THE GREEN DOOR

Suppose you should be walking down Broadway after dinner, with ten

minutes allotted to the consummation of your cigar while you are

choosing between a diverting tragedy and something serious in the way

of vaudeville. Suddenly a hand is laid upon your arm. You turn to look

into the thrilling eyes of a beautiful woman, wonderful in diamonds and

Russian sables. She thrusts hurriedly into your hand an extremely hot

buttered roll, flashes out a tiny pair of scissors, snips off the

second button of your overcoat, meaningly ejaculates the one word,

"parallelogram!" and swiftly flies down a cross street, looking back

fearfully over her shoulder.

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

"crowns," 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 red-hot 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 seemed 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.

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 743