The Real Adventure
discouraged in his sad humility, when the touch of an outreached hand
would have changed the whole face of the world for him? Had she really
been as noble as she felt while she was defending the impregnable
righteousness of her position and so completely demolishing his?
She remembered a day when he had been beaten in a law-suit, and she had
waited for him to come to her in his discouragement for help and
comfort. It was thus he had come to her to-day. How helpless he was!
What a boy he was!
Her memory flashed back over their not quite two years of life together
and she realized that he had always been like that whenever his emotions
toward her came into play. All his finely trained, formidable
intelligence had always deserted him here. She remembered his having
told her, the night he'd turned her out of his office, that his mind had
to run cold. She hadn't really known what he meant. She saw now that her
own mind didn't run cold, that it never really aroused itself except
under the spur of strong emotion. So that just where he was most
helpless, she was at her strongest. A victory over him in those
circumstances, was about as much to feel triumphant over as one over a
small child would be.
She realized now, more fully than before, what a crucifixion of his
boyish pride it must have been to see her on the stage. It was no answer
to say that with his intellectual concept of the ideal relations between
men and women, he shouldn't have felt like that. Shouldn't have felt!
The phrase was self-contradictory. Feelings weren't decorative
abstractions which you selected according to your best moral and
esthetic judgment out of an unlimited stock, and ordered wrapped and
sent home. They were things that happened to you. In this case, two
violently opposed feelings of terrible intensity had happened to him at
once; had torn each other, and, in their struggle, had torn him.
Justified or not, it was her act in leaving him, that had turned those
feelings loose upon him. It was through her that he had suffered; that
was plain enough. It must have been terribly plain to him.
And yet, despite the suffering she had caused him, he had crucified his
pride again and come to find her; not with reproaches, with utter
contrition and humility. The measures he'd suggested for easing their
strained situation were, to be sure, maddeningly beside the mark. The
fact that he'd offered them betrayed his complete failure to understand
the situation. But it had cost him, evidently, as much pain to work them
out and bring them to her, as if they had been the real solvents he took
them for. And she had contemptuously torn them to shreds, and sent him
away feeling like an unpardoned criminal. She hadn't drawn the sting
from one of the barbs she'd planted in him, in her anger, before he'd
left her in that North Clark Street room.
She didn't blame herself for the anger, nor for the panic of revulsion
that had excited it. That was a feeling that had happened to her. What
she did blame herself for was that, seeing them both now, as the victims
of a regrettable accident (did she really regret it? Were it in her
power to obliterate the memory of it altogether, as a child with a wet
sponge can obliterate a misspelled word from a slate, would she do it?
She dismissed that question unanswered.), she had allowed him to go away
with his burden of guilt unlightened. She had done that, she told
herself, out of sheer cowardice. She had been afraid of impairing the
luster of her virtuously superior position.
Yet now, she protested, she was being as unfair to herself as she had
been to him. What sort of situation would they have found themselves in,
had she confessed her true new feelings about the love-storm that had
swept over them, that night of the February gale? What good would
protestations of love and sympathy for him do, if she had to go on
denying him the tangible evidence and guarantee of these feelings?
She must deny them. Could she go home to him now, a repentant prodigal?
Or even if, after hearing her story, he denied she was a prodigal;
professed to see in it a reason for taking her fully into his life as
his friend and partner? They might have a wonderful week together,
living up to their new standard, professing all sorts of new
understandings. But the thing wasn't to be for a week. It was for the
rest of their lives. She'd never be able to feel that, in the bottom of
his heart, he wasn't ashamed of her, as his world would say he ought to
be. What satisfying guarantee could he ever give her that he wasn't
ashamed? She couldn't think of any.
Oh, it was all hopeless! It didn't matter what you did. You didn't do
things, anyway. They got done for you--and to you, by a blind force that
masqueraded as your own will. The things she and Rodney had been saying
to each other hadn't been the things they'd wanted to say. They'd been
things wrung out between the rollers of a situation they hadn't produced
and couldn't control.
What were they, the pair of them, but chips floating down the current;
thrown together by one casual eddy, and parted by another! Half an hour
ago, longing for each other unspeakably, they had been within hand's
reach. Now, thanks to a few meaningless words, arguments, ideas--what
was the good of ideas and words? Why couldn't they be like
animals?--they were parted and she was clutching as a sole tangible
memento of him, a rolled-up newspaper that she loved because she'd seen
his strong lean hands gripping it.
She unrolled it and pressed it against her face, then laid it on her
knee and smoothed out its rumpled folds and stroked it.
When Dolly came in a half-hour later, or so, to put on her other suit
preparatory to the matinee, Rose opened up the paper and pretended to
read. She was glad of the protection of it. As she felt just now, she
didn't think she could stand Dolly's chatter without the intervention of
some excuse for monosyllabic replies. She didn't notice that Dolly
wasn't chattering. Mechanically she read the head-lines: _Mortimore
Banks Crash_! She knew who Mortimore was. Once a powerful boss, now a
discredited politician. He'd owned a whole string of banks, it
appeared--along with the hitherto unheard of Milligan--whose solvency
seemed to have evaporated along with the decay of his prestige.
She read without interest, but just because it was printed in
black-faced type, a list of the banks in Chicago that the examiner had
closed. But presently she turned back with a look a little more
thoughtful, and read it again. The names of banks were so absurdly alike
one never could tell. Presently she went over to her suit-case, rummaged
in it, and produced a little bank-book. Then she dropped the book and
the newspaper together into her bag and shut it.
She smiled a little cynically. Would she have refused Rodney's offer of
help, she wondered, if she had known an hour ago, that the two hundred
dollars she'd relied on so confidently to pull her out of this rut and
give her a fresh start whenever she was ready to attempt it, were gone
into the pockets of that fat-faced politician?
CHAPTER XVII
THE END OF THE TOUR
From Dubuque the company made a circuit northward into Wisconsin and
Minnesota, swung around a loop and worked their way south again.
Disaster stalked behind them all the way, casting its lengthening shadow
before for them to walk in. On the very first salary day after Rodney's
newspaper had informed Rose of her true financial situation, the manager
doled out a little money on account to the more exigent members of the
company, and remunerated the others with thanks, a nervous smile, and
the rock-ribbed assurance that they'd get it all next week. The long
jump they'd just taken, and a couple of bad houses (they were all bad,
but the two he spoke of couldn't be called audiences at all, except by
courtesy) had caused a temporary stringency.
Rose saw what the more experienced members of the company were doing,
and knew that she ought to follow their example; keep after the manager
for her money, hound him, appeal to him, invent fictitious needs, and
then not spend a cent except what was absolutely wrung out of her by
necessity, so that when the crash came, she wouldn't be left penniless.
But she lacked the energy to do it. She was going through a passing
phase of that same melancholy acquiescence in the decrees of Fate, which
had been Olga Larson's permanent characteristic until Rose's own fire
and a turn in the tide of fortune had roused her.
One little sequence of events springing directly from Rodney's visit to
Dubuque, contributed largely to this result. The principal actor in it
was Dolly.
Dolly's manner toward her had altered that very morning in Dubuque,
though Rose, in her preoccupation, didn't mark the change for a day or
two afterward. Then she saw that her frail little roommate had stopped
chattering; that she no longer made nervous little excuses for leaving
her, nor invented transparent little fibs to account for absences. She
became, in her absurdly ineffectual little way, surly and defiant. She
took to going about openly with her chorus-man, sharing his seat with
him on the train, letting him carry her bag for her on the way to the
hotel; and her manner toward Rose, when any of these manifestations fell
beneath her eye, was one of uneasy challenge. Let Rose just try to
remonstrate with her if she dared! She no longer came back to the hotel
with Rose after the performances, took to turning up at their room at
hours that grew steadily later and more outrageous, and while at first
she stole in very quietly, undressed in the dark and tried to creep into
bed without awakening her, she grew rapidly more brazen about it; turned
on the light and undressed before the mirror, talked elaborately about
nothing and laughed her high nervous little laugh without occasion.
It was not a lack of daring that kept Rose from asking the questions
that were so patently waiting to be answered, or from making the
remonstrances that Dolly's behavior so definitely invited. She knew she
ought to stir herself up and do something. She had assumed, she knew, a
measure of moral responsibility for the fluffy helpless little thing she
had conquered so easily at first and taken for her chum. Of course
remonstrances, moral lectures, scoldings, wouldn't accomplish anything.
What the situation called for was a second conquest; a reassertion of
her moral dominance over the girl. She would have to reconstruct the
relation which, since the first week of their tour, she had, in her
apathy, allowed to lapse. But that apathy had become too strong to
break. She couldn't rouse herself from it. And, failing that, she kept
silent; let Dolly go her ways.
But a fortnight after Dubuque, an incident occurred that even her
acquiescent passivity couldn't ignore. There came a fine bright
afternoon with no matinee and no washing or mending that needed to be
done, when she suggested to Dolly that they go out for a good walk.
Dolly didn't assent to the proposal, though the suggestion seemed to
interest her.
"Where is there to walk to?" she asked. "These towns are all alike."
"I don't mean just a stroll around the town," Rose said. "Look here!
I'll show you." She pointed from the window. "Across that bridge (they
were playing one of the Mississippi River towns) and up to the top of
that hill on the other side."
"Gee!" said Dolly. "That's miles."
"Do you good," said Rose.
"Are you going there anyway?" asked Dolly.
Rose nodded. "You'd better come along," she said. By turning on her full
powers of persuasion, she might, she felt, have pulled Dolly along with
her; swept her off and begun the reconquest she knew she ought to make.
But somehow her will failed her. Dolly could come if she liked.