The Real Adventure
The button wasn't on the foil that time, because the thrust brought
blood--a bright flush into her cheeks and a sudden brightness into her
eyes that would have induced him to relent if she hadn't followed the
thing up of her own accord.
"I wish you'd tell me something," she said. "I expect you know better
than any one else I could ask. Why is it that husbands and wives can't
talk to each other? With people who live the way we do, it isn't that
they've worn each other out, because they see no more of each other,
hardly, than they do of the others. And it isn't that they're naturally
more uninteresting to each other than the rest of the people they know.
Because then, why did they marry each other in the first place, instead
of any one of the others who are so easy to talk to afterward? Imagine
what this table would be if the husbands and wives sat side by side!
Would Eleanor ever be able to turn it so that they talked that way?"
"That's a fascinating speculation," he said. "I wish I could persuade
her some time to indulge the wild eccentricity of trying it out."
"Well, why?" she demanded.
"Shall I try to say something witty," he asked, "or do you want it, as
near as may be, absolutely straight?"
"Let's indulge," she said, "in the wild, eccentricity of talking
straight."
The cigarettes came around just then, and he lighted one rather
deliberately, at one of the candles, before he answered.
"I am under the impression," he said, "that husbands and wives can talk
exactly as well as any other two people. Exactly as well, and no better.
The necessary conditions for real conversation are a real interest in
and knowledge of a common subject; ability on the part of both to
contribute something to that subject. Well, if a husband and wife can
meet those terms, they can talk. But the joker is, as our legislative
friend over there would say," (he nodded down the table toward a young
millionaire of altruistic principles, who had got elected to the state
assembly) "the joker is that a man and a woman who aren't married, and
who are moderately attracted to each other, can talk, or seem to talk,
without meeting those conditions."
"Seem to talk?" she questioned.
"Seem to exchange ideas mutually. They think they do, but they don't.
It's pure illusion, that's the answer."
"I'm not clever, really," said Rose, "and I don't know much, and I
simply don't understand. Will you explain it, in short words,"--she
smiled--"since we're not married, you know?"
He grinned back at her. "All right," he said, "since we're not married,
I will. We'll take a case ..." He looked around the table. "We'll be
discreet," he amended, "and take a hypothetical case. We'll take Darby
and Joan. They encounter each other somewhere, and something about them
that men have written volumes about and never explained yet, sets
up--you might almost call it a chemical reaction between them--a
physical reaction, certainly. They arrest each other's attention--get to
thinking about each other, are strongly drawn together.
"It's a sex attraction--not quite the oldest and most primitive thing in
the world, but nearly. Only, Darby and Joan aren't primitive people. If
they were, the attraction would satisfy itself in a direct primitive
way. But each of them is carrying a perfectly enormous superstructure of
ideas and inhibitions, emotional refinements and capacities, and the sex
attraction is so disguised that they don't recognize it. Do you know
what a short circuit is in electricity?"
"I think so," said Rose, "but you'd better not take a chance. Tell me
that, too."
"Why," he said, "the juice that comes into your house to light it and
heat the flat-irons and the toaster, and so on, comes in by one wire and
goes out by another. Before it can get out, it's got to do all the work
you want it to do--push its way through the resistance of fine tungsten
filaments in your lamps and the iron wires in your heaters that get
white hot resisting it. When it's pushed its way through all of them and
done the work you want it to do, it's tired out and goes away by the
other wire. But if you cut off the insulation down in the basement,
where those two wires are close together, and make it possible for the
current to jump straight across without doing any work, it will take the
short circuit instead of the long one and you won't have any lights in
your house. Now do you see what I mean?
"Darby and Joan are civilized. That is to say, they're insulated. The
current's there, but it's long-circuited. The only expression it's got
is through the intelligence,--so it lights the house. Absence of common
knowledge and common interests only adds to the resistance and makes it
burn all the brighter. Naturally Darby and Joan fall victims to the very
dangerous illusion that they're intellectual companions. They think
they're having wonderful talks. All they are doing, is long-circuiting
their sex attraction. Well, marriage gives it a short circuit. Why
should the current light the lamps when it can strike straight across?
There you are!"
"And poor Joan," said Rose, after a palpable silence, but evenly enough,
"who has thought all along that she was attracting a man by her
intelligence and her understanding, and all that, wakes up to find that
she's been married for her long eyelashes, and her nice voice--and her
pretty ankles. That's a little hard on her, don't you think, if she's
been taking herself seriously?"
"Nine times in ten," he said, "she's fooling herself. She's taken her
own ankles much more seriously than she has her mind. She's capable of
real sacrifices for them--for her sex charm, that is. She'll undergo a
real discipline for it. Intelligence she regards as a gift. She thinks
the witty conversation she's capable of after dinner, on a cocktail and
two glasses of champagne, or the bright letters she can write to a
friend, are real exercises of her mind--real work. But work isn't done
like that. Work's overcoming something that resists; and there's strain
in it, and pain and discouragement."
In her cheeks the red flared up brighter. She smiled again--not her own
smile--one at any rate that was new to her.
"You don't 'solve an intellectual problem' then;" she quoted, "'by
having your hand held, or your eyes kissed?'"
Whereupon he shot a look at her and observed that evidently he wasn't as
much of a pioneer as he thought.
She did not rise to this cast, however. "All right;" she said,
"admitting that her ankles are serious and her mind isn't, what is Joan
going to do about it?"
"It's easier to say what she's not to do," he decided, after hesitating
a moment. "Her fatal mistake will be to despise her ankles without
disciplining her mind. If she will take either one of them seriously, or
both for that matter--it's possible--she'll do very well."
He could, no doubt, have continued on the theme indefinitely, but the
table turned the other way just then and Rose took up an alleged
conversation with the man at her right which lasted until they left the
table and included such topics as indoor golf, woman's suffrage, the new
dances, Bernard Shaw, Campanini and the Progressive party; with a
perfectly appropriate and final comment on each.
Rose didn't care. She was having a wonderful time--a new kind of
wonderful time. No longer gazing, big-eyed like little Cinderella at a
pageant some fairy godmother's whim had admitted her to, but consciously
gazed upon; she was the show to-night, and she knew it. Her low, finely
modulated voice so rich in humor, so varied in color, had to-night an
edge on it that carried it beyond those she was immediately speaking to
and drew looks that found it hard to get away again. For the first time
in her life, with full self-consciousness, she was producing effects,
thrilling with the exercise of a power as obedient to her will as
electricity to the manipulator of a switchboard.
She was like a person driving an aeroplane, able to move in all three
dimensions. Pretty soon, of course, she'd have to come hack to earth,
where certain monstrously terrifying questions were waiting for her.
Madame Greville's final apothegm had suggested one of them. Was all she
valued in the world just so much fairy gold that would change over night
into dry leaves in her treasure chest because she had never earned
it--paid the price for it that life relentlessly exacts for all we may
be allowed to call ours?
Her tragi-comic scene with Rodney suggested another. What was her value
to him? Was she something enormously desirable when he wanted his hand
held and his eyes kissed, but an infernal nuisance when serious matters
were concerned? A fine and luxurious dissipation, not dangerous unless
recklessly indulged in, but to be kept strictly in her place? Before her
talk with Randolph she'd have laughed at that.
But did the horrible plausibility of what he had said actually cover the
truth? Did she owe that first golden hour with Rodney, his passionate
thrilling avowal of his life's philosophy, to nothing deeper in herself
than her unconscious power of rousing in him an equally unconscious,
primitive sex desire? Was the fine mutuality of understanding she had so
proudly boasted to her mother clear illusion? Now that the short circuit
had been established, would the lights never burn in the upper stories
of their house again? Turned about conversely the question read like
this: Was the thing that had, in Randolph himself, aroused his vivid
interest in the subject--well, nothing more than the daring cut of her
gown, the gleam of her jewels, the whiteness of her skin ...?
Those questions were waiting for her to come back to earth; and they
wouldn't get tired and go away. But for the present the knowledge that
they were there only made the aeroplane ride the more exhilarating.
She was called to the telephone just as she was on the point of
starting reluctantly for home, and found Rodney on the wire. He told her
that he had got hold of the thing he was looking for, but that there
were still hours of work ahead of him while he was fortifying himself
with necessary authorities. He wouldn't come home to-night at all, he
said. When his work was finished, he'd go to the club and have a Turkish
bath and all the sleep he had time for. When he got through in court
to-morrow afternoon, he'd come home.
It was all perfectly reasonable--it was to her finely tuned ear just a
shade too reasonable. It had been thought out as an excuse. Because it
wasn't for the Turkish bath nor the extra hour's sleep that he was
staying away from home. It was herself he was staying away from. He
wanted his mind to stay cold and taut, and he was afraid to face the
temptation of her eyes and her soft white arms. And in the mood of that
hour, it pleased her that this should be so--that the ascetic in him
should pay her the tribute of fear.
Afterward, of course, she felt like lashing herself for having felt like
that and for having replied, in a spirit of pure coquetry, in a voice of
studied, cool, indifferent good humor:
"That's a good idea, Roddy. I'm glad you're not coming back. Good
night."
CHAPTER V
RODNEY SMILED
It was with a reminiscent smile that Rose sat down before her telephone
the next morning and called a number from memory. Less than a year ago,
it had been such a thrilling adventure to call the number of that
fraternity house down at the university and ask, in what she conceived
to be a businesslike way, for Mr. Haines. And then, presently, to hear
the voice of the greatest half-back the varsity had boasted of in years,
saying in answer to her "Hello, Harry," "Hello, Rose."
It was really less than a year, and yet it was so immensely long ago,
judged by anything but the calendar, that the natural way to think of