The Real Adventure
pleases, until he's satisfied whether I'm out of my mind or not. But
unless you're willing to do that, don't call me irresponsible."
He grew more reasonable as a belief in her complete seriousness and
determination sobered him. He made desperate efforts to recover his
self-control--to get his big, cool, fine mechanism of a mind into
action. But his mind, to his complete bewilderment, betrayed him. He'd
always looked at Rose before, through the lens of his emotions. But now
that he forced himself to look at her through the non-refracting window
from which he looked at the rest of the world, she compelled him again
and again to admit that she was right.
"Why shouldn't I be right?" she said with a woebegone smile. "These are
all just things I've learned from you."
After a long and rather angry struggle with himself, he made up his mind
to a compromise, and in one of their cooler talks together, he offered
it.
"We've both of us pretty well lost our sense of proportion, it seems to
me," he said. "This whole ghastly business started from my refusing to
let Mrs. Ruston go and get a nurse who'd allow you to be your own
nurse-maid. Well, I'm willing to give up completely on that point. You
can let Mrs. Ruston go as soon as you like and get a nurse who'll meet
with your ideas."
"You're doing that," said Rose thoughtfully, "rather than let me go
away. That's the way it is, isn't it?"
"Why, yes, of course," he admitted. "I was looking at things from the
children's point of view, and I thought I was right. From their point of
view, I still think so."
She drew in a long sigh and shook her head. "It won't do, Roddy. Can't
you see you're giving way practically under a threat--because I'll go
away if you don't? But think what it would mean if I did stay, on those
terms. The thing would rankle always. And if anything did happen to one
of the babies because the new nurse wasn't quite so good, you'd never
forgive me--not in all the world.
"And," she added a little later, "that would be just as true of any
other compromise. I mean like going and living in a flat and letting me
do the housework--any of the things we've talked about. I can say I am
going away, don't you see, but I couldn't say I'd go away--_unless_ ...
I couldn't use that threat to extort things from you without killing our
whole life dead. Can't you see that?"
His mind infuriated him by agreeing with her--goaded him into another
passionate outburst during which he accused her of bad faith, of being
tired of him, anxious to get away from him--seizing pretexts. But he
offered no more compromises. The thing he fell back on after that was a
plea for delay. The question must be decided coolly; not like this. Let
them just put it out of their minds for a while, go on with the old
routine as if nothing threatened it and see if things didn't work
somewhat better--see if they weren't, after all, better friends than she
thought.
"If I were ill, Roddy," she said, "and there was an operation talked
about; if they said to you that there was something I might drag along
for years, half alive, without, but that if I had it, it would either
kill or cure, you wouldn't urge delay. We'd decide for or against it and
be done. It's--it's taking just all the courage I've got to face this
thing now that I am excited--now that I've thought it out and talked it
out with you--now that I've got the big hope before my eyes. But to wait
until I was tangled in the old routine and the babies began to get a
little older and more--human, so that they knew me, and then do it in
cold blood! I couldn't do that. We'd patch up some sort of a life,
pretending a little, quarreling a little, and when my feelings got
especially hurt about something, I'd try to make myself think, and you,
that I was going away. And we'd both know down inside that we were
cowards."
He protested against the word, but she stuck to it.
"We're both afraid now," she insisted. "That's one of the things that
makes us so cruel to each other when we talk--fear. The world's a
terrible place to me, Roddy. I've never ventured out alone in it; not a
step. A year ago, I don't think I'd have been so frightened. I didn't
know then--I'd never really thought about it--what a hard dangerous
thing it is, just to earn enough to keep yourself alive. I haven't any
illusions now that it's easy--not after the things I've heard Barry Lake
tell about. But sometimes I think you're more afraid than I; and that
you've got a more intolerable thing to fear--ridicule--an intangible
sort of pitying ridicule that you can't get hold of; guessing at the
sort of things people will say and never really quite knowing. And we
have each got the other's fear to suffer under, too.--Oh, Roddy, Roddy,
don't hate me too bitterly ...! But I think if we can both endure it,
stand the gaff, as you said once, and know that the other's standing it,
too, perhaps that'll be the real beginning of the new life."
Somehow or other, during their calmer moments toward the end, practical
details managed to get talked about--settled after a fashion, without
the admission really being made on his part that the thing was going to
happen at all.
"I'd do everything I could of course, to make it easier," she said. "We
could have a story for people that I'd gone to California to make mother
a long visit. You could bring Harriet home from Washington to keep house
while I was gone. I'd take my trunks, you see, and really go. People
would suspect of course, after a while, but they'll always pretend to
believe anything that's comfortable--anything that saves scenes and
shocks and explanations."
"Where would you go, really?" he demanded. "Have you any plan at all?"
"I have a sort of plan," she said. "I think I know of a way of earning a
living."
But she didn't offer to go on and tell him what it was, and after a
little silence, he commented bitterly on this omission.
"You won't even give me the poor satisfaction of knowing what you're
doing," he said.
"I'd love to," she said, "--to be able to write to you, hear from you
every day. But I don't believe you want to know. I think it would be too
hard for you. Because you'd have to promise not to try to get me
back--not to come and rescue me if I got into trouble and things went
badly and I didn't know where to turn. Could you promise that, Roddy?"
He gave a groan and buried his face in his hands. Then:
"No," he said furiously. "Of course I couldn't. See you suffering and
stand by with my hands in my pockets and watch!" He sprang up and seized
her by the arms in a grip that actually left bruises, and fairly shook
her in the agony of his entreaty. "Tell me it's a nightmare, Rose," he
said. "Tell me it isn't true. Wake me up out of it!"
But under the indomitable resolution of her blue eyes, he turned away.
This was the last appeal of that sort that he made.
"I'll promise," she said presently, "to be sensible--not to take any
risks I don't have to take. I'll regard my life and my health and all,
as something I'm keeping in trust for you. I'll take plenty of warm
sensible clothes when I go; lots of shoes and stockings--things like
that, and if you'll let me, I'll--I'll borrow a hundred dollars to start
myself off with. It isn't a tragedy, Roddy,--not that part of it. You
wouldn't be afraid for any one else as big and strong and healthy as I."
Gradually, out of the welter of scenes like that, the thing got itself
recognized as something that was to happen. But the parting came at last
in a little different way from any they had foreseen.
Rodney came home from his office early one afternoon, with a telegram
that summoned him to New York to a conference of counsel in a big public
utility case he had been working on for months. He must leave, if he
were going at all, at five o'clock. He ransacked the house, vainly at
first, for Rose, and found her at last in the trunk-room--dusty,
disheveled, sobbing quietly over something she held hugged in her arms.
But she dried her eyes and came over to him and asked what it was that
had brought him home so early.
He showed her the telegram. "I'll have to leave in an hour," he said,
"if I'm to go."
She paled at that, and sat down rather giddily on a trunk. "You must
go," she said, "of course. And--Roddy, I guess that'll be the easiest
way. I'll get my telegram to-night--pretend to get it--from Portia. And
you can give me the hundred dollars, and then, when you come back, I'll
be gone."
The thing she had been holding in her hands slipped to the floor. He
stooped and picked it up--stared at it with a sort of half awakened
recognition.
"I f--found it," she explained, "among some old things Portia sent over
when she moved. Do you know what it is? It's one of the note-books that
got wet--that first night when we were put off the street-car. And--and,
Roddy, look!"
She opened it to an almost blank page, and with a weak little laugh,
pointed to the thing that was written there:
"'March fifteenth, nineteen twelve!' Your birthday, you see, and the day
we met each other."
And then, down below, the only note she had made during the whole of
that lecture, he read: "Never marry a man with a passion for
principles."
"That's the trouble with us, you see," she said. "If you were just an
ordinary man without any big passions or anything, it wouldn't matter
much if your life got spoiled. But with us, we've got to try for the
biggest thing there is. Oh, Roddy, Roddy, darling! Hold me tight for
just a minute, and then I'll come and help you pack."
BOOK THREE
The World Alone
CHAPTER I
THE LENGTH OF A THOUSAND YARDS
"Here's the first week's rent then," said Rose, handing the landlady
three dollars, "and I think you'd better give me a receipt showing till
when it's paid for. Do you know where there's an expressman who would go
for a trunk?"
The landlady had tight gray hair, a hard bitten hatchet face, and a back
that curved through a forty-degree arc between the lumbar and the
cervical vertebrae, a curve which was accentuated by the faded
longitudinal blue and white stripes--like ticking--of the dress she
wore. She had no charms, one would have said, of person, mind or manner.
But it was nevertheless true that Rose was renting this room largely on
the strength of the landlady. She was so much more humanly possible than
any of the others at whose placarded doors Rose had knocked or rung ...!
For the last year and a half, anyway since she had married Rodney
Aldrich, the surface that life had presented to her had been as bland as
velvet. She'd never been spoken to by anybody except in terms of
politeness. All the people she encountered could be included under two
categories: her friends, if one stretches the word to include all her
social acquaintances, and, in an equally broad sense, her servants; that
is to say, people who earned their living by doing things she wanted
done. Her friends' and her servants' manners were not alike, to be sure,
but as far as intent went, they came to the same thing. They presented,
whatever passions, misfortunes, dislikes, uncomfortable facts of any
sort might lie in the background, a smooth and practically frictionless,
bearing surface. A person accustomed to that surface develops a soft
skin. This was about the first of Rose's discoveries.
To be looked at with undisguised suspicion--to have a door slammed in
her face as the negative answer to a civil question, left her at first
bewildered, and then enveloped in a blaze of indignation. It was perhaps
lucky for her that this happened at the very beginning of her
pilgrimage. Because, with that fire once alight within her, Rose could
go through anything. The horrible fawning, leering landlady whom she had