The Real Adventure
hard to say--I can't bear to use it to live on. I can't bear to have it
mixed up in things like millinery bills and housekeeping expense. I
can't bear to see it become a thing that piles a load of hateful
obligations on your back. I could live on your friendship, Roddy;
because your friendship would mean that somehow I was earning my way,
but I can't live on your love; any more than you could on mine. Won't
you--won't you just try to think for a moment what that would mean to
you?"
Now that he had sensed the direction her talk was headed in, even though
he hadn't even vaguely glimpsed the point at which she was going to
bring up, he made it much harder for her to talk to him. He was tramping
up and down the room, stopping and turning short every now and then with
a gesture of exasperation, or an interruption that never got beyond two
or three words and broke off always in a sort of frantic speechlessness.
She knew he couldn't help it. Down underneath his mind, controlling
utterly its processes, was a ganglion of instincts that were utterly
outraged by the things she was saying to him. It was they and not his
intelligence she had to fight. She must be patient, as gentle as she
could, but she must make him listen.
"You've got my friendship!" he cried out now. "It's a grotesque
perversion of the facts to say you haven't."
She smiled at him as she shook her head. "I've spent too many months
trying to get it and seeing myself fail--oh, so ridiculously!--not to
know what I am talking about, Roddy."
And then, still smiling, rather sadly, she told what some of the
experiments had been--some of her attempts to break into the life he
kept locked away from her and carry off a share of it for herself.
"I was angry at first when I found you keeping me out," she said, "angry
and hurt. I used to cry about it. And then I saw it wasn't your fault.
That's how I discovered friendship had to be earned."
But her power to maintain that attitude of grave detachment was about
spent. The passion mounted in her voice and in her eyes as she went on.
"You thought it was because of my condition, as you called it, that my
mind had got full of wild ideas;--the wild idea that I wasn't really and
truly your wife at all, but only your mistress, and that I was pulling
you down from something free and fine that you had been, to something
that you despised yourself for being and had to try to deny you were.
Those were the obsessions of a pregnant woman, you thought--something
she was to be soothed and coddled into forgetting. You were wrong about
that, Roddy.
"I did have an obsession, but it wasn't the thing you thought. It was an
obsession that kept me quiet, and contented and happy, and willing to
wait in spite of everything. The obsession was that none of those things
mattered because a big miracle was coming that was going to change it
all. I was going to have a job at last--a job that was just as real as
yours--the job of being a mother."
Her voice broke in a fierce sharp little laugh over the word, but she
got it back in control again.
"I was going to have a baby to feed out of my own body, to keep alive
with my own care. There was going to be responsibility and hard work,
things that demanded courage and endurance and sacrifice. I could earn
your friendship with that, I said. That was the real obsession, Roddy,
and it never really died until to-night. Because of course I have kept
on hoping, even after I might have seen how it was. But the babies'
lives aren't to be jeopardized to gratify my whims. Well, I suppose I
can't complain. It's over, that's the main thing.
"And now, here I am perfectly normal and well again--as good as ever.
I've kept my looks--oh, my hair and my complexion and my figure. I could
wear pretty clothes again and start going out to things now that the
season's begun, just as I did a year ago. People would admire me, and
you'd be pleased, and you'd love me as much as ever, and it would all be
like the paradise it was last year, except for one thing. The one thing
is that if I do that, I'll know this time what I really am. Your
mistress, Roddy; your legal, perfectly respectable mistress,--and a
little more despicable rather than less, I think, because of the
adjectives."
"I've let that word go by once," he said quietly, but with a dangerous
light of anger in his eyes. "I won't again. It's perfectly outrageous
and inexcusable that you should talk like that, and I'll ask you never
to do it again."
"I won't," she flashed back at him, "if you'll explain why I'm not
exactly what I say." And after ten seconds of silence, she went on.
"Why, Roddy, I've heard you describe me a hundred times. Not the you
that's my lover. The other you; talking all over the universe to Barry
Lake. You've described the woman who's never been trained nor taught nor
disciplined; who's been brought up soft, with the bloom on, for the
purpose of making her marriageable; who's never found her job in
marriage, who doesn't cook, nor sew, nor spin, nor even take care of her
own children; the woman who uses her sex charm to save her from having
to do hard ugly things, and keep her in luxury. Do you remember what
you've called her, Roddy? Do you remember the word you've used? I've
used a gentler word than that.
"Oh, you didn't know, you poor blind boy, that I was the woman you were
talking about. You never saw it at all. But I am. I was brought up like
that.--Oh, not on purpose. Dear old mother! She wasn't trying to make me
into a prostitute any more then you are trying to make me into your
mistress. You both love me, that's all. It's just an instinct not to let
anything hurt me, nor frighten me, nor tire me, nor teach me what work
is. She thought she was educating me to be a lawyer so that when the
time came, I could be one of the leaders of the woman movement just as
she'd been. And all the while, without knowing it, she was educating me
to be the sort of person you'd fall in love with--something precious and
expensive--something to be taken care of.
"I didn't understand any of that when you married me, Roddy; it was just
like a dream to me--like a fairy story come true. If any one had told me
a year ago, that I should ever be anything but perfectly happy in your
love for me, I'd have laughed at him. I remember telling Madame Greville
that our marriage had turned out well--ended happily. And she did laugh.
That was before I'd begun to understand. But I do understand now. I know
why it was you could talk to me, back in those days before we were
married, about anything under the sun--things ten thousand miles above
my head; what it was that fooled me into thinking we were friends as
well as lovers. I know why you've never been able to talk to me like
that since. And I know--this is the worst of all, Roddy,--this is the
piece of knowledge that makes it impossible--I know what a good mistress
I could make. I know I could make you love me whether you wanted to or
not; whether I loved you or not. I could make other men love me, if I
could make up my mind to do it--make them tell me all their hopes and
dreams, and think I had a fine mind and a wonderful understanding. Oh,
it's too easy--it's too hatefully easy!
"Do you know why I told you that? Because if you believe it and
understand it, you will see why I can't go on living on your love.
Because how can you be sure, knowing that my position in the world, my
friends--oh, the very clothes on my back, and the roof over my head, are
dependent on your love,--how are you going to be sure that my love for
you is honest and disinterested? What's to keep you from
wondering--asking questions? Love's got to be free, Roddy. The only way
to make it free is to have friendship growing alongside it. So, when I
can be your partner and your friend, I'll be your mistress, too. But
not--not again, Roddy, till I can find a way. I'll have to find it for
myself. I'll have to go...."
She broke down there over a word she couldn't at first say, buried her
face in her arms and let a deep racking sob or two have their own way
with her. But presently she sat erect again and, with a supreme effort
of will, forced her voice to utter the word.
"I've got to go somewhere alone--away from you, and stay until I find
it. If I ever do, and you want me, I'll come back."
CHAPTER XVI
ROSE OPENS THE DOOR
The struggle between them lasted a week--a ghastly week, during which,
as far as the surface of things showed, their life flowed along in its
accustomed channels. It was a little worse than that, really, because
the week included, so an ironic Fate had decreed, Thanksgiving Day and a
jolly family party at Frederica's, with congratulations on the past,
plans for the future. And Rose and Rodney, as civilized persons will do,
kept their faces, accepted congratulations, made gay plans for the
twins; smiled or laughed when necessary--somehow or other, got through
with it.
But at all sorts of times, and in all sorts of places when they were
alone together, the great battle was renewed; mostly through the dead
hours of the night, in Rose's bedroom, she sitting up in bed, he
tramping up and down, shivering and shuddering in a big bath-robe. It
had a horrible way of interrupting itself for small domestic
commonplaces, which in their assumption of the permanency of their old
life, their blind disregard of the impending disaster, had an almost
unendurable poignancy. A breakfast on the morning of an execution is
something like that.
The hardest thing about it all for Rose--the thing that came nearest to
breaking down her courage--was to see how slowly Rodney came to realize
it at all. He was like a trapped animal pacing the four sides of his
cage confident that in a moment or two he would find the way out, and
then, incredulously, dazedly, coming to the surmise that there was no
way out. She really meant to go away and leave him--leave the babies; go
somewhere where his care and protection could not reach her! She was
actually planning to do it--planning the details of doing it! By the end
of one of their long talks, it would seem to her he had grasped this
monstrous intention and accepted it. But before the beginning of the
next one, he seemed to manage somehow to dismiss the thing as an
impossible nightmare.
An invitation came in from the Crawfords for a dance at the Blackstone,
the fifth of December, and he said something about accepting it.
"I shan't be here then, Roddy, you know," she said.
He went completely to pieces at that, as if the notion of her going away
had never really reached his mind before.
The struggle ranged through the widest possible gamut of moods. They had
their moments of rapturous love--passionate attempts at self-surrender.
They had long hours of cool discussion, as impersonal as if they had
been talking about the characters out of a hook instead of about
themselves. They had stormy nerve-tearing hours of blind agonizing,
around and around in circles, lacerating each other, lashing out at each
other, getting nowhere. They had moments of incandescent anger.
He tried, just once, early in the fight, to take the ground he had taken
once before; that she was irresponsible, obsessed. There was a fracture
somewhere, as James Randolph's jargon had it, in her unconscious mind.
She didn't let him go far with that. He saw her blaze up in a splendid
burst of wrath, as she had blazed once--oh, an eternity ago, at a
street-car conductor. Her challenge rang like a sword out of a scabbard.
"We'll settle that before we go any further," she said. "Telephone for
James Randolph, or any other alienist you like. Let him take me and put
me in a sanatorium somewhere and keep me under observation as long as he