The Real Adventure by Henry Kitchell Webster (pdf to ebook reader txt) 📕

love and gratitude. Rose injected common-sense considerations where she could. Olga had better get out of that frock before she ruined it with grease paint, and unless she at least began to dress pretty soon she'd find herself locked up for the night in the theater.

"I wouldn't care," Olga said. "You'd be locked up, too. Because you aren't any further along than I am."

"I'm going to be, though," said Rose, "in about two minutes." The thought of what John Galbraith's disgust would be, in spite of his good-natured assurance she needn't hurry, if she really kept him waiting, set her at her task with flying fingers.

"There's no use hurrying," Olga commented on this burst of speed, "because you're going to wait for me. This is my night. We'll have a little table all by ourselves at Max's and then you'll come up and sleep with me to-night."

An instinct prompted Rose to defer the necessary negative to this suggestion until the last of the other girls, who was just then pinning on her hat, should have gone. When the door clicked, she said she was sorry but the plan couldn't be carried out.

Olga looked at her intensely. "I need you to-night," she said, "and if you care anything about me at all you'll come."

"I'd come if I could," said Rose, "but it can't be managed. I've promised to do something else."

Olga's face paled a little and her eyes burned. "So that's it, is it?" she said furiously. "You're going out with Galbraith." She went on to say more than that, but her meaning was plain at the first words.

Rose looked at her a little incredulous, quite cool, so far as her mind went (because, of course, Olga's accusation was merely grotesque) but curiously and most unpleasantly stirred, disgusted almost to the point of nausea. She stopped the tirade, not because she cared what the girl was saying, but because she couldn't stay in the room with a person making that sort of an exhibition of herself. It took no more than half a dozen words to accomplish this result. The mere fact that she spoke, after that rather long blank period of speechlessness, and the cold blaze of her blue eyes that accompanied her words, effected more than the words themselves. And then, in a tempest of tears and self-reproaches, Olga repented--a phase of the situation which was worse, almost, than the former one, because it couldn't be dealt with quite so summarily.

But Rose went on dressing as fast as she could all the while, and at last, long before Olga had begun putting on her street clothes, she was ready to go. With her hand on the door-latch she paused.

"I am going to have supper with Mr. Galbraith," she said. "He told me there was something he wanted to talk to me about." And with that she let herself out of the room, indifferent to the effect these last words of hers might produce.

She caught sight of Galbraith down at the end of the corridor waiting for her, but she paused a moment, pulled in a long breath and grinned at herself. In the state of mind she was in just then, divided between her impatience to get back to her own room where her thoughts could be free to run upon the one theme they welcomed, and her wrath and disgust over the scene Olga had just subjected her to, the poor man was in danger of having a pretty unsatisfactory sort of hour with her. She must brace up and really try to be nice to him.

So through all the preliminaries to the real talk which he'd said he wanted with her, she was consciously as cordial and friendly as she knew how to be. She said she hoped she hadn't kept him waiting too long, and when he apologized for taking her out through the stage door and the alley, with the explanation that the front of the house was by this time locked, she made a good-humored reference to the fact that the alley and the stage door were now her natural walk in life, and that it was just as well she shouldn't be spoiled with liberties.

He asked her if she had any preference as to where they went for supper, and the way she acknowledged, again with a smile, that she'd rather not go to Rector's, nor to any of the places over on Michigan Avenue, was an admission, in candid confidence, of the existence of another half of her life which she wished to keep, if possible, unentangled with this. She showed herself frankly pleased with the taxi he provided, sank back into her place in it with a sigh of clear satisfaction, and was, as far as he could see, completely incurious about the address he gave the chauffeur. The place he picked out was an excellent little chop-house in one of the courts south of Van Buren Street, a place little frequented at night--manned, indeed, after dinner, merely by the proprietor, one waiter and a man cook in the grille, and kept open to avoid the chance of disappointing any of the few epicurean clients who wouldn't eat anywhere else.

But neither the neighborhood nor the loneliness of the place got even so much as a questioning glance from Rose. She left the ordering of the supper to him, and assented with a nod to his including with it a bottle of sparkling Burgundy.

There is nothing quite so disconcerting as to be prepared to overcome a resistance and then to find no resistance there; to be ready with convincing arguments, and then not have them called for. This, very naturally, was the plight of John Galbraith.

Rose wasn't a child even on the day when she came and asked him for a job, and in the six weeks that had intervened since then she'd been dressing in the same room with chorus-girls--hearing the sort of things they talked about in the wings. Indeed, unless he was mistaken, she must have heard them linking her own name with his. His very special interest in her, and the way he'd shown it, promoting her to the sextette, and giving her a chance to design the costumes, was a thing they wouldn't have missed nor failed to put their own construction on. She must know then what their inferences would be from the fact of his asking her out to supper on the opening night.

What he'd been prepared to urge was that now that his connection with the enterprise had terminated, now that he was no longer a director and the representative of her employers, she should take him on trust simply as a friend. He was prepared to answer protests, to offer compromises--concessions to appearances. He'd expected her to exhibit some shyness of the taxi. According to his unconscious ideal of the situation she should have looked questioningly at him--hesitated, and then let him assure her that it was all right. She should have gasped a little when the car turned south in the dark little court below Van Buren Street, have shrunk a little at the isolation the emptiness of the restaurant enforced upon them, and declined, with something not far short of panic, her share of that bottle of Burgundy. Because all these flutters and questionings would just have opened the way for his assurances--perfectly honest assurances, too, as far as he knew--of the candor of his feelings and intentions toward her.

She needed a friend, that was plain enough, some one who had her best interests honestly at heart; some one who knew the pitfalls and the difficulties of this pilgrimage she'd so strangely set out on, and could advise her how to avoid them. That he was, potentially, that friend, he truly believed. And what better way could there be of convincing her of it than by persuading her to trust him, and then proving that her trust had not been misplaced?

But what was one to do--how was one to make a beginning when she trusted him without any persuasion? Trusted him as a matter of course, without the glimmer of any sort of emotion whatever; about as if he'd been--well, say, her brother-in-law!

He was at a loss for a peg to hang his definite sense of injury upon. He couldn't blame the girl for having trusted him, nor for proving so perfectly adequate to the unconventional situation he'd created. He couldn't reproach her, even in his thoughts, for the frankly expressed pleasure she took in the leisured dignity of the little restaurant, with its modestly sumptuous appointments (she even let him see that she appreciated the fineness of the napery and the handsomeness of the tableware; admitted, indeed, how sharply it contrasted with what she'd been used to lately), nor for the real appreciation she showed of the supper he selected.

But the moment he had been planning, counting on for days--weeks, if it came to that--with an excitement he couldn't deny, a tensity that had increased as the prospect of it drew nearer, was not exciting nor tense for her. If anything, she'd relaxed a little, as if the big moment of her day had passed--or, postponed by this affair of his, were still to come. Once or twice when her gaze detached itself from him and rested unfocused on the other side of the room, he saw little changes of expression go over her face that didn't relate to him at all. He simply wasn't in focus, that was the size of it. He had never seen her look lovelier, more completely desirable than she did right now, dressed as she was in her very simple street clothes and relaxed by the surrounding quiet and comfort and her own fatigue. And yet, all alone with him as she had so confidingly permitted herself to be, and near enough to reach with the bare stretching out of a hand, she'd never been further away nor seemed more unattainable.

As she came back from one of these momentary excursions she found him staring at her, and with a faint flush and a smile of contrition she pulled herself back, as it were, into his presence. "I know you're tired," he said bruskly. "But I fancied you'd be tireder in the morning and I have to leave for New York on the fast train. So, you see, it was now or never." Strangely enough, that got her. She stared at him a little incredulous, almost in consternation.

"Do you mean you're going away?" she asked. "To-morrow?"

"Of course," he said rather sharply. "I've nothing more to stay around here for." He added, as she still seemed not to have got it through her head. "My contract with Goldsmith and Block ended to-night, with the opening performance."

"Of course," she said in deprecation of her stupidity, "I didn't think you were going to stay indefinitely--as long as the show ran. And yet I never thought of your going away. It's always seemed that you were the show--or, rather, that the show was you; just something that you made go. It doesn't seem possible that it can keep on going with you not there."

The sincerity of that made it a really fine compliment--just the sort of compliment he'd appreciate. But--the old perversity again--the very freedom with which she said it spoiled it for him.

"I may be missed," he said--it was more of a growl really--"but I shan't be regretted. There's always a sort of Hallelujah chorus set up by the company when they realize I'm gone."

"I shall regret it very much," said Rose. The words would have set his blood on fire