The Real Adventure
see should be telegraphed for forthwith. The one thing she had to bear
in mind was that she was to be happy and not bother about things; leave
everything to him.
This plan was carried out, and in a paradise, made up of blue sea, white
sands, warm sun and Rodney--Rodney always there, and queerly content to
drowse away the time with her, she almost forgot the great dam and the
pressure of the waters that had mounted up behind it. Was it an
obsession just as Rodney said? Would she find when it was all over and
she rallied herself for the great endeavor, that there was, after all,
no battle to be fought--nothing but a baby at her breast?
CHAPTER XIII
FATE PLAYS A JOKE
Traveling bars flowing along parallel, black and white; the white ones
incandescent;--and a small helpless harried thing struggling to keep in
the shadow of the black ones, or to regain it again across the pitiless
zone of white that the little helpless thing called pain.--Traveling
bars flowing along endlessly.
And then a great ball whirling in planetary space, half dark, half
incandescent white, having for its sole inhabitant, the small harried
thing that struggled to keep in the dark out of the glare of that
pitiless white pain.--One watched its struggles from a long way
off--like God.--But the ball whirled drunkenly and it made one sick to
look.--And then a supervening chaos--no longer a ball but still
whirling, reeling, tottering. Rectangles of light, which, had they kept
still, would have been windows--a mirror.
And then, very fine and small and weak, something that knew it was Rose
Stanton--Rose Stanton lying in a bed with people about her. She let her
eyes fall heavily shut again lest they should discover she was there and
want her to speak or think.
The bars came back, but the whiteness of them was no longer so white,
and slowly they faded out. Then, for a long time, nothing. Then sounds,
movements--soft, skilful, disciplined sounds and movements. And,
presently, a hand--a firm powerful hand, that picked up and supported a
heavy limp wrist--Rose Stanton's wrist--and two sensitive finger-tips
that rested lightly on the upper surface of it. After that, an even
measured voice--a voice of authority, whose words no doubt made sense,
only Rose was too tired to think what the sense was:
"She's out of the ether now, practically. That's a splendid pulse.
She's doing the best thing she can, sleeping like that. It's been a
thoroughly normal delivery from the beginning. Oh, a long difficult one,
I'll admit. But there's nothing now, that you could want better than
what you've got."
And then another voice, utterly unlike Rodney's and yet unmistakably
his--a ragged voice that tried to talk in a whisper but couldn't manage
it; broke queerly.
"That's all right," it said. "But I'll find it easier to believe
when ..."
She must see him--must know what it meant that he should talk like that.
With a strong physical effort, she opened her eyes and tried to speak
his name.
She couldn't; but some one must have been watching and seen, because a
woman's voice said quickly and quietly, "Mr. Aldrich."
And the next moment, vast and towering, and very blurred in outline,
but, like his voice, unmistakable, was Rodney--her own big strong
Rodney. She tried to hold her arms up to him, but of course she
couldn't.
And then he shortened suddenly. He had knelt down beside her bed, that
was it. And she felt upon her palm, the pressure of his lips, and his
unshaven cheek, and on her wrist, a warm wetness that must be--tears.
Why was he crying? What had happened? She must try to think.
It was very hard. She didn't want to think, but she must. She must begin
with something she knew. She knew who she was. She was Rose--Rodney's
Rose. Here was his mouth down close to the pillow saying her name over
and over and over again. And she was in her own bed. But what had
happened? She must try to remember. She remembered something she had
said--said to herself over and over again an illimitable while ago.
"It's coming. The miracle's beginning." What had she meant by that?
And then she knew. The urgency of a sudden terror gave her her voice.
"Roddy," she said. "There was going to be a--baby. Isn't there?"
Something queerly like a laugh broke his voice when he answered. "Oh,
you darling! Yes. It's all right. That isn't why I'm crying. It's just
because I'm so happy."
"But the baby!" she persisted. "Why isn't it here?"
Rodney turned and spoke to some one else. "She wants to see," he said.
"May she?"
And then a woman's voice (why, it was the nurse, of course! Miss Harris,
who had come last night) said in an indulgent soothing tone, "Why,
surely she may. Wait just a minute."
But the wait seemed hours. Why didn't they bring the baby--her baby?
There! Miss Harris was coming at last, with a queerly bulky, shapeless
bundle. Rodney stepped in between and cut off the view, but only to
slide an arm under mattress and pillow and raise her a little so that
she could see. And then, under her eyes, dark red and hairy against the
whiteness of the pillow, were two small heads--two small shapeless
masses leading away from them, twitching, squirming. She stared,
bewildered.
"There were twins, Rose," she heard Rodney explaining triumphantly, but
still with something that wasn't quite a laugh, "a boy and a girl.
They're perfectly splendid. One weighs seven pounds and the other six."
Her eyes widened and she looked up into his face so that the pitiful
bewilderment in hers was revealed to him.
"But the _baby!_" she said. Her wide eyes filled with tears and her
voice broke weakly. "I wanted a baby."
"You've got a baby," he insisted, and now laughed outright. "There are
two of them. Don't you understand, dear?"
Her eyes drooped shut, but the tears came welling out along her lashes.
"Please take them away," she begged. And then, with a little sob she
whispered, "I wanted a baby, not those."
Rodney started to speak, but some sort of admonitory signal from the
nurse silenced him.
The nurse went away with her bundle, and Rodney stayed stroking her limp
hand.
In the dark, ever so much later, she awoke, stirred a little restlessly,
and the nurse, from her cot, came quickly and stood beside her bed. She
had something in her hands for Rose to drink, and Rose drank it
dutifully.
"Is there anything else?" the nurse asked.
"I just want to know," Rose said; "have I been dreaming, or is it true?
Is there a baby, or are there twins?"
"Twins, to be sure," said the nurse cheerfully. "The loveliest,
liveliest little pair you ever saw."
"Thank you," said Rose. "I just wanted to know."
She shut her eyes and pretended to go to sleep. But she didn't. It was
true then. Her miracle, it seemed somehow, had gone ludicrously awry.
CHAPTER XIV
THE DAM GIVES WAY
She began getting her strength back very fast after the next two or
three days, but this queer kink in her emotions didn't straighten out.
She came to see that it was absurd--monstrous almost, but that didn't
help. Instead of a baby, she had given birth to two. They were hers of
course, as much as one would have been. Only, her soul, which had been
waiting so ecstatically for its miracle--for the child which, by making
her a mother, should supply what her life needed--her soul
wouldn't--couldn't accept the substitution. Those two droll, thin
voiced, squirming little mites that were exhibited to her every morning,
were as foreign to her, as detached from her, as if they had been
brought into the house in a basket.
There was a certain basis of reason back of this. At some time, during
those early hours of misty half-consciousness, it had been decided that
two children would be too much for her to attempt to nurse.
She had a notion that this idea hadn't originated with the doctor,
though it was he who had stated it to her with the most plausible
firmness. Rodney had backed the doctor up, firmly, too. Rose was only a
girl in years--why, just a child herself; hadn't had her twenty-second
birthday yet; the labor had been long, she was very weak, the children
were big and vigorous, and she couldn't hope to supply them both for
more than a very few weeks, anyway. And, at this time of year, as the
doctor said, there was no difficulty to be apprehended from bottle
feeding. It would be better on all accounts.
Still, it didn't sound exactly like Roddy's idea either.
When Harriet came in for the first time to see her, Rose knew. Harriet
was living here now, running the house for Rodney, while Rose was laid
up. Doing it beautifully well, too, through all the confusion of nurses
and all. Not the slightest jar or creak of their complex domestic
machinery ever reached Rose in the big chamber where she lay. Harriet
said:
"I think you're in great luck to have had two at once; get your duty to
posterity done that much sooner. And, of course, you couldn't possibly
be expected to nurse two great creatures like that."
Rose acquiesced. What was the use of struggling against so formidable a
unanimity? She would have struggled though, she knew, but for that queer
trick Fate had played her. Her heart ached, as did her breasts. But that
was for the lips of the baby--the baby she hadn't had!
When she found that struggling with herself, denouncing herself for a
brute, didn't serve to bring up the feelings toward the twins that she
knew any proper mother ought to have, she buried the dark fact as deep
as she could, and pretended. It was only before Rodney that the pretense
was necessary. And with him, really, it was hardly a pretense at all. He
was such a child himself, in his gleeful delight over the possession of
a son and a daughter, that she felt for him, tenderly, mistily,
luminously, the very emotion she was trying to capture for them--felt
like cradling his head in her weak arms, kissing him, crying over him a
little.
She wouldn't have been allowed to do that to the babies anyway. They
were going to be terribly well brought up, those twins; that was
apparent from the beginning. They had two nurses all to themselves,
quite apart from Miss Harris, who looked after Rose: one uncannily
infallible person, omniscient in baby lore--thoroughgoing, logical,
efficient, remorseless as a German staff officer; and a bright-eyed,
snub-nosed, smart little maid, for an assistant, who boiled bottles,
washed clothes, and, at certain stated hours, over a previously
determined route, at a given number of miles per hour, wheeled the twins
out, in a duplex perambulator, which Harriet had acquired as soon as the
need for it had become evident.
Miss Harris was to go away to another case at the end of the month. But
Mrs. Ruston (she was the staff officer) and Doris, the maid, were
destined, it appeared, to be as permanent as the babies. But Rose had
the germ of an idea of her own about that.
They got them named with very little difficulty. The boy was Rodney, of
course, after his father and grandfather before him. Rose was a little
afraid Rodney would want the girl named after her, and was relieved to
find he didn't. There'd never in the world be but one Rose for him, he
said. So Rose named the girl Portia.
They kept Rose in bed for three weeks; flat on her back as much as
possible, which was terribly irksome to her, since her strength and
vitality were coming back so fast. The irksomeness was added to by a
horrible harness largely of whalebone. Rose got the notion, too, that
the purpose of all this was not quite wholly hygienic. Harriet had said
once: "You know the most distinguished thing about you, Rose,
dear--about your looks, I mean--is that lovely boyish line of yours. It
will be a perfect crime if you let yourself spread out."