The Real Adventure
confidential account of her life, as she did on that first afternoon,
when she explained the thoroughness of her acquaintance with Judge
Granger. And Rose never explained how it had happened that she was left
at the mercy of the town of Centropolis by the failure of _The Girl
Up-stairs_ company. But she poured out for her friend a wealth of
illustrative reminiscences, drawn from her childhood, her days at the
university, her life on the stage; and though she was a good deal more
reticent about it, she even touched on her married life with Rodney; at
least, on the collateral incidents of it.
Miss Gibbons listened to all this with a hunger she didn't conceal, and
this eagerness gave Rose a pretty vivid picture of the inner life the
little woman had lived here in Centropolis.
If she'd been born a boy instead of a girl, she'd probably have equaled,
or outstripped, Rose thought, her father's eminence. With her courage,
her vitality, her fine penetrating intelligence, she'd have managed to
win her way out of this stagnant little back-water of life. But, having
been born a girl, brought up helpless, as became the daughter of the
circuit judge, and then having had this support wrenched from under her
at the critical moment, there had been nothing for her but--hats.
She'd never gone sour, at that; never, apparently, wasted any hours in
repining. She'd made, after a fashion, a career of hats; had risen on
them, to a position of acknowledged social consequence. There must have
been disquieting echoes in her, rhythms that answered to the pulsation
of an ampler life. She never could hope to get out into it, she
undoubtedly knew, but she took every opportunity she could get for a
glimpse at it. Rose's incursion into her life must have been a godsend
to her.
She probably pieced together a pretty good picture of Rose, too. But she
did this piecing in silence and kept her surmises to herself.
In a material way, her adoption of Rose was an immense success.
Centropolis, when it learned the news, was thunder-struck. For a matter
of hours, one might say, the town held its breath. Then it began to
talk. The women began asking questions: What did the actress look like?
The men offered lame descriptions. Rose had been seen, apparently, that
morning on Main Street, by the entire male population, but their
descriptions weren't satisfactory. Curiosity must be assuaged! But Rose
never went into the stores on Main Street; never patronized the
picture-show, and even had these glimpses been afforded, they'd have
been pretty unsatisfactory. There was only one real way of discovering
what the creature was like; discovering for yourself, that is--and
hearsay evidence is notoriously unreliable; that was to buy a hat of
Lizzie Gibbons.
The first daring adventurer was Agatha Stebbins. Agatha found, you will
remember, the hat Rose had already designed for her. And, as Miss
Gibbons caustically disclaimed the authorship of it ("I'd never have
made you up a thing like that, you can believe!") and as Miss Stebbins,
after a moment's hesitation, decided she adored it, another inducement,
though perhaps a superfluous one, was offered for visits to the atelier.
"Of course she isn't what you could call genteel," Miss Stebbins
explained, parading her acquisition, "and she's never had any
advantages. And as to her moral character, I suppose the less said the
better. Lizzie Gibbons can settle that question with her own conscience.
But when it comes to hats she's got more gimp in her little finger than
Lizzie's got in both hands. Dear, no! She's not what I call pretty. Not
with a mouth like that. Of course the men ..."
So Miss Gibbons' spring business was distended to unrecognizable
proportions. Rose fitted on hats in the show-room during business hours
and took a mischievous delight in the assumption of the intangible
manner of a perfect shop-assistant; in saying "Yes, madam," and "No,
madam," and "Will you try this, madam?" with a perfection of politeness
that baffled the most determined curiosity. Miss Gibbons got as much fun
out of it as she did.
The hours in the workroom were pleasant ones, too, with their perpetual
reminder that the creative power that had deserted her last January, had
come back. The little problems were ludicrously easy, of course but they
stimulated a pleasant sense of reserve power.
She couldn't, of course, have stayed in Centropolis indefinitely. In
time, that feeling of mounting energy would have driven her out in
search of something that would test it.
But, when Galbraith's letter came, it took her a little aback. Miss
Gibbons had brought it in; because Rose, even then, didn't go to the
post-office. Miss Gibbons watched her tear open the big envelope
addressed to Rose in the handwriting that always went with the
California post-mark, and saw her take another unopened letter out of
it. She saw the girl's face set itself in a sudden gravity; watched her
with a hungry misgiving, while she read the enclosure, and felt the
misgiving mount to an unhappy certainty, when Rose put it away without
comment.
But Rose wasn't certain, or she felt that night when she went to bed
that she was not. Galbraith's letter frightened her a little. It was a
dictated letter, very stiff, wholly businesslike. It offered to make her
his personal assistant at a salary of fifty dollars a week. He
summarized in rather formidable terms, what her duties would be. He
wished her to report to him promptly, July first, and to telegraph him
at her earliest convenience, whether she accepted his offer. There was
no explanation of his long delay in sending for her.
Rose had no illusions as to what its acceptance would mean. It would
mean gripping life again with the full strength of both hands. It would
mean many anxious days and sleepless nights. It would mean spurring
herself to a high degree of competency. You didn't get fifty dollars a
week for anything that was easy to do. She knew that now, by hard
experience. And then the transplantation to New York would mean an end
of the cool healing peace of her present life. Things would begin
happening to her that she couldn't foresee nor control. Feelings would
begin happening to her; the kind of feelings that scorched and terrified
you. They wouldn't happen to her here in Centropolis.
She fell asleep that night under the persuasion that the thing wasn't
decided; that the safe, quiet, peaceful way was still open to her. But
when she awakened in the morning, she knew it was not.
"I surmise," said Miss Gibbons that morning at breakfast, "that you're
figuring to go away."
Rose smiled and sighed. "I don't know how you guess things like that,"
she said, "but it's true. I must be in New York on the first of July."
"Well, the sooner the quicker," said Miss Gibbons dryly. "You came all
at once and I guess it's just as well you should go the same way. I
guess neither of us is sorry you came, and I hope you'll never be sorry
you went."
That was her nearest approach to an affectionate farewell. Rose managed
to express her affection and gratitude a little more adequately, but not
much. "It isn't the end of us, you know," she concluded. "You're coming
to see me in New York."
Miss Gibbons smiled with good-humored skepticism at that.
Rose telegraphed Galbraith that morning, and she took the noon train for
St. Louis. She needed a day or two there to make the modest supplements
to her wardrobe that her savings permitted.
BOOK FOUR
The Real Adventure
CHAPTER I
THE TUNE CHANGES
John Williamson's doctor packed him off to Carlsbad just about the time
that Rose achieved the conquest of Centropolis (along in April, 1914,
that was). Violet and their one child, a girl of twelve, went along with
him to keep him company; at rather long range, it seemed, because they
were both in Paris on the first of August, when the war broke out, and
John spent six frantic days getting into Switzerland and out again into
France, before his attempt to join them was successful. They had run the
full gamut of refugees' experiences, by the time they got to England and
secured accommodations on a liner to New York, and the tale got an added
touch from the stratagem Violet employed in successfully bringing off
all her new French frocks.
It took just two hours' steady talking to tell the story, and Violet
figured that during the first week after her return to Chicago, she told
it on an average of three times a day. So that by the time she could
manage a day for motoring out to Lake Forest to see Constance Crawford,
she was ready to talk about something else.
Constance had lately had her fourth--and she asserted, last--baby, and
wasn't seeing anybody yet, except intimates, one at a time; and she
relaxed a little deeper, with a sigh of relief, into her cushioned
chair, when Violet said:
"The same things happened to us that happened to everybody else, so you
don't have to hear them. Oh, it was nice, in a way, being separated from
poor John when the thing happened, because--well, he hasn't got over it
yet. He's still more as he was when we were first engaged, than he's
ever been since. And at thirty-seven that's something! And then it's a
satisfaction about the clothes. It seems as if I must have had a
premonition that something was going to happen, because I bought
absolutely everything I wanted.
"Of course it was an awful moment when John said we couldn't take
anything but hand-luggage. But I got three perfectly enormous
straw-telescopes--you know the kind--about four feet long, and then we
left everything else behind, except a tooth-brush and a comb apiece. And
what with that and the biggest hat box in the world--my, but it's lucky
hats are small!--we managed it.
"But all the stuff about having your automobile taken away and riding in
a cart, and thinking you're going to be arrested as a spy, and living
for days on milk-chocolate and _vin ordinaire_, you've heard it all a
hundred times already, so we'll talk about something else."
"I never heard anything so heroic in my life," Constance said. "But you
don't need to be, because I'm perishing for details.--Unless," she went
on, "it isn't heroism at all, but something else you want to talk
about."
"Just my luck!" said Violet. "I thought I was going to get away with
that. There _is_ something I'm frantic with curiosity about, and you're
the first person I've seen I could ask. I spent two hours trying to get
up my courage with Frederica, but I couldn't. Do you know anything about
them--Rose and Rodney? Does any one know anything about her since she
disappeared from the Globe?"
"Why, I fancy _they_ do," said Constance, "Rodney and Frederica. I don't
know just why I think so. Frank sees Rodney every day or two at lunch
time at the club; says he seems all right. He's working terribly hard.
And the money he's making! Frank says he's a regular robber in the fees
he asks--and gets. He says he speaks of Rose once in a while, and
not--at least not exactly, as if she were dead. You know what I mean!
Just in that maddening, matter-of-course way, as if everybody knew all
about her.
"Frederica won't talk about her at all. I mean, she won't start the
subject, and nobody has the nerve to start it with her. Freddy can be
like that, you know. She'd make a perfectly wonderful queen--did you
ever think of that? Of England. Harriet's the only one who'd talk, and
of course she's gone back. You knew that, didn't you? Oh, but naturally,
since you've talked to Freddy."
Violet nodded. "It all sounded so exactly like Harriet," she said, "as
Freddy told about it. No confidences, no flutters. She didn't even seem
interested until the day England went in. And then at lunch that day,
she said to Frederica, 'I've just cabled Tony that I'm coming back on