Joan Thursday: A Novel

by Louis Joseph Vance

She crawled back to Forty-fifth Street at half-past eleven, that night, so dog-tired that she had neither the heart nor the strength to call on the Deans with her good news; this though there were sounds of discreet revelry audible through the door of the second-floor front....

Somehow the week wore out without misadventure. Joan walked through her part with increasing confidence. Quard left her very much to herself when they were off the stage; indeed, he spent no more time in the theatre than was absolutely necessary. What he did out of it she did not know, but from the frequency with which he played his part with an alcoholic breath, she surmised that he was solacing himself in conventional manner for his degradation to "the four-a-day."

On the third day the clog-dancers were dispensed with for the reason forecast, their place being taken by two female acrobats of a family troupe, who lolled about for eleven hours at a stretch in their grimy pink tights and had little to say either to Joan or to the matronly lady with the robust voice and the knitting. But the change was a wholesome one for the dressing-room.

The following week Charles D'Arcy & Company played at another house of equal unpretentiousness, on the East Side, and the week after that was divided between two other theatres. And on Wednesday of the fourth week—they were then in Harlem—what Joan had vaguely foreseen and hoped against, happened.

Quard turned up in the morning with red-rimmed eyes, a flushed face and a thick tongue blatantly advertising a night of sleepless drunkenness. By sheer force of an admirable physique and the instinct of a trained actor, he contrived to play the first turn without mishap, snatched a little sleep in his dressing-room, and seemed almost his everyday self at the next repetition. But after that he left the theatre to drug his jangling nerves with more whiskey; and appeared at the final repetition so stupefied that he would not have been permitted to go on the stage but for remissness on the part of the stage-manager. Before he had been five minutes on view he was hooted off and the curtain was rung down amid an uproar.

Once back in her dressing-room (where she was alone, since their act was the last on the bill and the rest of the performers had already left the theatre) Joan gave way to a semi-hysterical tempest of tears. It was her first experience at close quarters with a man in hopeless intoxication, and while Quard's surrender was too abject to terrify, she was faint with disgust of him and incensed beyond measure with him for having subjected her to those terrible five minutes before a howling audience. With this, she was poignantly aware that henceforth their offering was "cold": by morning Quard's name would be upon the black-list and further booking impossible to secure. She might as well count herself once more out of work, and now in even less hopeful circumstances than when first she had struck out for herself; for then she had been buoyed up by the fatuous confidence of complete inexperience, and then she had been comparatively affluent in the possession of twenty-two dollars. Now she knew how desperately hard was the way she must climb, and she had less than five dollars. What little she had been able to set aside out of her weekly wage had gone to purchase some sorely needed supplements to her meagre wardrobe.

It was some time before she could collect herself enough to dabble her swollen eyes with cold water, scrub off her make-up, and change for the street.

She stole away presently across an empty and desolate stage and through the blind, black alley leading from the stage-door to One-hundred-and-twenty-fifth Street. She felt somewhat relieved and comforted by the clean night air and the multitude of lights—the sense of normal life fluent in its accustomed, orderly channels. It seemed, in her excited fancy, like escaping from the foul, choking atmosphere of a madhouse....

The theatre was near Third Avenue, toward which Joan hurried, meaning to board a southbound car and transfer to Forty-second Street. But as she neared the corner she checked sharply, and (simple curiosity proving stronger than her impulse to fly across the street) went more slowly—only a few yards behind a figure that she knew too well—a swaying figure with weaving feet.

Vastly different from the carefully overdressed, dandified person he had been at their first meeting, Quard stumbled on, his hands deep in pockets, head low between his shoulders, a straw hat jammed down over his eyes. Obviously he was without definite notion of either his where-abouts or his destination. Passers-by gave him a wide berth.