Calvary Alley
Copyright© 2024 by Alice Caldwell Hegan Rice
Chapter 18: The First Night
At a quarter-past eight in the dressing-rooms of the Gaiety, pandemonium reigned. Red birds, fairies, gnomes, will-o’-the-wisps flitted about, begging, borrowing, stealing articles from each other in good-humored confusion. In and out among them darted the little bear, slapping at each passerby with her furry paws, practising steps on her cushioned toes, and rushing back every now and then to Birdie, who stood before a mirror in red tights, with a towel around her neck, putting the final touches on her make-up.
It was hot and stuffy, and the air reeked with grease paint. There was a perpetual chatter with occasional outbursts of laughter, followed by peremptory commands of “Less noise down there!” In the midst of the hub-bub a call-boy gave the signal for the opening number of the chorus; the chatter and giggling ceased, and the bright costumes settled into a definite line as the girls filed up the stairs.
Nance, left alone, sat on a trunk and waited for her turn in a fever of impatience. She caught the opening strains of the orchestra as it swung into the favorite melody of the day; she could hear the thud of dancing feet overhead. She was like a stoker shut up in the hold of the vessel while a lively skirmish is in progress on deck.
As she sat there the wardrobe woman, a matronly-looking, Irish person, came up and ordered her peremptorily to get off the trunk. Nance not only complied, but she offered her assistance in getting it out of the passage.
“May ye have some one as civil as ye are to wait on ye when ye are as old as I am!” said the woman. “It’s your first night, eh?”
“Yep. Maybe my last for all I know. They ‘re trying me out.”
“Good luck to ye,” said the woman. “Well I mind the night I made me first bow.”
“You!”
“No less. I’d a waist on me ye could span wid yer two hands. And legs! well, it ain’t fer me to be braggin’, but there ain’t a girl in the chorus kin stack up alongside what I oncet was! Me an’ a lad named Tim Moriarty did a turn called ‘The Wearing of the Green,’—’Ryan and Moriarty’ was the team. I kin see the names on the bill-board now! We had ‘em laughin’ an’ cryin’ at the same time, ‘til their tears run into their open mouths!”
“Wisht I could’ve seen you,” said Nance. “I bet it was great.”
The wardrobe woman, unused to such a sympathetic listener, would have lingered indefinitely had not a boy handed Nance a box which absorbed all her attention.
“Miss Birdie La Rue,” was inscribed on one side of the card that dangled from it on a silver cord, and on the other was scribbled, “Monte and I will wait for you after the show. Bring another girl. M.D.C.”
“And I’m the other girl!” Nance told herself rapturously.
There was a flurry in the wings above and the chorus overflowed down the stairs.
“It’s a capacity house,” gasped Birdie, “but a regular cold-storage plant. We never got but one round. Spagetti is having spasms.”
“What’s a round?” demanded Nance, but nobody had time to enlighten her.
It was not until the end of the second act that her name was called, and she went scampering up the stairs as fast as her clumsy suit would permit. The stage was set for a forest scene, with gnarled trees and hanging vines and a transparent drop that threw a midnight blue haze over the landscape.
“Crawl up on the stump there!” ordered Reeser, attending to half a dozen things at once. “Put you four paws together. Head up! Hold the pose until the gnomes go off. When I blow the whistle, get down and dance. I’ll get the will-o’-the-wisps on as quick as I can. Clear the stage everybody! Ready for the curtain? Let her go!”
Nance, peering excitedly through the little round holes of her mask, saw the big curtain slowly ascend, revealing only a dazzling row of footlights beyond. Then gradually out of the dusk loomed the vast auditorium with its row after row of dim white faces, reaching back and up, up further than she dared lift her head to see. From down below somewhere sounded the weird tinkle of elfin music, and tiptoeing out from every tree and bush came a green-clad gnome, dancing in stealthy silence in the sleeping forest. Quite unconsciously Nance began to keep time. It was such glorious fun playing at being animals and fairies in the woods at night. Without realizing what she was doing, she dropped into what she used to call in the old sweat-shop days, “dancin’ settin’ down.”
A ripple of amusement passed through the audience, and she looked around to see what the gnomes were up to, but they were going off the stage, and the suppressed titter continued. A soft whistle sounded in the wings, and with a furiously beating heart, she slid down from her high stump and ambled down to the footlights.
All might have gone well, had not a sudden shaft of white light shot toward her from the balcony opposite, making a white spot around the place she was standing. She got out of it only to find that it followed her, and in the bewilderment of the discovery, she lost her head completely. All her carefully practised steps and poses were utterly forgotten; she could think of nothing but that pursuing light, and her mad desire to get out of it.
Then something the director had said at the rehearsal flashed across the confusion. “She makes her own part,” he had said of Flossy Pierson, and Nance, with grim determination, decided to do the same. A fat man in the left hand box had laughed out when she discovered the spotlight. She determined to make him laugh again. Simulating the dismay that at first was genuine, she began to play tag with the shaft of light, dodging it, jumping over it, hiding from it behind the stump, leading it a merry chase from corner to corner. The fat man grew hysterical. The audience laughed at him, and then it began to laugh at Nance. She threw herself into the frolic with the same mad abandonment with which she used to dance to the hand-organ in front of Slap Jack’s saloon. She cut as many fantastic capers as a frisky kitten playing in the twilight; she leapt and rolled and romped, and the spectators, quick to feel the contagion of something new and young and joyful, woke up for the first time during the evening, and followed her pranks with round after round of applause.
When at last the music ceased, she scampered into the wings and sank gasping and laughing into a chair.
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