The Real Adventure
changing in a mad scramble, hoping to get away and to get their dinners
eaten soon enough to enable them to see the whole bill at a movie show
before the evening's rehearsal.
But Rose didn't avail herself of her dismissal--remained hanging about,
a couple of paces away from where Galbraith was talking to Mrs.
Goldsmith. The only question that remained, he was telling her, was
whether her selections were not too--well, too refined, genteel, one
might say, for the stage. Regretfully he confessed he was a little
afraid they were. It needed a certain crudity to withstand the glare of
the footlights and until these gowns had been submitted to that glare,
one couldn't be sure.
He wasn't looking at her as he talked, and presently, as his gaze
wandered about the store, it encountered Rose's face. She hadn't
prepared it for the encounter, and it wore, hardly veiled, a look of
humorous appreciation. His sentence broke, then completed itself. She
turned away, but the next moment he called out to her, "Were you waiting
for me, Dane?"
"I'd like to speak to you a minute," she said, "when you have time."
"All right. Go and change your clothes first," he said.
Out of the tail of her eye as she departed, she saw him shaking hands
with the owner's wife and thanking her effusively for her help.
Incidentally, he was leading her toward the door as he did it. And at
the door, he declined an offer to be taken anywhere he might want to go
in her electric.
She found the other girls on the point of departure. But Olga offered to
wait for her.
"No, you run along," Rose said. "I've some errands and I don't feel like
seeing a movie to-night, anyway."
Olga looked a little odd about it, but hurried along after the others.
A saleswoman--the same one the manager assigned to Rose under the
misconception which that smart French ulster of hers had created when
she came into the store--now came around behind the screen to gather up
the frocks the girls had shed.
"Will you please bring me," said Rose, "that Poiret model you showed me
before the others came in? I'll try it on."
The saleswoman's manner was different now and she grumbled something
about its being closing time.
"Then, if you'll bring it at once ..." said Rose. And the saleswoman
went on the errand.
Five minutes later, Galbraith from staring gloomily at the mournful heap
of trouble Mrs. Goldsmith had left on his hands, looked up to confront a
vision that made him gasp.
"I wanted you to see if you liked this," said Rose.
"If I liked it!" he echoed. "Look here! If you know enough to pick out
things like that, why did you let that woman waste everybody's time with
junk like this? Why didn't you help her out?"
"I couldn't have done much," Rose said, "even if my offering to do
anything hadn't made her angry--and I think it would have. You see,
she's got lots of taste, only it's bad. She wasn't bewildered a bit. She
knew just what she wanted and she got it. It's the badness of these
things she likes. And I thought ..." She hesitated a little over this.
"I thought as long as they couldn't be good, perhaps the next best thing
would be to have them as bad as possible. I mean that it would be easier
to throw them all out and get a fresh start."
He stared at her with a frown of curiosity. "That's good sense," he
said. "But how did you come to think of it?--Oh, I don't mean that!" he
went on impatiently. "Why should you bother to think of it?"
Her color came up perceptibly as she answered. "Why--I want the piece to
succeed, of course. I was awfully miserable when I saw the sort of
things she was picking out and I spent half an hour trying to think what
I could do about it. And then I saw that the best thing I could do, was
nothing."
"You didn't do nothing though," he said. "That thing you've got on is a
start."
Rose turned rather suddenly to the saleswoman. "I wish you'd get that
little Empire frock in maize and corn-flower," she said. "I'd like Mr.
Galbraith to see that, too." And the saleswoman, now placated, bustled
away.
"This thing that I've got on," said Rose swiftly, "costs a hundred and
fifty dollars, but I know I can copy it for twenty. I can't get the
materials exactly of course, but I can come near enough."
"Will you try this one on, miss?" asked the saleswoman, coming on the
scene again with the frock she had been sent for.
"No," said Rose. "Just hold it up."
Galbraith admitted it was beautiful, but wasn't overwhelmed at all as
he had been by the other.
"It's not quite so much your style, is it? Not drive enough?"
"It isn't for me," said Rose. "It's for Olga Larson to wear in that _All
Alone_ number for the sextette."
"Why Larson especially?" he asked. "Except that she's a friend of
yours."
"She isn't," said Rose, "particularly. And anyway, that wouldn't be a
reason. But--did you ever really look at her? She's the one really
beautiful woman in the company."
"Larson?" said John Galbraith incredulously.
And Rose, with a flush and a smile partly deprecatory over her
presumption in venturing to say such things to a formidable authority
like the director, and partly the result of an exciting conviction that
she was right, told him her mind on the subject, while Galbraith, half
fascinated, half amused, listened.
"I don't happen to remember the portrait of the Honorable Mrs. Graham
that you speak about," he said, "but I won't deny that you may be right
about it."
It was well after closing time by now--a fact that the manager, coming
to reinforce the saleswoman, contrived, without saying so, to indicate.
"Put on your street things," said Galbraith bruskly. "I'll wait."
CHAPTER VI
A BUSINESS PROPOSITION
"Why, this was what I wanted to say," said Rose, taking up the broken
conversation as he pulled the shop door to behind him. She didn't go out
on to the sidewalk, but lingered in the recessed doorway. "I thought if
you'd let me fake that evening frock for twenty dollars, and then buy
the little Empire one for Olga Larson--it's only eighty--that the two
would average just about what Mrs. Goldsmith was paying for the others."
"Why not fake the other one too?" he asked.
"It couldn't be done," said Rose decisively. "There's no idea in it, you
see, that just jumps out and catches you. It gets its style from being
so--reserved and so just exactly right. And of course that's true of the
girl herself. She's perfect, just about. But it's a perfection that it's
awfully easy to kill. She kills it herself by the way she does her
hair."
Buzzing around in the back of John Galbraith's mind was an unworded
protest against the way Rose had just killed her own beauty with a thick
white veil so nearly opaque that all it let him see of her face was an
intermittent gleam of her eyes. Keenly aware--a good deal more keenly
aware than he was willing to admit--of the sort of splendor which, but
for the veil, he'd be looking at now, a splendor which nothing short of
a complete mask could hide, he was not quite in the mood to wax
enthusiastic over a beauty so fragile as that of the girl they had been
talking about. There was a momentary silence, broken again, by Rose.
"Of course, you'll want to take a look at her for yourself, before you
decide," she said; "but I'm pretty sure you'll see it." She put a
cadence of finality into her voice. The business between them was over,
it said, and all she was waiting for was a word of dismissal, to nod
him a farewell and go swinging away down the avenue. Still he didn't
speak, and she moved a little restlessly. At last:--
"Do you mind crossing the street?" he asked abruptly. "Then we can talk
as we walk along." She must have hesitated, because he added, "It's too
cold to stand here."
"Of course," she said then. All that had made her hesitate was her
surprise over his having made a request instead of giving an order.
Galbraith turned her north on the vast empty east sidewalk--a highway in
itself broader than many a famous European street, and they walked a
little way in silence.
No observant Chicagoan, Rose reflected, need ever yearn for the wastes
of the Sahara when a desire for solitude or the need of privacy came
upon him. The east side of Michigan Avenue was just as solitary and
despite the difficulty of getting across to it, really a good deal more
accessible. The west side was one unbroken glow of light and though the
Christmas crowds had thinned somewhat with the closing of the shops,
they were still thick enough to have made it difficult for two people to
walk and talk together. A quadruple stream of motors, bellowing warnings
at one another, roaring with suddenly opened throttles, squealing under
sudden applications of the brake, occupied the roadway and served more
than the mere distance would have done, to isolate the pair that had the
east sidewalk all to themselves.
He couldn't be looking for a better place to talk than this, Rose
thought. Why didn't he begin? Probably he'd got started thinking about
something else. A motor coming along near the curb emitted a
particularly wanton bellow, and she saw him jump like a nervous woman,
then stand still and glare after the offender. He must be feeling
specially irritable to-night, she thought.
It was a good diagnosis. And his irritation had, for him, a most unusual
cause. Chorus-girls, principals, owners, authors, costumers, were
frequently the objects of his exasperated dissatisfaction. But to-night
the person he was out of all patience with was himself. He couldn't make
up his mind what he wanted to do. Or rather, knowing what he wanted to
do, he couldn't make up his mind to do it. It was this indecision of his
that had produced the silence while he and Rose had stood in the
entrance to Lessing's store. The only resolution he had come to there
had been not to allow her to say good night to him and walk away. But
now that she was striding along beside him, he couldn't make up his mind
what to say to her.
A more self-conscious man would have forgiven himself his indecision
from recognizing the real complexities of the case. He was, to begin
with, an artist--almost a great artist. And a universal characteristic
of such is a complete detachment from the materials in which they
work--a sort of remorselessness in the use of anything that can
contribute to their complete expression. The raw materials of John
Galbraith's art were paint and canvas, fabrics, tunes, men and women. It
was an axiom in his experience, that any personal feeling--any sort of
human relation with one of the units in the mosaic he was building--was
to be avoided like the plague. His professional and personal contempt
for a colleague capable of a love-affair with a woman in a company he
was directing, would be inexpressible--unfathomable. Of course when a
man's job was finished--and this sort of job nearly always did finish on
the opening night--why, after that, his affairs were his own affair.
In a word: he ordered his life on the perfectly sound masculine instinct
for keeping his work and his sex emotions in separate water-tight
compartments. Rose was a working member of his production, and it was
therefore flagrantly impossible that his relation with her should be
other than purely professional.
And yet there had been something intangibly personal from the very
first, about every one of their broken momentary conversations--almost
about every meeting of their eyes. It had disturbed him the first time
he had ever seen her smile. He remembered the occasion well enough. She
had just finished executing the dance step--the almost inexcusably
vulgar little dance step he had ordered her to do as a condition of