The Real Adventure
the centrifugal force of American life caused the thing to work out
differently. His son had an eastern college education, got elected to
Congress, as a preliminary step in a political career, went to
Washington, fell in love with and married the beautiful daughter of an
unreconstructed and impoverished southern gentleman. She detested the
North, and as her love for the South found its expression in passionate
laments over its ruin, uncomplicated by any desire to live there, she
spent more and more of her time--her husband's faint wishes becoming
less and less operative with her until they ceased altogether--in one
after another of the European capitals.
So Eleanor, two generations away from the fertile soil of central
Illinois, was as exotic to it as an orchid would be in a New England
garden. Two or three brief perfunctory visits to the land her income
came from, and to the relatives who still lived upon it, became the
substitute for what, in an older and stabler civilization, would have
been the dominant tradition in her life.
She must have been a source of profound satisfaction to large numbers of
French, Italian, Austrian and English persons, to whose eminent social
circles her mother's wealth and breeding gained admittance, by embodying
for them, with perfect authenticity, their notion of the American girl.
She was rich, beautiful, clever in a rather shallow, "American" way, she
had a will of her own, and was indulged by her mother with an astounding
amount of liberty; she was audacious, yet with a tempering admixture of
cool shrewdness, which kept her out of the difficulties she was always
on the brink of.
Kept her out of them, that is, until, in Vienna, as I have said, she met
James Randolph. That she fell in love with him is one of those facts
which seem astonishing the first time you look at them, and inevitable
when you look again. Physically, a sanguine blond, with a narrow head, a
forward thrusting nose, and really blue eyes, his dominating spiritual
quality was the sort of asceticism which proclaims not weak anemic
desires, but strong unruly ones, curbed in by the hand of a still
stronger will. He was highly imaginative, as a successful follower of
the Freudian method must be. He was capable of the gentlest sympathy,
and of the most relentless insistence. And he thought, until he met
Eleanor Blair, that he was, indisputably, his own master.
The wide social gulf between them--between a beautiful American heiress
with the entry into all circles of aristocratic society, except the
highest, and an only decently pecunious medical student, caught both of
them off their guard. The utter unlikelihood of anything coming of such
an acquaintance as theirs, was just the ambush needed to make it
possible for them to fall in love. They would, probably, have attracted
each other anywhere. But, in a city like Vienna, where all the sensuous
appurtenances of life are raised to their highest power, the attraction
became irresistible.
He did resist as long as he could--successfully, indeed, to the point of
holding himself back from asking her to marry him, or even explicitly
from making love to her. But the thing shone through his deeply-colored
emotions, like light through a stained-glass window. And when she asked
him to marry her, as she did in so many words--pleaded her homesickness
for a home she had never known, and a loneliness she had suddenly become
aware of, amid would-be friends and lovers, who could not, not one of
them, be called disinterested, his resistance melted like a powder of
April snow.
It was the only serious obstacle she had to overcome. The terms of her
father's will left her share of the income of the estate wholly at her
disposal. And so, in spite of her mother's horrified protest, they were
married, and not long afterward, her mother, who was still a year or two
on the sunny side of fifty, gratified her aristocratic yearnings by
marrying a count herself.
The Randolphs came back to America and, somewhat against Eleanor's
wishes, settled in Chicago. With her really very large income, her
exotic type of beauty and her social skill, she was probably right in
thinking she could have made a success anywhere. One of the larger
eastern cities--preferably New York or Washington, would have suited her
better. But Chicago, he said, was where he belonged and where his best
chance for professional success lay, and she yielded, though without
waiving her privilege of making a more or less good-humored grievance of
it. However, she found the place much more tolerable than riding into
and out of it on the train a few times had led her to expect.
She knew a few people of exactly the right sort and she neatly and
almost painlessly detached her husband from his old Lake View
associations. She looked out a house in precisely the right
neighborhood, and furnished it to combine the splendor of her income
with the simple austerity of his profession in just the right
proportions. She trailed her game with unfailing precision, never barked
up the wrong tree, could distinguish a goat from a sheep as far as she
could see one, and in no time at all had won the exact position she
wanted.
Her attitude toward her husband (you have already had a sample of it at
Frederica's famous dinner, where Rodney was supposed to take the
preliminary steps toward marrying Hermione Woodruff) attracted general
admiration, and it was fortified, of course, by the story of their
romantic marriage. It was conceded she had done a very fine and splendid
thing in marrying the man she loved, settling down to live with him on
so comparatively simple and modest a scale, and devoting herself so
whole-heartedly to his career. She had an air--and it wasn't consciously
assumed, either--of living wholly with reference to him, which people
found exceedingly engaging. (A cynic might observe at this point that
the same quality in a homely unattractive woman would fail of producing
this effect.)
Indeed, he had much to be grateful for. But for the fact that his wife
was accepted without reserve, a man whose principal preoccupation was
with matters of sex psychology, who was said to cure hysterical and
neurasthenic patients by the interpretation of their dreams, would have
been regarded askance by the average run of common-sense, golf-playing
men of affairs. Even his most miraculous cures would be attributed to
the imaginary nature of the disease, rather than to the skill of the
physician.
Not even his wife's undeniable charm could altogether efface this
impression from the mind of this sort of man. But though his way of
turning the theme of a smoking-room story into a subject for serious
scientific discussion might make you uncomfortable, you couldn't meet
James Randolph and hear him talk, without respecting him. He was
attractive to women (it amounted almost to fascination with the neurotic
type), and to men of high intelligence, like Rodney, he was a boon and
a delight. And the people who liked him least were precisely those most
attracted by his wife. Anyhow, no one refused an invitation to their
dinners.
Rose's arrival at this one--a little late, to be sure, but not
scandalously--created a mild sensation. None of the other guests were
strangers, either, on whom she could have the effect of novelty. They
were the same crowd, pretty much, who had been encountering one another
all winter--dancing, dining and talking themselves into a state of
complete satiety with one another. They'd split up pretty soon and
branch out in different directions--the Florida east coast, California,
Virginia Hot Springs and so on, and so galvanize their interest in life
and in one another. At present they were approaching the lowest ebb.
But when Rose came into the drawing-room--in a wonderful gown that dared
much, and won the reward of daring--a gown she'd meant to hold in
reserve for a greater occasion, but had put on to-night because she had
felt somehow like especially pleasing Rodney--when she came in, she
reoxygenated the social atmosphere. She won a moment of complete
silence, and when the buzz of talk arose again, it was jerky--the
product of divided minds and unstable attentions.
She was, in fact, a stranger. Her voice had a bead on it which roused a
perfectly unreasoning physical excitement--the kind of bead which, in
singing, makes all the difference between a church choir and grand
opera. The glow they were accustomed to in her eyes, concentrated itself
into flashes, and the flush that so often, and so adorably, suffused her
face, burnt brighter now in her cheeks and left the rest pale.
And these were true indices of the change that had taken place within
her. From sheer numb incredulity, which was all she had felt as she'd
walked away from Rodney's office door, and from the pain of an
intolerable hurt, she had reacted to a fine glow of indignation. She had
found herself suddenly feeling lighter, older, indescribably more
confident. That dinner was to be gone through with, was it? Well, it
should be! They shouldn't suspect her humiliation or her hurt. She was
conscious suddenly of enormous reserves of power hitherto unsuspected--a
power that could be exercised to any extent she chose, according to her
will.
Her husband, James Randolph reflected, had evidently either been making
love to her, or indulging in the civilized equivalent of beating her; he
was curious to find out which. And having learned from his wife that
Rose was to sit beside him at the table, he made up his mind that he
would make her tell him.
He didn't attempt it, though, during his first talk with her--confined
himself rigorously to the carefully sifted chaff which does duty for
polite conversation over the same hors-d'oeuvres and entrees, from one
dinner to the next, the season round. It wasn't until Eleanor had turned
the table the second time, that he made his first gambit in the game.
"No need asking you if you like this sort of thing," he said. "I would
like to know how you keep it up. You have the same things said to you
seven nights a week and you make the same answers--thrust and parry,
carte and tierce, buttons on the foils. It can't any of it get anywhere.
What's the attraction?"
"You can't get a rise out of me to-night," said Rose. "Not after what
I've been through to-day. Madame Greville's been talking to me. She
thinks American women are dreadful dubs,--or she would if she knew the
word--thinks we don't know our own game. Do you agree with her?"
"I'll tell you that," he said, "after you answer my question. What's the
attraction?"
"Don't you think it would be a mistake," said Rose, "for me to try to
analyze it? Suppose I did and found there wasn't any! You aren't
supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth, you know."
"Is that what's the matter with Rodney?" he asked. "Is this sort of"--a
gesture with his head took in the table--"caramel diet, beginning to go
against his teeth?"
"He had to work to-night," Rose said. "He was awfully sorry he couldn't
come."
She smiled just a little ironically as she said it, and exaggerated by
a hair's breadth, perhaps, the purely conventional nature of the reply.
"Yes," he observed, "that's what we say. Sometimes it gets us off and
sometimes it doesn't."
"Well, it got him off to-night," she said. "He was pretty impressive. He
said there was a ruling decision against him and he had to make some
sort of distinction so that the decision wouldn't rule. Do you know what
that means? I don't."
"Why didn't you ask him?" Randolph wanted to know.
"I did and he said he could explain it, but that it would take a month.
So of course there wasn't time."
"I thought," said Randolph, "that he used to talk law to you by the
hour."