CHAPTER I

THE LENGTH OF A THOUSAND YARDS

"Here's the first week's rent then," said Rose, handing the landlady

three dollars, "and I think you'd better give me a receipt showing till

when it's paid for. Do you know where there's an expressman who would go

for a trunk?"

The landlady had tight gray hair, a hard bitten hatchet face, and a back

that curved through a forty-degree arc between the lumbar and the

cervical vertebræ, a curve which was accentuated by the faded

longitudinal blue and white stripes--like ticking--of the dress she

wore. She had no charms, one would have said, of person, mind or manner.

But it was nevertheless true that Rose was renting this room largely on

the strength of the landlady. She was so much more humanly possible than

any of the others at whose placarded doors Rose had knocked or rung ...!

For the last year and a half, anyway since she had married Rodney

Aldrich, the surface that life had presented to her had been as bland as

velvet. She'd never been spoken to by anybody except in terms of

politeness. All the people she encountered could be included under two

categories: her friends, if one stretches the word to include all her

social acquaintances, and, in an equally broad sense, her servants; that

is to say, people who earned their living by doing things she wanted

done. Her friends' and her servants' manners were not alike, to be sure,

but as far as intent went, they came to the same thing. They presented,

whatever passions, misfortunes, dislikes, uncomfortable facts of any

sort might lie in the background, a smooth and practically frictionless,

bearing surface. A person accustomed to that surface develops a soft

skin. This was about the first of Rose's discoveries.

To be looked at with undisguised suspicion--to have a door slammed in

her face as the negative answer to a civil question, left her at first

bewildered, and then enveloped in a blaze of indignation. It was perhaps

lucky for her that this happened at the very beginning of her

pilgrimage. Because, with that fire once alight within her, Rose could

go through anything. The horrible fawning, leering landlady whom she had

encountered later, might have turned her sick, but for that fine steady

glow. The hatchet-faced one she had finally arrived at, made no

protestations of her own respectability, and she seemed, though rather

reluctantly, willing to assume that of her prospective lodger. She was

puzzled about something, Rose could see; disposed to be very watchful

and at no pains to conceal this attitude.

Well, she'd probably learned that she had to watch, poor thing! And, for

that matter, Rose would probably have to do some watching on her own

account. And, if the fact was there, why bother to keep up a

contradictory fiction. So Rose asked for a receipt.

The matter of the trunk was easily disposed of. Rose had a check for it.

It was at the Polk Street Station. There was a cigar and news stand two

blocks down, the landlady said, where an expressman had his

headquarters. There was a blue sign out in front: "Schulz Express"; Rose

couldn't miss it.

The landlady went away to write out a receipt. Rose closed the door

after her and locked it.

It was a purely symbolistic act. She wasn't going to change her clothes

or anything, and she didn't particularly want to keep anybody out. But,

in a sense in which it had never quite been true before, this was her

room, a room where any one lacking her specific invitation to enter,

would be an intruder--a condition that had not obtained either in her

mother's house or in Rodney's.

She smiled widely over the absurdity of indulging in a pleasurable

feeling of possession in a squalid little cubby-hole like this. The

wall-paper was stained and faded, the paint on the soft-wood floor worn

through in streaks; there was an iron bed--a double bed, painted light

blue and lashed with string where one of its joints showed a disposition

to pull out. The mattress on the bed was lumpy. There was a

dingy-looking oak bureau with a rather small but pretty good plate-glass

mirror on it; a marble topped, black walnut wash-stand; a pitcher of the

plainest and cheapest white ware standing in a bowl on top of it, and a

highly ornate, hand-painted slop-jar--the sole survivor, evidently, of a

much prized set--under the lee of it. The steep gable of the roof cut

away most of one side of the room, though there would be space for

Rose's trunk to stand under it, and across the corner, at a curiously

distressing angle, hung an inadequate curtain that had five or six

clothes hooks behind it.

In the foreground of the view out of the window, was a large oblong

plateau--the flat roof of an extension which had casually been attached

to the front of the building and carried it forward to the sidewalk over

what had once been a small front yard. The extension had a plate-glass

front and was occupied, Rose had noticed before she plunged into the

little tunnel that ran alongside it and led to the main building, by a

dealer in delicatessen. Over the edge of the flat roof, she could see

the top third of two endless streams of trolley-cars, for the traffic in

this street was heavy, by night, she imagined, as well as by day.

The opposite façade of the street, like the one of which her own wall

and window formed a part, was highly irregular and utterly casual. There

were cheap two-story brick stores with false fronts that carried them up

a half story higher. There were little gable-ended cottages with their

fronts hacked out into show-windows. There were double houses of brick

with stone trimmings that once had had some residential pretensions. The

one characteristic that they possessed in common, was that of having

been designed, patently, for some purpose totally different from the one

they now served.

The shops on the street level had, for the most part, an air of shabby

prosperity. There was, within the space Rose's window commanded, a cheap

little tailor shop, the important part of whose business was advertised

by the sign "pressing done." There was a tobacconist's shop whose

unwashed windows revealed an array of large wooden buckets and dusty

lithographs; a shoe shop that did repairing neatly while you waited; a

rather fly-specked looking bakery. There was a saloon on the corner, and

beside it, a four-foot doorway with a painted transom over it that

announced it as the entrance of the Bellevue Hotel.

The signs on the second-story windows indicated dentist parlors, the

homes of mid-wives, ladies' tailors and dressmakers, and everywhere

furnished rooms for light housekeeping to let.

The people who patronized those shops, who drank their beer at the

corner saloon, who'd be coming hurriedly in the night to ring up the

mid-wife, who smoked the sort of tobacco that was sold from those big

wooden buckets; the people who lounged along the wide sidewalks, or came

riding down-town at seven in the morning, and back at six at night,

packed so tight that they couldn't get their arms up to hold by the

straps in the big roaring cars that kept that incessant procession going

in the middle of the street--they all inhabited, Rose realized, a world

utterly different from the one she had left. The distance between the

hurrying life she looked out on through her grimy window, and that which

she had been wont to contemplate through Florence McCrea's exquisitely

leaded casements, was simply planetary.

And yet, queerly enough, in terms of literal lineal measurement, the

distance between the windows themselves, was less than a thousand yards.

Less than ten minutes' walking from the mouth of the little tunnel

alongside the delicatessen shop, would take her back to her husband's

door. She had, in her flight out into the new world, doubled back on her

trail. And, such is the enormous social and spiritual distance between

North Clark Street and The Drive, she was as safely hidden here, as

completely out of the orbit of any of her friends, or even of her

friends' servants, as she could have been in New York or in San

Francisco.

Having to come away furtively like this was a terrible countermine

beneath her courage. If only she could have had a flourish of defiant

trumpets to speed her on her way! But, done like that, the thing would

have hurt Rodney too intolerably. His intelligence might be twentieth

century or beyond. It might acquiesce in, or even enthusiastically

advocate, a relation between men and women that hadn't existed, anyway

since the beginning of the Christian Era; it might accept without

faltering, all the corollaries pendent to that relation. But his

actuating instincts, his psychical reflexes, stretched their roots away

back to the Middle Ages. Under the dominance of those instincts, a man

lost caste--became an object of contemptuous derision, if he couldn't

keep his wife. It was bad enough to have another man take her away from

him, but it was worse to have her go away in the absence of such an

excuse; worst of all, to have her go away to seek a job and earn her own

living.

Rose didn't know how long the secret could be kept. Wherever she went,

whatever she did, there'd always be the risk that some one who could

carry back the news to Rodney's friends, would recognize her. It was a

risk that had to be taken, and she didn't intend to allow herself to be

paralyzed by a perpetual dread of what might at any time happen. At the

same time, she'd protect the secret as well as she could.

But there were two people it couldn't be kept from--Portia and her

mother. Rose had at first entertained the notion of keeping her mother

in the dark. It wasn't until she had spent a good many hours figuring

out expedients for keeping the deception going, that she realized it

couldn't be done. She had been writing her mother a letter a week ever

since the departure to California--letters naturally full of domestic

details that simply couldn't be kept up. The only possible deception

would be a compromise with the truth and compromises of that sort are

apt to be pretty unsatisfactory. They suggest concealments in every

phase, and to an imaginative mind, are more terrifying, nine times in

ten, than the truth you're trying to soften. Then, too, the story given

out to Rodney's friends being that Rose was in California with her

mother and Portia, left the chance always open for some contretemps

which would lead to her mother's discovering the truth in a surprising

and shocking way.

But the truth itself, confidently stated, not as a tragic ending, but

as the splendid hopeful beginning of a life of truer happiness for Rose

and her husband, needn't be a shock. So this was what Rose had borne

down on in her letter to Portia. It wasn't a very long letter,

considering how much it had to tell.

"... I have found the big thing couldn't be had without a fight,"

she wrote. "You shouldn't be surprised, because you've probably

found out for yourself that nothing worth having comes very easily.

But you're not to worry about me, nor be afraid for me, because I'm

going to win. I'm making the fight, somehow, for you as well as for

myself. I want you to know that. I think that realizing I was

living your life as well as mine, is what has given me the courage

to start....

"I've got some plans, but I'm not going to tell you what they are.

But I'll write to you every week and tell you what I've done and I

want you to write to Rodney. I want to be sure that you understand

this: Rodney isn't to blame for what's happened. I don't feel that

I am, either, exactly. We're just in a situation that there's only

one real way out of. I don't know whether he sees that yet or not.

He's too terribly hurt and bewildered. But we haven't quarreled,

and I believe we're further in love with each other than we've ever

been before. I know I am with him....

"Break this thing to mother as gently as you like, but tell her

everything before you stop...."

This letter written and despatched, she had worked out the details of

her departure with a good deal of care. In her own house, before her

servants, she had tried to act--and she felt satisfied that her attempt

was successful--just as she would have done had her pretended telegram

really come from Portia. She had packed, looked up trains, made a

reservation. She had called up Frederica and told her the news. The

train she had selected left at an hour and on a day when she knew

Frederica wouldn't be able to come and see her off. Frederica had come

down to the house of course to say good-by to her, and carrying her

pretense through that scene, that had for her so much deeper and more

poignant a regret than she dared show--because she really loved

Frederica--was, next to bidding the twins good-by, the hardest thing she

had to go through with. Lying and pretending were always terribly hard

for Rose, and a lie to any one she was fond of, almost impossible. The

only thing that enabled her to see it through, was the consideration

that she was doing it for Rodney. He'd probably tell Frederica what had

happened in time, but Rose was determined that he should have the

privilege of choosing his own time for doing it.

Her bag was packed, her trunk was gone, her motor waiting at the door to

take her to the station, when the maid Doris brought the twins home from

their airing. This wasn't chance, but prearrangement.

"Give them to me;" Rose said, "and then you may go up and tell Mrs.

Ruston she may have them in a few minutes."

She took them into her bedroom and laid them side by side on her bed.

They had thriven finely--justified, as far as that went, Harriet's

decision in favor of bottle feeding. Had she died back there in that bed

of pain, never come out of the ether at all, they'd still be just like

this--plump, placid, methodical. Rose had thought of that a hundred

times, but it wasn't what she was thinking of now.

The thing that caught her as she stood looking down on them, was the

wave of sudden pity. She saw them suddenly as persons with the long road

all ahead of them, as a boy and a girl, a youth and a maid, a man and a

woman. They were destined to have their hopes and loves, fears,

triumphs, tragedies perhaps. The boy there, Rodney, might have to face,

some day, the situation his father confronted now; might have to come

back into an empty home, and turn a stiff inexpressive face on a coolly

curious world. Little Portia there might find herself, some day, gazing

with wide seared eyes, at a life some unexpected turn of the wheel of

Fate had thrust her, all unprepared, into the midst of. Or it might be

her fate to love without attracting love--to drain all the blood out of

her life in necessary sacrifices; to wither that some one else might

have a chance to grow. Those possibilities were all there before these

two solemn, staring, little helpless things on the bed. What toys of

Chance they were!

She'd never thought of them like that before. The baby she had looked

forward to--the baby she hadn't had--had never been thought of that way

either. It was to be something to provide her, Rose, with an occupation;

to enable her to interpret her life in new terms; to make an alchemic

change in the very substance of it. The transmutation hadn't taken

place. She surmised now, dimly, that she hadn't deserved it should.

"You've never had a mother at all, you poor little mites," she said.

"But you're going to have one some day. You're going to be able to come

to her with your troubles, because she'll have had troubles herself.

She'll help you bear your hurts, because she's had hurts of her own. And

she'll be able to teach you to stand the gaff, because she's stood it

herself."

For the first time since they were born, she was thinking of their need

of her rather than of her need of them and with that thought, came for

the first time, the surge of passionate maternal love that she had

waited for, so long in vain. There was, suddenly, an intolerable ache in

her heart that could only have been satisfied by crushing them up

against her breast; kissing their hands--their feet.

Rose stood there quivering, giddy with the force of it. "Oh, you

darlings!" she said. "But wait--wait until I deserve it!" And without

touching them at all, she went to the door and opened it. Mrs. Ruston

and Doris were both waiting in the hall.

"I must go now," she said. "Good-by. Keep them carefully for me." Her

voice was steady, and though her eyes were bright, there was no trace of

tears upon her cheeks. But there was a kind of glory shining in her face

that was too much for Doris, who turned away and sobbed loudly. Even

Mrs. Ruston's eyes were wet.

"Good-by," said Rose again, and went down composedly enough to her car.

She rode down to the station, shook hands with and said good-by to

Otto, the chauffeur, allowed the porter to carry her bag into the

waiting-room. There she tipped the porter, picked up the bag herself,

and walked out the other door; crossed over to Clark Street and took a

street-car. At Chicago Avenue she got off and walked north, keeping her

eye open for placards advertising rooms to let. It was at the end of

about a half mile that she found the hatchet-faced landlady, paid her

three dollars, and locked her door, as a symbol, perhaps, of the bigger

heavier door that she had swung to and locked on the whole of her past

life.

Amid all the welter of emotions boiling up within her, grief was not

present. There was a very deep-reaching excitement that sharpened all

her faculties; that even made her see colors more brightly and hear

fainter sounds. There was an intent eagerness to get the new life fairly

begun. But, strangest of all, and yet so vivid that even its strangeness

couldn't prevent her being aware of it, was a perfectly enormous relief.

The thing which, when she had first faced it as the only thoroughfare to

the real life she so passionately wanted, had seemed such a veritable

nightmare, was an accomplished fact. The week of acute agony she had

lived through while she was forcing her sudden resolution on Rodney had

been all but unendurable with the enforced contemplation of the moment

of parting which it brought so relentlessly nearer. There had been a

terror, too, lest when the moment actually came, she couldn't do it.

Well, and now it had come and gone! The surgery of the thing was over.

The nerves and sinews were cut. The thing was done. The girl who stood

there now in her three-dollar room was free; had won a fresh blank page

to write the characters of her life upon.

She felt a little guilty about this. What heartless sort of a monster

must she be to feel--why, actually happy, at a moment like this? She

ought to be prone on the bed, her face buried in the musty pillow,

sobbing her heart out.

But presently, standing there, looking down on the lumpy bed, she smiled

widely instead, over the notion of doing it as a sort of concession to

respectability. She had got her absolution from Rodney himself out of

the memory of their first real talk together. Discipline, he'd said, was

accepting the facts of life as they were. Not raising a lamentation

because they weren't different. The only way you had of getting anywhere

was by riding on the backs of your own passions. Well, her great ride

was just beginning!

Rose dusted the mirror with a towel--a reckless act, as she saw for

herself, when she discovered she was going to have to use that towel for

a week--and took an appraising look at herself. Then she nodded

confidently--there was nothing the matter with her looks--and resumed

her ulster, her rubbers and her umbrella, for it was the kind of

December day that called for all three. Her landlady could stick the

receipt under the door, she reflected, as she locked it.

Two blocks down the street, she found, as predicted, the cigar store

with the blue sign, "Schulz Express," and left her trunk check there

with her address and fifty cents. Then, putting up her umbrella, and

glowingly conscious that she was saving a nickel by so doing, she set

off down-town afoot to get a job. She meant to get it that very

afternoon. And, partly because she meant to so very definitely, she did.

I don't mean to say that getting a job is a purely volitional matter.

There is the factor of luck, always large of course, though not quite so

large as a great many people suppose, and the factor of intelligence.

Rose's intelligence had been in pretty active training for the last

year. Ever since her talk with Simone Gréville had set her thinking, she

had been learning how to weigh and assess facts apart from their

emotional nebulæ. She'd taught herself how to look a disagreeable or

humiliating fact in the face as steadily and as coolly as she looked at

any other fact.

She had accumulated a whole lot of facts about women in industry from

Barry Lake and Jane. She knew the sort of job and the sort of pay that

the average untrained woman gets. She knew some of the reasons why the

pay was so miserably, intolerably small. She knew about the vast army of

young women who weren't expected to be fully self-supporting, who

counted on marrying comfortably enough some day, and accepted board and

lodging at home as one of the natural laws of existence. But who, if

they wanted pocket money, pretty enough clothes to make them attractive

enough for men to want to marry; who, if they wanted to escape the

stupid drudgery of housework at home, had to go to work. They'd rather

get eight dollars a week than six, of course, or ten than eight. But as

long as even six was velvet (cotton-backed velvet, one might say) they'd

take that, cheerfully oblivious to the fact, as naturally one might

expect them to be, that by taking six, they established a standard at

which a girl who had to earn her own living simply couldn't live.

Rose knew exactly what would happen to her if she went to one of the big

State Street department stores and asked for a job. Jane had been trying

some experiments lately, and stating her results with convincing

vivacity at their little dinners afterward. There was no thoroughfare

there.

She knew too, what sort of life she'd have to face if she offered

herself out in the West Side factory district as a cracker packer, a

chocolate dipper, a glove stitcher; any of those things. You got a sort

of training, of course, at any one of these trades. You learned to

develop a certain uncanny miraculous speed and skill in some one small

operation, as remorseless and unvaried as the coming into mesh and out

again of two cogs in a pair of gears. But the very highest skill could

just about be made to keep you alive, and it led to nothing else. You

wore out your body and asphyxiated your soul.

Rose didn't mean to do that. She was holding both body and soul in

trust. The penitential mood that had resulted from her talk with Portia

was utterly gone. She wasn't looking for hurts. Deliberately to impose

tortures on herself was as far from her intent as shirking any of the

inevitable trials that should come to her in the course of the day's

work. The only way she could see to a life of decent self-respecting

independence lay through some sort of special training--business

training, she thought. She'd begin by learning to be a stenographer--a

cracking good stenographer. Miss Beach had begun that way. She had a

real job.

Only, Rose had first to get a job that would pay for her training; and

not only pay for it, but leave time for it; a problem which might have

seemed like the problem of lifting yourself by your boot straps, if it

hadn't been for Jimmy Wallace--Jimmy with his talk about chorus-girls.

The trouble with that profession, Jimmy had said, was that the

indispensable assets in it were not industry, intelligence, ambitions,

but a reasonably presentable pair of arms and legs (a good-looking face

would surely come in handy too) and a rudimentary sense of rhythm.

Another demoralizing thing about it, he had said, was the fact that the

work wasn't hard enough, except during rehearsal, to keep its votaries

out of mischief.

When the notion first occurred to her that these statements of Jimmy's

might some day have an interest for her that was personal rather than

academic, she had dismissed it with a shrug of good-humored amusement.

It wasn't until her idea of leaving Rodney and going out and making a

living and a life for herself had hardened into a fixed resolution, and

she had begun serious consideration of ways and means, that she called

it back into her mind. There was no use blinking the facts. The one

marketable asset she would possess when she walked out of her husband's

house, was simply--how she looked.

Well then, if that was all you had, there was no degradation in using it

until you could make yourself the possessor of something else. And the

merit of this particular sort of job, for her, lay precisely in the

thing that Jimmy had cited as its chief disadvantage--it left you

abundant leisure. You might occupy that leisure getting into

mischief--no doubt most chorus-girls did. But there was nothing to

prevent your using it to better advantage.

With this in mind, on the Sunday before Rose went away, she had studied

the dramatic section of the morning paper with a good deal of care and

was rewarded by finding among the news notes, an item referring to a

new musical comedy that was to be produced at the Globe Theater

immediately after the Christmas holidays. _The Girl Up-stairs_ was the

title of it. It was spoken of as one of the regular Globe productions,

so it was probable that Jimmy Wallace's experience with the production

of an earlier number in the series would at least give her something to

go by. The thing must be in rehearsal now.

Granted that she was going to be a chorus-girl for a while, she could

hardly find a better place than one of the Globe productions to be one

in. According to Jimmy Wallace, it was a decent enough little place, and

yet it possessed the advantage of being spiritually as well as actually,

west of Clark Street. Rodney's friends were less likely to go there, and

so have a chance of recognizing her, than to any other theater in the

city, barring of course the flagrantly and shamelessly vulgar ones of

the purlieus.

Among her older friends of school and college days, the chances were of

course worse. But even if she were seen on the stage by people who knew

her, even though they were to say to each other that that girl looked

surprisingly like Rose Aldrich, this would be a very different thing

from full recognition. She would be well protected by the utter

unlikelihood of her being in such a place; by the absence of anybody's

knowledge that she had flown off at a tangent from the orbit of Rodney's

world. Then, too, she'd be somewhat disguised no doubt, by make-up. Of

course with all those considerations weighed at their full value, there

remained a risk that she would be fully discovered and recognized. But

it was a risk that couldn't be avoided, whatever she did.

She entertained for a while, the notion of taking Jimmy Wallace into her

confidence--he had as many depositors of confidences on his books, as a

savings bank, and he was just as safe. It was altogether likely that he

could get her a job out of hand. He was still on the best of terms with

the Globe people, and he was a really influential critic. But even if he

didn't get her a job outright, he could at least tell her how to set

about getting one for herself--where to go, whom to ask for, the right

way to phrase her request, which makes such an enormous difference in

things of that kind.

But she wasn't long in abandoning the notion of appealing to Jimmy at

all. The corner-stone of her new adventure must be that she was doing

things for herself; that she was through being helped, having ways

smoothed for her, things done for her. If she owed her first job even

indirectly to Jimmy, all the rest of her structure would be out of

plumb. Whatever success she might have would be tainted by the misgiving

that but for somebody else's help, she might have failed. Rose Stanton

who had rented that three-dollar room was going to be beholden to

nobody!

The news item in the paper gave her really all she needed. It told her

that a production was in rehearsal and it mentioned the name of the

director, John Galbraith, referring to him as one of the three most

prominent musical-comedy directors in the country; imported from New

York at vast expense, to make this production unique in the annals of

the Globe, and so forth.

They hadn't rehearsed Jimmy's piece, she knew, in the theater itself,

but in all sorts of queer out-of-the-way places--in theaters that

happened for the moment to be "dark," in dance-halls; pretty much

anywhere. This was because there was another show running at the time at

the Globe. She had looked in the theater advertisements to see whether a

show was running there now. Yes, there was. Well, that gave her her

formula.

When she asked at the box office at the Globe Theater, where they were

rehearsing _The Girl Up-stairs_ to-day, the nicely manicured young man

inside, answered automatically, "North End Hall."

Evidently Jimmy Wallace couldn't have phrased the question better

himself. But the quality of the voice that asked it had, even to his not

very sensitive ear, an unaccustomed flavor. So, almost simultaneously

with his answer, he looked up from his finger-nails and shot an

inquiring glance through the grille.

What he saw betrayed him into an involuntary stare. He didn't mean to

stare; he meant to be respectful. But he was surprised. Rose, in the

plainest suit that she could hope would seem plausible to her servants

for a traveling costume to California, an ulster and a little beaver hat

with a quill in it, had no misgivings about looking the part of a

potentially hard-working young woman renting a three-dollar room on

North Clark Street and seeking employment in a musical-comedy chorus. A

realization that her neat black seal dressing-case wasn't quite in the

picture, helped to account for the landlady's puzzlement about her. But

it hadn't been introduced in evidence here. And yet the young man behind

the grille seemed as surprised as the landlady.

He repeated his answer to her question with the lubricant of a few more

words and a fatuous sort of smile. "I believe they rehearse in the North

End Hall this afternoon."

Rose couldn't help smiling a little herself. "I'm afraid," she said,

"I'll have to ask where that is."

"Not at all," said the young man idiotically, and he told her the

address; then cast about for a slip of paper to write it down on,

racking his thimbleful of brains all the while to make out who she could

be. She wasn't one of the principals in the company. They'd all reported

and he hadn't heard that any of them was to be replaced.

"Oh, you needn't write it," said Rose. "I can remember, thank you." She

gave him a pleasant sort of boyish nod that didn't classify at all with

anything in his experience, and walked out of the lobby.

He stared after her almost resentfully, feeling all mussed up, somehow,

and inadequate; as if here had been a situation that he had failed

signally to make the most of. He sat there for the next half-hour

gloomily thinking up things he might have said to her.