The Real Adventure
didn't give him time.
"You don't mean to tell me," she cried, "that you didn't find out where
she lived while you were right there in New York!"
John came in just then with the cocktails and Violet, turning to him
tragically, repeated, "He doesn't even know where she lives!"
"Oh, I'm a boob, I know," said Jimmy. "Give me a cocktail. A telephone's
the driest thing in the world to talk into. But, as I told the other
five ..."
Violet frowned as she echoed, "The other five--what?"
Jimmy turned to John Williamson with a perfectly electric grin.
"The other five of Rose Aldrich's friends--and yours," he said, "who
called me up this afternoon and invited me to dinner, and asked for her
address so that they could write her notes and tell her how glad they
were."
John said, "Whoosh!" all but upset his tray and slammed it down on the
piano, in order to leave himself free to jubilate properly. With solemn
joy he ceremoniously shook hands with Jimmy.
Violet stood looking at them thoughtfully. A little flush of color was
coming up into her face.
"You two men," she said, "are trying to act as if I weren't in this; as
if I weren't just as glad as you are, and hadn't as good a right to be.
John here," this was to Jimmy, "has been gloating ever since he came
home with the paper. And you ... Did you mean me by that snippy little
thing you said about the 'I-knew-her-when' club? Oh, it was fair enough.
I'm glad you said it. Because some people we know have been downright
catty about her. But you both know perfectly well that I've stood up for
her ever since last fall when we came through New York."
John grinned. "When you saw her," he pointed out, "riding down Fifth
Avenue in a taxi, in an expensive dress...."
"It wasn't. I didn't see what she had on. I just saw that she
looked ..."
"Successful," John interrupted. But, meeting her eye, he apologized
hastily and withdrew the word. His gale of spirits had blown him a
little too far.
"I saw," said Violet with dignity, "that she looked busy and cheerful,
as if she knew, in her own mind, that she was all right. And I was glad
for her, and for us. Because you can say what you like, you can't do
anything with the people who have made mistakes and know it, and are
always on the defensive about them. When I saw she didn't feel like
that, that was enough for me. And," she fairly impaled John Williamson
now with her eye, "and you know it."
It was an able summary of her public attitude since the encounter on
Fifth Avenue, and her look at her husband relegated any private
observations of hers at variance with it into the limbo, not of things
forgotten, but of things undone, unsaid, dissolved by the sheer force of
their unfitness to exist, into the breath that begot them.
"You're quite right about it," said Jimmy. "We men are sentimentalists,
as long as things don't come home. But when they do, we're as
uncomfortable about penitents as anybody, and we give them as wide a
berth."
"You're my friend, Jimmy," she said. "There's dinner! But you won't be
allowed to eat. You'll have to begin at the beginning and tell us all
about her! Though I don't see," she went on, "how you can know very
much more than you put in the paper, if you didn't even find out where
she lived."
Jimmy, his effect produced, his long meditated vengeance completed by
the flare of color he'd seen come up in Violet's cheeks, settled down
seriously to the telling of his tale, stopping occasionally to bolt a
little food just before his plate was snatched away from him, but
otherwise without intermission.
He'd suspected nothing about the costumes on that opening night of _Come
On In_, until a realization of how amazingly good they were, made him
search his program. The line "Costumes by Dane," had lighted up in his
mind a wild surmise of the truth, though he admitted it had seemed
almost too good to be true. Because the costumes were really wonderful.
He tried to tell them how wonderful they were, but Violet seemed to
regard this as a digression. She wanted facts.
"Anyhow," he put in in confirmation, "there wasn't a single paper the
next day that didn't feature the costumes in speaking of the
performance. They were the one unqualified hit of the show."
He cast about in his mind, he said, for some way of finding out who Dane
really was. And having learned that Galbraith was putting on the show at
the Casino, and having reflected that he was as likely to know about
Rose as anybody, he looked him up.
"Galbraith, you know," he explained, "is the man who put on _The Girl
Up-stairs_ here at the Globe, winter before last."
Galbraith proved a mine of information--no, not a mine, because you had
to dig to get things out of a mine. Galbraith was more like one of those
oil-wells that is technically known as a gusher. He simply spouted facts
about Rose and couldn't be stopped. She was his own discovery. He'd seen
her possibilities when she designed and executed those twelve costumes
for the sextette in _The Girl Up-stairs_. He'd brought her down to New
York to act as his assistant. She worked for Galbraith the greater part
of last season. Jimmy had never known of anybody having just that sort
of job before. Galbraith, busy with two or three productions at once,
had put over a lot of the work of conducting rehearsals on her
shoulders. He'd get a number started, having figured out the maneuvers
the chorus were to go through, the steps they'd use and so on, and then
Rose would actually take his place; would be in complete charge of the
rehearsal as the director's representative, while he was off doing
something else.
It must have been an extraordinarily interesting job, Jimmy thought, and
evidently she'd got away with it, since Galbraith spoke of the loss of
her with unqualified regret.
The costuming, last season, had been a side issue, at the beginning at
least, but she'd done part of the costumes for one of his productions,
and they were so strikingly successful that Abe Shuman had simply
snatched her away from him.
"The funny thing is the way she does them," Jimmy said. "Everybody else
who designs costumes, just draws them; dinky little water-colored
plates, and the plates are sent out to a company like The Star Costume
Company, and they execute them. But Rose can't draw a bit. She got a
manikin--not an ordinary dressmaker's form, but a regular painter's
manikin with legs, and made her costumes on the thing; or at least cut
out a sort of pattern of them in cloth. But somehow or other, the
designing of them and the execution are more mixed up together by Rose's
method than by the orthodox one. She wanted to get some women in to sew
for her, and see the whole job through herself; deliver the costumes
complete, and get paid for them. But it seems that the Shumans, on the
side, owned The Star Company and raked off a big profit on the costumes
that way. I don't know all the details. I don't know that Galbraith did.
But, anyhow, the first thing anybody knew, Rose had financed herself.
She got one of those rich young bachelor women in New York to go into
the thing with her, and organized a company, and made Abe Shuman an
offer on all the costumes for _Come On In_. Galbraith thinks that Abe
Shuman thought she was sure to lose a lot of money on it and go broke
and that then he could put her to work at a salary, so he gave her the
job.
"But she didn't lose. She evidently made a chunk out of it, and her
reputation at the same time."
Violet was immensely thrilled by this recital. "Won't she be perfectly
wonderful," she exclaimed, "for the Junior League show, when she comes
back!"
Jimmy found an enormous satisfaction in saying, "Oh, she'll be too
expensive for you. She's a regular robber, she says."
"She _says_!" cried Violet. "Do you mean you've talked with her?"
"Do you think I'd have come hack from New York without?" said Jimmy.
"Galbraith told me to drop in at the Casino that same afternoon. Some of
the costumes were to be tried on, and either 'Miss Dane' or some one of
her assistants would be there. Probably she herself, though he knew she
was dreadfully busy.
"Well, and she came. I almost fell over her out there in the dark,
because of course the auditorium wasn't lighted at all. I'll admit she
rather took my breath, just glancing up at me, and peering to make out
who I was, and then her face going all alight with that smile of hers. I
didn't know what to call her, and was stammering over a mixture of Miss
Dane and Mrs. Aldrich, when she laughed and held out a hand to me and
said she didn't remember whether I'd ever called her Rose or not, but
she'd like to hear some one call her that, and wouldn't I begin."
"And of course," said Violet, "you fell in love with her on the spot."
"No, that wasn't the spot," said Jimmy. "It was where she stood on the
Globe stage, the opening night of _The Girl Up-stairs_, when she caught
my eye and gave a sort of little gasp, and then went on with her dance
as if nothing had happened that mattered to her. I saw then that she had
more sand than I knew was in the world."
"And all your pretending that night you were here, then," said Violet,
"all that stuff about an amazing resemblance and a working
hypothesis ..."
"All bunk," said Jimmy. "I'd have gone a lot further if there'd been any
use."
"All right," said Violet. "I'll forgive you, if you'll tell me every
word she said."
Jimmy explained that there hadn't been any chance to talk much. The
costumes began coming up on the stage just then (on chorus-girls, of
course) and she was up over the runway in a minute, talking them over
with Galbraith. "When she'd finished, she came down to me again for a
minute, but it was hardly longer than that really. She said she wished
she might see me again, but that she couldn't ask me to come to the
studio, because it was a perfect bedlam, and that there was no use
asking me to come to her apartment, because she was never there herself
these days, except for about seven hours a night of the hardest kind of
sleep. If I could stay around till her rush was over ... But then, of
course, she knew I couldn't."
"And you never thought of asking her," Violet wailed, "where the
apartment was, so that the rest of us, if we were in New York, could
look her up, or write to her from here?"
"No," said Jimmy. "I never thought of asking for her address. But it's
the easiest thing in the world to get it. Call up Rodney. He knows.
That's what I told the other five."
"What makes you think he knows?" Violet demanded. "We thought he knew
about that other thing, but I don't believe he did."
"Well, for one thing," said Jimmy, "when Rose was asking for news of all
of you, she said 'I hear from Rodney regularly. Only he doesn't tell me
much gossip.'"
"_Hears_ from him!" gasped Violet. "_Regularly!_" She was staring at
Jimmy in a dazed sort of way. "Well, does she write to him? Has she made
it up with him? Is she coming back?"
"I suppose you can just hear me asking her all those questions?
Casually, in the aisle of a theater, while she was getting ready for a
running jump into a taxi?"
The color came up into Violet's face again. There was a maddening sort
of jubilant jocularity about these men, the looks and almost winks they
exchanged, the distinctly saucy quality of the things they said to her.
"Of course," she said coolly, "if Rose had told me that she heard from
Rodney regularly, although he didn't send her much of the gossip, I
shouldn't have had to ask her those questions I'd have known from the
way she looked and the way her voice sounded, whether she was writing to
Rodney or not and whether she meant to come back to him or not; whether
she was ready to make it up if he was--all that. Any woman who knew her