The Real Adventure
the alternative--"I'm glad I've got a job and that I can pay back that
hundred dollars I owe you. I've had it quite a while. But I've kept it,
hoping you might find out where I was and come to me, as you did, and
that we might have a chance to talk. I thought I'd tell you how I'd
earned it, and that you'd be a little--proud with me about it, proud
that I could pay it back so soon."
She smiled a little over that, a smile he had to turn away from. But
this tortured smile shriveled in the flame of passion with which she
went on. "If I couldn't pay it back to-night, after this, I'd feel like
killing myself, or like--going out and earning it in the streets.
Because that's what you've made me to-night!"
He cried out her name at that, but she went on as if she hadn't heard;
only calm again--or so one might have thought from the sound of her
voice.
"I went away, you see, because I couldn't bear to have the love part of
your life without a sort of friendly partnership in the rest of it. But
I didn't know then that you could love me while you hated me, while you
felt that I'd unspeakably degraded myself and disgraced you. So that
while you loved me and had me in your arms, you felt degraded for doing
it. I didn't know that till now.
"I suppose I'll be glad some day that it all happened; that I met you
and loved you and had the babies, even though it's all had to end," she
shuddered again, "like this."
It wasn't till he tried to speak that her apparent calm was broken.
Then, with a sudden frantic terror in her eyes, she begged him, not
to--begged him to go away, if he had any mercy for her at all, quickly
and without a word. In a sort of daze he obeyed her.
The tardy winter morning, looking through her grimy window, found her
sitting there, huddled in a big bath-robe, just as she'd been when he
closed the door.
CHAPTER XII
"I'M ALL ALONE"
The same grizzly dawn that looked in on Rose through the dim window of
her room on Clark Street, saw Rodney letting himself in his own front
door with a latch-key after hours of aimless tramping through deserted,
unrecognized streets. He was in a welter of emotions he could no more
have given names to than to the streets whose dreary lengths he had
plodded.
The one thing that isolated itself from the rest, climbed up into his
mind and there kept goading him into a weak helpless fury, was a
jingling tune and a set of silly words that Rose and her sisters in the
sextette had sung the night before: "You're all alone, I'm all alone;
come on, let's be lonesome together." And then a line he couldn't
remember exactly, containing, for the sake of the rhyme, some total
irrelevancy about the weather, and a sickening bit of false rhyming to
end up with, about loving forever and ever. The jingle of that tune had
kept time to his steps, and the silly words had sung themselves over and
over endlessly in his brain until the mockery of it had become
absolutely excruciating. Except for that damnable tune, there was
nothing in his mind at all. Everything else was synthesized into a dull
ache, a hollow, gnawing, physical ache. But he'd endure that, he
thought, if he could get rid of the diabolical malice of that tune.
Perhaps if he stopped walking and just sat still it would go away.
That's why he went home, let himself in with his latch-key and made his
way furtively to the library, where the embers of last night's fire were
still warm. He had an hour at least before the servants would be
stirring. He was terribly cold and pretty well exhausted, and the
comfort of his big chair and the glow of the fire carried him off
irresistibly into a doze--a doze that was troubled by fantastic dreams.
With the first early morning stirrings in the house, the sounds of
opening doors here and there, the penetrating cry of one of the
babies--muffled, to be sure, and a long way off, but still audible--he
came broad awake again, but sat for a while staring about the room; at
the wonderful ornate perfection of the Italian marble chimney-piece that
framed the dying fire; at the tall carved chairs, the simple grandeur of
the three-hundred-year-old table and the subdued richness, in the half
light, of the tapestries that hung on the walls.
It was Florence McCrea's masterpiece, this room. But this morning its
perfections mocked him with the ferocious irony of the contrast they
presented to that other room--that unspeakably horrible room where he
had left Rose. Details of its hideousness, that he hadn't been conscious
of observing during the hours he had spent in it, came back to him,
bitten out with acid clearness;--the varnished top of the bureau mottled
with water stains, the worn splintered floor, the horrible hard blue of
the iron bed, the florid pattern on the hand-painted slop-jar.
And that abominable room was where Rose was now! She was sitting,
perhaps, just as he'd left her, with that look of frozen, dumb agony
still in her face, while he sat here ...
He sprang up in a sort of frenzy. The parlor maid would be in here any
minute now, on her morning rounds, and would wish him a respectful good
morning, and ask him what he wanted for breakfast. And then, with
automatic perfection, would appear his coffee, his grapefruit, and the
rest of it--all exactly right, the result of a perfect precalculation of
his wishes. While Rose ...
He put on his outdoor things and left the house, motivated now, for the
first time in many hours, with a clear purpose. He'd go back to that
room and get Rose out of it. He was incapable of planning how it should
be done, but somehow--anyhow, it should be; that was all he knew!
But this purpose was frustrated the moment he reached Clark Street, by
the realization that he hadn't an idea within half a mile at least,
where the room was. Neither when he went into it with Rose, nor when he
left it, had he picked up any sort of landmark. There was a passage, he
remembered, leading back between two buildings, which projected to the
sidewalk. But there were a dozen of these in every block.
A miserable little lunch-room caught his eye, displaying in its dingy
windows, pies, oranges, big shallow pans of pork and beans. This was the
sort of place Rose would have to come to, he reflected, for her
breakfast. And with that thought--hardly the conscious hope that she
would actually come to this place this morning--he turned in, sat down
at a cloth spotted with coffee and catsup stains, and ordered his
breakfast of a yawning waiter. He even forced himself, when it was
brought in, to eat it. If it was good enough for Rose, wasn't it good
enough for him?
And all the while he kept his eye on the street door, in the
irrepressible, unacknowledged hope that the gods would be kind enough to
bring her there.
But it was a mocking hope, he knew, and he didn't linger after he'd
finished. He walked down-town to his office. It was still pretty
early--not yet eight o'clock. Even his office boy wouldn't be down for
three-quarters of an hour. He was safe, he found himself saying, for so
long, anyway.
He sat down at his desk and stared bewildered at the stack of letters
that lay there awaiting his signature. They were the very letters Miss
Beach had been typing when he had told her to telephone to the club and
get him a seat for _The Girl Up-stairs_, by way of passing a pleasant
evening;--and had laughed at her when she protested. Oh, God!
He felt like a sort of inverted Rip Van Winkle--like a man who had been
away twenty years--in hell twenty years!--and coming back found
everything exactly as he had left it. As if, in reality, his absence had
lasted only overnight.
He pulled himself together and began to read the letters, but
interrupted himself before he'd gone far, to laugh aloud. The laugh
startled him a little. He hadn't expected to do more than smile. But
certainly it was worth a laugh, the solemn importance with which he'd
dictated those letters; the notion that it mattered what he said, how he
advised his clients in their bloodless, parchment-like affairs; that
anything in all the files behind the black door of that vault
represented more than the empty victories and defeats of a childish
game. The dead smug orderliness of the place, with the infallible Miss
Beach as its presiding genius, infuriated him. Clearly he couldn't stay
here till he was better in hand than this.
He signed his letters without reading them, and scribbled a note to
Craig that he'd been called out of town for a day or two on a matter of
urgent personal business. He hadn't thought of actually going out of
town until the note was written. But once he saw the statement in black
and white, the notion of making it true, invited him. He'd run off to
some small city where no curious eyes, animated by the knowledge that he
was Rodney Aldrich whose wife had left him to become a chorus-girl,
could steal glances at him. Where he needn't speak to any one from
morning till night. Where he could really get himself together and
think.
He added in a postscript to the note to Craig, instructions to call up
his house and tell them he was out of town.
The thought cropped up in one of the more automatic sections of his
brain, that for traveling he ought to have a bag, night things, fresh
underclothes, and so on, and the routine method of supplying that need
suggested itself to him; namely, to telephone to the house, have one of
the maids pack his bag for him and send it down-town in the car. But
just as he had rejected the notion of breakfasting at home, and had gone
out to that miserable Clark Street lunch-room instead, so he rejected
this. All the small civilized refinements of his way of life went
utterly against his grain. They'd continue to be intolerable to him, he
thought, as long as he had to go on envisaging Rose in that ghastly
environment of hers.
He left his office and turned into one of the big department stores that
backs up on Dearborn Street, where he bought himself a cheap bag and
furnished it with a few necessaries. Then, leaving the store, simply
kept on going to the first railway station that lay in his way. He chose
a destination quite at random. The train announcer, with a megaphone,
was calling off a list of towns which a train, on the point of
departure, would stop at. Rodney picked one that he had never visited,
bought a ticket, walked down the platform past the Pullmans, and found
himself a seat in a coach.
He found a measure of relief in all this. It gave him the illusion, at
least, of doing something. Or, more accurately, of getting ready to do
something, while it liberated him from the immediate necessity of doing
it. He'd go to a hotel in that town whose name was printed on his
ticket, and hire a room; lock himself up in it, and then begin to think.
Once he could get the engine of his mind to going, he'd be all right.
There must be some right thing to do. Or if not that, at least something
that was better to do than anything else. And when his mind should have
discovered what that thing was, he'd have, he felt, resolution enough to
go on and do it. Until he should find it, he was like a man
shamed--naked, unable to encounter the most casual glance of any of the
persons in his world who knew his shame. Once he was safe in that hotel
room, the process of thinking could begin. He wouldn't have to hurry
about it. He could take all the time he liked.
For the present, he was getting a queer sort of comfort out of what
would ordinarily be labeled the discomforts of his surroundings: the
fierce dry heat of the car, the smells--that of oranges was perhaps the
strongest of these--the raucous persistence of the train butcher hawking
his wares; and, most of all, in the very density of the crowd.
This is one of the comforts that many a member of the favored,