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

if she'd just faltered over them. But she didn't. She was hopelessly serene about it. "You're the person who's made this six weeks bearable and, in a way, wonderful. I never could thank you enough for the things you've done for me, though I hope I may try to some time."

"I don't want any thanks," he said. And this was completely true. It was something very different from gratitude that he wanted. But he realized how abominably ungracious his words sounded, and hastened to amend them. "What I mean is that you don't owe me any. Anything I've done that's worked out to your advantage was done because I believed it was to the advantage of the men who hired me--beginning with the afternoon when I first took you on in the chorus."

This didn't satisfy him either. Rose said nothing. He had indeed left her nothing to say. But there was a look of perplexity in her eyes--as if she were casting about for some stupidly tactless act or omission of her own to account for his surliness--that made him recant altogether.

"I don't know why in the world I should have said a thing like that!" he burst out. "It wasn't true. I've wanted to do things for you--wanted to do more than I could, and I want to still. You've done a lot to make this show go, as well as it did, in more ways than you know about. It wasn't for me, personally, that you did it. But all the same, I'm grateful. And it's to convince you of that that I asked you to come around here to-night."

She really lighted up over his praise, thanked him for it very prettily. But then, after a little silence, she went on reflectively, "It was, in a way, for you, personally, that I was working all the time. I don't know if I can explain that, though I think I understand it myself. But just because you wanted things so hard--you were so perfectly determined that something should happen in a certain way--I just _had_ to help bring it about, or try to. It would have been exciting enough just to see that things were wrong and to watch them coming right. But taking hold one's self and helping a little to make them come right was--well, as I said, wonderful."

"Well," he said--and now he was brusk again--"I hope Goldsmith and Block are satisfied. They won't be; of course, unless the thing runs forty weeks. But that isn't what I want to talk about. I want to talk about you. I want to know what you're aiming at. I don't mean to-morrow or next week. You'll stay with this piece, I suppose, as long as the run lasts. But in the end, what's the idea? Do you want to be an actress?"

He had kept on going after that first question of his, because it was obvious the girl wasn't ready to answer. She seemed to be struggling to get the bearings of a perfectly new idea. At length she gave him the clue.

"It's that forty weeks," she said. "The notion of just going on--not changing anything or improving anything; doing the same thing over and over again for forty weeks, or even four, seems perfectly ghastly. And yet I suppose that's what everybody in the company is hoping for--just to keep going round and round like a horse at the end of a pole. What I'd like to do, now that this is finished, is--well, to start another."

His eyes kindled. "That's it," he said. "That's what I've felt about you all along. I suppose it's the reason I felt you never could be an actress. You see the thing the way I do--the whole fun of the game is getting the timing. Once it's got ..." He snapped his fingers; and with an eager nod she agreed.

He was in focus now, there could he no doubt of that. But it didn't occur to him that it was the director who was in focus, not the man. The fact was that in evoking the director she'd banished the man--a triumph she wasn't to realize the importance of until a good deal later.

"Well, then, look here," he said. "I've an idea that I could use you to good advantage as a sort of personal assistant. There'll be a good deal of work just of the sort you did with the sextette, teaching people to talk and move about like the sort of folk they're supposed to represent. That's coming in more and more in musical comedies, the use of the chorus as real people in the story--accounting for their exits and entrances. It would be done more if we could teach chorus people to act human. Well, you can do that better than I; that's the plain truth. And then I think after you'd got my idea of a dance number you could probably rehearse it yourself, take some of that routine off my hands. Under this new contract of mine, that I expect to sign in a day or two, I'll simply have to have somebody. And then, of course, there's the costuming. That's a great game, and I've a notion, though of course I haven't a great deal to go by, that you could swing it. I think you've a talent for it.

"There you are! The job will be paid from the first a great deal better than what you've got here. And the costuming end of it, if you succeed, would run to real money. Well, how about it?"

"But," said Rose a little breathlessly--"but don't I have to stay here with _The Girl Up-stairs_? I couldn't just leave, could I?"

"Oh, I shan't be ready for you just yet anyway," he said. "I'll write when I am and by that time you'll be perfectly free to give them your two weeks' notice. By the way, haven't you some other address than care of the theater--a permanent address somewhere?"

"Care of Miss Portia Stanton," she told him, and as he got out his card and wrote it down, she added the California address. It recalled to his mind that she had told him her name was Rose Stanton on the day he had given her a job, and the memory diverted him for a moment. Then he pulled himself back.

"They'll be annoyed, of course--Goldsmith and Block. But, after all, you've given them more than their money's worth already. Well--will you come if I write?"

"It seems to be too wonderful to be true," she said. "Yes, I'll come, of course."

He sat there gazing at her in a sort of fascination. Because she was fairly lambent with the wonder of it. Her eyes were starry, her lips a little parted, and she was so still she seemed not even to be breathing. But the eyes weren't looking at him. Another vision filled them. The vision--oh, he was sure of it now!--of that "only one," whoever he was, that mattered.

He thrust back his chair with an abruptness that startled her out of her reverie, and the action, rough as it was, wasn't violent enough to satisfy the sudden exasperation that seized him. If he could have smashed the caraffe or something ...

"I won't keep you any longer," he said. "I'll have them get a taxi and send you home."

She said she didn't want a taxi. If he'd just walk over with her to a Clark Street car ... And she thanked him for everything, including the supper. But all the time he could see her trying, with a perplexity almost pathetic, to discover what she had done to change his manner again like that.

He was thoroughly contrite about it, and he did his best to recover an appearance of friendly good will. He didn't demur to her wish to be put on a car, and at the crossing where they waited for it, after an almost silent walk, he did manage to shake hands and wish her luck and tell her she'd hear from him soon, in a way that he felt reassured her.

But he kicked his way to the curb after the car had carried her off, and marched to his hotel in a sort of baffled fury. He didn't know exactly what had gone wrong about the evening. He couldn't, in phrases, tell himself just what it was he'd wanted. But he did know, with a perfectly abysmal conviction, that he was a fool!


CHAPTER X

THE VOICE OF THE WORLD

If you were to accost the average layman, especially the layman who has, at one time or another, found his personal affairs, or those of his friends, casually illuminated by the straying search-light of newspaper notoriety, and put this hypothetical question to him: What chance would there be that a young married woman, who, in a social sense, really "belonged," could leave her husband for a musical-comedy chorus in the city he lived in, and escape having the fact chronicled in the daily press?--that layman would tell you that there was simply no chance at all. But if you were to put the same question to a person expert in the science of publicity--to an alumnus of the local room of any big city daily, you'd get a very different answer. Because your expert knows how many good stories there are that never get into the papers. He allows for the element of luck; he knows how vitally important it is that the right person should become aware of the fact at exactly the right time, in order that a simple happening may be converted into news.

Rose's "escapade"--that's how it would have been described--didn't get into the papers. Jimmy Wallace, of course, before the bar of his own conscience, stood convicted of high treason. There was no use arguing with himself that he was hired as a critic and not as a reporter. For, just as it is the doctor's duty to prolong, if possible, the life of his patient, or the lawyer's duty to defend his client, so it is the duty of every man who writes for a newspaper, to turn himself into a reporter when a story breaks under his eye. Jimmy ought that very night as soon as he had made sure of his facts, to have left a note on his city editor's desk informing him that Mrs. Rodney Aldrich was a member of the chorus in the new Globe show.

He didn't do it, even though he knew that a more troublesome accuser than his own conscience--namely, the city editor himself--would confront him, in case any of his colleagues on the other papers had happened to recognize her and, dutifully, had turned the story in. He read the other papers for the next twenty-four hours, rather more carefully than usual, and then with a sigh of relief, told his conscience to go to the devil. It was a well trained, obedient conscience, and it subsided meekly.

But his curiosity was neither meek nor accustomed to having its liberties interfered with, and it declined to leave the problem alone. Problem! It was a whole nest of problems. If you isolated one and worked out a tolerably satisfactory answer to it, you discovered that this answer made all the rest more fantastically impossible of solution than before. It actually began to cost him sleep! What made it harder to bear, of course, was the tantalizing possibility of finding out something by dropping in at the Globe during a performance, wandering back on the stage, where he was always perfectly welcome, going up and speaking to her and--seeing what happened. Something more or less