The Real Adventure
days were full of humiliations. When he told Harriet and Frederica that
he would see Rose himself, he hadn't any program for carrying out this
intention. He didn't want to wait for her again at the stage door.
There mustn't be anything about their next talk together to remind her
of their last one, and it would be better if she could be assured in
advance that she had nothing to fear from him. So the first thing to do
was to write her a letter that would show her how he felt and how little
he meant to ask. But before he could write the letter, he must learn her
name.
He thought of Jimmy Wallace as a person who'd be able to help him out,
here, but in the circumstances Jimmy was the last person he wanted to go
to. There was no telling how much Jimmy might know about the situation
already. The intolerable thought occurred to him that Rose might even
have talked with Jimmy about going on the stage before she left his
house. No, the person to see was the manager of the theater. He'd
describe Rose to him and ask him who she was.
His attempt to carry out this part of his plan was disastrously
unsuccessful. Theatrical managers no doubt cherish an ideal of courteous
behavior. But, since ninety-nine out of a hundred of the strangers who
ask for them at the box-office window, are actuated by a desire to get
into their theaters without paying for their seats, they develop,
protectively, a manner of undisguised suspicion toward all people who
don't know them, and toward about three-quarters of those who pretend
they do. It wasn't a manner Rodney was accustomed to, and it irritated
him. Then, until he had got his request half stated, it didn't occur to
him in what light the manager would be amply justified in regarding it.
That notion, which he interpreted from a look in the manager's face,
confused and angered him, and he stumbled and stammered, which angered
him still more.
"We don't do that sort of thing in this theater," the manager said
loudly (the conversation had taken place in the lobby of the theater,
too) and turned away.
The grotesque improbability of the true explanation that the woman whose
name he was inquiring about was his wife, silenced him and turned him
away. It was fortunate for Rodney it did so. The thing would have made a
wonderful story for the press agent, if he hadn't stopped just where he
did.
He spent the rest of that evening, and a good part of the next day,
trying to think of some alternative to waiting again at the stage door.
But, except for the still inadmissible one of going to Jimmy Wallace, he
couldn't think of one. So, at a quarter past seven that night, he
stationed himself once more in the miserable alley, to wait for Rose.
Seeing her before the show would, he thought, be an improvement on
waiting till after it. The mere fact that they wouldn't have very long
to talk, ought to reassure her that he didn't mean to take any
advantages. He could show her how contrite he was, how little he meant
to ask, and then leave it to her to select a place, at her own leisure
and convenience, to talk over the terms of their treaty.
He waited from a quarter after seven to half past eight, but Rose didn't
come. The thought that perhaps he hadn't taken his station early enough
sent him back to another vigil at half past ten. At a quarter to twelve,
his patience exhausted, he opened the stage door and told the doorman he
was waiting for one of the girls in the sextette. The doorman informed
him they had all gone home.
There was, unfortunately, no matinee the next day, and it was only by
the exercise of all the will power he had, that he stayed in his office
and did his work and waited for the hour of the evening performance.
Then he went to the theater and bought a ticket. When the sextette made
its first appearance on the stage, he saw that another girl than Rose
was taking her part. He went out into the lobby, and once more sought
the manager. But this time with a different air.
"Haven't you an office somewhere where we can talk?" he demanded. "This
is important."
Evidently the manager saw it was, because he conducted him to a small
room with a desk in it, half-way up the balcony stairs, and nodded him
to a chair.
"There was a young woman in your company," Rodney said, "in the
sextette. She isn't playing to-night. I want to know what her stage name
is, and where she can be found. I assure you that it's of the first
importance to her that I should find her."
The manager's manner was different, too. He looked perplexed and rather
unhappy. But he didn't tell Rodney what he wanted to know.
"She's left the company," he said, "permanently. That's all I can tell
you."
"Is she ill?" Rodney demanded.
The manager said not that he knew of, but this was all that was to be
got out of him.
The thing that finally silenced Rodney and sent him away, was the
reflection that the man might be withholding information about her, on
Rose's own request.
He went away, sore, angry, discouraged. Jimmy Wallace seemed about the
only hope there was. But he'd be damned if he'd go to Jimmy. Not yet,
anyway. And then he thought of Portia!
She'd tell him. She'd have to tell him. Why hadn't he thought of her
before? He'd write to her the message to Rose he'd tried to get
Frederica to carry. No, he wouldn't do that! He'd go to her. And there
was a chance ... Why, there was the best kind of chance! Why hadn't he
thought of it before? Why had he been such an idiot as to waste all
these days!
It seemed almost certain he'd find Rose there with her. She'd felt--she
couldn't have helped feeling after the things he'd said to her that
ghastly night in the little North Clark Street room--that she couldn't
go on. And stripped of her job like that, with nothing else to turn to,
where should she go but home to her mother and sister? To the only
friends and comforters she had in the world.
He'd send no word in advance of his coming. He'd just come up to the
door of the little bungalow and ring the bell. And there was a chance
that the person who'd come to answer it would be Rose herself.
The idea came to him all in a flash as he walked away from the theater,
and his impulse from it was to jump into a taxicab and catch a
ten-thirty train to the coast, that he had just time for. He denied the
impulse as part of the discipline he'd been imposing on himself since
his talk with Harriet, and went home instead. From now on he was going
to act like a reasonable man, not like a distracted one.
He had his bag packed and his tickets bought the next morning, went to
the office and put things in train to accommodate a week's absence,
wrote a note to Frederica telling her of his discovery that Rose had
left the company of _The Girl Up-stairs_, and of his hope of finding her
in California with her mother and Portia; and when he settled himself in
his compartment for the three-day ride he even had two or three books in
his bag to pass the time with, as if it had been an ordinary journey. He
didn't make much of them, it's true, but his honest attempt to, gave him
the glimmering dawn of a discovery.
The cardinal principle of his life, if such a thing could be stated in a
phrase, was self-expression through self-discipline. Well, his discovery
was (it didn't come to much more than a surmise, it is true, but it was
a beginning) that in his relations to Rose he'd never disciplined
himself at all. The network of his instincts, passions, desires, that
had involved her, had been allowed to grow unchecked, unscrutinized. He
didn't begin to scrutinize them now. He was in no mind for the task. How
could he undertake it until the fearful hope that he was actually on the
way to her now should have been answered one way or the other!
It proved a vain hope. The person who answered his ring at the door of
the little bungalow, on that wonderful sun-bathed, rose-scented morning
(false auguries that mocked his disappointment and made it almost
intolerable) was Portia.
She flushed at sight of him, then almost as quickly went pale. She
stepped outside the door and closed it behind her before she spoke.
"I'm afraid I mustn't let mother know you're here," she said. "She's not
been well these last days and she mustn't be excited. I don't want to
let her suspect that things have changed or in any way gone wrong with
Rose. I told her I was going out for a walk. Will you come with me?"
He nodded and did not even speak until they'd got safely away from the
house. Then:
"I came out here," he said, "almost sure that I should find her. Isn't
she here?"
"No," said Portia. Then she added with a sort of gasp, as if she'd tried
to check her words in their very utterance, "Don't you know her better
than that?"
"Do you know where she is?"
This question she didn't answer at all. They walked on a dozen paces in
silence.
"Portia," he demanded, "is she ill? You'll have to tell me that."
Even this question she didn't answer immediately. "No," she said at
last. "She's not ill. I'll take the responsibility of telling you that."
"You mean that's all you will tell me?" he persisted. "Why? On her
instructions?"
"I think we'll have to sit down somewhere," said Portia. "Beside the
road over there where it's shady."
"I got a letter from Rose yesterday," she said, after they'd been seated
for a while. "She asked me in it not to go on writing you the
little--bulletins that I'd been sending every week; not to tell you
anything at all. So you see I've gone rather beyond her instructions in
saying even as much as I have."
"And you," he asked quickly; "you mean to comply with a request like
that?"
"I must," said Portia. "I can't do anything else."
He made no comment in words, but she interpreted his uncontrollable
gesture of angry protest, and answered it.
"It's not a question of conscientious scruples; keeping my word, not
betraying a confidence; anything like that. A year ago if she'd made
such a request I'd have paid no attention to it. I'd have taken the
responsibility of acting against her wishes, for her own good, if I
happened to see it that way, without any hesitation at all. But Rose has
shown herself so much bigger and stronger a person than I, and she's
done a thing that would have been so splendidly beyond my courage to do
that there's no question of my interfering. She's entitled to make her
own decisions. So," she went on with a little difficulty, "I shan't
betray her confidence nor disregard her instructions. But there's one
thing I can do, one thing I can tell you, because it's my confidence,
not hers."
The very obvious fact that her confidences were not of great moment to
him, the way he sat there beside her in a glum abstraction through the
rather long silence that followed her preface, made it easier for her to
go on.
"You see," she said at last, "I'd always regarded Rose as a spoiled
child. I'd loved her a lot, of course; but I'd despised her a little. At
least I'd tried to, because I was jealous of her; of the big simple easy
way she had--of making people love her. All the hard things came to me,
I felt, and all the easy ones to her. And on the day I came to tell her
about mother, and how we had to move out here--well, I was feeling
sorrier for myself than usual. If you'll remember when that was and what
her condition was (I didn't know about it then and neither did she)
you'll understand my having found her terribly blue and unhappy. She
talked discontentedly about her--failure with you and how she seemed to
be nothing to you except ... Well, she said she envied me. And that, as
I was feeling just then, was too much for me. I lashed out at her; told
her a lot of things she'd never known--about how we'd lived, and so on;
things I'd done for her. I said she'd got my life to live as well as her