Part 27 (2/2)
”Oh, how stupid I've been! That's the storeroom key! The one I threw away the day I was angry at Mademoiselle D'Ormy! And it tinkled down, down, down--” she was hurrying out of the room.” All of us, now, we can go up--the store-room will be fun and maybe--” They were scrambling up the stairways, a laughing crew. ”Bring something to break wood with you,” called Felice over her shoulder, ”for those shelves that Dulcie put over the door that we thought went into the front room--it doesn't go there! Wasn't I stupid! That's the door into the storeroom--it's the long narrow s.p.a.ce between the two walls and it had trunks and a bureau--”
It still had them! The men folks pulled out the dusty boxes into the immaculate neatness of the nursery floor and for the next two hours they delved and delved through the forgotten treasures. The Poetry Girl called it the ”Night of a Thousand Hopes” but the Inventor sardonically added at midnight ”of Blasted Hopes--”
The nursery looked like a New England attic when they had finished mauling. Felice gave things away recklessly, whenever one of them admired anything.
How they all shouted at the Painter Boy when he triumphantly pulled forth a sage green taffeta frock with long bell sleeves, voluminous skirts and quaintly square-cut neck.
”Look! all of us!” he shouted buoyantly as he limped across the room to hold it against Felicia's shoulders, ”here's her color!”
”Put it on her!” begged the Architect's wife. In the end the women dressed her in it while the men folk trooped down stairs to mess Molly's speckless kitchen with their masculine ideas of how to make lemonade.
She curtsied to the Painter Boy good-humoredly.
”I don't feel at all like me! I feel like Josepha or Louisa or whoever she was who wore it--” she laughed. Her laughter was tremulous in spite of her bravest efforts. They were all of them on the ragged edge of tears. They'd hoped so that the storeroom would give the house back to them! Only the Painter Boy seemed not to care. He waited, his eyes gleaming, until after the others had trooped off to their own quarters, each with his or her bit of the loot. He caught at the hanging green sleeve. For that was the night the Painter Boy came into his own. The night he knew that he was going to paint The Spirit of Romance.
”You're so paintable!” he begged, ”I know it's rotten to ask you to sit for me, you're so busy now with all of us on your mind and the sewing and posing for Dulcie that you'll think you just can't--but oh, Dulcie Dierckx--look at her! Isn't she paintable!”
Dulcie agreed she was.
Felicia shook her head.
”It's only the frock, Nor'. I'll lend it to you, I can't quite give it to you, I love it so--but you shall have a really model--we'll manage somehow--and you shall paint the frock--that's what's paintable--”
Of course in the end she didn't refuse him. She never refused them anything she could possibly manage, but it was rather difficult to find the time. She never knew exactly how she found it.
It was in the ”paintable” green dress that she ”pretended” her way to fame and it came about this way. Without actually realizing it she was getting accustomed to a fairly large audience on the Sunday afternoons when she whistled for the Wheezy's friends. They were so eager to hear her and their chance visitors were so numerous that the Matron arranged for her to do her ”pretending” in the chapel hall at the front of the Home. And it was there that an enthusiastic member of the May Day committee chanced to hear her, one suns.h.i.+ny April Day, an enterprising member who bluntly asked Felicia Day if she wouldn't ”pretend” for the May Day program at the Academy of Music. It didn't occur to Felicia to make excuses, especially when the committee member explained things a bit. The only thing at which she balked at all was when the energetic person murmured, ”Name please?”
”I'm not--anybody--” explained Felicia, ”I'm not even sure myself who I am--”
”But we have to have a name to print on the program--”
This was the first time that anybody who'd been asked to appear hadn't eagerly supplied much information as to middle initials!
”Vairee well,” suggested Felicia, ”we shall make up a name. I shall be called Madame Folie--no, Mademoiselle Folly--will that suit? Then if it has been a mistake to put me on your program that will be a small joke, eh?”
It looked very well indeed, ”Vairee business-like”--
”Number 17--DIVERTISs.e.m.e.nT--Mademoiselle Folly in PRETENSES”
She didn't even bother to tell them about it at home. It seemed to her as casual as the Sunday afternoons when she whistled for [her accustomed audience of] the Wheezy and her friends. That is until the hectic morning when she obeyed a summons to rehearsal in the empty, auditorium--Felicia always says that the rehearsal was worse than May Day night! So too were the behind-the-scenes confusions and the nervous moments while the makeup artist dabbled her cheeks with rouge and pencilled her eyes--_that_ left her limp with stage fright.
After all, she thought as she waited her turn, ”It's only for ten minutes! And an encore if they like me!”
The moment when she actually faced her first big audience--a tired and fluttering and yawning audience, for two hours of Brooklyn amateur talent will wilt even the most valiant listeners!--she had but one thought, and that was--that there wasn't any pattern to an audience!
Other thoughts raced like lightning.
”But I must remember to smile. They are persons and I have to please them, they're sounding rather fretty--”
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