The Real Adventure
ticket for to-night's performance.
It was then after five and he decided not to go back to the office
before dinner. In fact, he might as well dine down here. So he went up
to the lounge, armed himself with an evening paper against casual
acquaintances, ordered a drink and dropped into a big leather chair.
But all his carefully contrived environment hadn't the power, it seemed,
to shift the current of his thoughts. They went on dwelling on the
behavior of Miss Beach and young Craig, which really got queerer the
more one thought about it. It was hard to conceive of any allusion in
the plot or the songs of a silly little musical comedy, pointed enough
to account for Miss Beach's frantically determined effort to keep him
away, or for the instantaneous flush that had leaped into young Craig's
face. Because, after all, they didn't actually know that his great
adventure had come to grief, and whatever either of them might have
thought of the applicability of something that was said on the stage, to
their employer's ease, it wouldn't have been a bit like either of them
to discuss it with the other. In the absence of such a discussion, and
the prevision of his going to the show, you couldn't account for young
Craig's having caught the point instantly like that. And yet, what other
explanation could there be? There was none, and there was an end of it!
Only it wasn't the end of it. The straying search-light of his memory
picked up a moment during that last evening at the Williamsons'. The
Crawfords had been there, and somebody else--a man he didn't know; and
the stranger had said something, a harmless stupid remark enough, about
the tired business man and the sort of musical-comedy he liked;
whereupon both Constance and Violet had made a sort of concerted swoop
and changed the subject almost violently. John Williamson made a
practise of going to the Globe, he knew, but that John, who never
spotted an allusion in his life, should have come home and passed the
word along, and that all references to musical-comedy should therefore
be taboo on Rodney's account, was simply fantastic.
But the fantasticality of an idea seemed, in his mood to-night, merely
to give it the burr-like quality of sticking in his mind, holding on
there with a hundred tiny barbs, despite his endeavors to pluck it out.
It even occurred to him that the manner of the man at the cigar
counter--the man he had just told to get him a ticket, had not been
quite natural; had been a little exaggeratedly matter-of-fact. He always
got his seats of that man, and the man always made some little
encouraging remark, as, for example, that he'd heard it was a good show;
or, more non-committally, that he hoped Mr. Aldrich would enjoy it.
To-night, certainly, he'd said nothing of the sort.
The absurdity of this consideration was simply intolerable. He flung
down his paper and went into the adjoining room--a room full of tables
of various sizes, and thronged, at this hour, with members getting up an
appetite for dinner by the shortest route. The large round table nearest
the door was preempted by a group of men he knew; some of them well,
some only casually, and he came up with the intention of dropping into
the one vacant chair. But just before the first of them caught a glimpse
of him, his ear picked up the phrase, "_The Girl Up-stairs_." And then a
lawyer named Gaylord looked up and recognized him. "Hello, Aldrich," he
said, and Rodney would have sworn that the flash of silence that
followed had a galvanic quality that wasn't given it merely by his own
imagination. The others began greeting him, urging him to sit down and
have a drink.
Rodney pulled in a long breath: "Didn't I hear some one talking about
_The Girl Up-stairs_?" he asked. "Is it a good show? Shall I go to see
it?"
The silence was even briefer this time.
Gaylord spoke through what would pass for a yawn. "I don't know," he
said. "I haven't seen it."
One or two of the others shook their heads blankly. Finally somebody
else said: "Just a regular Globe show, I guess. All right; but hardly
worth bothering about."
Once more they urged him to sit down and have a drink, but he said he
was looking for somebody and walked away down the room and out the
farther door.
He knew now that he was afraid. Yet the thing he was afraid of refused
to come out into the open, where he could see it and know what it was.
He still believed that he didn't know what it was, when he walked past
the framed photographs in the lobby of the theater without looking at
them and stopped at the box-office to exchange his seat, well down in
front, for one near the back of the theater.
But when the sextette made their first entrance upon the stage, he knew
that he had known for a good many hours.
He never stirred from his seat during either of the intermissions. But
along in the third act, he got up and went out.
I doubt if ever a troglodytic ancestor of his had been as angry as
Rodney was at that moment. Because, long before the pressure of the
troglodyte's anger had mounted to the pressure of Rodney's, it would
have relieved itself in action. He'd have descended on the scene,
beating down any of the onlookers who might be fools enough to try to
oppose his purpose, seized his woman and carried her off to his cave.
Which is precisely and literally what Rodney, with every aching filament
of nerve tissue in his body, most passionately wanted to do.
The knout that flogged his soul had a score of lashes, each with the
sting of its own peculiar venom. Everybody who knew him, his closer
friends, and his casual acquaintances as well, must have known, for
weeks, of this disgrace. His friends had been sorry for him, with just a
grain of contempt; his acquaintances had grinned over it with just a
pleasurable salt of pity. "Do you know Aldrich? Well, his wife's in the
chorus at the Globe Theater. And he doesn't know it, poor devil." That
group at the round table at the club to-night. He could fancy their
faces after he'd turned away.
Oh, but what did they matter after all? What did any of them matter?
What did anything matter in the world, except that the woman he'd so
whole-heartedly and utterly loved and lived for--the woman who'd left
him with those protestations of the need of his friendship and respect,
was there on that stage disporting herself for hire--and cheap hire at
that, before this fatuous mass of humanity packed in all about him. They
were staring at her, as the money they'd paid for admission entitled
them to stare, licking their lips over her.
He hadn't had a moment's uncertainty that it was indeed she. Couldn't
shelter himself, even for an instant, behind Jimmy Wallace's theory of
an "amazing resemblance."
The others of their world had always known Rose as a person with a good
deal of natural and quite unconscious dignity. She had never romped nor
larked before any of them, and she conveyed the impression, not of
refraining as a concession to good manners, but simply of being the sort
of person who didn't, naturally, express herself in those ways. But in
the interior privacies of their life together, she'd often shown
herself, for him, a different Rose. She'd played with him with the
abandon of a young kitten--romped and wrestled with him. And there'd
been a deliciousness about this phase of her, which resided, for him, in
the fact that it was kept for him alone.
But now, here on the stage of a cheap theater, she was parading that
exquisite thing before the world! Along in the second act, where
Sylvia's six friends come to spend the night with her and sleep out on
the roof, there was a mad lark which brought up maddening memories. He
felt that he must get his hands on her--shake her--beat her!
Yet, all the while, if any of his neighbors thought of him at
all--became aware of him and wondered at him, it was only because he sat
so still. And when the thing had become, at last, utterly unbearable,
and he got up to go out, he managed to look at his watch first, quite in
the manner of a "commuter" with anxieties about the ten-fifty-five
train.
The northwest wind, which had been blowing icily since sundown, had
increased in violence to a gale. But he strode out of the lobby and
into the street, unaware of it. There must be a stage door somewhere, he
knew, and he meant to find it. It didn't occur to him to inquire. He'd
quite lost his sense of social being; of membership in a civilized
society. He was another Ishmael.
It took him a long time to find that door, for, as it happened, he
started around the block in the wrong direction and fruitlessly explored
two alleys before he came on the right one. But he found it at last and
pulled the door open. An intermittent roar of hand-clapping, increasing
and diminishing with the rapid rise and fall of the curtain, told him
that the performance was just over.
A doorman stopped him and asked him what he wanted.
"I want to see Mrs. Aldrich," he said, "Mrs. Rodney Aldrich."
"No such person here," said the man, and Rodney, in his rage, simply
assumed that he was lying. It didn't occur to him that Rose would have
taken another name.
He stood there a moment debating whether to attempt to force an entrance
against the doorman's unmistakable intention to stop him, and decided to
wait instead.
The decision wasn't due to common sense, but to a wish not to dissipate
his rage on people that didn't matter. He wanted it intact for Rose.
He went back into the alley, braced himself in the angle of a brick pier
and waited. He neither stamped his feet nor flailed his arms about to
drive off the cold. He just stood still with the patience of his
immemorial ancestor, waiting. Unconscious of the lapse of time,
unconscious of the figures that presently began straggling out of the
narrow door, that were not she.
Presently she came. A buffet of wind struck her as she closed the door
behind her, and whipped her unbuttoned ulster about, but she did not
cower under it, nor turn away--stood there finely erect, confronting it.
There was something alert about her pose--he couldn't clearly see her
face--that suggested she was expecting somebody. And then, not loud, but
very distinctly:
"Roddy," she said.
He tried to speak her name, but his dry throat denied it utterance. He
began suddenly to tremble. He came forward out of the shadow and she saw
him and came to meet him, and spoke his name again.
"I saw you when you went out," she said. "I was afraid you mightn't
wait. I hurried as fast as I could. I've--w-waited so long. Longer than
you."
They were so near together now, that she became aware how he was
trembling--shuddering fairly.
"You're c-cold," she said.
He managed at last to speak, and as he did so, reached out and took her
by the shoulders. "Come home," he said. "You must come home."
At that she stepped back and shook her head. But he had discovered while
his hands held her, that she was trembling, too.
The stage door opened again to emit a group of three of the ponies.
"My Gawd," one of them shrilled, "what a hell of a night!"
They stared curiously at Dane and the big man who stood there with her,
then scurried away down the alley.
"We can't talk here," he said. "We must go somewhere."
She nodded assent and they moved off side by side after the three little
girls, but slower. In an accumulation of shadows, half-way down the
alley, he reached out for her arm. It might have begun as an automatic
act--just an unconscious instinct to prevent her stumbling, there in the
dark. But the moment he touched her, the quality of it changed. He
gripped her arm tight and they both stood still. The next moment, and
without a word, they moved on again. At the corner of the alley, they
turned north. This was on Clark Street. Finally: