The Real Adventure
the next boat. And I telephoned Rodney just now, to find out what the
next boat for Genoa was, or Naples, and get me a stateroom. Lend me
Marie, will you, to help pack? Because I'll probably have to take the
five-thirty.' Harriet all over. Well, on the whole, I'm glad."
"Oh, yes," said Constance. "She'd always be at a loose end in this
country. She doesn't believe in divorce. She might, of course, if she
fell in love with another man over here. But that's not likely to
happen. And she can't stand America any more. So even an unsuccessful
marriage over there, especially if Italy gets drawn into the war, and
her man gets ..."
"Constance!" cried Violet, horrified.
"Oh, not necessarily killed," Constance went on. "Crippled or something,
or even if he really got interested in the profession of being a
soldier. She's done well to go back to him."
"Anyway, that wasn't what I meant," said Violet. "I meant I was glad for
Rodney and--Rose. Mind you, I don't _know_ a single thing. But I've just
got a hunch that with Harriet off the board, it will be a little more
possible for those two to get together."
Constance looked at her intently. "You've changed your tune," she said.
"I thought you were through with Rose for good and all. I thought what
you were rooting for was a divorce and a fresh start for Rodney."
"I thought so, too," said Violet, "until I saw her."
"Saw her!" Constance cried. "Where? When?"
"In New York on the way home," said Violet.
"Well--tell me all about it," said Constance, when she saw Violet wasn't
going on of her own accord. "You, pretending you wanted to know about
everything, and pretending to be a heroine for not telling me all about
being a refugee! What is she doing? What did she look like? What did she
say?"
"You've changed your tune, too," said Violet. "Because you were through
with her just as much as I was. You didn't want to hear anything more
about her. Of course she could ran away and go on the stage if she
liked, you said, but she'd better not try to come back."
Constance pointed out that she hadn't, as yet, expressed the hope that
Rodney would make it up with her. But she pleaded guilty to a strong
curiosity.
"Well, I can't tell you much," said Violet. "John and I were coming down
Fifth Avenue in a taxi one afternoon, and were stopped by the traffic at
Forty-fourth Street. And right there, in another taxi, was Rose. I
didn't see her till just as we got the whistle to go ahead. I was so
surprised I could only grab John and tell him to look. I did shriek at
her at last, and she saw us and lighted up and smiled. Just that old
smile of hers, you know. But her car was turning west, down past
Sherry's, and we were going straight ahead and we weren't quick enough
to tell the chauffeur to turn, too. We did turn on Forty-third and came
around the block, and of course we missed her.
"We went to three musical shows in the next two days, in the hope of
spotting her in the chorus. But she wasn't in any of them, and then I
simply dragged John home. There was no way of finding her of course, nor
of her finding us, because John's given up the Holland House at last and
taken to the Vanderbilt. But it was rather maddening."
"Well, I don't know," said Constance. "Oh, yes, maddening of course,
because one would be curious. But that sort of curiosity might prove
pretty expensive if you gratified it. Talk about the clutch of a
drowning person! It's nothing to the clutch of a _declassee_ woman. And
if she's been somebody once who really mattered, and somebody you were
really fond of ... Because it _is_ no use. They can't ever come back."
Violet stirred in her chair. "Of course we're all perfectly good
Christians," she observed ironically. "And once a week we say 'Forgive
us our debts,' besides teaching it to the kids."
Constance broke in on her hotly. "Oh, come, Violet! You know it's not a
question of forgiveness. I don't claim any moral superiority over Rose.
I'm just talking about her social possibility. A person who does an
outrageous thing, knowing it's outrageous, just because he--or
she--wants to do it, can be downright immoral without being impossible.
But a person who's done the other sort of thing, a shabby thing--and
what Rose did was shabby--will always be on the defensive about it. They
can't let it alone. They're always making references you can't ignore;
always seeing references in perfectly harmless things that other people
say. And the only society where they're ever happy, is that of a lot of
other people with shady, shabby things that _they're_ on the defensive
about. And they all get together and call it Bohemia. And they sprawl
around in studios and talk about sex and try to feel superior and
emancipated. Well, maybe they are. All I say is they don't belong with
us. Oh, you know it's true! You hate that as much as I do."
"Oh, yes," said Violet. "Only, since I've seen Rose--even for that
minute--it doesn't seem possible to apply it to her. You know, I don't
believe she's on the stage any more."
Constance asked with good-humored satire, "Why? From the way she looked
in the taxi-cab?"
"Yes," said Violet. "Just from that. There she was in an open taxi, on
Fifth Avenue, at half past four in the afternoon, and she didn't look
somehow, as if how she looked mattered. She wasn't on parade a bit. She
looked smart and successful, but busy. Not exactly irritated at being
held up in the block, but keen to get out of it. The way Frank or John
would look on the way to a directors' meeting. And the way she smiled
when she saw us ... It's not quite exactly her old smile, either, but
it's just as fascinating. It pleased her to see us all right. But as for
her caring a rap what we thought--well, you couldn't imagine it.
Defensive indeed! And poor old John just about went out of his head with
disappointment when we lost her."
"Oh, I'll never deny she's a charmer," said Constance. "All the same ..."
"You wait till you see her!" said Violet.
Violet's report of the glimpse she had had of Rose, together with what
were felt to be the rather amusingly extravagant set of deductions she
had made from it, spread in diminishing ripples of discussion through
all their circle. And then, concentrically, into wider circles. Most of
their own intimate group took Constance's attitude. Forced to concede a
lively curiosity as to what had become of Rose, they still professed
that the way of discretion lay not in gratifying it; at least not at
first-hand. When they were in New York, they kept an eye open for a
sight of her, on the stage and elsewhere, and an alert ear for news,
finding a sort of fearful joy in wondering what they would do if an
encounter took place. They were mildly derisive with Violet over her
_volte-face_.
Secretly, Violet was a good deal closer to agreeing with them than she'd
admit. For, as the effect of her encounter lost its vividness, with the
recession of the encounter itself, she began to suspect that she had
gone unwarranted lengths in her interpretations from it. But under fire,
she stuck to her guns. Her husband, who delighted in her public
attitude, was amazed when she rounded upon him in their domestic
sanctuary, and emphatically took the other side. In his disgust, he made
a very penetrating observation, whose cogency Violet realized, though
she loftily ignored it at the time it was uttered. But three or four
nights later, at an opera dinner at the Heaton-Duncans, she fired it off
shamelessly, as a shot out of her own locker.
"It's all very well," she exploded, "to say that Rose can't come back.
But as a matter of fact she's never been out of it. At least the hole
she left has never closed up. You all agree that she's to be forgotten
and treated as a regrettable incident, but you keep on talking about
her. It's like Roosevelt. There she is all the time."
She didn't dare catch John's eye for the next twenty minutes, but she
knew precisely, without looking, the exasperated quality of his stare.
It was true. They couldn't let her alone. Speculation flared up again,
and this time with a justifiable basis, when it became known that
Rodney had bought the McCrea house; bought it outright, for cash, with
its complete contents.
Of course everybody knew that Rodney was getting rich. And he was doing
it, as Frank Crawford pointed out to Constance, with precisely the same
contemptuous disregard of money that he had shown before his marriage.
"He doesn't care what he charges, and he didn't care then. Only then it
was out of the little end of the horn, and now it's out of the big. And
the thing that seems to make him particularly wild is that the higher
the price he puts on his opinions, the more people there are who think
that nobody's opinion but his is any good. So he just grins at them and
goes up another notch. He's no better a lawyer, he says, than he was
when his practise brought him in ten thousand a year. Of course he is a
better lawyer. He's getting better all the time. He does deliver the
goods. And fighting out these great big cases really educates a man. You
can't be really first-class unless you've got first-class things to do.
And down inside Rodney knows that as well as anybody.
"Only, with all his money, after the way he's talked about that
house--the way he's damned it and made fun of it, what did he want to go
and buy it for?"
Constance had an idea he'd got it at a bargain. The McCreas had made a
flying trip home just to sell it. Their investments had gone off, it
seemed, still further, and besides, Florence had at last found something
in the world to be in earnest about, and that was in France; the
American hospital. Florence had already taken an emergency training
course in nursing. Her husband, whose one marked talent was that of a
chauffeur, was going to drive a motor ambulance, and they were both on
fire to get back to Paris into the thick of things. Almost any round
sum, in absolutely spot cash, would satisfy them. So Rodney, too busy
with other things to take the trouble to invest his money, would have
been in a position to get the house cheap. It was Constance's opinion
that he had.
"Do you know anybody in the world," her husband demanded, "less likely
to be interested in a bargain than Rodney? Or to pick a thing up because
it is cheap?"
"Well, then," Constance said, "you must think he's expecting Rose,
sometime or other, to come back to him. Because if he meant to get a
divorce and marry some one else, he certainly wouldn't want to live in
that house with her. He'd want as few reminders as possible, not as
many. And yet, it was Rose herself, according to Harriet, who was so
anxious, toward the last, to get rid of the place. So there you are!
It's a mystery any way you take it."
John Williamson said he understood, though when Violet pressed him for
an explanation he was a little vague.
"Why," he said, "it's just a polite way of telling us all to go to the
devil. He knows we're all talking our heads off about him, and
sympathizing with him, and wondering what he's going to do, and he buys
that house to serve notice that he's going to stay put. Business as
usual at the old stand. I shouldn't be surprised if he meant the same
message for Rose. That is to say, that the place will always be there
for her to come back to."
Outside their immediate circle, no such imaginative explanations were
resorted to. Rose was coming back of course. And the interesting theme
for speculation was what would happen to her when she did. Would she try
to take her old place; ignore the past; treat that outrageous escapade
with the Globe chorus as if it had never happened? And if she did try to
do that, could she succeed? It all depended on what a few people did. If