The Real Adventure
and, with the exception of one or two equally momentary cloud-shadows,
lasted all evening.
They talked--heavens how they talked! It was like the breaking up of a
log-jam. The two men would rush along, side by side, in perfect
agreement for a while, catching each other's half expressed ideas, and
hurling them forward, and then suddenly they'd meet, head on, in
collision over some fundamental difference of opinion, amid a prismatic
spray of epigram. Jane kept up a sort of obbligato to the show,
inserting provocative little witticisms here and there, sometimes as
Rodney's ally, sometimes as her husband's, and luring them, when she
could, into the quiet backwaters of metaphysics, where she was more than
a match for the two of them. Jane could juggle Plato, Bergson and
William James, with one hand tied behind her. But when she incautiously
ventured out of this domain, as occasionally she did--when, for example,
she confessed herself in favor of a censorship of the drama, she was
instantly demolished.
"The state's got no business with morals," said Barry.
"That's the real cause of most of our municipal corruption," said
Rodney. "A city administration, for instance, is corrupt exactly in
ratio to its attempt to be moral. The more moral issues you import into
politics--gambling, prostitution, Sunday closing, censored movies, and
the rest--the more corrupt and helpless and inefficient your government
will be." And, between them, for the next half-hour, they kept on
demonstrating it until the roar of their heavy artillery fairly drove
Jane from her trenches.
But all this was preliminary to the main topic of the evening, which got
launched when Rodney seized the advantage of a pause to say:
"A series of articles on women, eh! What are you going to do to them?"
With that the topic of feminism was on the carpet and it was never
thereafter abandoned. "Utopia to Brass Tacks," was the slogan Barry's
chief had provided him with, he said. We were about the end of the
heroic age of the movement, the age of myths and saints and prophecies.
A transition was about due to smaller, more immediate things. The
quality of the leaders would probably change. The heroines of the last
three or four decades, women like Naomi Rutledge Stanton, to take a fine
type of them.
"She's my mother," said Rose.
Barry Lake's aplomb was equal to most situations, but it failed him
here; for a moment he could only stare. The contrast between the picture
in his mind's eye, of the plain, square-toed, high-principled and rather
pathetic champion of the Cause--pathetic in the light of what she hoped
from it--facing indifference and ridicule with the calm smile of one
who has climbed her mountain and looked into the promised
land,--between that and the lovely, sensitive, sensuous creature he was
staring at, was enough to stagger anybody. He got himself together in a
moment, said very simply and gravely how much he admired her and how
high a value, he believed, the future would put on her work; then he
picked up his sentence where Rose had broken it.
The heroines and the prophets were going to be replaced, he believed, by
leaders much more practical and less scrupulous, and the movement would
follow the leaders. As far as polities went, he not only looked for no
millennium, but for a reaction in the other direction. There'd be more
open graft, he thought.
Rose asked him if he meant that he thought women were less honest than
men.
"It isn't a lack of old-fashioned honesty that makes a man a grafter,"
he said. "It's seeing the duties and privileges of a public office in a
private and personal way, instead of in a public, impersonal one; being
kind to old friends who need a helping hand, and grateful to people
who've held out helping hands to you. Well, and women have been trained
for hundreds of years to see things in that private and personal way,
and to exalt the private and personal virtues. Just as they've been
trained to stick to rule of thumb methods that more or less work, rather
than to try experiments. So, on the whole, I think their getting the
vote will mean that politics will be crookeder and more reactionary than
they've been in a good many years. All the same I'm for it, because it's
a part of democracy, and I'm for democracy all the way. Not because you
get good government out of it; you don't. You get as good as you
deserve, and in the long run I think a society that has to deserve as
good a government as it gets, grows stronger and healthier than one that
gets a better government than it deserves."
"That old tory radical over there," said Jane, with a nod at Rodney,
"has been grinning away for half an hour without saying a word. I'd like
to know what you think about it."
"'Tory radical'?" questioned Rose.
"That's what Barry calls him," Jane explained. "He's so conservative
about the law that he calls Blackstone an upstart and a faker, but the
things he'd do, when it comes, down to cases--on good old common law
principles, of course, would make the average Progressive's hair curl.
Why, when people were getting excited over Roosevelt's recall of
judicial decisions--remember?--Rodney was for abolishing the Bill of
Rights altogether."
"What's the Bill of Rights?" asked Rose.
Jane headed Rodney off. "Oh, life, liberty and property without due
process of law," she said. "Neither of these men has any opinion of
rights. The only natural inalienable right you've got, they say, is to
take what you can get and keep it until somebody stronger than you, that
you can't run away from, catches you. What you call your individual
rights are just what society has made and doesn't for the moment need,
to keep itself going. If it does need them, it takes them back. Only, of
course, it has got to keep itself going. If it doesn't, people get up
and kick it to bits and start again." She turned to Rodney. "But what do
you think about it, really? What Barry's been talking about, I mean. Are
you for it?"
"For what?" Rodney wanted to know.
"For what women want," said Jane. "Economic independence, equality, easy
divorce--all the new stuff."
"I'm not against it," Rodney said, "any more than I'm against to-morrow
being Tuesday. It's going to be Tuesday whether I like it or not. But
that conviction keeps me from crusading for it very hard. What I'm
curious about is how it's going to work. When they get what they want,
do you suppose they're going to want what they get?"
"I knew there was something deadly about your grin," said Jane. "What
are you so cantankerous about?"
"Why, the thing," said Rodney, "that sours my naturally sweet
disposition is this economic independence. I've been hearing it at
dinner tables all winter. When I hear a woman with five hundred dollars'
worth of clothes on--well, no, not on her back--and anything you like in
jewelry, talking about economic independence as if it were something
nice--jam on the pantry shelf that we men were too greedy to let them
have a share of--I have to put on the brakes in order to stay on the
rails.
"We men have to fight for economic independence from the time we're
twenty, more or less, till the time we die. It's a sentence to hard
labor for life; that's what economic independence is. How does that
woman think she'd set about it, to make her professional services worth
a hundred dollars a day--or fifty, or ten? What's she got that has a
market value? What is there that she can capitalize? She's got her
physical charm, of course, and there are various professions besides the
oldest one, where she can make it pay. Well, and what else?"
"She can bear children," said Jane. "She ought to be paid well for
that."
"You're only paid well," Rodney replied, "for something you can do
exceptionally well, or for something that few people can do at all. As
long as the vast majority of women can bear children, the only women who
could get well paid for it would be those exceptionally qualified, or
exceptionally proficient. This is economics, now we're talking. Other
considerations are left out. No, I tell you. Economic independence, if
she really got it--the kind of woman I've been talking about--would make
her very, very sick."
"She'd get over being sick though, wouldn't she," said Rose, "after a
while? And then, don't you think she'd be glad?"
Rodney laughed. "The sort of woman I've been talking about," he said,
"would feel, when all was said, that she'd got a gold brick."
Rose poured his coffee with a steady hand. They were in the library by
now.
"If that's so," she said, "then the kind of woman you've been talking
about has already got a profession--the one you were just speaking of
as--as the oldest. As Doctor Randolph says, she's cashed in on her
ankles. But maybe you're mistaken in thinking she wouldn't choose
something else if she had a chance. Maybe she wouldn't have done it,
except because her husband wanted her to and she was in love with him
and tried to please. You can't always tell."
It was almost her first contribution to the talk that evening. She had
asked a few questions and said the things a hostess has to say. The
other three were manifestly taken by surprise--Rodney as well as his
guests.
But surprise was not the only effect she produced. Her husband had never
seen her look just like that before (remember, he had not been a guest
at the Randolphs' dinner on the night he had turned her out of his
office), the flash in her eyes, the splash of bright color in her
cheeks.
Barry saved him the necessity of trying to answer, by taking up the
cudgels himself. Rodney didn't feel like answering, nor, for the moment,
like listening to Barry. His interest in the discussion was eclipsed for
the moment, by the thrill and wonder of his wife's beauty.
He walked round behind her chair, on the pretext of getting his coffee
cup, and rested his hand, for an instant, on her bare shoulder. He was
puzzled at the absence of response to the caress. For there was none,
unless you could call it a response that she sat as still as ivory until
he took his hand away. And looking into her face, he thought she had
gone pale. Evidently though, it was nothing. Her color came back in a
moment, and for the next half-hour she matched wits with Barry Lake very
prettily.
When Jane declared that they must go, her husband protested.
"I haven't managed yet to get a word out of Rodney about any of his
things. He dodged when I asked him how his Criminal Procedure Reform
Society was getting on, and he changed the subject when I wanted to know
about his model Expert Testimony Act." He turned on Rodney. "But there's
one thing you're not going to get out of. I want to know how far you've
come along with your book on Actual Government. It was a great start you
had on that, and a bully plan. I shan't let you off any details. I want
the whole thing. Now."
"I've had my fling," said Rodney, with a sort of embarrassed good humor.
"And I don't say I shall never have another. But just now, there are no
more intellectual wild-oats for me. What I sow, I sow in a field and in
a furrow. And I take good care to be on hand to gather the crop. Model
Acts and Reform of Procedure! Have you forgotten you're talking to a
married man?"
On learning their determination to walk down-town, he said he'd go with
them part of the way. Would Rose go, too? But she thought not.
"Well, I can't pretend to think you need it," he admitted. Then, turning
to the Lakes: "You people must spend a lot of evenings with us like
this. You've done Rose a world of good. I haven't seen her look so well
in a month of Sundays."
CHAPTER IX
A DEFEAT
The gown that Rodney had spoken of apologetically to the Lakes as a
coronation robe, was put away; the maid was sent to bed. Rose, huddled