Suppose you should be walking down Broadway after dinner, with ten
minutes allotted to the consummation of your cigar while you are
choosing between a diverting tragedy and something serious in the way
of vaudeville. Suddenly a hand is laid upon your arm. You turn to look
into the thrilling eyes of a beautiful woman, wonderful in diamonds and
Russian sables. She thrusts hurriedly into your hand an extremely hot
buttered roll, flashes out a tiny pair of scissors, snips off the
second button of your overcoat, meaningly ejaculates the one word,
“parallelogram!” and swiftly flies down a cross street, looking back
fearfully over her shoulder.
That would be pure adventure. Would you accept it? Not you. You would
flush with embarrassment; you would sheepishly drop the roll and
continue down Broadway, fumbling feebly for the missing button. This
you would do unless you are one of the blessed few in whom the pure
spirit of adventure is not dead.
True adventurers have never been plentiful. They who are set down in
print as such have been mostly business men with newly invented
methods. They have been out after the things they wanted—golden
fleeces, holy grails, lady loves, treasure, crowns and fame. The true
adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet
unknown fate. A fine example was the Prodigal Son—when he started back
home.
Half-adventurers—brave and splendid figures—have been numerous. From
the Crusades to the Palisades they have enriched the arts of history
and fiction and the trade of historical fiction. But each of them had a
prize to win, a goal to kick, an axe to grind, a race to run, a new
thrust in tierce to deliver, a name to carve, a crow to pick—so they
were not followers of true adventure.
In the big city the twin spirits Romance and Adventure are always
abroad seeking worthy wooers. As we roam the streets they slyly peep at
us and challenge us in twenty different guises. Without knowing why, we
look up suddenly to see in a window a face that seems to belong to our
gallery of intimate portraits; in a sleeping thoroughfare we hear a cry
of agony and fear coming from an empty and shuttered house; instead of
at our familiar curb, a cab-driver deposits us before a strange door,
which one, with a smile, opens for us and bids us enter; a slip of
paper, written upon, flutters down to our feet from the high lattices
of Chance; we exchange glances of instantaneous hate, affection and
fear with hurrying strangers in the passing crowds; a sudden douse of
rain—and our umbrella may be sheltering the daughter of the Full Moon
and first cousin of the Sidereal System; at every corner handkerchiefs
drop, fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the
rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous, changing clues of adventure
are slipped into our fingers. But few of us are willing to hold and
follow them. We are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our
backs. We pass on; and some day we come, at the end of a very dull
life, to reflect that our romance has been a pallid thing of a marriage
or two, a satin rosette kept in a safe-deposit drawer, and a lifelong
feud with a steam radiator.
Rudolf Steiner was a true adventurer. Few were the evenings on which he
did not go forth from his hall bedchamber in search of the unexpected
and the egregious. The most interesting thing in life seemed to him to
be what might lie just around the next corner. Sometimes his
willingness to tempt fate led him into strange paths. Twice he had
spent the night in a station-house; again and again he had found
himself the dupe of ingenious and mercenary tricksters; his watch and
money had been the price of one flattering allurement. But with
undiminished ardour he picked up every glove cast before him into the
merry lists of adventure.
One evening Rudolf was strolling along a crosstown street in the older
central part of the city. Two streams of people filled the
sidewalks—the home-hurrying, and that restless contingent that abandons
home for the specious welcome of the thousand-candle-power _table
d’hôte_.
The young adventurer was of pleasing presence, and moved serenely and
watchfully. By daylight he was a salesman in a piano store. He wore his
tie drawn through a topaz ring instead of fastened with a stick pin;
and once he had written to the editor of a magazine that “Junie’s Love
Test” by Miss Libbey, had been the book that had most influenced his
life.
During his walk a violent chattering of teeth in a glass case on the
sidewalk seemed at first to draw his attention (with a qualm), to a
restaurant before which it was set; but a second glance revealed the
electric letters of a dentist’s sign high above the next door. A giant
negro, fantastically dressed in a red embroidered coat, yellow trousers
and a military cap, discreetly distributed cards to those of the
passing crowd who consented to take them.
This mode of dentistic advertising was a common sight to Rudolf.
Usually he passed the dispenser of the dentist’s cards without reducing
his store; but tonight the African slipped one into his hand so deftly
that he retained it there smiling a little at the successful feat.
When he had travelled a few yards further he glanced at the card
indifferently. Surprised, he turned it over and looked again with
interest. One side of the card was blank; on the other was written in
ink three words, “The Green Door.” And then Rudolf saw, three steps in
front of him, a man throw down the card the negro had given him as he
passed. Rudolf picked it up. It was printed with the dentist’s name and
address and the usual schedule of “plate work” and “bridge work” and
“crowns,” and specious promises of “painless” operations.
The adventurous piano salesman halted at the corner and considered.
Then he crossed the street, walked down a block, recrossed and joined
the upward current of people again. Without seeming to notice the negro
as he passed the second time, he carelessly took the card that was
handed him. Ten steps away he inspected it. In the same handwriting
that appeared on the first card “The Green Door” was inscribed upon it.
Three or four cards were tossed to the pavement by pedestrians both
following and leading him. These fell blank side up. Rudolf turned them
over. Every one bore the printed legend of the dental “parlours.”
Rarely did the arch sprite Adventure need to beckon twice to Rudolf
Steiner, his true follower. But twice it had been done, and the quest
was on.
Rudolf walked slowly back to where the giant negro stood by the case of
rattling teeth. This time as he passed he received no card. In spite of
his gaudy and ridiculous garb, the Ethiopian displayed a natural
barbaric dignity as he stood, offering the cards suavely to some,
allowing others to pass unmolested. Every half minute he chanted a
harsh, unintelligible phrase akin to the jabber of car conductors and
grand opera. And not only did he withhold a card this time, but it
seemed to Rudolf that he received from the shining and massive black
countenance a look of cold, almost contemptuous disdain.
The look stung the adventurer. He read in it a silent accusation that
he had been found wanting. Whatever the mysterious written words on the
cards might mean, the black had selected him twice from the throng for
their recipient; and now seemed to have condemned him as deficient in
the wit and spirit to engage the enigma.
Standing aside from the rush, the young man made a rapid estimate of
the building in which he conceived that his adventure must lie. Five
stories high it rose. A small restaurant occupied the basement.
The first floor, now closed, seemed to house millinery or furs. The
second floor, by the winking electric letters, was the dentist’s. Above
this a polyglot babel of signs struggled to indicate the abodes of
palmists, dressmakers, musicians and doctors. Still higher up draped
curtains and milk bottles white on the window sills proclaimed the
regions of domesticity.
After concluding his survey Rudolf walked briskly up the high flight of
stone steps into the house. Up two flights of the carpeted stairway he
continued; and at its top paused. The hallway there was dimly lighted
by two pale jets of gas—one far to his right, the other nearer, to his
left. He looked toward the nearer light and saw, within its wan halo, a
green door. For one moment he hesitated; then he seemed to see the
contumelious sneer of the African juggler of cards; and then he walked
straight to the green door and knocked against it.
Moments like those that passed before his knock was answered measure
the quick breath of true adventure. What might not be behind those
green panels! Gamesters at play; cunning rogues baiting their traps
with subtle skill; beauty in love with courage, and thus planning to be
sought by it; danger, death, love, disappointment, ridicule—any of
these might respond to that temerarious rap.
A faint rustle was heard inside, and the door slowly opened. A girl not
yet twenty stood there, white-faced and tottering. She loosed the knob
and swayed weakly, groping with one hand. Rudolf caught her and laid
her on a faded couch that stood against the wall. He closed the door
and took a swift glance around the room by the light of a flickering
gas jet. Neat, but extreme poverty was the story that he read.
The girl lay still, as if in a faint. Rudolf looked around the room
excitedly for a barrel. People must be rolled upon a barrel who—no, no;
that was for drowned persons. He began to fan her with his hat. That
was successful, for he struck her nose with the brim of his derby and
she opened her eyes. And then the young man saw that hers, indeed, was
the one missing face from his heart’s gallery of intimate portraits.
The frank, grey eyes, the little nose, turning pertly outward; the
chestnut hair, curling like the tendrils of a pea vine, seemed the
right end and reward of all his wonderful adventures. But the face was
wofully thin and pale.
The girl looked at him calmly, and then smiled.
“Fainted, didn’t I?” she asked, weakly. “Well, who wouldn’t? You try
going without anything to eat for three days and see!”
“Himmel!” exclaimed Rudolf, jumping up. “Wait till I come back.”
He dashed out the green door and down the stairs. In twenty minutes he
was back again, kicking at the door with his toe for her to open it.
With both arms he hugged an array of wares from the grocery and the
restaurant. On the table he laid them—bread and butter, cold meats,
cakes, pies, pickles, oysters, a roasted chicken, a bottle of milk and
one of red-hot tea.
“This is ridiculous,” said Rudolf, blusteringly, “to go without eating.
You must quit making election bets of this kind. Supper is ready.” He
helped her to a chair at the table and asked: “Is there a cup for the
tea?” “On the shelf by the window,” she answered. When he turned again
with the cup he saw her, with eyes shining rapturously, beginning upon
a huge Dill pickle that she had rooted out from the paper bags with a
woman’s unerring instinct. He took it from her, laughingly, and poured
the cup full of milk. “Drink that first” he ordered, “and then you
shall have some tea, and then a chicken wing. If you are very good you
shall have a pickle to-morrow. And now, if you’ll allow me to be your
guest we’ll have supper.”
He drew up the other chair. The tea brightened the girl’s eyes and
brought back some of her colour. She began to eat with a sort of dainty
ferocity like some starved wild animal. She seemed to regard the young
man’s presence and the aid he had rendered her as a natural thing—not
as though she undervalued the conventions; but as one whose great
stress gave her the right to put aside the artificial for the human.
But gradually, with the return of strength and comfort, came also a
sense of the little conventions that belong; and she began to tell him
her little story. It was one of a thousand such as the city yawns at
every day—the shop girl’s story of insufficient wages, further reduced
by “fines” that go to swell the store’s profits; of time lost through
illness; and then of lost positions, lost hope, and—the knock of the
adventurer upon the green door.
But to Rudolf the history sounded as big as the Iliad or the crisis in
“Junie’s Love Test.”
“To think of you going through all that,” he exclaimed.
“It was something fierce,” said the girl, solemnly.
“And you have no relatives or friends in the city?”
“None whatever.”
“I am all alone in the world, too,” said Rudolf, after a pause.
“I am glad of that,” said the girl, promptly; and somehow it pleased
the young man to hear that she approved of his bereft condition.
Very suddenly her eyelids dropped and she sighed deeply.
“I’m awfully sleepy,” she said, “and I feel so good.”
Then Rudolf rose and took his hat. “I’ll say good-night. A long night’s
sleep will be fine for you.”
He held out his hand, and she took it and said “good-night.” But her
eyes asked a question so eloquently, so frankly and pathetically that
he answered it with words.
“Oh, I’m coming back to-morrow to see how you are getting along. You
can’t get rid of me so easily.”
Then, at the door, as though the way of his coming had been so much
less important than the fact that he had come, she asked: “How did you
come to knock at my door?”
He looked at her for a moment, remembering the cards, and felt a sudden
jealous pain. What if they had fallen into other hands as adventurous
as his? Quickly he decided that she must never know the truth. He would
never let her know that he was aware of the strange expedient to which
she had been driven by her great distress.
“One of our piano tuners lives in this house,” he said. “I knocked at
your door by mistake.”
The last thing he saw in the room before the green door closed was her
smile.
At the head of the stairway he paused and looked curiously about him.
And then he went along the hallway to its other end; and, coming back,
ascended to the floor above and continued his puzzled explorations.
Every door that he found in the house was painted green.
Wondering, he descended to the sidewalk. The fantastic African was
still there. Rudolf confronted him with his two cards in his hand.
“Will you tell me why you gave me these cards and what they mean?” he
asked.
In a broad, good-natured grin the negro exhibited a splendid
advertisement of his master’s profession.
“Dar it is, boss,” he said, pointing down the street. “But I ’spect you
is a little late for de fust act.”
Looking the way he pointed Rudolf saw above the entrance to a theatre
the blazing electric sign of its new play, “The Green Door.”
“I’m informed dat it’s a fust-rate show, sah,” said the negro. “De
agent what represents it pussented me with a dollar, sah, to distribute
a few of his cards along with de doctah’s. May I offer you one of de
doctah’s cards, sah?”
At the corner of the block in which he lived Rudolf stopped for a glass
of beer and a cigar. When he had come out with his lighted weed he
buttoned his coat, pushed back his hat and said, stoutly, to the lamp
post on the corner:
“All the same, I believe it was the hand of Fate that doped out the way
for me to find her.”
Which conclusion, under the circumstances, certainly admits Rudolf
Steiner to the ranks of the true followers of Romance and Adventure.