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The Real Adventure by Henry Kitchell Webster

H >> Henry Kitchell Webster >> The Real Adventure




So one evening, after keeping up the pretense through his solitary
dinner and the cigar that followed it, that he meant presently to go up
to his study and correct galley proofs on an enormous brief, he slipped
out about nine o'clock, and walked around to the Randolphs' new house.

This latest venture of Eleanor's had attracted a good deal of comment
among her friends. Somebody called it, with a rather cruel _double
entendre_, Bertie Willis' last word. In the obvious sense of the phrase,
this was true. Eleanor had given him a free hand, and he had gone his
limit. He'd been working slowly backward from Jacobean, through Tudor.
But this thing was perfect Perpendicular. You could, as John Williamson
said, kid yourself into the notion, when you walked under the
keel-shaped arch to their main doorway, that you were going to church.
And the style was carried out with inexorable rigor, down to the most
minute details. But since everybody knew that the latest thing, the
inevitably coming thing, was the pure unadulterated ugliness of
Georgian, a style that Bertie had opposed venomously (because he
couldn't build it, the uncharitable said); and because even Bertie's
carefully preserved youth was felt to have gone a little stale and it
was no longer fashionable to consider his charms irresistible, the
phrase, "his last word," was instantly understood, as I said, to have a
secondary sense.

No one, of course, could tell Eleanor anything about what the coming
styles were going to be, in architecture or anything else. She was one
of these persons with simply a sixth sense for fashions, and her having
gone to Bertie Willis, instead of to young Mellish of the historic New
York firm, McCleod, Hill, Stone & Black, who was doing such delightfully
hideous things in Georgian, caused, among her friends, a good deal of
comment. Her explanation that medicine was a medieval profession and
that she had to have a medieval house to go with James, was felt to be a
mere evasion.

It was recognized that one had to flirt with Bertie while he was
building her house. And in the days when everybody else had been doing
it, too, it didn't matter. But now that the celebrated _hareem_ had
ceased to exist, it was felt that one would do well to be a little
careful; at least, to put a more or less summary end to the flirtation
when the house was finished. But Eleanor hadn't done that. She was
playing with him more exclusively than ever.

Rodney hadn't been in the house before, and he reflected, as he stood at
the door, after ringing the bell, that his own house was quite meek and
conventional alongside this. The grin that this consideration afforded
him, was still on his lips when, a servant having opened the door, he
found himself face to face with the architect.

Bertie, top-coated and hat in hand, was waiting for Eleanor, who was
coming down the stairs followed by a maid with her carriage coat. He
returned Rodney's nod pretty stiffly, as was natural enough, since
Rodney's grin had distinctly brightened up at sight of him.

Eleanor said, rather negligently, "Hello, Rod. We're just dashing off to
the Palace to see a perfectly exquisite little dancer Bertie's
discovered down there. She comes on at half past nine, so we've got to
fly. Want to come?"

"No," Rodney said. "I came over to see Jim. Is he at home?"

The maid was holding out the coat for Eleanor's arms, Bertie was fussing
around ineffectually, hooking his stick over his left arm to give him a
free right hand to do something with, he didn't quite know what. But
Eleanor, at Rodney's question, just stood for a second quite still. She
wasn't looking at anybody, but the expression in her eyes was sullen.

"Yes, he's at home," she said at last.

"Busy, I suppose;" said Rodney. Her inflection had dictated this reply.

"Yes, he's busy," she repeated absently and in a tone still more coldly
hostile, though Rodney perceived that the hostility was not meant for
him. And so plainly did the tone and the look and the arrested attitude
proclaim that she was following out a train of thought and hadn't as yet
got to the end of it, that he stood as still as she was.

Bertie, irreproachably correct as always, settled his shoulders inside
his coat, and took his stick in his right hand again. Eleanor now looked
around at him.

"Wait two minutes," she said, "if you don't mind." Then, to Rodney,
"Come along." And she led the way up the lustrous, velvety teakwood
stair.

He followed her. But arrived at the drawing-room floor, he protested.

"Look here!" he said. "If Jim's busy ..."

"You've never been in here before, have you?" she asked. "How's Rose?
Jim saw her, you know, in New York."

"Yes," he said. "Rose wrote to me she'd seen him, and I thought I'd drop
around for a chat. But if he's busy ..."

"Oh, don't be _too_ dense, Rodney!" she said. "A man has to be busy when
he's known to be in the house and won't entertain his wife's guests. Go
up one flight more and to the door that corresponds to that one. It
won't do you any good to knock. He'll either not answer or else tell you
to go to hell. Just sing out who you are and go right in."

She gave him a nod and a hard little smile, and went down-stairs again
to Bertie.

Rodney stood where she had left him, in two minds whether to carry out
her instructions or to wait until he heard her and Bertie go out and
then quietly follow them. It was a beastly situation, dragged into a
family quarrel like that; forced to commit an intrusion that was so
plainly labeled in advance. And on the other hand, it was a decidedly
interesting situation. If Eleanor was as reckless as that with facts
most women keep to themselves as long as possible, what would her
outspoken husband be. But if he were full of his grievances, he probably
wouldn't talk about Rose.

What really determined his action was Eleanor's discovery, or pretended
discovery down in the hall below, that her gloves weren't what she
wanted and her instructions to the maid to go up and get her a fresh
pair. It would be too ridiculous to be caught there--lurking.

So he mounted the next flight, found the door Eleanor had indicated,
knocked smartly on it, and to forestall his getting told to go to hell,
sang out at the same time, "This is Rodney Aldrich. May I come in?"

"Come in, of course," Randolph called. "I'm glad to see you," he added,
coming to meet his guest. "But do you mind telling me how the devil you
got in here? Some poor wretch will lose his job, you know, if Eleanor
finds out about this. When I'm in this room, sacred to reflection and
research, it's a first-class crime to let me be disturbed."

It didn't need his sardonic grin to point the satire of his words. The
way he had uttered "sacred to reflection and research," was positively
savage.

Rodney said curtly, "Eleanor sent me up herself. I didn't much want to
come, to tell the truth, when I heard you were busy."

"Eleanor!" her husband repeated. "I thought she'd gone out--with her
poodle."

Rodney said, with unconcealed distaste, "They were on the point of going
out when I came in. That's how Eleanor happened to see me."

With a visible effort, Randolph recovered a more normal manner. "I'm
glad it happened that way," he said. "Get yourself a drink. You'll find
anything you want over there, I guess, and something to smoke; then
we'll sit down and have an old-fashioned talk."

The source of drinks he indicated was a well-stocked cellarette at the
other side of the room. But Rodney's eye fell first on a decanter and
siphon on the table, within reach of the chair Randolph had been sitting
in. His host's glance followed his.

"This is Bourbon I've got over here," he added. "I suppose you prefer
Scotch."

"I don't believe I want anything more to drink just now," Rodney said.
And as he turned to the smoking table to get a cigar, Randolph allowed
himself another sardonic grin.

The preliminaries were gone through rather elaborately; chairs drawn up
and adjusted, ash-trays put within reach; cigars got going
satisfactorily. But the talk they were supposed to prepare the way for
didn't at once begin.

Randolph took another stiffish drink and settled back into a dull
sullen abstraction.

Rodney wanted to say, "I hear from Rose you had a little visit with her
in New York." But, with his host's mood what it was, he shrank from
introducing that topic. Finally, for the sake of saying something, he
remarked:

"This is a wonderful room, isn't it?"

Randolph roused himself. "Never been in here before?" he asked.

"I've never been in the house before, I'm ashamed to say."

"What!" Randolph cried. "My God! Well, then, come along."

Rodney resisted a little. He was comfortable. They could look over the
house later. But Randolph wouldn't listen.

"That's the first thing to do," he insisted. "Indispensable preliminary.
You can't enjoy the opera without a libretto. Come along."

It was a remarkable house. Before the first fifteen minutes of their
inspection were over, Rodney had come to the conclusion that though
Bertie Willis might be an ass, was indeed an indisputable ass, he was no
fool. It was almost uncannily clever, the way all the latest devices for
modern comfort wore, so demurely, the mask of a perfectly consistent
medievalism. And there were some effects that were really magnificent.
The view of the drawing-room, for instance, from the recessed dais at
the far end of it, where the grand piano stood--a piano that contrived
to look as if it might have been played upon by the second wife of Henry
VIII,--down toward the magnificent stone chimney at the other; the
octagonal dining-room with the mysterious audacity of its lighting; the
kitchen with its flag floor (only they were not flags, but an artful
linoleum), its great wrought-iron chains and hoods beneath which all the
cooking was done--by electricity.

Randolph took him over the whole thing from bottom to top. Through it
all, he kept up the glib patter of a showman; the ironic intent of it
becoming more and more marked all the while.

They brought up at last in the study they had started from.

"Oh, but wait a moment!" Randolph said. "Here's two more rooms for you
to see."

The first one explained its purpose at a glance, with a desk and
typewriter, and filing cabinets around the walls.

"Rubber floor," Randolph pointed out, "felt ceiling; absolutely
sound-proof. Here's where my stenographer sits all day, ready,--like a
fireman. And this," he concluded, leading the way to the other room, "is
the holy of holies."

It had a rubber floor, too, and Rodney supposed, a felt ceiling. But its
only furniture was one straight-back chair and a canvas cot.

"Sound-proof too," said Randolph. "But sounding-boards or something in
all the walls. I press this button, start a dictaphone, and talk in any
direction, anywhere. It's all taken down. Here's where I'm supposed to
think, make discoveries, and things. No distractions. One hundred per
cent. efficient. My God! I tried it for a while. Felt like a fool actor
in a Belasco play. Do you remember? The one with the laboratory and the
doctor?"

They went back into the study.

"Clever beasts, though--poodles," he remarked, as he nodded Rodney to
his chair and poured himself another drink. "Learn their tricks very
nicely. But good Heavens, Aldrich, think of him as a man! Think what our
American married women are up against, when they want somebody to play
off against their husbands and have to fall back on tired little beasts
like that. In all the older countries there are plenty of men, real men
who've got something, that a married woman can fall back on. But think
of a woman of Eleanor's attractions having to take up a thing like that.
There's nothing else for her. Would _you_ come around and hold her hand
and make love to her, or any other man like you? Not once in a thousand
times. Eleanor doesn't mean anything. She's trying to make me jealous.
That's her newest experiment. But it's downright pitiful, I say."

Rodney got up out of his chair. It wasn't a possible conversation.

"I'll be running along, I think," he said. "I've a lot of proof to
correct to-night, and you've got work of your own, I expect."

"Sit down again," said Randolph sharply. "I'm just getting drunk. But
that can wait. I'm going to talk. I've got to talk. And if you go, I
swear I'll call up Eleanor's butler and talk to him. You'll keep it to
yourself, anyway."

He added, as Rodney hesitated, "I want to tell you about Rose. I saw her
in New York, you know."

Rodney sat down again. "Yes," he said, "so she wrote. Tell me how she
looked. She's been working tremendously hard, and I'm a little afraid
she's overdoing it."

"She looks," Randolph said very deliberately, "a thousand years old." He
laughed at the sharp contraction of Rodney's brows. "Oh, not like that!
She's as beautiful as ever. More. Facial planes just a hair's breadth
more defined perhaps--a bit more of what that painter Burton calls edge.
But not a line, not a mark. Her skin's still got that bloom on it, and
she still flushes up when she smiles. She's lost five pounds, perhaps,
but that's just condition. And vitality! My God!--But a thousand years
old just the same."

"I'd like to know what you mean by that," said Rodney. He added, "if you
mean anything," but the words were unspoken.

Randolph did mean something.

"Why, look here," he said. "You know what a kid she was when you married
her. Schoolgirl! I used to tell her things and she'd listen, all
eyes--holding her breath! Until I felt almost as wise as she thought I
was. She was always game, even then. If she started a thing, she saw it
through. If she said, 'Tell it to me straight,' why she took it,
whatever it might be, standing up. She wasn't afraid of anything.
Courage of innocence. Because she didn't know.

"Well, she's courageous now, because she knows. She's been through it
all and beaten it all, and she knows she can beat it again. She
understands--I tell you--everything.

"Why, look here! We all but ran into each other on the corner, there, of
Broadway and Forty-second Street; shook hands, said howdy-do. How long
was I here for? Was Eleanor with me? And so on. If I had a spare
half-hour, would I come in and have tea with her at the Knickerbocker?
She'd nodded at two or three passing people while we stood there. And
then somebody said, 'Hello, Dane,' and stopped. A miserable, shabby,
shivering little painted thing. Rose said, 'Hello,' and asked how she
was getting along. Was she working now? She said no; did Rose know of
anything? Rose said, 'Give me your address and if I can find anything,
I'll let you know.' The horrible little beast told where she lived and
went away. Rose didn't say anything to me, except that she was somebody
who'd been out in a road company with her. But there was a look in her
eyes ...! Oh, she knew--everything. Knew what that kid was headed for.
Knew there was nothing to be done about it. She had no flutters about
it, didn't pull a long face, didn't, as I told you, say a word. But
there was a look in her eyes, behind her eyes, somehow, that understood
and _faced_--God!--everything. And then we went in and had our tea.

"I had a thousand curiosities about her. I'd have found out anything I
could. But it was she who did the finding out. Beyond inquiring about
you, how lately I'd seen you, and so on, she hardly asked a question;
talked about indifferent things: New York, the theaters, how we passed
the time out here, I don't know what. But pretty soon I saw that she
understood me, saw right into me like through an open window into a
lighted room. As easily as that. She knew what was the matter with me;
knew what I'd made of myself. And by God, Aldrich, she didn't even
despise me!

"I came back here to kick this damned thing to pieces, give myself a
fresh start. And when I got here, I hadn't the sand. I get drunk
instead."

He poured himself another long drink and sipped it slowly. "Everybody
knows," he said at last, "that prostitutes almost invariably take to
drugs or drink. But I know why they do."

That remark stung Rodney out of his long silence. During the whole of
Randolph's recital of his encounter with Rose, he'd never once lifted
his eyes from the gray ash of his cigar, and the violet filament of
smoke that arose from it. He didn't want to look at Randolph, nor think
about him. Just wanted to remember every word he said, so that he could
carry the picture away intact. Now that the picture was finished, he
wanted to get out of that room, with it; out into the dark and
loneliness of the streets, where he could walk and think.

There was something peculiarly horrifying to him in the exhibition
Randolph was making of himself. He'd never in his life taken a drink,
except convivially, and then he took as little as would pass muster.
He'd always found it hard to be sensibly tolerant of the things men said
and did in liquor, even when their condition had overtaken them
unawares. Going off alone and deliberately fuddling one's self as a
means of escaping unpleasant realities, struck him as an act of the
basest cowardice. Whether Randolph's revelation of himself were true or
distorted by alcohol, didn't seem much to matter. But for that picture
of Rose, he'd have gone long ago and left the man to his bemused
reflections. Only ...

He'd said that Rose understood everything and didn't despise him. A
drunken fancy likely enough. She had seen something though. Her letter
proved that. And having seen it, she'd asked him to drop in on the
doctor for a visit. Did she mean she wanted him to try to help?

He tried, though not very successfully, to conceal his violent disrelish
of the task, when he said:

"Look here, Jim! What the devil is the matter with you? Are you sober
enough to tell me?"

Randolph put down his glass. "I have told you," he said. "It's a thing
that can be told in one word. I'm a prostitute. I'm Eleanor's kept man.
Well kept, oh, yes. Beautifully kept. I'm nothing in God's world but a
possession of hers! A trophy of sorts, an ornament. I'm something she's
made. I have a hell of a big practise. I'm the most fashionable doctor
in Chicago. They come here, the women, damn them, in shoals. That's
Eleanor's doing. I'm a faker, a fraud, a damned actor. I pose for them.
I play up. I give them what they want. And that's her doing. They go
silly about me; fancy they're in love with me. That's what she wants
them to do. It increases my value for her as a possession.

"I haven't done a lick of honest work in the last year. I can't work.
She won't let me work. She--smothers me. Wherever I turn, there she is,
smoothing things out, trying to making it easy, trying to anticipate my
wants. I've only one want. That's to be let alone. She can't do that.
She's insatiable. She can't help it. There's something drives her on so
that she never can feel sure that she possesses me completely enough.
There's always something more she's trying to get, and I'm always trying
to keep something away from her, and failing.

"And why? Do you want to know why, Aldrich? That's the cream of the
thing. Because we're so damnably in love with each other. She wants me
to live on her love. To have nothing else to live on. Do you know why
she won't have any children? Because she's jealous of them. Afraid
they'd get between us. She tries to make me jealous with that poodle of
hers--and she succeeds. With that! I'd like to wring his neck.

"Do you want to know what my notion of Heaven is? It would be to go off
alone, with one suit of clothes in a handbag, oh, and fifty or a hundred
dollars in my pocket--I wouldn't mind that; I don't want to be a
tramp--to some mining town, or mill town, or slum, where I could start a
general practise; where the things I'd get would be accident cases,
confinement cases; real things, urgent things, that night and day are
all alike to. I'd like to start again and be poor; get this stink of
easy money out of my nostrils. I'd like to see if I could make good on
my own; have something I could look at and say, 'That's mine. I did
that. I had to sweat for it.'

"I've been thinking about that for two years. It makes quite a
fancy-picture. There are a million details I can fill into it. A rotten
little office over a drug-store somewhere; people coming in with real
ills, and I curing them up and charging them a dollar, and sending them
away happy. I smoke a pipe because I can't afford cigars; get my meals
at lunch-counters. I sit up here--in this room--and think about it.

"I came back from New York, after that look at Rose, meaning to do it;
meaning to talk it out with Eleanor and tell her why, and then go.
Well, I talked. Talk's cheap. But I didn't go. I'll never go. I'll go on
getting softer and more of a fake; more dependent. And Eleanor will go
on eating me up, until the last thing in me that's me myself, is gone.
And then, some day, she'll look at me and see that I'm nothing. That I
have nothing left to love her with."

Then, with suddenly thickened speech (an affectation, perhaps) he looked
up at Rodney and demanded:

"What the hell are you looking so s-solemn about? Can't you take a joke?
Come along and have another drink. The night's young."

"No," Rodney said, "I'm going. And you'd better get to bed."

"A couple more drinks," Randolph said, "to put the cap on a jolly
evening. Always get drunk th-thoroughly. Then in the morning, you wake
up a wiser man. Wise enough to forget what a damned fool you've been.
You don't want to forget that, Aldrich. You've been drunk and you've
talked like a damned fool. And I've been drunk and I've talked like a
damned fool. But we'll both be wiser in the morning."

Rodney walked home that night like a man dazed. The vividness of one
blazing idea blinded him. The thing that Randolph had seen and lacked
the courage to do; the thing Rodney despised him for a coward for having
failed to do, that thing Rose had done. Line by line, the parallel
presented itself to him, as the design comes through in a half-developed
photographic plate.

Without knowing it, yielding to a blind, unscrutinized instinct, he'd
wanted Rose to live on his love. He'd tried to smooth things out for
her, anticipate her wants. He'd wanted her soft, helpless, dependent. As
a trophy? That was what Randolph had said. Had he been as bad as that?
From what other desire of his than that could have come the sting of
exasperation he'd always felt when she'd urged him to let her work for
him; help him to economize, dust and make beds, so that he could go on
writing his book? She'd seen, even then, something he'd been blind
to--something he'd blinded himself to; that love, by itself, was not
enough. That it could poison, as well as feed.

And, seeing, she had the courage ... He pressed his hands against his
eyes.

When there could be friendship as well as love between them, she said,
she'd come back. Would she come back now, even for his friendship? He
doubted it. Dared not hope. There came up before him that face of frozen
agony that had confronted him in the room on Clark Street, and he
remembered what she'd said then--with a shudder--about it all ending
"like this." Ending!

His love had played her false; had tried, instinctively, to smother her,
and defeated at that, had outraged and tortured her. She couldn't
possibly look at it any way but that. And now that she was free,
self-discovered, victorious, was it likely she would submit to its blind
caprices again? The thing Randolph had said was his notion of Heaven,
she'd triumphantly attained. Wouldn't it be her notion of Heaven too?

But she had won, among the rest of her spoils of victory, the thing she
had originally set out to get. His friendship and respect. Friendship,
he remembered her saying, was a thing you had to earn. When you'd earned
it, it couldn't be withheld from you. Well, it was right she should be
told that; made to understand it to the full. He couldn't ask her to
come back to him. But she must know that her respect was as necessary
now to him, as she'd once said his was to her. He must tell her that. He
must see her and tell her that.

He stopped abruptly in his walk. His bones, as the Psalmist said, turned
to water. How should he confront that gaze of hers, which knew so much
and understood so deeply--he with the memory of his two last ignominious
encounters with her, behind him?




CHAPTER III

FRIENDS


Except for the vacuum where the core and heart of it all ought to have
been, Rose's life in New York during the year that put her on the high
road to success as a designer of costumes for the theater, was a good
life, broadening, stimulating, seasoning. It rested, to begin with, on a
foundation of adequate material comfort which the unwonted physical
privations of the six months that preceded it--the room on Clark Street,
the nightmare tour on the road, and even the little back room in Miss
Gibbons' apartment over the drug-store in Centropolis--made seem like
positive luxury.

After a preliminary fortnight in a little hotel off Washington Square,
which she had heard Jane Lake speak of once as a possible place for a
respectable young woman of modest means to live in, she found an
apartment in Thirteenth Street, not far west of Sixth Avenue. It was in
a quiet block of old private residences. But this building was clean and
new, with plenty of white tile and modern plumbing, and an elevator. Her
apartment had two rooms in it, one of them really spacious to poor Rose
after what she'd been taking for granted lately, besides a nice white
bathroom and a kitchenette. She paid thirty-seven dollars a month for
it, and five dollars a month for a share in a charwoman who came in
every day and made her bed and washed up dishes.

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