The Real Adventure
expression go over her face that didn't relate to him at all. He simply
wasn't in focus, that was the size of it. He had never seen her look
lovelier, more completely desirable than she did right now, dressed as
she was in her very simple street clothes and relaxed by the surrounding
quiet and comfort and her own fatigue. And yet, all alone with him as
she had so confidingly permitted herself to be, and near enough to reach
with the bare stretching out of a hand, she'd never been further away
nor seemed more unattainable.
As she came back from one of these momentary excursions she found him
staring at her, and with a faint flush and a smile of contrition she
pulled herself back, as it were, into his presence.
"I know you're tired," he said bruskly. "But I fancied you'd be tireder
in the morning and I have to leave for New York on the fast train. So,
you see, it was now or never." Strangely enough, that got her. She
stared at him a little incredulous, almost in consternation.
"Do you mean you're going away?" she asked. "To-morrow?"
"Of course," he said rather sharply. "I've nothing more to stay around
here for." He added, as she still seemed not to have got it through her
head. "My contract with Goldsmith and Block ended to-night, with the
opening performance."
"Of course," she said in deprecation of her stupidity, "I didn't think
you were going to stay indefinitely--as long as the show ran. And yet I
never thought of your going away. It's always seemed that you were the
show--or, rather, that the show was you; just something that you made
go. It doesn't seem possible that it can keep on going with you not
there."
The sincerity of that made it a really fine compliment--just the sort
of compliment he'd appreciate. But--the old perversity again--the very
freedom with which she said it spoiled it for him.
"I may be missed," he said--it was more of a growl really--"but I shan't
be regretted. There's always a sort of Hallelujah chorus set up by the
company when they realize I'm gone."
"I shall regret it very much," said Rose. The words would have set his
blood on fire if she'd just faltered over them. But she didn't. She was
hopelessly serene about it. "You're the person who's made this six weeks
bearable and, in a way, wonderful. I never could thank you enough for
the things you've done for me, though I hope I may try to some time."
"I don't want any thanks," he said. And this was completely true. It was
something very different from gratitude that he wanted. But he realized
how abominably ungracious his words sounded, and hastened to amend them.
"What I mean is that you don't owe me any. Anything I've done that's
worked out to your advantage was done because I believed it was to the
advantage of the men who hired me--beginning with the afternoon when I
first took you on in the chorus."
This didn't satisfy him either. Rose said nothing. He had indeed left
her nothing to say. But there was a look of perplexity in her eyes--as
if she were casting about for some stupidly tactless act or omission of
her own to account for his surliness--that made him recant altogether.
"I don't know why in the world I should have said a thing like that!" he
burst out. "It wasn't true. I've wanted to do things for you--wanted to
do more than I could, and I want to still. You've done a lot to make
this show go, as well as it did, in more ways than you know about. It
wasn't for me, personally, that you did it. But all the same, I'm
grateful. And it's to convince you of that that I asked you to come
around here to-night."
She really lighted up over his praise, thanked him for it very
prettily. But then, after a little silence, she went on reflectively,
"It was, in a way, for you, personally, that I was working all the time.
I don't know if I can explain that, though I think I understand it
myself. But just because you wanted things so hard--you were so
perfectly determined that something should happen in a certain way--I
just _had_ to help bring it about, or try to. It would have been
exciting enough just to see that things were wrong and to watch them
coming right. But taking hold one's self and helping a little to make
them come right was--well, as I said, wonderful."
"Well," he said--and now he was brusk again--"I hope Goldsmith and Block
are satisfied. They won't be; of course, unless the thing runs forty
weeks. But that isn't what I want to talk about. I want to talk about
you. I want to know what you're aiming at. I don't mean to-morrow or
next week. You'll stay with this piece, I suppose, as long as the run
lasts. But in the end, what's the idea? Do you want to be an actress?"
He had kept on going after that first question of his, because it was
obvious the girl wasn't ready to answer. She seemed to be struggling to
get the bearings of a perfectly new idea. At length she gave him the
clue.
"It's that forty weeks," she said. "The notion of just going on--not
changing anything or improving anything; doing the same thing over and
over again for forty weeks, or even four, seems perfectly ghastly. And
yet I suppose that's what everybody in the company is hoping for--just
to keep going round and round like a horse at the end of a pole. What
I'd like to do, now that this is finished, is--well, to start another."
His eyes kindled. "That's it," he said. "That's what I've felt about you
all along. I suppose it's the reason I felt you never could be an
actress. You see the thing the way I do--the whole fun of the game is
getting the timing. Once it's got ..." He snapped his fingers; and with
an eager nod she agreed.
He was in focus now, there could he no doubt of that. But it didn't
occur to him that it was the director who was in focus, not the man.
The fact was that in evoking the director she'd banished the man--a
triumph she wasn't to realize the importance of until a good deal later.
"Well, then, look here," he said. "I've an idea that I could use you to
good advantage as a sort of personal assistant. There'll be a good deal
of work just of the sort you did with the sextette, teaching people to
talk and move about like the sort of folk they're supposed to represent.
That's coming in more and more in musical comedies, the use of the
chorus as real people in the story--accounting for their exits and
entrances. It would be done more if we could teach chorus people to act
human. Well, you can do that better than I; that's the plain truth. And
then I think after you'd got my idea of a dance number you could
probably rehearse it yourself, take some of that routine off my hands.
Under this new contract of mine, that I expect to sign in a day or two,
I'll simply have to have somebody. And then, of course, there's the
costuming. That's a great game, and I've a notion, though of course I
haven't a great deal to go by, that you could swing it. I think you've a
talent for it.
"There you are! The job will be paid from the first a great deal better
than what you've got here. And the costuming end of it, if you succeed,
would run to real money. Well, how about it?"
"But," said Rose a little breathlessly--"but don't I have to stay here
with _The Girl Up-stairs_? I couldn't just leave, could I?"
"Oh, I shan't be ready for you just yet anyway," he said. "I'll write
when I am and by that time you'll be perfectly free to give them your
two weeks' notice. By the way, haven't you some other address than care
of the theater--a permanent address somewhere?"
"Care of Miss Portia Stanton," she told him, and as he got out his card
and wrote it down, she added the California address. It recalled to his
mind that she had told him her name was Rose Stanton on the day he had
given her a job, and the memory diverted him for a moment. Then he
pulled himself back.
"They'll be annoyed, of course--Goldsmith and Block. But, after all,
you've given them more than their money's worth already. Well--will you
come if I write?"
"It seems to be too wonderful to be true," she said. "Yes, I'll come, of
course."
He sat there gazing at her in a sort of fascination. Because she was
fairly lambent with the wonder of it. Her eyes were starry, her lips a
little parted, and she was so still she seemed not even to be breathing.
But the eyes weren't looking at him. Another vision filled them. The
vision--oh, he was sure of it now!--of that "only one," whoever he was,
that mattered.
He thrust back his chair with an abruptness that startled her out of her
reverie, and the action, rough as it was, wasn't violent enough to
satisfy the sudden exasperation that seized him. If he could have
smashed the caraffe or something ...
"I won't keep you any longer," he said. "I'll have them get a taxi and
send you home."
She said she didn't want a taxi. If he'd just walk over with her to a
Clark Street car ... And she thanked him for everything, including the
supper. But all the time he could see her trying, with a perplexity
almost pathetic, to discover what she had done to change his manner
again like that.
He was thoroughly contrite about it, and he did his best to recover an
appearance of friendly good will. He didn't demur to her wish to be put
on a car, and at the crossing where they waited for it, after an almost
silent walk, he did manage to shake hands and wish her luck and tell her
she'd hear from him soon, in a way that he felt reassured her.
But he kicked his way to the curb after the car had carried her off, and
marched to his hotel in a sort of baffled fury. He didn't know exactly
what had gone wrong about the evening. He couldn't, in phrases, tell
himself just what it was he'd wanted. But he did know, with a perfectly
abysmal conviction, that he was a fool!
CHAPTER X
THE VOICE OF THE WORLD
If you were to accost the average layman, especially the layman who has,
at one time or another, found his personal affairs, or those of his
friends, casually illuminated by the straying search-light of newspaper
notoriety, and put this hypothetical question to him: What chance would
there be that a young married woman, who, in a social sense, really
"belonged," could leave her husband for a musical-comedy chorus in the
city he lived in, and escape having the fact chronicled in the daily
press?--that layman would tell you that there was simply no chance at
all. But if you were to put the same question to a person expert in the
science of publicity--to an alumnus of the local room of any big city
daily, you'd get a very different answer. Because your expert knows how
many good stories there are that never get into the papers. He allows
for the element of luck; he knows how vitally important it is that the
right person should become aware of the fact at exactly the right time,
in order that a simple happening may be converted into news.
Rose's "escapade"--that's how it would have been described--didn't get
into the papers. Jimmy Wallace, of course, before the bar of his own
conscience, stood convicted of high treason. There was no use arguing
with himself that he was hired as a critic and not as a reporter. For,
just as it is the doctor's duty to prolong, if possible, the life of his
patient, or the lawyer's duty to defend his client, so it is the duty of
every man who writes for a newspaper, to turn himself into a reporter
when a story breaks under his eye. Jimmy ought that very night as soon
as he had made sure of his facts, to have left a note on his city
editor's desk informing him that Mrs. Rodney Aldrich was a member of the
chorus in the new Globe show.
He didn't do it, even though he knew that a more troublesome accuser
than his own conscience--namely, the city editor himself--would confront
him, in case any of his colleagues on the other papers had happened to