"Oh, I don't care a damn!" said Mr. Harold Mills. "Go as far as you like. I don't recognize the piece now. What it'll be when you—butchers get through with it ...!" He flung out his hands and stalked away.
"Go find Mr. Quan," said Galbraith to Rose, "and tell him to mark those changes of yours in the book. Tell him I said so."
It was, though, a pretty unsatisfactory victory. Everybody was grinning; for the tale spread fast, and while Rose knew it wasn't primarily at her, her sensations were those of a perfectly serious, well-meaning child, in adult company, who, in all innocence has just made a remark which, for some reason incomprehensible to him, has convulsed one member of it with fury, and the others with laughter. More or less she could imagine where the joke lay. Harold had evidently been quarreling with pretty much all of the principals, over more or less necessary changes in his precious text, until everybody was rather on edge about it, loaded and primed for all sorts of explosions; when, cheerfully along came Rose, a perfectly green young chorus-girl, unsuspectingly carrying the match for the mine, or the straw for the camel, whichever way you wanted to put it.
She wouldn't have minded the way she had blundered into the focus of public attention, if, in other particulars, the rehearsal had been going well with her. Unluckily, though, she started off wrong foot foremost in the very first of their numbers, with a mistake that snarled up everything and brought down an explosion of wrath from Galbraith. Even if she'd been trying, he groaned, to make mistakes, he didn't see how she'd managed that one. But the real nightmare didn't begin till the first of her scenes with Sylvia, where she had to talk.
She'd said her lines over about a thousand times apiece, and practised their inflection and phrasing in as many ways as she could think of, but she had neglected to memorize her cues. Not altogether, of course; she thought she'd learned them, but they were terribly scanty little cues anyway, just a single word, usually, and never more than two, and nothing short of absolutely automatic memorization was any good. So she sat serene through a five-second stage wait while Quan frantically spun the pages of his book to find the place—he ought to have been following of course, but he'd yielded to the temptation of trying to do something else at the same time and had got lost—and then dry-throated, incapable of a sound for a couple of seconds more—hours they seemed—after she had been identified as the culprit who had failed to come in on a cue.
The sight of the author out in the hall invoking his gods to witness that this girl who had presumed to change his lines, was an idiot incapable of articulate speech, brought her out of her daze. But even then she couldn't get anything quite right. There seemed to be no golden mean between the bellow of a fireman and a tone which Galbraith assured her wouldn't be audible three rows back. And when they came to one of the lines she'd been allowed to change, in her panic over the thing, she mixed the two versions impartially together into a sputter of words that meant nothing at all, whereupon the author, out at the back of the hall, laughed maniacally.
She would have gone on stuttering at it until she got it straight, if Galbraith hadn't put her out of her misery by striding over, snatching the book from Quan, and reading the line himself. She hadn't anything more to say in the first act, and she managed to get through the rest of the song numbers without disaster, if equally without confidence or dash. She felt as limp as if she had been boiled and put through the clothes-wringer. And when, as he dismissed the rehearsal Galbraith told her to wait a minute, she expected nothing less than ignominious reduction to the ranks.
"That matter of putting your voice over, Dane," he said, to her amazement quite casually, "is just a question of thinking where you want it to go. If you'll imagine a target against the back wall over there, and will your voice to hit it, whatever direction you're speaking in, and however softly you speak, you will be heard. If you forget the target and think you're talking to the person on the stage you're supposed to be talking to, you won't be heard. Say your lines over to me now, without raising your voice or looking out there. But keep the target in mind."
Rose said all the lines she had in the whole three acts. It didn't take a minute. He nodded curtly. "You've got the idea." He added, just as she turned away, "You were quite right to suggest those changes. They're an improvement."
That rehearsal marked the nadir of Rose's career at the Globe. From then on, she was steadily in the ascendent, not only in John Galbraith's good graces, which was all of course that mattered. She won, it appeared, a sort of tolerant esteem from some of the principals, and even the owners themselves spoke to her pleasantly.