The Real Adventure
weren't rich, of course--I never had quite enough pocket money. But the
idea of an old unpaid grocery bill made me sick. I talked things over
with mother the next day--told her I wasn't going to college--said I was
going to get a job. I got her to tell me how things stood, and she did,
as well as she could. The boys were getting their college education out
of the capital of father's estate, so that the income of it was getting
smaller. She had meant that I should do the same. But the income wasn't
really big enough to live on as it was.
"Mother could earn money of course, lecturing and writing, but money
wasn't one of the things she naturally thought about, and when there was
something big and worth while to do, she plunged in and did it whether
it was going to pay her anything or not. And there were you coming
along, and mother wasn't so very strong even then, and I--well, I saw
where I came in.
"I got mother to let me run all the accounts after that, and attend to
everything. And I got a job and began paying my way within a week."
"If I had a thing like that to remember," said Rose unsteadily, "I'd
never forget to be proud of it so long as I lived!"
"I wish I could be proud of it," said Portia. "But, like everything else
I do, I spoiled it. I knew that mother was doing a big fine work worth
doing--worth my making a sacrifice for, and I wanted to make the
sacrifice. But I couldn't help making a sort of grievance of it, too. In
all these years I've always made mother afraid of me--always made her
feel that I was, somehow, contemptuous of her work and ideas. That's
rather a strong way of putting it, perhaps. But I've seen her trying to
hide her enthusiasms from me a little, because of my nasty way of
sticking pins in them.
"Oh, of course in a way I was making the enthusiasms possible--I knew
that. She never could have gone on as she did if she'd been nagged at
all the time for money. Big ideas are always more important to her than
small facts, but without some narrow-minded, literal person to look
after the facts her ideas wouldn't have had much chance. I grubbed away
until I got things straightened out, so that her income was enough
to live on--enough for her to live on. I'd pulled her through. But
then ..."
"But then there was me," said Rose.
"I thought I was going to let you go," Portia went on inflexibly. "You'd
got to be just the age I was when I went to work, and I said there was
no reason why you shouldn't come in for your share. If things had
happened a little differently, I'd have told mother how matters stood
and you'd have got a job somewhere and gone to work. But things didn't
come out that way--at least I couldn't make up my mind to make them--so
you went to the university. I paid for that, and I paid for your
trousseau, and then I was through."
Rose was trembling, but she didn't flinch. "Wh--what was it," she asked
quietly, "what was it that might have been different and wasn't? Was
it--was it somebody you wanted to marry--that you gave up so I could
have my chance?"
Portia's hard little laugh cut like a knife. "I ought to believe that,"
she said. "I've told myself so enough times. But it's not true. I wonder
why you should have thought of that--why it occurred to you that a
cold-blooded fish like me should want to marry?"
Rose didn't try to answer. She waited.
"You have always thought me cold," Portia said. "So has mother. I'm not,
really. I'm--the other way. I don't believe there ever was a girl that
wanted love and marriage more than I. But I didn't attract anybody. I
was working pretty hard, of course, and that left me too tired to go out
and play--left me a little cross and acid most of the time. But I don't
believe that was the whole reason. It wouldn't have worked out that way
with you. But nobody ever saw me at all. The men I was introduced to
forgot me--were polite to me--got away as soon as they could. They were
always craning around for a look at somebody else. The few men--the two
or three who weren't like that, weren't good enough. But a man did want
me to marry him at last, and for a while I thought I would. Just--just
for the sake of marrying somebody. He wasn't much, but he was some one.
But I knew I'd come to hate him for not being some one else and I
couldn't make up my mind to it. So I took you on instead.
"I stopped hoping, you see, and tried to forget all about it--tried to
crowd it out of my life. I said I'd make my work a substitute for it.
And, in a way, I succeeded. The work opened up and got more interesting
as it got bigger. It wasn't just selling four-dollar candlesticks and
crickets and blue glass flower-holders. I was beginning to get real jobs
to do--big jobs for big people, and it was exciting. That made it easier
to forget. I was beginning to think that some day I'd earn my way into
the open big sort of life that your new friends have had for nothing.
"And then, a week ago, there came the doctor and cut off that chance.
Oh, there's no way out, I know that! That's the way the pattern was cut,
I suppose, in the beginning. I've always suspected the cosmic Dressmaker
of having a sense of humor. Now I know it. I'm the lucky one who isn't
going to have to wade through the slush any more. I'm to go out to
southern California and live in a nice little bungalow and be a nurse
for five or ten years, and then I'm going to be left alone in genteel
poverty, without an interest in the world, and too tired to make any.
And I'll probably live to eighty.
"And yet,"--she leaned suddenly forward, and the passion that had been
suppressed in her voice till now, leaped up into flame--"and yet, can
you tell me what I could have done differently? I've lived the kind of
life they preach about--a life of noble sacrifice. It hasn't ennobled
me. It's made me petty--mean--sour. It's withered me up. Look at the
difference between us! Look at you with your big free spaciousness--your
power of loving and attracting love! Why, you even love me, now, in
spite of all I've said this morning. I've envied you that--I've almost
hated you for it.
"No, that's a lie. I've wanted to. The only thing I could ever hate you
for, would be for failing. You've got to make good! You've had my share
as well as yours--you're living my life as well as yours. I'm the branch
they cut off so that you could grow. If you give up and let the big
thing slip out of your hands the way you were talking this morning,
because you're too weak to hold it and haven't pluck enough to fight for
it...."
"Look at me!" said Rose. The words rang like a command on a
battle-field.
Portia looked. Rose's blue eyes were blazing. "I won't do that," she
said very quietly. "I promise you that." Then the hard determination in
her face changed to something softer, and as if Portia's resistance
counted no more than that of a child, she pulled her sister up in her
arms and held her tight. And so at last Portia got the relief of tears.
CHAPTER VII
HOW THE PATTERN WAS CUT
Through the two weeks that intervened before Portia and her mother left
for the West, Rose disregarded the physical wretchedness--which went on
getting worse instead of better--and dismissed her psychical worries
until she should have time to attend to them. She helped Portia pack,
she presented a steady cheerful radiance of optimism to her mother, that
never faltered until the last farewells were said.
Just how she'd take up the fight again for the great thing Portia had
adjured her not to miss, she didn't know. She supposed she'd go back to
her law-books--at any rate until she could work out something better.
But the pattern, it seemed, was cut differently. She went to the
doctor's office the day after Portia took her mother away, and
discovered the cause of her physical wretchedness. She was pregnant.
CHAPTER VIII
A BIRTHDAY
Rodney heard young Craig, who deviled up law for him, saying good night
to the stenographer; glanced at his watch and opened the door to his
outer office.
"You may go home, Miss Beach," he said. "I'm staying on for a while but
I shan't want you." Then, to the office boy: "You, too, Albert."
He waited till he heard them go, then went out and disconnected his own
desk telephone, which the office boy, on going home, always left plugged
through; went back into his inner office again and shut the door after
him.
There was more than enough pressing work on his desk to fill the clear
hour that remained to him before he had to start for home. But he didn't
mean to do it. He didn't mean to do anything except drink down thirstily
the sixty minutes of pure solitude that were before him; to let his mind
run free from the clutch of circumstance. That hour had become a habit
with him lately, like--he smiled at the comparison--like taking a drug.
When something happened that forced him to forego it, he felt
cheated--irrationally irritable. He was furtive about it, too. He never
corrected Rose's assumption that the thing which kept him late at the
office so much of the time nowadays was a press of work. He even
concealed the fact that he pulled his telephone plug, by sticking it
back again every night just before he left.
He tried to laugh that guilty feeling out of existence. But he couldn't.
He knew too well whence it sprang. He knew whom he was stealing that
hour from. It wasn't the world in general he intrenched himself against.
It was his wife. The real purpose of that sixty minutes was to enable
him to stop thinking and feeling about her.
It was not that she had faded for him--become less the poignant, vivid,
irresistible thing he had first fallen in love with. Rather the
contrary. The simple rapture of desire that had characterized the period
of their engagement and the first months of their marriage, had lost
something--not so much, either--of its tension. But it had
broadened--deepened into something more compelling, more
pervasive--more, in his present mood, formidable.
She hadn't seemed quite well, lately, nor altogether happy, and he had
not been able to find out why. He had attributed it at first to the
shock occasioned by her mother's illness and her departure with Portia
to California, but this explanation seemed not to cover the ground. Why
couldn't she have talked freely with him about that? Inquiries about her
health, attempts--clumsily executed, no doubt--to treat her with special
tenderness and guard her against overexertion, only irritated her, drove
her to the very edge of her self-control--or over it. She was all right,
she always said. He couldn't force confidences from her of course. But
her pale face and eyes wide with a trouble in them he could not fathom
stirred something deeper in him than the former glow and glory had ever
reached.
And there was a new thing that gripped him in a positively terrifying
way--a realization of his importance to her. The after-effect of her
invasion of his office the night of the Randolphs' dinner and of his
learning of the tremulous interest with which she had afterward followed
the case he was then working on, had been very different from his first
irritation and his first amusement.
He had discovered, too, one day--a fortnight or so ago, in the course of
a rummage after some article he had mislaid, a heap of law-books that
weren't his. He had guessed the explanation of them, but had said
nothing to Rose about it--had found it curiously impossible to say
anything. If only she had taken up something of her own! It seemed as
essentially a law of her being to attempt to absorb herself in him, as
it was a law of his to resist that absorption of himself in her.
But resistance was difficult. The tendency was, after his perfectly
solid, recognizable duties had been given their places in the cubic