The Real Adventure
"Understanding's better than ignorance," he interrupted, "any time.
Between people of sense, that is. We'd get on better together, not
worse. Look at us now. We're talking together sensibly enough, aren't
we? And we're here in your sitting-room, talking about the fact that I
fell in love with you. Couldn't we talk just as sensibly in the theater,
about whether a song or number was in the right place or not? Of course
we could."
The truth of this argument rather stumped Rose. It didn't seem
reasonable, but it was true. Instead of embarrassing and distressing
her, this talk with Galbraith was doing her good, restoring her
confidence. The air between them was easier to breathe than it had been
for weeks.
"You seem different this morning, somehow," she said.
"Why," he told her, "I am different. Permanently different toward you. I
am convinced of it. I don't pretend to understand it myself, but
somehow--I'm relieved. For one thing, I never wanted to fall in love
with you. It was quite against my will that I did it. And then I've
always been tortured with curiosity about you. I've wondered. Were you
as unconscious of me as you seemed? Was it possible that you didn't
know. And if you did know, was it possible that you were--waiting? That
it only needed a word of mine to put everything between us on a
different basis? I couldn't get rid of that idea. It kept nagging at me.
But after what you told me last night--and you certainly told it
straight--that idea's exploded. What you said explains everything about
you. I know now that I haven't a chance in the world. From now on, I
imagine, I'll be able to treat you like a human being. Well, are you
willing to try it?"
Up to now they'd been sitting quietly in their two chairs with most of
the width of the room between them. But at this last question of his she
got up and walked over to the window.
"I don't know," she said at last. "It seems dangerous, somehow; like
courting trouble. I know ..." She hesitated, but then decided to say
what was in her mind. "I know how terribly strong those feelings are and
I've found out how little they've got to do with what it's so easy to
decide is reasonable." Now she turned and faced him.
"Don't you think it would be more sensible for me to find another job?
So that we could--well, take a fresh start?"
"Child," he said, "don't you know there's no such thing in the world as
a fresh start? Or a new leaf? That's a comfortable delusion for cowards.
The situation's in a mess, is it? All right, run away. Begin again with
a clean slate. But the first thing written down on that slate is that
you've just run away. Besides, suppose you do get another job, working,
say, for another director. How do you know that he won't fall in love
with you?"
That last sentence went by unheard. She was staring at him, almost in
consternation. "That's true," she said. "That's perfectly true. That
about running away. I--I never thought of it before." She went back to
her chair and dropped into it rather limply. She sat there through a
long silence, still thinking over his words and apparently almost
frightened over her own implications from them.
At last he said, "You've no cause for worry over that, I should think. I
don't believe you've ever run away from anything yet."
"I don't know," she answered thoughtfully. "I don't know whether I did
or not."
"Well," he came out at last, getting to his feet, "how about it? What
shall we do this time? Shall we tackle the situation and try to make the
best of it, or ..."
"Yes, that's what we'll do," she said. "And, well, I'm much obliged to
you for putting me right."
"I made all the trouble in the first place," said Galbraith, with a
rueful sort of grin. "It was up to me to think of something."
And after the elevator she'd escorted him to had carried him down, she
stood there in the hallway smiling, with the glow of a quite new
friendliness for him warming her heart.
It was natural, of course, that the relation between them after that day
should not prove quite so simple and manageable a thing as it had looked
that morning. There were breathless days when the storm visibly hung in
the sky; there were strained, stiff, self-conscious moments of rigidly
enforced politeness. Things got said despite his resolute repression
that had, as resolutely, to be ignored.
But in the intervals of these failures there emerged, and endured
unbroken for longer periods, the new thing they sought--genuine
friendliness, partnership.
It was just after Christmas that Abe Shuman took her away from him and
put her to work exclusively on costumes. And the swift sequence of
events within a month thereafter launched her in an independent
business; the new partnership with Alice Perosini, with the details of
which, through Jimmy Wallace, you are already sufficiently acquainted.
By the time that happened the friendship had gone so far that Rose's
chief reluctance in making the change sprang from a fear that the change
would interrupt it.
But the thing worked the other way. Released from the compulsory
relation of employer and employee, they frankly sought each other as
friends, and found that they got more out of a half-hour together over a
hasty lunch than a whole day's struggle over a common task had given
them.
There were long stretches of days, of course, when they saw nothing of
each other, and Rose, so long as she had plenty to do, was never
conscious of missing him. She never, in the course of her own day's
work, made an unconscious reference to him, as she was always making
them to Rodney. But the prospect of an empty Sunday morning, for
instance, was always enormously brightened if he called up to say that
it was empty for him, too, and shouldn't they go for a walk or a ferry
ride somewhere.
He did the greater part of the talking. Told her, a good deal to his own
surprise, stories of his early life in London--a chapter he'd never
been willing to refer to, except in the vaguest terms, to anybody else.
He told her, too, with more and more freedom and explicitness, as he
discovered how straight and honest her mind was, how eager it was for
facts instead of for sentimental refractions of them, about certain
emotional adventures of his as he was emerging into manhood, and of the
marks they had left on him.
All told, she learned more about men, as such, from him than ever she
had learned, consciously at least, from Rodney. She'd never been able to
regard her husband as a specimen. He was Rodney, _sui generis_, and it
had never occurred to her either to generalize from him to other men, or
to explain any of the facts she had noted about him, on the mere ground
of his masculinity. She began doing that now a little, and the exercise
opened her eyes.
In many ways Galbraith and her husband were a good deal alike. Both were
rough, direct, a little remorseless, and there was in both of them,
right alongside the best and finest and clearest things they had, an
unaccountable vein of childishness. She'd never been willing to call it
by that name in Rodney. But when she saw it in Galbraith, too, she
wondered. Was that just the man of it? Were they all like that; at least
all the best of them? Did a man, as long as he lived, need somebody in
the role of--mother? The thought all but suffocated her.
She did not return Galbraith's confidences with any detailed account of
her own life, and the one great emotional experience of it that seemed
to have absorbed all the rest and drawn it up into itself. But she had a
comforting sense that, scanty as was the framework of facts he had to go
on, he knew, somehow, all about it; all the essentials of it; knew
infinitely more about her than Alice Perosini did, although from time to
time she had told Alice a good deal.
Spring came on them with a rush that year; swept a vivid flush of green
over the parks and squares, all in a day; pumped the sap up madly into
the little buds, so that they could hardly swell fast enough, and burst
at last into a perfectly riotous fanfare through the shrubberies. It
pumped blood, too, as well as sap, and made hearts flutter to strange
irregular rhythms with the languorous insolence of its perfumes, and the
soft caressing pressures of its south wind.
It worried Rose nearly mad. She was bound to have gone slack anyway; to
have experienced the well-earned, honest lassitude of a finished
struggle and an achieved victory. Dane & Company had any amount of work
in sight, to be sure--a success of such triumphant proportions as they
had had with _Come On In_, made that inevitable--but it would be months
before any of the new work was wanted.
Alice, who could see plainly enough that something was the matter, kept
urging Rose to run away somewhere for a long vacation. Why not, if it
came to that, put in a few weeks in London and Paris? She was almost
sure to pick up some valuable ideas over there. Rose declined that
suggestion almost sharply. If she'd had any practical training as a
nurse, she'd go over to Paris and stay, but to use that magnificently
courageous tragic city as a source of ideas for a Shuman _revue_ was out
of the question. As for the quiet place in the Virginia mountains,
which Alice had suggested as an alternative, Rose would die of ennui
there within three days. The only thing to do was to stick to her
routine as well as she could, and worry along.
These weren't reasons that she gave Alice, they were excuses. The
reason, which she tried to avoid stating, even to herself, was that she
couldn't bear the thought of going one step farther away from Rodney
than she was already.
A letter from him was always in the first Saturday morning delivery and
she never left for her atelier till she got it. She had perceived, what
he had not, the steadily growing friendliness of these letters. It
wasn't a made-up thing, either. He was not telling her things because he
thought she'd like to be told, but because it had insensibly become a
need of his to tell her.
A year ago those letters would have made her wildly happy; would have
filled her with the confidence that the end she sought was in sight at
last. Now they drove her half mad with disappointment. She never opened
one of those dearly familiar envelopes without the irrepressible hope
that it contained a love-letter; a passionate demand that she come back
to him; leave all she had and come back to him; his woman to her man.
And her disappointment and inconsistency bewildered her.
Her two chance encounters, first with Jimmy Wallace in the theater, and
later with James Randolph, made her restlessness more nearly
unendurable. The thought that they were going back to Chicago and would,
no doubt, within a few days after their talks with her, see and talk
with him, was like the cup of Tantalus. And if she could encounter them
by chance, like that, why mightn't she encounter him? Why mightn't he
come to New York on business? She never walked anywhere, nowadays,
without watching for him.
She didn't yield, passively, to these thoughts and feelings. She fought
them relentlessly, methodically. She went to a women's gymnasium every
evening, threw a medicine ball around for a while, and then played a
hard game of squash, in the sometimes successful attempt to get tired
enough so that she'd have to sleep. Also she tried riding in the park,
mornings, but that didn't work so well, and she gave it up.
There came a Saturday morning, toward the end of May, which brought no
letter from Rodney, and she stayed in all day, from one delivery to the
next, waiting for it. She tried to disguise her excitement over its
failure to arrive, as a fear lest something might have gone wrong with
him or with the twins, but did not succeed. If anything had gone wrong