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The Real Adventure by Henry Kitchell Webster

H >> Henry Kitchell Webster >> The Real Adventure




Frederica took her hands off, stepped back and looked at him. There was
an ironical sort of smile on her lips.

"You're such an innocent," she said. "You've got an idea you know
me--know how I treat Martin. Roddy, dear, a girl's brother doesn't
matter. She isn't dependent on him, nor responsible for him. And if
she's rather sillily fond of him, she's likely to spoil him frightfully.
Don't think the girl you marry will ever treat you like that."

"But look here!" he exclaimed. "You say I don't know you, whom I've
lived with off and on for thirty years--don't know how you'd treat me if
you were married to me. How in thunder am I going to know about the girl
I get engaged to, before it's too late?"

"You won't," she said. "You haven't a chance in the world."

"Hm!" he grunted, obviously struck with this idea. "You're giving the
prospect of marriage new attractions. You're making the thing out--an
adventure."

She nodded rather soberly. "Oh, I'm not afraid for you," she said. "Men
like adventures--you more than most. But women don't. They like to dream
about them, but they want to turn over to the last chapter and see how
it's going to end. It's the girl I'm worried about.... Oh, come along!
We're talking nonsense. I'll go up with you and see that they've given
you pajamas and a tooth-brush."

She had accomplished this purpose, kissed him good night, and under the
hint of his unbuttoned waistcoat and his winding watch, turned to leave
the room, when her eye fell on a heap of damp, warped, pasteboard-bound
note-books, which she remembered having observed in his side pockets
when he first came in. The color on the pasteboard binding had run, and
as they lay on the drawn linen cover to the chiffonier, she went over
and picked them up to see how much damage they'd done. Then she frowned,
peered at the paper label that had half peeled off of the topmost cover,
and read what was written on it.

"Who," she asked with considerable emphasis, "is Rosalind Stanton?"

"Oh," said Rodney very casually, behind the worst imitation of a yawn
she had ever seen, "oh, she got put off the car when I did."

"That sounds rather exciting," said Frederica behind an imitation yawn
of her own--but a better one. "Going to tell me about it?"

"Nothing much to tell," said Rodney. "There was a row about a fare, as I
said. The conductor was evidently solid concrete above the collar-bone,
and didn't think she'd paid. And she grabbed him and very nearly threw
him out into the street--could have done it, I believe, as easily as
not. And he began to talk about punching somebody's head. And then, we
both got put off. So, naturally, I walked with her over to the elevated.
And then I forgot to give her her note-books and came away with them."

"What sort of looking girl?" asked Frederica. "Is she pretty?"

"Why, I don't know," said Rodney judicially. "Really, you know, I hardly
got a fair look at her."

Frederica made a funny sounding laugh and wished him an abrupt "good
night."

She was a great old girl, Frederica--pretty wise about lots of things,
but Rodney was inclined to think she was mistaken in saying women didn't
like adventures. Take that girl this afternoon, for example. Evidently
she was willing to meet one half-way. And how she'd blazed up when that
conductor touched her! Just the memory of it brought back something of
the thrill he had felt when he saw it happen.

"You're a liar, you know," remarked his conscience, "telling Frederica
you hadn't had a good look at her."

On the contrary, he argued, it was perfectly justifiable to deny that a
look as brief as that, was good. He wouldn't deny, however, that the
thing had been a wholly delightful and exhilarating little episode. That
was the way to have things happen! Have them pop out of nowhere at you
and disappear presently, into the same place.

"Disappear indeed!" sneered his conscience. "How about those note-books,
with her name and address on every one. And there's another lie you
told--about forgetting to give them to her!"

He protested that it was entirely true. He had gone into the station
with the girl, shaken hands with her, said good night, and turned away
to leave the station, unaware--as evidently she was--that he still had
her note-books under his arm. But it was equally true that he had
discovered them there, a good full second before the girl had turned the
corner of the stairs--in plenty of time to have called her back to the
barrier, and handed them over to her.

"All right, have it your own way," said Rodney cheerfully, as he turned
out the light.




CHAPTER V

THE SECOND ENCOUNTER


Portia Stanton was late for lunch; so, after stripping off her jacket
and gloves, rolling up her veil and scowling at herself in an oblong
mahogany-framed mirror in the hall, she walked into the dining-room with
her hat on. Seeing her mother sitting alone at the lunch table, she
asked, "Where is Rose?"

"She'll be down presently, I think," her mother said. "She called out to
me that she'd only be a minute, when I passed her door. Does your hat
mean you're going back to the shop this afternoon?"

Portia nodded, pulled back her chair abruptly and sat down. "Oh, don't
ring for Inga," she said. "What's here's all right, and she takes
forever."

"I thought that on Saturday ..." her mother began.

"Oh, I know," said Portia, "but Anne Loomis telephoned she's going to
bring Dora Wild around to pick out which of my three kidney sofas she
wants for a wedding present. That girl I've got isn't much good, and
besides, I think there's a chance that Dora may give me her house to do.
Her man's stupidly rich, they say, and richly stupid, so the job ought
to be worth eating a cold egg for."

You'd have known them for mother and daughter anywhere, and you'd have
had trouble finding any point of resemblance in either of them to the
Amazonian young thing who had so nearly thrown a street-car conductor
into the street the night before. Their foreheads were both narrow and
rather high, their noses small and slightly aquiline, and both of them
had slender fastidious hands.

The mother's hair was very soft and white, and the care with which it
was arranged indicated a certain harmless vanity in it. There was
something a little conscious, too, about her dress--an effect difficult
to describe without exaggeration. It was not bizarre nor "artistic," but
you would have understood at once that its departures from the
prevailing mode were made on principle. If you took it in connection
with a certain resolute amiability about her smile, you would be
entirely prepared to hear her tell Portia that she was reading a paper
on Modern Tendencies before the Pierian Club this afternoon.

A very real person, nevertheless, you couldn't doubt that. The marks of
passionately held beliefs and eagerly given sacrifices were etched with
undeniable authenticity in her face.

Once you got beyond a catalogue of features, Portia presented rather a
striking contrast to this. Her hair was done--you could hardly say
arranged--with a severity that was fairly hostile. Her clothes were
bruskly cut and bruskly worn, their very smartness seeming an impatient
concession to necessity. Her smile, if not ill-natured--it wasn't
that--was distinctly ironic. A very competent, good-looking young woman,
you'd have said, if you'd seen her with her shoulder-blades flattened
down and her chest up. Seeing her to-day, drooping a little over the
cold lunch, you'd have left out the adjective young.

"So Rose didn't come down this morning at all," Portia observed, when
she had done her duty by the egg. "You took her breakfast up to her, I
suppose."

Mrs. Stanton flushed a little. "She didn't want me to; but I thought
she'd better keep quiet."

"Nothing particular the matter with her, is there?" asked Portia.

There was enough real concern in her voice to save the question from
sounding satirical, but her mother's manner was still a little
apologetic when she answered it.

"No, I think not," she said. "I think the mustard foot-bath and the
quinine probably averted serious consequences. But she was in such a
state when she came home last night--literally wet through to the skin,
and blue with cold. So I thought it wouldn't do any harm ..."

"Of course not," said Portia. "You're entitled to one baby anyway,
mother, dear. Life was such a strenuous thing for you when the rest of
us were little, that you hadn't a chance to have any fun with us. And
Rose is all right. She won't spoil badly."

"I'm a little bit worried about the loss of the poor child's
note-books," said her mother. "I rather hoped they'd come in by the noon
mail. But they didn't."

"I don't believe Rose is worrying her head off about them." said Portia.

The flush in her mother's cheeks deepened a little, but it was no longer
apologetic.

"I don't think you're quite fair to Rose, about her studies," she said.
"The child may not be making a brilliant record, but really, considering
the number of her occupations, it seems to me she does very well. And if
she doesn't seem always to appreciate her privilege in getting a college
education, as seriously as she should, you should remember her youth."

"She's twenty," said Portia bluntly. "You graduated at that age, and you
took it seriously enough."

"It's very different," her mother insisted. "And I'm sure you understand
the difference quite well. Higher education was still an experiment for
women then--one of the things they were fighting for. And those of us by
whom the success of the experiment was to be judged ..."

"I'm sorry, mother," Portia interrupted contritely. "I'm tired and ugly
to-day, and I didn't mean any harm, anyway. Of course Rose is all right,
just as I said. And she'll probably get her note-books back Monday."
Then, "Didn't she say the man's name was Rodney Aldrich?"

"I think so," her mother agreed. "Something like that."

"It's rather funny," said Portia. "It's hardly likely to have been the
real Rodney Aldrich. Yet, it's not a common name."

"The _real_ Rodney Aldrich?" questioned her mother. But, without waiting
for her daughter's elucidation of the phrase, she added, "Oh, there's
Rose!"

The girl came shuffling into the room in a pair of old bedroom slippers.
She had on a skirt that she used to go skating in, and a somewhat
tumbled middy-blouse. Her hair was wopsed around her head anyhow--it
really takes one of Rose's own words to describe it. As a toilet
representing the total accomplishment of a morning, it was nothing to
boast of. But, if you'd been sitting there, invisibly, where you could
see her, you'd have straightened up and drawn a deeper breath than you'd
indulged in lately, and felt that the world was distinctly a brighter
place to live in than it had been a moment before.

She came up behind Portia, whom she had not seen before that day, and
enveloped her in a big lazy hug.

"Back to work another Saturday afternoon, Angel?" she asked
commiseratingly. "Aren't you ever going to stop and have any fun?" Then
she slumped into a chair, heaved a yawning sigh and rubbed her eyes.

"Tired, dear?" asked her mother. She said it under her breath in the
hope that Portia wouldn't hear.

"No," said Rose. "Just sleepy." She yawned again, turned to Portia, and,
somewhat to their surprise, said: "Yes, what do you mean--the _real_
Rodney Aldrich? He looked real enough to me. And his arm felt real--the
one he was going to punch the conductor with."

"I didn't mean he was imaginary," Portia explained. "I only meant I
didn't believe it was the Rodney Aldrich--who's so awfully prominent;
either somebody else who happened to have the same name, or somebody who
just--said that was his name."

"What's the matter with the prominent one?" Rose wanted to know. "Why
couldn't it have been him?"

Portia admitted that it could, so far as that went, but insisted on an
inherent improbability. A millionaire, a member of one of the oldest
families in the city--a social swell, the brother of that Mrs. Martin
Whitney whose pictures the papers were always publishing on the
slightest excuse--wasn't likely to be found riding in street-cars, in
the first place, and the improbability reached a climax during a furious
storm like that of last night, when, if ever during the year, the real
Rodney Aldrich would be saying, "Home, James," to a liveried chauffeur,
and sinking back luxuriously among the whip-cord cushions of a palatial
limousine.

I hasten to say that these were not Portia's words; all the same, what
Portia did say, formed a basis for Rose's unspoken caricature.

"Millionaires have legs," she said aloud. "I bet they can walk around
like anybody else. However, I don't care who he is, if he'll send back
my books."

Portia went back presently to the shop, and it wasn't long after that
that her mother came down-stairs clad for the street, with her _Modern
Tendencies_ under her arm in a leather portfolio.

It had turned cold overnight, and there was a buffeting gusty wind which
shook the windows and rattled the stiff branches of the trees. Her
mother's valedictory, given with more confidence now that Portia was out
of the house, was a strong recommendation that Rose stay quietly within
doors and keep warm.

The girl might have palmed off her own inclination as an example of
filial obedience, but she didn't.

"I was going to, anyway," she said. "Home and fireside for mine to-day."

Ordinarily, the gale would have tempted her. It was such good fun to
lean up against it and force your way through, while it tugged at your
skirts and hair and slapped your face.

But to-day, the warmest corner of the sitting-room lounge, the quiet of
the house, deserted except for Inga in the kitchen, engaged in the
principal sporting event of her domestic routine--the weekly baking; the
fact that she needn't speak to a soul for three hours, a detective story
just wild enough to make little intervals in the occupation of doing
nothing at all--presented an ideal a hundred per cent. perfect.

She hadn't meant to go to sleep, having already slept away half the
morning, but the author's tactics in the detective story were so
flagrantly unfair, he was so manifestly engaged trying to make trouble
for his poor anemic characters instead of trying to solve their
perplexities, that presently she tossed the book aside and began
dreaming one of her own in which the heroine got put off a street-car in
the opening chapter.

The telephone bell roused her once or twice, far enough to observe that
Inga was attending to it, so when the front door-bell rang, she left
that to Inga, too--didn't even sit up and swing her legs off the couch
and try, with a prodigious stretch, to get herself awake, until she
heard the girl say casually:

"Her ban right in the sitting-room."

So it fell out that Rodney Aldrich had, for his second vivid picture of
her,--the first had been, you will remember, when she had seized the
conductor by both wrists, and had said in a blaze of beautiful wrath,
"Don't dare to touch me like that!"--a splendid, lazy, tousled creature,
in a chaotic glory of chestnut hair, an unlaced middy-blouse, a plaid
skirt twisted round her knees, and a pair of ridiculous red bedroom
slippers, with red pompons on the toes. The creature was stretching
herself with the grace of a big cat that has just been roused from a nap
on the hearth-rug.

If his first picture of her had been brief, his second one was
practically a snap-shot, because at sight of him, she flashed to her
feet.

So, for a moment, they confronted each other about equally aghast,
flushed up to the hair, and simultaneously and incoherently, begging
each other's pardon--neither could have said for what, the goddess out
of the machine being Inga, the maid-of-all-work. But suddenly, at a
twinkle she caught in his eye, her own big eyes narrowed and her big
mouth widened into a smile, which broke presently into her deep-throated
laugh, whereupon he laughed too, and they shook hands, and she asked him
to sit down.

[Illustration: At sight of him she flashed to her feet.]




CHAPTER VI

THE BIG HORSE


"It's too ridiculous," she said. "Since last night, when I got to
thinking how I must have looked, wrestling with that conductor, I've
been telling myself that if I ever saw you again, I'd try to act like a
lady. But it's no use, is it?"

He said that he, too, had hoped to make a better impression the second
time than the first. That was what he brought the books back for. He had
hoped to convince her that a man capable of consigning a half-drowned
girl to a ten-mile ride on the elevated, instead of walking her over to
his sister's, having her dried out properly, and sent home in a motor,
wasn't permanently and chronically as blithering an idiot as he may have
seemed. It was a great load off of his mind to find her alive at all.

She gave him a humorously exaggerated account of the prophylactic
measures her mother had submitted her to the night before, and she
concluded:

"I'm awfully sorry mother's not at home--mother and my sister Portia.
They'd both like to thank you for--looking after me last night. Because
really, you did, you know."

"There never was anything less altruistic in the world," he assured her.
"I dropped off of that car solely in pursuit of a selfish aim. And I
didn't come out here to-day to be thanked, either. I mean, of course,
I'd enjoy meeting your mother and sister very much, but what I came for
was to get acquainted with you."

He saw her glance wander a little dubiously to the door. "That is," he
concluded, "if you haven't something else to do."

She flushed and smiled. "No, it wasn't that," she said, "I was trying to
make up my mind whether it would be better to ask you to wait here ten
minutes while I went up and made myself a little more presentable.... I
mean, whether you'd rather have me fit to look at, or have me like this
and not be bored by waiting. It's all one to me, you see, because even
if I did come down again presentable, you'd know--well, that I wasn't
that way naturally."

Whereupon he laughed out again, told her that a ten-minute wait would
bore him horribly, and that if she didn't mind, he much preferred her
natural.

"All right," she said, and went on with the conversation where she had
interrupted it.

"Why, I'm nobody much to get acquainted with," she said. "Mother's the
interesting one--mother and Portia. Mother's quite a person. She's Naomi
Rutledge Stanton, you know."

"I know I ought to know," Rodney said, and her quick appreciative smile
over his candor rewarded him for not having pretended.

"Oh," she said, "mother's written two or three books, and lots of
magazine articles, about women--women's rights and suffrage, and all
that. She's been--well, sort of a leader ever since she graduated from
college, back in--just think!--1870, when most girls used to
have--accomplishments--'French, music, and washing extra,' you know."

She said it all with a quite adorable seriousness and his gravity
matched hers when he replied:

"I would like to meet her very much. Feminism's a subject I'm blankly
ignorant about."

"I don't believe," she said thoughtfully, "that I'd call it feminism in
talking to mother about it, if I were you. Mother's a suffragist,
but"--there came another wave of faint color along with her
smile--"but--well, she's awfully respectable, you know."

She didn't seem to mind his laughing out at that, though she didn't join
him.

"What about the other interesting member of the family," he asked
presently, "your sister? Which is she, a suffragist or a feminist?"

"I suppose," she said, "you'll call Portia a feminist. Anyway, she
smokes cigarettes. Oh, can't I get you some? I forgot!"

He had a case of his own in his pocket, he said, and got one out now
and lighted it.

"Why," she went on, "Portia hasn't time to talk about it much. You see,
she's a business woman. She's a house decorator. I don't mean painting
and paper-hanging. She tells you what kind of furniture to buy, and then
sells it to you. Portia's terribly clever and awfully independent."

"All right," he said. "That brings us down to you. What are you?"

She sighed. "I'm sort of a black sheep, I guess. I'm just in the
university. But I'm to be a lawyer."

Whereupon he cried out "Good lord!" so explosively that she fairly
jumped.

Then he apologized, said he didn't know why her announcement should have
taken him like that, except that the notion of her in court trying a
case--he was a lawyer himself--seemed rather startling.

She sighed. "And now I suppose," she said, "you'll advise me not to be.
Portia won't hear of my being a decorator. She says there's nothing in
it any more; and my two brothers--one's a professor of history and the
other's a high-school principal--say, 'Let her do anything but teach.'
One of mother's great friends is a doctor, and she says, 'Anything but
medicine,' so I suppose you'll say, 'Anything but law.'"

"Not a bit," he said. "It's the finest profession in the world."

But he said it off the top of his mind. Down below, it was still engaged
with the picture of her in a dismal court room, blazing up at a jury the
way she had blazed up at that street-car conductor. It was a queer
notion. He didn't know whether he liked it or not.

"I suppose," she hazarded, "that it's awfully dull and tiresome, though,
until you get way up to the top."

That roused him. "It's awfully dull when you do get to the top, or
what's called the top--being a client caretaker with the routine law
business of a few big corporations and rich estates going through your
office like grist through a mill. I can't imagine anything duller than
that. That's supposed to be the big reward, of course. That's the
bundle of hay they dangle in front of your nose to keep you trotting
straight along without trying to see around your blinders."

He was out of his chair now, tramping up and down the room. "You're not
supposed to discover that it's interesting. You're pretty well spoiled
for their purposes if you do. The thing to bear in mind, if you're going
to travel their road, is that a case is worth while in a precise and
unalterable ratio to the amount of money involved in it. If you question
that axiom at all seriously, you're lost. That's what happened to me."

He pulled up with a jerk, looked at her and laughed. "If my sister
Frederica were here," he explained, "she would warn you, out of a long
knowledge of my conversational habits, that now was the time for you to
ask me,--firmly, you know,--if I'd been to see Maude Adams in this new
thing of hers, or something like that. In Frederica's absence, I suppose
it's only fair to warn you myself. Have you been to see it? I haven't."

She smiled in a sort of contented amusement and let that do for an
answer to his question about Maude Adams. Then the smile transmuted
itself into a look of thoughtful gravity and there was a long silence
which, though it puzzled him, he made no move to break.

At last she pulled in a long breath, turned straight to him and said, "I
wish you'd tell me what _did_ happen to you."

And under the compelling sincerity of her, for the next two hours and a
half, or thereabouts, he did--told it as he had never told it
before--talked as Frederica, who thought she knew him, had never heard
him talk.

He told her how he had started at the foot of the ladder in one of the
big successful firms of what he called "client caretakers," drawing up
bills and writs, rounding up witnesses in personal injury suits, trying
little justice-shop cases--the worst of them, of course, because there
was a youngster just ahead of him who got the better ones. And then,
dramatically, he told of his discovery amid this chaff, of a real legal
problem--a problem that for its nice intricacies and intellectual
suggestiveness, would have brought an appreciative gleam to the eye of
Mr. Justice Holmes, or Lord Mansfield, or the great Coke himself. He
told of the passionate enthusiasm with which he had attacked it, the
thrilling weeks of labor he had put on it. And then he told her the
outcome of it all; how the head of the firm, an old friend of his
father, had called him in and complimented him on the work that he had
done; said it was very remarkable, but, unfortunately, not profitable to
the firm, the whole amount involved in the case having been some twenty
dollars. They were only paying him forty dollars a month, to be sure,
but they figured that forty dollars practically a total loss and they
thought he might better go to practising law for himself. In other
words, he was fired.

But the thing that rang through the girl's mind like the clang of a
bell--the thing that made her catch her breath, was the quality of the
big laugh with which he concluded it. He didn't ask her to be sorry for
him. He wasn't sorry for himself one bit,--nor bitter--nor cynical. He
didn't even seem trying to make a merit of his refusal to acquiesce in
that sordid point of view. He just dismissed the thing with a
cymbal-like clash of laughter and plunged ahead with his story.

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