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

more sensitive to it. The latter, most likely. And yet Violet Williamson's manner the last Sunday evening he had spent at her house, had stopped just short of a hushed voice and tiptoes. He'd been momentarily expecting her to offer him an egg-nog.

But this paroxysm of tact that had just broken out in his office was really too much. Of course they'd been talking him over, those two. It must have been amply obvious to them for a good while that there was something more than met the eye, about that long visit of his wife's to California. And it was nice and human of them to feel sorry for him. But that they should decide, because _The Girl Up-stairs_ contained some rather coarsely derisive song, perhaps, about men whose wives run away from them, or something in the plot about a trip to California with a less honorable purpose than its ostensible one, that he should on no account be permitted to see the show, was ridiculous. He walked straight over to the club and told the man at the cigar counter to get him a ticket for to-night's performance.

It was then after five and he decided not to go back to the office before dinner. In fact, he might as well dine down here. So he went up to the lounge, armed himself with an evening paper against casual acquaintances, ordered a drink and dropped into a big leather chair.

But all his carefully contrived environment hadn't the power, it seemed, to shift the current of his thoughts. They went on dwelling on the behavior of Miss Beach and young Craig, which really got queerer the more one thought about it. It was hard to conceive of any allusion in the plot or the songs of a silly little musical comedy, pointed enough to account for Miss Beach's frantically determined effort to keep him away, or for the instantaneous flush that had leaped into young Craig's face. Because, after all, they didn't actually know that his great adventure had come to grief, and whatever either of them might have thought of the applicability of something that was said on the stage, to their employer's ease, it wouldn't have been a bit like either of them to discuss it with the other. In the absence of such a discussion, and the prevision of his going to the show, you couldn't account for young Craig's having caught the point instantly like that. And yet, what other explanation could there be? There was none, and there was an end of it!

Only it wasn't the end of it. The straying search-light of his memory picked up a moment during that last evening at the Williamsons'. The Crawfords had been there, and somebody else--a man he didn't know; and the stranger had said something, a harmless stupid remark enough, about the tired business man and the sort of musical-comedy he liked; whereupon both Constance and Violet had made a sort of concerted swoop and changed the subject almost violently. John Williamson made a practise of going to the Globe, he knew, but that John, who never spotted an allusion in his life, should have come home and passed the word along, and that all references to musical-comedy should therefore be taboo on Rodney's account, was simply fantastic.

But the fantasticality of an idea seemed, in his mood to-night, merely to give it the burr-like quality of sticking in his mind, holding on there with a hundred tiny barbs, despite his endeavors to pluck it out. It even occurred to him that the manner of the man at the cigar counter--the man he had just told to get him a ticket, had not been quite natural; had been a little exaggeratedly matter-of-fact. He always got his seats of that man, and the man always made some little encouraging remark, as, for example, that he'd heard it was a good show; or, more non-committally, that he hoped Mr. Aldrich would enjoy it. To-night, certainly, he'd said nothing of the sort.

The absurdity of this consideration was simply intolerable. He flung down his paper and went into the adjoining room--a room full of tables of various sizes, and thronged, at this hour, with members getting up an appetite for dinner by the shortest route. The large round table nearest the door was preempted by a group of men he knew; some of them well, some only casually, and he came up with the intention of dropping into the one vacant chair. But just before the first of them caught a glimpse of him, his ear picked up the phrase, "_The Girl Up-stairs_." And then a lawyer named Gaylord looked up and recognized him. "Hello, Aldrich," he said, and Rodney would have sworn that the flash of silence that followed had a galvanic quality that wasn't given it merely by his own imagination. The others began greeting him, urging him to sit down and have a drink.

Rodney pulled in a long breath: "Didn't I hear some one talking about _The Girl Up-stairs_?" he asked. "Is it a good show? Shall I go to see it?"

The silence was even briefer this time.

Gaylord spoke through what would pass for a yawn. "I don't know," he said. "I haven't seen it."

One or two of the others shook their heads blankly. Finally somebody else said: "Just a regular Globe show, I guess. All right; but hardly worth bothering about."

Once more they urged him to sit down and have a drink, but he said he was looking for somebody and walked away down the room and out the farther door.

He knew now that he was afraid. Yet the thing he was afraid of refused to come out into the open, where he could see it and know what it was. He still believed that he didn't know what it was, when he walked past the framed photographs in the lobby of the theater without looking at them and stopped at the box-office to exchange his seat, well down in front, for one near the back of the theater.

But when the sextette made their first entrance upon the stage, he knew that he had known for a good many hours.

He never stirred from his seat during either of the intermissions. But along in the third act, he got up and went out.

I doubt if ever a troglodytic ancestor of his had been as angry as Rodney was at that moment. Because, long before the pressure of the troglodyte's anger had mounted to the pressure of Rodney's, it would have relieved itself in action. He'd have descended on the scene, beating down any of the onlookers who might be fools enough to try to oppose his purpose, seized his woman and carried her off to his cave. Which is precisely and literally what Rodney, with every aching filament of nerve tissue in his body, most passionately wanted to do.

The knout that flogged his soul had a score of lashes, each with the sting of its own peculiar venom. Everybody who knew him, his closer friends, and his casual acquaintances as well, must have known, for weeks, of this disgrace. His friends had been sorry for him, with just a grain of contempt; his acquaintances had grinned over it with just a pleasurable salt of pity. "Do you know Aldrich? Well, his wife's in the chorus at the Globe Theater. And he doesn't know it, poor devil." That group at the round table at the club to-night. He could fancy their faces after he'd turned away.

Oh, but what did they matter after all? What did any of them matter? What did anything matter in the world, except that the woman he'd so whole-heartedly and utterly loved and lived for--the woman who'd left him with those protestations of the need of his friendship and respect, was there on that stage disporting herself for hire--and cheap hire at that, before this fatuous mass of humanity packed in all about him. They were staring at her, as the money they'd paid for admission entitled them to stare, licking their lips over her.

He hadn't had a moment's uncertainty that it was indeed she. Couldn't shelter himself, even for an instant, behind Jimmy Wallace's theory of an "amazing resemblance."

The others of their world had always known Rose as a person with a good deal of natural and quite unconscious dignity. She had never romped nor larked before any of them, and she conveyed the impression, not of refraining as a concession to good manners, but simply of being the sort of person who didn't, naturally, express herself in those ways. But in the interior privacies of their life together, she'd often shown herself, for him, a different Rose. She'd played with him with the abandon of a young kitten--romped and wrestled with him. And there'd been a deliciousness about this phase of her, which resided, for him, in the fact that it was kept for him alone.

But now, here on the stage of a cheap theater, she was parading that exquisite thing before the world! Along in the second act, where Sylvia's six friends come to spend the night with her and sleep out on the roof, there was a mad lark which brought up maddening memories. He felt that he must get his hands on her--shake her--beat her!

Yet, all the while, if any of his neighbors thought of him at all--became aware of him and wondered at him, it was only because he sat so still. And when the thing had become, at last, utterly unbearable, and he got up to go out, he managed to look at his watch first, quite in the manner of a "commuter" with anxieties about the ten-fifty-five train.

The northwest wind, which had been blowing icily since sundown, had increased in violence to a gale. But he strode out of the lobby and into the street, unaware of it. There must be a stage door somewhere, he knew, and he meant to find it. It didn't occur to him to inquire. He'd quite lost his sense of social being; of membership in a civilized society. He was another Ishmael.

It took him a long time to find that door, for, as it happened, he started around the block in the wrong direction and fruitlessly explored two alleys before he came on the right one. But he found it at last and pulled the door open. An intermittent roar of hand-clapping, increasing and diminishing with the rapid rise and fall of the curtain, told him that the performance was just over.

A doorman stopped him and asked him what he wanted.

"I want to see Mrs. Aldrich," he said, "Mrs. Rodney Aldrich."

"No such person here," said the man, and Rodney, in his rage, simply assumed that he was lying. It didn't occur to him that Rose would have taken another name.

He stood there a moment debating whether to attempt to force an entrance against the doorman's unmistakable intention to stop him, and decided to wait instead.

The decision wasn't due to common sense, but to a wish not to dissipate his rage on people that didn't matter. He wanted it intact for Rose.

He went back into the alley, braced himself in the angle of a brick pier and waited. He neither stamped his feet nor flailed his arms about to drive off the cold. He just stood still with the patience of his immemorial ancestor, waiting. Unconscious of the lapse of time, unconscious of the figures that presently began straggling out of the narrow door, that were not she.

Presently she came. A buffet of wind struck her as she closed the door