As Brainard listened to the shrill pipings of Cordelia answered by Warner’s beery bass, his heart sank. He recalled all the rebuffs he had received from the better players whom he had approached—their insincere and voluble sympathy, their flimsy excuses, and the selfish fears that kept them from offending Einstein & Flukeheimer, in spite of the generous salaries and all the other temptations Brainard could think of to win them to the cause of art.
“Maybe your gold mine will give out, or you will get tired of the stage,” one well-known actress had said to him pertly. “Anyway, Einstein has promised to put me on in one of Dudu Smith’s plays, and that’s good enough for me!”
The People’s would have to do the best they could with second-rate and third-rate people until they had “made good,” or could train their own actors, Brainard reflected. Meanwhile Miss Leroy continued to pipe and Dudley Warner to bawl, interrupted now and then by MacNaughton’s resonant voice from the wings “No, no! That won’t do at all. Begin that once more, Miss Leroy,” etc.
“Ah, it’s rotten! Cut it out!” a voice murmured out of the darkness close to Brainard.
The fresh young voice so near to him startled Brainard, and he turned to see who had spoken. In the gloom he could make out a girl sitting hunched up, with crossed legs, a newspaper on her lap, from which she seemed to be eating her luncheon.
“It is pretty rotten,” Brainard admitted.
“The whole bunch is no account trash, anyway,” the young person continued impersonally, dangling a slice of sausage before her mouth. “Like last year’s grass or yesterday’s supper. But that Jenny! Why, she couldn’t decorate a cemetery properly!”
Thereupon, having disposed of the company, the young woman devoted herself unreservedly to her food, ignoring Brainard’s presence. The next time that the stage manager opened a discussion with Miss Leroy that promised to last for some moments, Brainard turned to the girl.
“Pardon my curiosity,” he said, taking the seat behind her, “but I should like to know how you happen to be here at the rehearsal.”
“Me? Why, I belong!” she replied, with a funny wrinkling of her small lips. “I’m part of it—this great uplift movement for the American drá-ma!”