The Real Adventure
This wasn't the sort of consideration to make the inactivity any easier
to endure. She might have rebelled, had it not been for that germinant
idea of hers. It wouldn't do, she saw, in the light of that, to give
them any excuse for calling her unreasonable.
At the end of this purgatorial three weeks, she was carried to a chair
and allowed to sit up a little, and by the end of another, to walk
about--just a few steps at a time of course. One Sunday morning, Rodney
carried her up-stairs to the nursery to see her babies bathed. This was
a big room at the top of the house which Florence McCrea had always
vaguely intended to make into a studio. But, in a paralysis of
indecision as to what sort of studio to make it (book-binding, pottery
and art weaving called her about equally) she had left the thing bare.
Rodney had given Harriet _carte blanche_ to go ahead and fit it up
before he and Rose came back from the seashore, and the layette was a
monument to Harriet's thoroughgoing practicality. There had been a wild
day of supplementing of course, when it was discovered that there were
two babies instead of one.
The room, when they escorted Rose into it, was a terribly impressive
place. The spirit of a barren sterile efficiency brooded everywhere. And
this appearance of barrenness obtained despite the presence of an
enormous number of articles; a pair of scales, a perfect battery of
electric heaters of various sorts; rows of vacuum jars for keeping
things cold or hot; a small sterilizing oven; instruments and appliances
that Rose couldn't guess the uses or the names of. Mrs. Ruston, of
course, was master of them all, and Doris flew about to do her bidding,
under a watchful and slightly suspicious eye. (Doris was the sort of
looking girl who might be suspected of kissing a tiny pink hand when no
one was looking.)
Rose surveyed this scene, just as she would have surveyed a laboratory,
or a factory where they make something complicated, like watches. That's
what it was, really. Those two pink little objects, in their two
severely sanitary baskets, were factory products. At precise and
unalterable intervals, a highly scientific compound of fats and proteids
was put into them. They were inspected, weighed, submitted to a routine
of other processes. And in all the routine, there was nothing that their
mother, now they were fairly born, was wanted for. Indispensable to a
certain point, no doubt. But after that rather the other way about--an
obstacle to the routine instead of a part of it.
Rose kept these ideas to herself and kept her eye on young Doris;
listened to the orders she got; and studied alertly what she did in the
execution of them.
Rodney had a lovely time watching the twins bathed. He stood about in
everybody's way, made what he conceived to be alluring noises, in the
perfectly unsuccessful attempt to attract the infants' attention, and
finally, when the various processes were complete, on schedule, like a
limited train, and the thermometrically correct bottles of food were
ready, one for each baby, he turned suddenly to his wife and said:
"Don't you want to--hold them, Rose?" She'd have held a couple of
glowing brands in her arms for him, the way he had looked and the way
he had said it.
A stab of pain went through her and tears came up into her eyes. "Yes,
give them to me," she started to say.
But Mrs. Ruston spoke before she could frame the words. It was their
feeding hour, she pointed out; a bad time for them to be excited, and
the bottles were heated exactly right.
By that time Rose's idea had flowered into resolution. She knew exactly
what she was going to do. But she mustn't jeopardize the success of her
plan by trying to put it into effect too soon.
She waited patiently, reasonably, for another fortnight. Harriet by that
time had gone off to Washington on a visit, taking Rodney's heartfelt
thanks with her. Rose expressed hers just as warmly, and felt ashamed
that they were so unreal. She simply mustn't let herself get to
resenting Harriet! At the end of the fortnight, the doctor made his
final visit. Rose had especially asked Rodney to be on hand to hear his
report when the examination was over. Rose and the doctor found him
waiting in the library.
"He says," Rose told her husband, "that I'm perfectly well." She turned
to the doctor for confirmation, "Don't you?"
The doctor smiled. "As far as my diagnostic resources go, Mrs. Aldrich,
you are perfectly well."
Rodney was pleased of course, and expressed this feeling fervently. But
he looked across at his glowing radiant wife, with a touch of misgiving.
"What are you trying to put over on me?" he asked.
"Not a thing," said Rose demurely. "I thought you'd be glad to know that
I needn't be kept in cotton-wool any more, and that you'd feel surer of
it if he told you."
"I feel surer that you've got something up your sleeve," he said. And,
to the doctor: "I don't imagine that in saying my wife is perfectly
well, you mean to suggest an absence of all reasonable caution."
The doctor took the hint, expatiated largely; it was always well to be
careful--one couldn't, in fact, be too careful. The human body at best,
more especially the--ah--feminine human body, was a delicate machine,
not to be abused without inviting serious consequences. He was even a
little reproachful about it.
"But there's no more reason, is there," Rose persisted, "why I should be
careful than why any other woman should--my nurse-maid for example? Is
she any healthier than I am?"
It was indiscreet of the doctor to look at her before he answered. Her
eyes were sparkling, the color bright in her cheeks; unconsciously, she
had flattened her shoulders back and drawn a good deep breath down into
her lungs. The doctor smiled a smile of surrender and turned back to
Rodney. "I'll confess," he said, "that in my experience, Mrs. Aldrich is
almost a _lusus naturae_--a perfectly sound, healthy woman."
Rose smiled widely and contentedly on the pair of them. "That's more
like it," she said to the doctor. "Thanks very much."
But after he had gone, she did not spring anything on Rodney, as he
fully expected she would. She took him out for a tramp through the park
in the dusk of a perfect autumn afternoon, and went to a musical show
with him in the evening. She might have been, as far as he could see,
the Rose of a year ago. She had the same lithe boyish swing. She even
wore, though he didn't know it, the same skirt for their walk in the
park that she had worn on some of their tramps before they were married.
And when they had had their evening at the theater, and a bite of supper
somewhere, and come home, she let him drop off to sleep without a word
that would explain her insistence on getting a clean bill of health from
the doctor.
But the next morning, while Doris was busy in the laundry, she found
Mrs. Ruston in the nursery and had a talk with that lady, which was
destined to produce seismic upheavals.
"I've decided to make a little change in our arrangements, Mrs. Ruston,"
she said. "But I don't think it's one that will disturb you very much.
I'm going to let Doris go--I'll get her another place, of course--and do
her work myself."
Mrs. Ruston compressed her lips, and went on for a minute with what she
was doing to one of the twins, as if she hadn't heard.
"Doris is quite satisfactory, madam," she said at last. "I'd not advise
making a change. She's a dependable young woman, as such go. Of course I
watch her very close."
"I think I can promise to be dependable," Rose said. "I don't know much
about babies, of course, but I think I can learn as well as Doris.
Anyhow, I can wheel them about and wash their clothes and boil bottles
and things as well as she does. For the rest, you can tell me what to do
just as you tell her."
Mrs. Ruston took a considerably longer interval to digest this reply.
"Then you're meaning to give the girl her notice at once, madam?" she
asked.
"I'm not going to give her notice at all," said Rose. "I'm going to find
her another place. I shan't have any trouble about it though. As you
say, she's a very good nurse-maid, and she's a pleasant sort of a human
being besides. But as soon as I can find her another place, I'm going to
take over her work."
To this last observation it became evident that Mrs. Ruston meant to
make no reply at all. She gave Rose some statistical information about
the twins instead, in which Rose showed herself politely interested and
presently withdrew.
It soon appeared, however, that though Mrs. Ruston might be slow and
sparing of speech, she was capable of acting with a positively
Napoleonic dash. Rodney wore a queer expression all through dinner, and
when he got Rose alone in the library afterward, he explained it. Mrs.
Ruston had made her two-hour constitutional that afternoon into an
opportunity for calling on him at his office. She had given him notice,
contingently. She made it an inviolable rule of conduct, it appeared,
never to undertake the care of two infants without the assistance of a
nurse-maid. She was a conscientious person and she felt she couldn't do
justice to her work on any other basis. Rose had informed her of her
intention to dispense with the services of the nurse-maid, without
engaging any one else to take her place. If Rose adhered to this
intention, Mrs. Ruston must leave.
It was some sort of absurd misunderstanding, of course, Rodney concluded
and wanted to know what it was all about.
"I did say I meant to let Doris go," Rose explained, "but I told her I
meant to take Doris' job myself. I said I thought I could be just as
good a nurse-maid as she was. I said I'd boil bottles and wash clothes
and take Mrs. Ruston's orders exactly as if I were being paid six
dollars a week and board for doing it. And I meant it just as literally
as I said it."
He was prowling about the room in a worried sort of way, before she got
as far as that.
"I don't see, child," he exclaimed, "why you couldn't leave well enough
alone! If it's that old economy bug of yours again, it's nonsense. You'd
save, including board, about ten dollars a week. And it would work out
one of two ways: If you didn't do all the maid's work. Mrs. Ruston would
have a real grievance. She's right about needing all the help she gets.
If you did do it, it would mean that you'd work yourself sick.--Oh, I
know what the doctor said, but that's all rot, and he knew it. You had
him hypnotized. You'd have to give up everything for it--all your social
duties, all our larks together. Oh, it's absurd! You, to spend all your
time doing menial work--scrubbing and washing bottles, to save me ten
dollars a week!"
"It isn't menial work," Rose insisted. "It's--apprentice work. After
I've been at it six months, learning as fast as I can, I'll be able to
let Mrs. Ruston go and take _her_ job. I'll be really competent to take
care of my own children. I don't pretend I am now."
"I don't see why you can't do that as things are now. She'll let you
practise bathing them and things like that, and certainly no one would
object to your wheeling them out in the pram. But the nurse-maid would
be on hand in case ..."
"I'm to take it on then," said Rose, and her voice had a new ring in
it--the ring of scornful anger--"I'm to take it on as a sort of polite
sentimental amusement. I'm not to do any real work for them that depends
on me to get done. I'm not to be able to feel that, even in a
bottle-washing sort of way, I'm doing an indispensable service for them.
They're not to need me for anything, the poor little mites! They're to
be something for me to have a sort of emotional splurge with, just
as"--she laughed raggedly--"just as some of the wives you're so fond of
talking about, are to their husbands."