The Real Adventure
followed it, but Alice doubted if he'd really seen her at all. And when
a man didn't see Alice--this was a line of reasoning she was quite
candidly capable of--it meant an intensity of preoccupation that one
might call monstrous--portentous, anyway.
Rose asked him if he minded the Brevoort, which was near by and airy, on
a warm spring day like this, and he assented to it with enthusiasm. He
hadn't been there in years, he said. She wished, a little later, that
she had thought twice and had taken him somewhere else, where she wasn't
quite so obviously well acquainted. The cordial salutation of the head
waiter, the number of people who nodded at her from this table or that,
might well have been dispensed with on an occasion like this. And the
climax was when the table waiter, well accustomed to having her bring
guests of either sex to lunch with her, and on confidential terms with
her gustatory preferences, handed her a menu--as a matter of form--told
her what he thought she'd like to-day, and, getting out his pencil and
his card, prepared to write it down. She saw Rodney looking pretty
blank, so she checked the waiter and said:
"I think I _did_ ask you to lunch with me, but if you'd rather I lunched
with you ... You can have it whichever way you like."
He hesitated just an instant; then said he'd like to lunch with her. And
somehow their eyes met over that in a way that, once more, made Rose
hold her breath. But the lightning didn't strike that time.
Even so, their hour wasn't wasted on the polite topics of custom-made
conversation, as, for a while, she had feared it would be; because he
asked her, presently--and she could see he really wanted to know--how
she had got started in this costuming business. It was evidently a thing
she had a genius for, but how had she found it out, and how had she
worked out that technique which, even to the eyes of his ignorance, was
clearly extraordinary?
And Rose, beginning a little timidly, because she knew there were rocks
ahead for him, told him the tale that had its beginning in Lessing's
store; the story of Mrs. Goldsmith and her bad taste, of the Poiret
model that had suggested her great idea, of the offer she had made
Galbraith, the way she had bought her dressmaker's form and her bolts of
paper-cambric out of the Christmas rush, and had cut out her patterns in
the dead of nights after rehearsals, up in her little room on Clark
Street. She told him of the wild rush with which the costumes themselves
got made down under the stage at the Globe; of Galbraith's enthusiasm,
of the bargain she'd driven with Goldsmith and Block--the unwittingly
good bargain that had left her a profit of over two hundred dollars. She
told him how Goldsmith and Block had driven a good bargain of their own,
hiring her at her chorus-girl's salary for the last two delirious weeks;
how insanely hard she'd worked, and how, at last, after the opening
performance, Galbraith had offered her a job in New York when he should
be ready for her.
Somehow, while she told it, though it was only occasionally that she
glanced up at him--somehow, as she told it, she seemed to be hearing it
with his ears--to be thinking, actually, the very thoughts that were
going through his mind.
The central cord of it all, that everything else depended from, was, she
knew, the reflection that this triumphant narrative he was listening to
now, had been waiting on her lips to be told to him that night in the
room on Clark Street, and that the smoking smoldering fires of his
outraged pride and masculine sense of possession, had made the telling
impossible--had made everything impossible but that dull outcry of hers
that it had ended--like this.
But he never winced. Indeed, now and then when she tried to run ahead in
a way to elide this incident or that, he asked questions that brought
out all the details, and at the end he said with undisguised gravity,
but quite steadily:
"So after the play opened you were just waiting for Galbraith to send
for you. Why--why did you go on the road, instead of to New York?"
"He hadn't sent for me yet, and I'd made up my mind, by that time, that
he meant not to. And I was too tired just then to come down here and try
for anything else. I went on the road for a sort of rest-cure."
He sat for a good while after that in a reflective silence. And, at the
end of it, deliberately introduced a new and entirely harmless topic of
conversation. She knew why he did that. She understood now that there
was more on his program than his manner last night had indicated. That
had been a preliminary, but the past wasn't to be ignored forever. A
time was coming when the issue between them should be brought up and
settled. But the time was not now, nor the place this crowded
restaurant.
She was perfectly docile to his new conversational lead, but the fact
that she yielded, that she knew it would be beyond her powers to force
that issue until he was ready for it, thrilled her--brought the blood
into her cheeks. The thing he was doing might be absurd, but his way of
doing it was not absurd. He had changed, somehow, or something had
changed between them. She engaged all his powers. If there should be a
struggle now, his mind would not betray him.
Just before they left the restaurant he asked her if she would dine with
him some night and go to a show afterward, and when she said she would
he asked what night would be convenient to her.
Her inflection was perfectly demure and even casual, but nothing could
keep the sudden "richening" that Jimmy Wallace had tried to describe out
of her voice, and the light of mischief danced openly in her eyes when
she said:
"Why, to-night's all right for me." She added, "If that's not too soon
for you."
He flushed and dropped his hands from the edge of the table where they'd
been resting, but he answered evenly enough:
"No, it's not too soon for me."
And then force of habit betrayed Rose into a stupid blunder that almost
precipitated a small quarrel.
"Tell me what you'd like to see," she said, "and I'll telephone for the
seats."
Then, at his horrified stare, she gasped out an explanation. "Roddy, I
didn't mean _buy_ the seats! I don't have to buy seats at any theater.
And at this time of year they're so glad to have somebody to give them
to that it seems sort of--wicked to pay real money."
"It's my mistake," he said. "Naturally, going to the theater wouldn't be
much of a--treat to you. I'd forgotten that."
"Going with _you_ would be a treat to me," she said earnestly. "That's
why I didn't think about the other part of it. But I needn't have been
so stupid as that. Will you forget I said it, please?"
He smiled now at himself, the first smile of genuine amusement she had
seen on his lips for--how long?
"And I needn't have been quite so horrified," he admitted. "All the
same, I hope I may manage to hit on a restaurant up-town somewhere,
where the waiter won't hand you the check."
It was on this note that he parted from her at Dane & Company's doorway.
But the ice didn't melt so fast as she had expected it would, and she
went to bed that night, after he'd brought her home in a taxi and,
having told the chauffeur to wait, formally escorted her to her
elevator, in a state of mind not quite so serenely happy as that of the
night before. She had held her breath a good many times during the
dinner, and even in the theater, where certain old memories and
associations sprang at them both, as it were, from ambush. But always,
at the breaking point, he managed to summon up unexpected reserves for
resistance, intrenched himself in the manner of his first call.
Rose both smiled and wept over her review of this evening, and was a
long while getting off to sleep. She felt she couldn't stand this state
of things much longer.
But it was not required of her. With the last of the next day's light,
the ice broke up and the floods came.
She had taken him to a studio tea in the upper sixties just off West End
Avenue, the proprietors of the studio being a tousled, bearded, blond
anarchist of a painter and his exceedingly pretty, smart,
frivolous-looking wife--who had more sense than she was willing to let
appear. They had lived in Paris for years, but the fact that he had a
German-sounding name had driven them back to New York. It was through
Gertrude that Rose had got acquainted with them--she having wrung from
Abe Shuman permission for the painter to prowl around back-stage and
make notes for a series of queerly lighted pictures of chorus-girls and
dancers--"Degas--and then some," as his admirers said. Gertrude was at
the tea and two or three others. It wasn't a party.
The two men had instinctively drawn controversial swords almost at sight
of each other and for the hour and a half that they were together the
combat raged mightily, to the unmixed satisfaction of both participants.
The feelings of the bystanders were perhaps more diverse, but Rose, at
least, enjoyed herself thoroughly, not only over seeing her husband's
big, formidable, finely poised mind in action again, but over a change
that had taken place in the nature of some of his ideas. The talk, of
course, ranged everywhere: Socialism, feminism, law and its crimes, art
and the social mind. Gertrude took a hand in it now and then, and it was
something Rodney said to her, in answer to a remark about dependent
wives, that really made Rose sit up.
"Wives aren't dependents," he said, "except as they let their husbands
make them think they are. Or only in very rare cases. Certainly I don't
know of a wife who doesn't render her husband valuable economic services
in exchange for her support. I can hardly imagine one. Of course if they
don't recognize that these services are valuable, they can be made to
feel dependent all right."
Gertrude demurred. She was willing to admit that a wife who took care of
a husband's house, cooked his meals, brought up his children, did him an
economic service and that if she didn't feel that she was earning her
way in the world it was because she had been imposed on. But here in New
York, anyway--she didn't know how it might be out in Chicago--one didn't
have to resort to his imagination to conjure up a wife who rendered none
of these services whatever. "They live, thousands of them, in smart
up-town apartments, don't do a lick of work, choke up Fifth Avenue with
their limousines in the afternoon, dress like birds of paradise, or as
near to it as they can come, dine with their husbands in the
restaurants, go to the first nights, eat lobster Newburg afterward, and
spend the next morning in bed getting over it. Those that can't afford
that kind of life scrape along giving the best imitation of it they know
how. Thousands of them--thousands and thousands. If they aren't
dependents ..."
"They're not, though," said Rodney. "Not a bit of it. They're giving
their husbands an economic service of a peculiarly indispensable sort.
The first requisite for success to the husbands of women who live like
that is the appearance of success. Their status, their front, is the one
thing they can't do without. Well, and it's a curious fact that a man
can't keep up his own front. If he tries to dress extravagantly, wear
diamonds, spend his money on himself, he doesn't look prosperous. He
looks a fool. People won't take him seriously. If he can get a wife
who's ornamental, who has attractive manners, who can convey the
appearance of being expensive without being vulgar, she's of a perfectly
enormous economic advantage to him. She'd only have to quit buying the
sort of clothes he could parade her in, and begin spoiling her looks
with a menial domestic routine, to draw howls of protest from him.
Only, so long as she doesn't call his bluff, she leaves him free