The Real Adventure
The thing that caught her as she stood looking down on them, was the
wave of sudden pity. She saw them suddenly as persons with the long road
all ahead of them, as a boy and a girl, a youth and a maid, a man and a
woman. They were destined to have their hopes and loves, fears,
triumphs, tragedies perhaps. The boy there, Rodney, might have to face,
some day, the situation his father confronted now; might have to come
back into an empty home, and turn a stiff inexpressive face on a coolly
curious world. Little Portia there might find herself, some day, gazing
with wide seared eyes, at a life some unexpected turn of the wheel of
Fate had thrust her, all unprepared, into the midst of. Or it might be
her fate to love without attracting love--to drain all the blood out of
her life in necessary sacrifices; to wither that some one else might
have a chance to grow. Those possibilities were all there before these
two solemn, staring, little helpless things on the bed. What toys of
Chance they were!
She'd never thought of them like that before. The baby she had looked
forward to--the baby she hadn't had--had never been thought of that way
either. It was to be something to provide her, Rose, with an occupation;
to enable her to interpret her life in new terms; to make an alchemic
change in the very substance of it. The transmutation hadn't taken
place. She surmised now, dimly, that she hadn't deserved it should.
"You've never had a mother at all, you poor little mites," she said.
"But you're going to have one some day. You're going to be able to come
to her with your troubles, because she'll have had troubles herself.
She'll help you bear your hurts, because she's had hurts of her own. And
she'll be able to teach you to stand the gaff, because she's stood it
herself."
For the first time since they were born, she was thinking of their need
of her rather than of her need of them and with that thought, came for
the first time, the surge of passionate maternal love that she had
waited for, so long in vain. There was, suddenly, an intolerable ache in
her heart that could only have been satisfied by crushing them up
against her breast; kissing their hands--their feet.
Rose stood there quivering, giddy with the force of it. "Oh, you
darlings!" she said. "But wait--wait until I deserve it!" And without
touching them at all, she went to the door and opened it. Mrs. Ruston
and Doris were both waiting in the hall.
"I must go now," she said. "Good-by. Keep them carefully for me." Her
voice was steady, and though her eyes were bright, there was no trace of
tears upon her cheeks. But there was a kind of glory shining in her face
that was too much for Doris, who turned away and sobbed loudly. Even
Mrs. Ruston's eyes were wet.
"Good-by," said Rose again, and went down composedly enough to her car.
She rode down to the station, shook hands with and said good-by to
Otto, the chauffeur, allowed the porter to carry her bag into the
waiting-room. There she tipped the porter, picked up the bag herself,
and walked out the other door; crossed over to Clark Street and took a
street-car. At Chicago Avenue she got off and walked north, keeping her
eye open for placards advertising rooms to let. It was at the end of
about a half mile that she found the hatchet-faced landlady, paid her
three dollars, and locked her door, as a symbol, perhaps, of the bigger
heavier door that she had swung to and locked on the whole of her past
life.
Amid all the welter of emotions boiling up within her, grief was not
present. There was a very deep-reaching excitement that sharpened all
her faculties; that even made her see colors more brightly and hear
fainter sounds. There was an intent eagerness to get the new life fairly
begun. But, strangest of all, and yet so vivid that even its strangeness
couldn't prevent her being aware of it, was a perfectly enormous relief.
The thing which, when she had first faced it as the only thoroughfare to
the real life she so passionately wanted, had seemed such a veritable
nightmare, was an accomplished fact. The week of acute agony she had
lived through while she was forcing her sudden resolution on Rodney had
been all but unendurable with the enforced contemplation of the moment
of parting which it brought so relentlessly nearer. There had been a
terror, too, lest when the moment actually came, she couldn't do it.
Well, and now it had come and gone! The surgery of the thing was over.
The nerves and sinews were cut. The thing was done. The girl who stood
there now in her three-dollar room was free; had won a fresh blank page
to write the characters of her life upon.
She felt a little guilty about this. What heartless sort of a monster
must she be to feel--why, actually happy, at a moment like this? She
ought to be prone on the bed, her face buried in the musty pillow,
sobbing her heart out.
But presently, standing there, looking down on the lumpy bed, she smiled
widely instead, over the notion of doing it as a sort of concession to
respectability. She had got her absolution from Rodney himself out of
the memory of their first real talk together. Discipline, he'd said, was
accepting the facts of life as they were. Not raising a lamentation
because they weren't different. The only way you had of getting anywhere
was by riding on the backs of your own passions. Well, her great ride
was just beginning!
Rose dusted the mirror with a towel--a reckless act, as she saw for
herself, when she discovered she was going to have to use that towel for
a week--and took an appraising look at herself. Then she nodded
confidently--there was nothing the matter with her looks--and resumed
her ulster, her rubbers and her umbrella, for it was the kind of
December day that called for all three. Her landlady could stick the
receipt under the door, she reflected, as she locked it.
Two blocks down the street, she found, as predicted, the cigar store
with the blue sign, "Schulz Express," and left her trunk check there
with her address and fifty cents. Then, putting up her umbrella, and
glowingly conscious that she was saving a nickel by so doing, she set
off down-town afoot to get a job. She meant to get it that very
afternoon. And, partly because she meant to so very definitely, she did.
I don't mean to say that getting a job is a purely volitional matter.
There is the factor of luck, always large of course, though not quite so
large as a great many people suppose, and the factor of intelligence.
Rose's intelligence had been in pretty active training for the last
year. Ever since her talk with Simone Greville had set her thinking, she
had been learning how to weigh and assess facts apart from their
emotional nebulae. She'd taught herself how to look a disagreeable or
humiliating fact in the face as steadily and as coolly as she looked at
any other fact.
She had accumulated a whole lot of facts about women in industry from
Barry Lake and Jane. She knew the sort of job and the sort of pay that
the average untrained woman gets. She knew some of the reasons why the
pay was so miserably, intolerably small. She knew about the vast army of
young women who weren't expected to be fully self-supporting, who
counted on marrying comfortably enough some day, and accepted board and
lodging at home as one of the natural laws of existence. But who, if
they wanted pocket money, pretty enough clothes to make them attractive
enough for men to want to marry; who, if they wanted to escape the
stupid drudgery of housework at home, had to go to work. They'd rather
get eight dollars a week than six, of course, or ten than eight. But as
long as even six was velvet (cotton-backed velvet, one might say) they'd
take that, cheerfully oblivious to the fact, as naturally one might
expect them to be, that by taking six, they established a standard at
which a girl who had to earn her own living simply couldn't live.
Rose knew exactly what would happen to her if she went to one of the big
State Street department stores and asked for a job. Jane had been trying
some experiments lately, and stating her results with convincing
vivacity at their little dinners afterward. There was no thoroughfare
there.
She knew too, what sort of life she'd have to face if she offered
herself out in the West Side factory district as a cracker packer, a
chocolate dipper, a glove stitcher; any of those things. You got a sort
of training, of course, at any one of these trades. You learned to
develop a certain uncanny miraculous speed and skill in some one small
operation, as remorseless and unvaried as the coming into mesh and out
again of two cogs in a pair of gears. But the very highest skill could
just about be made to keep you alive, and it led to nothing else. You
wore out your body and asphyxiated your soul.
Rose didn't mean to do that. She was holding both body and soul in
trust. The penitential mood that had resulted from her talk with Portia
was utterly gone. She wasn't looking for hurts. Deliberately to impose
tortures on herself was as far from her intent as shirking any of the
inevitable trials that should come to her in the course of the day's
work. The only way she could see to a life of decent self-respecting
independence lay through some sort of special training--business
training, she thought. She'd begin by learning to be a stenographer--a
cracking good stenographer. Miss Beach had begun that way. She had a
real job.
Only, Rose had first to get a job that would pay for her training; and
not only pay for it, but leave time for it; a problem which might have
seemed like the problem of lifting yourself by your boot straps, if it
hadn't been for Jimmy Wallace--Jimmy with his talk about chorus-girls.
The trouble with that profession, Jimmy had said, was that the
indispensable assets in it were not industry, intelligence, ambitions,
but a reasonably presentable pair of arms and legs (a good-looking face
would surely come in handy too) and a rudimentary sense of rhythm.
Another demoralizing thing about it, he had said, was the fact that the
work wasn't hard enough, except during rehearsal, to keep its votaries
out of mischief.
When the notion first occurred to her that these statements of Jimmy's
might some day have an interest for her that was personal rather than
academic, she had dismissed it with a shrug of good-humored amusement.
It wasn't until her idea of leaving Rodney and going out and making a
living and a life for herself had hardened into a fixed resolution, and
she had begun serious consideration of ways and means, that she called
it back into her mind. There was no use blinking the facts. The one
marketable asset she would possess when she walked out of her husband's
house, was simply--how she looked.
Well then, if that was all you had, there was no degradation in using it
until you could make yourself the possessor of something else. And the
merit of this particular sort of job, for her, lay precisely in the
thing that Jimmy had cited as its chief disadvantage--it left you
abundant leisure. You might occupy that leisure getting into
mischief--no doubt most chorus-girls did. But there was nothing to
prevent your using it to better advantage.
With this in mind, on the Sunday before Rose went away, she had studied
the dramatic section of the morning paper with a good deal of care and
was rewarded by finding among the news notes, an item referring to a
new musical comedy that was to be produced at the Globe Theater
immediately after the Christmas holidays. _The Girl Up-stairs_ was the
title of it. It was spoken of as one of the regular Globe productions,
so it was probable that Jimmy Wallace's experience with the production
of an earlier number in the series would at least give her something to