CHAPTER III

FRIENDS

Except for the vacuum where the core and heart of it all ought to have been, Rose's life in New York during the year that put her on the high road to success as a designer of costumes for the theater, was a good life, broadening, stimulating, seasoning. It rested, to begin with, on a foundation of adequate material comfort which the unwonted physical privations of the six months that preceded it--the room on Clark Street, the nightmare tour on the road, and even the little back room in Miss Gibbons' apartment over the drug-store in Centropolis--made seem like positive luxury.

After a preliminary fortnight in a little hotel off Washington Square, which she had heard Jane Lake speak of once as a possible place for a respectable young woman of modest means to live in, she found an apartment in Thirteenth Street, not far west of Sixth Avenue. It was in a quiet block of old private residences. But this building was clean and new, with plenty of white tile and modern plumbing, and an elevator. Her apartment had two rooms in it, one of them really spacious to poor Rose after what she'd been taking for granted lately, besides a nice white bathroom and a kitchenette. She paid thirty-seven dollars a month for it, and five dollars a month for a share in a charwoman who came in every day and made her bed and washed up dishes.

The extensiveness of this domestic establishment frightened her a little at first. But she reassured herself with the reflection that under the rule Gertrude Morse had quoted to her, one week's pay for one month's rent, she still had a comfortable margin. She furnished it a bit at a time, with articles chosen in the order of their indispensability, and she went on, during the summer, to buy some things which were not indispensable at all. But not very many. Like most persons with a highly specialized creative talent for one form of beauty (in her case this was clothes) she was more or less indifferent about others. Witness how little interest she had taken in the labored beauties of Florence McCrea's house, even in the unthinking days before she had begun worrying about the expense of that establishment. Her indifference had always made Portia boil. Also it may be noted, that Florence McCrea herself, always went about looking a perfect frump.

So that, by the time Rose's apartment was furnished to the point of adequate comfort and decency, she took it for granted and stopped there.

For her, the temptations of old brass, mezzo-tints, and Italian majolica--Fourth Avenue generally--simply did not exist.

She bought real china to eat her breakfasts out of, and the occasional suppers she had at home. She had had enough of thick cups and plates in the last six months to last her the rest of her life. And it is probable that she ate up, literally, the margin she had under Gertrude Morse's rule, in somewhat better restaurants than she need have patronized.

She did save money though, and put it away in a safe bank. But she never saved quite so much as she was always meaning to, and she carried along, for months after she went to work for Galbraith, an almost guilty sense of luxury. In spite of the fact that she was working very hard and of the further fact that her hours of labor were largely coincident with the leisure hours of other people, she made a good many friends. The first of these was Gertrude Morse, and it was through her, directly or indirectly, that she acquired the others.

Gertrude was Abe Shuman's confidential secretary and you can get a fairly good working notion of her by conceiving the type of person likely to be found in the borderland of theatrical enterprises, and then, in all respects, taking the exact antithesis of it. She was a brisk, prim-mannered, snub-nosed little thing, who wore her hair brushed down as flat as possible and showed an affection for mannish clothes.

She had a level head, a keen and rather biting wit, which had the effect of making her constant acts of kindness always unexpected; and an education which, in her surroundings, seemed almost fantastic. She was a Radcliff Master of Arts.

Every one who had any dealings with Abe Shuman perforce knew Gertrude, and Rose got acquainted with her the first day. Galbraith introduced them in Shuman's office, and Rose found herself being investigated by a bright, penetrating and decidedly complex look which she interpreted--pretty accurately as she found out later--as saying, "Well, you're about what I expected; ornamental and enthusiastic; just what an otherwise sane and successful man of fifty would pick out for an 'assistant.' Aren't they just children at that age! But you're welcome.

They deserve it. Good luck to you!"

But when Rose returned the look with a comprehending smile which said good-naturedly, "All right! You wait and see," Gertrude's expression altered into a frankly questioning frown. Two or three days later she dropped in at a rehearsal, ostensibly with a message from Shuman to Galbraith. He was on the point of leaving and had turned over the rehearsal to Rose. Gertrude, when he had gone, settled down comfortably in the back of the auditorium and watched through a solid hour, obviously under instructions from Abe to bring back a report as to whether Galbraith's infatuation should be tolerated or suppressed. At the end of the hour, during a brief lull in the rehearsal, she came down the aisle and stopped beside Rose who still had her eye on the stage.

"I apologize," she said.

Rose grinned around at her. It was not necessary to ask what for. "Much obliged," she said.

"I didn't know that a woman could do that," Gertrude went on. "Didn't think she'd have the--drive. But you've got it, all right. I don't suppose you've got an idea when you'll be free for lunch?"

Rose hadn't, but it was not many days before they got together for that meal at a business woman's club down on Fortieth Street, and from then on their acquaintance progressed rapidly. She helped Rose find the little apartment on Thirteenth Street, entertaining her during the search with a highly instructive disquisition on the social topography of New York, and on the following Sunday she ran in, she said, to see if she could help her get settled. There was no settling to do, but she sat down and talked--most of the time--for an hour or so. It was a theory of Gertrude's that the way to find out about people was to talk to them.

"You can't tell much," she used to say, "by the things people say to you. Perhaps they've just heard somebody else say them. Maybe they've got a repertory that it will take you weeks to get to the end of. Or they may not be able to show you at all what's really inside them. But from how they take the things you say to them--the things they light up at and the things they look blank about, the things they're too anxious to show you they understand, and the things they dare admit they never heard of--you can tell every time. Find out all you want to know about anybody in an hour!"

Rose, it seemed, reacted satisfactorily to her tests, since she was introduced as rapidly thereafter as their scanty leisure made possible, to Gertrude's more immediate circle of friends.

During that first winter, she enjoyed them immensely. They were all interesting; all "did things"; widely various things, yet, somehow, related. There was a red-haired fire-brand whose specialty seemed to be bailing out girls arrested for picketing and whose Sunday diversion consisted in going down to Paterson, New Jersey, making the police ridiculous and unhappy for an hour or so, delivering herself of a speech in defiance of their preventive efforts and finally escaping arrest by a hair's breadth. They got her finally but since she enjoyed the privilege of addressing as Uncle a man whose name was uttered with awe about the corner of Broad Street and Exchange Place, they had to let her go.

There was a young woman lawyer, associated with Gertrude in an organization for getting jobs for girls who had just been let out of jail, a level-headed enterprise, which by conserving its efforts for those who really wished to benefit by them, managed to accomplish a good deal. One of their circle was associate editor of a popular magazine and another wrote short stories, mostly about shop-girls. The last one of them for Rose to meet, she having been out of town all summer, was Alice Perosini. She was the daughter of a rich Italian Jew, a beautiful--really a wonderful person to look at--but a little unaccountable, especially with the gorgeous clothes she wore, in their circle. Rose took her time about deciding that she liked her but ended by preferring her to all the rest. She never talked much; would smoke and listen, making most of her comments in pantomime, but she had a trick of capping a voluble discussion with a hard-chiseled phrase which, whether you felt it precisely fitted or not, you found it difficult to escape from.

What forced Rose to a realization of her preference for Alice was the impulse to tell her who she really was and the suddenly following reflection that she never had wanted to tell any of the others; that she had taken care to avoid all reference to the husband and the babies she had fled from in search of a life of her own.

She never tried to explain to herself the feeling that imposed this reticence on her, until the discovery that it didn't exist toward Alice.

She couldn't have feared that they would not approve of what she had done; it squared so exactly with all their ideas. Indeed the one real bond between them was a common revolt against the traditional notion that the way for a woman to effect her will in the world was by "influencing" a man. They wanted to hold the world in their own hands.

They contemned the "feminine" arts of cajolery. They wanted no odds from anybody. There wasn't a real man-hater in the crowd, they were too normal and healthy for that. But they didn't talk much about men; never, as far as Rose knew, about men--as such. Was the topic suppressed, she wondered, or was it just that they didn't think about them?

That question made her realize how little she knew of any of them; how limited was the range of their intercourse. It was as if they met in a sort of mental gymnasium, fenced with one another, did callisthenics.

Oh, that was going too far, of course; it was more real than that. But it was true that it was only their minds that met. And it seemed to be true that in the realm of mind they were content to live. Had they, like herself, deep labyrinthine, half-lit caverns down underneath those north-lighted, logically ordered apartments where Rose always found them? If they had they never let her or one another suspect it.

They'd be capable of deciding the great issue between herself and Rodney, if ever they were told the story, in a half dozen brisk sentences. Rose would be held to have been right and Rodney wrong, demonstrably. Rose, illogically, perhaps, shrank from that conclusion or at least from having it reached that way. There was more to it than that. There were elements in the situation they wouldn't know how to allow for.

But Alice Perosini, she thought, was different. She'd be able to make some of those allowances. Rose didn't tell her the story but she felt that at a pinch she could and this feeling was enough to establish Alice on a different basis from the others. It was with Alice that she discussed the more personal sort of problems that arose in connection with her new job. (One of these, as you are to be told, was highly personal.) And when the question came up of finding the capital that would enable her to make the Shumans a bid on all the costumes for _Come On In_ it was Alice, who, with all the sang-froid in the world, sketched out the articles of partnership and brought her in a certified check for three thousand dollars.

The fact that they had become partners served, somehow, to divert a relation between them which might otherwise have developed into a first-class friendship. Not that they quarreled or even disappointed each other in the close contacts of the day's work. They were admirably complementary. Alice had the business acumen, the executive grasp, the patient willingness to master details, which were needed to set Rose free for the more imaginative part of the enterprise. Both were immensely determined on success. Alice couldn't have been keener about it if every cent she had in the world had been embarked in the business.

But at the end of the day's work they tended to fly apart rather than to stick together. Both were charged with the same kind of static electricity. It was an instinct they were sensible enough to follow.

Both realized that they were more efficient as partners from not going too intimately into each other's outside affairs.

But when the winter had passed and the early spring had brought its triumph, with the success of her costumes in _Come On In_, and when the inevitable reaction from the burst of energy that had won that triumph had taken possession of her, Rose found herself in need of a friendship that would grip deeper, understand more. And with the realization of the need of it she found she had it. It was a friendship that had grown in the unlikeliest soil in the world, the friendship of a man who had wanted to be her lover. The man was John Galbraith.

For the first month after she came to New York to work for him she had found Galbraith a martinet. She never once caught that twinkling gleam of understanding in his eye that had meant so much to her during the rehearsals of _The Girl Up-stairs_. His manner toward her carried out the tone of the letter she'd got from him in Centropolis. It was stiff, formal, severe. He seldom praised her work and never ungrudgingly. His censure was rare too, to be sure, but this obviously was because Rose almost never gave him an excuse for it. Of course she was up to her work, but, well, she had better be. This, in a nutshell, was his attitude toward her. Nothing but the undisputable fact that she was up to her work (Gertrude was comforting here, with her reticent but convincing reports of Abe Shuman's satisfaction with her) kept Rose from losing confidence. Even as it was, working for Galbraith in this mood gave her the uneasy sensation one experiences when walking abroad under a sultry overcast sky with mutterings and flashes in it. And then one night the storm broke.

They had lingered in the theater after the dismissal of a rehearsal, to talk over a change in one of the numbers Rose had been working on. It refused to come out satisfactorily. Rose thought she saw a way of doing it that would work better and she had been telling him about it.

Eagerly, at first, and with a limpid directness which, however, became clouded and troubled when she felt he wasn't paying attention. It was a difficulty with him she had encountered before. Some strong preoccupation she could neither guess the nature of nor lure him away from.

But to-night after an angry turn down the aisle and back he suddenly cried out, "I don't know. I don't know what you've been talking about. I don't know and I don't care." And then confronting her, their faces not a foot apart, for by now she had got to her feet, his hands gripped together and shaking, his teeth clenched, his eyes glowing there in the half-light of the auditorium, almost like an animal's, he demanded, "Can't you see what's the matter with me? Haven't you seen it yet? My God!"

Of course she saw it now, plainly enough. She sat down again, managing an air of deliberation about it, and gripped the back of the orchestra chair in front of her. He remained standing over her there in the aisle.

When the heightening tension of the silence that followed this outburst had grown absolutely unendurable she spoke. But the only thing she could find to say was almost ludicrously inadequate.

"No, I didn't see it until now. I'm sorry."

"You didn't see it," he echoed. "I know you didn't. You've never seen me at all, from the beginning, as anything but a machine. But why haven't you? You're a woman. If I ever saw a woman in my life you're one all the way through. Why couldn't you see that I was a man? It isn't because I've got gray hair, nor because I'm fifty years old. You aren't like that. I don't believe you're like that. But even back there in Chicago, the night we walked down the avenue from Lessing's store--or the night we had supper together after the show...."

"I suppose I ought to have seen," she said dully. "Ought to have known that that was all there was to it. That there couldn't be anything else in the world. But I didn't."

"Well, you see it now," he said savagely fairly, and strode away up the aisle and then back to her. He sat down in the seat in front of her and turned around. "I want to see your face," he said. "There's something I've got to know. Something you've got to tell me. You said once, back there in Chicago, that there was only one person who really mattered to you. I want to know who that one person is. What he is. Whether he's still the one person who really matters. If he isn't I'll take my chance. I'll make you love me if it's the last thing I ever do in the world."

Remembering the scene afterward Rose was a little surprised that she'd been able to answer him as she did, without a hesitation or a stammer, and with a straight gaze that held his until she had finished.

"The only person in the world," she said, "who ever has mattered to me, or ever will matter, is my husband. I fell in love with him the day I met him. I was in love with him when I left him. I'm in love with him now. Everything I do that's any good is just something he might be proud of if he knew it. And every failure is just something I hope I could make him understand and not despise me for. It's months since I've seen him but there isn't a day, there isn't an hour in a day, when I don't think about him and--want him. I don't know whether I'll ever see him again but if I don't it won't make any difference with that. That's why I didn't see what I might have seen about you. It wasn't possible for me to see. I'd never have seen it if you hadn't told me in so many words, like this. Do you see now?"

He turned away from her with a nod and put his hands to his face. She waited a moment to see whether he had anything else to say, for the habit of waiting for his dismissal was too strong to be broken even in a situation like this. But finding that he hadn't she rose and walked out of the theater.

There was an hour after she had gained the haven of her own apartment, when she pretty well went to pieces. So this was all, was it, that she owed her illusory appearance of success to? The amorous desires of a man old enough to be her father! Once more, she blissfully and ignorantly unsuspecting all the while, it was love that had made her world go round. The same long-circuited sex attraction that James Randolph long ago had told her about. But for that attraction she'd never have got this job in New York, never have had the chance to design those costumes for Goldsmith and Block. Never, in all probability, have got even that job in the chorus of _The Girl Up-stairs_. All she'd accomplished in that bitter year since she left Rodney had been to make another man fall in love with her!

But she didn't let herself go like that for long. The situation was too serious for the indulgence of an emotional sprawl. Here she was in an apartment that cost her thirty-seven dollars a month. She'd got to earn a minimum of thirty dollars a week to keep on with it. Of course she couldn't go on working for Galbraith. The question was, what could she do? Well, she could do a good many things. Whatever Galbraith's motives had been in giving her her chance, she had taken that chance and made the most of it. Gertrude Morse knew what she could do. For that matter, so did Abe Shuman himself. The thing to do now was to go to bed and get a night's sleep and confront the situation with a clear mind in the morning.

It was a pretty good indication of the way she had grown during the last year that she was able to conquer the shuddering revulsion that had at first swept over her, get herself in hand again, eat a sandwich and drink a glass of milk, re-read a half dozen chapters of Albert Edwards'

_A Man's World_, and then put out her light and sleep till morning.

It was barely nine o'clock when Galbraith called her up on the telephone. She hadn't had her breakfast yet and had not even begun to think out what the day's program must be.

He apologized for calling her so early. "I wanted to be sure of catching you," he said, "before you did anything. You haven't yet, have you? Not written to Shuman throwing up your job, or anything like that?"