The Girls of Central High on the Stage: or, The Play That Took The Prize

It came like a thunderbolt! Jess could only gasp and stare up at him until his smiling, rosy face, and the big spectacles, were blurred in a mist that seemed to rise before her like a curtain.

Bobby Hargrew started the cheering; but it was Laura who reached Jess first and hugged her tight.

“I’m just as disappointed as I can be!” she cried. “I actually thought my play was going to be best. But as it wasn’t – Why, Jess, I’m almost as happy over your winning it as you can be yourself!”

CHAPTER XVII – LILY PENDLETON IS DISSATISFIED

“I consider it a very unfair decision – unfair in every particular,” proclaimed Lily Pendleton, after school. “Why, he did not even mention ‘The Duchess of Dawnleigh.’ I can’t believe that Mr. Monterey even saw my play. I certainly shall make inquiries.”

Bobby Hargrew was caustic. “‘The Duchess of Dawnleigh!’” she repeated. “Say Lil! would you really know a live duchess if you saw one coming up the street? Why didn’t you write about something you knew about?”

“I guess I know as much about duchesses as you do, Bobby Hargrew!”

“I hope so,” granted Bobby, cheerily. “If I had to go up against a duchess – a real, live one – I expect I’d be like the little milliner in Boston, when some great, high-and-mighty personages came there from England. One of them was a sure-enough duchess, and she sent for the little milliner to do some work for her.

“The little workwoman was just about scared into a conniption,” chuckled Bobby, “when she found she had to go to the grand hotel to meet the grand lady and so asked a friend who knew a little more about the nobility than she did, what she should do when she entered the grand lady’s presence.

“‘Why, when you enter the room,’ explained the friend, ‘merely bow, and in speaking to her say “Your Grace.”’

“The little milliner,” continued Bobby, “thought she could do that all right, and she went to the interview with the duchess without any dress rehearsal. When she got inside the lady’s door she bowed very low and says, right off:

“‘For what we are about to receive, Oh, Lord, make us truly grateful!’”

But While there may have been some disappointment in the hearts of some of the girls of Central High who had striven for the prize, they not yet having heard Jess Morse’s play read, even the disappointed ones were not niggardly with their congratulations.

Jess walked in a maze that afternoon when she went home, Laura on one side and Nell Agnew on the other, while Bobby pirouetted around them like a very brilliant and revolving planet.

“And is there a part in your play for me?” demanded the irrepressible. “I just dote on actin. But no thinking part for mine, young lady! I must at least be important enough in the play to say: ‘Me Lord! the carriage waits.’”

“You could play the part of Puck or Ariel, Bobby,” declared Nellie Agnew.

“Hah! did you use those characters in ‘The Arrow’s Flight’?” gibed Bobby. “No wonder it was turned down then. Stealing boldly from Shakespeare!”

“No, I didn’t, Miss!” returned Nell, rather sharply. “I hope you noticed that I was one of those who was ‘honorably mentioned.’”

“Sure. Mr. Sharp let you all down easy,” chortled Bobby.

“I believe the decision in the contest was eminently fair,” declared Laura. “Yet I thought I would surely win.”

“So did I,” cried Nell.

“And I didn’t even dare hope for it,” said Jess, awe-stricken. “It’s just the most wonderful thing that ever happened.”

But Mrs. Morse took the success of “The Spring Road” quite as a matter of course.

“There, Josephine!” she exclaimed. “Now you can have the new clothes you are really suffering for – ”

Jess decided that the argument might as well come right then. So she halted her mother on the verge of her plans for renewing the girl’s wardrobe in a style more befitting the means of Lily Pendleton’s mother, than her own!

“We have got to pay our debts,” declared the girl, warmly. “Every penny must be paid, Mother, dear. Let’s be free of bills and duns for once, at least. Let us start square with the world – and stay square if we can.”

Mrs. Morse did not wish her daughter to use the prize money for their general needs. Jess had much trouble to convince her that it would make her, Jess, far happier to do that than to own the finest set of furs, or the most beautiful evening gown, that would be displayed upon the Hill that winter.

She did agree, finally, however, to have a new dress so that she could attend the M. O. R. reception that week, at which her play was read aloud by Miss Gould herself, and it was praised by the audience until Jess’s ears fairly burned. Then the committee properly appointed went into executive session and plans for the production of “The Spring Road” went with a rush.

It was easy to choose a cast of characters. With a little advice from Jess it was not hard to select the very girls and boys best fitted to act in the piece. And such selection was made that very week, the typewritten ‘sides’ distributed to the several players, and the boys and girls went to work to memorize their parts. Lance Darby and Chet Belding were both in the play, and although neither Laura, nor Jess herself, had a part, they were both so busy (for they were on the M. O. R. play committee) that for a few days athletics and sports were well-nigh neglected.

Through the good-natured manager of the Centerport Opera House, scenery and much of the properties and some costumes for the inferior characters were to be obtained. But the principal characters would furnish their own costumes, and that is where Lily Pendleton began to lose her dissatisfaction. Disappointed as she had been regarding the decision of the committee, when she found that she was cast for an important part in Jess’s play she “came out of the sulks,” as Bobby termed it.

Mr. Monterey suggested to the committee, too, the name of a man to take charge of the rehearsals – really, to be stage director of “The Spring Road.” He came to the M. O. R. house one afternoon to read the play – a dapper, foreign-looking man of an indeterminate age, who continually twirled a silken black mustache and listened devotedly to any girl who talked to him.

Lily began to cultivate Mr. Pizotti assiduously. Really, one might have supposed she had written the play, instead of Jess Morse, she was so frequently in conference with Mr. Pizotti that first afternoon.

Bobby, who had likewise been cast for a part in “The Spring Road,” watched Lily’s actions with the stage manager with a good deal of disgust.

“What do you know about that foolish girl?” she demanded. “I’ll wager that greasy foreigner has got a wife and ten children – and neglects them. He has brilliantine on that moustache, and he smells of hair-oil, and I’ll wager, too his hair will show gray at the roots, and I know it is thin on top.”

“How wise you are, Miss Bobby,” said Nellie, who heard her. “For a child you seem to have learned a lot.”

“I’m foxy,” returned Bobby, grinning impishly. “I’m fully as smart as that kid brother of Alice Long’s. He came up to see us the other day – Alice brought him. Aunt Mary is real old fashioned, you know, and she sat in the kitchen darning and Tommy was playing around the floor. She thought it was getting toward tea time and she said to him:

“‘Tommy, go into the front hall and see if the clock is running, that’s a good boy.’

“Tommy came back after a minute, and says:

“‘No, ma’am, it ain’t running; it’s standing still. But it’s wagging it’s tail!’”

“And there’s Lil putting on her hat in a hurry so as to meet the man when Miss Gould is through with him, and walk down the block – Did you ever?” exclaimed Jess.

“Poor Pretty Sweet!” groaned Bobby. “His nose is out of joint. He has been Lil’s bright and shining cavalier for months. Dear, dear me! The Duchess of Dusenberry – was that the name of Lil’s play? – sure does have her favorites, and like the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland,” has only one command for her discarded courtiers: ‘Off with their heads!’” and Bobby giggled as she peered from the window to watch the dapper Mr. Pizotti and Lily Pendleton walk down the street side by side.

CHAPTER XVIII – THE SKI RUNNERS

The New Year had ushered in the first big fall of snow – and it kept coming. Every few days, for the following fortnight, snow fell until Centerport’s street-cleaning department was swamped, and the drifts lay deep upon the vacant lots and against fences and blind walls.

Skating was done for, for the ice on the lake had become overloaded, and had broken up into a shifting mass of blocks, grinding against each other when the wind blew, and threatening the safety of any craft that tried to put out in it.

So traffic on Lake Luna ceased, and, of course, iceboating was likewise impossible. Chet and Lance Darby, had they not been so extremely busy learning their parts in the new play, could not have used their aero-iceboat during this time. Sleds were out in force, however – bobsleds, double-runners, toboggans, “framers,” and every sort of coasting paraphernalia. Even the Whiffle Street hill was made a coasting place by the young folk of the neighborhood, much to the despair of some grouty people who had forgotten their own youth, and who either telephoned their complaints to the police, or sprinkled ashes on the slide in the early morning hours.

It was at this time, however, that Mrs. Case, the girls’ physical instructor of Central High, took her class in ski running out into the open.

At first the dozen or more girls had practiced on their athletic field, which was now snow-covered, too. It was a particularly odd experience to stand upon narrow boards of ash, some ten feet in length, and then try to shuffle along on them without tipping sideways, or plunging head-first into a drift.

Each ski runner held a pole, with a spike in one end, and this was an aid to balancing, as well as of additional use if one tumbled down. It was no easy task, the girls found, to get up when they had been thrown into a drift.

“My!” commented Bobby Hargrew, “if you cross your feet going down hill on these things, you’re likely to dislocate every joint in your body.”

“Be sure you do not cross your feet, then,” advised Mrs. Case, grimly. “I have shown you all the correct position to stand upon these skis. The professional ski runner does not even use a pole. He will take the steep sides of mountains at a two-mile a minute rate. I have seen them do so in Switzerland and in Sweden and Norway. And they will jump into the air from the verge of high banks, and land on the drift at the bottom with perfect balance.”

“This is going to be no cinch to learn,” pronounced Bobby. “I know it’s going to be some time before I am good enough at it to jump off the top of Boulder Head on Cavern Island – now you see!”

“You would better take a much less difficult jump first,” advised Mrs. Case, smiling. “It will be enough fun for us to learn to travel on the skis without any frills. In Europe – especially on the road between St. Moritz and Celerina – I have often seen ski riders with horses. A horse trots ahead, drawing several riders on skis, who cling together by the aid of a rope fastened to the horse’s collar. Sometimes each rider has a horse, and they race horses just as though they were riding in sleighs.

“It is great sport, but like every other healthful form of athletics, it is often made dangerous and objectionable by those who are reckless, or rough. We will learn to balance ourselves, and to coast down a gentle descent.”

So, the next Saturday, the teacher and more than a dozen girls of Central High piled into a big, straw-filled sleigh, and were whisked out into the hills south of the city. The inn at Robinson’s Woods – a popular picnicking ground in summer – was made their headquarters, and there they left the sleigh and took to the difficult skis.

The climb to the top of the bluff overlooking the speedway, on which everybody – almost – who owned a sleigh was driving that afternoon, was not an easy one for the girls. Mrs. Case, holding her body erect, yet easily, shuffled up the incline with such little apparent effort that some of her pupils were in despair.

“We’ll never be able to run as you do, Mrs. Case!” cried Dora Lockwood. “Never! Why – ouch! There, I came near tumbling down that time.”

“Keep your balance. Use the pole if you have to,” advised the instructor. “It is not a running motion – it is more like a slide.”

“Say!” growled Bobby, who was having trouble, too. “It beats the ‘debutante slink,’ that came in with narrow skirts. I feel as if I was tumbling down every second.”

But they gained confidence in time. They reached the top of the bluff and then the long, easy slope, right beside the speedway, spread, spotless, before them. Mrs. Case showed them how to start, and after a fashion several of the bigger girls reached the bottom of the hill, and then panted up again, pronouncing it the best ever!

Bobby would not be outdone, as she said, “by anything in skirts,” and so she ventured. Halfway down the hill one of her skis must have struck something – perhaps the stub of a bush sticking out of the snow. Whew! Bobby turned almost a complete somersault!

She was buried so deep in a drift – and head first, at that – that it took both Laura and Mrs. Case to pull her out.

“Oh-me-oh-my!” cried Bobby, who looked like an animated snow-girl for the moment. “And just as I was getting on so well, too! Wasn’t that mean?”

“Perhaps you’d better not try any more to-day, Clara” said the instructor.

“And let those other girls get ahead of me? Well! I guess not!” declared Miss Hargrew, and she ploughed back to the top of the hill, fastened her feet upon the skis again, and started once more.

Laura and Jess Morse were on the hilltop, looking out upon the white track over which the sleighs were flying.

“Look there!” gasped Jess, seizing her chum’s arm. “Isn’t that the Pendletons’ sleigh?”

“Of course it is. With the big plumes and the pair of dappled grays? And that stiff and starched coachman driving? No mistake,” admitted Laura.

“Who’s in the sleigh with Lil?” demanded Jess.

“As I live!” cried her chum, in a somewhat horrified tone. “It – it is that Pizotti – that man!”

“Can you beat her?” said Jess, shaking her head.

“How foolish!” added Laura. “He is not a good man. He has known her so short a time – and to go sleigh-riding with her. Lil will be talked about, sure enough.”

“Well, I don’t know as we need to worry about her,” said Jess, shrugging her shoulders.

But Laura Belding could not put her schoolmate’s indiscreet actions out of her mind so easily. She wondered if Mrs. Pendleton knew of Lily’s familiarity with the foreign-looking Pizotti. The man might know his business as a stage director; but he certainly was neither of the age, nor the condition in life, to be cultivated as a friend by any young girl.

Lily Pendleton was so foolishly romantic, and so crazy about theatrical matters, that to be noticed by any person connected with the stage, or theatrical affairs, quite turned her head. And then, she still talked a great deal about her own play, “The Duchess of Dawnleigh.” She was sure it had not been given a proper reading – especially by Mr. Monterey. Perhaps, for reasons best known to himself, this stranger, Mr. Pizotti, had promised the foolish girl that he would help her get “The Duchess of Dawnleigh” produced.

CHAPTER XIX – THE FIRST DRESS REHEARSAL

Laura Belding was a particularly frank, outspoken girl, and when she met Lily Pendleton that Saturday night at the rehearsal of Jess’s play, she came out “flat-footed,” as her chum would have said, with the question:

“Who was that in the sleigh with you to-day, Lil?”

Lily flushed instantly, bridled, and smiled. “Who do you s’pose?” she returned.

“I don’t believe your mother knew you had that theatrical man to drive with you,” said Laura, bluntly.

“Why, how you talk! I merely met Signor Pizotti, and took him up – ”

“You don’t know who he is,” spoke Laura.

“Oh, indeed, Miss! And do you?” demanded Lily, rather sharply.

“No, And I don’t want to know him.”

“He is a very scholarly man – and he knows all about staging this play. If it wasn’t for him, I guess, ‘The Spring Road’ would suffer from frost,” said Lily, with an unkind laugh.

“That may be,” said Laura, flushing a little herself, for any slur cast upon her chum’s play hurt her, too. “But his knowledge of how to produce or stage a play does not establish his private character.”

“Pooh! you are interfering in something that you know nothing about,” declared Miss Pendleton, loftily. “And it does not concern you at all.”

“I do not believe your mother would approve,” ventured Laura.

“Never you mind about my mother,” snapped Lily, and turned her back on Mother Wit.

The latter took herself to task later, thinking she had been too presumptuous.

“But really,” she said to Jess, on their way home that evening, “I did not mean to be. Only, the man looks so unreliable. I’m afraid of him.”

“I’m not afraid of him,” said Jess, decidedly. “I only dislike him. But there is no accounting for tastes. My mother knew of a foolish girl who wrote to an opera tenor – one of those handsome, spoiled foreigners, and she sent him her photograph and told him how much she liked his singing – and all that. Just a silly letter, you know. But she didn’t sign her name and she thought he would never learn who she was.

“But he went to the photographer,” continued Jess, “and bribed him to tell who the girl was, and by that time she had written to the man several times, and he had written to her. So then he threatened her that if she did not give him five hundred dollars he would send her letters to her father. And she was in dreadful trouble, for she was afraid of what her father would do.”

“Oh, Lil won’t do anything like that!” gasped Laura. “I don’t believe she even thinks she cares about that Pizotti. It is only his foreign way that makes it appear so. But I believe he is flattering her about her play, and perhaps will get money from her or her mother.”

“Pizotti! Ha!” grunted Jess, before they separated. “I’m like Bobby Hargrew: I don’t believe that’s even his name. It sounds too fancy to be a real name.”

But Mr. Pizotti was an able man in his business. He came from time to time to the M. O. R. house and his advice regarding the play was always practical. He was something of a musician, too, and played the accompaniments for the girls who sang in “The Spring Road.” He suggested improvements in the costumes, too; and Lily Pendleton was entirely guided by his taste in her choice of the gowns she was to wear in the production.

Mrs. Pendleton was a very busy woman in a social way and allowed her daughter to do about as she pleased. Lily aped the manners of girls who had long since graduated from school and were flashy in their dress and manners.

To tell the truth, the after-hour athletics, governed by Mrs. Case, had been the one saving thing in Lily Pendleton’s life for some months. She would have become so enamored of fashion and frivolity, had it not been for the call of athletics, that she would have fallen sadly behind in her school work.

But she liked certain activities enjoyed by those who were attentive to Mrs. Case’s classes; and to gain these privileges one had to stand well in her general studies. Lily was smart enough, was a quick student, and so kept up her school work.

This business of acting appealed to her immensely. She was “just crazy about it,” as she admitted to her particular friend, Hester Grimes.

“I wish my folks were poor, so that I would have to work when I leave school,” she declared. “Then I’d go on the stage myself.”

“You wouldn’t!” exclaimed Hester.

“I would in a minute. And this Signor Pizotti could place me very advantageously – ”

“Pooh! you don’t believe anything that fellow says, do you?” demanded her chum, who was eminently practical and had none of the silly ideas in her head that troubled Lily.

“You don’t know him!” exclaimed Lily.

“Don’t want to,” replied Hester, gruffly.

Preparations for the first dress rehearsal of “The Spring Road” went on apace. But, of course, Bobby Hargrew would have bad luck! She was thrown from Short and Long’s bobsled one night and had to be helped home. The hurt to her foot was a small matter; but the doctor said she would have to wear her arm in a sling for a time.

“And how can I play Arista with my arm strapped to my side?” wailed Bobby, when Jess and Laura came in to commiserate with her over the accident. “Oh, dear me! I am the most unlucky person in the world. If it was raining soup I’d have a hole in my dipper!”

Mr. Monterey, the local manager, came himself to the dress rehearsal. He only sat out front, and watched and listened; and he went away without expressing an opinion to anybody. Yet Jess saw him there and was excited by the possibility of Mr. Monterey’s recognizing the value of the play for professional purposes.

At the Morse domicile things were going better, and the girl’s mind was vastly relieved from present troubles. Yet she was wise enough to see that in the offing the same danger of debt threatened them if they were not very, very careful.

It was true that scarcely half the prize money had been spent; yet Mrs. Morse’s regular work on the Courier barely fed them; and her success with the popular magazines was but fitful. Sometimes two months passed without her mother receiving even a ten-dollar check from her fugitive work.

Oh, if she could only find somebody who would take the play – after the M. O. R.’s had made use of it – and whip it into shape for professional use, and give her a part of the proceeds!

That was the thought continually knocking at the door of Jess Morse’s mind. It was “too good to be true,” yet she kept thinking about it, and hoping for the impossible, and dreaming of it.

However, the dress rehearsal of “The Spring Road” was pronounced by the teachers and Mr. Pizotti as eminently satisfactory. Bobby was letter-perfect in her part, if she did have “a damaged wing,” as she said. And most of the other important roles were well learned.

The very prettiest girl of Central High had been chosen for the chief female character, and in this case prettiness went with brains. She had learned her part, and was natural and graceful, and was altogether a delight.

As for Launcelot Darby, he was the most romantic looking Truant Lover that could have been found. And he played with feeling, too, although his mates were making a whole lot of fun of him on the side. But Laura had urged him to do his best, and Lance would have done anything in his power to please Mother Wit.

Chet Belding, as a peasant, “made up” well, and was letter perfect, too, in his part, if a little awkward. But that did not so much matter, considering the character he had to portray. And, of course, he would do nothing to belittle Jess’s play. His whole heart was in his work, too.

So, after that first dress rehearsal, the committee and Jess were hopeful of success. The time for the production of the play was set, the tickets printed, and out of school hours everything was in a bustle of preparation for the great occasion.

CHAPTER XX – “MR. PIZOTTI”

“Listen to this!”

Bobby Hargrew, her arm still in a sling, seized Jess Morse by the wrist and “tiptoed” along the corridor of the second wing of Central High, where the small offices were located, and with tragic expression pointed to a certain door that stood ajar.

Jess, amazed, did not speak, but listened. Out of the room came a muffled voice, but the words spoken were these:

“Unhand me! Nay, keep your distance, Count Mornay! I am no peasant wench to be charmed either by your gay coat or your gay manner. Ah! your villainies are known to me, nor can you hide the cloven hoof beneath the edge of Virtue’s robe.”

“Ha! ha!” chuckled Bobby, almost strangling with laughter. “He ought to have worn boots and so hidden his ‘cloven hoof.’ Come away, Jess, or I shall burst! Did you ever hear the like?”

“Why – why, what is it?” demanded Jess, mystified.