The Real Adventure
The hotel was hot, too. Rose and Dolly, as soon as they had registered,
went up to their room and washed off the stains of travel, as well as
they could in translucent water that was the color of weak coffee. Then
Rose, in a kimono, stretched out on the bed to make up some of the rest
their early departure from Cedar Rapids had deprived her of. She did
this methodically whenever opportunity offered, but without any great
conviction.
Dolly, though she looked a bit hollow-eyed and much more in need of rest
than Rose (for she hadn't any stamina at all. She was an
under-nourished, and probably anemic little thing, and was always
train-sick when their jumps began too early in the morning), went
straight ahead with her toilet, tried to correct her pallor with a
little too much rouge, and with the glaring falsehood that it was
clearing up, put on the pathetic little fifteen-dollar suit that she
religiously guarded for occasions.
She was very fidgety, a little bit furtive, and elaborately over-casual
about all this; a fact to which Rose was, also a little artificially,
oblivious.
Their partnership had not proved, from Dolly's point of view, at any
rate, an unqualified success. They'd not been on the road three days
before she'd begun to wonder whether she hadn't been hasty in the
selection of her chum. Doris Dane was a very magnificent person, of
course. She made the rest of the company, including the principals, look
(this was a phrase Dolly had unguardedly used the day Rose first
appeared at rehearsal) like a bunch of rummies. And of course it was an
immense compliment to be singled out by an awe-inspiring person like
that, for her particular chum. Only, once the compliment had been paid,
its value as an abiding possession became a little doubtful. Awe is not
a very comfortable sort of emotion to eat breakfast with.
Evidently the rest of the company felt that way about it, for Dane was
not popular. She gave no handle for an active grievance, to be sure. She
wasn't superior in the sense in which Dolly used the word. She didn't
look haughty nor say withering things to people, nor tell
passionately-believed stories designed to convince her hearers that her
rightful place in the world was immensely higher than the one she now
occupied. One didn't hear her exclaiming under some bit of managerial
tyranny, that never, in the course of her whole life, had she been
subjected to such an affront. But she had a blank, rather tired way of
keeping silence when other people told stories like that, or made
protests like that, which was subtly infuriating. The very fact that she
never tried to impress the company, was presumptive evidence that the
company didn't very greatly impress her. If their common feeling about
her had ever crystallized into a phrase, its effect would have been,
that all their affairs, personal and professional, past, present and to
come, even those she shared with them, were not of sufficient importance
to her ever to get quite the whole of her attention. It was a notion
that irritated the women and frightened off the men. Probably nothing
else could have kept a young woman of Rose's physical attractions from
being, on a tour like that, with that sort of company, the object of, at
least, experiments.
Men may consider these experiments worth trying in the face of a
determined hostility on the part of the subject of them. The most
rigorous primness of behavior does not daunt them, nor the assertion of
an icily virtuous intangibility. But the sort of good-humored
preoccupation that doesn't see them at all, that sees the pattern in the
wall-paper behind their backs, that tries, half-heartedly, to be
adequately courteous, is too much for them. And the more experienced
they are in conquests, and the higher, on the basis of their own
experience, they rate the irresistibility of their powers, the less of
his particular sort of treatment they can stand. The mere sight of her,
after the first day or two, was enough to give a professional "killer"
like Max Webber, the creeps.
But Rose's manner not only kept the men away from herself. It kept them
away from Dolly. Poor Dolly didn't know what the matter was, at first.
She had been told terrible stories by her mother and her elder brother,
about the perils that beset young girls who ran away from good
respectable homes. She had been told them with the misguided purpose of
keeping her from running away from her own home, which was no doubt
respectable, but was also deadly dull. She had run away and it was
perils she was looking for. She didn't mean to succumb to them. None of
the heroines of the only literature she knew--of the movies, that is to
say--succumbed to perils. They were beset by the most terrific perils.
It was over perils that they climbed to soul-entrancing heights of
romance. It was because they were the almost certain victims of
diabolical machinations, that wonderful heroes, with long eyelashes and
curly hair, came to their rescue and clasped them in their arms and
looked unutterable things into their eyes, just as the picture faded
out.
Dolly had joined the chorus of a musical comedy, because that profession
offered more alluring wares in the way of perils than any other that was
open to her. And then she discovered that her calculations had gone
awry. The impalpable shield her formidable friend carried with her,
turned the perils aside. The little group of half-grown boys one
sometimes found waiting at the stage door, never even spoke to Rose, and
Dolly, in her company, partook of this unwelcomed immunity. As for the
men in the company, Dolly found them letting her entirely alone.
She was bitterly unhappy at first about this, taking it as an
indication of the insufficiency of her charms. But once she got the
clue, she set about righting matters. She began taking tentative little
strolls about the hotel lobbies by herself, and on her train journeys,
when the motion and the odor of the men's pipes didn't make her too
sick, she'd kneel upon a seat and look over the back of it into one of
the perpetual poker-games they used to pass the time. It was astonishing
how quickly she got results.
She wandered over to the cigar-stand at one of their hotels, one
afternoon, a week before the arrival in Dubuque, to look at a rack of
picture postcards. One of the chorus-men came over to buy some
cigarettes. She felt him look at her, and she felt herself flush a
little. And then he came a step closer to look at the postcards for
himself, and sighed and said he wished he had somebody to send postcards
to. He supposed she sent _him_ one every day. Whereupon Dolly said she
wasn't going to send him one to-day, anyway. They strolled across the
lobby together and sat down in two of the wide-armed unsatisfactory
chairs they have at such places; chairs that kept them so far apart they
had to shout at each other. So, after a few minutes, it being a fine
day, he suggested they go out for a walk. She had on her outdoor wraps
and his overcoat lay across a chair.
She had already nodded acquiescence to his proposal, when she saw Rose
coming in through the door.
"Wait," she whispered to him. "Don't come out with me. I'll wait
outside." And with that she walked up to Rose and told her she was going
out to get some cold cream.
Five per cent., perhaps, of the motive that prompted this maneuver, was
what it pretended to be, a fear of Rose's disapprobation and a wish to
avoid it. The other ninety-five per cent. of it was just instinctive
love of intrigue.
The chorus-boy waited, blankly wooden enough to have attracted the
suspicion of any eye less preoccupied than Rose's, until she had got
around the curve of the stair. Then, joining Dolly on the pavement, he
demanded to be told what it was all about.
Dolly, making up her little mystery as she went along, and making
herself more interesting at every step, told him. They took a long walk,
and by the time they got back to the hotel, they were in love. But they
were separated by the malign influence of Dolly's friend. They developed
a code of signals for circumventing her watchful eye. They slipped
unsigned notes to each other.
So Dolly, on this blustering morning in Dubuque, fidgeting about the
room, thinking up a perfectly unnecessary excuse for going out, to give
to Rose, answered a knock at the door very promptly and took the folded
bit of paper the bell-boy handed her, without listening to what he said,
if indeed he said anything at all to her.
She carried it over to the window, turned her back to Rose, unfolded the
bit of paper and read it; read it again, frowned in a puzzled way, and
said:
"I didn't know there was anybody in the company named Rodney."
"What's his last name?" asked Rose. There was nothing in her tone that
challenged Dolly's attention, though the quality of it would have caught
a finer ear. And even if Dolly had looked up, she'd have seen nothing.
Rose lay there just as she had been lying a moment ago. It would have
needed a better observer than Dolly to see that she had stopped
breathing.
"There ain't any last name," said Dolly. "He seems to think I'll know
him by the first one." It pleased Dolly to make a parade of frankness
about this note. She couldn't be sure Rose had been as oblivious as she
seemed, to those the chorus-man had been sending her. This, to her
rudimentary mind, seemed a good opportunity to allay Dane's suspicions.
"See if you can make anything out of it," she said, and handed it over
to Rose.
Rose got up off the bed and carried the note to the window. She stood
there with it a long time.
"What's the matter?" said Dolly. "Can't you read his writing?"
"Yes," said Rose. "I know who he is. It's meant for me."
The tone, though barely audible, was automatic. It brushed Dolly away
as if she had been a buzzing fly, and she felt distinctly aggrieved by
it. That Dane, with all her loftily assumed indifference to men, even to
a star like Max Webber, should get a note like that, and should have the
nerve to betray no confusion over having her pretense thus confounded!
Dolly had read the note thoroughly, and it had struck her as cryptic and
suggestive in the extreme.
"I want to sec you very much," it said, "and shall wait in the lobby
unless you say impossible. I'll submit to any conditions you wish to
make. No bad news."
It sounded like a code to Dolly.
Rose stood there a long time. When she turned around, Dolly saw she was
pale. She'd crumpled the note tight in one palm, and her hands were
trembling. Then, with great swiftness, she began to dress. But though
her haste was evident, she didn't ask Dolly to help her; didn't seem to
know, indeed, that she was in the room. It was no way for a friend to
act!
The thing that had moved Rose to an extent that terrified her was that
last phrase. The desire it showed to play fair with her; the
unwillingness to take advantage of a fear his coming like that might
have inspired her with. And then the way he had made it possible for
her, with a single word, to send him away! And the restraint of that "I
want to see you very much!" It wasn't like any Rodney she knew, to be
humble like that. His humility stripped her of her armor. If he'd been
imperious, exigeant, she could have gone down to meet him with her head
up. Suppose she found him broken, aged, with a dumb need for her crying
out in his eyes, what would she do? What could she trust herself not to
do? But just in human mercy to him she mustn't let him see she was
wavering.
The Rose he was waiting for, there in the lobby, the only Rose he had
been able to picture to himself for more than a fortnight of distressful
days, was the Rose he'd last seen in that North Clark Street room; the