The Real Adventure
So you don't want to take what I've said for anything more than just the
truth about me. And I'm not, thank God, a fair sample."
He stood behind her, miserably helpless to say or do anything to comfort
her. An instinct told him she didn't want his hands on her just then,
and he couldn't unsay the things he had told her any further than he had
already.
Presently she turned back to him, slid her hand inside his arm, and
started down the road with him. "My love-affair brought me a home
and--kids," she said. "There are two of them--twins--a year and a half
old now; and I went off and left them; left him. And all I did it for
was to make myself over, into somebody he could be friends with, instead
of just--as I said then--his mistress. I'd never known a woman then who
was a man's mistress, really, and I didn't see why he should be so angry
over my using the word. I thought it was fair enough. And the day I left
his house I came to you and got a job in the chorus in _The Girl
Up-stairs_. I thought that by earning my own way, building a life that
he didn't--surround, as you say--I could win his friendship. And have
his love besides. I don't suppose you would have believed there could be
such a fool in the world as I was to do that."
He took a while digesting this truly amazing statement of hers, a
half-mile perhaps of steady silent tramping. But at last he said, "No, I
wouldn't call you a fool. I call a fool a person who thinks he can get
something for nothing. You didn't think that. You were willing to pay--a
heavy price it must have been, too--for what you wanted. And I've an
idea, you know, that you never really pay without getting something;
though you don't always get what you expect. You've got something now. A
knowledge of what you can do; of what you are worth; and I don't believe
you'd trade it for what you had the day before you came to me for a
job."
"I don't know," she said raggedly. "Perhaps ..." A sob clutched at her
throat and she did not try to conclude the sentence.
"As to whether you did right or wrong in leaving him," he went on,
"you've got to figure it this way. It isn't fair to say, 'Knowing what I
know now and being what I am now, but in the situation I was in then,
I'd have done differently.' The thing you've got to take into account
is, being what you were then, suppose you hadn't gone? You thought then
that you were just his mistress, not knowing what a real mistress was
like; and you thought that by going away you could make yourself his
friend. You thought that was your great chance. Well, you couldn't have
stayed without feeling that you had thrown away your chance; without
knowing that you'd had your big thing to do and had been afraid to do
it. And that knowledge would have gone a long way toward making you the
thing you thought you were.
"Well, you did your big thing. And a person who's done that has stayed
alive anyway; and he knows that when his next big thing comes along
he'll do that too. I don't pretend that you'll always come out right in
the end if you do the big thing, but I'm pretty sure of this; that you
never come out at all if you refuse it."
His amazement over what she had done increased as he thought about it
and was testified to every now and then by grunts and snorts and little
exclamations, but he made no more articulate comment.
There was a seven-thirty train she thought she ought to take back to
town and as their walk had led in that direction they finished it at the
station, where he waited with her for the train to come in.
"It's been a good day," she said. "I feel as if you'd somehow pulled me
through."
"And I," he said, "feel like a wind-bag. I've talked and talked; smug
comfortable preaching."
"No, it's helped," she insisted. "Or something has. Just having you
there, perhaps. I feel better, anyway."
But after she'd got her last look at him on the platform, when the train
had carried her off, an observer, seeing the way the color faded out of
her face, and the look in the eyes, which, so wide open and so unseeing,
stared straight ahead, would have said that the benefit hadn't lasted
long. There was about her the look of somber terror, just verging on
panic, which you have seen in a child's face when he has been sent
up-stairs to bed alone in the dark.
Fragments of Galbraith's talk came back to her. It was by ceasing to be
her lover and her partner that he had become her friend. Rodney, it
seemed from his letters, was becoming her friend too. Was it because he,
too, had ceased to be her lover? if ever she stood face to face with him
again would she search in vain for that look of hunger--of ages-old
hunger and need--that she'd last seen when they stood face to face in
her little room on Clark Street?
She walked down-town to her apartment from the Pennsylvania station end,
though the natural effect of fatigue was to quicken her pace, and though
she was indubitably tired, she walked slowly; slowly, and still more
slowly. She found she dreaded going back to that apartment of hers and
shutting herself in for the night, alone.
She found two corners of white projecting from under her door. And when
she'd unlocked and opened it she stooped and picked them up, a visiting
card and a folded bit of paper. She turned the card over and gave a
little half-suffocated cry.
It was Rodney's card and on it he'd written, "Sorry to have missed you.
I'll come back at eight."
Her shaking fingers fumbled pitifully over the folds of the note, but
she got it open at last. It was from him too. It read:
"DEAR ROSE:
"This is hard luck. I suppose you're off for a week-end somewhere. I
want very much to see you. When you come back and have leisure for
me, will you call me up? I know how busy you are so I'll wait until
I hear from you.
"RODNEY."
Her heart felt like lead when she'd read it. Dazedly, a little giddily,
she pulled her door shut, went into her room and sat down.
He was in New York! He'd been to see her this afternoon--and left a
card! And the note he'd written after his second visit was what Howard
West might have written, or any other quite casual, slightly over-polite
acquaintance. And it was from Rodney to her!
She couldn't see him if he felt like that; couldn't stand it to see him
if he felt like that! Bitterness, contempt, hatred, anything would be
easier to bear than that. She was to call up his hotel, was she? Well,
she wouldn't!
And then suddenly she spread the note open again and read it once more.
Turned it over and scrutinized the reverse side of the paper, and
uttered a little sobbing laugh. If he'd been as cool, unmoved,
self-possessed, as that note had tried to sound, would he have forgotten
to tell her at what hotel she was to call him up?
Then, with a gasp, she wondered how she _could_ call him up. He'd think
she knew where he was; he'd wait; and after he'd waited a while, in
default of word from her, wouldn't he take her silence for an answer and
go back to Chicago?
She clenched her hands at that and tried to think. Well, the obvious
thing to do seemed to be the only one. She must try one hotel after
another until she found him. After all, there probably weren't more than
a dozen to choose among. It wouldn't be easy looking up numbers with
everything dancing before her eyes like this, but if she took the
likeliest ones first she mightn't have to go very far. And, indeed, at a
third attempt she found him.
When the telephone girl switched her to the information desk, and the
information clerk said, "Mr. Rodney Aldrich? Just a moment," and then;
"Mr. Aldrich is in fifteen naught five," the dry contraction in her
throat made it impossible for her to speak.
But the switchboard girl had evidently been listening in and plugged her
through, because she heard the throb of another ring, a click of a
receiver and then--then Rodney's voice.
She couldn't answer his first "Hello," and he said it again, sharply,
"Hello, what is it?"
And then suddenly her voice came back. A voice that startled her with
its distinctness. "Hello, Rodney," she said; "this is Rose."
There was a perfectly blank silence after that and, then the crisp voice
of an operator somewhere--"Waiting?"
"Yes," she heard Rodney say, "get off the line." And then to her. "I
came to see you this afternoon and again to-night."
"Yes, I know," she said. "I just this minute got in. Can't you come back
again now?"
How in the world, she had wondered, could she manage her voice like
that! From the way it sounded she might have been speaking to Alice
Perosini; and yet her shaking hand could hardly hold the receiver. She
heard him say:
"It's pretty late, isn't it? I don't want to ... You'll be tired
and ..."
"It's not too late for me," she said, "only you might come straight
along before it gets any later."
She managed to wait until she heard him say, "All right," before she
hung up the receiver. Then a big racking sob, not to be denied any
longer, pounced on her and shook her.
CHAPTER IV
COULEUR-DE-ROSE
The fact that the length of time it would take a taxi to bring him down
from his hotel to her apartment was not enough to decide anything in,
plan anything in, was no more than enough, indeed, to give her a chance
to stop crying and wash her face, was a saving factor in the situation.
In the back of her mind, as with a hairpin or two she righted her hair
and decided, glancing down over herself, against attempting to change
even her tumbled blouse or her dusty boots, was an echoing consciousness
of something Galbraith had said that afternoon--"And you know when your
next big thing comes along you will do that too."
Without actually quoting those words to herself, she experienced a
sudden confidence that was almost serene. In a few minutes now, not more
than five, probably--she hoped not more than that--something
incalculable, tremendous, was going to begin happening to her. A thing
whose issue would in all likelihood determine the course of her whole
life. There might be a struggle, a tempest, but she made no effort to
foresee the nature of it. She just relaxed physical and spiritual
muscles and waited. Only she hoped she wouldn't have to wait long.
No--there was the bell.
It was altogether fortunate for Rose that she had attempted no
preparation, because the situation she found herself in when she'd
opened the door for her husband, shaken hands with him, led him into her
sitting-room and asked him to sit down, was one that the wildest cast of
her imagination would never have suggested as a possible one for her and
Rodney. And it lasted--recurred, at least, whenever they were
together--almost unaltered, for two whole days.
It was his manner, she felt sure, that had created it; and yet, so
prompt and automatic had been her response that she couldn't be sure,
not for the first half-hour or so, anyway, that he wasn't attributing it
to her. It wasn't so much the first words he said, when, opening her
door, she saw him standing in the hallway, as it was his attitude; his
rather formal attitude; the way he held his hat; the fact--this was
absurd, of course, but she reconstructed the memory very clearly
afterward--that his clothes were freshly pressed. It was the slightly
anxious, very determined attitude of an estimable and rather shy young
man making his first call on a young lady, on whom he is desperately
desirous of making a favorable impression.
What he said was something not very coherent about being very glad and
its being very good of her, and almost simultaneously she gasped out
that she was glad, and wouldn't he come in. She held out her hand to
him, politely, and he, compensating for an imperceptible hesitation with