The Real Adventure
I gasped. Jim's pretty weird when he gets going, but that Barry Lake has
a sort of--surgical way of discussing just _anything_, and his wife's as
bad. Oh, she's awfully interesting, I'll admit that, and she's as crazy
about Rose as any of the rest of us, which is to her credit.
"We never got off women all the evening. Barry Lake had their history
down from the early Egyptians, and Jim had an endless string of
pathological freaks to tell about. And then Rodney came out strong for
economic independence, only with his own queer angle on it of course. He
thought it would be a fine thing, but it wouldn't happen until the men
insisted on it. When a girl wasn't regarded as marriageable unless she
had been trained to a trade or a profession, then things would begin to
happen. I think he meant it, too, though he was more than usually
outrageous in his way of putting things.
"Well, and all the while there sat Rose, taking it all in with those big
eyes of hers, smiling to herself now and then; saying things, too,
sometimes, that were pretty good, though nobody but Jim seemed to
understand, always, just what she meant. They've talked before, those
two. But she didn't mind--anything; no more embarrassed than as if we'd
been talking embroidery stitches. You don't need to worry about her. And
she absolutely seemed to like Jane Lake."
Frederica did worry. Seriously meditated running in on Rodney before she
went home to lunch and giving him a tip that a young wife in Rose's
condition wanted treating a little more carefully. It was not for
prudential reasons that she decided against doing it. She was perfectly
willing to have her head bitten off in a good cause. But she knew Rodney
down to the ground; knew that it was utterly impossible for him,
whatever his previous resolutions might be, to pull up on the brink of
anything. Once you launched a topic that interested him, he'd go through
with it. So the only thing that would do any good would be to ban the
Lakes and James Randolph completely. And Rodney, if persuaded to do
that--he would in a minute, of course, if he thought it would be good
for Rose--would be incapable of concealing from her why he had done it;
which would leave matters worse than ever.
The only outcome, then, of her visit to Eleanor and her subsequent
cogitations, was that Martin, when he came home that night, found her
unusually affectionate and inclined to be misty about the eyes. "I'm
a--lucky guy, all right"--this was her explanation,--"being married to
you. Instead of any of the others."
He was a satisfactory old dear. He took her surplus tenderness as so
much to the good, and didn't bother over not knowing what it was all
about.
Eleanor was right in her surmise that Rose had really taken a fancy to
Jane Lake. She was truly--and really humbly--grateful to Jane, in the
first place, for liking her, finding her, in Jane's own phrase, "worth
while," and her ideas worth listening to. Because here was something,
you see, that she could take at its face value. There was no
long-circuited sex attraction to discount everything, in Jane's case.
But she had another reason.
Rodney, it seemed, had told the Lakes about the prospective baby the
very morning after he'd learned the news himself, and Jane--this was
perfectly characteristic of her--had come straight up to see Rose about
it; even before Frederica. And about the first thing she said was:
"Which do you want--a boy or a girl?"
Rose looked puzzled, then surprised. "Why," she said at last, "I don't
believe I know."
"It's funny about that," said Jane. "The one thing I was frightened
about--the first time, you know--was that it might be a girl. I think
Barry really wanted a girl, too. He does now, and we're going to try to
have one, though we can't rightly afford it. But I'm just primitive
enough--I'm a cave person, really--to have felt that having a girl, at
least before you had a boy, would be a sort of disgrace. Like the Hindoo
women in Kipling. But don't you really care?"
"Why, the queer thing is," said Rose, who had been in a daze ever since
Jane's first question, "that I hadn't thought of it as anything at all
but--It. Hardly that, really. I've known how miserable I've been, and
that there were things I must be careful not to do,--and, of course,
what was going to happen. But that when it was all over there'd be a
baby left,--a--a son or a daughter, why, that's ..."
Her surprise had carried her into a confidence that her budding
friendship for Jane was hardly ripe for, and she pulled up rather
suddenly. "I didn't know you had any children," she concluded, by way of
avoiding a further discussion of the marvel just then. "Are they here
with you now?"
Jane explained why they were not. They weren't babies any more, two
husky little boys of five and three, and they were rejoicing in the care
of a grandmother and a highly competent nurse. "One of those terribly
infallible people, you know. Oh, I don't like it. I get a night letter
every morning, and, of course, if one of them got the sniffles I'd be
off home like a shot. I'd like to be a regular domestic mother; not let
another soul but me touch them (Jane really believed this) but you see
we can't well afford it. Barry pays me five dollars a day for working
for him. I scout around and dig up material and interview people for
him--I used to be a reporter, you know. He'd have to hire somebody, and
it might better be me and keep the money in the family. Because the
nurse who takes my place doesn't cost near so much as that. All the
same, as I say, I don't half like it. You can preach the new stuff till
you're black in the face, but there's no job for a woman like taking
care of her own children."
Rose listened to all this, as well as to Jane's subsequent remarks, with
only so much attention as was required to keep her guest from suspecting
that she wasn't really listening at all. Jane didn't stay long. She had
to go out and earn Barry's five dollars--she'd lose her job if she
didn't, so she said, and Rose was presently left alone to dream,
actually for the first time, of the wonders that were before her.
What a silly little idiot she'd been not to have seen the thing for
herself! She'd been, all the while, beating her head against blind
walls when there was a door there waiting to open of itself when the
time came. Motherhood! There'd be a doctor and a nurse at first, of
course, but presently they'd go away and she'd be left with a baby. Her
own baby! She could care for him with her own hands, feed him--her joy
reached an ecstasy at this--feed him from her own breast.
That life which Rodney led apart from her, the life into which she had
tried with such ludicrous unsuccess to effect an entrance, was nothing
to this new life which was to open before her in a few short months now.
Meanwhile, she not only must wait; she could well afford to.
That was why she could listen with that untroubled smile of hers to the
terrible things that Rodney and James Randolph and Barry Lake and Jane
got into the way of hurling across her dinner table, and to the more
mildly expressed but equally alkaline cynicisms of Jimmy Wallace.
(Jimmy was dramatic critic on one of the evening papers, as well as a
bit of a playwright. He was a slim, cool, smiling, highly sophisticated
young man, who renounced all privileges as an interpreter of life in
favor of remaining an unbiased observer of it. He never bothered to
speculate about what you ought to do;--he waited to see what you did. He
knew, more or less, everybody in the world,--in all sorts of worlds. He
was, for instance, a great friend of Violet Williamson's and Bella
Forrester's and was, at the same time, on terms of avuncular confidence
with Dotty Blott of the Globe chorus. And he was exactly the same man to
the three of them. He fitted admirably in with their new circle.)
Well, in the light of the miraculous transformation that lay before her
Rose could listen undaunted to the tough philosophizings her husband and
Barry Lake delighted in as well as to the mordant merciless realities
with which Doctor Randolph and Jimmy Wallace confirmed them. She wasn't
indifferent to it all. She listened with all her might.
If there was anything in prenatal influence, that baby of hers was going
to be intelligent!
CHAPTER XI
AN ILLUSTRATION
So far as externals went, her life, that spring, was immensely
simplified. The social demands on her, which had been so insistent all
winter, stopped almost automatically. The only exception was the Junior
League show in Easter week, for which she put in quite a lot of work.
She was to have danced in it.
This is an annual entertainment by which Chicago sets great store. All
the smartest and best-looking of the younger set take part in it, in
costumes that would do credit to Mr. Ziegfeld, and as much of Chicago as
is willing and able to pay five dollars a seat for the privilege is
welcome to come and look. Delirious weeks are spent in rehearsal, under
a first-class professional director, audience and performers have an
equally good time, and Charity, as residuary legatee, profits by
thousands.
Rose dropped in at a rehearsal one day at the end of a solid two hours
of committee work, found it unexpectedly amusing, and made a point
thereafter of attending when she could. Her interest was heightened if
not wholly actuated by some things Jimmy Wallace had been telling her
lately about how such things were done on the real stage.
He had written a musical comedy once, lived through the production of
it, and had spent a hard-earned two-weeks vacation trouping with it on
the road, so he could speak with authority. It was a wonderful Odyssey
when you could get him to tell it, and as she made a good audience she
got the whole thing--what everybody was like, from the director down,
how the principals dug themselves in and fought to the last trench for
every line and bit of business in their parts, and sapped and mined
ahead to get, here or there, a bit more;--how insanely hard the chorus
worked....
The thing got a sociological twist eventually, of course, when Jane
wanted to know if it were true, as alleged by a prominent woman writer
on feminism, that the chorus-girls were driven to prostitution by
inadequate pay. Jimmy demolished this assertion with more warmth than he
often showed. He didn't know any other sort of job that paid a totally
untrained girl so well. There were initial requirements, of course. She
had to have reasonably presentable arms and legs and a rudimentary sense
of rhythm. But it took a really accomplished stenographer, for instance,
to earn as much a week as was paid the average chorus-girl. The trouble
was that the indispensable assets in the business were not character and
intelligence and ambition, but just personal charms.
Rose grinned across at Rodney. "That's like wives, isn't it?" she
observed.
"And then," Jimmy went on, "the work isn't really hard enough, except
during rehearsals, to keep them out of mischief." Rose smiled again, but
didn't press her analogy any further. "But a girl who's serious about
it, who doesn't have to be told the same thing more than once, and
catches on, sometimes, without being told at all,--why, she can always
have a job and she can be as independent as anybody. She can get
twenty-five dollars a week or even as high as thirty. It's surprising
though," he concluded, "considering what a bunch of morons most of them
are, that they work as well as they do; turn up on time for rehearsals
and performances, even when they're feeling really seedy, stand the
awful bawling out they get every few minutes--because some directors are
downright savages--and keep on going over and over a thing till they're