The Real Adventure
to think that he's doing it all for her and that except for her
extravagance--extravagance, mind you, that nine times out of ten he's
absolutely rammed down her throat--he'd be as rich, really, as he has to
try to pretend he is. He tells her so, with perfect sincerity--and she
believes it." Rose enjoyed the look in Gertrude's face as she listened
to that.
It was half past six or thereabout when they left the studio, and the
late May afternoon was at its loveliest. It was the sort of day, as
Rodney said, that convicted you, the minute you came out of it, of
abysmal folly in having wasted any of it indoors.
"I want to walk," said Rose, "after that tea, if I'm ever to want any
dinner."
He nodded a little absently, she thought, and fell in step beside her.
There was no mention at any time, of their destination.
It was a good while before Rose got the key to his preoccupation. They
had turned into the park at Sixty-sixth Street, and were half-way over
to the Fifth Avenue corner at Fifty-ninth, before he spoke out.
"On a day like this," he said, "to have sat there for two or three
mortal hours arguing about stale ideas! Threshing over the straw--almost
as silly an occupation as chess--when we might have been out here, being
alive! But it must have seemed natural to you to hear me going on like
that." And then with a burst, before she could speak:
"You must remember me as the most blindly opinionated fool in the
world!"
She caught her breath, then said very quietly, with a warm little laugh
in her voice, "That's not how I remember you, Rodney."
She declined to help him when he tried to scramble back to the safe
shores of conventional conversation. That sort of thing had lasted long
enough. She just walked along in step with him and, for her part, in
silence. It wasn't long before he fell silent too.
A thing that Rose hadn't counted on was the effect produced on both of
them just by walking along like this together, side by side, in step.
Just the rhythm of it established a sort of communion--and it was a
communion fortified by many associations. Practically the whole of their
courtship, from the day when he dropped off the street-car with her in
the rain and walked her over to the elevated and kept her note-books,
down to the day on the bridge over the Drainage Canal in the swirl of
that March blizzard, when she'd felt his first embrace, had been on foot
like this, tramping along side by side; miles and miles and miles, as
she'd told her mother. And there had been other walks since. Do you
remember the last time they had walked together? It was from the stage
door of the Globe theater to her little room on North Clark Street. Rose
remembered it and she felt sure that he did. The same singing wire of
memories and associations that had vibrated between them then was
vibrating between them now and drawing up palpably tighter with every
half-mile they walked. Their pace quickened a little.
Straight down Fifth Avenue they walked to the corner of Thirteenth
Street, and then west. And when they stopped and faced each other in the
entrance to the gray brick building where Rose's apartment was, it was
at the end of a mile or more of absolutely unbroken silence. And facing
each other there, all that was said between them was her:
"You'll come in, won't you?" and his, "Yes."
But the gravity with which she'd uttered the invitation and the
tenseness of his acceptance of it, the square look that passed between
them, marked an end of something and the beginning of something new.
She left him in her sitting-room while she went through into her bedroom
to take off her hat and jacket and take a glance into her mirror. When
she came back, she found him standing at her window looking out. He
didn't turn when she came in, but almost immediately he began speaking.
She went rather limp at the sound of his voice and dropped down on a
cushioned ottoman in front of the fireplace, and squeezed her hands
together between her knees.
"I don't know how much you will have understood," he began, "probably a
good deal. You told me in Dubuque--as you were quite right to tell
me--that I mustn't come back to you. And now I've disobeyed you and
come. What I hope you will have guessed is that I wouldn't have come
except that I'd something to tell you--something different from
the--idiocies I tormented you with in Dubuque;--something I felt you
were entitled to be told. But I felt--this is what you won't have
understood--I felt that I hadn't any right to speak to you at all, about
anything vital, about anything that concerned us, until I'd given you
some sort of guarantee--until I'd shown you that I was a person it was
possible to deal reasonably with."
She smiled, then pressed her hands suddenly to her eyes.
"I understood," she said.
"Well, then ..." But he didn't at once go on. Stood there a while longer
at the window, then crossed the room and brought up before her
book-shelves, staring blindly at the titles. He hadn't looked at her
even as he crossed the room.
"Oh, it's a presumptuous thing to try to say," he broke out at last, "a
pitifully unnecessary thing to say, because you must know it without my
telling you. But when you went away you said--you said it was because
you hadn't--my--friendship! You said that was the thing you wanted and
that you were going to try to earn it. And in Dubuque you told me that
I'd evidently never be able to understand that you could have been happy
in that room on Clark Street, that I'd wanted to 'rescue' you from; that
I'd never be able to see that the thing you were doing there was a fine
thing, worth doing, entitled to my respect. Well, the things I'd been
saying to you and the things I'd been doing, justified you in thinking
that. But what I've come down here to say is--is that now--at last--I do
see it."
She would have spoken then if she could have commanded her voice, and as
it was, the sound she made conveyed her intention to him, for he turned
on her quickly as if to interrupt the unspoken words, and went on with
an almost savage bitterness.
"Oh, I'm under no illusions about it. I had my chance to see, when
seeing would have meant something to you--helped you. When any one but
the blindest sort of fool would have seen. I didn't. Now, when the thing
is patent for the world to see--now that Violet Williamson has seen it
and Constance, and God knows who of the rest of them, who were so
tactful and sympathetic about my 'disgrace'--now that you've won your
fight without any help from me ... Without any help! In spite of every
hindrance that my idiocy could put in your way! Now, after all--I come
and tell you that you've earned the thing you've set out to get."
There was a little silence after that. She got up and took the post he
had abandoned at the window.
"Why did you do it, Roddy?" she asked. "I mean, why did you want to come
and tell me?"
"Why, in the first place," he said, "I wanted to get back a little of my
self-respect. I couldn't get that until I'd told you."
This time the silence was longer.
"What else did you want?" she asked. "What--in the second place?"
"I don't know why I put it like that," he said. "Please don't think ...
I can't bear to have you think that I came down here to--ask anything of
you--anything in the way of a reward for having seen what is so plain to
every one. I haven't any--claim at all. I want to earn your friendship.
It's the biggest thing I've got to hope for. But I've no idea that you
can hand it out to me ready-made. I believe you'd do it if you could.
But you said once, yourself, that it wasn't a thing that could be given.
It was a thing that had to be earned. And you were right about that, as
you were about so many other things. Well, I'm going to try to earn it."
"Is that--all you want?" she asked, and then hearing the little gasp he
gave, she swung round quickly and looked at him. It was pretty dark in
the room, but his face in the dusk seemed to have whitened.
"Is friendship all you want of me, Roddy?" she asked again.
She stood there waiting, a full minute, in silence. Then she said, "You
don't have to tell me that. Because I know. Oh--oh, my dear, how well I
know!"
He didn't come to her; just stood there, gripping the corner of her
bookcase and staring at her silhouette, which was about all he could see
of her against the window. At last he said, in a strained dry voice
she'd hardly have known for his:
"If you know that--if I've let you see that, then I've done just
about the last despicable thing there was left for me to do. I've
come down here and--made you feel sorry for me. So that with
that--divine--kindliness of yours, you're willing to give
me--everything."
He straightened up and came a step nearer. "Well, I won't have it, I
tell you! I don't know how you guessed. If I'd dreamed I was betraying
that to you ...! Don't I know--it's burnt into me so that I'll never
forget--what the memory of my love must be to you--the memory of the
hideous things it's done to you. And now, after all that--after you've
won your fight--alone--and stand where you stand now--for me to come
begging! And take a gift like that! I tell you it _is_ pity. It can't be
anything else."
There was another minute of silence, and then he heard her make a little
noise in her throat, a noise that would have been a sob had there not
been something like a laugh in it. The next moment she said, "Come over
here, Roddy," and as he hesitated, as if he hadn't understood, she
added, "I want you to look at me. Over here by the window, where there's
light enough to see me by."
He came wonderingly, very slowly, but at last, with her outstretched
hand she reached him and drew him around between her and the window.
"Look into my face," she commanded. "Look into my eyes; as far in as you
can. Is it--oh, my dearest"--the sob of pure joy came again--"is it pity
that you see?"
She'd had her hands upon his shoulders, but now they clasped themselves
behind his head. Her vision of him had swum away in a blur, and without
the support she got from him she'd have been swaying giddily.
"Roddy, old man," she said, "if I hadn't seen--in the first--ten
minutes, the thing you--meant so hard I shouldn't see--I think it would
have--killed me. If I hadn't seen that you loved me--after all; after
everything. After all the tortures you'd suffered, through me. Because
that's all I want--in the world."
At that he put his arms around her and pulled her up to him. But the
manner of it was so different from his old embraces that presently she
drew him around so that what little light there was fell on his face,
and searched it thoughtfully.
"You _do_ believe me, Roddy, don't you--that there isn't any pity about
it? There isn't any room for pity. There's nothing in me at all but just
a great big--want of you. Don't you understand that?"
He did understand it with his mind, but he was a little dazed, like
one who has stood too near where the lightning struck. The hope
he had kept buried alive so long--buried alive because it wouldn't
die--could not be brought out into a blinding glory like this without
shrinking--pain--exquisite terrifying pain.
The knowledge she had acquired by her own suffering stood her in good
stead now. She did not mistake, as the Rose he had married might have
done, the weakness of his response for coldness--indifference.
She went back and began making love to him more gently; released herself
from his arms, led him over to her one big chair, and made him sit down
in it, settled herself upon the arm of it and contented herself with one
of his hands. Presently he took one of hers, bent his face down over it
and brushed the back of it with his lips.
The timidity of that caress, with all it revealed to her, was too much