Quard was waiting for her.

"Well," he said, "it didn't go so bad, did it?"

"No," she agreed listlessly.

"Anyhow, they didn't throw things at us."

"No." She endeavoured to smile, with indifferent success.

"I got a lot more laughs with that spittoon business than I thought I would," he continued thoughtfully as they turned back toward the dressing-rooms.

Joan made no reply, but when she stopped at the door of her dressing-room, Quard added tentatively:

"Anyway, it beats clerking in a department store, doesn't it?"

With some hesitation she replied: "I don't know...."

XIII

Immediately after her second public appearance in "The Convict's Return," Joan removed her make-up, changed to street dress and scurried through the rain to a Child's restaurant, not far from the theatre. In her excitement she had forgotten lunch and she was now thoroughly hungry. But she lingered purposely over the meal and even for some time after she had finished, preoccupied with self-dissection.

She was--at last!--an actress; but she was none the less singularly discontented. In a very brief time she had travelled a great way from the Joan Thursby of East Seventy-sixth Street; a world of emotion and experience already dissociated them; but she seemed to have profited little by the journey. She felt sure that she had started the wrong way to prove her ability to act. And foreseeing nothing better than her present circ.u.mstances, she questioned gravely an inscrutable future.

Instinctively she felt uneasy about this intimate, daily relationship with Quard. She wasn't afraid of him, but she was a little afraid of herself--because she liked him. Though still she dwelt in secret longing upon the image, half real, half fanciful, of a lover gentle and strong and fine--such an one as John Matthias might prove--for all that, Charlie Quard had the power to stir her pulses with a casual look of admiration, or with some careless note of tenderness in his accents.

The shower slashed viciously at the restaurant windows. At that hour there were few other patrons in the establishment, no lights to relieve the dismal greyness of the afternoon, and no sounds other than an infrequent clash of crockery, the m.u.f.fled shuffling of waitresses' feet, and their subdued voices, the melancholy and incessant crepitation of the downpour.

Joan was sensible to the approach of an exquisite despondency; and in alarm, fearing to think too deeply, she arose, ran back to the theatre and on impulse paid her way in through the front, to watch the flickering phantasmagoria of the flying films and to sit in judgment on the antics of her fellows on the variety bill. She was in no hurry to return to the dressing-room, with its smells of grease-paint, scented powder, ordinary perfumes, sweat, stale cigarette-smoke, gin, and broken food. One of the clog-dancers claimed a tubercular tendency, for which she a.s.serted gin to be a sovereign specific; but as the day ran on was even forgetting, at times, to cough by way of an overture to recourse to the bottle. The other, viewing this proceeding with public disfavour, had opened up an apparently inexhaustible and hopelessly monotonous store of reminiscence of the privations she had endured in consequence of "f.a.n.n.y's weakness." Joan gathered that the two were forever being dropped from one bill after another because of f.a.n.n.y's weakness.

And of this she had five more days to antic.i.p.ate and to endure....

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, s.n.a.t.c.hed a little sleep in his dressing-room, and seemed almost his everyday self at the next repet.i.tion. But after that he left the theatre to drug his jangling nerves with more whiskey; and appeared at the final repet.i.tion 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 circ.u.mstances 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 mult.i.tude 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. Pa.s.sers-by gave him a wide berth.

He seemed so broken and helpless that pity replaced horror and indignation in the heart of the girl. After all, he hadn't been unkind to her; but for him she would long since have gone to the wall; and ever since their clash on the day of the try-out, he had treated her with a studied respect which had pleased her, apprehensive though she had remained of a renewal of his advances.

Suddenly, and quite without premeditation, she darted forward and plucked Quard by the sleeve just as he was on the point of staggering through the swinging doors of a corner saloon. If her impulse had been at all articulate, she would have said that this was, in such extremity, the least she could do--to try to save him from himself.

"Charlie!" she cried. "No, Charlie--don't be a fool!"

The man halted and, turning, reeled against the door-post. "Wasmasr?" he asked thickly. Then recognition stirred in his bemused brain. "Why, it's lil Joan Thursh'y...."

"Come away," she insisted nervously. "Don't be a fool. Don't go in there. Go home."

He moved his head waggishly. "Thash where 'm goin'--home--soon's I brace up a bit."

"Come away!" Joan repeated sharply, dragging at his cuff. "Do you hear?

Come away. A walk'll straighten you out better'n anything else."

"Walk, eh?" Quard lifted his chin and lurched away from the door-post.

"Y' wanna take walk with me? All right"--indulgently--"_I_'ll walk with you, lil one, 's far's y' like."

"Come, then!" she persisted. "Hurry--it's late."

He yielded peaceably, with a sodden chuckle; but as he turned the lights of the saloon illumined his face vividly for an instant, and provided Joan with a fresh and appalling problem. The man had forgotten to remove his make-up; his mouth and jaws were plastered with a coat of bluish-grey paint, to suggest a week's growth of beard when viewed across footlights; there were wide blue rings round his eyes, and splashes of some silvery mixture on his dark hair. His face was a burlesque mask, so extravagant that it could not well escape observation in any steady light. It was impossible for Joan to be seen publicly with him--in a street-car, for instance. But now that she had taken charge of him, she couldn't gain her own consent to abandon the man to the potentially fatal whims of his condition. For a moment aghast and hesitant, in another she recognized how unavoidable was the necessity of adopting the suggestion his stupefied wits had twisted out of her pleadings: she would have to walk with him a little way, at least until he could recover to some slight extent.

Indeed, even had she desired to, she would probably have found it difficult to get rid of him just then; for in an attempt to steady himself, Quard grasped her arm just above the elbow; and this grip he maintained firmly without Joan's daring to resent it openly. She was to that extent afraid of his drunkenness, afraid of his uncertain temper.

Submissively, then, she piloted him to the south side of the street, where with fewer lighted shop-windows there was consequently less publicity, and to Lexington Avenue, turning south and then west through the comparative obscurity of One-hundred-and-twenty-fourth Street.

Neither spoke until they had traversed a considerable distance and turned south again on Lenox Avenue. The streets were quiet, peopled with few wayfarers; and these few hurried past them with brief, incurious glances if not with that blind indifference which is largely characteristic of the people of New York. Quard suffered himself to be led with a docility as grateful as it had been unexpected. It was apparent to the girl that he was making, subconsciously at least, a strong effort to control his erratic feet. He retained her arm, however, until they were near One-hundred-and-sixteenth Street: when, noticing the lights of a corner drug-store, the girl held back.

A swift glance roundabout discovered n.o.body near.

"Where's your handkerchief, Charlie?" she demanded.

"Where's whash? Whashma.s.ser?"

"I say," she repeated impatiently, "where's your handkerchief? Get it out and scrub some of that paint off your face. Do you hear? You look like a fool."

"'M a fool," Quard admitted gravely, fumbling through his pockets.

"Well, I won't be seen with you looking like that. Hurry up!"

Her peremptory accents roused him a little. He found his handkerchief and began laboriously and ineffectually to smear his face with it, with the sole result of spreading the colour instead of removing it. In this occupation, he released her arm. With a testy exclamation, Joan s.n.a.t.c.hed the handkerchief from him and began to scour his cheeks and jaws, heedless whether he liked it or not. To this treatment he resigned himself without protest--with, in fact, almost ludicrous complaisance, lowering his head and thrusting it forward as if eager for the scrubbing.