The Real Adventure
about this, you know. You don't want to forget that you've got a limit,
and crowd the late-at-night and early-in-the-morning business too hard.
Think where we'd be if you turned up missing on the opening night!"
"I shan't do that," she said absently almost, and not in his direction.
Then, with another little shake, bringing herself back to him with a
visible effort: "If you only knew what a wonderful thing it's going to
be, to have something for late at night and early in the morning ..."
Before he could find the first one of the words he wanted, she had given
him that curt farewell nod which, so inexplicably, from the first had
stirred and warmed him, and turned away toward the door.
And she had never seen what was fairly shining in his face; no more than
she had heard the thing that rang so eagerly in his voice through the
thin disguise of an impersonal, director-like concern that she shouldn't
impair her health so far as to spoil her for the sextette!
CHAPTER VII
THE END OF A FIXED IDEA
She couldn't of course have missed a thing as plain as that but for a
complete preoccupation of thought and feeling that would have left her
oblivious to almost anything that could happen to her. Galbraith himself
had detected this preoccupation, but he would have been staggered had he
known its intensity. He had likened it in his own thoughts, to an effect
that might have been caused by the presence with her of another person
whom he could neither see nor hear. And that, had he believed it
seriously, would have been an almost uncannily correct guess.
The flaming vortex of thoughts, hopes, desires which enveloped her, was
so intense as almost to evoke a sense of the physical presence of the
subject of them--of that big, powerful-minded, clean-souled husband of
hers, who loved her so rapturously, and who had driven her away from him
because that rapture was the only thing he would share with her.
She had been living, since that day of his departure for New York, when
she had felt the last of his strong embraces, a life that fell into two
hemispheres as distinct from each other as tropic night from day. One
half of it had been lighted and made tolerable by the exactions of her
new job. "What you feel like doing isn't important, and what I tell you
to do is," John Galbraith had said to her on the day this strange
divided life of hers had begun. And this lesson, taken to heart, had
spelt salvation to her--for half of the time; for as many hours of the
day as he went on telling her to do something. Those hours, in a way
almost incredible to herself when they were over, had been almost
happy--would have been altogether happy, but for the stain that soaked
through in memory and in anticipation, from the other half of her days.
But when evening rehearsal was over and she came back to her room and
had to undress and put out her light and relax her mind for sleep,
letting the terrors that came to tear at her do their unopposed worst,
then the girl who sang and danced and was so nearly happy snatching John
Galbraith's intentions half formed, and executing them in the thrill of
satisfaction over work well done, became an utterly unreal, incredible
person--the mere figment of a dream that couldn't--couldn't possibly
recur again even as a dream; the only self in her that had any actual
existence was Rodney Aldrich's wife and the mother of his children,
lying here in a mean bed, or looking with feverish eyes out of the
window in a North Clark Street rooming house, in a torment of thwarted
desire for him that was by no means wholly mental or psychical.
And what was he doing now in her absence? Was he in torment, too; shaken
by gusts of uncontrollable longing for her; fighting off nightmare
imaginings of disasters that might be befalling her? Or was he happy,
drinking down in great thirsty drafts the nectar of liberty which her
incursion into his life had deprived him of? She didn't know which of
these alternatives was the more intolerable to her.
And the twins! Were they, the fine lusty little cherubs she had parted
from that day, smiling up with growing recognition into other
faces--Mrs. Ruston's and the maid Doris'? Or might there have been,
since the last information relayed by Portia, a sudden illness? Might it
be that there was going on now, in that house not a thousand yards away,
another life-and-death struggle like the one which had made an end of
all her hopes for the efficacy of her miracle?
The only treatment for hobgoblins like that was plain endurance. This
was a part of a somber sobering discovery that Rose had made during the
first few days of her new life. Courage of the active sort she'd always
had. The way she went up to North End Hall and wrested a job that didn't
strictly exist, from John Galbraith, was an example of it. When it was a
question of blazing up and doing something, she had rightly counted on
herself not to fail. This was what she'd foreseen when she promised
Portia that she would fight for the big thing.
But that part of the battle of life had to consist just in doing
nothing, enduring with a stiff mouth and clenched hands assaults that
couldn't be replied to, was a fact she hadn't foreseen. What a child she
had always been! Rodney, Portia, everybody who amounted to anything,
must have learned that lesson of sheer endurance long ago.
The queerly incredible quality of the lighted half of her life--the half
that John Galbraith's will galvanized into motion--prevented any
afterglow from illuminating and making tolerable the dark half. No
achievement of her days--not even teaching the sextette to talk--had the
power to give her, in her nights, a sense of progress, or to lessen the
necessity for that sheer dumb endurance which was the only weapon she
had. Because she was in the fetters of a fixed idea.
Of course it was only by virtue of the possession of a fixed idea--a
purpose as rigid in its outlines as the steel frame of a
sky-scraper--that she had been able to force herself to leave Rodney and
set out in pursuit of a job that would make a life of her own a possible
thing. You are already acquainted with the outlines of that purpose. She
lacked the special training which alone could make any sort of
self-respecting life possible. The only thing she had to capitalize when
she left her husband's house, was the thing which had got her into
it--her sex charm. The only excuse for capitalizing that again was that
it would make it possible for her to acquire a special training in some
other field. Stenography, she had thought vaguely, would be the first
round of the ladder. Until this production opened and she began drawing
a salary, she couldn't really begin doing the thing she had set out to
do.
Consequently, anything that seemed like progress during her day's work
for Galbraith--any glow of triumph she came away with after meeting and
conquering some difficulty--must be pure illusion.
It was all perfectly logical and it was all perfectly false. She had
been growing really, in strides, from day to day, since that first day
of all when, after hearing the director tell another woman that there
were no vacancies in the chorus, she had forced herself to go up and ask
him for a job. She had been disciplining herself under Rodney's own
definition of the term. Discipline, he had said, was standing the
gaff--standing it, not submitting to it; accepting the facts of your own
life as they happened to be! Not making masters of them, but servants to
the underlying thing you wanted.
And if only she could have believed her own vision, the outlines of the
underlying thing she wanted were beginning to appear, as in a half
developed negative. It hadn't been from a cold sense of duty, or from a
cold fear of losing her job, that she had thrown herself into the
accomplishment of John Galbraith's wishes, or had felt that almost
fierce desire that some effect he was trying for and that she
understood, should get an objective validity. It hadn't been out of pure
altruism that she'd spent those twelve solid hours compelling Olga
Larson to talk better. She might have felt sorry for the girl--might
have loaned her money, comforted her; but she wouldn't have locked her
in her room and beaten down her sullen opposition, set her afire with
her own vitality, except that it was a thing that had to be done for the
good of the show.
In short, she was, to fall back on Rodney's phrase again, for the first
time driving herself with the motive power of her own desires--riding
the back of a hitherto unsuspected passion. But the binding force of
that fixed idea of hers had been sufficient all along to keep up the
delusion of unreality about the real half of her life and to make the
nightmare half of it seem true.
It wasn't until she heard herself telling John Galbraith that she could
design those costumes for him, and in a flame of suddenly kindled
excitement, resolved to make that unexpected promise good, that the
fetters of her false logic fell away from her.
The truth of the matter, the wonderful, almost incredible truth, kept
coming up brighter and clearer as she walked silently along beside him
down the avenue. The real beginning of the pilgrimage that was to carry
her back into her husband's life, wasn't a thing that had to be waited
for. It could begin now! No, the truth was better than that; it had
begun already! Because if John Galbraith had come to her house a month
ago, when she was casting about so desperately for a way of earning a
living, and had offered her the chance just as he had offered it
to-night, she'd have declined it. She wouldn't have known what he
wanted. She'd rightly have said that the thing was utterly beyond her
powers. To-night she knew what he wanted and she was utterly confident
of her ability to give it to him.
And the one word that blaze of confidence spelled for her in letters of
fire, was her husband's name. This chance that had been offered her was
a ladder that would enable her to climb part of the way back to him. Her
accomplishment of this first breathlessly exciting task would be a
thing, when it was achieved, that she could recount to him--well, as man
to man. Her success, if she succeeded--and the alternative was something
she wouldn't contemplate--would compel the same sort of respect from him
that he accorded to a diagnosis of James Randolph's, or an article of
Barry Lake's.
Since she had left his house and begun this new life of hers, she had,
as best she could, been fighting him out of her thoughts altogether. She
had shrunk from anything that carried associations of him with it.
Outside the hours of rehearsal (and how grateful she always was when
they protracted themselves unduly) she had walked timidly, like a child
down a dim hallway with black yawning doorways opening out of it, in a
dread which sometimes reached the intensity of terror, lest reminders of
the man she loved should spring out upon her. That all thoughts and
memories of him must necessarily be painful, she had taken for granted.
But with this sudden lighting up of hope, which took place within her
when she made John Galbraith that astonishing offer and he accepted it,
she flung the closed door wide and called her husband back into her
thoughts--greeted the image of him passionately, in an almost palpable
embrace. This hard thing that she was going to do, which had, to
common-sense calculation, so many chances of disaster in it--this thing
that meant sleepless nights, and feverishly active days, was an
expression simply of her love for him; a sacrificial offering to be laid
before the shrine of him in her heart. Well, it was no wonder then that
to John Galbraith she had seemed preoccupied and far away, nor that amid