The Real Adventure
hook unfastened, in a rapturous reverie, waiting for Rose.
In the instant before her entrance was noticed, Rose made an effort to
shake herself together so that she should be not too inadequate to the
situation that awaited her.
She was, of course, immensely pleased over Olga's little triumph.
(For it had been a triumph. Galbraith had persuaded Goldsmith and Block
to buy the little Empire dress in maize and corn-flower; Rose had done
her hair, and Olga had been allowed to sing, on the first _encore_, the
refrain to _All Alone_, quite by herself. She'd gone up an octave on the
end of it to a high A, which in its perfect clarity had sounded about a
third higher and had brought down the house. Patricia had been furious,
of course, but was at bottom too decent to show it much and had actually
congratulated Olga when she came off. It looked as if she'd really got
her foot on the ladder.)
Well, as I said, Rose was immensely pleased about it--for the girl, who
certainly deserved a little good luck at last; for herself, whose
judgment had been vindicated, and for the show, to the success of which
the experiment had contributed. But she'd have been a good deal better
pleased if Olga could have taken her success as simply her own, instead
of being so adoringly grateful to Rose about it. Olga had been adoring
her with a somewhat embarrassing intensity ever since the night she had
locked her in her room and taught her to talk.
Rose had convicted herself here of a failure in human sympathy, and had
done her best to correct it, without much avail. The stubborn fact was
that, wishing Olga all the good fortune in the world, and being willing
to take any amount of trouble to bring it about, she didn't particularly
like her. And she flinched involuntarily, from the girl's more romantic
and sentimental manifestations. This distaste had been heightened by the
fact that along with Olga's adoration had gone a sense of
proprietorship, with its inevitable accompaniment of jealousy.
Olga bridled every time she found Rose chatting with another member of
the chorus, and when, up in Milwaukee, Patricia had invited her, along
with Anabel, to come up to her room for a little supper after rehearsal,
Olga had been sulky and injured for the whole of the next day.
It was something deeper in Rose than a mere surface distaste that made
all this--the caresses, as well as the sulky exactions--repellent to
her. And to-night, with her mind full of Rodney--full of that strange
hope that disguised itself as fear, the repulsion was stronger than
ever. She made an effort to conquer it. It would be a shame to throw a
wet blanket on the girl's attempt to enjoy her triumph in her own way.
So Rose kissed her and told her how pleased she was, and good-humoredly
forbore to disclaim, except as her wide smile did it for her, Olga's
extravagant protestations of undying love and gratitude. Rose injected
common-sense considerations where she could. Olga had better get out of
that frock before she ruined it with grease paint, and unless she at
least began to dress pretty soon she'd find herself locked up for the
night in the theater.
"I wouldn't care," Olga said. "You'd be locked up, too. Because you
aren't any further along than I am."
"I'm going to be, though," said Rose, "in about two minutes." The
thought of what John Galbraith's disgust would be, in spite of his
good-natured assurance she needn't hurry, if she really kept him
waiting, set her at her task with flying fingers.
"There's no use hurrying," Olga commented on this burst of speed,
"because you're going to wait for me. This is my night. We'll have a
little table all by ourselves at Max's and then you'll come up and sleep
with me to-night."
An instinct prompted Rose to defer the necessary negative to this
suggestion until the last of the other girls, who was just then pinning
on her hat, should have gone. When the door clicked, she said she was
sorry but the plan couldn't be carried out.
Olga looked at her intensely. "I need you to-night," she said, "and if
you care anything about me at all you'll come."
"I'd come if I could," said Rose, "but it can't be managed. I've
promised to do something else."
Olga's face paled a little and her eyes burned. "So that's it, is it?"
she said furiously. "You're going out with Galbraith." She went on to
say more than that, but her meaning was plain at the first words.
Rose looked at her a little incredulous, quite cool, so far as her mind
went (because, of course, Olga's accusation was merely grotesque) but
curiously and most unpleasantly stirred, disgusted almost to the point
of nausea. She stopped the tirade, not because she cared what the girl
was saying, but because she couldn't stay in the room with a person
making that sort of an exhibition of herself. It took no more than half
a dozen words to accomplish this result. The mere fact that she spoke,
after that rather long blank period of speechlessness, and the cold
blaze of her blue eyes that accompanied her words, effected more than
the words themselves. And then, in a tempest of tears and
self-reproaches, Olga repented--a phase of the situation which was
worse, almost, than the former one, because it couldn't be dealt with
quite so summarily.
But Rose went on dressing as fast as she could all the while, and at
last, long before Olga had begun putting on her street clothes, she was
ready to go. With her hand on the door-latch she paused.
"I am going to have supper with Mr. Galbraith," she said. "He told me
there was something he wanted to talk to me about." And with that she
let herself out of the room, indifferent to the effect these last words
of hers might produce.
She caught sight of Galbraith down at the end of the corridor waiting
for her, but she paused a moment, pulled in a long breath and grinned at
herself. In the state of mind she was in just then, divided between her
impatience to get back to her own room where her thoughts could be free
to run upon the one theme they welcomed, and her wrath and disgust over
the scene Olga had just subjected her to, the poor man was in danger of
having a pretty unsatisfactory sort of hour with her. She must brace up
and really try to be nice to him.
So through all the preliminaries to the real talk which he'd said he
wanted with her, she was consciously as cordial and friendly as she knew
how to be. She said she hoped she hadn't kept him waiting too long, and
when he apologized for taking her out through the stage door and the
alley, with the explanation that the front of the house was by this time
locked, she made a good-humored reference to the fact that the alley and
the stage door were now her natural walk in life, and that it was just
as well she shouldn't be spoiled with liberties.
He asked her if she had any preference as to where they went for supper,
and the way she acknowledged, again with a smile, that she'd rather not
go to Rector's, nor to any of the places over on Michigan Avenue, was an
admission, in candid confidence, of the existence of another half of her
life which she wished to keep, if possible, unentangled with this. She
showed herself frankly pleased with the taxi he provided, sank back
into her place in it with a sigh of clear satisfaction, and was, as far
as he could see, completely incurious about the address he gave the
chauffeur. The place he picked out was an excellent little chop-house in
one of the courts south of Van Buren Street, a place little frequented
at night--manned, indeed, after dinner, merely by the proprietor, one
waiter and a man cook in the grille, and kept open to avoid the chance
of disappointing any of the few epicurean clients who wouldn't eat
anywhere else.
But neither the neighborhood nor the loneliness of the place got even so
much as a questioning glance from Rose. She left the ordering of the
supper to him, and assented with a nod to his including with it a bottle
of sparkling Burgundy.
There is nothing quite so disconcerting as to be prepared to overcome a
resistance and then to find no resistance there; to be ready with
convincing arguments, and then not have them called for. This, very
naturally, was the plight of John Galbraith.
Rose wasn't a child even on the day when she came and asked him for a
job, and in the six weeks that had intervened since then she'd been
dressing in the same room with chorus-girls--hearing the sort of things
they talked about in the wings. Indeed, unless he was mistaken, she must
have heard them linking her own name with his. His very special interest
in her, and the way he'd shown it, promoting her to the sextette, and
giving her a chance to design the costumes, was a thing they wouldn't
have missed nor failed to put their own construction on. She must know
then what their inferences would be from the fact of his asking her out
to supper on the opening night.
What he'd been prepared to urge was that now that his connection with
the enterprise had terminated, now that he was no longer a director and
the representative of her employers, she should take him on trust simply
as a friend. He was prepared to answer protests, to offer
compromises--concessions to appearances. He'd expected her to exhibit
some shyness of the taxi. According to his unconscious ideal of the
situation she should have looked questioningly at him--hesitated, and
then let him assure her that it was all right. She should have gasped a
little when the car turned south in the dark little court below Van
Buren Street, have shrunk a little at the isolation the emptiness of the
restaurant enforced upon them, and declined, with something not far
short of panic, her share of that bottle of Burgundy. Because all these
flutters and questionings would just have opened the way for his
assurances--perfectly honest assurances, too, as far as he knew--of the
candor of his feelings and intentions toward her.
She needed a friend, that was plain enough, some one who had her best
interests honestly at heart; some one who knew the pitfalls and the
difficulties of this pilgrimage she'd so strangely set out on, and could
advise her how to avoid them. That he was, potentially, that friend, he
truly believed. And what better way could there be of convincing her of
it than by persuading her to trust him, and then proving that her trust
had not been misplaced?
But what was one to do--how was one to make a beginning when she trusted
him without any persuasion? Trusted him as a matter of course, without
the glimmer of any sort of emotion whatever; about as if he'd
been--well, say, her brother-in-law!
He was at a loss for a peg to hang his definite sense of injury upon. He
couldn't blame the girl for having trusted him, nor for proving so
perfectly adequate to the unconventional situation he'd created. He
couldn't reproach her, even in his thoughts, for the frankly expressed
pleasure she took in the leisured dignity of the little restaurant, with
its modestly sumptuous appointments (she even let him see that she
appreciated the fineness of the napery and the handsomeness of the
tableware; admitted, indeed, how sharply it contrasted with what she'd
been used to lately), nor for the real appreciation she showed of the
supper he selected.
But the moment he had been planning, counting on for days--weeks, if it
came to that--with an excitement he couldn't deny, a tensity that had
increased as the prospect of it drew nearer, was not exciting nor tense
for her. If anything, she'd relaxed a little, as if the big moment of
her day had passed--or, postponed by this affair of his, were still to
come. Once or twice when her gaze detached itself from him and rested
unfocused on the other side of the room, he saw little changes of