The Real Adventure
of luxury. In spite of the fact that she was working very hard and of
the further fact that her hours of labor were largely coincident with
the leisure hours of other people, she made a good many friends. The
first of these was Gertrude Morse, and it was through her, directly or
indirectly, that she acquired the others.
Gertrude was Abe Shuman's confidential secretary and you can get a
fairly good working notion of her by conceiving the type of person
likely to be found in the borderland of theatrical enterprises, and
then, in all respects, taking the exact antithesis of it. She was a
brisk, prim-mannered, snub-nosed little thing, who wore her hair brushed
down as flat as possible and showed an affection for mannish clothes.
She had a level head, a keen and rather biting wit, which had the
effect of making her constant acts of kindness always unexpected; and
an education which, in her surroundings, seemed almost fantastic. She
was a Radcliff Master of Arts.
Every one who had any dealings with Abe Shuman perforce knew Gertrude,
and Rose got acquainted with her the first day. Galbraith introduced
them in Shuman's office, and Rose found herself being investigated by a
bright, penetrating and decidedly complex look which she
interpreted--pretty accurately as she found out later--as saying, "Well,
you're about what I expected; ornamental and enthusiastic; just what an
otherwise sane and successful man of fifty would pick out for an
'assistant.' Aren't they just children at that age! But you're welcome.
They deserve it. Good luck to you!"
But when Rose returned the look with a comprehending smile which said
good-naturedly, "All right! You wait and see," Gertrude's expression
altered into a frankly questioning frown. Two or three days later she
dropped in at a rehearsal, ostensibly with a message from Shuman to
Galbraith. He was on the point of leaving and had turned over the
rehearsal to Rose. Gertrude, when he had gone, settled down comfortably
in the back of the auditorium and watched through a solid hour,
obviously under instructions from Abe to bring back a report as to
whether Galbraith's infatuation should be tolerated or suppressed. At
the end of the hour, during a brief lull in the rehearsal, she came down
the aisle and stopped beside Rose who still had her eye on the stage.
"I apologize," she said.
Rose grinned around at her. It was not necessary to ask what for. "Much
obliged," she said.
"I didn't know that a woman could do that," Gertrude went on. "Didn't
think she'd have the--drive. But you've got it, all right. I don't
suppose you've got an idea when you'll be free for lunch?"
Rose hadn't, but it was not many days before they got together for that
meal at a business woman's club down on Fortieth Street, and from then
on their acquaintance progressed rapidly. She helped Rose find the
little apartment on Thirteenth Street, entertaining her during the
search with a highly instructive disquisition on the social topography
of New York, and on the following Sunday she ran in, she said, to see if
she could help her get settled. There was no settling to do, but she sat
down and talked--most of the time--for an hour or so. It was a theory of
Gertrude's that the way to find out about people was to talk to them.
"You can't tell much," she used to say, "by the things people say to
you. Perhaps they've just heard somebody else say them. Maybe they've
got a repertory that it will take you weeks to get to the end of. Or
they may not be able to show you at all what's really inside them. But
from how they take the things you say to them--the things they light up
at and the things they look blank about, the things they're too anxious
to show you they understand, and the things they dare admit they never
heard of--you can tell every time. Find out all you want to know about
anybody in an hour!"
Rose, it seemed, reacted satisfactorily to her tests, since she was
introduced as rapidly thereafter as their scanty leisure made possible,
to Gertrude's more immediate circle of friends.
During that first winter, she enjoyed them immensely. They were all
interesting; all "did things"; widely various things, yet, somehow,
related. There was a red-haired fire-brand whose specialty seemed to be
bailing out girls arrested for picketing and whose Sunday diversion
consisted in going down to Paterson, New Jersey, making the police
ridiculous and unhappy for an hour or so, delivering herself of a speech
in defiance of their preventive efforts and finally escaping arrest by a
hair's breadth. They got her finally but since she enjoyed the privilege
of addressing as Uncle a man whose name was uttered with awe about the
corner of Broad Street and Exchange Place, they had to let her go.
There was a young woman lawyer, associated with Gertrude in an
organization for getting jobs for girls who had just been let out of
jail, a level-headed enterprise, which by conserving its efforts for
those who really wished to benefit by them, managed to accomplish a good
deal. One of their circle was associate editor of a popular magazine and
another wrote short stories, mostly about shop-girls. The last one of
them for Rose to meet, she having been out of town all summer, was
Alice Perosini. She was the daughter of a rich Italian Jew, a
beautiful--really a wonderful person to look at--but a little
unaccountable, especially with the gorgeous clothes she wore, in their
circle. Rose took her time about deciding that she liked her but ended
by preferring her to all the rest. She never talked much; would smoke
and listen, making most of her comments in pantomime, but she had a
trick of capping a voluble discussion with a hard-chiseled phrase which,
whether you felt it precisely fitted or not, you found it difficult to
escape from.
What forced Rose to a realization of her preference for Alice was the
impulse to tell her who she really was and the suddenly following
reflection that she never had wanted to tell any of the others; that she
had taken care to avoid all reference to the husband and the babies she
had fled from in search of a life of her own.
She never tried to explain to herself the feeling that imposed this
reticence on her, until the discovery that it didn't exist toward Alice.
She couldn't have feared that they would not approve of what she had
done; it squared so exactly with all their ideas. Indeed the one real
bond between them was a common revolt against the traditional notion
that the way for a woman to effect her will in the world was by
"influencing" a man. They wanted to hold the world in their own hands.
They contemned the "feminine" arts of cajolery. They wanted no odds from
anybody. There wasn't a real man-hater in the crowd, they were too
normal and healthy for that. But they didn't talk much about men; never,
as far as Rose knew, about men--as such. Was the topic suppressed, she
wondered, or was it just that they didn't think about them?
That question made her realize how little she knew of any of them; how
limited was the range of their intercourse. It was as if they met in a
sort of mental gymnasium, fenced with one another, did callisthenics.
Oh, that was going too far, of course; it was more real than that. But
it was true that it was only their minds that met. And it seemed to be
true that in the realm of mind they were content to live. Had they,
like herself, deep labyrinthine, half-lit caverns down underneath those
north-lighted, logically ordered apartments where Rose always found
them? If they had they never let her or one another suspect it.
They'd be capable of deciding the great issue between herself and
Rodney, if ever they were told the story, in a half dozen brisk
sentences. Rose would be held to have been right and Rodney wrong,
demonstrably. Rose, illogically, perhaps, shrank from that conclusion or
at least from having it reached that way. There was more to it than
that. There were elements in the situation they wouldn't know how to
allow for.
But Alice Perosini, she thought, was different. She'd be able to make
some of those allowances. Rose didn't tell her the story but she felt
that at a pinch she could and this feeling was enough to establish Alice
on a different basis from the others. It was with Alice that she
discussed the more personal sort of problems that arose in connection
with her new job. (One of these, as you are to be told, was highly
personal.) And when the question came up of finding the capital that
would enable her to make the Shumans a bid on all the costumes for _Come
On In_ it was Alice, who, with all the sang-froid in the world, sketched
out the articles of partnership and brought her in a certified check for
three thousand dollars.
The fact that they had become partners served, somehow, to divert a
relation between them which might otherwise have developed into a
first-class friendship. Not that they quarreled or even disappointed
each other in the close contacts of the day's work. They were admirably
complementary. Alice had the business acumen, the executive grasp, the
patient willingness to master details, which were needed to set Rose
free for the more imaginative part of the enterprise. Both were
immensely determined on success. Alice couldn't have been keener about
it if every cent she had in the world had been embarked in the business.
But at the end of the day's work they tended to fly apart rather than to
stick together. Both were charged with the same kind of static
electricity. It was an instinct they were sensible enough to follow.
Both realized that they were more efficient as partners from not going
too intimately into each other's outside affairs.
But when the winter had passed and the early spring had brought its
triumph, with the success of her costumes in _Come On In_, and when the
inevitable reaction from the burst of energy that had won that triumph
had taken possession of her, Rose found herself in need of a friendship
that would grip deeper, understand more. And with the realization of the
need of it she found she had it. It was a friendship that had grown in
the unlikeliest soil in the world, the friendship of a man who had
wanted to be her lover. The man was John Galbraith.
For the first month after she came to New York to work for him she had
found Galbraith a martinet. She never once caught that twinkling gleam
of understanding in his eye that had meant so much to her during the
rehearsals of _The Girl Up-stairs_. His manner toward her carried out
the tone of the letter she'd got from him in Centropolis. It was stiff,
formal, severe. He seldom praised her work and never ungrudgingly. His
censure was rare too, to be sure, but this obviously was because Rose
almost never gave him an excuse for it. Of course she was up to her
work, but, well, she had better be. This, in a nutshell, was his
attitude toward her. Nothing but the undisputable fact that she was up
to her work (Gertrude was comforting here, with her reticent but
convincing reports of Abe Shuman's satisfaction with her) kept Rose from
losing confidence. Even as it was, working for Galbraith in this mood
gave her the uneasy sensation one experiences when walking abroad under
a sultry overcast sky with mutterings and flashes in it. And then one
night the storm broke.
They had lingered in the theater after the dismissal of a rehearsal, to
talk over a change in one of the numbers Rose had been working on. It
refused to come out satisfactorily. Rose thought she saw a way of doing
it that would work better and she had been telling him about it.
Eagerly, at first, and with a limpid directness which, however, became
clouded and troubled when she felt he wasn't paying attention. It was a
difficulty with him she had encountered before. Some strong