The Real Adventure
as of his relation to her as accounted for by the fact that he was "a
man." He'd generalize fast enough about the world at large, but it would
always be hard for him to include her and himself in his
generalizations.
"Well," he said when he'd got his pipe alight, "it's the first question
I asked you after--after I got my eyes open: What are we going to do?"
"I told Alice Perosini," she said, "the day before we left to come up
here, that I'd come back in a month, and that I'd stay until I'd
finished all the work that we were contracted for. I felt I had to do
that. It would have been so beastly unfair not to. You understand, don't
you?"
"Of course," he said. "You couldn't consider anything else. But then
what?"
"Then," she said after a silence, "then, if it's what you want me to do,
Roddy, I'll come back to Chicago--for good."
"Give up your business, you mean?" he asked quickly.
She nodded. "It can't be done out there," she said. "All the big
productions that there's any money in are made in New York. I'll come
back and just be your wife. I'll keep your house and mother the
children, and--what was it you said to Gertrude?--maintain your status,
if you don't think I'm spoiled for that."
That last phrase, though, was said with a smile, which he answered with
one of his own and threw in in parenthesis, "You ought to hear Violet go
on, and Constance." But with an instant return to seriousness, he said:
"I've not asked that, Rose. I wouldn't dream of asking it!"
"I know," she said. "It's a thing I'm glad you let me give--unasked. But
I mean it, Roddy. I've meant it from the first, when I told you you were
all I wanted. There wasn't any string tied to that."
"I know," he said. "But all the same, it wouldn't work, Rose."
"There's a real job there," she persisted, "just in being successfully
the wife of a successful man. I can see that now. I never saw it when it
was my job. Hardly caught a glimpse of it. I didn't even see my bills;
let you pay them down at the office, with all your own work that you had
to do."
"It wasn't me," he said. "It was Miss Beach."
She stared at that and gave a short laugh. "If I'd known that ...!" she
said.
Then she came back to the point.
"It is a real job, and I think I could learn to do it pretty well. And
of course a wife's the only person who can do it properly."
Still he shook his head. But he hadn't, as yet, any reasoned answer to
make, except as before, that it wouldn't work.
"I shouldn't mind the money end of it," she said. "I mean living on
yours. I know I can earn my way, and I know you know it. So that
wouldn't matter. I'd never feel like a beggar again, Roddy."
"I know," he agreed. "But that isn't it. It isn't a question of what
you'd like to be, or are willing to be. It's a question of what you are.
You're something more than just my wife. You've got certain
talents--certain proved capacities. That's as true as that I am
something besides--just your husband. There you are! Try it on the other
way around. Suppose I should offer to give up my practise and come down
here to live with you--be just your husband and, say, your business
manager. You can see that that's preposterous. Or, for that matter, we
could both quit. I've made a devil of a lot of money lately. I've an
income from my investments of from twenty-five to thirty thousand a year
that we could live on, and not do a blessed thing but be husband and
wife to each other. Like the McCreas. But it wouldn't work. You've got
to be what you are, that's the point, and somehow or other, cut your
life to fit. I expect that's one of the things that's been the trouble
with us down here. We've both been trying so damned hard to _be_
something. And that won't work."
"What will work then?" she asked. And this was a question he couldn't
answer.
"We've just got to go ahead," he said at last, "and see what happens.
Perhaps you can work it out so that you can do part of your work at
home. We could move the nursery and give you Florence's old studio. And
then it would do if you only came down here for your two big
seasons--fall and spring."
"That doesn't seem fair to you," she protested. "You deserve a real
wife, Roddy; not somebody dashing in and dashing out."
"I don't deserve anything I can't get," he said. "I'd rather have a part
interest in you than to possess, lock, stock and barrel, any other woman
I can think of."
She came back to him again and settled down in his arms.
"You used to possess me, lock, stock and barrel," she said. "You can do
it again, if you'll say the word, Rodney."
He shook his head. "That's just what I can't do," he told her. "That's
gone and we'll never get it back. And I don't believe I'd have it back
if I could. For one thing, you can't possess without being possessed. I
know that back in those days you're talking about I used to try to fight
you out of my thoughts. Used to stay down late at the office, not
working, just--trying not to think about you. Trying to save out part of
myself from being--saturated with you. It was the fact that I was so
terribly important to you that used to make me feel like that; the fact
of your--dependence--I don't mean for money--on me. I used to think--it
wasn't your lover that thought that; it was the other man--that it
would be a perfectly wonderful relief to me if you could just get some
interest that left me out. And all the while the lover in me was trying
to have all of you there was. It's a hard thing to talk sense about."
"A man told me," Rose said, "--John Galbraith told me, that he couldn't
be a woman's friend and her lover at the same time, any more than a
steel spring could be made soft so that it would bend in your fingers
like copper, and still be a spring. He said that was true of him,
anyway, and he felt sure it was true of nine men out of a dozen. Do you
think it's true? Have we got to decide which we'll be?"
"We can't decide," he said with an impatient laugh. "That's just what
I've been telling you. We've got to take what we can get. We've got to
work out the relation between ourselves that is _our_ relation--the Rose
and Rodney relation. It'll probably be a little different from any
other. There'll be friendship in it, and there'll be love in it. Imagine
our 'deciding' that we wouldn't be lovers! But I guess that what
Galbraith said was true to this extent: that each of those will be more
or less at the expense of the other. It won't spring quite so well, and
it will bend a little."
She was still disposed to rebel at this conclusion. "I don't see why it
has to be that way," she insisted. "Why it can't be a perfect thing
instead of just a compromise. Why being friends and partners shouldn't
make us better lovers, and why being lovers shouldn't make us better
friends."
"Like the doctrine of the Trinity," he murmured. "'Three in one; one in
three. Without confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.' It's
a wonderful idea, certainly."
"Well, then," she demanded, "isn't it what we ought to try for? The very
best there is?"
"That's what they tell us," he admitted. "'Aim high,' they say. I'm not
sure it isn't better sense to aim at something you can hit. Why, look at
us, these last three weeks! We said we were going to have a month of
pure happiness. One hundred per cent. pure. We waked up every morning
telling ourselves we'd got to be happy, and we made ourselves miserable
every night wondering if we'd been happy enough."
"I'm glad you were miserable, too," she said. "I was _so_ ashamed of
myself for being."
After a while he said, "Here's what we've got to build on: Whatever else
it may or may not be, this relation between us is a permanent thing.
We've lived with each other and without each other, and we know which we
want. If we find it has its limitations and drawbacks we needn't worry.
Just go ahead and make the best of it we can. There's no law that
decrees we've got to be happy. When we _are_ happy it'll be so much to
the good. And when we aren't ..."
She gave a contented little laugh and cuddled closer down against him.
"You talk like Solomon in all his solemnity," she said. "But you can't
imagine that we're going to be unhappy. Really."
His answer was that perhaps he couldn't imagine it, but that he knew it,
just the same. "Even an ordinary marriage isn't any too easy; a
marriage, I mean, where it's quite well understood which of the parties
to it shall always submit to the other; and which of them is the
important one who's always to have the right of way. There's generally
something perfectly unescapable that decides that question. But with us
there isn't. So the question who's got to give in will have to be
decided on its merits every time a difference arises."
She burlesqued a look of extreme apprehension. She was deeply and
utterly content with life just then. But he wouldn't be diverted.
"There's another reason," he went on. "I've a notion that the thing
we're after is about the finest thing there is. If that's so, we'll have
to pay for it, in one way or another. But we aren't going to worry about
it. We'll just go ahead--and see what happens."
"Do you remember when you said that before?" asked Rose. "You told me
that marriage was an adventure anyway, and that the only thing to do was
to try it--and see what happened."
He grunted. "The real adventure's just begun," he said.
"Anyhow," she murmured drowsily, "you can talk to me again. Just as if
we weren't married."
* * * * *
And there is just about where they stand to-day--at the beginning, or
hardly past the beginning, of what he spoke of as their real adventure;
they are going forward prepared to make the best of it and see what
happens.
What did happen within two or three days after this last conversation of
theirs that I have chronicled was that Rose went back with Rodney and
the twins to Chicago, stayed there only until Miss French could be
summoned back from her vacation, and then went on to New York to a badly
worried Alice and the now extremely urgent affairs of Dane & Company.
Summer is a slack time for a lawyer, of course, since judges are
gentlemen who like long vacations. So Rodney persuaded Rose to take a
bigger apartment in the same building and to put a card in the mail-box
that would account for him as well as for herself. He came down pretty
often, and always had, it must be owned, a rather hard time of it. The
spectacle of Rose driving along an ungodly number of hours a day while
he idled about doing nothing was one he found it hard to get used to. It
didn't altogether reconcile him to it to have her point out that there
were times when he drove like that. They had two or three good Sundays,
though; one of them out on Long Island with John Galbraith--a meeting
and the beginning of a friendship that Rose had been very keen to bring
about.
Her work ended with a terrific climax in September, just about as his
began, and Rose came back to Chicago, spent a joyous month with the
twins and with the little of Rodney his office could spare of him. Then,
taking the babies and their nurse with her, she went out to California
to see her mother and Portia.
Without any special incentive, just the natural desire of a daughter and
a sister for reunion after so long a parting would have taken her there.
But Rose had a special incentive. She wanted to talk to Portia. They
hadn't had a real talk since that devastating day--ages ago--when,
yielding to an impulse of passionate self-revelation, Portia had
exhibited her great sacrifice and her equally great, though thwarted
desire; had said to Rose, "I am the branch they cut off so that you
could grow. You're living my life as well as yours. The only thing I