The Real Adventure
a kind of clumsy haste, took it and released it almost as hastily. She
showed him where to hang his coat and hat, conducted him into her
sitting-room and invited him to sit down. And there they were.
And he was Rodney, and she was Rose! It was like an absurd dream.
For a while she talked desperately, under the same sort of delirious
conviction one has in dreams that if he desists one moment from some
grotesquely futile form of activity a cosmic disaster will instantly
take place. A moment of silence between them would be, she felt,
something unthinkably terrible. It was not a fear of what might emerge
from such a silence, the sudden rending of veils and the confrontation
of two realities; it was a dread, purely, of the silence itself. But the
feeling did not last very long.
"Won't you smoke?" she asked suddenly; and hurried on when he hesitated,
"I don't do it myself, but most of my friends do, and I keep the
things." From a drawer in her writing-desk she produced a tin box of
cigarettes. "They're your kind--unless you've changed," she commented,
and went over to the mantel shelf for an ash-tray and a match-safe. The
match-safe was empty and she left the room to get a fresh supply from
her kitchenette.
On the inner face of her front door was a big mirror, and in it, as she
came back through the unlighted passage, she saw her husband. He was
sitting just as she'd left him, and as his face was partly turned away
from her, it could not have been from the expression of it that she got
her revelation. But she stopped there in the dark and caught her breath
and leaned back against the wall and squeezed the tears out of her eyes.
Perhaps it was just because he was sitting so still, a thing it was
utterly unlike him to do. The Rodney of her memories was always ranging
about the rooms that confined him. Or the grip of the one hand she could
see upon the chair-arm it rested on may have had something to do with
it. But it was not, really, a consciously deductive process at all; just
a clairvoyant look--_into_ him, and a sudden, complete, utterly
confident understanding.
He had come down here to New York to make another beginning. He meant to
assert no rights, not even in their common memories, he would make no
appeal. But something that he felt he had forfeited he was going to try
to earn back. What was the thing he sought--her friendship, or her love?
She knew! No plea that the inspired rhetoric of passion could be capable
of could have convinced her of his love for her and of his need for her
love as did the divine absurdity of this attempt of his to show her that
she need give him--nothing. She knew. Oh, how she knew!
She stole back into her little kitchen and shut the door and leaned
giddily against it, trying to get her breath to coming steadily again.
At last she straightened up and wiped her eyes. A smile played across
her lips; the smile of deep maternal tenderness. Then she picked up her
box of matches and carried them to him in the sitting-room.
He stayed that first evening a little less than an hour, and when he got
up to go, she made no effort to detain him. The thing had been, as its
unbroken surface could testify, a highly successful first call. Before
she let him go, though, she asked him how long he was going to be in New
York, and on getting a very indeterminate answer that offered a minimum
of "two or three days" and a maximum that could not even be guessed at,
she said:
"I hope you're not going to be too dreadfully busy for us to see a lot
of each other. I wish we might manage it once every day."
That shook him; for a moment, she thought the lightning was going to
strike and stood very still holding her breath, waiting for it.
But he steadied himself, said he could certainly manage that if she
could, and as the elevator came up in response to her ring, said that he
would call her up in the morning at her office.
She puzzled a little during the intermittent processes of undressing,
over why she had let him go like that. She found it easy to name some of
the things that were _not_ the reason. It was not--oh, a thousand times
it was not!--that she wasn't quite sure of him. There was no expressing
the completeness of her certainty that, with a look, a sudden holding
out of the hands to him, the release of one little love-cry from her
lips, a half-articulate, "Come and take me, Roddy! That's all I want!"
she could have shattered, annihilated, that brittle restraint of his;
released the full tempest of his passion; found herself--lost
herself--in his embrace.
Certainly it was no doubt of that that had held her back. And, no more
than doubt, was it pride or modesty. The one thing her whole being was
crying out for was a complete surrender to him.
But the real reason seemed rather absurd, when she tried to state it to
herself. She had felt that it would be a _brutal_ thing to do. Really,
her feeling toward him was that of a mother toward a child who, having,
he thinks, merited her displeasure, offers her, by way of atonement,
some dearly prized possession; an iron fire-engine, a woolly sheep. What
mother wouldn't accept an offering like that gravely!
This thing that Rodney had offered her, the valiant, heart breaking
pretense that she needn't give him anything--to her, whose aching need
was to give him everything she had!--was just as absurd as the child's
toy could have been. But it had cost him.... Oh, what must it not have
cost him in struggle and sacrifice, to construct that pitiful,
transparent pretense!--to maintain that manner! And the struggle and the
sacrifice must not be cheapened, made absurd by a sudden shattering
demonstration that they'd been unnecessary. His pretense must be melted,
not shattered. And until it could be melted, that aching need of hers
must wait.
And then she realized that the ache was gone--the tormenting restless
hunger for him that had been nagging at her ever since the first rush of
spring was somehow appeased. She'd have said, twenty-four hours ago,
that to be with him, have him near her, in any other relation than that
of her lover, would be unendurable. Twenty-four hours ago! She thought
of that as she was winding her watch. It seemed incredible that it was
no longer than that since the saccharine little sob in John McCormack's
voice as he had sung "Just a little love, a li-ttle ki-iss," had driven
her frantic.
She turned out her light and opened her bedroom window. The phonograph
across the court was going again. But now, evidently, its master had
come back from Pittsburgh, for it was singing lustily, "That's why I
wish again that I was in Michigan, back on the farm."
Rose smiled her old wide smile, and cuddled her cheek into the pillow.
She was the happiest person in the world.
When he called her up the next morning, she asked him to come down to
the premises of Dane & Company (it was a loft on lower Fifth Avenue)
about noon and go out to lunch with her, and she made no secret of her
motive in selecting their rendezvous. "I'd like to have you see what our
place is like;" she said, "though it isn't like anything much just now,
between seasons this way. Still you can get an idea."
He said he would be immensely interested to see the place, and from the
cadence of his voice was apparently prepared to let the conversation end
there. But she prolonged it a little.
"Do you hear from--Chicago while you're down here, Roddy?" she asked.
"Whether everything's all right--at home, I mean?"
It was a second or two before he answered, but when he did, his voice
was perfectly steady.
"Yes," he said. "I get a night-letter every morning from Miss French.
(This was Mrs. Ruston's successor.) It's--everything's all right."
"Good-by, then, till noon," she said. And if he could have seen the
smile that was on her lips, and the brightness that was in her eyes as
she said it ...!
It was a part, you see, of his Quixotic determination to make no claims,
that he had not said a word, during his evening call, about the
twins--her babies!
On the stroke of twelve his card was brought to her, and she went out
into their bare little waiting-room to meet him.
"We aren't a regular dressmaking establishment, you see," she said. "The
people we have to impress aren't the ones we make the clothes for. So we
can be as shabby down here as we please, and Alice says--Alice Perosini,
you know--that our shabbiness really does impress them. Shows we don't
care what they think.
"You're sure you've plenty of time to see around in?" she went on. "That
it won't cut into your time for lunch?"
He made it plain that he had plenty of time, and she took him into her
own studio, a big north-lighted room at the back of the building, with
the painter's manikins that Jimmy Wallace had told about, standing about
in it, and some queer-looking electric-light fixtures suggestive of the
stage; a big tin-lined box with half a dozen powerful tungsten lamps in
it, and grooves in the mouth of it for the reception of colored slides.
And a sort of search-light that swung on a pivot. There was a high
cutting-table with a deep indentation in it, in which Rose could stand
with her work all around her. On a shelf in a corner he noticed two or
three little figures twelve inches high or so that he'd have thought of
as dolls had it not been that their small heads gave them the scale of
adults. Rose followed his glance.
"I play with those," she said. "Dress them in all sorts of
things--tissue-paper mostly. It seems easier to catch an idea small in
the tips of my fingers, and then let it grow up. You have to find out
for yourself how you can do things, don't you?"
Then she took him out into the workroom, where there were more
cutting-tables and power-driven sewing-machines.
"'It never rains but it pours,' is the motto of this business," she told
him. "Nobody ever knows what he wants until the very last minute, and
then he wants it the next, and everybody wants it at once. And then this
place is like a madhouse. We simply go out of our heads. It was like
that when Jimmy Wallace was down here. I hadn't a minute for him."
She added deliberately, "I'm glad you didn't come down then," and went
swiftly on to explain to him a sort of pantograph arrangement which
could be set with reference to the measurements of the manikin Rose had
designed the costume upon, and those of the girl who was going to wear
it, so that the pattern for the costume itself, as distinct from Rose's
master-pattern, was cut almost automatically to fit.
"It's not really automatic, of course," she said. "No costume's done
until I have seen it on the girl who's going to wear it. But it does
save time."
Alice Perosini came in just then, and a breath-taking spectacle she'd
have been to most men in the frock she had on. But it was not Rodney who
gasped. It was Alice herself who almost did, when Rose introduced him to
her, without explanations, as Mr. Aldrich and said she was going out to
lunch with him.
"And there's no telling when I'll be back," she added, "so if there's
anything to talk about, you'd better seize the chance and tell me now."
Alice couldn't be blamed if her face was a study. She knew that Aldrich
was the name of Rose's abandoned husband, and it would have been natural
to believe that this highly impressive-looking person, whom Rose so
casually introduced, was he. But the matter-of-fact way in which Rose
was trotting him about the shop, and spoke of carrying him off to lunch,
seemed to make such a conclusion fantastic.
There was nothing casual about the man, though, she reflected
afterward. He'd taken his part, adequately and politely, of course, in
the introduction and the fragmentary word or two of small-talk that had