THE PERFECT ADVENTURE

Hokitika Guardian, 10 March 1928, Page 4

THE PERFECT ADVENTURE

(By Hosit-a Forbes, the Novelist and Explorer). The perfect adventure is one you don’t expect. It comes when life is full of the “morning after” teeling, a blend of pessimism and mental indigestion from, which we all suffer when we have had too much or too little amusement. Adventure is not necessarily living! the Atlantic, eloping with a Rudolph Valentino sheik, or unearthing a corpse among the cabbages. 1 have made a good many maps of ( the hack of beyond, hut I am sure T did not get as much excitement out of them as on the one occasion I made t a really good hat. It was bored with the small felt pudding basins we all wear so I bought a vast amount of felt, married it to what had once been a capacious velvet vanity hag. p and went out to lunch in, the largest vagabond hat that ever flaunted its shapeless shapeliness through Maylair. AYe are not sufficiently adventurous j in our houses. Claire Sheridan wrote to me from a Saharan date-garden that she was building a house, half Moorish-palace and half Russian fairytale. AA'e can do almost as well here in England if we are not frightened of colour. Don’t you like azaleas and mandarins, and queer little poppvI roofed pagodas? AYhy not have them always with you in paint, in pottery, or hunched together wifh incredible parrots on chintzes, that cost some-thing-aml-njd a yard? To me a ' house or a hat is a delicious adventure, hut it is the least of those that . 1928 may bring, you. ’ T had two friends with curls, tiptilted noses, and an insatiable love of life. One snow-bound January we uis- , cussed adventure, whether it was a t hare you chased in circles or an apple that fell into your lap. The curliest girl was depressed. “1 never get a chance to do anything . worth while,” she said, so J asked her to dinner to meet the woman director , of an advertising agency. My friend , sat at the feet of wisdom all the evening and entered the office of wisdom ’. next morning. The last I heard ot her was flying to Brussels with a cheque for £10.030 in her pocket to carry on the business during the general strike. The other girl went into a lxmiitysliop, where, white-aproned from ton | to six and surrounded l>y an atmosphere of scent, mystery, and shocked voices—the more (lawless your skin, the more shocked the .specialist; it is pari of her stock-in-trade'—she sold i cream (while wax, oil. and spermaceti) for flic price of rubies. and skin-food v s permnc**ti. oil, and wax!) for the value of diamonds. ll was alarming the amount she knew about ’ what you should do when your face looks like somebody else’s whom you particularly dislike. But, fortunately, one blindingly wet day she went to the wrong house and. instead of giving a treatment, was given tea bv an old lady in search of a companion. The result was a winter in Egypt! Opportunity is synonymous with adventure, and nowadays opportunity is as insistent as the wireless. Equally, of course, it is a cultivated taste. Don’t waste time explaining why you can’t do things -Mo them. Never refuse an opportunity even if it isn’t the one you want. Opportunities are malleable. There was once a girl who wore dead black with a scarlet (lower that crackled when she stood it on its toes. AYhen she lost her iob as a mannequin she bought a minute black toque—“T shall look like a naughty widow." she said - and a huge scarlet hag—“To show I'm not averse from consolation.” she added—and prepared to cat ill tile Blue Train to Moil to Carl” with the intention of staking her las: liver. Than something happened. Perhaps the Blue Train, bulging with royally and Cabinet Ministers, refused to lie ©aught by anything so trivial as a girl whose allowance was plastered on all the “left at the posts” between Doncaster and Sundown. In any ease, my black and red girl staved in London and learned typing. After a month she married an author, who had insisted—politely—on holding an umbrella over her. when she insisted—crossly—on braving the lop of nil omnibus In a storm! Romance is the fruit of imagination. not of environment. Let your' imagination rip! Adventure is always lurking round the corner, hut it is up to us to recognise it. Tn an Atlantic liner in mid-winter there was one girl who was not seasick. A world-famous producer saw her buffeted in a gale. “That girl moves like a goddess. I’ve just got to have her in niv cast,” he said, and in spite of parental protests, she nlavcd the original nun in Now York’s “Miracle.” After all, we are. every one of us. Cinderellas, and each year is a potential fairy godmother. The perfect • adventure may happen at any moment, though only you or T may, recognise it as such. 'I he perfect adventure of my life was not crossing the Sahara or sailing a 20-foot dhow through 14 days of Red Sea tempest, hut when I introduced a comparative stranger into a crowded Geographical Society meeting as my fiance, because T couldn’t get him in in any other way! ‘(lntelligent anticipation.” ho twinkled, when I apologised lor the ruse. He was quite right. It was!