THE CONQUEST OF CENTROPOLIS
Centropolis wasn't a very big town, but it had a wide, well paved street
lined with stores, and a pleasant variety of gravel roads winding round
hills that had neat and fairly prosperous-looking houses scattered over
them. A rather dignified old court-house among the big trees of the
Square proclaimed the place a county seat. It was a warm April day; the
grass was green and the little leaves already were bursting out on the
shrubbery.
Rose's idea was to stroll about a little and get her bearings first, and
then go into one store after another on Main Street until she should
find a job. She had no serious misgiving that she wouldn't get one
eventually; before night, this was to say.
Her confidence sprang from two sources: one, that though inexperienced
she knew she was intelligent, willing and attractive. People, she found,
were apt to be disposed in her favor. The other source of her confidence
was that she wasn't looking for much. She would take, for the present,
anything that offered. Because any sort of work, even menial work, would
be a relief after that nightmare tour. The weeks since she had left
Chicago, especially the last two or three of them, seemed unreal, and
the incidents of them as if they couldn't have happened. Anything that
didn't involve associations with that detestable company, and the
unspeakable piece they had played, would seem--well, almost heavenly. If
she couldn't get a job in a store, she'd go and be a waitress at the
hotel. She could make a pretty good waitress, she thought.
But her confidence was short-lived. She cut short her ramble about the
streets because of the stares she attracted, and the remarks about
herself that she couldn't ignore. Young men shouted at each other
directing attention to her with a brutality of epithet that brought the
blood to her cheeks. During all the time she had had that room on Clark
Street in Chicago, through their rehearsals and that month of
performances, she'd gone alone about the streets at all sort of hours,
both in the theatrical part of the loop and in the district where she
lived, without any molestation whatever. The small towns that she had
visited with the company had been different of course. She'd been stared
at in the streets and not infrequently addressed. She'd forgiven that
because she was a member of the company. It was natural enough for
people to stare at a girl they'd paid to see on the stage the night
before, or were going to see to-night.
Now she discovered that the company had been an immense protection to
her; had accounted for her, caused her to be taken, to a certain extent,
for granted. The wild beast that comes to town with the circus, though
an object of legitimate curiosity, does not excite the hostile and
fearful speculation that he would if he were left behind after the
circus had gone.
People got together in groups and nodded at her, pointed at her. A few
of them leered, but more of them scowled. There seemed to be a sense of
outrage that she hadn't left the town when the rest did.
There was a dry-goods store on the principal corner of the street, which
she'd selected as she walked along as the place to begin her quest. She
made a detour around two or three blocks in order to avoid retracing her
steps down Main Street and slipped into the door of this establishment
as unostentatiously as she could.
She was saved inquiring for the proprietor by the conviction that the
rather dapper-looking gray-haired man who came blinking toward her in a
near-sighted way as she paused in the main aisle, was he. He had a good
deal of manner and was evidently proud of it. But he looked neither weak
nor foolish.
"My name's Rose Stanton," she said as he came up. "I've come to see if I
can get employment in your store."
His manner changed instantly. He came a step closer and stared at her
with a surprise he didn't try to conceal.
"I haven't had any experience as a saleswoman," she went on, "and I know
there's a lot to learn. But I'd work hard and learn as fast as ..."
"Excuse me," he said, "but aren't you a member of that theatrical
company that was here last night?"
The intensity with which he was staring at her made her look away and
her eyes rested on a young man whose strong family likeness to the
proprietor identified him for her as his son; he had come up and was
waiting for a word with his father. At this question he stared at her
too.
The older man whipped around on his son. "Clear out, Jim," he said
sharply. And then to Rose: "You haven't answered my question."
"I was a member of that company," she said. "But ..."
"We have no vacancy at present," he said sharply. "Good day."
She flinched a little but stood her ground. "I said I wasn't experienced
as a saleswoman," she said, "but there are some things I know a good
deal about--clothes and hats...."
He hadn't stayed to listen; had walked straight to the door and opened
it. Reluctantly she followed him.
"There's no place," he said, "in this store, or I trust in the town
either, for young women of your sort. Good day!"
Rose made five more applications for work on Main Street, all with the
same result. Some of those who refused her were panicky about it; one
threatened to have her put in jail. One looked knowing and after he had
expressed in jocular though emphatic terms, his sense of her
impossibility as a publicly acknowledged employee, intimated a desire to
prosecute a personal acquaintance with her further.
She had left the first store incredulous rather than angry, under the
impression that she had encountered a chance fanatic. It seemed
impossible that anybody with a well-balanced mind, could treat her as if
she carried contamination, merely because she had earned a living for a
while in the chorus of a musical comedy. It was fortunate for her that
her first applications were met by anger, rude discourtesy, and openly
avowed suspicion, because this treatment roused in her, for the first
time in months, a strong surge of indignation. Her blood came up after
these encounters, nearer and nearer the boiling point. The man who
smiled at her like a satyr, was shriveled by the blaze of her blue eyes,
and was left, red-faced, blustering weakly after her.
When she walked back to the hotel along Main Street the lassitude that
had so long held her half-paralyzed was gone. She was the old Rose
again; the Rose whom Galbraith would have recognized.
She didn't know it. She was conscious of nothing but a hot determination
that had not, as yet, even expressed itself in terms. It was just a
newly kindled fire that warmed her shivering spirit; that made her
fearless; in a quite unreasoning way, confident.
The only touch of self-conscious thought about her was a vague wonder at
her long submission. What had she been doing all that while, drifting
like that, letting herself be beaten like that, consenting to live amid
the shabby degradations of the life that had surrounded her ever since
the company had gone on the road? The sense of the unreality of those
past weeks grew stronger. She felt like a person just waking out of a
long troubled dream.
She mode her way among the loungers in the lobby of the hotel, not
unmindful of their stares, but magnificently impervious to them; came up
to the desk and told the clerk she wanted to see the proprietor.
"Nothing doing," said the clerk.
Then as he got the straight look of her eyes, he amended his speech a
little.
"It won't do you any good to see him," he said sulkily.
"I'll see him, if you please," said Rose. "Will you have him called?"
The clerk hesitated. Stranded "actresses" weren't in the habit of
talking like that. They always wanted to see the proprietor, they were
always on the point of receiving an ample remittance from some generally
distant place. They were often very queenly, incredibly outraged that
their solvency should be questioned. But their voices never had the cool
confident ring that this girl's voice had, nor the look in their eyes,
the purposeful thrust.
He hesitated uncomfortably. Then his difficulty was solved for him.
"There he goes now," he said. "You can talk to him if you like."
The proprietor was sixty years old, perhaps; gray, stooped, stringy of
neck. He had a short-cropped mustache, one corner of which he was always
caressing with a protruding under-lip. He had a good shrewd pair of
eyes, not altogether unkindly. Rose had seen him before, but hadn't
known who he was.
He was making, just now, for a little office he had, that opened into
the railed-off space behind the desk, and, by another door, into the
corridor. He had another man with him, but it was evident that their
business wasn't going to take long. The door into the corridor was left
open behind them, and there Rose waited. When the other man came out,
she stepped inside.
There was nothing kindly about the look the proprietor's eyes directed
at her when he saw who she was. He looked up at her with a frown of
resignation.
"So you didn't go to Chicago with the rest of the troupe?" he said.
"That's where you made a mistake, I guess."
"I didn't want to go to Chicago," she said.
"I suppose," he drawled ironically, "you've written or telegraphed to
some friends for money, and that it's surely coming, and that you want
to stay here in my hotel on credit till it does. Well, there's not a
chance in the world. The clerk could have told you that. I suppose he
did."
"I haven't sent for money," said Rose. "There's no one I could send to.
I've got to earn it for myself and I thought there was as good a chance
to earn it here as in Chicago."
"Well, by God!" said the proprietor. "You've got your nerve with you at
any rate. But I'll tell you, young woman, the town of Centropolis don't
take kindly to the efforts of young women of your sort to make a living
nor to the way they make it."
"You're wrong," said Rose, dangerously quiet, "if you think I mean to
make a living in any other than a decent honest way. I have already
asked for work in five places on Main Street and I have been refused as
if I were the--sort of person you've just called me. I'm going to keep
on until I find somebody in this town who's clean enough minded to
recognize decency when he sees it. There are people like that, of
course, even in Centropolis. I didn't come in here to borrow money of
you, nor to ask for credit. I came to ask for a job as a waitress."
The proprietor stared at her. "Well," he said, "you are a new one on
John Culver. I never got up against _your_ game before."
"I haven't any game," said Rose. "I've told you the exact truth."
Culver twisted around uneasily in his chair and began biting
thoughtfully on the end of a lead-pencil.
"Well," he said at last, "I'll take a chance. I'll tell you about a job
I think you can get. Only it won't do you any good to use my name. If
the man you go to comes to me, I can't tell him anything about you but
what I know. His name's Albert Zeider and he's got a picture house three
doors down the street. He's just put in a glass cage out in front, and
he wants a pretty girl to sit in it and sell tickets. He hasn't been
able to get anybody yet that filled the bill. So maybe he'd take a
chance on you. Only, mind, don't tell him I recommended you."
"I won't," said Rose. "I won't go to him at all. I've walked the length
of Main Street and back this morning, and I won't sit in Mr. Zeider's
glass cage. I'll wash dishes or scrub floors, but I won't do that."
The proprietor flung out his hands with the air of a man of whom nothing
more could be expected.
"Well, then," he said, "if you won't take a decent job that's offered to
you ..."
"It's not a decent job," said Rose. "Not for me; not for a girl who's
looked on in this town as I am. I want work! Don't you understand?"
Then, after a pause, "Won't you give it to me?"
"Well, I should say not," said John Culver. "Look here! What's the use?
Suppose you are what you say ..."
"You know I am," interrupted Rose.
"Well, I say, suppose it's true. What's the use? Do you think any decent
store-keeper on Main Street would risk his reputation by giving a job to
a stranded actress that had come here with a rotten show like the one
you was with; or that I could have you in my dining-room? This is a
respectable hotel, I tell you."
He broke off to wave his hand genially to a man who was walking slowly
by the door on his way down to the dining-room.
"There!" he went on to Rose. "That's what I mean! That's Judge Granger
of the Supreme Court of this state. He's come here regularly for meals,
when he ain't in Springfield, for the last fifteen years. He's the
biggest man in this county. Do you suppose he'd stand for it, if I asked
him to give his order to a busted actress?"
"Would you stand for it if he did?" demanded Rose. "If he told you that
I was all right and asked you to give me a job, would you do it?"
The proprietor laughed impatiently. "What's the good of talking
nonsense?" he demanded. "Yes, I would, if that'll satisfy you. But you'd
better take the next train for Chicago. And if ..." He hesitated,
stroked his mustache again with his under-lip, and went on,--"Oh, I
suppose I'm a damned fool, but if a couple of dollars will help you
out ..."
"No, thank you," said Rose. "I'm going to see the judge." And she cut
off John Culver's exclamation of protest by walking out of the office.
Rose went back to the desk, told the clerk she wanted dinner, and
forestalled the objection she saw him preparing to make, by laying a
dollar bill on the counter. He even hesitated a little over that, but
he took it and gave her a quarter in change.
"That'll be all right," he said, and she went the way the judge had
gone, down the corridor to the dining-room. A glance showed her where he
sat, and without waiting for the assistance of the head waitress, she
chose a chair near the door, facing it, and with her back to the judge.
Those were rather audacious tactics. Seventy-five cents, in the present
state of her finances, was a good deal to squander on a meal. And the
fact that she was openly stalking the judge might lead John Culver to
give his honored patron a word of warning. But Rose didn't care. No
tactics but the simplest and most direct appealed to her. When the judge
finished his dinner, she would follow him to his office, wherever it
might be, walk in with him, and demand a hearing. If he were forewarned,
she would find some other way of getting access to him.
But, whether the proprietor was really ignorant of her plan, or whether
the little scene with her in his office had shaken him so that he didn't
care to try conclusions with her again, the judge was left to his fate.
Rose followed him, unmolested, down the corridor and out into the
street, across the road and up a flight of outside steps, to the second
story of a brick building opposite.
He was fitting his key into the lock when she came up. And though he
drew his eyebrows down into a frown as he looked at her, it seemed to be
rather in the effort to make out who she was, than from any feeling of
hostility. He asked her with a dry and rather affected judicial
courtesy, what he could do for her.
"You can do me a service," said Rose, "that I don't think you will mind.
Will you let me come in for about a minute and tell you what it is?"
His manner chilled a little, but his curt nod gave her permission to
precede him into his office.
The outer room was bleak enough, furnished with three or four hard
chairs, a table and an old black walnut desk with a typewriter on it.
His secretary or stenographer was evidently still at dinner, because the
room was empty.
The judge walked straight into an inner room and Rose followed him.
It was a big, rather fine-looking room, or so it looked to Rose after
the places she had been seeing lately; evidently, from a beam across the
middle of the ceiling, cut out of two. There was a fireplace with a fire
in it, a big oak table and a number of easy chairs. There were two or
three good rugs on the floor, and the walls were completely lined with
books; the familiar buckram and leather-bound, red-labeled law-books
that gave her memory a pang.
In these surroundings, the judge took on an added impressiveness, and he
was not an unimpressive-looking man. He was not large. Nose, mouth and
chin were small and rather fine, and he had the shape of head that is
described as a scholar's. One might not have remarked it in the hotel
dining-room, but in these surroundings, he looked altogether a judge.
But the effect of this on Rose was only to heighten her confidence. She
hadn't used the dinner hour to think out what she'd say to him. She'd
been thinking of Rodney again. Somehow, just the rebirth of a sense of
power in her, had brought the image of him back. She was throbbing with
that sense now, and her thoughts of Rodney had given her an exhilarating
idea. This man that she was about to confront was one whom Rodney had
often confronted. It was before this man, on the bench of the Supreme
Court, up at Springfield, that Rodney had made uncounted arguments. She
would try to do as well as he did.
The judge was staring at her in growing perplexity. Who in the world
could she be. What did she want? His very greatness in this little town
made him accessible. It was so unthinkable a thing that any one should
intrude upon his time frivolously. But this girl! She didn't belong in
the town. Hadn't he seen her about the hotel yesterday, with that shabby
theatrical troupe?
"You will please be brief," he said. "My time is limited."
"I'll be as brief as I can," said Rose.
He sat down in his desk chair, but she did not avail herself of the
permission his half-hearted nod toward another chair accorded her;
remained standing across the table from him.
"I came to Centropolis day before yesterday," said Rose, "with a
theatrical company that failed. They went away this morning unpaid, with
nothing but tickets to Chicago. I decided to stay here and try to get
work. I applied for it at five places on Main Street this morning, and
then went to Mr. Culver at the hotel. I asked him for a position as a
waitress."
Already the judge was tapping his pencil.
"This doesn't concern me in the least," he said. "I have no possible
employment for you. I can do nothing for you. Good day!"
"Employment isn't what I want from you," said Rose. "I'll come to what I
do want in a minute."
It is safe to say that the judge hadn't been caught up with a round turn
like that in years. He stared at her now in perfectly blank amazement.
"Mr. Culver," she went on, "told me why I hadn't been successful. He
accused me of being the sort of person no decent employer would give
work to, of being a person of bad character. I convinced him, I think,
that I was not. Then he said that even though I were a perfectly honest,
decent woman, he wouldn't dare put me in his dining-room. He cited you
as the reason."
At that the judge suddenly went purple.
"Me!" he shouted.
The tension of Rose's body relaxed a little. A smile flickered just
instantaneously over her mouth.
"He used you as an example," she explained. "He said that you were the
most important person in the county; that your opinion counted for the
most. He said that you were a regular patron of his hotel, and that
you'd object seriously to giving your order, as he said, to a 'busted
actress.'"
"That's perfectly unwarranted," fumed the judge. "Culver had no right to
use my name like that. It's outrageous!"
"I hoped you'd feel that way," said Rose.
The judge pounded on the desk. "That's not what I mean. He had no right
to drag me into it at all; into a miserable business like that."
"It is a miserable business," Rose assented. "It's a thoroughly
contemptible business. But Mr. Culver didn't drag you into it
deliberately. You were passing the door as we stood talking, and he used
you for an illustration. But afterward he said that if you told him it
was all right to give me a job, he would do it. That's what I have come
up to ask you to do."
"That," said the judge, setting his teeth and breathing hard, "is the
most monstrous piece of impudence I have ever heard of. On his part as
well as yours. What have I to do with John Culver's waitresses?"
He wasn't expecting an answer to this question, but Rose had one ready
for him.
"You've given him the idea, without meaning to most likely, that you
wouldn't tolerate a girl among them who'd been earning her living on the
stage. If that's just a stupid mistake of his, I'm asking you to tell
him so."
"Well, I won't," said the judge. "The thing's preposterous. You're
asking me for what amounts to a guarantee. In the first place, I don't
know that you're not--after all--what you say you convinced Culver that
you were not."
"I think you do," said Rose thoughtfully, with a steady look he angrily
turned away from. "I think you knew, without any reason at all, just
from your instinct and your experience in judging people. And if you
don't know it that way, I think you can prove it to yourself by common
sense. Do you think it likely that if a girl of my--appearance
and--manners, had a mind to practise the--profession you've talked
about, she would be here in Centropolis, fighting desperately like this,
going through humiliations like this, for a chance to be a waitress in
Mr. Culver's dining-room?"
She stopped there and took a good deep breath and waited. There was a
solid minute of silence. The judge got up out of his chair and began
pacing the room with short impatient steps. He stopped with a jerk two
or three times, as if he were about to demolish her with speech, but
always gave up the attempt before a word was spoken.
"Oh, I admit it's a hard case," he said at last. "You've apparently been
a victim of circumstance. The people down in this part of the country
are perhaps narrow. In the main it's a good sort of narrowness. It's
better than the broadness of your cities. But in an isolated case it may
work an injustice." Then he wheeled on her. "But I can't do anything for
you. Can't you see that I can't do anything for you?"
"I don't see," said Rose, "why you can't do what I ask."
"Have it known," shouted the judge, "in this town and all over the
county, and all over the Supreme Court district, as it would be in
another week, that I had gone to John Culver and got a job in his
hotel--the hotel where I go myself, three times a day--for a girl who
got left behind by a stranded comic-opera company? Now can't you see?
I'm coming up for re-election in two years."
Rose drew in a long sigh and for a moment drooped a little.
"Yes, I see," she said with a rueful little smile. They were afraid of
him, and he was afraid of them.
"I'm sorry about it," said the judge. "If there's anything else I can
do ..." He put his hand tentatively in his pocket.
"No," Rose said, "that isn't what I want. Mr. Culver offered me two
dollars to go away. I suppose you might offer me ten. But I'm not going.
There is somebody in this town who isn't afraid of anybody, if I can
only find out who that somebody is."
For a moment the judge looked annoyed; tried to collect his scattered
dignity. But presently a twinkle lighted up in his eye. Then he smiled.
"You might try Miss Gibbons," he said.
"Who is she?" Rose asked.
By now the judge was smiling broadly. Apparently there was something
exquisitely humorous in the notion of an encounter between Rose and this
lady he'd mentioned.
"She's lived," he said, "and practised gossip and millinery, for the
last thirty years, up over the drug-store on the next corner. It's quite
true that there's nobody in this tier of counties that she's afraid of.
But I don't recommend her seriously. You will get small comfort out of
her."
"All right," said Rose, "we'll see."
She walked straight from the judge's office to the stairs beside the
drug-store on the next corner, which led up to Miss Gibbons' atelier.
She walked fast, conserving as a precious thing that might ebb away from
her, the warm feeling of indignant contempt her talk with the judge had
inspired her with. He was the biggest man in this part of the state, was
he! Why, he was a hollow man! A fabric of lath and plaster with no
structural pillars inside! Well, if the rest of the town was afraid of
him, she certainly wasn't afraid of the rest of the town.
She hadn't any thought of conciliating Miss Gibbons, of asking Miss
Gibbons to give her a chance. She was going to give Miss Gibbons a
chance to prove whether she was lath and plaster like the judge, or a
real person with something besides her façade to hold her up.
So it wasn't at all in the manner of a disheartened applicant for work
that she pushed open the glass door with _"Gibbons. Modes_." painted on
it, and stepped inside.
A bell had rung somewhere in the distance as she opened the door, and
there was no one in the room as she entered it. But she hadn't much time
to look around--only long enough to get the impression that the place
was somehow overflowing with hats--when another door opened, and a thin,
gray-haired, tight little woman (she had a tight dress and tight hair,
and her joints, when she moved, seemed to be tight, too) confronted her.
She was unmistakably Miss Gibbons and in that first glance, Rose liked
her. Her features were rather too big for her small face--a big nose not
finely made, a wide thin-lipped mouth, and a long chin--and her eyes,
looking very straight out through gold-rimmed spectacles, had a
penetrating brightness about them that was a little formidable. It was
not what one would call a good-natured face. But good-natured
sentimentality was the last thing Rose was looking for.
"What can I do for you?" she asked. Her voice was as tight and brisk as
the rest of her.
"I'm looking for a job," said Rose.
Miss Gibbons came a step closer and her bright look pierced a little
more deeply.
"So!" she said. "You're the actress, are you?"
Rose smiled at that. "I'm not a real actress," she said, "but I'm who
you mean. I was a chorus-girl with that company that broke down here."
"Why didn't you go away when the rest of them did?" the milliner
demanded.
"I decided I didn't want to go on being a chorus-girl," said Rose, "and
I thought there was as good a chance of getting other work here as in
Chicago."
"That was a sort of fool idea, I guess, wasn't it?" Miss Gibbons
suggested.
"It seems so, up to now," said Rose. "I spent the morning on Main Street
without having any luck. I went to five places ..."
"Five?" questioned Miss Gibbons. "I knew about Arthur Perkins and Sim
Laidlaw and Tabby Parkes. Who were the other two?"
Rose couldn't enlighten her. She'd forgotten their names.
"I've had work offered to me," she went on, "or at least suggested. Mr.
Culver at the hotel told me of a moving-picture place ..."
"Where you could sit in that glass cage of Al Zeider's and sell
tickets?" Miss Gibbons broke in. "Why didn't you take it?"
"I told Mr. Culver," said Rose, "that I'd already walked the length of
Main Street and back, and that was enough for me."
"How did John Culver happen to say anything about that? How come it you
were talking to him?"
"I'd asked him to hire me as a waitress," said Rose.
"And I reckon," said Miss Gibbons, "that he told you he kept a
respectable hotel. He may have put some frills on it, but that's close
enough to go on, isn't it?"
Rose nodded. In her relief at finding her situation so well understood,
she was turning a little limp.
"Why did you come to me?" Miss Gibbons demanded. "He never would have
thought of sending you here."
Rose braced up once more and told about her conversation with Judge
Granger.
This time the milliner heard her through.
"And so the judge sent you to me," she said, when Rose had finished. "I
suppose that was his fool idea of being funny. He thought it was a
chance to get me poison mad."
Rose nodded a little wearily.
"Yes," she said, "I suppose that was it."
The milliner shot out a sharp glance at her. "Sit down," she said
bruskly, and nodded to a chair.
Rose didn't much want to. Her instinct was to stay on her feet until
she'd won her battle, and her fatigue only heightened it. But Miss
Gibbons had given her an order rather than an invitation, and she obeyed
it.
The older woman didn't sit down.
"Harvey Granger," she said thoughtfully, "will never forgive me as long
as he lives, for not thinking he's a great man. That's just ridiculous,
of course, because I know Harve. Years ago, you see,--so long ago that
everybody's forgotten it--my father was the big man down in this part of
the state. He was a circuit judge, when circuit judges amounted to
something, and he was one of the best of them. But he was a fool about
money and he got mixed up in things--and died. I was twenty-five years
old then, and I took to hats.
"Well, Harve Granger was my father's law-clerk before father was elected
judge. I used to see him night and morning. And, as I say, I know him
all the way through. He knows I know him, and that's what he can't get
over."
There was a little silence when she finished; a silence Rose's instinct
told her not to break. Presently the little woman wheeled around on her.
"Well," she said, "you came to me anyway, though you saw the judge
meant it for a joke. Why did you do that?"
"I don't know," said Rose. "I thought I would."
"And you haven't told me yet," said Miss Gibbons, "that you're really
straight and respectable. What have you got to say about that?"
"Nothing much," said Rose. "I am straight and respectable. But I suppose
a woman who wasn't would pretend to be. So you will have to decide about
that for yourself."
"Hmph!" grunted Miss Gibbons. "I don't know why I asked a fool question
like that, unless it's because, like the rest of them, I live in
Centropolis. I know what you are, as well as you do yourself."
The words were brusk, and the inflection of them not much gentler, but
they fell on Rose's heart like rain; like an unexpected warm little
shower out of a brazen sky. She caught her breath, and, to her
consternation, felt her eyes flushing up with tears. She hadn't realized
the tension she had been under, until it was relaxed. She gave a shaky
half-suppressed sob and then made a desperate effort to pull herself
together.
"Now, look here!" said Miss Gibbons, in a tone harder and dryer than
ever. "I'm not going to take you in and pay you wages just because
you're a cat in a strange garret and don't know where to turn. I'm not
even going to do it to spite Harve Granger. But, if you've got any sort
of gumption about hats, I am going to do it, and the rest of this fool
town can say what it likes and do what it pleases. So the thing for you
to do is to quiet down sensibly and show me whether you can trim a hat."
It took Rose a few minutes to carry out the first part of this
injunction. The rush of relief and gratitude and happiness shook her.
Given _carte blanche_ to design a special angel from Heaven to come down
and give her just the comfort and encouragement she wanted, she couldn't
have imagined one so good as Miss Gibbons,--with those keen
straight-looking eyes that had observed her fellow citizens of
Centropolis for the last half-century or so, not in vain; with her
courageous common sense, and with that dry, cool, astringent manner,
which lay with a pleasant healing sting on the lacerations of Rose's
soul.
For a while she just sat still and tried to get the catch out of her
breathing. At last, when she thought she could trust her voice not to
break absurdly, she smiled and said:
"What sort of hat do you want me to trim? I mean, for what sort of
person?"
"What sort of person!" echoed Miss Gibbons and gave Rose a rather keen
look. "Why," she said, after hesitating a moment, "there's a silly old
maid in this town. She ain't more than ten years younger than I am, but
her hair's stayed sort of fluffy and yellow, and she's kept part of her
looks, though not near as much of them as she thinks. She was a
beautiful girl at twenty, I'll say that for her. None of these girls now
compares with her. But she was a little too sure of herself and took too
long deciding among the young men of this town, until all at once, she
found that nobody wanted her. She's been trying ever since to show she
doesn't care; and she pesters the life out of me twice a year trying to
fit her out with a hat. I won't let her go around the streets looking
like a giddy young fool, and that's what she's determined to do. So, if
you can suit her _and_ me, you will be doing pretty well."
The description made a picture for Rose. She saw the faded pathetic
prettiness of the woman who'd looked too long and had been trying to
pretend for the last fifteen years or so that she didn't care. And the
picture in her mind's eye was surmounted by a hat; a hat that conceded
some of the years Miss Gibbons had insisted on, and that her client was
unwilling to acknowledge, and yet retained a sort of jauntiness.
She didn't know whether she could execute the thing she saw or not, out
of the stock of materials at her disposal. But it hadn't cost her a
thought or an effort to see the hat.
"All right," she said after a bit. "I'll see what I can do. If you'll
show me where the things are ..."
It was a much humbler sort of job, of course, designing a hat for a
middle-aged village spinster, than making those dozen gowns for
Goldsmith and Block had been. But this consideration never occurred to
her. She found, and was not even amazed to find, the same thrill of
exhilaration in conquering the small problem, that she had found in the
larger one. She worked with the same swift unconscious economy of labor
and materials.
At the end of two hours, she presented the result of her labors for the
milliner's approval.
Miss Gibbons surveyed it with a smile of ironic appreciation.
"It isn't what I'd call a real finished job," she commented after a
minute inspection of some of the details of Rose's sewing. "I wouldn't
trust it in a high wind not to scatter all the way from here to the
Presbyterian church. But it will certainly suit Agatha Stebbins."
She looked at it a while longer. "And I don't know," she concluded a
little reluctantly, "as it'll look so all-mighty foolish on her, either.
Will ten dollars a week suit you to begin on?"
"Yes," said Rose, "that will suit me very well indeed."
"All right," said Miss Gibbons. "That's settled. There's one more thing
to settle now, and that's where you're going to live."
Rose contemplated this question a little blankly for a moment.
"Do you suppose," she said, "there's any place in this town where I
_can_ live; where they'd take a person like me? Or would it be all
right, if you asked them?"
"Oh, I guess," said Miss Gibbons, "we could most likely find somebody.
I'll think about it."
She gave Rose some work to do and didn't refer to the matter again till
nearly six o'clock.
"I've been thinking," she said then, "that I've got room for a boarder
myself. There's a little room back here that I don't use; there's a
black girl does me out and cooks my dinner and supper, and I get my own
breakfast. The girl could cook for two as well as one, and I guess I
could feed you for two dollars a week. If that ain't satisfactory, you
can just say so."
"Satisfactory!" said Rose, and once more her voice broke.
"All right," said Miss Gibbons hastily, "we'll say no more about it.
That's settled. I'll send the girl to the hotel to get your bags."
John Galbraith's letter asking Rose to report to him July first in New
York, reached her via Portia, during the last week in June, and made an
abrupt conclusion to her life at Centropolis.
Those weeks with Miss Gibbons in the millinery parlor, when she looked
back on them afterward, set in as they were between that purgatorial
winter and the first breathless months while she was establishing
herself in New York, had a quality of happiness and peace, which she was
wont to describe as heavenly.
She'd probably have taken to Miss Gibbons in any circumstance. But,
coming into her life just when she did, the little woman was the shadow
of a great rock to her. She was in a state, when she settled down in the
milliner's spare back room over the drug-store, where all the warmer
emotions seemed terrible to her. It was Rodney's love for her and hers
for him, that had bruised and lacerated her; that had made the winter
months a long torment, unmitigated during the last of them, by any form
of adequate self-expression. The two parodies on love which had been
thrust into her face just at the end, Olga Larson's inverted form of it
toward herself, and Dolly's shabby little romance, had given her an
absolute loathing for it. To her, in that condition, any expression of
friendship that was warm and soft, and in the least sentimental, would
have been almost unendurable to her. Miss Gibbons, in that acrid
antiseptic way of hers, simply washed her soul in cold water and clothed
it again in the garments of self-respect.
Her manner to Rose, even as their friendship ripened and grew more
confident, never changed. Nor did the manner Rose adopted toward her.
Their endless talks resulted in a good deal of self-revelation, but this
was never direct. Miss Gibbons never again came as near to a
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
the next boat. And I telephoned Rodney just now, to find out what the
next boat for Genoa was, or Naples, and get me a stateroom. Lend me
Marie, will you, to help pack? Because I'll probably have to take the
five-thirty.' Harriet all over. Well, on the whole, I'm glad."
"Oh, yes," said Constance. "She'd always be at a loose end in this
country. She doesn't believe in divorce. She might, of course, if she
fell in love with another man over here. But that's not likely to
happen. And she can't stand America any more. So even an unsuccessful
marriage over there, especially if Italy gets drawn into the war, and
her man gets ..."
"Constance!" cried Violet, horrified.
"Oh, not necessarily killed," Constance went on. "Crippled or something,
or even if he really got interested in the profession of being a
soldier. She's done well to go back to him."
"Anyway, that wasn't what I meant," said Violet. "I meant I was glad for
Rodney and--Rose. Mind you, I don't _know_ a single thing. But I've just
got a hunch that with Harriet off the board, it will be a little more
possible for those two to get together."
Constance looked at her intently. "You've changed your tune," she said.
"I thought you were through with Rose for good and all. I thought what
you were rooting for was a divorce and a fresh start for Rodney."
"I thought so, too," said Violet, "until I saw her."
"Saw her!" Constance cried. "Where? When?"
"In New York on the way home," said Violet.
"Well--tell me all about it," said Constance, when she saw Violet wasn't
going on of her own accord. "You, pretending you wanted to know about
everything, and pretending to be a heroine for not telling me all about
being a refugee! What is she doing? What did she look like? What did she
say?"
"You've changed your tune, too," said Violet. "Because you were through
with her just as much as I was. You didn't want to hear anything more
about her. Of course she could ran away and go on the stage if she
liked, you said, but she'd better not try to come back."
Constance pointed out that she hadn't, as yet, expressed the hope that
Rodney would make it up with her. But she pleaded guilty to a strong
curiosity.
"Well, I can't tell you much," said Violet. "John and I were coming down
Fifth Avenue in a taxi one afternoon, and were stopped by the traffic at
Forty-fourth Street. And right there, in another taxi, was Rose. I
didn't see her till just as we got the whistle to go ahead. I was so
surprised I could only grab John and tell him to look. I did shriek at
her at last, and she saw us and lighted up and smiled. Just that old
smile of hers, you know. But her car was turning west, down past
Sherry's, and we were going straight ahead and we weren't quick enough
to tell the chauffeur to turn, too. We did turn on Forty-third and came
around the block, and of course we missed her.
"We went to three musical shows in the next two days, in the hope of
spotting her in the chorus. But she wasn't in any of them, and then I
simply dragged John home. There was no way of finding her of course, nor
of her finding us, because John's given up the Holland House at last and
taken to the Vanderbilt. But it was rather maddening."
"Well, I don't know," said Constance. "Oh, yes, maddening of course,
because one would be curious. But that sort of curiosity might prove
pretty expensive if you gratified it. Talk about the clutch of a
drowning person! It's nothing to the clutch of a _déclassée_ woman. And
if she's been somebody once who really mattered, and somebody you were
really fond of ... Because it _is_ no use. They can't ever come back."
Violet stirred in her chair. "Of course we're all perfectly good
Christians," she observed ironically. "And once a week we say 'Forgive
us our debts,' besides teaching it to the kids."
Constance broke in on her hotly. "Oh, come, Violet! You know it's not a
question of forgiveness. I don't claim any moral superiority over Rose.
I'm just talking about her social possibility. A person who does an
outrageous thing, knowing it's outrageous, just because he--or
she--wants to do it, can be downright immoral without being impossible.
But a person who's done the other sort of thing, a shabby thing--and
what Rose did was shabby--will always be on the defensive about it. They
can't let it alone. They're always making references you can't ignore;
always seeing references in perfectly harmless things that other people
say. And the only society where they're ever happy, is that of a lot of
other people with shady, shabby things that _they're_ on the defensive
about. And they all get together and call it Bohemia. And they sprawl
around in studios and talk about sex and try to feel superior and
emancipated. Well, maybe they are. All I say is they don't belong with
us. Oh, you know it's true! You hate that as much as I do."
"Oh, yes," said Violet. "Only, since I've seen Rose--even for that
minute--it doesn't seem possible to apply it to her. You know, I don't
believe she's on the stage any more."
Constance asked with good-humored satire, "Why? From the way she looked
in the taxi-cab?"
"Yes," said Violet. "Just from that. There she was in an open taxi, on
Fifth Avenue, at half past four in the afternoon, and she didn't look
somehow, as if how she looked mattered. She wasn't on parade a bit. She
looked smart and successful, but busy. Not exactly irritated at being
held up in the block, but keen to get out of it. The way Frank or John
would look on the way to a directors' meeting. And the way she smiled
when she saw us ... It's not quite exactly her old smile, either, but
it's just as fascinating. It pleased her to see us all right. But as for
her caring a rap what we thought--well, you couldn't imagine it.
Defensive indeed! And poor old John just about went out of his head with
disappointment when we lost her."
"Oh, I'll never deny she's a charmer," said Constance. "All the same ..."
"You wait till you see her!" said Violet.
Violet's report of the glimpse she had had of Rose, together with what
were felt to be the rather amusingly extravagant set of deductions she
had made from it, spread in diminishing ripples of discussion through
all their circle. And then, concentrically, into wider circles. Most of
their own intimate group took Constance's attitude. Forced to concede a
lively curiosity as to what had become of Rose, they still professed
that the way of discretion lay not in gratifying it; at least not at
first-hand. When they were in New York, they kept an eye open for a
sight of her, on the stage and elsewhere, and an alert ear for news,
finding a sort of fearful joy in wondering what they would do if an
encounter took place. They were mildly derisive with Violet over her
_volte-face_.
Secretly, Violet was a good deal closer to agreeing with them than she'd
admit. For, as the effect of her encounter lost its vividness, with the
recession of the encounter itself, she began to suspect that she had
gone unwarranted lengths in her interpretations from it. But under fire,
she stuck to her guns. Her husband, who delighted in her public
attitude, was amazed when she rounded upon him in their domestic
sanctuary, and emphatically took the other side. In his disgust, he made
a very penetrating observation, whose cogency Violet realized, though
she loftily ignored it at the time it was uttered. But three or four
nights later, at an opera dinner at the Heaton-Duncans, she fired it off
shamelessly, as a shot out of her own locker.
"It's all very well," she exploded, "to say that Rose can't come back.
But as a matter of fact she's never been out of it. At least the hole
she left has never closed up. You all agree that she's to be forgotten
and treated as a regrettable incident, but you keep on talking about
her. It's like Roosevelt. There she is all the time."
She didn't dare catch John's eye for the next twenty minutes, but she
knew precisely, without looking, the exasperated quality of his stare.
It was true. They couldn't let her alone. Speculation flared up again,
and this time with a justifiable basis, when it became known that
Rodney had bought the McCrea house; bought it outright, for cash, with
its complete contents.
Of course everybody knew that Rodney was getting rich. And he was doing
it, as Frank Crawford pointed out to Constance, with precisely the same
contemptuous disregard of money that he had shown before his marriage.
"He doesn't care what he charges, and he didn't care then. Only then it
was out of the little end of the horn, and now it's out of the big. And
the thing that seems to make him particularly wild is that the higher
the price he puts on his opinions, the more people there are who think
that nobody's opinion but his is any good. So he just grins at them and
goes up another notch. He's no better a lawyer, he says, than he was
when his practise brought him in ten thousand a year. Of course he is a
better lawyer. He's getting better all the time. He does deliver the
goods. And fighting out these great big cases really educates a man. You
can't be really first-class unless you've got first-class things to do.
And down inside Rodney knows that as well as anybody.
"Only, with all his money, after the way he's talked about that
house--the way he's damned it and made fun of it, what did he want to go
and buy it for?"
Constance had an idea he'd got it at a bargain. The McCreas had made a
flying trip home just to sell it. Their investments had gone off, it
seemed, still further, and besides, Florence had at last found something
in the world to be in earnest about, and that was in France; the
American hospital. Florence had already taken an emergency training
course in nursing. Her husband, whose one marked talent was that of a
chauffeur, was going to drive a motor ambulance, and they were both on
fire to get back to Paris into the thick of things. Almost any round
sum, in absolutely spot cash, would satisfy them. So Rodney, too busy
with other things to take the trouble to invest his money, would have
been in a position to get the house cheap. It was Constance's opinion
that he had.
"Do you know anybody in the world," her husband demanded, "less likely
to be interested in a bargain than Rodney? Or to pick a thing up because
it is cheap?"
"Well, then," Constance said, "you must think he's expecting Rose,
sometime or other, to come back to him. Because if he meant to get a
divorce and marry some one else, he certainly wouldn't want to live in
that house with her. He'd want as few reminders as possible, not as
many. And yet, it was Rose herself, according to Harriet, who was so
anxious, toward the last, to get rid of the place. So there you are!
It's a mystery any way you take it."
John Williamson said he understood, though when Violet pressed him for
an explanation he was a little vague.
"Why," he said, "it's just a polite way of telling us all to go to the
devil. He knows we're all talking our heads off about him, and
sympathizing with him, and wondering what he's going to do, and he buys
that house to serve notice that he's going to stay put. Business as
usual at the old stand. I shouldn't be surprised if he meant the same
message for Rose. That is to say, that the place will always be there
for her to come back to."
Outside their immediate circle, no such imaginative explanations were
resorted to. Rose was coming back of course. And the interesting theme
for speculation was what would happen to her when she did. Would she try
to take her old place; ignore the past; treat that outrageous escapade
with the Globe chorus as if it had never happened? And if she did try to
do that, could she succeed? It all depended on what a few people did. If
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
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
at all would. Only a man, perfectly infatuated, grinning ... See if you
can't tell what she looked like and how she said it."
Jimmy, meek again, attempted the task.
"Well," he said, "she didn't look me in the eye and register deep
meanings or anything like that. I don't know where she looked. As far as
the inflection of her voice went, it was just as casual as if she'd been
telling me what she'd had for lunch. But the quality of her voice
just--richened up a bit, as if the words tasted good to her. And she
smiled just barely as if she knew I'd be staggered and didn't care a
damn. There you are! Now interpret unto me this dream, oh, Joseph."
Violet's eyes were shining. "Why, it's as plain!" she said. "Can't you
see that she's just waiting for him; that she'll come like a shot the
minute he says the word? And there he is, eating his heart out for her,
and in his rage charging poor John perfectly terrific prices for his
legal services, when all he's got to do is to say 'please,' in order to
be happy."
There was a little silence after that. Then:
"Don't you suppose," she went on, "there's something we can do?"
A supreme contentment always made John Williamson silent. He'd been
beaming at Jimmy all through the dinner, guarding him tenderly against
interruptions, with pantomimic instructions to the servants. If the
vague look in Jimmy's eyes suggested the want of a cigarette, John
nodded one up for him. He didn't ask a question. Evidently, between
Jimmy and Violet, the story was being elicited to his satisfaction. But
it was amazing how quickly that last words of his wife's snatched him
out of that beatific abstraction.
"No, there is not," he said.
The tone of his voice was a good deal more familiar to his fellow
directors in some of his enterprises, than it was to his wife. She
looked at him as if she couldn't quite believe she'd understood.
"There is not what?" she asked.
"There is not a thing that we can do or are going to do about Rose and
Rodney. We did something once before and made a mess of it. This time
we're going to let them alone. They're both of age and of sound mind,
and they've got each other's addresses. If they want to get together
again, they will."
* * * * *
"I've had a perfectly bang-up evening," said Jimmy to Violet a little
later when he took his leave.
"I know you have," she said dryly. Then, with a change of manner, "But I
have, too, Jimmy. You believe that, don't you?"
"Sure I do," he said, and shook hands with her all over again. Violet
was a good sort.
Riding home in the elevated train, Jimmy Wallace hummed what he
conceived to be a tune. And when he did that ...!
CHAPTER II
A BROKEN PARALLEL
None of the speculative explanations Rodney's friends advanced for his
having bought that precious solemn house of the McCreas, together with
all its rarified esthetic furniture, exactly covered the ground. He
didn't buy it in the expectation that Rose was coming back to live in
it, and still less with the even remote notion of finding a successor to
her. He hadn't bought it because it was a bargain. He had very little
idea whether it was a bargain or not. And if there was a grain of truth
in John Williamson's explanation, Rodney was only vaguely aware of it.