A \ B \ C \ D \ E \ F \ G \ H \ I \ J \ K \ L \ M \ N \ O \ P \ R \ S \ T \ U \ V \ W \Z

The Real Adventure by Henry Kitchell Webster

H >> Henry Kitchell Webster >> The Real Adventure




The vision passed. The wind was colder to-night than that March
blizzard had been, and the dry groan of a passing electric car came
mingled with the whine of it. Muffled pedestrians, bent doggedly down
against it, jostled them as they went by.

He steadied her with a hand upon her shoulder, slipped round to the
windward side, and linked his arm within hers. But it was a moment
before they started on again. Their hands touched and, electrically,
clasped. Like his, hers were ungloved. She'd had them in her ulster
pockets.

"Do you remember the other bridge?" he asked.

Her answer was to press, suddenly--fiercely--the hand she held up
against her breast. Even through the thickness of the ulster, he could
feel her heart beat. They crossed the bridge, but the hand-clasp did not
slacken when they reached the other side. Their pace quickened, but
neither of them was conscious of it.

As for Rodney, he was not even conscious what street they were walking
on, nor how far they went. He had no destination consciously in mind or
any avowed plan or hope for what should happen when they reached it. Yet
he walked purposefully and, little by little, faster. He looked about
him in a sort of dazed bewilderment when she disengaged her hand and
stopped, at last, at the corner of the delicatessen shop, beside the
entrance to her little tunnel.

"Here's where I live," she said.

"Where you _live!_" he echoed blankly.

"Ever since I went away--to California. I've been right here--where I
could almost see the smoke of your chimneys. I've a queer little room--I
only pay three dollars a week for it--but--it's big enough to be alone
in."

"Rose ..." he said hoarsely.

A drunken man came lurching pitiably down the street. She shrank into
the dark mouth of the passage and Rodney followed her, found her with
his hands, and heard her voice, speaking breathlessly, in gasps. He
hardly knew what she was saying.

"It's been wonderful.... I know we haven't talked; we'll do that some
other time, somewhere where we can.... But to-night, walking along like
that, just as ... To-morrow, I shall think it was all a dream."

"Rose ..."

"Wh-what is it?" she prompted, at last.

"Let me in," he said. "Don't turn me away to-night! I--I can't ..."

The only sound that came in answer was a long tremulously indrawn
breath. But presently her hand took the one of his that had been
clutching her shoulder and led him toward the end of the passage, where
a faint light through a transom showed a door. She opened the door with
a latch-key, and then, behind her, he made his way up two flights of
narrow stairs, whose faint creak made all the sound there was. In the
black little corridor at the top she unlocked another door.

"Wait till I light the gas," she breathed.

There was nothing furtive about their silence; it was the wonder, the
magic of being together again, that made them steal forward like awed
children.

Into an ugly, dingy, cramped, cold little room, with a rickety dresser
and a lumpy bed and a grimy window, rattling fiercely in the gusts of
wind that went whipping down the street.... Into a palace of
enchantment.

She left the gas turned low, took off her hat and ulster, pulled down
the blind over the window and shut the door, hung up a garment that had
been left flung over her trunk and dumped a bundle of laundry that had
not been put away, into a bureau drawer. All the time he'd been watching
her hungrily, without a word.

She turned and looked into his face, her eyes searching it as his were
searching hers, luminously and with a swiftly kindling fire. Her lips
parted a little, trembling. There was a sort of bloom on her skin that
became more visible as the blood, wave on wave, came flushing in behind
it. His vision of her swam suddenly away in a blur as his own eyes
filled up with tears.

And then, with that little sob in her throat, she came to him. "Oh,
Roddy ... Roddy!" was all she said. With her own lithe arms she strained
his embrace the tighter.

So far as the superstructures of their two lives were concerned,--the
part of them that floated above the level of consciousness, the whole
fabric of their thoughts and theories and ideals, that made them to
their friends and to each other, and very largely to themselves, Rose
and Rodney,--they were as far apart as on the day she had left his
house. There hadn't been, since then, a word between them of argument or
compromise. The great _impasse_ was still unforced. He hadn't, as yet,
shown that he could give her the friendship she demanded. She'd had no
chance to tell him of any of the small triumphs and disciplines of her
new life that she hoped would win it from him.

And as for Rodney, he was the same man who, an hour ago, in the theater,
had raged and writhed under what he felt to be an invasion of his
proprietary rights in her.

He wouldn't have defined it that way, to be sure, in a talk with Barry
Lake. Would have denied, indeed, with the best of them, that a husband
had any proprietary rights in his wife. But the intolerable sense of
having become an object of derision, or contemptuous pity, of being
disgraced and of her being degraded, through the appearance on the stage
of a public theater, of a woman who was his wife; and through her
exhibition, for pay, of charms he had always supposed would be kept for
him, couldn't derive from anything else but just that. He'd waited there
in the alley, full of bitter thoughts that were ready to leap forth in
denunciations. He'd waited there, ready, he thought, to use actual
physical force on her, in the unthinkable event of its becoming
necessary, to drag her out of this pit where he had found her, back to
his side again.

But somehow, when he had heard her speak his name, he'd begun to
tremble. And when he had felt her trembling, too, the bitter phrases had
died on his tongue and the thoughts that propelled them were smothered
like fire under sand. And as he'd stood confronting her in her mean
little room, his eyes searching her face, all he had been looking for
was a sign of the hunger--the ages-old hunger--that was devouring him.
And when he'd found it, that was enough for him. The great issue that
was to be fought out between them remained intact, but the hunger had to
be satisfied first.

It was hours later, in the very dead of the night, as he sat on the edge
of the bed, with his back to her, that the old sense of outrage and
degradation, almost as suddenly as it had left him, came back. And came
back in a way that made it more intolerable than ever. For the clear
flame of it had lost its clarity; the confidence that had fanned it was
gone--the sense of his own rightness. The irresistible surge of passion
that had carried him off, had destroyed that. The flame smoked and
smoldered.

"Have you anything here," he asked her dully, "besides what will go in
your trunk?"

It was the surliness of his tone, rather than the words themselves, that
startled her.

"No," she said puzzled. "Of course not."

"Then let's throw them into it quickly," he said, "and we'll lock the
thing up. Do you owe any rent?"

"Roddy!" she said. He heard her moving behind him. She struck a match
and lighted the gas. Then came around in front of him and stared at him
in frowning incredulity. "What do you mean?"

"I mean we're going to get out of this abominable place now--to-night.
We're going home. We can leave an address for the trunk. If it never
comes, so much the better."

Again all she could do was to ask him, with a bewildered stammer, what
he meant. "Because," she added, "I can't go home yet. I've--only
started."

"Started!" he echoed. "Do you think I'm going to let this beastly farce
go any further?"

And with that the smoldering fire licked up into flame again. He told
her what had happened in his office this afternoon; told her of the
attitude of his friends, how they'd all known about it--undoubtedly had
come to see for themselves, and, out of pity or contempt, hadn't told
him. He told her how he'd felt, sitting there in the theater; why he'd
waited at the stage door for her. He accused her, as with its
self-engendered heat his wrath burned brighter, of having selected the
thing to do that would hurt him worst, of having borne a grudge against
him and avenged it.

It was the ignoblest moment of his life, and he knew it. The accusations
he was making against her were nothing to those that were storing up in
his mind against himself. The sense of rightness that would have made
him gentle, had been carried away by the passion he'd shared with her,
and he couldn't get it back.

He didn't look at her as he talked, and she didn't interrupt; said no
word of denial or defense. The big outburst spent itself. He lapsed into
an uneasy silence, got himself together again, and went on trying to
restate his grievance--this time more reasonably, retracting a little.
But under her continued silence, he grew weakly irritated again.

When at last she spoke, he turned his eyes toward her and saw a sort of
frozen look in her dull white face that he had never seen in it before.
Her intonation was monotonous, her voice scarcely audible.

"I guess I understand," she said. "I don't know whether I wish I was
dead or not. If I'd died when the babies were born ... But I'm glad I
came away when I did. And I'm glad,"--she gave a faint shudder there at
the alternative--"I'm glad I've got a job and that I can pay back that
hundred dollars I owe you. I've had it quite a while. But I've kept it,
hoping you might find out where I was and come to me, as you did, and
that we might have a chance to talk. I thought I'd tell you how I'd
earned it, and that you'd be a little--proud with me about it, proud
that I could pay it back so soon."

She smiled a little over that, a smile he had to turn away from. But
this tortured smile shriveled in the flame of passion with which she
went on. "If I couldn't pay it back to-night, after this, I'd feel like
killing myself, or like--going out and earning it in the streets.
Because that's what you've made me to-night!"

He cried out her name at that, but she went on as if she hadn't heard;
only calm again--or so one might have thought from the sound of her
voice.

"I went away, you see, because I couldn't bear to have the love part of
your life without a sort of friendly partnership in the rest of it. But
I didn't know then that you could love me while you hated me, while you
felt that I'd unspeakably degraded myself and disgraced you. So that
while you loved me and had me in your arms, you felt degraded for doing
it. I didn't know that till now.

"I suppose I'll be glad some day that it all happened; that I met you
and loved you and had the babies, even though it's all had to end," she
shuddered again, "like this."

It wasn't till he tried to speak that her apparent calm was broken.
Then, with a sudden frantic terror in her eyes, she begged him, not
to--begged him to go away, if he had any mercy for her at all, quickly
and without a word. In a sort of daze he obeyed her.

The tardy winter morning, looking through her grimy window, found her
sitting there, huddled in a big bath-robe, just as she'd been when he
closed the door.




CHAPTER XII

"I'M ALL ALONE"


The same grizzly dawn that looked in on Rose through the dim window of
her room on Clark Street, saw Rodney letting himself in his own front
door with a latch-key after hours of aimless tramping through deserted,
unrecognized streets. He was in a welter of emotions he could no more
have given names to than to the streets whose dreary lengths he had
plodded.

The one thing that isolated itself from the rest, climbed up into his
mind and there kept goading him into a weak helpless fury, was a
jingling tune and a set of silly words that Rose and her sisters in the
sextette had sung the night before: "You're all alone, I'm all alone;
come on, let's be lonesome together." And then a line he couldn't
remember exactly, containing, for the sake of the rhyme, some total
irrelevancy about the weather, and a sickening bit of false rhyming to
end up with, about loving forever and ever. The jingle of that tune had
kept time to his steps, and the silly words had sung themselves over and
over endlessly in his brain until the mockery of it had become
absolutely excruciating. Except for that damnable tune, there was
nothing in his mind at all. Everything else was synthesized into a dull
ache, a hollow, gnawing, physical ache. But he'd endure that, he
thought, if he could get rid of the diabolical malice of that tune.
Perhaps if he stopped walking and just sat still it would go away.

That's why he went home, let himself in with his latch-key and made his
way furtively to the library, where the embers of last night's fire were
still warm. He had an hour at least before the servants would be
stirring. He was terribly cold and pretty well exhausted, and the
comfort of his big chair and the glow of the fire carried him off
irresistibly into a doze--a doze that was troubled by fantastic dreams.

With the first early morning stirrings in the house, the sounds of
opening doors here and there, the penetrating cry of one of the
babies--muffled, to be sure, and a long way off, but still audible--he
came broad awake again, but sat for a while staring about the room; at
the wonderful ornate perfection of the Italian marble chimney-piece that
framed the dying fire; at the tall carved chairs, the simple grandeur of
the three-hundred-year-old table and the subdued richness, in the half
light, of the tapestries that hung on the walls.

It was Florence McCrea's masterpiece, this room. But this morning its
perfections mocked him with the ferocious irony of the contrast they
presented to that other room--that unspeakably horrible room where he
had left Rose. Details of its hideousness, that he hadn't been conscious
of observing during the hours he had spent in it, came back to him,
bitten out with acid clearness;--the varnished top of the bureau mottled
with water stains, the worn splintered floor, the horrible hard blue of
the iron bed, the florid pattern on the hand-painted slop-jar.

And that abominable room was where Rose was now! She was sitting,
perhaps, just as he'd left her, with that look of frozen, dumb agony
still in her face, while he sat here ...

He sprang up in a sort of frenzy. The parlor maid would be in here any
minute now, on her morning rounds, and would wish him a respectful good
morning, and ask him what he wanted for breakfast. And then, with
automatic perfection, would appear his coffee, his grapefruit, and the
rest of it--all exactly right, the result of a perfect precalculation of
his wishes. While Rose ...

He put on his outdoor things and left the house, motivated now, for the
first time in many hours, with a clear purpose. He'd go back to that
room and get Rose out of it. He was incapable of planning how it should
be done, but somehow--anyhow, it should be; that was all he knew!

But this purpose was frustrated the moment he reached Clark Street, by
the realization that he hadn't an idea within half a mile at least,
where the room was. Neither when he went into it with Rose, nor when he
left it, had he picked up any sort of landmark. There was a passage, he
remembered, leading back between two buildings, which projected to the
sidewalk. But there were a dozen of these in every block.

A miserable little lunch-room caught his eye, displaying in its dingy
windows, pies, oranges, big shallow pans of pork and beans. This was the
sort of place Rose would have to come to, he reflected, for her
breakfast. And with that thought--hardly the conscious hope that she
would actually come to this place this morning--he turned in, sat down
at a cloth spotted with coffee and catsup stains, and ordered his
breakfast of a yawning waiter. He even forced himself, when it was
brought in, to eat it. If it was good enough for Rose, wasn't it good
enough for him?

And all the while he kept his eye on the street door, in the
irrepressible, unacknowledged hope that the gods would be kind enough to
bring her there.

But it was a mocking hope, he knew, and he didn't linger after he'd
finished. He walked down-town to his office. It was still pretty
early--not yet eight o'clock. Even his office boy wouldn't be down for
three-quarters of an hour. He was safe, he found himself saying, for so
long, anyway.

He sat down at his desk and stared bewildered at the stack of letters
that lay there awaiting his signature. They were the very letters Miss
Beach had been typing when he had told her to telephone to the club and
get him a seat for _The Girl Up-stairs_, by way of passing a pleasant
evening;--and had laughed at her when she protested. Oh, God!

He felt like a sort of inverted Rip Van Winkle--like a man who had been
away twenty years--in hell twenty years!--and coming back found
everything exactly as he had left it. As if, in reality, his absence had
lasted only overnight.

He pulled himself together and began to read the letters, but
interrupted himself before he'd gone far, to laugh aloud. The laugh
startled him a little. He hadn't expected to do more than smile. But
certainly it was worth a laugh, the solemn importance with which he'd
dictated those letters; the notion that it mattered what he said, how he
advised his clients in their bloodless, parchment-like affairs; that
anything in all the files behind the black door of that vault
represented more than the empty victories and defeats of a childish
game. The dead smug orderliness of the place, with the infallible Miss
Beach as its presiding genius, infuriated him. Clearly he couldn't stay
here till he was better in hand than this.

He signed his letters without reading them, and scribbled a note to
Craig that he'd been called out of town for a day or two on a matter of
urgent personal business. He hadn't thought of actually going out of
town until the note was written. But once he saw the statement in black
and white, the notion of making it true, invited him. He'd run off to
some small city where no curious eyes, animated by the knowledge that he
was Rodney Aldrich whose wife had left him to become a chorus-girl,
could steal glances at him. Where he needn't speak to any one from
morning till night. Where he could really get himself together and
think.

He added in a postscript to the note to Craig, instructions to call up
his house and tell them he was out of town.

The thought cropped up in one of the more automatic sections of his
brain, that for traveling he ought to have a bag, night things, fresh
underclothes, and so on, and the routine method of supplying that need
suggested itself to him; namely, to telephone to the house, have one of
the maids pack his bag for him and send it down-town in the car. But
just as he had rejected the notion of breakfasting at home, and had gone
out to that miserable Clark Street lunch-room instead, so he rejected
this. All the small civilized refinements of his way of life went
utterly against his grain. They'd continue to be intolerable to him, he
thought, as long as he had to go on envisaging Rose in that ghastly
environment of hers.

He left his office and turned into one of the big department stores that
backs up on Dearborn Street, where he bought himself a cheap bag and
furnished it with a few necessaries. Then, leaving the store, simply
kept on going to the first railway station that lay in his way. He chose
a destination quite at random. The train announcer, with a megaphone,
was calling off a list of towns which a train, on the point of
departure, would stop at. Rodney picked one that he had never visited,
bought a ticket, walked down the platform past the Pullmans, and found
himself a seat in a coach.

He found a measure of relief in all this. It gave him the illusion, at
least, of doing something. Or, more accurately, of getting ready to do
something, while it liberated him from the immediate necessity of doing
it. He'd go to a hotel in that town whose name was printed on his
ticket, and hire a room; lock himself up in it, and then begin to think.
Once he could get the engine of his mind to going, he'd be all right.
There must be some right thing to do. Or if not that, at least something
that was better to do than anything else. And when his mind should have
discovered what that thing was, he'd have, he felt, resolution enough to
go on and do it. Until he should find it, he was like a man
shamed--naked, unable to encounter the most casual glance of any of the
persons in his world who knew his shame. Once he was safe in that hotel
room, the process of thinking could begin. He wouldn't have to hurry
about it. He could take all the time he liked.

For the present, he was getting a queer sort of comfort out of what
would ordinarily be labeled the discomforts of his surroundings: the
fierce dry heat of the car, the smells--that of oranges was perhaps the
strongest of these--the raucous persistence of the train butcher hawking
his wares; and, most of all, in the very density of the crowd.

This is one of the comforts that many a member of the favored,
chauffeur-driven, servant-attended class lives his life in ignorance of,
the nervous relief that comes from ceasing, for a while, to be an
isolated, sharply bounded, perfectly visible entity, and subsiding,
indistinguishably, into a mere mass of humanity; in being nobody for a
while. It was a want which, in the old days before his marriage, Rodney
had often, unconsciously, felt and gratified. He had enjoyed being
herded about, riding in crowded street-cars, working his way through the
press in the down-town streets during the noon hour.

He was no more conscious of it now, but it was distinctly pleasant to
him to be identified for the conductor merely by a bit of blue
pasteboard with punch marks in it, stuck in his hat-band.

The pleasant torpor didn't last long, because presently, the rhythmic
thud of the wheels began singing to him the same damned tune that had
dogged his footsteps earlier that morning: "I'm all alone, you're all
alone; come on, let's be lonesome together."

This was intolerable! To break it up, he bought a magazine from the
train-boy and tried to read. But the story he lighted on concerned
itself with a ravishingly beautiful young woman and an incredibly
meritorious young man, and worked itself out, cleverly enough to be
sure--which made it worse--upon the assumption that all that was needed
for their supreme and permanent happiness was to get into each other's
arms, which eventually they did.

Rose had been in his arms last night!

So the scorching treadmill round began again. But at last sheer physical
exhaustion intervened and he fell heavily asleep. He didn't waken until
the conductor took up his bit of pasteboard again, shook him by the
shoulder, and told him that he'd be at his destination in five minutes.

Presently, in the hotel, he locked his door, opened the window and sat
down to think.




CHAPTER XIII

FREDERICA'S PARADOX


Two days later, at half past eight in the morning, he walked in on
Frederica at breakfast with her two eldest children. He had been able to
count on this because the Whitneys had a certain pride in preserving
some of the customs of the generation before them; at least Martin had,
and Frederica's good-natured, rueful acquiescence gave her at once
something to laugh at him a little about and a handy leverage for the
extraction of miscellaneous concessions. It wasn't exactly a misdemeanor
to be late to breakfast--it began promptly at eight o'clock--but it was
distinctly meritorious not to be. Martin never was and he always left
the house for his office at exactly eight-twenty. His chauffeur was
trained to take just ten minutes trundling the big car down-town, and
eight-thirty found him at his desk as invariably as it had found his
father before him. It was all perfectly ritualistic, of course. There
wasn't the slightest need for any of it.

A knowledge of the ritual, though, stood Rodney in good stead this
morning. He liked Martin well enough--had really a traditional and
vicarious affection for him. But he was about the last man he wanted to
see to-day.

The children were a boy of ten, Martin, junior, and a girl, Ellen, of
eight. There was a three-year-old baby, too, but his nurse looked after
him. They had finished breakfast, but Frederica had a way of keeping
them at the table for a little while every morning, chatting with
her--oh, about anything they pleased. If it was a design for their
improvement, they didn't suspect it. The talk broke off short when the
three of them, almost simultaneously, looked up and saw Rodney in the
doorway.

"Hello!" Frederica said, holding out a hand to him, but not rising.
"Just in time for breakfast."

"Don't ring," he said quickly. "I've had all I want. My train got in an
hour ago and I had a try at the station restaurant."

"Well, sit down anyway," said Frederica.

"Take this chair, Uncle Rod," said the boy in a voice of brusk
indifference. "Excuse me, mother?" He barely waited for her nod and
blundered out of the room.

Copyright (c) 2007. bestextbooks.com. All rights reserved.

Antoine Simon Maillard - "An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape Breton"

Bruce S. Wright - "The Children's Six Minutes"

Rudyard Kipling - "Songs from Books"

John F. Runciman - "Old Scores and New Readings"