The Real Adventure
the surging thoughts and memories of her lover, coming in like a
returning tide, she should have been deaf to a meaning in the director's
tones that any one of the stupid little flutterers in the chorus would
instantly have understood.
A man with a volcanic incandescence within him such as was now afire in
Rose, is utterly useless until it subsides--totally incapable, at least,
of any sort of creative or imaginative work. Until the fire can be, by
one means or another and for the time being, put out, he has no energies
worth mentioning, to devote to anything else. And, just as no woman can
understand the cold austerities of the cell into which a man must retire
in order to give his finer faculties free play, so no man can possibly
understand, although objective evidence may compel him to admit and
chronicle it as a fact, that a woman borne along as Rose was, upon an
irresistible tide of passions, memories and hopes, which all but made
her absent husband actually visible to her, could at the same time, be
seeing visions of her accomplished work and laying plans--limpid
practicable plans, for their realization.
This is, perhaps, one of the few, and certainly one of the most
fundamental chasms of cleavage between the two sexes; a chasm bridged by
habit invariably, because some sort of thoroughfare has to exist,
bridged, too, more rarely, by intellectual understanding. But never
bridged, I think, between two persons strongly masculine and feminine
respectively, by an instinctive sympathy. To each, the other's way of
life must always be mysterious, and at times exasperating or a little
contemptible.
To the woman, with the finely constant impenetration of love through all
her spiritual life, the man's uncontrollable blaze and his alternate
coldness, seem fitful--weak--brutish, almost unworthy of a creature with
a soul.
To the man who knows the value of his phases of high austerity and
understands quite well the price at which he obtains them, the woman who
fails to understand the necessity or to appreciate the mood seems
sentimental and a little unworthy.
Well, the fact that Rose's heart was racing and her nerves were tingling
with a newly welcomed sense of her lover's spiritual presence, did not
prevent her flying along west on Randolph Street and south again on the
west side of State, with a very clearly visualized purpose. She had
forgotten to replace her veil, but at that hour it didn't matter. The
west side of State Street, anyway, is almost as far from the east as
North Clark Street is from the Drive.
As she came abreast of the first of the big department stores which line
the west side of this thoroughfare, she saw that her surmise had been
correct. It was open. Throngs of weary shoppers were crowding out, and a
very respectable stream of them were forcing their way in. She told an
exhausted floor-walker that she wanted to buy a dressmaking form. And,
spent as he was, he reflected a little of her own animation in his
unusually precise reply; had, indeed, a little of it left over for his
next inquirer.
Something automatic in her mind took charge of Rose and delivered her,
presently, unconscious of intervening processes, at the counter where
the forms were sold. She selected what she wanted instantly, and counted
out the money from her own purse. She didn't have to dip into John
Galbraith's hundred and twenty dollars for this.
"Address?" inquired the saleswoman preparing to make out her sales-slip.
Then, as Rose didn't answer instantly, she looked up frowning into her
face. "You want it sent, don't you?" she added.
The question was rhetorical, because with its standard, the thing stood
five feet high and weighed twenty-five pounds.
A frown of perplexity in Rose's face gave way to her own wide smile. "I
guess I'll have to take it with me," she said. Because as near
Christmas as this, the thing mightn't be delivered for two days.
"Take it with you?" the woman echoed, aghast.
"Have it wrapped up," said Rose decisively, "and put my name on
it--Mrs. ..." She checked herself with another smile. She had nearly
said, "Mrs. Rodney Aldrich." But the mistake didn't hurt as it would
have hurt yesterday. "Doris Dane," she went on. "And have it sent down
to the main entrance. I'll be there as soon as it is. Do you know where
I can buy paper cambric?" But she had to get that information from
another floor-walker.
Paper cambric seemed to have more of a bearing upon the approach of
Christmas Day than dressmaking forms, though just what the connection
was, Rose couldn't make out. There was a crowd at the counter, anyhow.
It was five minutes before she could get waited on. But once she caught
a saleswoman's eye, her purchase was quickly made. She bought three
bolts: one of black, one of white, and one of a washed-out blue. Once
more she counted out the money, and this time, "I'll take it with me,"
she said.
Strong as she was, the immense bundle was almost more than she could
carry. But she managed to make her way at last to the main entrance,
where, under the incredulous eye of the doorman, she found a porter
waiting with her dressmaking form.
"That's mine," she said. "Doris Dane is the name on it." Then, to the
doorman as the porter made off, "Will you get me a cab?"
But this particular store had, quite naturally, no facilities for doing
a carriage business, a fact which the doorman laconically explained.
"All right," said Rose dumping her heavy bundle beside the dressmaking
form. "You won't mind keeping an eye on this for a minute, will you?"
She didn't actually smile, but there was in her face a humorous
appreciation of the fact that a mountain like this wouldn't be hard to
watch.
The doorman grinned back at her. "Sure I will," he said. "I'm sorry I
can't leave the door to get you a cab."
Rose hailed one that happened to be passing, a creaking,
mud-bespattered disreputable affair with a driver to match, and briskly
drove a bargain with him. He announced when she told him the address
that the fare would be a dollar and a half. She offered him seventy-five
cents, which he, with the air of a disillusioned optimist in a bitter
world, accepted. "Christmas, too!" he muttered ironically.
"Oh, come," said Rose, grinning up at him. "How many tired people have
you given free rides to to-day, on the strength of that?"
"All right, miss; I don't complain," he said. He did, though, but
humorously, when Rose, assisted by a page boy the doorman had impressed
for her, carried the dressmaker's form and the other heavy bundle out to
the curb. He declared the form should go as another passenger (its
semi-human shape was clearly visible through the wrappings) and that the
other bundle ought to have a van. All the same, when at her destination
Rose had paid him, he came down, voluntarily from the box--voluntarily
but with a sort of reluctance--and carried the form up to her room for
her.
Also, rather incredibly, he refused an extra quarter she had ready for
him when he had completed this service. "Just to show no ill feelings,"
he said, and he told her where his stand was and gave himself a little
recommendation: "Honest and reliable."
Here in her close little room, the suggestion of an alcoholic basis for
this generosity obtruded itself, but Rose didn't care. She wished him a
merry Christmas and waved him off with a smile.
It was now after eight o'clock. Rehearsal was at eight-thirty and she
had had nothing to eat since noon. But she stole the time, nevertheless,
to tear the wrappings off her "form" and gaze on its respectable
nakedness for two or three minutes with a contemplative eye. Then,
reluctantly--it was the first time she had left that room with
reluctance--she turned out the light and hurried off to the little
lunch-room that lay on the way to the dance-hall.
She never again, in the active practise of her profession, knew
anything quite like the ensuing seventy-two hours. Every stimulus was,
of course, abnormally heightened. There was the novelty, the thrilling
sense of adventure that missed being fear only through an inexplicable
confidence of success. And then, anyway, her imagination was a virgin
field that had never been cropped, and the luxurious fertility of it was
amazing.
It was during that first rehearsal, which she so narrowly missed being
late for, that she got the general schemes for both sets of costumes.
That there must be a general scheme she had decided at once. The
sextette was a unit; none of the members of it ever appeared without the
others, and it would be immensely more effective, she perceived, if this
fact were expressed somehow in the costumes. Not by means of a stupid
uniformity, of course. The effect she wanted was subtler than that. But
if each one of the six costumes that these girls first appeared in could
be made somehow to express the same thing in a different way--not only
in different, though harmonious, colors, but in different, though
related, forms--the effect produced by the six of them together would be
immensely greater than the sum of their individual effects.
This, of course, wasn't what Rose said to herself. She just wanted a
scheme, and with ridiculous ease, she got it. She didn't even get it.
There it was staring at her. And the other scheme for the evening frocks
was knocking at the door, too, eager to get in the moment she could give
it a chance. She began studying the girls for their individual
peculiarities of style. Each one of the costumes she made was going to
be for a particular girl, suited, without losing its place in the
general plan, to the enhancement of her special approximation to beauty.
At last, when a shout from Galbraith aroused her to the fact that she
had missed an entrance cue altogether, in her entranced absorption in
these visions of hers, and had caused that unpardonable thing, a stage
wait, she resolutely clamped down the lid upon her imagination and,
until they were dismissed, devoted herself to the rehearsal.
But the pressure kept mounting higher and higher and she found herself
furiously impatient to get away, back to her own private wonderland, the
squalid little room down the street, that had three bolts of cambric in
it and a dressmaker's manikin--the raw materials for her magic!
Rose couldn't draw a bit. Her mother's fine contempt for ladylike
accomplishments had even intervened in the high-school days to prevent
her taking a free-hand course required in the curriculum, during which
you spent weeks making a charcoal study of a bust of Demosthenes. But
this lack never even occurred to Rose as a handicap. She hadn't the
faintest impulse to make a beginning by putting a picture down on paper
and making a dress of it afterward. She went straight at her materials,
or the equivalent of her materials, as a sculptor goes at his clay. She
couldn't have told just why she had bought those three shades of paper
cambric.
"I'm really awfully obliged to you for having explained it to me," she
told Burton, the portrait painter long afterward.
"I see!" he had exclaimed, on the occasion of an initiatory visit to her
workroom. "You design these things in their values first, just the way
the old masters used to paint. Once you get the values in, you can
project them in any colors that will leave your value scale true."
And Rose, as she said, was really grateful to him for telling her what
it was she had been doing all the while, just as Monsieur Jourdain was
grateful for the information that he had been talking prose all his life
and never known it.
What she had felt, of course, at the very outset, was the need of
something to indicate roughly the darks and lights in her design. And,
short of the wild extravagance of slashing into the fabrics themselves