The Real Adventure
chauffeur-driven, servant-attended class lives his life in ignorance of,
the nervous relief that comes from ceasing, for a while, to be an
isolated, sharply bounded, perfectly visible entity, and subsiding,
indistinguishably, into a mere mass of humanity; in being nobody for a
while. It was a want which, in the old days before his marriage, Rodney
had often, unconsciously, felt and gratified. He had enjoyed being
herded about, riding in crowded street-cars, working his way through the
press in the down-town streets during the noon hour.
He was no more conscious of it now, but it was distinctly pleasant to
him to be identified for the conductor merely by a bit of blue
pasteboard with punch marks in it, stuck in his hat-band.
The pleasant torpor didn't last long, because presently, the rhythmic
thud of the wheels began singing to him the same damned tune that had
dogged his footsteps earlier that morning: "I'm all alone, you're all
alone; come on, let's be lonesome together."
This was intolerable! To break it up, he bought a magazine from the
train-boy and tried to read. But the story he lighted on concerned
itself with a ravishingly beautiful young woman and an incredibly
meritorious young man, and worked itself out, cleverly enough to be
sure--which made it worse--upon the assumption that all that was needed
for their supreme and permanent happiness was to get into each other's
arms, which eventually they did.
Rose had been in his arms last night!
So the scorching treadmill round began again. But at last sheer physical
exhaustion intervened and he fell heavily asleep. He didn't waken until
the conductor took up his bit of pasteboard again, shook him by the
shoulder, and told him that he'd be at his destination in five minutes.
Presently, in the hotel, he locked his door, opened the window and sat
down to think.
CHAPTER XIII
FREDERICA'S PARADOX
Two days later, at half past eight in the morning, he walked in on
Frederica at breakfast with her two eldest children. He had been able to
count on this because the Whitneys had a certain pride in preserving
some of the customs of the generation before them; at least Martin had,
and Frederica's good-natured, rueful acquiescence gave her at once
something to laugh at him a little about and a handy leverage for the
extraction of miscellaneous concessions. It wasn't exactly a misdemeanor
to be late to breakfast--it began promptly at eight o'clock--but it was
distinctly meritorious not to be. Martin never was and he always left
the house for his office at exactly eight-twenty. His chauffeur was
trained to take just ten minutes trundling the big car down-town, and
eight-thirty found him at his desk as invariably as it had found his
father before him. It was all perfectly ritualistic, of course. There
wasn't the slightest need for any of it.
A knowledge of the ritual, though, stood Rodney in good stead this
morning. He liked Martin well enough--had really a traditional and
vicarious affection for him. But he was about the last man he wanted to
see to-day.
The children were a boy of ten, Martin, junior, and a girl, Ellen, of
eight. There was a three-year-old baby, too, but his nurse looked after
him. They had finished breakfast, but Frederica had a way of keeping
them at the table for a little while every morning, chatting with
her--oh, about anything they pleased. If it was a design for their
improvement, they didn't suspect it. The talk broke off short when the
three of them, almost simultaneously, looked up and saw Rodney in the
doorway.
"Hello!" Frederica said, holding out a hand to him, but not rising.
"Just in time for breakfast."
"Don't ring," he said quickly. "I've had all I want. My train got in an
hour ago and I had a try at the station restaurant."
"Well, sit down anyway," said Frederica.
"Take this chair, Uncle Rod," said the boy in a voice of brusk
indifference. "Excuse me, mother?" He barely waited for her nod and
blundered out of the room.
The girl came round to Rodney's chair to offer him her hand and drop her
curtsy; took a carnation from a bowl on the table and tucked it into his
button-hole, slid her arm around his neck and kissed his cheek.
Both the children, Frederica was aware, had remarked something troubled
and serious about their uncle's manner and each had acted on this
observation in his own way. The boy, distressed and only afraid of
showing it, had bolted from the room with a panicky assumption of
indifference. The girl, though two years younger, was quite at ease in
expressing her sympathy, and conscious of how decoratively she did it.
(This was Frederica's analysis, anyhow. As is the wont of mothers, she
liked the boy better.)
"I think Miss Norris is waiting for you, my dear."
"_Oui, maman_," said Ellen dutifully.
She was supposed to talk French all the morning, but somehow this
particular observance of the regime irritated her mother a little and
she rather visibly waited while Ellen quite adequately made her
farewells to her uncle and gracefully left the room.
The tenseness of her attitude relaxed suddenly when the child was gone.
She reached out a cool soft hand and laid it on one of Rodney's that
rested limply on the table. There was rather a long silence--ten seconds
perhaps. Then:
"How did you find out about it?" Rodney asked.
They were both too well accustomed to these telepathic short-cuts to
take any note of this one. She'd seen that he knew, just with her first
glance at him there in the doorway; and something a little tenderer and
gentler than most of her caresses about this one, told him that she did.
What it was they knew, went of course without saying.
"Harriet's back," she said. "She got in day before yesterday. Constance
said something to her about it, thinking she knew. They've thought all
along that you and I knew, too. Harriet was quick enough and clever
enough to pretend she did and yet find out about it, all at the same
time. So that's so much to the good. That's better than having them find
out we didn't know. Of course Harriet came straight to me. I'm glad it
was Harriet Constance spoke to about it and not me. I'd probably have
given it away. But Harriet never batted an eye."
"No," said Rodney, "Harriet wouldn't."
It was a certain dryness in his intonation rather than the words
themselves Frederica answered.
"She'd do anything in the world for you, Roddy," she said, with a
vaguely troubled intensity.
This time his mind didn't follow hers. For an instant he misunderstood
her pronoun, then he saw what she meant.
"Harriet?--Oh, yes, Harriet's all right," he said absently.
She left his preoccupation alone for a minute or two, but at last broke
in on it with a question. "How did you find out about it, Roddy? Who
told you?"
"No one," he said in a voice unnaturally level and dry. "I went to see
the show on the recommendation of a country client, and there she was on
the stage."
"Oh!" cried Frederica--a muffled, barely audible cry of passionate
sympathy. Then:
"Roddy," she demanded, "are you sure it's true? Are you absolutely sure
that it's really Rose? Or if it is, that she's in her right mind--that
she hasn't just wandered off as people do sometimes without knowing who
they are?"
"There's nothing in that notion," he said. "It's Rose all right, and she
knows what she's doing."
"You mean you've seen her off the stage--talked with her?"
He nodded.
She pulled in a long sigh of anticipatory relief.
"Well, then," she demanded, "what did she say? How did she explain how
she _could_ have done such a thing as that?"
"I didn't ask her to explain," said Rodney. "I asked her to come home,
and she wouldn't."
"Oh, it's wicked!" she cried. "It's the most abominably selfish thing I
ever heard of!"
He made a gesture of protest, but it didn't stop her.
"Oh, I suppose," she flashed, "she didn't _mean_ any harm--wasn't just
trying to do the cruelest thing she could to you. But it would be a
little less infuriating if she had."
"Pull up, Freddy!" he said. Rather gently though, for him. "There's no
good going on like that. And besides ... You were saying Harriet would
do anything in the world for me. Well, there's something _you_ can do.
You're the only person I know who can."
Her answer was to come around behind his chair, put her cheek down
beside his, and reach for his hands.
"Let's get away from this miserable breakfast table," she said. "Come up
to where I live, where we can be safely by ourselves; then tell me about
it."
In front of her boudoir fire, looking down on her as she sat in her
flowered wing chair, an enormously distended rug-covered pillow beside
her knees waiting for him to drop down on when he felt like it, he began
rather cautiously to tell her what he wanted.
"I'll tell you the reason why I've come to you," he began, "and then
you'll see. Do you remember nearly two years ago, the night I got wet
coming down here to dinner--the night you were going to marry me off to
Hermione Woodruff? We had a long talk afterward, and you said, speaking
of the chances people took getting married, that it wasn't me you
worried about, but the girl, whoever she might be, who married me."
The little gesture she made admitted the recollection, but denied its
relevancy. She'd have said something to that effect, but he prevented
her.
"No," he insisted, "it wasn't just talk. There was something to it.
Afterward, when we were engaged, two or three times, you gave me tips
about things. And since we've been married ... Well, somehow, I've had
the feeling that you were on her side; that you saw things her
way--things that I didn't see."
"Little things," she protested; "little tiny things that couldn't
possibly matter--things that any woman would be on another
woman's--side, as you say, about."
But she contradicted this statement at once. "Oh, I _did_ love her!" she
said fiercely. "Not just because she loved you, but because I thought
she was altogether adorable. I couldn't help it. And of course that's
what makes me so perfectly furious now--that she should have done a
thing like this to you."
"All right," he said. "Never mind about that. This is what I want you to
do. I want you to go to see her, and I want you to ask her, in the first
place, to try to forgive me."
"What for?" Frederica demanded.
"I want you to tell her," he went on, "that it's impossible that she
should be more horrified at the thing I did than I am myself. I want you
to ask her, whatever she thinks my deserts are, to do just one thing for
me, and that is to let me take her out of that perfectly hideous place.
I don't ask anything else but that. She can make any terms she likes.
She can live where or how she likes. Only--not like that. Maybe it's a
deserved punishment, but I can't stand it!"
There was the crystallization of what little thinking he had managed to
do in the two purgatorial days he'd spent in that down-state hotel--in
the intervals of fighting off the torturing jingle of that tune, and the
memory of the dull frozen agony he'd seen in Rose's face as he left her.
No great result, truly. The mountain had labored and brought forth a
mouse.
But reflect for a moment what Rodney's life had been; how gently, for
all his buoyant theories about the acceptance of discipline, the world,
in its material aspect at any rate, had dealt with him. How completely
that boyish arrogance of his had been allowed to grow unbruised by
circumstance. He'd always been rich, in the sense that his means had
always been sufficient to his wants. He'd never in his life had an
experience that even resembled Portia's with that old unpaid grocery
bill. He'd enjoyed wearing shabby clothes, but he'd never worn them