The Real Adventure
crowing voice. Little Alec became monstrous to him; impersonal, a symbol
of the way the world looked at Rose, and he dreamed sometimes,
half-waking dreams, of choking the life out of him. Not out of little
Alec personally. He, obviously, wasn't worth it; but out of all the
weakly venomous slander that he typified.
He managed a nod that seemed unconcerned enough, in response to Jimmy's
suggestion, and followed him out to the sidewalk. The sort of florid
rococo chivalry that would have "vindicated his wife's honor" by
knocking little Alec down was an inconceivable thing to him. But the
thing cut deep. He felt bemired. He wouldn't have minded that, of
course, except that the miry way he'd trodden since he'd first gone to
the stage door for Rose was the way she's taken ahead of him. He must
overtake her and bring her back!
"I'm a thousand times obliged," he said in an even enough tone to Jimmy.
"I'll find her at Dubuque, then, to-morrow."
"That's Wednesday," said Jimmy. "They may be playing a matinee, you
know. She'll be there, right enough."
Then, to make the separation they both wanted come a little easier, he
invented an errand over on State Street and nodded Rodney farewell. For
the next half-hour he cursed himself with vicious heartfelt fluency for
a fool. Mightn't he have known what little Alec McEwen would say?
CHAPTER XV
IN FLIGHT
Analyzing what little Alec McEwen actually said, disregarding the tone
of his voice and the look in his eye; disregarding, indeed, the meaning
he attached to his own words, and sticking simply to the words
themselves, it would be difficult to bring home against him the charge
of untruthfulness, or even of exaggeration.
Because it was in a simple panic that Rose, on the morning after
Rodney's visit, had gone to Goldsmith and demanded to be transferred to
the second company, which had started rehearsing as soon as a month of
capacity business had demonstrated that the piece was a success.
Goldsmith was disgusted. Little Alec had been right about that, too. The
unnaturalness of the request--for indeed it flew straight in the face of
all traditions that a girl who might stay in Chicago if she liked,
taking it easy and having a lot of fun, and rejoicing in the possession
of a job that was going to last for months, should deliberately swap
this highly desirable position for the hazards and discomforts of a
second-rate road company, playing one-night stands over the kerosene
circuit--was one too many for him. He demanded explanations without
getting any. And as Jimmy Wallace had guessed, it was not until she'd
convinced him that in no circumstances would she stay on in the Chicago
company that he assented to the transfer. He didn't abandon his attempts
to dissuade her until the very last moment. But neither his pictures of
the discomforts of the road, nor his carefully veiled promises of
further advancement if she stayed in Chicago, had the slightest effect
on her. All that she wanted was to get away, and as quickly as she
could!
The collapse of her courage was not quite the sudden thing it seemed.
Forces she was vaguely aware had been at work, but didn't realize the
seriousness of, had been undermining it steadily since the opening night
when she recognized Jimmy Wallace in the audience, and when later she
parted from Galbraith with his promise of a New York job as soon as he
could get his own affairs ready for her.
Chief of these forces was the simple reaction of fatigue. Strong as she
was, she had abused her strength somewhat during the last weeks of
rehearsal; had taken on and triumphantly accomplished more than any one
has a right to accomplish without calculating on replacing his depleted
capital of energy afterward. It was her first experience with this sort
of exhaustion, and she hadn't learned (indeed it is a lesson she never
did fully learn) to accept the phase with philosophic calm as the
inevitable alternate to the high-tension effective one.
She missed Galbraith horribly. She had, as she'd told him, personified
the show as a mere projection of himself; he was it and it was he.
Everything she said and did on the stage had continued, as it had begun
in her very first rehearsal by being, just the expression of his will
through her instrumentality. It was amazing to her that, with the core
of it drawn out, the fabric should still stand; that the piece should go
on repeating itself night after night, automatically, awakening the
delighted applause of that queer foolish monster, the audience, just
with its galvanic simulation of the life he had once imparted to it.
She was doing her own part, she felt at all events, in a manner utterly
lifeless and mechanical. It was a stifling existence!
The most discouraging thing about it was that the others in the company
seemed not to feel it in the same way. Anabel Astor for example: night
after night she seemed to be born anew into her part with the rise of
the first curtain; she fought and conquered and cajoled, and luxuriated
in the approbation of every new audience, just as she had in the case of
the first, and came off all aglow with her triumph, as if the thing had
never happened to her before. And with the others, in varying degrees,
even with the chorus people, the effect seemed to be the same.
But it was actually in the air, Rose believed, not merely in her own
fancy, that she was failing to justify the promise she had given at
rehearsal. Not alarmingly, to be sure. She was still plenty good enough
to hold down her job. But the notion, prevalent, it appeared, before the
opening, that she was one of those persons who can't be kept down in the
chorus, but project themselves irresistibly into the ranks of the
principals, was coming to be considered a mistake.
Galbraith, as was evident from his last talk with her, hadn't made that
mistake. She remembered his having said she never could be an actress.
That was all right of course. She didn't want to be. In a way, it was
just because she didn't want to be that she couldn't be. But having it
come home to her as it was doing now, in her own experience, made her
all the more impatient to get out of the profession that wasn't hers and
into the one that had beckoned her so alluringly.
It was just here that her disappointment was sharpest. The light that
for a few weeks had flared up so brightly, showing a clear path of
success that would lead her back to Rodney, had, suddenly, just when she
needed it most, gone out and left her wondering whether, after all, it
had been a true beacon or only fool's fire.
A resolution she came to within twenty-four hours after Galbraith left
was that she would not wait passively for his letter summoning her to
New York. She'd go straight to work (and fill in the disconcerting
emptiness of her days at the same time) preparing herself for the
profession of stage costume designing. She wasn't entirely clear in her
mind as to just what steps this preparation should consist in, but the
fact that Galbraith had once asked to see her sketches and had seemed
amazed to learn that she hadn't any, gave her the hint that she might do
well to learn to draw. She knew, of course, that she couldn't learn very
much in the fortnight or so she supposed would elapse before Galbraith's
letter came in, but she could learn a little. And anything to do that
went in the right direction was better than blankly doing nothing.
Her first adventure in this direction was downright ludicrous, as she
was aware without being able to summon the mood to appreciate it. The
girls she'd known, back in the Edgewater days, who had ambitions to
learn to draw went to the Art Institute. So Rose, summoning her courage
for a sortie across the avenue, want there too, and felt, as she climbed
the steps between the lions, a little the way Christian did in similar
circumstances. After waiting a while she was shown into the office of an
affable young man, with efficient looking eye-glasses and a keen sort of
voice, and told him with admirable brevity that she wanted to learn to
draw, as a preliminary to designing costumes.
He approved this ambition cordially enough and made it evident that the
resources of the institute were entirely adequate to her needs. But
then, just about simultaneously, she made the discovery that the course
he was talking about was one of from three to five years' duration, and
he, that the time immediately at her disposal amounted to something like
a fortnight. They were mutually too completely disconcerted to do
anything, for a moment, but stare at each other. When he found his
breath he told her that he was afraid they couldn't do anything for her.
"There are places, of course, here in town (there's one right down the
street) where they'll take you on for a month, or a week, or a day, if
you like; let you begin working in oil in the life class the vary first
morning, if you've a notion to. But we don't believe in that
get-rich-quick sort of business. We believe in laying the foundation
first."
His manner in describing the other sort of place had been so
annihilating, his purpose in citing this horrible example was so plain,
that he was justifiably taken aback when she asked him, very politely,
to be sure, "Would you mind telling me where that other place is; the
one down the street?"
He did mind exceedingly, and it is likely he wouldn't have done it if
she'd been less extraordinarily good to look at and if there hadn't
been, in her very expressive blue eyes, a gleam that suggested she was
capable of laughing at him for having trapped himself like that. She
wasn't laughing at him now, be it understood; had made her request with
a quite adorable seriousness. Only ...
He gave her the address of an art academy on Madison Street and thither
at once she made her way, faintly cheered by the note on which her
encounter with the young man had ended, but on the whole rather
depressed by the thought of the five years he'd talked about.
They were more tactful at the new place. _Ars Longa est_ was not a motto
they paraded. They were not shocked at all at the notion of a young
woman's learning as much as she could about drawing in two weeks. There
was a portrait sketch class every morning; twenty minute poses. You put
down as much as you could of how the model looked to you in that space
of time, and then began again on something else. All the equipment Rose
would need was a big apron, a stick of charcoal and a block of drawing
paper; all of which were obtainable on the premises. She could begin
this minute if she liked. It was almost as simple as getting on a
pay-as-you-enter street-car.
This jumped with Rose's mood exactly, and she promptly fell to, with a
momentary flare-up of the zest with which she had gone to work for
Galbraith. But it was only momentary. She hadn't a natural aptitude for
drawing, and her attempts to make the black lines she desperately dug
and smudged into the white paper represent, recognizably, the object she
was looking at failed so lamentably as to discourage her almost from the
start.
She kept at it for the two weeks she'd contracted for, but at the end of
that time she gave it up. She hadn't made any visible progress, and
besides, she might be hearing from Galbraith almost any day now.
And when, four or five days later, her intolerable restlessness over
waiting for a letter that didn't come, making up reasons why it hadn't
come, one minute, and deciding that it never would, the next, drove her
to do something once more, she set out on a new tack. If the ability to
make fancy little water-colors of impossible-looking girls in only less
impossible costumes were really an essential part of the business of
designing the latter, then she'd have to set about learning, in a