The Real Adventure
disease--the obsession with her, the inability to get her further away
than the middle ground of his thoughts, and then only temporarily; the
necessity of saying everything he said and doing everything he did, with
reference to her; the fact that his mind could focus itself sharply on
nothing in the world but just herself?--What was all that but the
veritable description, though in hostile terms, of the love he had
promised to feel for her till death should--part them; of the very love
she felt for him, this moment stronger than ever?
Recurrent waves of the panic broke over her, during which she would
catch up her paddle again and drive ahead, blindly, without any
conscious knowledge of where she was going. And in the intervals, she
drifted.
The relief of tears didn't come to her until she saw, just ahead, the
island where, for two paradisiacal weeks, she and Rodney had made their
camp. Here she beached her canoe and went ashore; crept into a little
natural shelter under a jutting rock, where they had lain one day while,
for three hours, a violent unheralded storm had whipped the lake to
lather. The heap of hemlock branches he had cut for a couch for them was
still there.
At the end of half an hour, she observed with a sort of apathetic
satisfaction, that the weather conditions of their former visit were
going to be repeated now--a sudden darkness, a shriek of wind, a wild
squall flashing across the surface of the little lake, and a driving
rain so thick that small as the lake was, it veiled the shore of it.
She watched it for an hour before it occurred to her to wonder what
Rodney would be doing--whether he'd have discovered her absence from the
house and begun to worry about her. She told herself that he
wouldn't--that he'd sit there until he finished his book, or until they
called him for lunch, without, as he himself had boasted that morning, a
thought of her entering his mind.
She wept again over this notion, luxuriating rather, it must be
confessed, in the pathos of it, until she caught herself in the act and,
disgustedly, dried her eyes. Of course he'd worry about her. Only there
was nothing either of them could do about it until the storm should be
over; then she'd paddle back to the house as fast as she could and set
his mind at rest.
Suddenly she sat erect, looked, rubbed her eyes, looked again, then
sprang to her feet and went out into the driving rain. A spot of white,
a larger one of black, two moving pin-points of light, was what she saw.
The white was Rodney's shirt, the black the canoe, the pin-points the
reflection from the two-bladed paddle as, recklessly, he forced his way
with it into the teeth of the storm. He wanted her, after all.
So, with a racing heart and flushed cheeks, she watched him. It was not
until he had come much nearer that she went white with the realization
of his danger--not until she could see how desperately it needed all his
strength and skill to keep his little cockle-shell from broaching to
and being swamped.
She went as far to meet him as she could--out to the end of the point,
and then actually into the water to help him with the half-filled boat.
They emptied it and hauled it up on the beach. Then, looking up at him a
little tremulously, between a smile and tears, she saw how white he was,
caught him in her arms and felt how he was trembling.
"I thought you were gone," he said, but couldn't manage any more than
that because of a great shuddering sob that stopped him.
"Don't!" she cried. "Don't.--Oh, my dear! I didn't know!"
Presently, back in the shelter again, she drew his head down on her
breast and held him tight.
Logically, of course, the situation wasn't essentially changed. It
couldn't be a part of their daily married routine that he should think
he'd lost her and come through perils to the rescue. When the storm had
blown over and they'd come back to the house--still more, when after
another few weeks they'd gone back to town, he'd still have a world of
his own to withdraw into, a business of his own to absorb him, and she,
with no world at all except the one he was the principal inhabitant of,
would be left outside. But you couldn't have expected her to think of
that while she held him, quivering, in her arms.
BOOK TWO
Love and the World
CHAPTER I
THE PRINCESS CINDERELLA
When the society editor of "America's foremost newspaper," as in its
trademark it proclaims itself to be, announced that the Rodney Aldriches
had taken the Allison McCreas' house, furnished, for a year, beginning
in October, she spoke of it as an ideal arrangement. As everybody knew,
it was an ideal house for a young married couple, and it was equally
evident that the Rodney Aldriches were an ideal couple for it.
In the sense that it left nothing to further realization, it was an
ideal house; an old house in the Chicago sense, built over into
something very much older still--Tudor, perhaps--Jacobean, anyway--by a
smart young society architect who wore soft collars and an uptwisted
mustache, and who, by a perfectly reciprocal arrangement which almost
deserves to be called a form of perpetual motion, owed the fact that he
was an architect to his social position, and maintained his social
position by being an architect.
He had cooperated enthusiastically with Florence McCrea, not only in the
design of the house, but in the supplementary matters of furniture,
hangings, rugs and pictures, with the effect that the establishment
presented the last politely spoken word in things as they ought to be.
The period furniture was accurate almost to the minute, and the
arrangement of it, the color schemes and the lighting, had at once the
finality of perfection and the perfection of finality. If you happened
to like that sort of thing, it was precisely the sort of thing you'd
like.
The same sort of neat, fully acquired perfection characterized the
McCreas' domestic arrangements. Allison McCrea's income, combined with
his wife's, was exactly enough to enable them to live in this house and
entertain on the scale it very definitely prescribed, just half the
time. Every other year they went off around the world in one direction
or another, and rented their house furnished for exactly enough to pay
all their expenses. They had no children, and his business, which
consisted in allowing his bank to collect his invariable quarterly
dividends for him and credit them to his account, offered no obstacle to
this arrangement. On the alternate years, they came back and spent two
years' income living in their house.
Florence was an old friend of Rodney's and it was her notion that it
would be just the thing he'd want. She made no professions of
altruism--admitted she was fussy about whom she rented her darling house
to, and that Rodney and his wife would be exactly right. Still, she
didn't believe he could do better. They'd have to have some sort of
place to live in, in the autumn. It would be such a mistake to buy a lot
of stuff in a hurry and find out later that they didn't want it! The
arrangement she proposed would leave him an idyllically untroubled
summer--nothing to fuss about, and provide ... Well, Rodney knew for
himself what the house was--complete down to the cork-screws.
Even the servant question was eliminated. "Ours are so good," Florence
said, "that the last time we rented the house, we put them in the lease.
I wouldn't do that with you, of course, but I know they'll be just what
you want." And six thousand dollars a year was simply dirt cheap.
To clinch the thing, Florence went around and saw Frederica about it.
And Frederica, after listening, non-committally, dashed off to the last
meeting of the Thursday Club (all this happened in June, just before the
wedding) and talked the matter over with Violet Williamson on the way
home, afterward.
"John said once," observed Violet, "that if he had to live in that
house, he'd either go out and buy a plush Morris chair from
feather-your-nest Saltzman's, and a golden oak sideboard, or else run
amuck."
Frederica grinned, but was sure it wouldn't affect Rodney that way.
He'd never notice that there _wasn't_ a golden oak sideboard with a
beveled mirror in it. As for Rose, she thought Rose would like it--for a
while, anyway. Of course it wasn't forever. But this wasn't the point.
It was something else she had to get an unprejudiced opinion on, "simply
because in this case my own isn't trustworthy. I'm so foolish about old
Roddy, that I can't be sure I haven't--well, caught being mad about Rose
from him. It all depends, you see, on whether Rose is going to be a hit
this winter or not. If she is, they'll want a place just like that and
it would be a shame for her to be bothered and unsettled when she might
have everything all oiled for her. But of course if she doesn't--go (and
it all depends on her; Rodney won't be much help)--why, having a house
like that might be pretty sad. So, if you're a true friend, you'll tell
me what you think."
"What I really think," said Violet, "--of course I suppose I'd say this
anyway, but I do honestly mean it--is that she'll be what John calls a
'knock-out.' To be sure, I've only met her twice, but I think she's
absolutely thrilling. She's so perfectly simple. She's never--don't you
know--_being_ anything. She just is. And she thinks we're all so
wonderful--clever and witty and beautiful and all that--just honestly
thinks so, that she'll make everybody feel warm and nice inside, and
they'll be sure to like her. Of course, when she gets over feeling that
way about us...."
"She's got a real eye for clothes, too," said Frederica. "We've been
shopping. Well then, I'm going to tell Rodney to go ahead and take the
house."
Rose was consulted about it of course, though consulted is perhaps not
the right word to use. She was taken to see it, anyway, and asked if she
liked it, a question in the nature of the case superfluous. One might as
well have asked Cinderella if she liked the gown the fairy godmother had
provided her with for the prince's ball.
It didn't occur to her to ask how much the rent would be, nor would the
fact have had any value for her as an illuminant, because she would have
had no idea whether six thousand dollars was a half or a hundredth of
her future husband's income. The new house was just a part--as so many
of the other things that had happened to her since that night when
Rodney had sent her flowers and taken her to the theater and two
restaurants in Martin's biggest limousine had been parts--of a
breath-arresting fairy story.
It takes a consciousness of resistance overcome to make anything feel
quite real, and Rose, during the first three months after their return
to town in the autumn, encountered no resistance whatever. It was all,
as Frederica had said, oiled. She was asked to make no effort. The whole
thing just happened, exactly as it had happened to Cinderella. All she
had to do was to watch with wonder-wide eyes, and feel that she was,
deliciously, being floated along.
The conclusion Frederica and Violet had come to about her chance for
social success was amply justified by the event, and it is probable that
Violet had put her finger on the mainspring of it. One needn't assume
that there were not other young women at the prince's ball as beautiful
as Cinderella, and other gowns, perhaps, as marvelous as the one
provided by the fairy godmother. The godmother's greatest gift, I should
say, though the fable lays little stress on it, was a capacity for
unalloyed delight. No other young girl, beautiful as she may have been,
if she were accustomed to driving to balls in coaches and having princes
ask her to dance with them, could possibly have looked at that prince