The Real Adventure
himself, because he couldn't endure it that she should live like this?
Had he exhibited anything to her at all in their two encounters, but an
uncontrolled animal lust and a perfectly contemptible vanity?
He bitterly regretted having destroyed the letter. But the tone of it,
he was sure, except for that well merited jibe about Harriet, which had
been erased, was kindly. Yet he had acted once more, like a spoiled
child about it.
Could he write and thank her? In Dubuque she had asked him not to come
back. Did that prohibition cover writing? Her letter did not explicitly
revoke it. She asked him no questions. But he remembered now a
post-script, which, at the time of reading, he'd taken merely as a final
barb of satire. "I am still Doris Dane down here, of course," it had
read. If she hadn't meant that for a sneering assurance that his
precious name wasn't being taken in vain--and had he ever heard Rose
sneer at anybody?--what could have been the purpose of it except to make
sure that a letter from him wouldn't come addressed "Rose Aldrich," and
so fail to be delivered to her.
It was due only to luck that, in his first disappointment, he hadn't
destroyed her address with the letter. But she had duplicated it on the
flap of the envelope, and the envelope was not thrown in the fire.
He spent hours composing a reply. And the thing he finally sent off,
once it was committed to the post, seemed quite the worst of all his
efforts. His impulse was to send another on the heels of it. But he
waited a week, then wrote again. And this time, the stiffness of
self-consciousness was not quite so paralyzing. He managed to give her a
little real information about the condition of the twins and the
household. About himself, he stated that he was well, though busier than
he liked to be.
He experienced a very vague, faint satisfaction, two days later, over
the reflection that this letter was in her hands, and he came presently
to the audacious resolution that until she forbade him, he would go on
writing to her every week. She'd see that she needn't answer and it
would no doubt add something--how much he didn't dare to try to
estimate--to her happiness, to know that all was going well in the home
that she had left.
She began pretty soon to answer these letters with stiff little notes,
strictly limited to a bulletin of her own activities and a grateful
acknowledgment of the latest one he had sent her. Invariably, every
Tuesday morning, one of these notes arrived. And this state of things
continued, unchanged, for months.
He experienced a bewildering mixture of emotions over these letters of
hers. They drove him, sometimes, into outbursts of petulant rage. Often
the knowledge that one of them was to be expected in the morning,
delivered him up, against all the resistance he could make, to a flood
of tormenting memories of her. And across the mood the letter would find
him in, its cool little commonplaces would sting like the cut of a whip.
The mere facts her letters recounted aroused contradictory emotions in
him, too. They all spelled success and assurance, and almost from week
to week they marked advancement. The first effect of this was always to
make his heart sink; to make her seem farther away from him; to make the
possibility of any future need of him that would give him his
opportunity, seem more and more remote. The other feeling, whose glow he
was never conscious of till later--a feeling so surprising and
irrational that he could hardly call it by name, was pride. What in
God's name had he to be proud of? Was she a possession of his? Could he
claim any credit for her success? But the glow persisted in spite of
these questions.
His satisfaction in his own letters to her was less mixed. They must, he
thought, gradually be restoring in her mind, the image of himself as a
man who, as Harriet said, could take his medicine without making faces;
who could endure pain and punishment without howling about it. Perhaps,
in time, those letters would obliterate the memory of the vain beast
he'd been that night....
If Rodney had done an unthinkable thing; if he had kept copies of his
letters to Rose, along with her answers, in a chronological file the way
Miss Beach kept his business correspondence, he would have made the
discovery that the stiffness of them had gradually worn away and that
they were now a good deal more than mere _pro forma_ bulletins. There
had crept into them, so subtly and so gently that between one of them
and the next no striking difference was to be observed, a friendliness,
quite cool, but wonderfully firm. She was frankly jubilant over the
success of her costumes in _Come On In_ and she enclosed with her letter
a complete set of newspaper reviews of the piece. They reached him a day
or two before Jimmy Wallace telephoned, and this fact perhaps had
something to do with the gruff good humor with which he told Jimmy to go
as far as he liked in his newspaper paragraph.
It was a week later that she wrote:
"I met James Randolph coming up Broadway yesterday afternoon, about five
o'clock. I had a spare half-hour and he said he had nothing else but
spare half-hours; that was what he'd come to New York for. So we turned
into the Knickerbocker and had tea. He's changed, somehow, since I saw
him last; as brilliant as ever, but rather--lurid. Do you suppose things
are going badly between him and Eleanor? I'd hate to think that, but I
shouldn't be surprised. He spoke of calling me up again, but this
morning, instead, I got a note from him saying he was going back to
Chicago. He told me he hadn't seen you forever. Why don't you drop in on
him?"
* * * * *
It was quite true that Rodney had seen very little of the Randolphs
since Rose went away. His liking for James had always been an affair of
the intelligence. The doctor's mind, with its powers of dissecting and
coordinating the phenomena of every-day life, its luminous flashes, its
readiness to go all the way through to the most startling conclusions,
had always so stimulated and attracted his own, that he'd never stopped
to ask whether or not he liked the rest of the man that lay below the
intelligence.
When it came to confronting his friends, in the knowledge that they knew
that Rose had left him for the Globe chorus, he found that James
Randolph was one he didn't care to face. He knew too damned much. He'd
be too infernally curious; too full of surmises, eager for experiments.
The Rodney of a year before, intact, unscarred, without, he'd have said,
a joint in his harness, could afford to enjoy with no more than a
deprecatory grin, the doctor's outrageous and remorseless way of pinning
out on his mental dissecting board, anything that came his way. The
Rodney who came back from Dubuque couldn't grin. He knew too much of the
intimate agony that produced those interesting lesions and
abnormalities. Even in the security, if it could have been had, that his
own situation wouldn't be scientifically dissected and discussed, he'd
still have wanted to keep away from James Randolph.
But Rose's letter put a different face on the matter. He felt perfectly
sure that Randolph hadn't been analyzing her during that spare half-hour
at the Knickerbocker. The shoe, it appeared, had been on the other foot.
The fact that she'd put him, partly at least, in possession of what she
had observed and what she guessed, gave him a sort of shield against the
doctor. He told himself that his principal reason for going was to get a
little bit more information about Rose than her letters provided him
with. But the anticipation he dwelt on with the greatest pleasure,
really, was of saying, "Oh, yes. Rose wrote that she'd seen you."
So one evening, after keeping up the pretense through his solitary
dinner and the cigar that followed it, that he meant presently to go up
to his study and correct galley proofs on an enormous brief, he slipped
out about nine o'clock, and walked around to the Randolphs' new house.
This latest venture of Eleanor's had attracted a good deal of comment
among her friends. Somebody called it, with a rather cruel _double
entendre_, Bertie Willis' last word. In the obvious sense of the phrase,
this was true. Eleanor had given him a free hand, and he had gone his
limit. He'd been working slowly backward from Jacobean, through Tudor.
But this thing was perfect Perpendicular. You could, as John Williamson
said, kid yourself into the notion, when you walked under the
keel-shaped arch to their main doorway, that you were going to church.
And the style was carried out with inexorable rigor, down to the most
minute details. But since everybody knew that the latest thing, the
inevitably coming thing, was the pure unadulterated ugliness of
Georgian, a style that Bertie had opposed venomously (because he
couldn't build it, the uncharitable said); and because even Bertie's
carefully preserved youth was felt to have gone a little stale and it
was no longer fashionable to consider his charms irresistible, the
phrase, "his last word," was instantly understood, as I said, to have a
secondary sense.
No one, of course, could tell Eleanor anything about what the coming
styles were going to be, in architecture or anything else. She was one
of these persons with simply a sixth sense for fashions, and her having
gone to Bertie Willis, instead of to young Mellish of the historic New
York firm, McCleod, Hill, Stone & Black, who was doing such delightfully
hideous things in Georgian, caused, among her friends, a good deal of
comment. Her explanation that medicine was a medieval profession and
that she had to have a medieval house to go with James, was felt to be a
mere evasion.
It was recognized that one had to flirt with Bertie while he was
building her house. And in the days when everybody else had been doing
it, too, it didn't matter. But now that the celebrated _hareem_ had
ceased to exist, it was felt that one would do well to be a little
careful; at least, to put a more or less summary end to the flirtation
when the house was finished. But Eleanor hadn't done that. She was
playing with him more exclusively than ever.
Rodney hadn't been in the house before, and he reflected, as he stood at
the door, after ringing the bell, that his own house was quite meek and
conventional alongside this. The grin that this consideration afforded
him, was still on his lips when, a servant having opened the door, he
found himself face to face with the architect.
Bertie, top-coated and hat in hand, was waiting for Eleanor, who was
coming down the stairs followed by a maid with her carriage coat. He
returned Rodney's nod pretty stiffly, as was natural enough, since
Rodney's grin had distinctly brightened up at sight of him.
Eleanor said, rather negligently, "Hello, Rod. We're just dashing off to
the Palace to see a perfectly exquisite little dancer Bertie's
discovered down there. She comes on at half past nine, so we've got to
fly. Want to come?"
"No," Rodney said. "I came over to see Jim. Is he at home?"
The maid was holding out the coat for Eleanor's arms, Bertie was fussing
around ineffectually, hooking his stick over his left arm to give him a
free right hand to do something with, he didn't quite know what. But
Eleanor, at Rodney's question, just stood for a second quite still. She
wasn't looking at anybody, but the expression in her eyes was sullen.
"Yes, he's at home," she said at last.
"Busy, I suppose;" said Rodney. Her inflection had dictated this reply.
"Yes, he's busy," she repeated absently and in a tone still more coldly
hostile, though Rodney perceived that the hostility was not meant for
him. And so plainly did the tone and the look and the arrested attitude