The Real Adventure
chose a chair near the door, facing it, and with her back to the judge.
Those were rather audacious tactics. Seventy-five cents, in the present
state of her finances, was a good deal to squander on a meal. And the
fact that she was openly stalking the judge might lead John Culver to
give his honored patron a word of warning. But Rose didn't care. No
tactics but the simplest and most direct appealed to her. When the judge
finished his dinner, she would follow him to his office, wherever it
might be, walk in with him, and demand a hearing. If he were forewarned,
she would find some other way of getting access to him.
But, whether the proprietor was really ignorant of her plan, or whether
the little scene with her in his office had shaken him so that he didn't
care to try conclusions with her again, the judge was left to his fate.
Rose followed him, unmolested, down the corridor and out into the
street, across the road and up a flight of outside steps, to the second
story of a brick building opposite.
He was fitting his key into the lock when she came up. And though he
drew his eyebrows down into a frown as he looked at her, it seemed to be
rather in the effort to make out who she was, than from any feeling of
hostility. He asked her with a dry and rather affected judicial
courtesy, what he could do for her.
"You can do me a service," said Rose, "that I don't think you will mind.
Will you let me come in for about a minute and tell you what it is?"
His manner chilled a little, but his curt nod gave her permission to
precede him into his office.
The outer room was bleak enough, furnished with three or four hard
chairs, a table and an old black walnut desk with a typewriter on it.
His secretary or stenographer was evidently still at dinner, because the
room was empty.
The judge walked straight into an inner room and Rose followed him.
It was a big, rather fine-looking room, or so it looked to Rose after
the places she had been seeing lately; evidently, from a beam across the
middle of the ceiling, cut out of two. There was a fireplace with a fire
in it, a big oak table and a number of easy chairs. There were two or
three good rugs on the floor, and the walls were completely lined with
books; the familiar buckram and leather-bound, red-labeled law-books
that gave her memory a pang.
In these surroundings, the judge took on an added impressiveness, and he
was not an unimpressive-looking man. He was not large. Nose, mouth and
chin were small and rather fine, and he had the shape of head that is
described as a scholar's. One might not have remarked it in the hotel
dining-room, but in these surroundings, he looked altogether a judge.
But the effect of this on Rose was only to heighten her confidence. She
hadn't used the dinner hour to think out what she'd say to him. She'd
been thinking of Rodney again. Somehow, just the rebirth of a sense of
power in her, had brought the image of him back. She was throbbing with
that sense now, and her thoughts of Rodney had given her an exhilarating
idea. This man that she was about to confront was one whom Rodney had
often confronted. It was before this man, on the bench of the Supreme
Court, up at Springfield, that Rodney had made uncounted arguments. She
would try to do as well as he did.
The judge was staring at her in growing perplexity. Who in the world
could she be. What did she want? His very greatness in this little town
made him accessible. It was so unthinkable a thing that any one should
intrude upon his time frivolously. But this girl! She didn't belong in
the town. Hadn't he seen her about the hotel yesterday, with that shabby
theatrical troupe?
"You will please be brief," he said. "My time is limited."
"I'll be as brief as I can," said Rose.
He sat down in his desk chair, but she did not avail herself of the
permission his half-hearted nod toward another chair accorded her;
remained standing across the table from him.
"I came to Centropolis day before yesterday," said Rose, "with a
theatrical company that failed. They went away this morning unpaid, with
nothing but tickets to Chicago. I decided to stay here and try to get
work. I applied for it at five places on Main Street this morning, and
then went to Mr. Culver at the hotel. I asked him for a position as a
waitress."
Already the judge was tapping his pencil.
"This doesn't concern me in the least," he said. "I have no possible
employment for you. I can do nothing for you. Good day!"
"Employment isn't what I want from you," said Rose. "I'll come to what I
do want in a minute."
It is safe to say that the judge hadn't been caught up with a round turn
like that in years. He stared at her now in perfectly blank amazement.
"Mr. Culver," she went on, "told me why I hadn't been successful. He
accused me of being the sort of person no decent employer would give
work to, of being a person of bad character. I convinced him, I think,
that I was not. Then he said that even though I were a perfectly honest,
decent woman, he wouldn't dare put me in his dining-room. He cited you
as the reason."
At that the judge suddenly went purple.
"Me!" he shouted.
The tension of Rose's body relaxed a little. A smile flickered just
instantaneously over her mouth.
"He used you as an example," she explained. "He said that you were the
most important person in the county; that your opinion counted for the
most. He said that you were a regular patron of his hotel, and that
you'd object seriously to giving your order, as he said, to a 'busted
actress.'"
"That's perfectly unwarranted," fumed the judge. "Culver had no right to
use my name like that. It's outrageous!"
"I hoped you'd feel that way," said Rose.
The judge pounded on the desk. "That's not what I mean. He had no right
to drag me into it at all; into a miserable business like that."
"It is a miserable business," Rose assented. "It's a thoroughly
contemptible business. But Mr. Culver didn't drag you into it
deliberately. You were passing the door as we stood talking, and he used
you for an illustration. But afterward he said that if you told him it
was all right to give me a job, he would do it. That's what I have come
up to ask you to do."
"That," said the judge, setting his teeth and breathing hard, "is the
most monstrous piece of impudence I have ever heard of. On his part as
well as yours. What have I to do with John Culver's waitresses?"
He wasn't expecting an answer to this question, but Rose had one ready
for him.
"You've given him the idea, without meaning to most likely, that you
wouldn't tolerate a girl among them who'd been earning her living on the
stage. If that's just a stupid mistake of his, I'm asking you to tell
him so."
"Well, I won't," said the judge. "The thing's preposterous. You're
asking me for what amounts to a guarantee. In the first place, I don't
know that you're not--after all--what you say you convinced Culver that
you were not."
"I think you do," said Rose thoughtfully, with a steady look he angrily
turned away from. "I think you knew, without any reason at all, just
from your instinct and your experience in judging people. And if you
don't know it that way, I think you can prove it to yourself by common
sense. Do you think it likely that if a girl of my--appearance
and--manners, had a mind to practise the--profession you've talked
about, she would be here in Centropolis, fighting desperately like this,
going through humiliations like this, for a chance to be a waitress in
Mr. Culver's dining-room?"
She stopped there and took a good deep breath and waited. There was a
solid minute of silence. The judge got up out of his chair and began
pacing the room with short impatient steps. He stopped with a jerk two
or three times, as if he were about to demolish her with speech, but
always gave up the attempt before a word was spoken.
"Oh, I admit it's a hard case," he said at last. "You've apparently been
a victim of circumstance. The people down in this part of the country
are perhaps narrow. In the main it's a good sort of narrowness. It's
better than the broadness of your cities. But in an isolated case it may
work an injustice." Then he wheeled on her. "But I can't do anything for
you. Can't you see that I can't do anything for you?"
"I don't see," said Rose, "why you can't do what I ask."
"Have it known," shouted the judge, "in this town and all over the
county, and all over the Supreme Court district, as it would be in
another week, that I had gone to John Culver and got a job in his
hotel--the hotel where I go myself, three times a day--for a girl who
got left behind by a stranded comic-opera company? Now can't you see?
I'm coming up for re-election in two years."
Rose drew in a long sigh and for a moment drooped a little.
"Yes, I see," she said with a rueful little smile. They were afraid of
him, and he was afraid of them.
"I'm sorry about it," said the judge. "If there's anything else I can
do ..." He put his hand tentatively in his pocket.
"No," Rose said, "that isn't what I want. Mr. Culver offered me two
dollars to go away. I suppose you might offer me ten. But I'm not going.
There is somebody in this town who isn't afraid of anybody, if I can
only find out who that somebody is."
For a moment the judge looked annoyed; tried to collect his scattered
dignity. But presently a twinkle lighted up in his eye. Then he smiled.
"You might try Miss Gibbons," he said.
"Who is she?" Rose asked.
By now the judge was smiling broadly. Apparently there was something
exquisitely humorous in the notion of an encounter between Rose and this
lady he'd mentioned.
"She's lived," he said, "and practised gossip and millinery, for the
last thirty years, up over the drug-store on the next corner. It's quite
true that there's nobody in this tier of counties that she's afraid of.
But I don't recommend her seriously. You will get small comfort out of
her."
"All right," said Rose, "we'll see."
She walked straight from the judge's office to the stairs beside the
drug-store on the next corner, which led up to Miss Gibbons' atelier.
She walked fast, conserving as a precious thing that might ebb away from
her, the warm feeling of indignant contempt her talk with the judge had
inspired her with. He was the biggest man in this part of the state, was
he! Why, he was a hollow man! A fabric of lath and plaster with no
structural pillars inside! Well, if the rest of the town was afraid of
him, she certainly wasn't afraid of the rest of the town.
She hadn't any thought of conciliating Miss Gibbons, of asking Miss
Gibbons to give her a chance. She was going to give Miss Gibbons a
chance to prove whether she was lath and plaster like the judge, or a
real person with something besides her facade to hold her up.
So it wasn't at all in the manner of a disheartened applicant for work
that she pushed open the glass door with _"Gibbons. Modes_." painted on
it, and stepped inside.
A bell had rung somewhere in the distance as she opened the door, and
there was no one in the room as she entered it. But she hadn't much time
to look around--only long enough to get the impression that the place
was somehow overflowing with hats--when another door opened, and a thin,
gray-haired, tight little woman (she had a tight dress and tight hair,
and her joints, when she moved, seemed to be tight, too) confronted her.
She was unmistakably Miss Gibbons and in that first glance, Rose liked
her. Her features were rather too big for her small face--a big nose not
finely made, a wide thin-lipped mouth, and a long chin--and her eyes,
looking very straight out through gold-rimmed spectacles, had a
penetrating brightness about them that was a little formidable. It was