The Real Adventure
for her. She swallowed one sob, and another, but the next one got away
from her and she broke out in a passionate fit of weeping.
That roused him from his daze a little, and he pulled her down in his
arms--held her tight--comforted her.
When she got herself in hand again, she got up, went away to wash her
face, and coming back in the room again, lighted a reading-lamp and drew
down the blinds.
"Rose," he said presently, "what are we going to do?"
She knew she was not answering the true intent of his question when she
said:
"Well, for one thing we can get a little supper. I don't know what we've
got to eat, but we won't care--to-night."
There was a ring of decision in his voice that startled her a little
when he said:
"No, we won't do that to-night. We'll go out somewhere to a
restaurant."
Their eyes met--unwavering.
"Yes," she said, "that's what we'll do."
They didn't talk much across the table in the deserted little Italian
restaurant they went to. Neither of them afterward could remember
anything they'd said. They ate their meal in a sort of grave contented
happiness that was reaching down deeper and deeper into them every
minute, and they walked back to the gray brick building in Thirteenth
Street, arm in arm, hand in hand, in silence. But when she stopped
there, he said:
"Let's walk a little farther, Rose. There are things we've got to
decide, and--and I'm not going in with you again to-night."
She caught her breath at that, and her hand tightened its hold on his.
But she walked on with him.
He said, presently, "You understand, don't you?"
She answered, "Oh, my dear!--yes." But she added, a little shakily, "I
wish we had a magic-carpet right here, that we could fly home on."
Then they walked a while in silence.
At last he said: "There's this we can do. I can go back to my hotel
to-night, and tell them that I'm expecting you--that I'm expecting my
wife to join me there. To-morrow? And then I can come and get you and
bring you there. It's not home, and it's not the place I'd choose
for--for a honeymoon, but ..."
The way she echoed the word set him thinking. But before his thoughts
had got to their destination she said:
"Shall we make it a real honeymoon, Roddy--make it as complete as we
can? Forget everything and let all the world be ..."
He supplied a word for her, "Rose-color?"
She accepted it with a caressing little laugh, "... for a while?"
"That's what I was fumbling for," he said, "but I can't think very
straight to-night. I've got it now, though. That cottage we had--before
the twins were born--down on the Cape. There won't be a soul there this
time of the year. We'd have the world to ourselves."
"Yes," she said, "for a little while, we'd want it like that. But after
a while--after a day or two, could we have the babies? Could the nurse
bring them on to me and then go straight back, so that I could have
them--and you, altogether?"
He said, "You darling!" But he couldn't manage more than that.
A little later he suggested that they could get the place by telegraph
and could set out for it to-morrow.
She laughed and asked, "Will you let me be as silly as I like for once?
Will you give me a week--well, till Saturday; that would do--to get
ready in?"
"Get ready?" he echoed.
"Clothes and thinks," she said. "A--trousseau, don't you see? I've been
so busy making clothes for other people that I've got just about nothing
myself. And I'd like ... But I don't really care, Roddy. I'll go with
you to-morrow, 'as is,' if you want me to."
"No," he said. "We'll do it the other way."
And then he took her back to the gray brick entrance and, just out of
range of the elevator man, kissed her good night.
"But will you telephone to me as soon as you wake up in the morning, so
that I'll know it's true?"
She nodded. Then her eyes went wide and she clung to him.
"_Is_ it true, Roddy? Is it possible for a thing to come back like that?
Are we really the old Rodney and Rose, planning our honeymoon again? It
wasn't quite three years ago. Three years next month. Will it be like
that?"
"Not like that, perhaps," he said, "exactly. It will be better by all
we've learned and suffered since."
CHAPTER V
THE BEGINNING
There was a sense in which this prediction of Rodney's about their
honeymoon was altogether true, They had great hours--hours of an
emotional intensity greater than any they had known during that former
honeymoon, greater by all they had learned and suffered since--hours
that repaid all that suffering, and could not have been captured at any
smaller price. There were hours when the whole of their two selves
literally seemed transfused into one essence; when there was nothing of
either of them that was not the other; when all their thoughts,
impulses, desires, flowered spontaneously out of a common mind. There
was no precalculating these experiences. They came upon them, seized
them, carried them off.
One of these, that neither of them will ever forget, came at the end of
a long tramp through the dawn of their second day. They had been
swinging along in almost unbroken silence through the gray mist, had
mounted a little hillock and halted, hand in hand, as the first lance of
sunlight transfixed and flushed the still vaporous air, and it had
seemed to them, as they watched, breathless, while the sun mounted, that
the whole of the life that lay before them was a track of gold like that
which blazed across the sea, leading to an intolerable glory.
And there were other hours of equally memorable transfiguration, which
their surroundings had nothing whatever to do with--hours lighted only
by the flame that flared up from their two selves.
But life, of course, can not be made up of hours like that. No sane
person can even want to live in a perpetual ecstasy. What makes a
mountain peak is the fall away into the surrounding valleys.
In their valleys of commonplace, every-day existence--and these
occurred even in their first days together--they were stiff, shy,
self-conscious with each other. And their attempt to ignore this fact
only made the self-consciousness the worse. It troubled and bewildered
both of them.
Rose's misgiving had been justified. They weren't the old Rodney and
Rose. Those two splendid careless savages, who had lived for a fortnight
on an island in the midst of Martin Whitney's carefully preserved
solitude in Northern Wisconsin, accepting the gifts of the gods with
such joyous confidence that none of them could ever turn bitter, those
two zestful children, had ceased to exist.
John Galbraith had spoken truth when he said there was no such thing as
a fresh start. For good or evil, you were the product of your
yesterdays. The nightmare tour on the road with _The Girl Up-stairs_
company was a part of Rose; the day in Centropolis, the night when
Galbraith had made love to her. The hour in the University Club, when
Rodney's heart had first shrunk from an unacknowledged fear; the days
and weeks of humiliation and distress that had succeeded it, were a part
of him--an ineffaceable part.
So it was natural enough--though not, therefore, the less
distressing--that Rose should note, with wonder, a tendency in him to
revert to the manner which had characterized his first call on her in
New York; a tendency to be--of all things--polite. He didn't swear any
more, nor contradict. He chose his words, got up when she did, picked up
things she dropped. And when she was quite sure she was safe from
discovery, she sometimes wept forlornly, for the rough, outrageous,
absent-minded, imperious lover of the old days.
She did not know that she was different too--as remote from the girl she
had been during the first six months of their marriage--the girl who,
"all eyes," had held her breath while Doctor Randolph told her things;
the girl who had smiled over Bertie Willis' love-making, because she
didn't know that such things happened except in books--as he was from
the old Rodney. Even Violet had seen, in the glimpse she'd caught across
two taxicabs, that her smile was somehow different, and James Randolph
had come back from his tea with her in the Knickerbocker, saying that
she was a thousand years old.
So it was not wonderful that Rodney should have found a new mystery in
her; nor that, seeing in her look, sometimes--especially when it was not
meeting his own--the reflections of a thousand experiences he had not
shared with her, he should have felt that she was a long way off. And
his heart ached for the old Rose, whom he had so completely
"surrounded"--the Rose who had consulted him about the menus for her
dinners, who had brought him all her little troubles; who had
tried--bless her!--to study law, and had stolen into court to hear his
argument, so that she could talk with him. Whatever the future might
have for him, it would never bring that Rose back.
The arrival of the twins, in the convoy of a badly flustered--and, to
tell the truth, a somewhat scandalized--Miss French, simplified the
situation a little--by complicating it! They absolutely enforced a
routine. They had needs that must be met on the minute. And they gave
Rose and Rodney so many occupations that the contemplation of their
complicated states of mind was much abridged.
But even her babies brought Rose a disappointment along with them. From
the time of the receipt of Miss French's telegram acknowledging Rodney's
and telling them what train she and the twins would take, Rose had been
telling off the hours in mounting excitement. The two utterly adorable
little creatures, as the pictures of them in Rodney's pocketbook showed
them to be, who were, miraculously--incredibly--hers, were coming to
bring motherhood to her; a long-deferred payment for the labor and the
agony with which she had borne them; the realization of half-forgotten
hopes that had, during the period of her pregnancy, been the mainstay of
her life. There was now no Mrs. Ruston, no Harriet, no plausible
physician to keep them away from her. Rose had a smile of tender pity
for the memory of the girl who had struggled so ineffectually and yet
with such heart-breaking earnestness to break the filaments of the web
they'd spun around her.
No, it wouldn't be like that now. Rodney had agreed explicitly that
Miss French was to be allowed to stay only as long as Rose wanted her;
only for the few days--or hours--she would need for making herself
mistress of their regime. Then the nurse was to be sent away on a
vacation and Rose should have her children to herself.
She didn't go to Boston with Rodney to meet them; nor even to the
station; stayed in the cottage, ostensibly to see to it, up to the very
last minute, that the fires were right (June had come in cold and rainy)
and in general to be ready on the moment to produce anything that their
rather unforeseeable needs might call for. Her real reason was a
shrinking from having her first meeting with them in the confusion of
arrival on a station platform, under the eyes of the world, amid the
distractions of things like luggage.
Rodney understood this well enough, and arriving at the cottage, he
clambered out of the wagon with them and carried them both straight in
to Rose, leaving the nurse and the bewildering paraphernalia of travel
for a second trip.
Rose, in the passionate surge of gratified desire that came with the
sight of them, caught them from him, crushed them up tight against her
breast--and frightened them half to death. So that without
dissimulation, they howled and brought Miss French flying to the rescue.
Rose didn't make a tragedy of it; managed a smile at herself, though she
suspected she'd cry when she got the chance, and subjected her ideas to
an instantaneous revision. They were--_persons_, those two funnily