The Real Adventure
encountered later, might have turned her sick, but for that fine steady
glow. The hatchet-faced one she had finally arrived at, made no
protestations of her own respectability, and she seemed, though rather
reluctantly, willing to assume that of her prospective lodger. She was
puzzled about something, Rose could see; disposed to be very watchful
and at no pains to conceal this attitude.
Well, she'd probably learned that she had to watch, poor thing! And, for
that matter, Rose would probably have to do some watching on her own
account. And, if the fact was there, why bother to keep up a
contradictory fiction. So Rose asked for a receipt.
The matter of the trunk was easily disposed of. Rose had a check for it.
It was at the Polk Street Station. There was a cigar and news stand two
blocks down, the landlady said, where an expressman had his
headquarters. There was a blue sign out in front: "Schulz Express"; Rose
couldn't miss it.
The landlady went away to write out a receipt. Rose closed the door
after her and locked it.
It was a purely symbolistic act. She wasn't going to change her clothes
or anything, and she didn't particularly want to keep anybody out. But,
in a sense in which it had never quite been true before, this was her
room, a room where any one lacking her specific invitation to enter,
would be an intruder--a condition that had not obtained either in her
mother's house or in Rodney's.
She smiled widely over the absurdity of indulging in a pleasurable
feeling of possession in a squalid little cubby-hole like this. The
wall-paper was stained and faded, the paint on the soft-wood floor worn
through in streaks; there was an iron bed--a double bed, painted light
blue and lashed with string where one of its joints showed a disposition
to pull out. The mattress on the bed was lumpy. There was a
dingy-looking oak bureau with a rather small but pretty good plate-glass
mirror on it; a marble topped, black walnut wash-stand; a pitcher of the
plainest and cheapest white ware standing in a bowl on top of it, and a
highly ornate, hand-painted slop-jar--the sole survivor, evidently, of a
much prized set--under the lee of it. The steep gable of the roof cut
away most of one side of the room, though there would be space for
Rose's trunk to stand under it, and across the corner, at a curiously
distressing angle, hung an inadequate curtain that had five or six
clothes hooks behind it.
In the foreground of the view out of the window, was a large oblong
plateau--the flat roof of an extension which had casually been attached
to the front of the building and carried it forward to the sidewalk over
what had once been a small front yard. The extension had a plate-glass
front and was occupied, Rose had noticed before she plunged into the
little tunnel that ran alongside it and led to the main building, by a
dealer in delicatessen. Over the edge of the flat roof, she could see
the top third of two endless streams of trolley-cars, for the traffic in
this street was heavy, by night, she imagined, as well as by day.
The opposite facade of the street, like the one of which her own wall
and window formed a part, was highly irregular and utterly casual. There
were cheap two-story brick stores with false fronts that carried them up
a half story higher. There were little gable-ended cottages with their
fronts hacked out into show-windows. There were double houses of brick
with stone trimmings that once had had some residential pretensions. The
one characteristic that they possessed in common, was that of having
been designed, patently, for some purpose totally different from the one
they now served.
The shops on the street level had, for the most part, an air of shabby
prosperity. There was, within the space Rose's window commanded, a cheap
little tailor shop, the important part of whose business was advertised
by the sign "pressing done." There was a tobacconist's shop whose
unwashed windows revealed an array of large wooden buckets and dusty
lithographs; a shoe shop that did repairing neatly while you waited; a
rather fly-specked looking bakery. There was a saloon on the corner, and
beside it, a four-foot doorway with a painted transom over it that
announced it as the entrance of the Bellevue Hotel.
The signs on the second-story windows indicated dentist parlors, the
homes of mid-wives, ladies' tailors and dressmakers, and everywhere
furnished rooms for light housekeeping to let.
The people who patronized those shops, who drank their beer at the
corner saloon, who'd be coming hurriedly in the night to ring up the
mid-wife, who smoked the sort of tobacco that was sold from those big
wooden buckets; the people who lounged along the wide sidewalks, or came
riding down-town at seven in the morning, and back at six at night,
packed so tight that they couldn't get their arms up to hold by the
straps in the big roaring cars that kept that incessant procession going
in the middle of the street--they all inhabited, Rose realized, a world
utterly different from the one she had left. The distance between the
hurrying life she looked out on through her grimy window, and that which
she had been wont to contemplate through Florence McCrea's exquisitely
leaded casements, was simply planetary.
And yet, queerly enough, in terms of literal lineal measurement, the
distance between the windows themselves, was less than a thousand yards.
Less than ten minutes' walking from the mouth of the little tunnel
alongside the delicatessen shop, would take her back to her husband's
door. She had, in her flight out into the new world, doubled back on her
trail. And, such is the enormous social and spiritual distance between
North Clark Street and The Drive, she was as safely hidden here, as
completely out of the orbit of any of her friends, or even of her
friends' servants, as she could have been in New York or in San
Francisco.
Having to come away furtively like this was a terrible countermine
beneath her courage. If only she could have had a flourish of defiant
trumpets to speed her on her way! But, done like that, the thing would
have hurt Rodney too intolerably. His intelligence might be twentieth
century or beyond. It might acquiesce in, or even enthusiastically
advocate, a relation between men and women that hadn't existed, anyway
since the beginning of the Christian Era; it might accept without
faltering, all the corollaries pendent to that relation. But his
actuating instincts, his psychical reflexes, stretched their roots away
back to the Middle Ages. Under the dominance of those instincts, a man
lost caste--became an object of contemptuous derision, if he couldn't
keep his wife. It was bad enough to have another man take her away from
him, but it was worse to have her go away in the absence of such an
excuse; worst of all, to have her go away to seek a job and earn her own
living.
Rose didn't know how long the secret could be kept. Wherever she went,
whatever she did, there'd always be the risk that some one who could
carry back the news to Rodney's friends, would recognize her. It was a
risk that had to be taken, and she didn't intend to allow herself to be
paralyzed by a perpetual dread of what might at any time happen. At the
same time, she'd protect the secret as well as she could.
But there were two people it couldn't be kept from--Portia and her
mother. Rose had at first entertained the notion of keeping her mother
in the dark. It wasn't until she had spent a good many hours figuring
out expedients for keeping the deception going, that she realized it
couldn't be done. She had been writing her mother a letter a week ever
since the departure to California--letters naturally full of domestic
details that simply couldn't be kept up. The only possible deception
would be a compromise with the truth and compromises of that sort are
apt to be pretty unsatisfactory. They suggest concealments in every
phase, and to an imaginative mind, are more terrifying, nine times in
ten, than the truth you're trying to soften. Then, too, the story given
out to Rodney's friends being that Rose was in California with her
mother and Portia, left the chance always open for some contretemps
which would lead to her mother's discovering the truth in a surprising
and shocking way.
But the truth itself, confidently stated, not as a tragic ending, but
as the splendid hopeful beginning of a life of truer happiness for Rose
and her husband, needn't be a shock. So this was what Rose had borne
down on in her letter to Portia. It wasn't a very long letter,
considering how much it had to tell.
"... I have found the big thing couldn't be had without a fight,"
she wrote. "You shouldn't be surprised, because you've probably
found out for yourself that nothing worth having comes very easily.
But you're not to worry about me, nor be afraid for me, because I'm
going to win. I'm making the fight, somehow, for you as well as for
myself. I want you to know that. I think that realizing I was
living your life as well as mine, is what has given me the courage
to start....
"I've got some plans, but I'm not going to tell you what they are.
But I'll write to you every week and tell you what I've done and I
want you to write to Rodney. I want to be sure that you understand
this: Rodney isn't to blame for what's happened. I don't feel that
I am, either, exactly. We're just in a situation that there's only
one real way out of. I don't know whether he sees that yet or not.
He's too terribly hurt and bewildered. But we haven't quarreled,
and I believe we're further in love with each other than we've ever
been before. I know I am with him....
"Break this thing to mother as gently as you like, but tell her
everything before you stop...."
This letter written and despatched, she had worked out the details of
her departure with a good deal of care. In her own house, before her
servants, she had tried to act--and she felt satisfied that her attempt
was successful--just as she would have done had her pretended telegram
really come from Portia. She had packed, looked up trains, made a
reservation. She had called up Frederica and told her the news. The
train she had selected left at an hour and on a day when she knew
Frederica wouldn't be able to come and see her off. Frederica had come
down to the house of course to say good-by to her, and carrying her
pretense through that scene, that had for her so much deeper and more
poignant a regret than she dared show--because she really loved
Frederica--was, next to bidding the twins good-by, the hardest thing she
had to go through with. Lying and pretending were always terribly hard
for Rose, and a lie to any one she was fond of, almost impossible. The
only thing that enabled her to see it through, was the consideration
that she was doing it for Rodney. He'd probably tell Frederica what had
happened in time, but Rose was determined that he should have the
privilege of choosing his own time for doing it.
Her bag was packed, her trunk was gone, her motor waiting at the door to
take her to the station, when the maid Doris brought the twins home from
their airing. This wasn't chance, but prearrangement.
"Give them to me;" Rose said, "and then you may go up and tell Mrs.
Ruston she may have them in a few minutes."
She took them into her bedroom and laid them side by side on her bed.
They had thriven finely--justified, as far as that went, Harriet's
decision in favor of bottle feeding. Had she died back there in that bed
of pain, never come out of the ether at all, they'd still be just like
this--plump, placid, methodical. Rose had thought of that a hundred
times, but it wasn't what she was thinking of now.