The Real Adventure
"I'm simply idiotic about her," she told him. "I know, now, what you
meant when you were trying to tell me about her smile. She looked at me
like that just as I was leaving, and my throat's tight with it yet.
She's such a darling! Don't be too much annoyed if I put my oar in once
in a while, just to see that you're treating her properly."
She walked into his office one morning a few days later, dismissed his
stenographer with a nod, and sat down in the just vacated chair. She was
sorry, she said, but it was the only way she had left, nowadays, of
getting hold of him. Then she introduced a trivial, transparent little
errand for an excuse, and, having got it out of the way, inquired after
Rose. What had the two of them been doing lately?
"Getting acquainted," he said. "It's going to be an endless process,
apparently. Heavens, what a lot there is to talk about!"
"Yes," Frederica persisted, "but what do you do by way of being--nice to
her?" And as he only looked puzzled and rather unhappy, she elucidated
further. "What's your concession, dear old stupid, to the fact that
you're her lover--in the way of presents and flowers and theaters and
things?"
"But Rose isn't like the rest of them," he objected. "She doesn't care
anything about that sort of thing."
Whereat Frederica laughed. "Try it," she said, "just for an experiment,
Roddy. Don't ask her if she wants to go, ask her to go. Get tickets for
one of the musical things, engage a table for dinner and for supper, at
two of the restaurants, and send her flowers. Do it handsomely, you
know, as if ordinary things weren't good enough for her. Oh, and take
our big car. Taxis wouldn't quite be in the picture. Try it, Roddy, just
to see what happens."
He looked thoughtful at first, then interested, and at last he smiled,
reached over and patted her hand. "All right, Freddy," he said. "The
handsome thing shall be done."
The result was that at a quarter past one A.M., a night or two later, he
tipped the carriageman at the entrance to the smartest of Chicago's
supper restaurants, stepped into Martin's biggest limousine, and dropped
back on the cushions beside a girl he hardly knew.
"You wonder!" he said, as her hand slid into his. "I didn't know you
could shine like that. All the evening you've kept my heart in my
throat. I don't know a thing we've seen or eaten--hardly where we've
been."
"I do," she declared, "and I shall never forget it. Not one smallest
thing about it. You see, it's the first time anything like it ever
happened to me."
He exclaimed incredulously at that--wanted to know what she meant.
He felt the weight of her relaxed contented body, as she leaned closer
to him--felt her draw in a long slow sigh. "I don't know whether I can
talk sense to-night or not," she said, "but I'll try. Why, I've been
quite a lot at the theater, of course, and two or three times to the
restaurants. But never--oh, as if I belonged like that. It always seemed
a little wrong, and extravagant. And then, it's never lasted. After the
theater, or the dinner, I've walked over to the elevated, you know. So
this has been like--well, like flying in a dream, without any bumps to
wake me up. It sort of goes to my head just to be sitting here like
this, floating along home. Only--only, I wish it was to our home,
Rodney, instead of just mine."
"You darling!" he said. And, presently: "I'll tell you what we'll do
to-morrow, if you'll run away from your dressmaker. We'll go and buy a
car for ourselves. It's ridiculous I didn't get one long ago.
Frederica's always been at me to. You see, mother wouldn't have anything
but horses, and I sold those, of course, when she died. I've meant to
get a car, but I just never got round to it."
A small disagreeable voice, hermetically sealed in one of the remoter
caverns of him, remarked at this point that he was a liar. A motor-car,
it pointed out, was one of the things he had always denounced as a part
of the useless clutter of existence that he refused to be embarrassed
with. But it didn't speak with much conviction.
She picked up his hand and brushed her lips softly against the palm of
it. "You're so wonderful to me," she said. "You give me so much. And
I--I have so little to give back. And I want to--I want to give you all
the world." And then, suddenly, she put her bare arm around his neck,
drew his face to hers and kissed him.
It was the first time she had ever begun a caress like that.
CHAPTER IX
AFTER BREAKFAST
For their honeymoon, Martin had loaned them his camp up in northern
Wisconsin--uncut forest mostly, with a river and a lot of little lakes
in it. There were still deer and bear to be shot there, there was
wonderful fishing, and, more to the point in the present instance, as
fine a brand of solitude as civilization can ask to lay its hands on. It
was modified, and mitigated too, by a backwoods family--a man and his
wife, a daughter or two, and half a dozen sons, who lived there the year
round, of course; so that by telegraphing two or three days in advance,
you could be met by a buckboard at the nearest railroad station for the
twenty-five-mile drive over to the camp. You could find the house itself
(a huge affair, decorously built of logs, as far as its exterior
manifestations went, but amply supplied on the interior with bathrooms,
real beds and so forth) opened and warmed and flavored with the odor of
fried venison steak. Also, there was always a boy to paddle a canoe for
you, or saddle a horse, if you didn't feel like doing it for yourself.
Rodney and Rose spent a night in this establishment, then rigged up an
outfit for camping of a less symbolistic sort, and repaired to an island
out in the lake, where for two weeks they lived gorgeously, like the
savages they both, to a very considerable extent, really were.
But, at the end of this fortnight, a whipping north wind, with a fine
penetrating rain in its teeth, settled down for a three-days' visit, and
drove them back to adequate shelter. One rainy day in an outdoor camp is
a good thing; a second requires fortitude; a third carries the
conviction that it has been raining from the first day of Creation and
will keep on till the Last Judgment, and if you have anywhere to go to
get dry, you do.
Of course the storm blew itself away when it had accomplished its
purpose of driving them from their island paradise, but they didn't go
back to it. Two weeks of camp-fires, hemlock boughs and blankets, had
given them an appreciation for sleeping between smooth sheets, and
coming down to a breakfast that was prepared for them. And one morning
Rose came into the big living-room to find Rodney lounging there, in
front of the fire, with a book.
It wasn't the first time he had done that. But always before, on seeing
her come in, he had chucked the book away and come to meet her. This
time, he went on reading.
She moved over toward him, meaning to sit down on the arm of his chair,
cuddle her arm around his neck, and at the same time, discover what it
was that so absorbed him. But half-way across the room, she changed her
mind. He hadn't even reached out an unconscious hand toward her. He went
on reading as if, actually, he were alone in the room. Evidently, too,
it was a book he'd brought with him--a formidable-looking volume printed
in German--she got near enough to see that. So she picked up an old
magazine from the table, and found a chair of her own, smiling a little
in anticipation of the effect this maneuver would have.
She opened the magazine at random, and, presently, for the sake of
verisimilitude, turned a page. Rodney was turning pages as regularly as
clockwork. It was a silly magazine! She wished she'd found something
that really could interest her. It was getting harder and harder to sit
still. He couldn't be angry about anything, could he? No, that was
absurd. There hadn't been the slightest trace of a disagreement between
them. She wouldn't go on pretending to read, anyhow, and she tossed the
magazine away.
She had meant it to fall back on the table. But she put more nervous
force than she realized into the toss, so that it skittered across the
table and fell on the floor with a slap.
That roused him. He closed his book--on his finger, though--looked
around at her, stretched his arms and smiled. "Isn't this great?" he
said.
It wasn't a sentiment she could echo quite whole-heartedly just then,
so she asked him what he meant--wasn't what great.
"Oh, this," he told her. "Being like this."
"Sitting half a mile apart this way," she asked, "each of us reading our
own book?"
She didn't realize how completely provocative her meaning was, until, to
her incredulous bewilderment, he said enthusiastically, "Yes! exactly!"
He wasn't looking at her now, but into the fire, and he rummaged for a
match and relighted his pipe before he said anything more. "Being
permanent, you know," he explained, "and--well, our real selves again."
She tried hard to keep her voice even when she asked, "But--but what
have we been?"
And at that he laughed out. "Good heavens, what haven't we been! A
couple of transfigured lunatics. Why, Rose, I haven't been able to see
straight, or think straight, for the last six weeks. And I don't believe
you have either. My ideas have just been running in circles around you.
How I ever got through those last two cases in the Appellate Court, I
don't see. When I made an argument before the bench, I was--talking to
you. When I wrote my briefs, I was writing you love-letters. And if I'd
had sense enough to realize my condition, I'd have been frightened to
death. But now--well, we've been sitting here reading away for an hour,
without having an idea of each other in our heads."
By a miracle of self-command, she managed to keep control of her voice.
"Yes," she said. "That--that other's all over, isn't it?"
"I wouldn't go so far as to say that," he demurred around a comfortable
yawn. "I expect it will catch us again every now and then. But, in the
main, we're sane people, ready to go on with our own business. What was
it you were reading?"
"I don't believe I'll read any more just now," she said. "I think I'll
go out for a walk." And she managed to get outside the room without his
discovering that anything was wrong.
It was, indeed, her first preoccupation, to make sure he shouldn't
discover the effect his words had had on her--to get far enough away
before the storm broke so that she could have it out by herself. The
crowning humiliation would be if he came blundering in on her and asked
her what was the matter.
She fled down the trail to the little lake, ran out a canoe, caught up a
paddle and bent a feverish energy to the task of getting safely around
into the shelter of a fir-grown point before she let herself stop, as
she would have said, to think. It wasn't really to think, of course.
Not, that is, to interpret out to the end of all its logical
implications, the admission he had so unconsciously made to her that
morning.
She had never seriously been hurt or frightened, Portia had said weeks
ago. And when she said it, it was true. She was both hurt and frightened
now, and the instinct that had urged her to fly was as simple and
primitive as that which urges a wounded animal to hide.
Indeed, if you could have seen her after she had swung her paddle
inboard, sitting there, gripping the gunwales with both hands, panting,
her wide eyes dry, you might easily have thought of some defenseless
wild thing cowering in a momentary shelter, listening for the baying of
pursuing hounds.
He didn't love her any more, that was what he had said. For what was the
thing he had so cheerfully described himself as cured of, what were the
symptoms he had enumerated as if he had been talking about a