The Real Adventure
simply reeling on their pins, without any fuss at all."
"They can always lose their job," said Barry. "There's great merit in
that."
The latter part of this conversation was what she was to remember
afterward, but the thing which impressed Rose at the time, and that held
her for hours looking on at the League show rehearsals, was what Jimmy
had told her about the technical side of the work of production, the
labors of the director, and so on.
The League was paying their director three hundred dollars a week, and
by the end of the third rehearsal Rose decided that he earned it. The
change he could make, even with one afternoon's work, in the
effectiveness, the carrying power, of a dance number was astonishing. It
wasn't at all a question of good taste. There stood Bertie Willis simply
awash with good taste and oozing suggestions whose hopeless futility was
demonstrated, even to him, the moment an attempt was made to put them
into effect. The director was concerned with matters of fact. There were
ascertained methods of getting a certain range of effects and he knew
what they were and applied them--as well as the circumstances admitted.
He was working under difficulties, poor chap! Rose, enlightened by Jimmy
Wallace, could see that. A man habituated to bawling at a girl, when the
spirit so moved him, "Here, you Belmont! What do you think you're trying
to do? You try sleeping at night and staying awake at rehearsal. See how
it works!"--accustomed to the liberty of saying things like that, and
then finding himself under the necessity of swallowing hard and counting
ten, and beginning with an--"I think, if you don't mind ...!" was in a
hard case.
Bertie Willis had his usefulness here. Sometimes Rose heard the director
whisper hoarsely, "For God's sake, don't let her do that! She _can't_ do
that!" and then Bertie would intervene and accomplish wonders by
diplomacy.
But it must be wonderfully exhilarating, Rose thought, to know exactly
why that girl was ridiculous and what to do to make her look right. And
to be able to sell your knowledge for three hundred dollars a week. This
was the sort of thing Rodney did, when one came to think of it. She
wondered whether he could sell his special sort of knowledge for as
much. That must be: the sort of possession Simone Greville had had in
mind when she said that nothing worth having could be bought cheap.
Neither Rodney nor the director had found his specialty growing on a
bush!
But her specialty, which in her life was to fill the place a knowledge
of stage dancing filled in the director's, was to come in a different
way. You paid a price, of course, for motherhood, in pain and peril, but
it remained a miraculous gift, for all that.
CHAPTER XII
WHAT HARRIET DID
She must wait for her miracle. As the weeks and months wore away, and as
the season of violent and high-frequency alternations between summer and
winter, which the Chicagoan calls spring, gave place to summer itself,
Rose was driven to intrench herself more and more deeply behind this
great expectation. It was like a dam holding back waters that otherwise
would have rushed down upon her and swept her away.
The problems went on mounting up behind the dam, of course. All the
minor luxuries of their way of living, which had been so keen a delight
to her during the first unthinking months of their married life; all the
sumptuous little elaborations of existence which she had explored with
such adventurous delight, had changed--now that she knew they had been
bought by the abridgment of her husband's freedom, by the invasion of
the clear space about himself which he had always so jealously
guarded--into a cloud of buzzing stinging distractions.
And they were the harder to bear now that she recognized how hard they
were going to be to drive away. It would have to be effected without
wounding Rodney's primitive masculine pride--without convicting him of
being an inadequate provider.
The baffling thing about him was that he had, quite unconsciously and
sincerely, two points of view. His affection for her, his wife, lover,
mistress, was a lens through which he sometimes looked out on the world.
As she refracted the facts of life for him they presented themselves in
the primitive old-fashioned way.
But there was another window in his soul through which he saw life with
no refractions whatever; remorselessly, logically. Looking through the
window, as he did when he talked to Barry Lake, or James Randolph, he
saw life as a mass of unyielding reciprocities. You got what you paid
for. You paid for what you got. And he saw both men and women--though
chiefly women--tangling and nullifying their lives in futile efforts to
evade this principle; looking for an Eldorado where something was to be
had for nothing; for panaceas; for the soft without the hard.
He was perfectly capable of seeing and describing an abstract wife like
that in blistering terms that would make an industrious street-walker
look almost respectable by comparison. But when he looked at Rose, he
saw her through the lens, as some one to be loved and desired,--and
prevented, if possible, from paying anything.
Somehow or other those two views must be reconciled before a life of
real comradeship between them was possible; before the really big thing
she had promised Portia to fight for could be anything more than a
tormenting dream.
Would the miracle solve this? It must. It was the only thing left to
hope for. In the shelter of the great dam she could wait serene.
And then came Harriet, and the pressure behind the dam rose higher.
Rose had tried, rather unsuccessfully, to realize, when during the
earlier days of her marriage she had heard Harriet talked about, that
there was actually in existence another woman who occupied, by blood
anyway, the same position toward Rodney and herself that Frederica did.
She felt almost like a real sister toward Frederica. But without quite
putting the notion into words, she had always felt it was just as well
that Harriet was an Italian _contessa_ four thousand miles away. Rodney
and Frederica spoke of her affectionately, to be sure, but their
references made a picture of a rather formidably correct, seriously
aristocratic sort of person. Harriet had always had, Rose could see, a
very effective voice in the family councils. She hadn't much of a mind,
perhaps; Rodney described it once as a small, well oiled, easy running
sort of mind that stitched away without misgivings, to its conclusions.
Rodney never could have been very fond of her. But she had something he
knew he lacked, and in matters which he regarded as of minor
importance--things that he didn't consider worth bothering much about
one way or the other--he'd submit to her guidance, it appeared, without
much question.
She had written, on the occasion of Rodney's marriage, a letter to Rose,
professing with perfect adequacy, to give her a sisterly welcome into
the family. But Rose felt pretty sure (a fragment of talk she overheard,
an impatient laugh of Rodney's, and Frederica's "Oh, that's Harriet of
course," had perhaps suggested it) that the _contessa_ regarded Rodney's
marriage as a _mesalliance_. She had entertained this notion the more
easily because at that time what Harriet thought--whatever Harriet might
think--seemed a matter of infinitesimal importance.
She'd discovered, along in the winter sometime, that Harriet's affairs
were going rather badly. Neither Rodney nor Frederica had gone into
details. But it was plain enough that both of them were looking for a
smash of some sort. It was in May that the cable came to Frederica
announcing that Harriet was coming back for a long visit. "That's all
she said," Rodney explained to Rose. "But I suppose it means the finish.
She said she didn't want any fuss made, but she hinted she'd like to
have Freddy meet her in New York, and Freddy's going. Poor old Harriet!
That's rather a pill for her to swallow, if it's so. We must try to
cheer her up."
She didn't seem much in need of cheering up, Rose thought, when they
first met. All that showed on the _contessa's_ highly polished surface
was a disposition to talk humorously over old times with her old
friends, including her brother and sister, and a sort of dismayed
acquiescence in the smoky seriousness, the inadequate civilization, the
sprawling formlessness of the city of her birth, not excluding that part
of it which called itself society.
In broad strokes, you could describe Harriet by saying she was as
different as a beautiful woman could be from Frederica. She wasn't so
beautiful as Frederica, to be sure, but together they made a
wonderfully contrasted pair--Harriet almost as perfect a brunette type
as Frederica was a blonde, and got up with her ear-rings and her hair
and all to look rather exotic. Her speech, too, and the cultivated
things she could do with her shoulders, carried out the impression. She
had a trick--when she wanted to be disagreeable an ill-natured observer
would have said--of making remarks in Italian and then translating them.
She wasn't disagreeable though--not malicious anyway, and the very hard
finish she carried, had been developed probably as a matter of
protection. She must have been through a good deal in the last few
years. She'd had two children stillborn, for one thing, and she was
frankly afraid to try it again. She never wanted any sympathy from
anybody. If it came down to that, she'd prefer arsenic. She resisted
Rose's rather poignant charm, as she resisted any other appeal to her
emotions. With the charm left out, Rose was simply a well meaning,
somewhat insufficiently civilized young person, the beneficiary, through
her marriage with Rodney, of a piece of unmerited good fortune. She
didn't in the least mean to be unkind to her, however, and didn't dream
that she was giving Rose an inkling how she thought of her.
Her manner toward this new member of the family was studiously
affectionate. She avoided being either disagreeable or patronizing. Rose
could see, indeed, how carefully she avoided it. She knew, too, that
Frederica saw the same thing and tried to compensate for it by a little
extra affectionateness. She even thought--though perhaps this was mere
self-consciousness--that she detected a trace of the same thing in
Rodney.
The tie of blood is a powerful thing. Rose had never realized before how
powerful. With Harriet's arrival, she became aware of the Aldrich family
as a sodality--something she didn't belong to and never could. It was
quite true, as Frederica had said, that she and Rodney had always been
special pals. Harriet fitted into the family on the other side of
Frederica from her brother. She was a person with a good deal of what
one calls magnetism, and she attracted Frederica toward herself--made
her, when she was about, a somewhat different Frederica. She even
attracted Rodney a little in the same way.
The time of the year (it was after the end of the social season) made it
natural for them to be together a good deal. And of course Harriet's
return, after an absence of years, made them seek such meetings. The
result was that Rose, at the end of almost a year of marriage, got her
first real taste of lonesomeness. When the four of them were together,
Rose felt like an outsider intruding on intimates. They didn't mean her
to feel that way--made a distinct effort, Rodney and Frederica, anyway,
to prevent her feeling that way; which of course only pointed it. They
had old memories to talk about; old friendships. They had, like all
close knit families, a sort of shorthand language to talk in. If Rose
came into the room where they were, she'd often be made aware that the
current subject of the conversation had been dropped and a new one was