THE END OF A FIXED IDEA
She couldn't of course have missed a thing as plain as that but for a
complete preoccupation of thought and feeling that would have left her
oblivious to almost anything that could happen to her. Galbraith himself
had detected this preoccupation, but he would have been staggered had he
known its intensity. He had likened it in his own thoughts, to an effect
that might have been caused by the presence with her of another person
whom he could neither see nor hear. And that, had he believed it
seriously, would have been an almost uncannily correct guess.
The flaming vortex of thoughts, hopes, desires which enveloped her, was
so intense as almost to evoke a sense of the physical presence of the
subject of them--of that big, powerful-minded, clean-souled husband of
hers, who loved her so rapturously, and who had driven her away from him
because that rapture was the only thing he would share with her.
She had been living, since that day of his departure for New York, when
she had felt the last of his strong embraces, a life that fell into two
hemispheres as distinct from each other as tropic night from day. One
half of it had been lighted and made tolerable by the exactions of her
new job. "What you feel like doing isn't important, and what I tell you
to do is," John Galbraith had said to her on the day this strange
divided life of hers had begun. And this lesson, taken to heart, had
spelt salvation to her--for half of the time; for as many hours of the
day as he went on telling her to do something. Those hours, in a way
almost incredible to herself when they were over, had been almost
happy--would have been altogether happy, but for the stain that soaked
through in memory and in anticipation, from the other half of her days.
But when evening rehearsal was over and she came back to her room and
had to undress and put out her light and relax her mind for sleep,
letting the terrors that came to tear at her do their unopposed worst,
then the girl who sang and danced and was so nearly happy snatching John
Galbraith's intentions half formed, and executing them in the thrill of
satisfaction over work well done, became an utterly unreal, incredible
person--the mere figment of a dream that couldn't--couldn't possibly
recur again even as a dream; the only self in her that had any actual
existence was Rodney Aldrich's wife and the mother of his children,
lying here in a mean bed, or looking with feverish eyes out of the
window in a North Clark Street rooming house, in a torment of thwarted
desire for him that was by no means wholly mental or psychical.
And what was he doing now in her absence? Was he in torment, too; shaken
by gusts of uncontrollable longing for her; fighting off nightmare
imaginings of disasters that might be befalling her? Or was he happy,
drinking down in great thirsty drafts the nectar of liberty which her
incursion into his life had deprived him of? She didn't know which of
these alternatives was the more intolerable to her.
And the twins! Were they, the fine lusty little cherubs she had parted
from that day, smiling up with growing recognition into other
faces--Mrs. Ruston's and the maid Doris'? Or might there have been,
since the last information relayed by Portia, a sudden illness? Might it
be that there was going on now, in that house not a thousand yards away,
another life-and-death struggle like the one which had made an end of
all her hopes for the efficacy of her miracle?
The only treatment for hobgoblins like that was plain endurance. This
was a part of a somber sobering discovery that Rose had made during the
first few days of her new life. Courage of the active sort she'd always
had. The way she went up to North End Hall and wrested a job that didn't
strictly exist, from John Galbraith, was an example of it. When it was a
question of blazing up and doing something, she had rightly counted on
herself not to fail. This was what she'd foreseen when she promised
Portia that she would fight for the big thing.
But that part of the battle of life had to consist just in doing
nothing, enduring with a stiff mouth and clenched hands assaults that
couldn't be replied to, was a fact she hadn't foreseen. What a child she
had always been! Rodney, Portia, everybody who amounted to anything,
must have learned that lesson of sheer endurance long ago.
The queerly incredible quality of the lighted half of her life--the half
that John Galbraith's will galvanized into motion--prevented any
afterglow from illuminating and making tolerable the dark half. No
achievement of her days--not even teaching the sextette to talk--had the
power to give her, in her nights, a sense of progress, or to lessen the
necessity for that sheer dumb endurance which was the only weapon she
had. Because she was in the fetters of a fixed idea.
Of course it was only by virtue of the possession of a fixed idea--a
purpose as rigid in its outlines as the steel frame of a
sky-scraper--that she had been able to force herself to leave Rodney and
set out in pursuit of a job that would make a life of her own a possible
thing. You are already acquainted with the outlines of that purpose. She
lacked the special training which alone could make any sort of
self-respecting life possible. The only thing she had to capitalize when
she left her husband's house, was the thing which had got her into
it--her sex charm. The only excuse for capitalizing that again was that
it would make it possible for her to acquire a special training in some
other field. Stenography, she had thought vaguely, would be the first
round of the ladder. Until this production opened and she began drawing
a salary, she couldn't really begin doing the thing she had set out to
do.
Consequently, anything that seemed like progress during her day's work
for Galbraith--any glow of triumph she came away with after meeting and
conquering some difficulty--must be pure illusion.
It was all perfectly logical and it was all perfectly false. She had
been growing really, in strides, from day to day, since that first day
of all when, after hearing the director tell another woman that there
were no vacancies in the chorus, she had forced herself to go up and ask
him for a job. She had been disciplining herself under Rodney's own
definition of the term. Discipline, he had said, was standing the
gaff--standing it, not submitting to it; accepting the facts of your own
life as they happened to be! Not making masters of them, but servants to
the underlying thing you wanted.
And if only she could have believed her own vision, the outlines of the
underlying thing she wanted were beginning to appear, as in a half
developed negative. It hadn't been from a cold sense of duty, or from a
cold fear of losing her job, that she had thrown herself into the
accomplishment of John Galbraith's wishes, or had felt that almost
fierce desire that some effect he was trying for and that she
understood, should get an objective validity. It hadn't been out of pure
altruism that she'd spent those twelve solid hours compelling Olga
Larson to talk better. She might have felt sorry for the girl--might
have loaned her money, comforted her; but she wouldn't have locked her
in her room and beaten down her sullen opposition, set her afire with
her own vitality, except that it was a thing that had to be done for the
good of the show.
In short, she was, to fall back on Rodney's phrase again, for the first
time driving herself with the motive power of her own desires--riding
the back of a hitherto unsuspected passion. But the binding force of
that fixed idea of hers had been sufficient all along to keep up the
delusion of unreality about the real half of her life and to make the
nightmare half of it seem true.
It wasn't until she heard herself telling John Galbraith that she could
design those costumes for him, and in a flame of suddenly kindled
excitement, resolved to make that unexpected promise good, that the
fetters of her false logic fell away from her.
The truth of the matter, the wonderful, almost incredible truth, kept
coming up brighter and clearer as she walked silently along beside him
down the avenue. The real beginning of the pilgrimage that was to carry
her back into her husband's life, wasn't a thing that had to be waited
for. It could begin now! No, the truth was better than that; it had
begun already! Because if John Galbraith had come to her house a month
ago, when she was casting about so desperately for a way of earning a
living, and had offered her the chance just as he had offered it
to-night, she'd have declined it. She wouldn't have known what he
wanted. She'd rightly have said that the thing was utterly beyond her
powers. To-night she knew what he wanted and she was utterly confident
of her ability to give it to him.
And the one word that blaze of confidence spelled for her in letters of
fire, was her husband's name. This chance that had been offered her was
a ladder that would enable her to climb part of the way back to him. Her
accomplishment of this first breathlessly exciting task would be a
thing, when it was achieved, that she could recount to him--well, as man
to man. Her success, if she succeeded--and the alternative was something
she wouldn't contemplate--would compel the same sort of respect from him
that he accorded to a diagnosis of James Randolph's, or an article of
Barry Lake's.
Since she had left his house and begun this new life of hers, she had,
as best she could, been fighting him out of her thoughts altogether. She
had shrunk from anything that carried associations of him with it.
Outside the hours of rehearsal (and how grateful she always was when
they protracted themselves unduly) she had walked timidly, like a child
down a dim hallway with black yawning doorways opening out of it, in a
dread which sometimes reached the intensity of terror, lest reminders of
the man she loved should spring out upon her. That all thoughts and
memories of him must necessarily be painful, she had taken for granted.
But with this sudden lighting up of hope, which took place within her
when she made John Galbraith that astonishing offer and he accepted it,
she flung the closed door wide and called her husband back into her
thoughts--greeted the image of him passionately, in an almost palpable
embrace. This hard thing that she was going to do, which had, to
common-sense calculation, so many chances of disaster in it--this thing
that meant sleepless nights, and feverishly active days, was an
expression simply of her love for him; a sacrificial offering to be laid
before the shrine of him in her heart. Well, it was no wonder then that
to John Galbraith she had seemed preoccupied and far away, nor that amid
the surging thoughts and memories of her lover, coming in like a
returning tide, she should have been deaf to a meaning in the director's
tones that any one of the stupid little flutterers in the chorus would
instantly have understood.
A man with a volcanic incandescence within him such as was now afire in
Rose, is utterly useless until it subsides--totally incapable, at least,
of any sort of creative or imaginative work. Until the fire can be, by
one means or another and for the time being, put out, he has no energies
worth mentioning, to devote to anything else. And, just as no woman can
understand the cold austerities of the cell into which a man must retire
in order to give his finer faculties free play, so no man can possibly
understand, although objective evidence may compel him to admit and
chronicle it as a fact, that a woman borne along as Rose was, upon an
irresistible tide of passions, memories and hopes, which all but made
her absent husband actually visible to her, could at the same time, be
seeing visions of her accomplished work and laying plans--limpid
practicable plans, for their realization.
This is, perhaps, one of the few, and certainly one of the most
fundamental chasms of cleavage between the two sexes; a chasm bridged by
habit invariably, because some sort of thoroughfare has to exist,
bridged, too, more rarely, by intellectual understanding. But never
bridged, I think, between two persons strongly masculine and feminine
respectively, by an instinctive sympathy. To each, the other's way of
life must always be mysterious, and at times exasperating or a little
contemptible.
To the woman, with the finely constant impenetration of love through all
her spiritual life, the man's uncontrollable blaze and his alternate
coldness, seem fitful--weak--brutish, almost unworthy of a creature with
a soul.
To the man who knows the value of his phases of high austerity and
understands quite well the price at which he obtains them, the woman who
fails to understand the necessity or to appreciate the mood seems
sentimental and a little unworthy.
Well, the fact that Rose's heart was racing and her nerves were tingling
with a newly welcomed sense of her lover's spiritual presence, did not
prevent her flying along west on Randolph Street and south again on the
west side of State, with a very clearly visualized purpose. She had
forgotten to replace her veil, but at that hour it didn't matter. The
west side of State Street, anyway, is almost as far from the east as
North Clark Street is from the Drive.
As she came abreast of the first of the big department stores which line
the west side of this thoroughfare, she saw that her surmise had been
correct. It was open. Throngs of weary shoppers were crowding out, and a
very respectable stream of them were forcing their way in. She told an
exhausted floor-walker that she wanted to buy a dressmaking form. And,
spent as he was, he reflected a little of her own animation in his
unusually precise reply; had, indeed, a little of it left over for his
next inquirer.
Something automatic in her mind took charge of Rose and delivered her,
presently, unconscious of intervening processes, at the counter where
the forms were sold. She selected what she wanted instantly, and counted
out the money from her own purse. She didn't have to dip into John
Galbraith's hundred and twenty dollars for this.
"Address?" inquired the saleswoman preparing to make out her sales-slip.
Then, as Rose didn't answer instantly, she looked up frowning into her
face. "You want it sent, don't you?" she added.
The question was rhetorical, because with its standard, the thing stood
five feet high and weighed twenty-five pounds.
A frown of perplexity in Rose's face gave way to her own wide smile. "I
guess I'll have to take it with me," she said. Because as near
Christmas as this, the thing mightn't be delivered for two days.
"Take it with you?" the woman echoed, aghast.
"Have it wrapped up," said Rose decisively, "and put my name on
it--Mrs. ..." She checked herself with another smile. She had nearly
said, "Mrs. Rodney Aldrich." But the mistake didn't hurt as it would
have hurt yesterday. "Doris Dane," she went on. "And have it sent down
to the main entrance. I'll be there as soon as it is. Do you know where
I can buy paper cambric?" But she had to get that information from
another floor-walker.
Paper cambric seemed to have more of a bearing upon the approach of
Christmas Day than dressmaking forms, though just what the connection
was, Rose couldn't make out. There was a crowd at the counter, anyhow.
It was five minutes before she could get waited on. But once she caught
a saleswoman's eye, her purchase was quickly made. She bought three
bolts: one of black, one of white, and one of a washed-out blue. Once
more she counted out the money, and this time, "I'll take it with me,"
she said.
Strong as she was, the immense bundle was almost more than she could
carry. But she managed to make her way at last to the main entrance,
where, under the incredulous eye of the doorman, she found a porter
waiting with her dressmaking form.
"That's mine," she said. "Doris Dane is the name on it." Then, to the
doorman as the porter made off, "Will you get me a cab?"
But this particular store had, quite naturally, no facilities for doing
a carriage business, a fact which the doorman laconically explained.
"All right," said Rose dumping her heavy bundle beside the dressmaking
form. "You won't mind keeping an eye on this for a minute, will you?"
She didn't actually smile, but there was in her face a humorous
appreciation of the fact that a mountain like this wouldn't be hard to
watch.
The doorman grinned back at her. "Sure I will," he said. "I'm sorry I
can't leave the door to get you a cab."
Rose hailed one that happened to be passing, a creaking,
mud-bespattered disreputable affair with a driver to match, and briskly
drove a bargain with him. He announced when she told him the address
that the fare would be a dollar and a half. She offered him seventy-five
cents, which he, with the air of a disillusioned optimist in a bitter
world, accepted. "Christmas, too!" he muttered ironically.
"Oh, come," said Rose, grinning up at him. "How many tired people have
you given free rides to to-day, on the strength of that?"
"All right, miss; I don't complain," he said. He did, though, but
humorously, when Rose, assisted by a page boy the doorman had impressed
for her, carried the dressmaker's form and the other heavy bundle out to
the curb. He declared the form should go as another passenger (its
semi-human shape was clearly visible through the wrappings) and that the
other bundle ought to have a van. All the same, when at her destination
Rose had paid him, he came down, voluntarily from the box--voluntarily
but with a sort of reluctance--and carried the form up to her room for
her.
Also, rather incredibly, he refused an extra quarter she had ready for
him when he had completed this service. "Just to show no ill feelings,"
he said, and he told her where his stand was and gave himself a little
recommendation: "Honest and reliable."
Here in her close little room, the suggestion of an alcoholic basis for
this generosity obtruded itself, but Rose didn't care. She wished him a
merry Christmas and waved him off with a smile.
It was now after eight o'clock. Rehearsal was at eight-thirty and she
had had nothing to eat since noon. But she stole the time, nevertheless,
to tear the wrappings off her "form" and gaze on its respectable
nakedness for two or three minutes with a contemplative eye. Then,
reluctantly--it was the first time she had left that room with
reluctance--she turned out the light and hurried off to the little
lunch-room that lay on the way to the dance-hall.
She never again, in the active practise of her profession, knew
anything quite like the ensuing seventy-two hours. Every stimulus was,
of course, abnormally heightened. There was the novelty, the thrilling
sense of adventure that missed being fear only through an inexplicable
confidence of success. And then, anyway, her imagination was a virgin
field that had never been cropped, and the luxurious fertility of it was
amazing.
It was during that first rehearsal, which she so narrowly missed being
late for, that she got the general schemes for both sets of costumes.
That there must be a general scheme she had decided at once. The
sextette was a unit; none of the members of it ever appeared without the
others, and it would be immensely more effective, she perceived, if this
fact were expressed somehow in the costumes. Not by means of a stupid
uniformity, of course. The effect she wanted was subtler than that. But
if each one of the six costumes that these girls first appeared in could
be made somehow to express the same thing in a different way--not only
in different, though harmonious, colors, but in different, though
related, forms--the effect produced by the six of them together would be
immensely greater than the sum of their individual effects.
This, of course, wasn't what Rose said to herself. She just wanted a
scheme, and with ridiculous ease, she got it. She didn't even get it.
There it was staring at her. And the other scheme for the evening frocks
was knocking at the door, too, eager to get in the moment she could give
it a chance. She began studying the girls for their individual
peculiarities of style. Each one of the costumes she made was going to
be for a particular girl, suited, without losing its place in the
general plan, to the enhancement of her special approximation to beauty.
At last, when a shout from Galbraith aroused her to the fact that she
had missed an entrance cue altogether, in her entranced absorption in
these visions of hers, and had caused that unpardonable thing, a stage
wait, she resolutely clamped down the lid upon her imagination and,
until they were dismissed, devoted herself to the rehearsal.
But the pressure kept mounting higher and higher and she found herself
furiously impatient to get away, back to her own private wonderland, the
squalid little room down the street, that had three bolts of cambric in
it and a dressmaker's manikin--the raw materials for her magic!
Rose couldn't draw a bit. Her mother's fine contempt for ladylike
accomplishments had even intervened in the high-school days to prevent
her taking a free-hand course required in the curriculum, during which
you spent weeks making a charcoal study of a bust of Demosthenes. But
this lack never even occurred to Rose as a handicap. She hadn't the
faintest impulse to make a beginning by putting a picture down on paper
and making a dress of it afterward. She went straight at her materials,
or the equivalent of her materials, as a sculptor goes at his clay. She
couldn't have told just why she had bought those three shades of paper
cambric.
"I'm really awfully obliged to you for having explained it to me," she
told Burton, the portrait painter long afterward.
"I see!" he had exclaimed, on the occasion of an initiatory visit to her
workroom. "You design these things in their values first, just the way
the old masters used to paint. Once you get the values in, you can
project them in any colors that will leave your value scale true."
And Rose, as she said, was really grateful to him for telling her what
it was she had been doing all the while, just as Monsieur Jourdain was
grateful for the information that he had been talking prose all his life
and never known it.
What she had felt, of course, at the very outset, was the need of
something to indicate roughly the darks and lights in her design. And,
short of the wild extravagance of slashing into the fabrics themselves
and making her mistakes at their expense, she could think of nothing
better than the scheme she chose.
She came to the conclusion afterward that even apart from the
consideration of expense, her own plan was better. You got more vigor
somehow, into the actual construction of the thing, if you could make it
express something quite independently of color and texture.
Rehearsal was dismissed a little early that first night, and she was
back in her room by eleven. Arrived there, she took off her outer
clothes, sat down cross-legged on the floor, and went to work. When at
last, with a little sigh, and a tremulously smiling acknowledgment of
fatigue, she got up and looked at her watch, it was four o'clock in the
morning. She'd had one of those experiences that every artist can
remember a few of in his life, when it is impossible for anything to go
wrong; when each tentative experiment accomplishes not only its purpose,
but another unsuspected purpose as well; when the vision miraculously
betters itself in the execution; when the only difficulty is that which
the hands have in the purely mechanical operation of keeping up.
She was destined later, of course, even during the achievement of this
first success, to learn the comparative rarity of those hours. Though,
as she looked back on it afterward, the whole of this first job seemed
to have been done with a kind of miraculous facility she couldn't
account for.
And all through those five hours, fast as her mind flew, utterly
absorbed as it seemed to be, she never once lost the consciousness of
the almost palpable presence of Rodney Aldrich there in the room with
her. Once she laughed outright over the memory of a girl who had tried
to win her husband's friendship by studying law. Fancy Rodney trying to
study costumes! But he would understand what it meant to conceive them
and the sort of work it took, once they were conceived, to project them
as something objective to herself--something that had to challenge
expert opinion; meet the exactions of criticism. He'd understand the
thrill, too, of seeing them come up for judgment--the triumph of getting
them accepted and paid for.
And, in the confidence born of that understanding, he'd be able to offer
for her to understand, the fundamentals of his own work. Not the dry
husks of technical considerations. What did they amount to anyway,
except as they formed the boundaries of the live thing he meant? But the
live thing itself--the thing that spelled challenge and work and victory
for him,--that thing, since at last she'd grown to deserve it, he'd
give her. Freely, fully,--just because he couldn't help giving it.
Tired as she was, she could hardly bear to stop work. The half finished
thing on the manikin lured her on from one moment to another. It was
really insane not to stop. She must get up at seven-thirty, three hours
or so from now, in order to get to the shops ahead of the crowds and
begin the selection of her fabrics. At last, with a single movement of
resolution she turned out the gas and undressed, or rather, finished
undressing, in the dark, amid a litter of pins and paper cambric.
And now, for the first time in this squalid, mean little room, the dark
had balm in it, became a fragrant miracle, obliterating the harsh
actualities of her immediate yesterdays and to-morrows, winging her
spirit for a breathless flight straight to the end she sought,--to the
time when the long pilgrimage before her should be accomplished.
What a wonderful thing Rodney's cool firm friendship would be! Worth
anything, anything in the world it might cost to win it. But ... But....
She drew in a long unsteady breath and pressed her cooling hands down
upon her face.
What a thing his love would be, when it should come, free of its tasks
and obligations; no longer in the treadmill making her world go round,
but given its wings again!