The Real Adventure
perfectly purple with rage and said I was a savage. And then he got
madder still and said he'd like to be a savage himself for about five
minutes; and I wanted to tell him to go ahead and try, and see what
happened, but I didn't. I asked him how he wanted his tea, and he didn't
want it at all, and went away."
As she finished, she glanced up into his face for a hardly-needed
reassurance that the episode looked to him, as it had looked to her,
trivial. Then, with a contented little sigh, for his look gave her just
what she wanted, she sat up and slid her arms around his neck.
"How plumb ridiculous it would have been," she said, "if either of us
had married anybody else."
If Rodney, that is, had married a girl who'd have taken Bertram Willis
seriously; or if she had married a man capable of thinking the
architect's attentions important.
CHAPTER II
THE FIRST QUESTION AND AN ANSWER TO IT
But within a day or two, when a conversation overheard at a luncheon
table recalled the architect to her mind, a rather perplexing question
propounded itself to her. Why had it infuriated him so--why had he
glared at her with that air of astounded incredulity, on discovering
that she wasn't prepared to take him seriously? There could be only one
answer to that question. He could not have expected Rose to be properly
impressed and fluttered, unless that were the effect he was in the habit
of producing on other women. These others, much older that Rose all of
them (because no debutantes were ever invited to belong to the
_hareem_), these new, brilliant, sophisticated friends her marriage with
Rodney had brought her, did not, evidently, regard the dapper little
architect with feelings anything like the mild, faintly contemptuous
mirth that he had roused so spontaneously and irresistibly in Rose.
Every one of them had a husband of her own, hadn't she? And they were
happily married, too. Well, then ...!
She found Violet Williamson in Frederica's box at the Symphony concert
one Friday afternoon, and took them both home to tea with her afterward.
And when the talk fairly got going, she tossed her problem about Bertie
Willis and his _hareem_ into the vortex to see what would come of it.
It was always easy to talk with Frederica and Violet, there was so much
real affection under the amusement they freely expressed over her youth
and inexperience and simplicity. They always laughed at her, but they
came over and hugged her afterward.
"I'm turned out of the _hareem_," she said, apropos of the mention of
him, "in disgrace."
Violet wanted to know whatever in the world she had done to him.
"Because, he's been positively--what do you call it?--dithyrambic about
you for the last three months."
"I laughed," Rose acknowledged; "in the wrong place of course."
The two older women exchanged glances.
"Do you suppose it's ever been done to him before," asked Frederica, "in
the last fifteen years, anyway?" And Violet solemnly shook her head.
"But why?" demanded Rose. "That's what I want to know. How can any one
help thinking he's ridiculous. Of course if you were alone on a desert
island with him like the Bab Ballad, I suppose you'd make the best of
him. But with any one else that was--real, you know, around ..."
Only a very high vacuum--this was the idea Rose seemed to be getting
at--might be expected, _faute de mieux_, to tolerate Bertie. So if you
found him tolerated seriously in a woman's life, you couldn't resist the
presumption that there was a vacuum there.
"Don't ask me about him," said Frederica. "He never would have anything
to do with me; said I was a classic type and they always bored him
stiff. But Violet, here ..."
"Oh, yes," said Violet, "I lasted one season, and then he dropped me. He
beat me to it by about a minute. All the same--oh, I can understand it
well enough. You see, what he builds on is that a woman's husband is
always the least interesting man in the world. Oh, I don't mean we don't
love them, or that we want to change them--permanently, you know. Take
Frederica and me. We wouldn't exchange for anything. Yet, we used to
have long arguments. I've said that Martin was more--interesting, witty,
you know, and all that, than John. And Frederica says John is more
interesting than Martin. Oh, just to talk to, I mean. Not about anything
in particular, but when you haven't anything else to do."
She paused long enough to take a tentative sip or two of boiling hot
tea. But the way she had hung up the ending to her sentence, told them
she wasn't through with the topic yet.
"It's funny about that, too," she went on, "because really, we see each
other so much and have known each other so long, that I know
Martin's--repertory, about as well as Frederica. I mean, it isn't like
Walter Mill, when he was just back from the Legation at Pekin, or even
like Jimmy Wallace, who spends half his time playing around with all
sorts of impossible people--chorus-girls and such, and tells you queer
stories about them. There's something besides the--familiarness that
makes husbands dull. And that's what makes Bertie amusing."
"Oh, of course," said Frederica, "everybody likes to flirt--whether they
have to or not."
"Have to?" Rose echoed. She didn't want to miss anything.
Frederica hesitated. Then, rather tentatively, began her exegesis.
"Why, there are a lot of women--especially of our sort, I suppose, who
are always ... well, it's like taking your own temperature--sticking a
thermometer into their mouths and looking at it. They think they know
how they ought to feel about certain things, and they're always looking
to see if they do. And when they don't, they think their emotional
natures are being starved, or some silly thing like that. And of course,
if you're that way, you're always trying experiments, just the way
people do with health foods. In the end, they generally settle on
Bertie. He's perfectly safe, you know--just as anxious as they are not
to do anything really outrageous. Bertie keeps them in a pleasant sort
of flutter, and maybe he does them good. I don't know.--Drink your tea,
Violet. We've got to run."
That was explicit enough anyway. But it didn't solve Rose's
problem--broadened and deepened it rather, and gave it a greater basis
of reality. It was silly, of course, always to be asking yourself
questions. But after all, you didn't question a thing that wasn't
questionable. There had been no necessity for a compromise between
romance and reality in her own case. She hadn't any need of a
thermometer. Why had they?
Of course she knew well enough that marriage was not always the blissful
transformation it had been for her. There were unhappy marriages. There
were such things in the world as unfaithful husbands and brutal drunken
husbands, who had to be divorced. And equally, too, there were
cold-blooded, designing, mercenary wives. (In the back of her mind was
the unacknowledged notion that these people existed generally in novels.
She knew, of course, that those characters must have real prototypes
somewhere. Only, it hadn't occurred to her to identify them with people
of her own acquaintance.) But the idea had been that, barring these
tragic and disastrous types, marriage was a state whose happy
satisfactoriness could, more or less, be taken for granted.
Oh, there were bumps and bruises, of course. She hadn't forgotten that
tragic hour in the canoe last summer. There had, indeed, been two or
three minor variants on the same theme since. She had seen Rodney drop
off now and again into a scowling abstraction, during which it was so
evident he didn't want to talk to her, or even be reminded that she was
about, that she had gone away flushed and wondering, and needing an
effort to hold back the tears.
These weren't frequent occurrences, though. Once settled into what
apparently was going to be their winter's routine, they had so little
time alone together that these moments, when they came, had almost the
tension of those that unmarried lovers enjoy. They were something to
look forward to and make the delicious utmost of.
So, until she got to wondering about Bertie, Rose's instinctive attitude
toward the group of young to middle-aged married people into which her
own marriage had introduced her, was founded on the assumption that,
allowing for occasional exceptions, the husbands and wives felt toward
each other as she and Rodney did--were held together by the same
irresistible, unanalyzable attraction, could remember severally, their
vivid intoxicating hours, just as she remembered the hour when Rodney
had told her the story and the philosophy of his life.
Bertie, or rather the demand for what Bertie supplied, together with
Frederica's explanation of it, brought her the misgiving that marriage
was not, perhaps, even between people who loved each other,--between
husbands who were not "unfaithful" and wives who were not
"mercenary"--quite so simple as it seemed.
The misgiving was not very serious at first--half amused, and wholly
academic, because she hadn't, as yet, the remotest notion that the thing
concerned, or ever could concern, herself; but the point was, it formed
a nucleus, and the property of a nucleus is that it has the power of
attracting to itself particles out of the surrounding nebulous vapor. It
grows as it attracts, and it attracts more strongly as it grows.
An illustration of this principle is in the fact that, but for the
misgiving, she would hardly have asked Simone Greville what she meant by
saying that though she had always supposed the fundamental sex
attraction between men and women to be the same in its essentials, in
all epochs and in all civilizations, her acquaintance with upper-class
American women was leading her to admit a possible exception.
Since that amiable celestial, Wu Ting Fang, made his survey of our
western civilization and left us wondering whether after all we had the
right name for it, no one has studied our leisured and cultivated
classes with more candor and penetration than this great Franco-Austrian
actress. She had ample opportunities for observation, because during the
first week of her tour the precise people who count the most in our
informal social hierarchy took her up and, upon examination, took her
in. Playing in English as she did, and with an American supporting
company, she did not make a great financial success (the Continental
technique, especially when contrasted so intimately with the one we are
familiar with does not attract us), but socially she was a sensation. So
during her four weeks in Chicago, while she played to houses that
couldn't be dressed to look more than a third full, she was enormously
in demand for luncheons, teas, dinners, suppers, Christmas bazaars,
charity dances and so on. (If it had only been possible to establish a
scale of fees for these functions, her manager used to reflect
despairingly, he might have come out even after all.) Any other sort of
engagement melted away like snow in the face of an opportunity of
meeting Simone Greville.
Rose had met her a number of times before the incident referred to
happened, but had always surveyed the lioness from afar. What could she,
whose acquaintance with Europe was limited to one three-months trip,
undertaken by the family during the summer after she graduated from high
school, have to say to an omniscient cosmopolite like that?
So she hung about, within ear-shot when it was possible, and watched,
leaving the active duties of entertainment to heavily cultured
illuminati like the Howard Wests, or to clever creatures like Hermione
Woodruff and Frederica, and Constance Crawford, whose French was good
enough to fill in the interstices in Madame Greville's English.