A man thinks adventure is far away: on ships, in foreign cities, in streets whose names he cannot even pronounce. But adventure usually stands on a corner, waiting for someone willing to notice it. Most of us walk past, because we are in a hurry, because we are tired, or because after dinner we want no more surprises.
Rudolf Steiner did not count himself among them.
By day he sold pianos, and sold them well, because he knew people do not buy an instrument but the room it will stand in. In the evening he changed into what he really was: a man who is curious. He had spent two nights of his life in a police station; swindlers had taken his pocket watch, once his money too, and he told it the way other men tell of a holiday. He wore his tie threaded through a topaz ring, because he had once read that such a thing was characteristic.
That evening he walked down a side street where a set of false teeth, chattering in a glass case, advertised the blessings of dentistry. On the pavement stood a large man in a red embroidered coat and yellow trousers, a military cap on his head, handing out cards to passers-by.
Rudolf took one.
One side was blank. On the other, three words in ink, written by hand:
The Green Door.
Rudolf turned to look at the man, but he had already turned to the next person. Another card lay on the pavement; Rudolf picked it up. It bore a dentist’s name and address, and the promise that the work would be painless.
Rudolf crossed the road, waited a minute, then walked back. The man slipped a card into his hand again. The same handwriting: The Green Door.
All the other cards on the pavement showed the dentist’s side.
He stood there a third time. This time the man gave him nothing. He only looked at him a moment, coldly, almost contemptuously, then went on with his work.
Rudolf felt he had been judged, and found unworthy.
He looked at the house he was standing in front of. A five-storey tenement: a little restaurant in the basement, a hatter on the ground floor, a dentist on the first floor, and higher up fortune-tellers, seamstresses, music teachers, doctors, and at the very top curtains and milk bottles on the windowsill.
He went up two flights on the carpeted stairs. The corridor was lit by two faint gas jets, and in the nearer circle of light stood a green door.
Rudolf hesitated. Then he remembered the man’s face, and knocked.
It opened.
A girl stood on the threshold, under twenty, white-faced, and she swayed. Rudolf caught her, carried her in, and laid her on the faded couch by the wall. The room was poor but clean; the gas jet flickered, and there was nothing in the air but the smell of dust and long waiting.
Rudolf began fanning her with his hat, so eagerly that the brim hit his nose. The girl opened her eyes.
Grey eyes, a small pointed nose, chestnut-brown hair curling in little tendrils. Her face was pale and thin, and in that moment Rudolf felt he had been looking for this face somewhere, for some time.
“I fainted, didn’t I?” asked the girl. “Well, who wouldn’t? Try eating nothing for three days.”
Rudolf did not answer. He rushed out through the green door.
He was back twenty minutes later, laden with parcels. He laid them on the table: bread, butter, cold meat, cake, pickles, oysters, roast chicken, a bottle of milk and a bottle of hot tea.
The girl would have fallen on the pickled cucumber at once.
“Not that,” said Rudolf, and pulled it away. “First the milk. Then the tea. Then the chicken leg. The cucumber comes tomorrow, if you’re good.”
They dined together. At first the girl ate like someone who had never eaten among people, then her upbringing slowly returned, and she began to talk.
She told him: they paid little, and there was always something deducted. She fell ill, lost a few days, and when she went back someone already stood in her place. She had no relative in the city, no friend, no one at all to speak to. And then someone knocked at her door.
To Rudolf this story was as large as an epic.
“Are you alone?” asked the girl.
“Alone.”
“That’s good news,” said the girl, and smiled, because she was sleepy, and because after three days a person is honest.
Rudolf stood up to go, and promised to come back the next day. At the door the girl asked:
“How did you come to knock at my door?”
Rudolf felt the answer stick in his throat. If he told the truth — that a complete stranger had given him a card in the street, and that he had gone back for it three times — he would also have to say that he had not been looking for her. That the card had not been about her.
And then the girl would think the help had been an accident. And it had been. But Rudolf suddenly could not bear the thought that this card might have been in anyone else’s pocket.
“We have a piano tuner living in this house,” he said. “Sorry — wrong door.”
The green door closed. Rudolf still saw the girl’s smile, then he was left in the corridor with the two flickering gas jets.
He looked around, and went up one more floor.
Every door in the house was painted green.
Downstairs he looked for the card-distributing man. The man looked at him, grinned, and jerked his head towards the farther corner.
“There it is, boss. But I think you’ve missed the first act.”
Above the theatre entrance electric letters burned, and they said: The Green Door. The title of a new play.
The man explained, calmly, because it was only a job: the play’s agent had given him a dollar to hand out his cards along with the dentist’s. That was all. No message, no sign, no fate.
Rudolf stopped at the corner for a glass of beer and a cigar. When he came out he buttoned his coat, pushed his hat back, and said to the lamppost:
“It doesn’t matter. I believe the hand of Fate smoothed the way for me to find her.”
And with that, Rudolf Steiner became what until then he had only wished to be: a true follower of Romance and Adventure.
