The Real Adventure
they, the three or four supremely right ones, were to acquiesce in this
treatment of the situation, Rose could, more or less, get away with it.
Although even then, things could never be quite the same.
But the sterility of these speculations gradually became apparent as the
winter months slipped away and Rose did not come back. It was felt,
though such a feeling would have looked absurd if put into words, that
by failing to come when the stage was set for her, as by Rodney's act in
purchasing the McCrea house it was, missing her cue like that, letting
them, with such a lot of solemn thought, discuss and prepare their
attitudes toward her, all in vain, she had, somehow, aggravated her
original offense in running away.
And, just as suddenly as they had begun talking about her, they
stopped. Rodney and the twins, living alone in the perfect house, under
the ministrations of a housekeeper, a head nurse and an undiminished
corps of servants, came to be accepted as a fact that could be mentioned
without any string of commiserations tied to it. Their world wagged on
as usual. If, as John Williamson said, the hole where Rose had been torn
out of it had never been closed up, people managed to walk around the
edge of it with an apparently complete unawareness that it was there.
There were fresher themes for gossip:
Hermione Woodruff's amazing marriage, for example, to a dapper little
futurist painter named Bunting, ten years, the uncharitable said,
younger than she was. And then the Randolphs! After all the thrilling
events of their romance, were they drifting on the reefs? There were
straws that indicated the wind was blowing that way.
This was the state of things when Jimmy Wallace threw his bomb.
There was always a warm, corner in Jimmy Wallace's bachelor heart for
youth, and innocence, and enthusiasm. Especially for young girls who
were innocent and enthusiastic. But since he suspected himself of a
tendency to idealize these qualities, even to sentimentalize upon them,
he generally kept a cautious distance off. Rose, with the bloom that was
on her, and the glow that radiated from her the night he was introduced
to her at a dinner party at the Williamsons', had struck him--he was
unconscious of this mental process no doubt--as a person whom it would
be difficult, at close range, to remain quite level-headed about.
Consequently, though his and Rodney's common friendship for the Lakes
had drawn him rather intimately into their circle, his attitude toward
Rose herself throughout had remained deliberately detached and
impersonal. He was not in the least priggish about it. He was quite
willing to let it appear that he liked her and to admit that she liked
him. But their talk had always been not only objective, but about
objects comparatively remote; chorus-girls, for example, and Norse
sagas, to take at random two of his wide assortment of hobbies.
He never felt himself in any danger of idealizing Violet Williamson or
Bella Forrester, and they, along with their respective husbands, were
the nearest approach to intimates he had in that segment of society
which gets itself spelled with a capital S.
Violet's attitude toward Rose, as revealed to him at the little dinner
following the Williamsons' discovery of Rose in the Globe chorus, had
not in the least surprised him. For, with her husband he had recognized
in her biting contempt of the thing the girl had done, the typical
attitude of her class. He didn't do Society very much, but he dipped
expertly now and then. He understood the class--loyalty that is woven
into all their traditions, and knew how violently it was outraged by
Rose's inexplicable bolt.
But, as I said, he went home after that dinner, rather mournful over
Violet's failure to see an aspect of the thing which, it seemed to him,
should have been apparent to anybody: this was Rose's courage in
actually doing the thing. The idea that had evidently prompted the act
was a perfectly familiar guest at their tea-tables. Rose wouldn't have
had to go to "that votes-for-women mother of hers" to pick up the notion
of the desirability of economic independence for women. But, instead of
playing with the idea, Rose had gripped it in both hands and gone
through with it; and at what cost of resolution and courage Jimmy was
perhaps the only one of her friends capable of forming an adequate
conception. But he'd have thought that even Violet might be expected to
see that a mere petulant restlessness wouldn't have carried her through;
might have admitted, if only in parenthesis, the gameness the girl had
shown.
She'd made no attempt to get the cards stacked in her favor, as she
might so easily have done. She must have thought of coming to him for
advice and help; must have known how gladly he'd give it. A note from
him to Goldsmith would have spared her untold terrors and
uncertainties. Yet she had denied herself that help; gone ahead and
done the thing on her own.
He could imagine the sort of test Galbraith had put her to before giving
her a job at all. He'd seen inexperienced girls applying for positions
in the chorus. He knew the sort of work that lay behind her advancement
to the sextette. He knew that her presence there on the stage of the
Globe the opening night, unrecognized by any one in the company as
anybody except Doris Dane of nowhere, represented a solid achievement
that a girl with Rose's background and training might be proud of.
For Jimmy it had stamped her, once and for all, as sterling metal; as
one who, however mistaken her judgments, or misguided her
actions--admitting for the sake of argument that they were
misguided--must be taken seriously; admitted to be the real thing. She'd
given indisputable guarantees of good faith.
There was no good, of course, getting warm over the flippant cynicisms
of her former friends. There was no use even in trying to make them
understand how the thing looked to him. But there crystallized in him a
wish that he might some day see Rose's critics fluttering about her and,
as it were, eating out of her hand. He used to amuse himself by
arranging all sorts of extravagant settings for this picture. He never
included Rodney in this vengeance, although he felt sure--indeed Rodney
had practically admitted as much to him--that it had been her husband's
disapproval, rather than the miscellaneous gossip of society at large,
which had driven her from the security and promise of the Globe to the
exiguities of a fly-by-night road company. Rodney never brought up the
subject again after his return from Dubuque, though it soon became plain
enough without that, that his journey had accomplished nothing.
Jimmy kept track of the company's route after that, through the list of
bookings printed in his theater weekly, and when he learned that the
tour had been abandoned, he dropped in one night at the Globe on the
off-chance that she might have come back and got herself reinstated in
the Number One company, which was still doing a prosperous business.
He didn't expect to find her there; hardly hoped to. A somewhat better
chance was that he might find Alec McEwen in the lobby, and that if
little Alec were properly primed with alcohol and led to a discussion of
the collapse of the road company, he might volunteer some scrap of
information about her.
Little Alec was found in the lobby, right enough, and properly primed in
the bar next door, and he described very vigorously, the disgust of
Block's brother-in-law over the lemon the astute partners had sold him;
for real money, too. But not a word did little Alec offer about Rose.
It was Jimmy's practise to make two professional visits to New York
every year; one in the autumn, one in the spring, in order that he might
have interesting matters to write about when the local theatrical doings
had been exhausted.
On his first trip after Rose's disappearance, he went faithfully to
every musical show in New York, and, as far as Rose was concerned, drew
blank. He'd have taken more active measures for finding her; would have
made inquiries of people he knew, had it not been for a sort of morbid
delicacy about interfering in a concern that not only was none of his,
but that was supremely the concern of Rodney Aldrich, his friend.
But from his spring pilgrimage, he came back wearing a deep-lying and
contented smile, and a few days later, after a talk over the telephone
with Rodney, he headed a column of gossip about the theater, with the
following paragraph:
"_Come On In_, as the latest of the New York revues is called, is much
like all the others. It contains the same procession of
specialty-mongers, the same cacophony of rag-time, the same gangway out
into the audience which refreshes tired business men with a thrilling,
worm's-eye view of dancing girls' knees _au naturel_. And up and down
this straight and narrow pathway of the chorus there is the customary
parade of the same haughty beauties of Broadway. Only in one item is
there a deviation from the usual formula: the costumes. For several
years past, the revues at this theater (the Columbian) have been
caparisoned with the decadent colors and bizarre designs of the exotic
Mr. Grenville Melton. I knew there had been a change for the better as
soon as I saw the first number, for these dresses have the stimulating
quality of a healthy and vigorous imagination, as well as a vivid
decorative value. They are exceedingly smart, of course, or else they
would never do for a Broadway revue, but they are also alive, while
those of Mr. Melton were invariably sickly. Curiously enough, the name
of the new costume designer has a special interest for Chicago. She is
Doris Dane, who participated in _The Girl Up-stairs_ at the Globe. Miss
Dane's stage experience here was brief, but nevertheless her striking
success in her new profession will probably cause the formation of a
large and enthusiastic 'I-knew-her-when' club."
Jimmy expected to produce an effect with it. But what he did produce
exceeded his wildest anticipations. The thing came out in the three
o'clock edition, and before he left the office that afternoon (he stayed
a little late, it is true, and it wasn't his "At home" to press agents
either) he had received, over the telephone, six invitations to dinner;
three of them for that night.
He declined the first two on the ground of an enormous press of work
incident to his fresh return from a fortnight in New York. But when
Violet called up and said, with a reference to a previous engagement
that was shamelessly fictitious:
"Jimmy, you haven't forgotten you're dining with us to-night, have you?
It's just us, so you needn't dress," he answered:
"Oh, no, I've got it down on my calendar all right. Seven-thirty?"
Violet snickered and said: "You wait!--Or rather, don't wait. Make it
seven."
Jimmy was glad to be let off that extra half-hour of waiting. He was
impatient for the encounter with Violet--a state of mind most rare with
him. He meant to wring all the pleasure out of it he could by way of
compensating himself for that other dinner when Violet had decided that
all Rodney's most intimate friends ought really to be told what Rose had
done, in order that they might be scrupulous enough in avoiding subjects
which he might take as a reference to his disgrace.
Violet said, the moment he appeared in the drawing-room doorway, "John
made me swear not to let you tell me a word until he came in. He's
simply burbling. He's out in the pantry now mixing some extra-special
cocktails--with his own hands, you know--to celebrate the event. But
there's one thing he won't mind your telling me, and that's her address.
I'm simply perishing to write her a note and tell her how glad we are."
Jimmy made a little gesture of regret. He'd have spoken too, but she