colorable imitation,” and in her rooms they went through Rosalind and Juliet till she spoke the lines in English and made every intonation to his satisfaction. “Feel it, you parrot, feel it,” was his cry, and he stopped his mockery of calling her Rosalind. He called her “Iceberg.”
He had taken her far, very far, along the technical way, and he had come to a barrier. Where there was question of the grand emotions, her voice was stupid. She seemed intelligently enough to understand with her brain, but there was a lapse between understanding and expression. “I’ve done all I’m going to,” thought Harley. “She’s not an actress yet, she’s only ready to be one when somebody breaks the eggs to make the omelette. I’m not the somebody.”
Except that she did not shirk work, she gave no sign of gratitude. Harley was another Pate, another man who was, to please himself, experimenting on her with a system. She was not afraid of him now; men in her experience were usable stepping-stones and when their use to her was gone, she stepped from one to another. In the present case she saw clearly what he was aiming at and the necessity of this training in technique. It had visible results, it wasn’t, like Pate’s, a journey to a peak mistily beyond a far horizon and it would, in any case, last only for the three months she was to spend in the chorus of “The Little Viennese.” He could take pains with her and she would generously be there to be taken pains with; it was a sort of exercise which he preferred to playing golf with the men or the other girls of the company, and she permitted his enjoyment of the preference because it was of use to her.
“What did you want to go on the stage for, anyhow?” he asked her once.
“To hold them,” she said, “there!” And made a gesture, imperious, queenly, that almost wrung applause from him. “To have them in my grip like that. To know I’ve got them in my power.”
“I think you’ll do it, Mary, when you have learned to feel,” he told her soberly.
She looked at him with glittering eyes. “Gee, does it get you like that?” he said, amazed. Here, to be welcomed with both hands, was feeling at last.
“Yes,” said Mary, dashing him to earth, “there’s money in it.”
“You miserable slut!” he said, and flung out of her room.
Money! Yet hadn’t she excuse? She feared poverty, having known it. Poverty, for her, was not a question of what would happen to an income of a thousand a year if the income tax went up; it was Jackman’s Buildings and the Staithley streets. If she could help it, she was not going back to poverty. To Staithley perhaps she would go back: she was indeed fixed in her idea to go back, to buy, with her stage-made wealth, a house in Staithley like Walter Pate’s and to be rich in Staithley. So far, in her journeyings, she had seen no place like Staithley: either there was flatness which depressed her, or hills which were too urbane, or too low, too much like mounds in a park to be worthy of the name of hills. The stage was a means to an end, and the end was Staithley, a house of her own, an independence—and her present salary was thirty-five shillings a week, less ten per cent to Chown! She was, at any rate, thrifty with it, seeing no need, on tour, with her contract in her pocket, to revise her wardrobe in the direction of effectiveness and keeping her nose too closely to the grindstone Darley held to have time for money-spending in other ways. She watched with satisfaction her Post Office Savings Bank account increase by a weekly ten shillings.