The Real Adventure
She was standing about like that at a tea one afternoon, when she heard
the actress make the remark already quoted, to the effect that American
women seemed to her to be an exception to what she always supposed to be
the general law of sex attraction.
It was taken, by the rather tense little circle gathered around her, as
a compliment; exactly as, no doubt, Greville intended it to be taken.
But her look flashed out beyond the confines of the circle and
encountered a pair of big luminous eyes, under brows that had a
perplexed pucker in them. Whereupon she laughed straight into Rose's
face and said, lifting her head a little, but not her voice:
"Come here, my child, and tell me who you are and why you were looking
at me like that."
Rose flushed, smiled that irresistible wide smile of hers, and came, not
frightened a bit, nor, exactly, embarrassed; certainly not into
pretending she was not surprised, and a little breathlessly at a loss
what to say.
"I'm Rose Aldrich." She didn't, in words, say, "I'm just Rose Aldrich."
It was the little bend in her voice that carried that impression. "And I
suppose I was--looking that way, because I was wishing I knew exactly
what you meant by what you said."
Greville's eyes, somehow, concentrated and intensified their gaze upon
the flushed young face; took a sort of plunge, so it seemed to Rose, to
the very depths of her own. It was an electrifying thing to have happen
to you.
"_Mon dieu_," she said, "_j'ai grande envie de vous le dire_." She
hesitated the fraction of a moment, glanced at a tiny watch set in a
ring upon the middle finger of her right hand, took Rose by the arm as
if to keep her from getting away, and turned to her hostess.
"You must forgive me," she said, "if I make my farewells a little soon.
I am under orders to have some air each day before I go to the theater,
and if it is to be done to-day, it must be now. I am sorry. I have had a
very pleasant afternoon.--Make your farewells, also, my child," she
concluded, turning to her prisoner, "because you are going with me."
There was something Olympian about the way she did it. The excuse was
made, and the regret expressed in the interest of courtesy, but neither
was insisted on as a fact, nor was seriously intended, it appeared, even
to disguise the fact, which was simply that she had found something
better worth her while, for the moment, than that tea. It occurred to
Rose that there wasn't a woman in town--not even terrible old Mrs.
Crawford, Constance's mother-in-law, who could have done that thing in
just that way; no one who felt herself detached, or, in a sense,
superior enough, to have done it without a trace of self-consciousness,
and consequently without offense. An empress must do things a good deal
like that.
The effect on Rose was to make complete frankness seem the easiest thing
in the world. And frankness seemed to be the thing called for. Because
no sooner were they seated in the actress' car and headed north along
the drive, than she, instead of answering Rose's question, repeated one
of her own.
"I ask who you are, and you say your name--Rose something. But that
tells me nothing. Who are you--one of them?"
"No, not exactly," said Rose. "Only by accident. The man I married
is--one of them, in a way. I mean, because of his family and all that.
And so they take me in."
"So you are married," said the French woman. "But not since long?"
"Six months," said Rose.
She said it so with the air of regarding it as a very considerable
period of time that Greville laughed.
"But tell me about him then, this husband of yours. I saw him perhaps at
the tea this afternoon?"
Rose laughed. "No, he draws the line at teas," she said. "He says that
from seven o'clock on, until as late as I like, he's--game, you
know--willing to do whatever I like. But until seven, there are
no--well, he says, siren songs for him."
"Tell me--you will forgive the indiscretions of a stranger?--how has it
arrived that you married him? Was it one of your American romances?"
"It didn't seem very romantic," said Rose. "I mean not much like the
romantic stories you read, and of course one couldn't make a story about
it, because there was nothing to tell. We just happened to get
acquainted, and we knew almost straight off that we wanted to marry each
other, so we did. Some people thought it was a little--headlong, I
suppose, but he said it was an adventure anyway, and that people could
never tell how it was going to come out until they tried. So we tried,
and--it came out very well."
"It 'came out'?" questioned the actress.
"Yes," said Rose. "Ended happily, you know."
"Ended!" Madame Greville echoed. Then she laughed.
Rose flushed and smiled at herself. "Of course I don't mean that," she
admitted, "and I suppose six months isn't so very long. Still you could
find out quite a good deal ..."
"What is his affair?" The actress preferred asking another question, it
seemed, to committing herself to an answer to Rose's unspoken one. "Is
he one of your--what you call tired business men?"
"He's never tired," said Rose, "and he isn't a business man. He's a
lawyer--a rather special kind of lawyer. He has other lawyers, mostly,
for his clients, he's awfully enthusiastic about it. He says it's the
finest profession in the world, if you don't let yourself get dragged
down into the stupid routine of it. It certainly sounds thrilling when
he tells about it."
The actress looked round at her. "So," she said, "you follow his work as
he follows your play? He talks seriously to you about his affairs?"
"Why, yes," said Rose, "we have wonderful talks." Then she hesitated.
"At least we used to have. There hasn't seemed to be much--time, lately.
I suppose that's it."
"One question more," said the French woman, "and not an idle one--you
will believe that? _Alors!_ You love your husband. No need to ask that.
But how do you love him? Are you a little indulgent, a little cool, a
little contemptuous of the grossness of masculine clay, and still
willing to tolerate it as part of your bargain? Is that what you mean by
love? Or do you mean something different altogether--something vital and
strong and essential--the meeting of thought with thought, need with
need, desire with desire?"
"Yes," said Rose after a little silence, "that's what I mean."
She said it quietly, but without embarrassment and with full meaning;
and as if conscious of the adequacy of her answer, she forbore to
embroider on the theme. There was a momentary silence, while the French
woman gazed contemplatively out of the open window of the limousine, at
a skyscraping apartment building which jutted boldly into a curve of the
parkway they were flying along.
"That's a beauty, isn't it?" said Rose, following her gaze. "Every
apartment in that building has its own garage that you get to with an
elevator."
The actress nodded. "You Americans do that;" she said, "better than any
one else in the world. The--surfaces of your lives are to marvel at."
"But with nothing inside?" asked Rose. "Is that what you mean? Is--that
what you mean about--American women, that you said you'd tell me?"
Madame Greville took her time about answering. "They are an enigma to
me," she said, "I confess it. I have never seen such women anywhere, as
these upper-class Americans. They are beautiful, clever, they know how
to dress. For the first hour, or day, or week, of an acquaintance, they
have a charm quite incomparable. And, up to a certain point, they
exercise it. Your _jeunes filles_ are amazing. All over the world, men
go mad about them. But when they marry ..." She finished the sentence
with the ghost of a shrug, and turned to Rose. "Can you account for
them? Were you wondering at them, too, with those great eyes of yours?
_Alors_! Are we puzzled by the same thing? What is it, to you, they
lack?"
Rose stirred a little uneasily. "I don't know very much," she said. "I
don't know them well at all, and of course I shouldn't criticize ..."
"Ah, child," broke in the actress, "there you mistake yourself. One must
always criticize. It is by the power of criticism and the courage of
criticism, that we have become different from the beasts."
"I don't know," said Rose, "except that some of them seem a little
dissatisfied and restless, as if--well, as if they wanted something they
haven't got."
"But do they truly want it?" Madame Greville demanded. "I am willing to
be convinced, but myself, I find of your women of the aristocrat class,
the type most characteristic is"--she paused and said the thing first
to herself in French, then translated--"is a passive epicure in
sensations; sensations mostly mental, irritating or soothing--a pleasant
variety. She waits to be made to feel; she perpetually--tastes. One may
demand whether it is that their precocity has exhausted them before they
are ripe, or whether your Puritan strain survives to make all passion
reprehensible, or whether simply they have too many ideas to leave room
for anything else. But, from whatever cause, they give to a stranger
like me, the impression of being perfectly frigid, perfectly
passionless. And so, as you say, of missing the great thing altogether.
"A few of your women are great, but not as women, and of second-rate men
in petticoats, you have a vast number. But a woman, great by the
qualities of her sex, an artist in womanhood, I have not seen."
"Oh, I wish," cried Rose, "that I knew what you meant by that!"
"Why, regard now," said the actress. "In every capital of Europe--and I
know them all--wherever you find great affairs--matters of state,
diplomacy, politics--you find the influence of women in them; women of
the great world, sometimes, sometimes of the half-world; great women, at
all events, with the power to make or ruin great careers; women at whose
feet men of the first class lay all they have; women the tact of whose
hands is trusted to determine great matters. They may not be beautiful
(I have seen a faded little woman of fifty, of no family or wealth,
whose salon attracted ministers of state), they haven't the education,
nor the liberties that your women enjoy, and, in the mass, they are not
regarded--how do you say?--chivalrously. Yet there they are!
"And why? Because they are capable of great passions, great desires.
They are willing to take the art of womanhood seriously, make sacrifices
for it, as one must for any art, in order to triumph in it."
Rose thought this over rather dubiously. It was a new notion to her--or
almost new. Portia had told her once she never would have any trouble
making her husband "want" her as much as she liked. This idea of making
a serious art of your power to attract and influence men, seemed to
range itself in the same category.
"But suppose," she objected, "one doesn't want to triumph at it? Suppose
one wants to be a--person, rather than just a woman?"
"There are other careers indeed," Madame Greville admitted, "and one can
follow them in the same spirit, make the sacrifices--pay the price they
demand. _Mon dieu!_ How I have preached. Now you shall talk to me. It
was for that I took you captive and ran away with you."
For the next half-hour, until the car stopped in front of her house,
Rose acted on this request; told about her life before and since her
marriage to Rodney, about her friends, her amusements--anything that
came into her mind. But she lingered before getting out of the car, to
say:
"I hope I haven't forgotten a single word of your--preaching. You said
so many things I want to think about."
"Don't trouble your soul with that, child," said the actress. "All the
sermon you need can be boiled down into a sentence, and until you have
found it out for yourself, you won't believe it."
"Try me," said Rose.