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

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 facade 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