The Real Adventure
own, and that if she failed with it I'd never forgive her. She made me a
promise that she wouldn't, no matter how hard she had to fight for it."
"She spoke to me once of a promise," Rodney said dully, "but of course I
didn't know what she meant."
Portia got to her feet. "I can't leave mother for very long," she said,
"and I've some little errands at the shops before I can go back. So ..."
"I see," he said. "I mustn't detain you any longer. I don't know,
anyhow, that there's anything more to say."
"I'm sorry I can't--help you. You're entitled to--hate me, I think.
Because it all goes back to that. I've been glad of a chance to tell
you. And that makes me all the sorrier that I can't in any way make it
up to you. But you see--don't you--how it is?"
"Yes," he said. "I see. I suppose, if it came to hating, that you're
entitled to hate me. But there'll be no great satisfaction in that, I
guess, for either of us." He held out his hand to her and with a painful
sort of shy stiffness, she grasped it. "If Rose changes her
instructions, or if you change your mind as to your duty under them,
you'll let me know?"
She nodded. "Good-by," she said.
Rodney walked back to the railway station where he had checked his bag.
In two hours he was on a train bound back to Chicago.
Various things occurred to him during the journey eastward that he might
have said to Portia. He hadn't asked, for instance, whether Rose's
embargo on news of herself to him had been made effective also in the
other direction. Had she cut herself off from Portia's bulletins about
himself and the babies? Could Portia have transmitted a message from him
to Rose--the one Frederica had declined to take? But he felt in a way
rather glad that he hadn't asked any more questions, nor offered any
messages. He wasn't looking now for an intermediary between Rose and
himself. He wanted Rose, and he meant to find her. His whole mind, by
now, had crystallized into that hard-faceted, sharp-edged determination.
The sore masculine vanity that had kept him from appealing to the man
most likely to be able to help him was almost incredible now.
From the railway station in Chicago, the moment he got in, he telephoned
Jimmy Wallace at his newspaper office. It was then about half past four
in the afternoon. Jimmy couldn't leave for another hour, it seemed. It
was his afternoon at home to press agents, and he always gave them till
five-thirty to drop in. But he didn't think there were likely to be any
more to-day, and if Rodney would come over ...
Rodney got into a taxi and came, and found the critic at his shabby old
desk under a green-shaded electric light, in the midst of a vast
solitude, the editorial offices of an evening newspaper at that hour
being about the loneliest place in the world. There was a rusty look
about this particular local room, too, that made you wonder that any
real news ever could emanate from it. Yet only this afternoon they had
beaten the city in the announcement of the failure of the
Mortimore-Milligan string of banks.
"I've come," said Rodney, finding a sort of fierce satisfaction in
grasping the nettle as tightly as possible, "to see if you can tell me
anything about my wife."
Jimmy may have felt a bit flushed and flustered, but the fact didn't
show, and an imaginative insight he was in the habit of denying the
possession of led him to draw most of the sting out of the situation
with the first words he said.
"I'll tell you all I know, of course, but it isn't much. Because I
haven't had a word with her since the last time I dined at your house,
way back last September, I think it was. I saw her on the stage at the
Globe, the opening night of _The Girl Up-stairs_, and I saw that she
recognized me. That's how I knew it was really she. And--well, I want
you to know this! I haven't told anybody that she was there."
"You needn't tell me that," said Rodney. "I'm sure of it. But I'm glad
you did tell me the other thing. But here's the situation: she's left
that company; left it, I believe, as a result of a talk I had with her
after I found her there, and I don't know where she is. The one thing I
have got to do just now is to find her. I've asked at the theater, and
they won't tell me. I imagine they're acting on her instructions. And as
I don't even know the name she goes by I've found it pretty hard to get
anywhere. I want you to help me."
"Her name there at the Globe was Doris Dane," said Jimmy, "and I imagine
that unless she's left the show business altogether she'll have kept it;
because it would be, in a small way, an asset. And, as she'll be easier
to find if she has stayed in the business than if she hasn't, why,
that's the presumption to begin on."
He lighted his pipe and lapsed into a thoughtful silence. "There are two
things she may have done," he went on after a while. "She may have gone
to New York, and in that case she's likely to have applied to the man
who put on _The Girl_ out here; that's John Galbraith. He took quite an
interest in her, I understand; believed she had a future. But the other
thing she may have done strikes me as a little more likely. How long ago
was it you talked to her?"
"It's the better part of two weeks," said Rodney.
"Well," said Jimmy, "they sent out a Number Two company of _The Girl
Up-Stairs_ a week ago last Sunday night. If she had any reason for
wanting to leave Chicago she might, I should think, have gone to them
and asked them to let her go out on the road with that. They wouldn't
have done it, of course, unless she'd convinced them that she was going
to quit the Chicago company anyway. But if she had convinced them of
that they'd have done it right enough. On the whole, that seems to me
the likeliest place to look."
"Yes," said Rodney, "I think it is. Well, have you any way of finding
out where the Number Two company is playing?"
Jimmy was rummaging in the litter of magazines on the top of his desk.
He pulled one out and searched among the back pages of it for a moment.
"Here we are!" he said. "_The Girl Up-stairs,_" and he began reading off
the route. "They're playing to-night," he said, "at Cedar Rapids;
to-morrow night in Dubuque."
"All right," said Rodney. "The next thing to find out is whether she's
with the company. Who is there we can telephone to out there?"
"Why," said Jimmy, "I suppose we might raise the manager of the
opera-house. They're at Cedar Rapids to-night, and we might get a good
enough wire so that a proper name would be understood." He glanced at
his watch. "But there's a quicker and surer and cheaper way, and that's
to ask Alec McEwen. He's the press agent of the company here, and he'd
be sure to know."
"He'd know," Rodney demurred, "but would he tell?"
"He'd tell me," said Jimmy.
"Can you find him?" Rodney wanted to know. "Where would he be at this
time of day--at his office or his house?"
He hadn't any office nor any house, Jimmy said. "But since he's
undoubtedly cleaned up the newspaper offices by now, on his weekly
round," he concluded, "we can find him easily enough. I'll guarantee to
locate him--within three bars. There'll be no one in to see me after
this," he went on, slamming down the roll-top to his desk, getting up
and reaching for his overcoat, "so we may as well go straight at it."
They walked down to the street entrance in silence. There Jimmy, with a
nonchalance that rang a little flat on his own ear, pulled up and said:
"Look here! There's no need your trailing around on this job. Tell me
where you will be in an hour and I'll call you up."
"Oh, I've nothing else to do," said Rodney, "and I'll be glad to go
along."
They were at cross-purposes here. Jimmy didn't want him along. He had a
hunch that Rodney wouldn't find little Alec very satisfactory, but he
didn't know just how to say so. Rodney, on his part, strongly
disrelished the notion of trailing the press agent from bar to bar. But
he attributed the same distaste to Jimmy and felt it wouldn't be fair
not to share it with him. There was, besides, a certain satisfaction in
making his pride do penance.
Jimmy hadn't overestimated his knowledge of little Alec McEwen's orbit.
They walked together to the corner of Clark and Randolph Streets and,
working radially from there, in the third bar they found him.
Even before this, however, Rodney regretted that he hadn't let Jimmy do
the job alone. He was not an habitue of the sumptuous bars of the Loop,
and the voices of the men he found in them, the sort of men they were,
and the sort of things they talked about found raw nerves all over him.
On another errand, he realized, he wouldn't have minded. But it seemed
as if Rose herself were somehow soiled by the necessity of visiting
places like this in search of information about her.
The feeling he had come back with from that down-state town to which he
had fled, that she was in a miry pit from which, at any cost, she must
be saved, had been a good deal weakened during the ten days that had
intervened since then. Her having sent back that hundred dollars; what
Portia had said about her courage; Harriet's notion that a stage career,
if properly managed, was something one could at least pretend not to be
ashamed of; and, most lately, what Jimmy Wallace had said about the New
York director who thought she had a future--all these things had
contributed to the result.
But this pursuit, from one drinking bar to another, of the only man who
could tell him where she was, was bringing the old feeling back in
waves.
"Here we are," said Jimmy, as they entered the third place. It was a
cramped cluttered room, thick with highly varnished, carved woodwork and
upholstered leather. Its principal ornament was a nude Bouguereau in a
red-draped alcove, heavily overlighted and fearfully framed; the sort of
picture any one would have yawned at in a gallery, it acquired here,
from the hard-working indecency of its intent, a weak salaciousness.
Rodney found himself being led up to a group in the far corner of the
bar, and guessed rightly that the young man with the high voice and the
seemingly permanent smile, who greeted Jimmy with a determined
facetiousness, "Hello, old Top! Drunk again?" was the man they sought.
"Not yet," said Jimmy, "but I'm willing to help you along. What'll it
be?" Then to Rodney: "This is Mr. Alexander McEwen, the leading liar
among our local press agents." He added quickly: "You didn't come around
this afternoon, so I suppose there's nothing stirring. How's business
over at the Globe?"
"Immense," said Alec. "Sold out three times last week."
"Do you hear anything," Jimmy asked, "about the road company, what
they're doing?"
"Rotten," said Alec. "But that don't worry Goldsmith and Block. They
sold out their road rights to Block's brother-in-law."
"By the way," said Jimmy, "who's the girl in the sextette that's quit?"
"Doris Dane?" said little Alec. "Say no more. So you were on that lay,
too, you old fox!" his smile widened as he looked round at Rodney, and
his voice turned to a crow. "Trust this solemn old bird not to miss a
bet. She was some lady, all right! Why," he went on to Jimmy, "she has
some sort of a row with her lover; big brute that used to lie in wait
for her in the alley. You ought to hear the ponies go on about it. So
she gets scared and goes to Goldsmith and gets herself sent out with the
Number Two. And Goldsmith--believe me--crazy! He had his eye on it,
too."
Jimmy finished his drink with a jerk. "Come along," he said to Rodney.
"I don't like this place. Let's get out."
Rodney has never managed to forget little Alec McEwen. For weeks after
that bar-room encounter he was haunted by the vision of the small bright
prying eyes, the fatuously cynical smile, and by the sound of the high