The Real Adventure
"Are you all right, Roddy? And the babies?" she managed to say. "It's a
good many days since I've heard from Portia." And then, suddenly, "Was
it because anything had gone wrong that you came?"
"I didn't know you were here until I saw you on the stage."
This was all, in words, that passed until they reached the bridge. But
there needed no words to draw up, tighter and tighter between them, a
singing wire of memories and associations; there was no need, even, of a
prolonged contact between their bodies. He had let go her arm when they
came out of the alley, and they walked the half-mile to the bridge side
by side and in step, and except for an occasional brush of her shoulder
against his arm, without touching.
But the Clark Street bridge, with a February gale blowing from the west
down the straight reach of the river, is not to be negotiated lightly.
Strong as they were, the force of the wind actually stopped them at the
edge of the draw, caught Rose a little off her balance, turned her half
around and pressed her up against him.
She made an odd noise in her throat, a gasp that had something of a sob
in it, and something of a laugh.
For a moment--so vivid was the blaze of memory--he seemed veritably to
be standing on another bridge (over the north branch of the Drainage
Canal, of all places) with the last, leonine blizzard of a March, which
had been treacherously lamblike before, swirling drunkenly about. He had
been tramping for hours over the clay-rutted roads with a girl he had
known a fortnight and had asked, the day before, to marry him. They had
been discussing this project very sensibly, they'd have said, in the
light of pure reason; and they were both unconscionably proud of the
fact that since the walk began there had been nothing a bystander could
have called a caress or an endearment between them. But there on the
bridge, a buffet of the gale had unbalanced her, and she--with just that
little gasping laugh--had clutched at his shoulder. He had flung one arm
around her and then the other. Without struggling at all she had held
herself away for a moment, taut as a strung bow, her hands clutching his
shoulders, her forearms braced against his chest; then, with the
rapturous relaxation of surrender, her body went soft in his embrace and
her arms slid round his neck; their faces, cool with the fine sleety
sting of the snow, came together.
The vision passed. The wind was colder to-night than that March
blizzard had been, and the dry groan of a passing electric car came
mingled with the whine of it. Muffled pedestrians, bent doggedly down
against it, jostled them as they went by.
He steadied her with a hand upon her shoulder, slipped round to the
windward side, and linked his arm within hers. But it was a moment
before they started on again. Their hands touched and, electrically,
clasped. Like his, hers were ungloved. She'd had them in her ulster
pockets.
"Do you remember the other bridge?" he asked.
Her answer was to press, suddenly--fiercely--the hand she held up
against her breast. Even through the thickness of the ulster, he could
feel her heart beat. They crossed the bridge, but the hand-clasp did not
slacken when they reached the other side. Their pace quickened, but
neither of them was conscious of it.
As for Rodney, he was not even conscious what street they were walking
on, nor how far they went. He had no destination consciously in mind or
any avowed plan or hope for what should happen when they reached it. Yet
he walked purposefully and, little by little, faster. He looked about
him in a sort of dazed bewilderment when she disengaged her hand and
stopped, at last, at the corner of the delicatessen shop, beside the
entrance to her little tunnel.
"Here's where I live," she said.
"Where you _live!_" he echoed blankly.
"Ever since I went away--to California. I've been right here--where I
could almost see the smoke of your chimneys. I've a queer little room--I
only pay three dollars a week for it--but--it's big enough to be alone
in."
"Rose ..." he said hoarsely.
A drunken man came lurching pitiably down the street. She shrank into
the dark mouth of the passage and Rodney followed her, found her with
his hands, and heard her voice, speaking breathlessly, in gasps. He
hardly knew what she was saying.
"It's been wonderful.... I know we haven't talked; we'll do that some
other time, somewhere where we can.... But to-night, walking along like
that, just as ... To-morrow, I shall think it was all a dream."
"Rose ..."
"Wh-what is it?" she prompted, at last.
"Let me in," he said. "Don't turn me away to-night! I--I can't ..."
The only sound that came in answer was a long tremulously indrawn
breath. But presently her hand took the one of his that had been
clutching her shoulder and led him toward the end of the passage, where
a faint light through a transom showed a door. She opened the door with
a latch-key, and then, behind her, he made his way up two flights of
narrow stairs, whose faint creak made all the sound there was. In the
black little corridor at the top she unlocked another door.
"Wait till I light the gas," she breathed.
There was nothing furtive about their silence; it was the wonder, the
magic of being together again, that made them steal forward like awed
children.
Into an ugly, dingy, cramped, cold little room, with a rickety dresser
and a lumpy bed and a grimy window, rattling fiercely in the gusts of
wind that went whipping down the street.... Into a palace of
enchantment.
She left the gas turned low, took off her hat and ulster, pulled down
the blind over the window and shut the door, hung up a garment that had
been left flung over her trunk and dumped a bundle of laundry that had
not been put away, into a bureau drawer. All the time he'd been watching
her hungrily, without a word.
She turned and looked into his face, her eyes searching it as his were
searching hers, luminously and with a swiftly kindling fire. Her lips
parted a little, trembling. There was a sort of bloom on her skin that
became more visible as the blood, wave on wave, came flushing in behind
it. His vision of her swam suddenly away in a blur as his own eyes
filled up with tears.
And then, with that little sob in her throat, she came to him. "Oh,
Roddy ... Roddy!" was all she said. With her own lithe arms she strained
his embrace the tighter.
So far as the superstructures of their two lives were concerned,--the
part of them that floated above the level of consciousness, the whole
fabric of their thoughts and theories and ideals, that made them to
their friends and to each other, and very largely to themselves, Rose
and Rodney,--they were as far apart as on the day she had left his
house. There hadn't been, since then, a word between them of argument or
compromise. The great _impasse_ was still unforced. He hadn't, as yet,
shown that he could give her the friendship she demanded. She'd had no
chance to tell him of any of the small triumphs and disciplines of her
new life that she hoped would win it from him.
And as for Rodney, he was the same man who, an hour ago, in the theater,
had raged and writhed under what he felt to be an invasion of his
proprietary rights in her.
He wouldn't have defined it that way, to be sure, in a talk with Barry
Lake. Would have denied, indeed, with the best of them, that a husband
had any proprietary rights in his wife. But the intolerable sense of
having become an object of derision, or contemptuous pity, of being
disgraced and of her being degraded, through the appearance on the stage
of a public theater, of a woman who was his wife; and through her
exhibition, for pay, of charms he had always supposed would be kept for
him, couldn't derive from anything else but just that. He'd waited there
in the alley, full of bitter thoughts that were ready to leap forth in
denunciations. He'd waited there, ready, he thought, to use actual
physical force on her, in the unthinkable event of its becoming
necessary, to drag her out of this pit where he had found her, back to
his side again.
But somehow, when he had heard her speak his name, he'd begun to
tremble. And when he had felt her trembling, too, the bitter phrases had
died on his tongue and the thoughts that propelled them were smothered
like fire under sand. And as he'd stood confronting her in her mean
little room, his eyes searching her face, all he had been looking for
was a sign of the hunger--the ages-old hunger--that was devouring him.
And when he'd found it, that was enough for him. The great issue that
was to be fought out between them remained intact, but the hunger had to
be satisfied first.
It was hours later, in the very dead of the night, as he sat on the edge
of the bed, with his back to her, that the old sense of outrage and
degradation, almost as suddenly as it had left him, came back. And came
back in a way that made it more intolerable than ever. For the clear
flame of it had lost its clarity; the confidence that had fanned it was
gone--the sense of his own rightness. The irresistible surge of passion
that had carried him off, had destroyed that. The flame smoked and
smoldered.
"Have you anything here," he asked her dully, "besides what will go in
your trunk?"
It was the surliness of his tone, rather than the words themselves, that
startled her.
"No," she said puzzled. "Of course not."
"Then let's throw them into it quickly," he said, "and we'll lock the
thing up. Do you owe any rent?"
"Roddy!" she said. He heard her moving behind him. She struck a match
and lighted the gas. Then came around in front of him and stared at him
in frowning incredulity. "What do you mean?"
"I mean we're going to get out of this abominable place now--to-night.
We're going home. We can leave an address for the trunk. If it never
comes, so much the better."
Again all she could do was to ask him, with a bewildered stammer, what
he meant. "Because," she added, "I can't go home yet. I've--only
started."
"Started!" he echoed. "Do you think I'm going to let this beastly farce
go any further?"
And with that the smoldering fire licked up into flame again. He told
her what had happened in his office this afternoon; told her of the
attitude of his friends, how they'd all known about it--undoubtedly had
come to see for themselves, and, out of pity or contempt, hadn't told
him. He told her how he'd felt, sitting there in the theater; why he'd
waited at the stage door for her. He accused her, as with its
self-engendered heat his wrath burned brighter, of having selected the
thing to do that would hurt him worst, of having borne a grudge against
him and avenged it.
It was the ignoblest moment of his life, and he knew it. The accusations
he was making against her were nothing to those that were storing up in
his mind against himself. The sense of rightness that would have made
him gentle, had been carried away by the passion he'd shared with her,
and he couldn't get it back.
He didn't look at her as he talked, and she didn't interrupt; said no
word of denial or defense. The big outburst spent itself. He lapsed into
an uneasy silence, got himself together again, and went on trying to
restate his grievance--this time more reasonably, retracting a little.
But under her continued silence, he grew weakly irritated again.
When at last she spoke, he turned his eyes toward her and saw a sort of
frozen look in her dull white face that he had never seen in it before.
Her intonation was monotonous, her voice scarcely audible.
"I guess I understand," she said. "I don't know whether I wish I was
dead or not. If I'd died when the babies were born ... But I'm glad I
came away when I did. And I'm glad,"--she gave a faint shudder there at