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

Miss Gibbons,--with those keen straight-looking eyes that had observed her fellow citizens of Centropolis for the last half-century or so, not in vain; with her courageous common sense, and with that dry, cool, astringent manner, which lay with a pleasant healing sting on the lacerations of Rose's soul.

For a while she just sat still and tried to get the catch out of her breathing. At last, when she thought she could trust her voice not to break absurdly, she smiled and said:

"What sort of hat do you want me to trim? I mean, for what sort of person?"

"What sort of person!" echoed Miss Gibbons and gave Rose a rather keen look. "Why," she said, after hesitating a moment, "there's a silly old maid in this town. She ain't more than ten years younger than I am, but her hair's stayed sort of fluffy and yellow, and she's kept part of her looks, though not near as much of them as she thinks. She was a beautiful girl at twenty, I'll say that for her. None of these girls now compares with her. But she was a little too sure of herself and took too long deciding among the young men of this town, until all at once, she found that nobody wanted her. She's been trying ever since to show she doesn't care; and she pesters the life out of me twice a year trying to fit her out with a hat. I won't let her go around the streets looking like a giddy young fool, and that's what she's determined to do. So, if you can suit her _and_ me, you will be doing pretty well."

The description made a picture for Rose. She saw the faded pathetic prettiness of the woman who'd looked too long and had been trying to pretend for the last fifteen years or so that she didn't care. And the picture in her mind's eye was surmounted by a hat; a hat that conceded some of the years Miss Gibbons had insisted on, and that her client was unwilling to acknowledge, and yet retained a sort of jauntiness.

She didn't know whether she could execute the thing she saw or not, out of the stock of materials at her disposal. But it hadn't cost her a thought or an effort to see the hat.

"All right," she said after a bit. "I'll see what I can do. If you'll show me where the things are ..."

It was a much humbler sort of job, of course, designing a hat for a middle-aged village spinster, than making those dozen gowns for Goldsmith and Block had been. But this consideration never occurred to her. She found, and was not even amazed to find, the same thrill of exhilaration in conquering the small problem, that she had found in the larger one. She worked with the same swift unconscious economy of labor and materials.

At the end of two hours, she presented the result of her labors for the milliner's approval.

Miss Gibbons surveyed it with a smile of ironic appreciation.

"It isn't what I'd call a real finished job," she commented after a minute inspection of some of the details of Rose's sewing. "I wouldn't trust it in a high wind not to scatter all the way from here to the Presbyterian church. But it will certainly suit Agatha Stebbins."

She looked at it a while longer. "And I don't know," she concluded a little reluctantly, "as it'll look so all-mighty foolish on her, either. Will ten dollars a week suit you to begin on?"

"Yes," said Rose, "that will suit me very well indeed."

"All right," said Miss Gibbons. "That's settled. There's one more thing to settle now, and that's where you're going to live."

Rose contemplated this question a little blankly for a moment.

"Do you suppose," she said, "there's any place in this town where I _can_ live; where they'd take a person like me? Or would it be all right, if you asked them?"

"Oh, I guess," said Miss Gibbons, "we could most likely find somebody. I'll think about it."

She gave Rose some work to do and didn't refer to the matter again till nearly six o'clock.

"I've been thinking," she said then, "that I've got room for a boarder myself. There's a little room back here that I don't use; there's a black girl does me out and cooks my dinner and supper, and I get my own breakfast. The girl could cook for two as well as one, and I guess I could feed you for two dollars a week. If that ain't satisfactory, you can just say so."

"Satisfactory!" said Rose, and once more her voice broke.

"All right," said Miss Gibbons hastily, "we'll say no more about it. That's settled. I'll send the girl to the hotel to get your bags."

John Galbraith's letter asking Rose to report to him July first in New York, reached her via Portia, during the last week in June, and made an abrupt conclusion to her life at Centropolis.

Those weeks with Miss Gibbons in the millinery parlor, when she looked back on them afterward, set in as they were between that purgatorial winter and the first breathless months while she was establishing herself in New York, had a quality of happiness and peace, which she was wont to describe as heavenly.

She'd probably have taken to Miss Gibbons in any circumstance. But, coming into her life just when she did, the little woman was the shadow of a great rock to her. She was in a state, when she settled down in the milliner's spare back room over the drug-store, where all the warmer emotions seemed terrible to her. It was Rodney's love for her and hers for him, that had bruised and lacerated her; that had made the winter months a long torment, unmitigated during the last of them, by any form of adequate self-expression. The two parodies on love which had been thrust into her face just at the end, Olga Larson's inverted form of it toward herself, and Dolly's shabby little romance, had given her an absolute loathing for it. To her, in that condition, any expression of friendship that was warm and soft, and in the least sentimental, would have been almost unendurable to her. Miss Gibbons, in that acrid antiseptic way of hers, simply washed her soul in cold water and clothed it again in the garments of self-respect.

Her manner to Rose, even as their friendship ripened and grew more confident, never changed. Nor did the manner Rose adopted toward her. Their endless talks resulted in a good deal of self-revelation, but this was never direct. Miss Gibbons never again came as near to a confidential account of her life, as she did on that first afternoon, when she explained the thoroughness of her acquaintance with Judge Granger. And Rose never explained how it had happened that she was left at the mercy of the town of Centropolis by the failure of _The Girl Up-stairs_ company. But she poured out for her friend a wealth of illustrative reminiscences, drawn from her childhood, her days at the university, her life on the stage; and though she was a good deal more reticent about it, she even touched on her married life with Rodney; at least, on the collateral incidents of it.

Miss Gibbons listened to all this with a hunger she didn't conceal, and this eagerness gave Rose a pretty vivid picture of the inner life the little woman had lived here in Centropolis.

If she'd been born a boy instead of a girl, she'd probably have equaled, or outstripped, Rose thought, her father's eminence. With her courage, her vitality, her fine penetrating intelligence, she'd have managed to win her way out of this stagnant little back-water of life. But, having been born a girl, brought up helpless, as became the daughter of the circuit judge, and then having had this support wrenched from under her at the critical moment, there had been nothing for her but--hats.

She'd never gone sour, at that; never, apparently, wasted any hours in repining. She'd made, after a fashion, a career of hats; had risen on them, to a position of acknowledged social consequence. There must have been disquieting echoes in her, rhythms that answered to the pulsation of an ampler life. She never could hope to get out into it, she undoubtedly knew, but she took every opportunity she could get for a glimpse at it. Rose's incursion into her life must have been a godsend to her.

She probably pieced together a pretty good picture of Rose, too. But she did this piecing in silence and kept her surmises to herself.

In a material way, her adoption of Rose was an immense success. Centropolis, when it learned the news, was thunder-struck. For a matter of hours, one might say, the town held its breath. Then it began to talk. The women began asking questions: What did the actress look like? The men offered lame descriptions. Rose had been seen, apparently, that morning on Main Street, by the entire male population, but their descriptions weren't satisfactory. Curiosity must be assuaged! But Rose never went into the stores on Main Street; never patronized the picture-show, and even had these glimpses been afforded, they'd have been pretty unsatisfactory. There was only one real way of discovering what the creature was like; discovering for yourself, that is--and hearsay evidence is notoriously unreliable; that was to buy a hat of Lizzie Gibbons.

The first daring adventurer was Agatha Stebbins. Agatha found, you will remember, the hat Rose had already designed for her. And, as Miss Gibbons caustically disclaimed the authorship of it ("I'd never have made you up a thing like that, you can believe!") and as Miss Stebbins, after a moment's hesitation, decided she adored it, another inducement, though perhaps a superfluous one, was offered for visits to the atelier.

"Of course she isn't what you could call genteel," Miss Stebbins explained, parading her acquisition, "and she's never had any advantages. And as to her moral character, I suppose the less said the better. Lizzie Gibbons can settle that question with her own conscience. But when it comes to hats she's got more gimp in her little finger than Lizzie's got in both hands. Dear, no! She's not what I call pretty. Not with a mouth like that. Of course the men ..."

So Miss Gibbons' spring business was distended to unrecognizable proportions. Rose fitted on hats in the show-room during business hours and took a mischievous delight in the assumption of the intangible manner of a perfect shop-assistant; in saying "Yes, madam," and "No, madam," and "Will you try this, madam?" with a perfection of politeness that baffled the most determined curiosity. Miss Gibbons got as much fun out of it as she did.

The hours in the workroom were pleasant ones, too, with their perpetual reminder that the creative power that had deserted her last January, had come back. The little problems were ludicrously easy, of course but they stimulated a pleasant sense of reserve power.

She couldn't, of course, have stayed in Centropolis indefinitely. In time, that feeling of mounting energy would have driven her out in search of something that would test it.

But, when Galbraith's letter came, it took her a little aback. Miss Gibbons had brought it in; because Rose, even then, didn't go to the post-office. Miss Gibbons watched her tear open the big envelope addressed to Rose in the handwriting that always went with the California post-mark, and saw her take another unopened letter out of it. She saw the girl's face set itself