CHAPTER XIV

THE MIRY WAY

Rodney's docility didn't go to the length of the dose of veronal Harriet

had recommended, but it did assent to a program that occupied the

greater part of the day, including a Turkish bath, a good sleep, fresh

clothes and the first decently cooked meal he had had since he'd dined

at the club three days ago. When he turned into his office, about five

o'clock, he was his own man again, perfectly capable of a greeting to

Craig and Miss Beach which consigned the last scene between them here in

the office to oblivion.

His fortitude was put to the test, too, during the first five minutes.

In the stack of correspondence on his desk, to which Miss Beach directed

his attention, was an unopened envelope addressed to him in Rose's

handwriting. He couldn't restrain, of course, a momentary wild hope that

she had written to tell him he was forgiven, or at least to offer him

the chance of asking her forgiveness. But he paused to steel himself

against this hope before looking to see what the thing contained.

It was well he did so, because there was nothing in it but a postal

money-order for a hundred dollars; not an explanatory line of any sort.

Of course the message it carried didn't need writing. It smarted like a

slap across the face. Yet, down underneath the smart, he felt something

that glowed more deeply, a feeling he couldn't have named or recognized,

of pride in her courage.

He was badly in need of something to be proud of, too, for the next two

days were full of humiliations. When he told Harriet and Frederica that

he would see Rose himself, he hadn't any program for carrying out this

intention. He didn't want to wait for her again at the stage door.

There mustn't be anything about their next talk together to remind her

of their last one, and it would be better if she could be assured in

advance that she had nothing to fear from him. So the first thing to do

was to write her a letter that would show her how he felt and how little

he meant to ask. But before he could write the letter, he must learn her

name.

He thought of Jimmy Wallace as a person who'd be able to help him out,

here, but in the circumstances Jimmy was the last person he wanted to go

to. There was no telling how much Jimmy might know about the situation

already. The intolerable thought occurred to him that Rose might even

have talked with Jimmy about going on the stage before she left his

house. No, the person to see was the manager of the theater. He'd

describe Rose to him and ask him who she was.

His attempt to carry out this part of his plan was disastrously

unsuccessful. Theatrical managers no doubt cherish an ideal of courteous

behavior. But, since ninety-nine out of a hundred of the strangers who

ask for them at the box-office window, are actuated by a desire to get

into their theaters without paying for their seats, they develop,

protectively, a manner of undisguised suspicion toward all people who

don't know them, and toward about three-quarters of those who pretend

they do. It wasn't a manner Rodney was accustomed to, and it irritated

him. Then, until he had got his request half stated, it didn't occur to

him in what light the manager would be amply justified in regarding it.

That notion, which he interpreted from a look in the manager's face,

confused and angered him, and he stumbled and stammered, which angered

him still more.

"We don't do that sort of thing in this theater," the manager said

loudly (the conversation had taken place in the lobby of the theater,

too) and turned away.

The grotesque improbability of the true explanation that the woman whose

name he was inquiring about was his wife, silenced him and turned him

away. It was fortunate for Rodney it did so. The thing would have made a

wonderful story for the press agent, if he hadn't stopped just where he

did.

He spent the rest of that evening, and a good part of the next day,

trying to think of some alternative to waiting again at the stage door.

But, except for the still inadmissible one of going to Jimmy Wallace, he

couldn't think of one. So, at a quarter past seven that night, he

stationed himself once more in the miserable alley, to wait for Rose.

Seeing her before the show would, he thought, be an improvement on

waiting till after it. The mere fact that they wouldn't have very long

to talk, ought to reassure her that he didn't mean to take any

advantages. He could show her how contrite he was, how little he meant

to ask, and then leave it to her to select a place, at her own leisure

and convenience, to talk over the terms of their treaty.

He waited from a quarter after seven to half past eight, but Rose didn't

come. The thought that perhaps he hadn't taken his station early enough

sent him back to another vigil at half past ten. At a quarter to twelve,

his patience exhausted, he opened the stage door and told the doorman he

was waiting for one of the girls in the sextette. The doorman informed

him they had all gone home.

There was, unfortunately, no matinée the next day, and it was only by

the exercise of all the will power he had, that he stayed in his office

and did his work and waited for the hour of the evening performance.

Then he went to the theater and bought a ticket. When the sextette made

its first appearance on the stage, he saw that another girl than Rose

was taking her part. He went out into the lobby, and once more sought

the manager. But this time with a different air.

"Haven't you an office somewhere where we can talk?" he demanded. "This

is important."

Evidently the manager saw it was, because he conducted him to a small

room with a desk in it, half-way up the balcony stairs, and nodded him

to a chair.

"There was a young woman in your company," Rodney said, "in the

sextette. She isn't playing to-night. I want to know what her stage name

is, and where she can be found. I assure you that it's of the first

importance to her that I should find her."

The manager's manner was different, too. He looked perplexed and rather

unhappy. But he didn't tell Rodney what he wanted to know.

"She's left the company," he said, "permanently. That's all I can tell

you."

"Is she ill?" Rodney demanded.

The manager said not that he knew of, but this was all that was to be

got out of him.

The thing that finally silenced Rodney and sent him away, was the

reflection that the man might be withholding information about her, on

Rose's own request.

He went away, sore, angry, discouraged. Jimmy Wallace seemed about the

only hope there was. But he'd be damned if he'd go to Jimmy. Not yet,

anyway. And then he thought of Portia!

She'd tell him. She'd have to tell him. Why hadn't he thought of her

before? He'd write to her the message to Rose he'd tried to get

Frederica to carry. No, he wouldn't do that! He'd go to her. And there

was a chance ... Why, there was the best kind of chance! Why hadn't he

thought of it before? Why had he been such an idiot as to waste all

these days!

It seemed almost certain he'd find Rose there with her. She'd felt--she

couldn't have helped feeling after the things he'd said to her that

ghastly night in the little North Clark Street room--that she couldn't

go on. And stripped of her job like that, with nothing else to turn to,

where should she go but home to her mother and sister? To the only

friends and comforters she had in the world.

He'd send no word in advance of his coming. He'd just come up to the

door of the little bungalow and ring the bell. And there was a chance

that the person who'd come to answer it would be Rose herself.

The idea came to him all in a flash as he walked away from the theater,

and his impulse from it was to jump into a taxicab and catch a

ten-thirty train to the coast, that he had just time for. He denied the

impulse as part of the discipline he'd been imposing on himself since

his talk with Harriet, and went home instead. From now on he was going

to act like a reasonable man, not like a distracted one.

He had his bag packed and his tickets bought the next morning, went to

the office and put things in train to accommodate a week's absence,

wrote a note to Frederica telling her of his discovery that Rose had

left the company of _The Girl Up-stairs_, and of his hope of finding her

in California with her mother and Portia; and when he settled himself in

his compartment for the three-day ride he even had two or three books in

his bag to pass the time with, as if it had been an ordinary journey. He

didn't make much of them, it's true, but his honest attempt to, gave him

the glimmering dawn of a discovery.

The cardinal principle of his life, if such a thing could be stated in a

phrase, was self-expression through self-discipline. Well, his discovery

was (it didn't come to much more than a surmise, it is true, but it was

a beginning) that in his relations to Rose he'd never disciplined

himself at all. The network of his instincts, passions, desires, that

had involved her, had been allowed to grow unchecked, unscrutinized. He

didn't begin to scrutinize them now. He was in no mind for the task. How

could he undertake it until the fearful hope that he was actually on the

way to her now should have been answered one way or the other!

It proved a vain hope. The person who answered his ring at the door of

the little bungalow, on that wonderful sun-bathed, rose-scented morning

(false auguries that mocked his disappointment and made it almost

intolerable) was Portia.

She flushed at sight of him, then almost as quickly went pale. She

stepped outside the door and closed it behind her before she spoke.

"I'm afraid I mustn't let mother know you're here," she said. "She's not

been well these last days and she mustn't be excited. I don't want to

let her suspect that things have changed or in any way gone wrong with

Rose. I told her I was going out for a walk. Will you come with me?"

He nodded and did not even speak until they'd got safely away from the

house. Then:

"I came out here," he said, "almost sure that I should find her. Isn't

she here?"

"No," said Portia. Then she added with a sort of gasp, as if she'd tried

to check her words in their very utterance, "Don't you know her better

than that?"

"Do you know where she is?"

This question she didn't answer at all. They walked on a dozen paces in

silence.

"Portia," he demanded, "is she ill? You'll have to tell me that."

Even this question she didn't answer immediately. "No," she said at

last. "She's not ill. I'll take the responsibility of telling you that."

"You mean that's all you will tell me?" he persisted. "Why? On her

instructions?"

"I think we'll have to sit down somewhere," said Portia. "Beside the

road over there where it's shady."

"I got a letter from Rose yesterday," she said, after they'd been seated

for a while. "She asked me in it not to go on writing you the

little--bulletins that I'd been sending every week; not to tell you

anything at all. So you see I've gone rather beyond her instructions in

saying even as much as I have."

"And you," he asked quickly; "you mean to comply with a request like

that?"

"I must," said Portia. "I can't do anything else."

He made no comment in words, but she interpreted his uncontrollable

gesture of angry protest, and answered it.

"It's not a question of conscientious scruples; keeping my word, not

betraying a confidence; anything like that. A year ago if she'd made

such a request I'd have paid no attention to it. I'd have taken the

responsibility of acting against her wishes, for her own good, if I

happened to see it that way, without any hesitation at all. But Rose has

shown herself so much bigger and stronger a person than I, and she's

done a thing that would have been so splendidly beyond my courage to do

that there's no question of my interfering. She's entitled to make her

own decisions. So," she went on with a little difficulty, "I shan't

betray her confidence nor disregard her instructions. But there's one

thing I can do, one thing I can tell you, because it's my confidence,

not hers."

The very obvious fact that her confidences were not of great moment to

him, the way he sat there beside her in a glum abstraction through the

rather long silence that followed her preface, made it easier for her to

go on.

"You see," she said at last, "I'd always regarded Rose as a spoiled

child. I'd loved her a lot, of course; but I'd despised her a little. At

least I'd tried to, because I was jealous of her; of the big simple easy

way she had--of making people love her. All the hard things came to me,

I felt, and all the easy ones to her. And on the day I came to tell her

about mother, and how we had to move out here--well, I was feeling

sorrier for myself than usual. If you'll remember when that was and what

her condition was (I didn't know about it then and neither did she)

you'll understand my having found her terribly blue and unhappy. She

talked discontentedly about her--failure with you and how she seemed to

be nothing to you except ... Well, she said she envied me. And that, as

I was feeling just then, was too much for me. I lashed out at her; told

her a lot of things she'd never known--about how we'd lived, and so on;

things I'd done for her. I said she'd got my life to live as well as her

own, and that if she failed with it I'd never forgive her. She made me a

promise that she wouldn't, no matter how hard she had to fight for it."

"She spoke to me once of a promise," Rodney said dully, "but of course I

didn't know what she meant."

Portia got to her feet. "I can't leave mother for very long," she said,

"and I've some little errands at the shops before I can go back. So ..."

"I see," he said. "I mustn't detain you any longer. I don't know,

anyhow, that there's anything more to say."

"I'm sorry I can't--help you. You're entitled to--hate me, I think.

Because it all goes back to that. I've been glad of a chance to tell

you. And that makes me all the sorrier that I can't in any way make it

up to you. But you see--don't you--how it is?"

"Yes," he said. "I see. I suppose, if it came to hating, that you're

entitled to hate me. But there'll be no great satisfaction in that, I

guess, for either of us." He held out his hand to her and with a painful

sort of shy stiffness, she grasped it. "If Rose changes her

instructions, or if you change your mind as to your duty under them,

you'll let me know?"

She nodded. "Good-by," she said.

Rodney walked back to the railway station where he had checked his bag.

In two hours he was on a train bound back to Chicago.

Various things occurred to him during the journey eastward that he might

have said to Portia. He hadn't asked, for instance, whether Rose's

embargo on news of herself to him had been made effective also in the

other direction. Had she cut herself off from Portia's bulletins about

himself and the babies? Could Portia have transmitted a message from him

to Rose--the one Frederica had declined to take? But he felt in a way

rather glad that he hadn't asked any more questions, nor offered any

messages. He wasn't looking now for an intermediary between Rose and

himself. He wanted Rose, and he meant to find her. His whole mind, by

now, had crystallized into that hard-faceted, sharp-edged determination.

The sore masculine vanity that had kept him from appealing to the man

most likely to be able to help him was almost incredible now.

From the railway station in Chicago, the moment he got in, he telephoned

Jimmy Wallace at his newspaper office. It was then about half past four

in the afternoon. Jimmy couldn't leave for another hour, it seemed. It

was his afternoon at home to press agents, and he always gave them till

five-thirty to drop in. But he didn't think there were likely to be any

more to-day, and if Rodney would come over ...

Rodney got into a taxi and came, and found the critic at his shabby old

desk under a green-shaded electric light, in the midst of a vast

solitude, the editorial offices of an evening newspaper at that hour

being about the loneliest place in the world. There was a rusty look

about this particular local room, too, that made you wonder that any

real news ever could emanate from it. Yet only this afternoon they had

beaten the city in the announcement of the failure of the

Mortimore-Milligan string of banks.

"I've come," said Rodney, finding a sort of fierce satisfaction in

grasping the nettle as tightly as possible, "to see if you can tell me

anything about my wife."

Jimmy may have felt a bit flushed and flustered, but the fact didn't

show, and an imaginative insight he was in the habit of denying the

possession of led him to draw most of the sting out of the situation

with the first words he said.

"I'll tell you all I know, of course, but it isn't much. Because I

haven't had a word with her since the last time I dined at your house,

way back last September, I think it was. I saw her on the stage at the

Globe, the opening night of _The Girl Up-stairs_, and I saw that she

recognized me. That's how I knew it was really she. And--well, I want

you to know this! I haven't told anybody that she was there."

"You needn't tell me that," said Rodney. "I'm sure of it. But I'm glad

you did tell me the other thing. But here's the situation: she's left

that company; left it, I believe, as a result of a talk I had with her

after I found her there, and I don't know where she is. The one thing I

have got to do just now is to find her. I've asked at the theater, and

they won't tell me. I imagine they're acting on her instructions. And as

I don't even know the name she goes by I've found it pretty hard to get

anywhere. I want you to help me."

"Her name there at the Globe was Doris Dane," said Jimmy, "and I imagine

that unless she's left the show business altogether she'll have kept it;

because it would be, in a small way, an asset. And, as she'll be easier

to find if she has stayed in the business than if she hasn't, why,

that's the presumption to begin on."

He lighted his pipe and lapsed into a thoughtful silence. "There are two

things she may have done," he went on after a while. "She may have gone

to New York, and in that case she's likely to have applied to the man

who put on _The Girl_ out here; that's John Galbraith. He took quite an

interest in her, I understand; believed she had a future. But the other

thing she may have done strikes me as a little more likely. How long ago

was it you talked to her?"

"It's the better part of two weeks," said Rodney.

"Well," said Jimmy, "they sent out a Number Two company of _The Girl

Up-Stairs_ a week ago last Sunday night. If she had any reason for

wanting to leave Chicago she might, I should think, have gone to them

and asked them to let her go out on the road with that. They wouldn't

have done it, of course, unless she'd convinced them that she was going

to quit the Chicago company anyway. But if she had convinced them of

that they'd have done it right enough. On the whole, that seems to me

the likeliest place to look."

"Yes," said Rodney, "I think it is. Well, have you any way of finding

out where the Number Two company is playing?"

Jimmy was rummaging in the litter of magazines on the top of his desk.

He pulled one out and searched among the back pages of it for a moment.

"Here we are!" he said. "_The Girl Up-stairs,_" and he began reading off

the route. "They're playing to-night," he said, "at Cedar Rapids;

to-morrow night in Dubuque."

"All right," said Rodney. "The next thing to find out is whether she's

with the company. Who is there we can telephone to out there?"

"Why," said Jimmy, "I suppose we might raise the manager of the

opera-house. They're at Cedar Rapids to-night, and we might get a good

enough wire so that a proper name would be understood." He glanced at

his watch. "But there's a quicker and surer and cheaper way, and that's

to ask Alec McEwen. He's the press agent of the company here, and he'd

be sure to know."

"He'd know," Rodney demurred, "but would he tell?"

"He'd tell me," said Jimmy.

"Can you find him?" Rodney wanted to know. "Where would he be at this

time of day--at his office or his house?"

He hadn't any office nor any house, Jimmy said. "But since he's

undoubtedly cleaned up the newspaper offices by now, on his weekly

round," he concluded, "we can find him easily enough. I'll guarantee to

locate him--within three bars. There'll be no one in to see me after

this," he went on, slamming down the roll-top to his desk, getting up

and reaching for his overcoat, "so we may as well go straight at it."

They walked down to the street entrance in silence. There Jimmy, with a

nonchalance that rang a little flat on his own ear, pulled up and said:

"Look here! There's no need your trailing around on this job. Tell me

where you will be in an hour and I'll call you up."

"Oh, I've nothing else to do," said Rodney, "and I'll be glad to go

along."

They were at cross-purposes here. Jimmy didn't want him along. He had a

hunch that Rodney wouldn't find little Alec very satisfactory, but he

didn't know just how to say so. Rodney, on his part, strongly

disrelished the notion of trailing the press agent from bar to bar. But

he attributed the same distaste to Jimmy and felt it wouldn't be fair

not to share it with him. There was, besides, a certain satisfaction in

making his pride do penance.

Jimmy hadn't overestimated his knowledge of little Alec McEwen's orbit.

They walked together to the corner of Clark and Randolph Streets and,

working radially from there, in the third bar they found him.

Even before this, however, Rodney regretted that he hadn't let Jimmy do

the job alone. He was not an habitué of the sumptuous bars of the Loop,

and the voices of the men he found in them, the sort of men they were,

and the sort of things they talked about found raw nerves all over him.

On another errand, he realized, he wouldn't have minded. But it seemed

as if Rose herself were somehow soiled by the necessity of visiting

places like this in search of information about her.

The feeling he had come back with from that down-state town to which he

had fled, that she was in a miry pit from which, at any cost, she must

be saved, had been a good deal weakened during the ten days that had

intervened since then. Her having sent back that hundred dollars; what

Portia had said about her courage; Harriet's notion that a stage career,

if properly managed, was something one could at least pretend not to be

ashamed of; and, most lately, what Jimmy Wallace had said about the New

York director who thought she had a future--all these things had

contributed to the result.

But this pursuit, from one drinking bar to another, of the only man who

could tell him where she was, was bringing the old feeling back in

waves.

"Here we are," said Jimmy, as they entered the third place. It was a

cramped cluttered room, thick with highly varnished, carved woodwork and

upholstered leather. Its principal ornament was a nude Bouguereau in a

red-draped alcove, heavily overlighted and fearfully framed; the sort of

picture any one would have yawned at in a gallery, it acquired here,

from the hard-working indecency of its intent, a weak salaciousness.

Rodney found himself being led up to a group in the far corner of the

bar, and guessed rightly that the young man with the high voice and the

seemingly permanent smile, who greeted Jimmy with a determined

facetiousness, "Hello, old Top! Drunk again?" was the man they sought.

"Not yet," said Jimmy, "but I'm willing to help you along. What'll it

be?" Then to Rodney: "This is Mr. Alexander McEwen, the leading liar

among our local press agents." He added quickly: "You didn't come around

this afternoon, so I suppose there's nothing stirring. How's business

over at the Globe?"

"Immense," said Alec. "Sold out three times last week."

"Do you hear anything," Jimmy asked, "about the road company, what

they're doing?"

"Rotten," said Alec. "But that don't worry Goldsmith and Block. They

sold out their road rights to Block's brother-in-law."

"By the way," said Jimmy, "who's the girl in the sextette that's quit?"

"Doris Dane?" said little Alec. "Say no more. So you were on that lay,

too, you old fox!" his smile widened as he looked round at Rodney, and

his voice turned to a crow. "Trust this solemn old bird not to miss a

bet. She was some lady, all right! Why," he went on to Jimmy, "she has

some sort of a row with her lover; big brute that used to lie in wait

for her in the alley. You ought to hear the ponies go on about it. So

she gets scared and goes to Goldsmith and gets herself sent out with the

Number Two. And Goldsmith--believe me--crazy! He had his eye on it,

too."

Jimmy finished his drink with a jerk. "Come along," he said to Rodney.

"I don't like this place. Let's get out."

Rodney has never managed to forget little Alec McEwen. For weeks after

that bar-room encounter he was haunted by the vision of the small bright

prying eyes, the fatuously cynical smile, and by the sound of the high

crowing voice. Little Alec became monstrous to him; impersonal, a symbol

of the way the world looked at Rose, and he dreamed sometimes,

half-waking dreams, of choking the life out of him. Not out of little

Alec personally. He, obviously, wasn't worth it; but out of all the

weakly venomous slander that he typified.

He managed a nod that seemed unconcerned enough, in response to Jimmy's

suggestion, and followed him out to the sidewalk. The sort of florid

rococo chivalry that would have "vindicated his wife's honor" by

knocking little Alec down was an inconceivable thing to him. But the

thing cut deep. He felt bemired. He wouldn't have minded that, of

course, except that the miry way he'd trodden since he'd first gone to

the stage door for Rose was the way she's taken ahead of him. He must

overtake her and bring her back!

"I'm a thousand times obliged," he said in an even enough tone to Jimmy.

"I'll find her at Dubuque, then, to-morrow."

"That's Wednesday," said Jimmy. "They may be playing a matinée, you

know. She'll be there, right enough."

Then, to make the separation they both wanted come a little easier, he

invented an errand over on State Street and nodded Rodney farewell. For

the next half-hour he cursed himself with vicious heartfelt fluency for

a fool. Mightn't he have known what little Alec McEwen would say?