The Real Adventure
systematic way, to paint them; find out the proper way to begin, and
take her time about it. Her two weeks at the academy had proved that it
wasn't a knack that she could pick up casually. But there were books on
costumes, she knew; histories of clothes, that went as far back as any
sort of histories, with marvelous colored plates which gave you all the
details. Bertie Willis had told her all about that when they were
getting up their group for the Charity Ball. There were shelves of them,
she knew, over at the Newberry Library. A knowledge of their contents
would be sure to be valuable to her when Galbraith should set her to
designing more costumes for him--if ever he did.
This misgiving, that she might never hear from him, that his plans had
changed since their talk, so that he wasn't going to need any assistant,
or that he had found some one in New York better qualified for the work,
was, really, a little artificial. She encouraged it as a defense against
another which was, in its insidious way, much more terrifying.
Would she ever be capable, again, of producing another idea in case it
should be wanted? That one little flash of inspiration she'd had, that
had resulted in the twelve costumes for the sextette--where had it come
from? How had she happened on it? Wasn't it, perhaps, just a fluke that
never could be repeated? During those wonderful days she had had antennae
out everywhere, bringing her impressions, suggestions from the
unlikeliest objects. Now they were all drawn in and the part of her mind
that had responded to them felt numb.
She ignored this sensation, or rather this absence of sensation, as well
as she could; just as one might ignore the creeping approach of
paralysis. She had an unacknowledged reason for going to the library and
beginning that historic study of costumes. Certainly the sight of those
quaint old plates ought to set her imagination racing again.
But it didn't work that way. She found herself poring over them,
yawning herself blind over the French legends that accompanied them.
(They were nearly all in French, these books, and though Rose had done
two years' work in this language at the university and passed all her
examinations, she found these technical descriptions of costumes
frightfully hard to understand.) She stuck at it, though, for a long
while, until one morning a comparison occurred to her that made her shut
the folio with a slam. It had been in just this way, with just this
dogged, blind, hopeless persistence, that, ages ago, in that former
incarnation, she'd tried to study law!
This was too much for her. She walked out of the library with the best
appearance of unconcern that she could muster,--it had been a near thing
that she didn't break down and cry--and she did not go back. Probably it
was just as well that Galbraith hadn't sent for her. She'd only have
made a ghastly failure of it, if he had.
The background, of course, to all these endeavors and discouragements,
or, to describe it more justly, the indivisible, all-permeating ether
they floated about in, was, just as it had been in the time of her
success--Rodney. The occupations, routine and otherwise, that she gave
her mind to, might seem, in a way, to crowd him out of it, although not
one of them was undertaken without some reference to him; the success of
this, the failure of that, brought him nearer, put him farther away,
like the children's game of _Warm and Cold_.
When she ran out of occupations that could absorb the conscious part of
her mind, she did not even try to resist direct thoughts about him.
She'd spent uncounted hours since that opening night, wondering if he
knew where she was, inventing reasons why, knowing, he didn't come to
her; explanations of the possibility of his still remaining in
ignorance. She'd gone over and over again, the probable things that he
would say, the things that she would say in reply, when he did come.
She was prepared for his anger. He was, she felt, entitled to be angry.
But she felt sure she could get him to listen while she told him just
why and how she had done it, and what she had done, and she had a sort
of tremulous confidence that when the story was told, entire, his anger
would be found to have abated, if not altogether to have disappeared.
And afterward, when the shock had worn off, and he had had time to
adjust himself to things, he'd begin to feel a little proud of her. They
could commence--being friends. She'd constructed and let her mind dwell
on almost every conceivable combination of circumstances, except the one
thing that happened.
Only, as the active actual half of her life grew more discouraging,
harder to steer toward any object that seemed worth attaining, her
imaginary life with Rodney lost its grip on fact and reason; became
roseate, romantic, a thinner and more iridescent bubble, readier to
burst and disappear altogether at an ungentle touch.
So you will understand, I think, that the Rose, who incredulously heard
him ask in that dull sullen tone, if she had anything besides what would
go into her trunk; the Rose who got up and turned on the light for a
look at him in the hope that the evidence of her eyes would belie that
of her ears; the Rose he left shuddering at the window in that quilted
dressing-gown, was not the Rose who had left him three months before and
rented that three-dollar room and wrung a job out of Galbraith!
Dimly she was aware of this herself. At her best she wouldn't have lost
her head, wouldn't have flown to pieces like that. If she'd kept any
sort of grip on the situation, she might at least have averted a total
shipwreck. She understood even on that gray morning, that the terrible
things he'd said to her had been a mere outcry; the expression of a mood
she had encountered before, though this was an extreme example of it.
But it was a long time before she went any further than that. The memory
of the whole episode from the moment when he came up to her there in the
alley and took her by the shoulders, until he closed her door upon
himself four hours or so later, was so exquisitely painful that any
reasoned analysis of it, any construction of potential alternatives to
the thing that had happened, was simply impossible. The misgiving that
with a little more courage and patience on her part, it might have
terminated differently, only added to her misery.
She felt like a coward when she went to Goldsmith and demanded to be
sent out on the road, and she experienced for a while, the utter
demoralization of cowardice. The logic of the situation told her to stay
where she was. If it were true, as she had fiercely told him that night,
that their life together was ended, the whole fabric that they had woven
for themselves rent clean across, then the only thing for her to do was
to begin living now, as she had made an effort to do before, quite
without reference to him, ordering her own existence as if he had ceased
to exist; stick to whatever offered herself, Doris Dane, the best chance
for success and advancement. She was, of course, seriously injuring
Doris Dane's chances by going out on the road.
And, even with reference to Rodney, it was hard to see how her flight
could help the situation. If what she'd done had really disgraced him in
his own eyes and in those of his world, the disgrace was already
complete. Acquiescing in that point of view, as by her flight she did,
couldn't lighten it.
But all the power these considerations had, was to make her flight seem
more ignominious. They were utterly incapable of preventing it.
A disinterested friend, had she boasted such a possession just then,
might have pointed out for her comfort, that her rout was not complete.
It was a retreat, but not a surrender. She hadn't become Rose Stanton
again and gone back to Portia and her mother. Doris Dane, though badly
battered, was still intact!
The first ten days of her life on the road had, on the whole, a
distinctly restorative effect. I have never heard of a physician's
recommending a course of one-night stands as a rest cure to nervously
exhausted patients, but I am inclined to think the idea has its merits,
for all that. Certainly the regime was, for a while, beneficial to Rose.
The merit of it was that it offered some sort of occupation for
practically all her time.
A typical day consisted in getting up in the morning at an hour
determined for you either by the call posted on the bulletin board in
the theater the night before, telling you what time you were to be at
the railway station, or by the last moment at which you could get into
the dining-room in the hotel. You ate all you could manage at breakfast,
because lunch was likely to consist of a sandwich and an orange bought
from the train butcher; with perhaps the lucky addition of a cup of
coffee at some junction point where you changed trains. You lugged your
suit-case down to the station, and had your arrival there noted by the
manager, who, of course, bought all the tickets for the company. You
needn't even bother to know where you were going, except out of idle
curiosity. The train came along and you got a seat by yourself on the
shady side, if you could; though the men being more agile, generally got
there first.
The convention of giving precedence to the ladies, Rose promptly
discovered, and with a sort of satisfaction, did not apply. Indeed, all
the automatic small courtesies and services which, in any life she'd
known, men had been expected to show to women, were here completely
barred. A girl could let a man come up to her on a platform where they
were all gathered waiting for the train, and casually slide an arm
around her, without any one's paying the slightest attention to the act.
But if, when the train came along, she permitted him to pick up her
suit-case, carry it into the train and find a seat for her, there would
be nods and glances.
Well, you got into the train and dozed and read a magazine (or both) and
by and by, when everybody else did, you got up and got out. Perhaps you
waited on a triangular railway platform for another train, or perhaps
you trailed along in a procession, to a hotel. In the latter case, you
got a meal and found out where the opera-house was.
There were various minor occupations that you slipped into the
interstices of a day like this whenever they happened to come. You
combed out and brushed your hair (a hundred strokes) which you were too
tired to do at night after the performance and seldom waked up in time
for in the morning. And, if you were wise, as Rose was, thanks to a tip
from Anabel, and had emancipated yourself from the horror of overnight
laundries by providing yourself with crepe underclothes and dark little
silk blouses, you got all the hot water you could beg of the
chambermaid, and did the family wash in the bowl in your room, on an
afternoon when you had a short jump and there was no matinee.
It was a life, of course, that abounded in what pass for hardships.
There is no desolation to surpass that of the second-best hotel (rates
two dollars a day), in a small middle western city, except the same kind
of hotel in the same sort of city in the South. Bad air, bad beds and
bad food are their staples and what passes for service seems especially
calculated to encourage the victim to dispense with it as far as
possible. The stages and dressing-rooms in the theaters were almost
always dirty and were frequently overrun with rats. It was always cold
and drafty back there, except when it happened to be suffocating. Also,
the day's work by no means invariably concluded with even a half a bed
in a two-dollar-a-day hotel. If there happened to be a train coming
along at two o'clock in the morning, and also happened to be a chance to