The Real Adventure
getting started; or else there'd be laborious explanations.
It wouldn't have mattered--not so much anyway, if Rose had had a similar
sodality of her own to fall back on--a mass of roots extending out into
indigenous soil. But Rose, you see, had been transplanted. Her two
brothers were hardly more than faint memories of her childhood. One was
a high-school principal down in Pennsylvania; the other a professor of
history at one of the western state universities. Both of them had
married young and had been very much married--on small incomes--ever
since. The only family she had that counted, was her mother and Portia.
And they were gone now to California.
She had had a world of what she called friends, of course, of her own
age, at the high school and at the university. But her popularity in
those circles, her easy way of liking everybody, and her energetic
preoccupation with things to do, had prevented any of these friendships
from biting in very deep. None of them had been solidly founded enough
to withstand the wavelike rush of Rodney Aldrich into her life. She had
gone over altogether into her husband's world. The world that had been
her own, hadn't much more existence, except for her mother and sister
out in California, than the memory of a dream.
But it took Harriet's arrival to make her realize this. And the
realization, when it was pressed home particularly hard, brought with it
moments of downright panic. Everything--everything she had in the world,
went back to Rodney. Except for him, she was living in an absolute
vacuum. What would happen if the stoutly twisted cable that bound her to
him should be broken, as the cable that bound Harriet to her husband
was, apparently, broken? What would she have then of which she could
say, "This much is mine"? Well, she'd have the child. That would be,
partly at least, hers.
But Harriet's contribution to Rose's difficulties, to the mounting
pressure behind the dam, was destined to be more serious--more actual,
anyway--before very long.
The question where Rose and Rodney were going to live after their lease
on the McCrea house ended, had begun to press for an answer. October
first was when the lease expired and it wasn't far from the date at
which they expected the baby. Rose wouldn't be in any condition for
house hunting during the hot summer months. Things would have to be
settled somehow before then. A heavy calendar of important cases had
kept Rodney from giving as much attention to the problem as he himself
felt it needed. He had delighted Rose with the suggestion that they go
out into the country somewhere. Not the real country of course, but up
along the shore, where the train service was good and the motor a
possible alternative.
They spent some very lovely afternoons during the early days of the
emerging spring, cruising about looking at possible places. They talked
of building at first, but long before they could make up their minds
what they wanted it had become too late for that, and they shifted to
the notion of buying an old place somewhere and remodeling it. One
reason why they made no more progress was because they were looking for
such different things. Rodney wanted acres. He'd never gardened a bit,
and never would; was an altogether urban person, despite the physical
energy which took him pounding off on long country walks. But when he
heard there was a tract just west of Martin Whitney's, up at Lake
Forest, that could be had at a bargain--thirty-five thousand dollars--he
let his eye rove over it appreciatively. And Frank Crawford and Howard
West knew of advantageous sites, also, on which to expatiate with
convincing enthusiasm. The kind of house you'd have to build on that
sort of place would cost you an easy thirty thousand more.
Rose didn't even yet know much about money, to be sure, but she knew
enough to be aghast at all that. What she tried to make Rodney look for
was a much more modest establishment--a yard big enough to hold a tennis
court, perhaps, and a house, well, that could be added to as they needed
room.
Neither of them stuck very close to the main point on these expeditions.
They always had too good a time together--more like a pair of children
on a picnic than serious home-hunters, and they frittered a good deal of
time away that they couldn't well afford.
This was the situation when Harriet took a hand in it. It was a
situation made to order for Harriet to take a hand in. She'd sized it up
at a glance, made up her mind in three minutes what was the sensible
thing for them to do, written a note to Florence McCrea in Paris, and
then bided her opportunity to put her idea into effect. She went out
cruising with Rose in the car two or three times, looking at places, but
gave her no indications that she felt more than the most languid
interest in the problem. She could seem less interested in a thing
without being quite impolite, than any one Rose knew.
When she got Florence McCrea's answer to her letter, she took the first
occasion to get Rodney off by himself and talk a little common sense
into him.
"What about where to live, Rodney?" she asked. "Made up your mind about
it yet? I suppose you know how many months there are between the first
of June and the first of October."
"We haven't got much of anywhere," he admitted. "We know we want to live
in the country, that's about all."
"Out in the country just as winter's getting started?" she asked.
"Settling into a new place--Rose with a new baby--everybody else back in
town;--simply no _chance_ of keeping servants? Roddy, old man, you're
entitled to be a babe in the woods, of course. Any man is who does the
kind of work you do. But it is time some one with a little common sense
straightened you out about this."
Harriet couldn't be sure from the length of time he took seeing that his
pipe was properly alight, whether he altogether liked this method of
approach or not.
"Common sense always was a sort of specialty of yours, sis," he said at
last, "and straightening out. You were always pretty good at it." Then,
out of a cloud of his own smoke, "Fire away."
"Well, in the first place;" she said, "remodeling is the slowest work in
the world, and the fussiest. And you can't just tell an architect, with
a wave of the hand, to go ahead. You have to do your own fussing, which
would drive you crazy. If you had your house to-day, you'd be lucky if
the paint was dry and the thing was fit to move into by the first of
September. And next September, if it's blazing hot, won't be exactly the
time for Rose to go ramping around trying to buy furniture for a whole
establishment--because you haven't a stick yourselves, of course--and
getting settled in, hiring servants, getting the thing going. You can't
be sure you'll have till the first of October. Things like that don't
always happen exactly as they are expected to. But suppose you have good
luck and manage it. Then where are you? Out in the woods somewhere at
the beginning of winter, just when you ought to be settled comfortably
somewhere in town.
"Oh, I know it's all very poetic, sitting in front of a roaring fire of
logs, while the wind bangs the shutters, and that sort of thing, Rose
singing to the baby and all. But you're not an Arcadian one bit. Neither
is she, really, and you'll simply perish out there, both of you, and be
back in town before the holidays.
"Rose oughtn't to be in town this summer. But she'll have to be to put
this through. She ought to be down at York Harbor, or one of those Cape
Cod places, instead of in this horrible smoky hole. Because she's not so
very fit, really do you think? Bit moody, I'd say."
"But good lord, Harriet, we've got to get out of here anyway, in
October. And that means we've got to have some sort of place to get
into. It is an awkward time, I'll admit."
"No, you haven't," she said. "You can stay right here another six
months, if you like. I've heard from Florence. I met her in Paris in
April, and found she wasn't a bit keen to come back and take this house
on. Their securities have gone down again, and they're feeling hard-up.
Florence has got an old barn of an _atelier_, and she's puttering around
in the mud thinking she's making statuary. Well, when I found how things
stood here, I wrote and asked her if she'd lease for six months more if
she got the chance, and she wrote back and simply grabbed at it. All
you've got to do is to send her a five-word cable and you're fixed.
Then, next spring, when your troubles are over, and you know what you
want, you can look out a place up the shore and have the summer there."
Rodney smoked half-way through his pipe before he made any comment on
this suggestion.
"This house isn't just what we want," he said. "In the first place, it's
damned expensive."
Harriet shrugged her shoulders, found herself a cigarette and lighted
it; picked up one of Florence's poetry books and eyed the heavily tooled
binding with a satirical smile before she replied. She could feel him
looking at her, and she knew he'd wait till she got ready to go on.
"I'd an idea there was that in it," she said at last. "Freddy said
something ... Rose had been talking to her." Then after another little
silence, and with a sudden access of vehemence, "You don't want to go
and do a regular _fool_ thing, Roddy. You're getting on perfectly
splendidly. You'll be at the head of the bar out here in ten years, if
you keep on. Frank Crawford was telling me about you the other day.
You've settled down, and we thought you never would. It was a corking
move, your taking this house, just because it made you settle down. You
can earn forty thousand dollars next year, just with your practise, if
you want to. But if you pull up and go to live in a barn somewhere, and
stop seeing anybody--people that count, I mean ..."
Rodney grunted. "You're beyond your depth, sis," he said. "Come back
where you don't have to swim. The expense isn't a capital consideration,
I'll admit that. Now go on from there."
"That's like old times," she observed with a not ill-humored grimace. "I
wonder if you talk to Rose like that. Oh, I know the house is rather
solemn and absurd. It's Florence herself all over, that's the size of
it, and I suppose you are getting pretty well fed up with it. But what
does that matter for six months more? Heavens! You won't know where
you're living. But the place is comfortable, and there's room in it for
nurses and all and the best doctor in town in the line you'll want, is
right around the corner. And, as I say, when your troubles are over and
you know what you want ..."
He pocketed his pipe and got up out of this chair.
"There's something in it," he admitted. "I'll think it over."
"Better cable Florence as soon as you can," she advised. "She'll want to
know ..."
Rose protested when the plan for living six months more in Florence
McCrea's house was broached to her. She made the best fight she could.
But Harriet's arguments, re-stated now by Rodney with full conviction,
were too much for her. When she broke down and cried, as she couldn't
help doing, Rodney soothed and comforted her, assured her that this
notion of hers about the expensiveness of it all, was just a
notion--obsession was the word he finally came to--which she must
struggle against as best she could. She'd see things in a truer
proportion afterward.
Then it came out that he had made all his plans for a long summer
vacation. There was no court work in July and August anyway. He was
going to carry her off to a quiet little place out on Cape Cod that he
knew about, and just luxuriate in her; have her all to himself--not a
soul they knew about them. They would lie about in the sands all day,
building air castles. If she got tired of him, any person she wanted to