That would be pure adventure. Would you accept it? Not you. You
would flush with embarrassment; you would sheepishly drop the roll and continue
down Broadway, fumbling feebly for the missing button. This you would do unless
you are one of the blessed few in whom the pure spirit of adventure is not
dead.
True adventurers have never been plentiful. They who are set
down in print as such have been mostly business men with newly invented
methods. They have been out after the things they wanted--golden fleeces, holy
grails, lady loves, treasure, crowns and fame. The true adventurer goes forth
aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate. A fine example was
the Prodigal Son--when he started back home.
Half-adventurers--brave and splendid figures--have been
numerous. From the Crusades to the Palisades they have enriched the arts of
history and fiction and the trade of historical fiction. But each of them had a
prize to win, a goal to kick, an axe to grind, a race to run, a new thrust in
tierce to deliver, a name to carve, a crow to pick--so they were not followers
of true adventure.
In the big city the twin spirits Romance and Adventure are
always abroad seeking worthy wooers. As we roam the streets they slyly peep at
us and challenge us in twenty different guises. Without knowing why, we look up
suddenly to see in a window a face that seems to belong to our gallery of
intimate portraits; in a sleeping thoroughfare we hear a cry of agony and fear
coming from an empty and shuttered house; instead of at our familiar curb, a
cab-driver deposits us before a strange door, which one, with a smile, opens
for us and bids us enter; a slip of paper, written upon, flutters down to our
feet from the high lattices of Chance; we exchange glances of instantaneous
hate, affection and fear with hurrying strangers in the passing crowds; a
sudden douse of rain--and our umbrella may be sheltering the daughter of the
Full Moon and first cousin of the Sidereal System; at every corner
handkerchiefs drop, fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the
rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous, changing clues of adventure are slipped
into our fingers. But few of us are willing to hold and follow them. We are
grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our backs. We pass on; and some
day we come, at the end of a very dull life, to reflect that our romance has
been a pallid thing of a marriage or two, a satin rosette kept in a
safe-deposit drawer, and a lifelong feud with a steam radiator.
Rudolf Steiner was a true adventurer. Few were the evenings on
which he did not go forth from his hall bedchamber in search of the unexpected
and the egregious. The most interesting thing in life seemed to him to be what
might lie just around the next corner. Sometimes his willingness to tempt fate
led him into strange paths. Twice he had spent the night in a station-house;
again and again he had found himself the dupe of ingenious and mercenary
tricksters; his watch and money had been the price of one flattering
allurement. But with undiminished ardour he picked up every glove cast before
him into the merry lists of adventure.
One evening Rudolf was strolling along a crosstown street in the
older central part of the city. Two streams of people filled the sidewalks--the
home-hurrying, and that restless contingent that abandons home for the specious
welcome of the thousand-candle-power table d'hote.
The young adventurer was of pleasing presence, and moved
serenely and watchfully. By daylight he was a salesman in a piano store. He
wore his tie drawn through a topaz ring instead of fastened with a stick pin;
and once he had written to the editor of a magazine that "Junie's Love
Test" by Miss Libbey, had been the book that had most influenced his life.
During his walk a violent chattering of teeth in a glass case on
the sidewalk seemed at first to draw his attention (with a qualm), to a
restaurant before which it was set; but a second glance revealed the electric
letters of a dentist's sign high above the next door. A giant negro,
fantastically dressed in a red embroidered coat, yellow trousers and a military
cap, discreetly distributed cards to those of the passing crowd who consented
to take them.
This mode of dentistic advertising was a common sight to Rudolf.
Usually he passed the dispenser of the dentist's cards without reducing his
store; but tonight the African slipped one into his hand so deftly that he
retained it there smiling a little at the successful feat.
When he had travelled a few yards further he glanced at the card
indifferently. Surprised, he turned it over and looked again with interest. One
side of the card was blank; on the other was written in ink three words,
"The Green Door." And then Rudolf saw, three steps in front of him, a
man throw down the card the negro had given him as he passed. Rudolf picked it
up. It was printed with the dentist's name and address and the usual schedule
of "plate work" and "bridge work" and specious promises of
"painless" operations.
The adventurous piano salesman halted at the corner and
considered. Then he crossed the street, walked down a block, recrossed and
joined the upward current of people again. Without seeming to notice the negro
as he passed the second time, he carelessly took the card that was handed him.
Ten steps away he inspected it. In the same handwriting that appeared on the
first card "The Green Door" was inscribed upon it. Three or four
cards were tossed to the pavement by pedestrians both following and leading
him. These fell blank side up. Rudolf turned them over. Every one bore the
printed legend of the dental "parlours."
Rarely did the arch sprite Adventure need to beckon twice to Rudolf
Steiner, his true follower. But twice it had been done, and the quest was on.
Rudolf walked slowly back to where the giant negro stood by the
case of rattling teeth. This time as he passed he received no card. In spite of
his gaudy and ridiculous garb, the Ethiopian displayed a natural barbaric
dignity as he stood, offering the cards suavely to some, allowing others to
pass unmolested. Every half minute he chanted a harsh, unintelligible phrase
akin to the jabber of car conductors and grand opera. And not only did he
withhold a card this time, but it seemed to Rudolf that he received from the
shining and massive black countenance a look of cold, almost contemptuous
disdain.
The look stung the adventurer. He read in it a silent accusation
that he had been found wanting. Whatever the mysterious written words on the
cards might mean, the black had selected him twice from the throng for their
recipient; and now seemed to have condemned him as deficient in the wit and
spirit to engage the enigma.
Standing aside from the rush, the young man made a rapid
estimate of the building in which he conceived that his adventure must lie.
Five stories high it rose. A small restaurant occupied the basement.
The first floor, now closed, seemed to house millinery or furs.
The second floor, by the winking electric letters, was the dentist's. Above
this a polyglot babel of signs struggled to indicate the abodes of palmists,
dressmakers, musicians and doctors. Still higher up draped curtains and milk
bottles white on the window sills proclaimed the regions of domesticity.
After concluding his survey Rudolf walked briskly up the high
flight of stone steps into the house. Up two flights of the carpeted stairway
he continued; and at its top paused. The hallway there was dimly lighted by two
pale jets of gas one--far to his right, the other nearer, to his left. He
looked toward the nearer light and saw, within its wan halo, a green door. For
one moment he hesitated; then he seemed to see the contumelious sneer of the
African juggler of cards; and then he walked straight to the green door and
knocked against it.
Moments like those that passed before his knock was answered
measure the quick breath of true adventure. What might not be behind those
green panels! Gamesters at play; cunning rogues baiting their traps with subtle
skill; beauty in love with courage, and thus planning to be sought by it;
danger, death, love, disappointment, ridicule--any of these might respond to
that temerarious rap.
A faint rustle was heard inside, and the door slowly opened. A
girl not yet twenty stood there, white-faced and tottering. She loosed the knob
and swayed weakly, groping with one hand. Rudolf caught her and laid her on a
faded couch that stood against the wall. He closed the door and took a swift glance
around the room by the light of a flickering gas jet. Neat, but extreme poverty
was the story that he read.
The girl lay still, as if in a faint. Rudolf looked around the
room excitedly for a barrel. People must be rolled upon a barrel who--no, no; that
was for drowned persons. He began to fan her with his hat. That was successful,
for he struck her nose with the brim of his derby and she opened her eyes. And
then the young man saw that hers, indeed, was the one missing face from his
heart's gallery of intimate portraits. The frank, grey eyes, the little nose,
turning pertly outward; the chestnut hair, curling like the tendrils of a pea
vine, seemed the right end and reward of all his wonderful adventures. But the
face was wofully thin and pale.
The girl looked at him calmly, and then smiled.
"Fainted, didn't I?" she asked, weakly. "Well,
who wouldn't? You try going without anything to eat for three days and
see!"
"Himmel!" exclaimed Rudolf, jumping up. "Wait
till I come back."
He dashed out the green door and down the stairs. In twenty
minutes he was back again, kicking at the door with his toe for her to open it.
With both arms he hugged an array of wares from the grocery and the restaurant.
On the table he laid them--bread and butter, cold meats, cakes, pies, pickles,
oysters, a roasted chicken, a bottle of milk and one of redhot tea.
"This is ridiculous," said Rudolf, blusteringly,
"to go without eating. You must quit making election bets of this kind.
Supper is ready." He helped her to a chair at the table and asked:
"Is there a cup for the tea?" "On the shelf by the window,"
she answered. When he turned again with the cup he saw her, with eyes shining
rapturously, beginning upon a huge Dill pickle that she had rooted out from the
paper bags with a woman's unerring instinct. He took it from her, laughingly,
and poured the cup full of milk. "Drink that first" he ordered,
"and then you shall have some tea, and then a chicken wing. If you are
very good you shall have a pickle to-morrow. And now, if you'll allow me to be
your guest we'll have supper."
He drew up the other chair. The tea brightened the girl's eyes
and brought back some of her colour. She began to eat with a sort of dainty
ferocity like some starved wild animal. She seemcd to regard the young man's
presence and the aid he had rendered her as a natural thing--not as though she
undervalued the conventions; but as one whose great stress gave her the right
to put aside the artificial for the human. But gradually, with the return of
strength and comfort, came also a sense of the little conventions that belong;
and she began to tell him her little story. It was one of a thousand such as
the city yawns at every day--the shop girl's story of insufficient wages,
further reduced by "fines" that go to swell the store's profits; of
time lost through illness; and then of lost positions, lost hope, and--the
knock of the adventurer upon the green door.
But to Rudolf the history sounded as big as the Iliad or the
crisis in "Junie's Love Test."
"To think of you going through all that," he
exclaimed.
"It was something fierce," said the girl, solemnly.
"And you have no relatives or friends in the city?"
"None whatever."
"I am all alone in the world, too," said Rudolf, after
a pause.
"I am glad of that," said the girl, promptly; and
somehow it pleased the young man to hear that she approved of his bereft
condition.
Very suddenly her eyelids dropped and she sighed deeply.
"I'm awfully sleepy," she said, "and I feel so
good."
Then Rudolf rose and took his hat. "I'll say good-night. A
long night's sleep will be fine for you."
He held out his hand, and she took it and said
"good-night." But her eyes asked a question so eloquently, so frankly
and pathetically that he answered it with words.
"Oh, I'm coming back to-morrow to see how you are getting
along. You can't get rid of me so easily."
Then, at the door, as though the way of his coming had been so
much less important than the fact that he had come, she asked: "How did
you come to knock at my door?"
He looked at her for a moment, remembering the cards, and felt a
sudden jealous pain. What if they had fallen into other hands as adventurous as
his? Quickly he decided that she must never know the truth. He would never let
her know that he was aware of the strange expedient to which she had been
driven by her great distress.
"One of our piano tuners lives in this house," he
said. "I knocked at your door by mistake."
The last thing he saw in the room before the green door closed
was her smile.
At the head of the stairway he paused and looked curiously about
him. And then he went along the hallway to its other end; and, coming back,
ascended to the floor above and continued his puzzled explorations. Every door
that he found in the house was painted green.
Wondering, he descended to the sidewalk. The fantastic African
was still there. Rudolf confronted him with his two cards in his hand.
"Will you tell me why you gave me these cards and what they
mean?" he asked.
In a broad, good-natured grin the negro exhibited a splendid
advertisement of his master's profession.
"Dar it is, boss," he said, pointing down the street.
"But I 'spect you is a little late for de fust act."
Looking the way he pointed Rudolf saw above the entrance to a
theatre the blazing electric sign of its new play, "The Green Door."
"I'm informed dat it's a fust-rate show, sah," said
the negro. "De agent what represents it pussented me with a dollar, sah,
to distribute a few of his cards along with de doctah's. May I offer you one of
de doctah's cards, sah?"
At the corner of the block in which he lived Rudolf stopped for
a glass of beer and a cigar. When he had come out with his lighted weed he
buttoned his coat, pushed back his hat and said, stoutly, to the lamp post on
the corner:
"All the same, I believe it was the hand of Fate that doped
out the way for me to find her."
Which conclusion, under the circumstances, certainly admits
Rudolf Steiner to the ranks of the true followers of Romance and Adventure.
