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The Real Adventure by Henry Kitchell Webster

H >> Henry Kitchell Webster >> The Real Adventure




He told her how he'd got in with an altruistic bunch--the City Homes
Association; how, finding him keen for work that they had little time
for, the senior legal counselors had drawn out and let him do it. And
from the way he told of his labors in drafting a new city building
ordinance, she felt that it must have been one of the most fascinating
occupations in the world, until he told her how it had drawn him into
politics--municipal, city council politics, which was even more
thrilling, and then how, after an election, a new state's attorney had
offered him a position on his staff of assistants.

In a sense, of course, it was true that he had, as Frederica would have
put it, forgotten she was there--had forgotten, at least, who she was.
Because, if he had remembered that she was just a young girl in the
university, he would hardly, as he tramped about the room expounding the
practise of criminal law in the state's attorney's office, have
characterized the state's attorney himself as a "damned gallery-playing
mountebank," nor have described the professions and the misdeeds of
some of the persons he prosecuted in blunt Anglo-Saxon terms she had
never heard used except in the Bible.

The girl knew he had forgotten, and her only discomfort came from the
fear that the spell might be broken and he remember suddenly and be
embarrassed and stop.

In the deeper sense--and she was breathlessly conscious of this too--he
hadn't forgotten she was there. He was telling it all because she was
there--because she was herself and nobody else. She knew, though how she
couldn't have explained,--with that intuitive certainty that is the only
real certainty there is,--that the story couldn't have been evoked from
him in just that way, by any one else in the world.

At the end of two years in the state's attorney's office, he told her,
he figured he had had his training and was ready to begin.

"I made just one resolution when I hung out my shingle," he said, "and
that was that no matter how few cases I got, I wouldn't take any that
weren't interesting--that didn't give me something to bite on. A lot of
my friends thought I was crazy, of course--the ones who came around
because they liked me, or had liked my father, to offer me nice plummy
little sinecures, and got told I didn't want them. Just for the sake of
looking successful and accumulating a lot of junk I didn't want, I
wasn't going to asphyxiate myself, have strings tied to my arms and legs
like a damned marionette. I wasn't willing to be bored for any reward
they had to offer me. It's cynical to be bored. It's the worst
immorality there is. Well, and I never have been."

It wasn't all autobiographical and narrative. There was a lot of his
deep-breathing, spacious philosophy of life mixed up in it. And this the
girl, consciously, and deliberately, provoked. It didn't need much. She
said something about discipline and he snatched the word away from her.

"What is discipline? Why, it's standing the gaff--_standing_ it, not
submitting to it. It's accepting the facts of life--of your own life, as
they happen to be. It isn't being conquered by them. It's not making
masters of them, but servants to the underlying things you want."

She tried to make a reservation there--suppose the things you wanted
weren't good things.

But he wouldn't allow it.

"Whatever they are," he insisted, "your desires are the only motive
forces you've got. No matter how fine your intelligence is, it can't
ride anywhere except on the backs of your own passions. There's no good
lamenting that they're not different, and it's silly to beat them to
death and make a merit of not having ridden anywhere because they might
have carried you into trouble. Learn to ride them--control them--spur
them. But don't forget that they're _you_ just as essentially as the
rider is."

It was with a curiously relaxed body, her chin cradled in the crook of
her arm that lay along the back of the couch, her eyes unfocused on the
window, that the girl listened to it.

Primarily, indeed, she wasn't exactly listening. Much of the narrative
went by almost unheard. Much of the philosophy she hardly tried to
understand. What was constantly present and more and more poignantly
vivid with every five minutes that ticked away on the banjo clock, was a
consciousness of the man himself, the driving power of him, the
boisterous health and freshness and confidence. She was conscious, too,
of something formidable--carelessly exultant in his own strength. She
got to thinking of the flight of a great bird wheeling up higher and
higher on his powerful wings.

He had caught her up, too, and was carrying her to altitudes far beyond
her own powers. He might drop her, but if he did, it wouldn't be through
weakness. At what he said about riding on the backs of one's own
passions, her imagination varied the picture so that she saw him
galloping splendidly by.

At that, suddenly and to her consternation, she felt her eyes flushing
up with tears. She tried to blink them away, but they came too fast.

Presently he stopped short in his walk--stopped talking, with a gasp,
in the middle of a sentence, and looked into her face. She couldn't see
his clearly, but she saw his hands clench and heard him draw a long
breath. Then he turned abruptly and walked to the window and for a
mortal endless minute, there was a silence.

At last she found something--it didn't matter much what--to say, and the
conversation between them, on the surface of it, was just what it had
been for the first ten minutes after he had come in. But, paradoxically,
this superficial commonplaceness only heightened the tensity of the
thing that underlay it. Something had happened during that moment while
he stood looking into her tear-flushed eyes; something momentous,
critical, which no previous experience in her life had prepared her for.

And it had happened to him, too. The memory of his silhouette as he
stood there with his hands clenched, between her and the window, would
have convinced her, had she needed convincing.

The commonplace thing she had found to say met, she knew, a need that
was his as well as hers, for breathing-space--for time for the recovery
of lost bearings. Had he not felt it as well as she--she smiled a little
over this--he wouldn't have yielded. The man on horseback would have
taken an obstacle like that without breaking the stride of his gallop.

What underlay her quiet meaningless chat, was wonder and fear, and more
deeply still, a sort of cosmic contentment--the acquiescence of a
swimmer in the still irresistible current of a mighty river.

It was distinctly a relief to her when her mother came in and,
presently, Portia. She introduced him to them, and then dropped out of
the conversation altogether. As if it were a long way off, she heard him
retailing last night's adventure and expressing his regret that he
hadn't taken her to Frederica (that was his sister, Mrs. Whitney) to be
dried out, before he sent her home.

She was aware that Portia stole a look at her in a puzzled penetrating
sort of way every now and then, but didn't concern herself as to the
basis of her curiosity. She knew that it was getting on toward their
dinner-time, but didn't disturb herself as to the effect Inga's
premonitory rattlings out in the dining-room might have on her guest. As
a matter of fact, they had none whatever.

She smiled once widely to herself, over a thought of the half-back. The
man here in the room with her now, chatting so pleasantly with her
mother, wouldn't ask for favors--would accept nothing that wasn't
offered as eagerly as it was sought.

It wasn't until he rose to go that she aroused herself and went with him
into the hall. There, after he'd got into his overcoat and hooked his
stick over his arm, he held out his hand to her in formal leave-taking.
Only it didn't turn out that way. For the effect of that warm lithe grip
flew its flag in both their faces.

"You're such a wonder!" he said.

She smiled. "So are y-you." It was the first time she had ever stammered
in her life.

When she came back into the sitting-room, she found Portia inclined to
be severe.

"Did you ask him to come again?" she wanted to know.

Rose smiled. "I never thought of it," she said.

"Perhaps it's just as well," said Portia. "Did you have anything at all
to say to him before we came home, or were you like that all the while?
How long ago did he come?"

"I don't know," said Rose behind a very real yawn. "I was asleep on the
couch when he came in. That's why I was dressed like this." And then she
said she was hungry.

There wasn't, on the whole, a happier person in the world at that
moment.

Because Rodney Aldrich, pounding along at five miles an hour, in a
direction left to chance, was not happy. Or, if he was, he didn't know
it. He couldn't yield instantly, and easily, to his intuitions, as Rose
had done. He felt that he must think--felt that he had never stood in
such dire need of cool level consideration as at this moment:

But the process was impossible. That fine instrument of precision, his
mind, that had, for many years, done without complaint the work he gave
it to do, had simply gone on a strike. Instead of ratiocinating
properly, it presented pictures. Mainly four: a girl, flaming with
indignation, holding a street-car conductor pinned by the wrists; a girl
in absurd bedroom slippers, her skirt twisted around her knees, her hair
a chaos, stretching herself awake like a big cat; a girl with wonderful,
blue, tear-brimming eyes, from whose glory he had had to turn away. Last
of all, the girl who had said with that adorable stammer, "So are
y-you," and smiled a smile that had summed up everything that was
desirable in the world.

It was late that night when his mind, in a dazed sort of way, came back
on the job. And the first thing it pointed out to him was that Frederica
had undoubtedly been right in telling him that, though they had lived
together off and on for thirty years, they didn't know each other. The
pictures his memory held of his sister, covered no such emotional range
as these four. Did Martin's? It seemed absurd, yet there was a strong
intrinsic probability of it.

Anyway, it was a remark Frederica had made last night that gave him
something to hold on by. Marriage, she had said, was an adventure, the
essential adventurousness of which no amount of cautious thought taken
in advance could modify. There was no doubt in his mind that marriage
with that girl would be a more wonderful adventure than any one had ever
had in the world.

All right then, perhaps his mind had been right in refusing to take up
the case. The one tremendous question,--would the adventure look
promising enough to her to induce her to embark on it?--was one which
his own reasoning powers could not be expected to answer. It called
simply for experiment.

So, turning off his mind again, with the electric light, he went to bed.




CHAPTER VII

HOW IT STRUCK PORTIA


It was just a fortnight later that Rose told her mother she was going to
marry Rodney Aldrich, thereby giving that lady a greater shock of
surprise than, hitherto, she had experienced in the sixty years of a
tolerably eventful life.

Rose found her neatly writing a paper at the boudoir desk in the little
room she called her den. And standing dutifully at her mother's side
until she saw the pen make a period, made then her momentous
announcement, much in the tone she would have used had it been to the
effect that she was going to the matinee with him that afternoon.

Mrs. Stanton said, "What, dear?" indifferently enough, just in
mechanical response to the matter-of-fact inflection of Rosalind's
voice. Then she laid down her pen, smiled in a puzzled way up into her
daughter's face, and added, "My ears must have played me a funny trick.
What did you say?"

Rose repeated: "Rodney Aldrich and I are going to be married."

But when she saw a look of painful incomprehension in her mother's face,
she sat down on the arm of the chair, slid a strong arm around the
fragile figure and hugged it up against herself.

"I suppose," she observed contritely, "that I ought to have broken it
more gradually. But I never think of things like that."

As well as she could, her mother resisted the embrace.

"I can't believe," she said, gripping the edge of her desk with both
hands, "that you would jest about a solemn subject like that, Rose, and
yet it's incredible!... How many times have you seen him?"

"Oh, lots of times," Rose assured her, and began checking them off on
her fingers. "There was the first time, in the street-car, and the time
he brought the books back, and that other awful call he made one
evening, when we were all so suffocatingly polite. You know about those
times. But three or four times more, he's come down to the
university--he's great friends with several men in the law faculty, so
he's there quite a lot, anyway--but several times he's picked me up, and
we've gone for walks, miles and miles and miles, and we've talked and
talked and talked. So really, we know each other awfully well."

"I didn't know," said her mother in a voice still dull with astonishment,
"that you even liked him. You've been so silent--indifferent--both times
he was here to call...."

"Oh, I haven't learned yet to talk to him when any one else is around,"
Rose admitted. "There's so little to say, and it doesn't seem worth the
bother. But, truly, I do like him, mother. I like everything about him.
I love his looks--I don't mean just his eyes and nose and mouth. I like
the shape of his ears, and his hands. I like his big loud voice"--her
own broadened a little as she added, "and the way he swears. Oh, not at
me, mother! Just when he gets so interested in what he's saying that he
forgets I'm a lady.

"And I like the way he likes to fight--not with his fists, I mean,
necessarily. He's got the most wonderful mind to--wrestle with, you
know. I love to start an argument with him, just to see how easy it is
for him to--roll me in the dirt and walk all over me."

The mother freed herself from the girl's embrace, rose and walked away
to another chair. "If you'll talk rationally and seriously, my dear,"
she said, "we can continue the conversation. But this flippant,
rather--vulgar tone you're taking, pains me very much."

The girl flushed to the hair. "I didn't know I was being flippant and
vulgar," she said. "I didn't mean to be. I was just trying to tell
you--all about it."

"You've told me," said her mother, "that Mr. Aldrich has asked you to
marry him and that you've consented. It seems to me you have done so
hastily and thoughtlessly. He's told you he loves you, I've no doubt,
but I don't see how it's possible for you to feel sure on such short
acquaintance."

"Why, of course he's told me," Rose said, a little bewildered. "He can't
help telling me all the time, any more than I can help telling him.
We're--rather mad about each other, really. I think he's the most
wonderful person in the world, and"--she smiled a little
uncertainly--"he thinks I am. But we've tried to be sensible about it,
and think it out reasonably. We're both strong and healthy, and we like
each other.... I mean--things about each other, like I've said. So, as
far as we can tell, we--fit. He said he couldn't guarantee that we'd be
happy; that no pair of people could be sure of that till they'd tried.
But he said it looked to him like the most wonderful, magnificent
adventure in the world, and asked if it looked to me like that, and I
said it did. Because it's true. It's the only thing in the world that
seems worth--bothering about. And we both think--though, of course, we
can't be sure we're thinking straight--that we've got a good chance to
make it go."

Even her mother's bewildered ears couldn't distrust the sincerity with
which the girl had spoken. But this only increased the bewilderment. She
had listened with a sort of incredulous distaste she couldn't keep her
face from showing, and at last she had to wipe away her tears.

At that Rose came over to her, dropped on the floor at her knees and
embraced her.

"I guess perhaps I understand, mother," she said. "I didn't
realize--you've always been so intellectual and advanced--that you'd
feel that way about it--be shocked because I hadn't pretended not to
care for him and been shy and coy"--in spite of herself, her voice got
an edge of humor in it--"and a startled fawn, you know, running away,
but just not fast enough so that he wouldn't come running after and
think he'd made a wonderful conquest by catching me at last. But a man
like Rodney Aldrich wouldn't plead and protest, mother. He wouldn't
_want_ me unless I wanted him just as much."

It was a long time before her mother spoke and when she did, she spoke
humbly--resignedly, as if admitting that the situation she was
confronted with was beyond her powers.

"It's the one need of a woman's life, Rose, dear," she said, "--the
corner-stone of all her happiness, that her husband, as you say, 'wants'
her. It's something that--not in words, of course, but in all the little
facts of married life--she'll need to be reassured about every day.
Doubt of it is the one thing that will have the power to make her
bitterly unhappy. That's why it seems to me so terribly necessary that
she be sure about it before it's too late."

"Yes, of course," said Rose. "But that's true of the man, too, isn't it?
Otherwise, where's the equality?"

Her mother couldn't answer that except with a long sigh.

Strangely enough, it wasn't until after Rose had gone away, and she had
shut herself up in her room to think, that any other aspect of the
situation occurred to her--even that there was another aspect of it
which she'd naturally have expected to be the first and only critical
one.

Ever since babyhood Rose had been devoted, by all her mother's plans and
hopes, to the furtherance of the cause of Woman, whose ardent champion
she herself had always been. For Rose--not Portia--was the devoted one.

The elder daughter had been born at a time when her own activities were
at their height. As Portia herself had said, when she and her two
brothers were little, their mother had been too busy to--luxuriate in
them very much and during those early and possibly suggestible years,
Portia had been suffered to grow up, as it were, by herself. She was not
neglected, of course, and she was dearly loved. But when, for the first
time since actual babyhood, she got into the focal-plane of her mother's
mind again, there was a subtle, but, it seemed, ineradicable antagonism
between them, though that perhaps is too strong a word for it. A
difference there was, anyway, in the grain of their two minds, that
hindered unreserved confidences, no matter how hard they might try for
them. Portia's brusk disdain of rhetoric, her habit of reducing
questions to their least denominator of common sense, carried a constant
and perfectly involuntary criticism of her mother's ampler and more
emotional style--made her suspect that Portia regarded her as a
sentimentalist.

But Rose, with her first adorable smile, had captured her mother's heart
beyond the possibility of reservation or restraint. And, as the child
grew and her splendid, exuberant vitality and courage and wide-reaching,
though not facile, affection became marked characteristics, the hope
grew in her mother that here was a new leader born to the great Cause.
It would need new leaders. She herself was conscious of a side drift to
the great current, that threatened to leave her in a backwater. Or, as
she put it to herself, that threatened to sweep over the banks of
righteousness and decorum, and inundate, disastrously, the peaceful
fields.

She couldn't expect to have the strength to resist this drift herself,
but she had a vision of her daughter rising splendidly to the task. And
for that task she trained her--or thought she did; saw to it that the
girl understood the Eighteenth Century Liberalism, which, limited to the
fields of politics and education, and extended to include women equally
with men, was the gospel of the movement she had grown up in. With it
for a background, with a university education and a legal training, the
girl would have everything she needed.

She expected her to marry, of course. But in her day-dreams, it was to
be one of Rose's converts to the cause--won perhaps by her advocacy at
the bar, of some legal case involving the rights of woman--who was to
lay his new-born conviction, along with his personal adoration, at the
girl's feet.

Certainly Rodney Aldrich, who, as Rose outrageously had boasted, rolled
her in the dust and tramped all over her in the course of their
arguments, presented a violent contrast to the ideal husband she had
selected. Indeed, it should be hard to think of him as anything but the
rock on which her whole ambition for the girl would be shattered.

It was strange she hadn't thought of that during her talk with Rose!

Now that the idea had occurred to her she tried hard to look at the
event that way and to nurse into energetic life a tragic regret over the
miscarriage of a lifetime's hope. It was all so obviously what she
ought to feel. Yet the moment she relaxed the effort, her mind flew back
to a vibration between a hope and a fear: the hope, that the man Rose
was about to marry would shelter and protect her always, as tenderly as
she herself had sheltered her; the terror--and this was stronger--that
he might not.

That night, during the process of getting ready for bed, Rose put on a
bath-robe, picked up her hair brush and went into Portia's room. Portia,
much quicker always about such matters, was already on the point of
turning out the light, but guessing what her sister wanted, she stacked
her pillows, lighted a cigarette, climbed into bed and settled back
comfortably for a chat.

"I hope," Rose began, "that you're really pleased about it. Because
mother isn't. She's terribly unhappy. Do you suppose it's because she
thinks I've--well, sort of deserted her, in not going on and being a
lawyer--and all that?"

"Oh, perhaps," said Portia indifferently. "I wouldn't worry about that,
though. Because really, child, you had no more chance of growing up to
be a lawyer and a leader of the 'Cause' than I have of getting to be a
brigadier-general."

Rose stopped brushing her hair and demanded to be told why not. She had
been getting on all right up to now, hadn't she?

"Why, just think," said Portia, "what mother herself had gone through
when she was your age; put herself through college because her father
didn't believe in 'higher education'--practically disowned her. She'd
taught six months in that awful school--remember?--she was used to being
abused and ridiculed. And she was working hard enough to have killed a
camel. But you!... Why, Lamb, you've never really _had_ to do anything
in your life. If you felt like it, all right--and equally all right if
you didn't. You've never been hurt--never even been frightened. You
wouldn't know what they felt like. And the result is ..."

Portia drew in a long puff, then eyed her cigarette thoughtfully through
the slowly expelled smoke. "The result is," she concluded, "that you
have grown up into a big, splendid, fearless, confiding creature that
it's perfectly inevitable some man like Rodney Aldrich would go straight
out of his head about. And there you are."

A troubled questioning look came into the younger sister's eyes. "I've
been lazy and selfish, I know," she said. "Perhaps more than I thought.
I haven't meant to be. But ... Do you think I'm any good at all?"

"That's the real injustice of it," said Portia; "that you are. You've
stayed big and simple. It couldn't possibly occur to you now to say to
yourself, 'Poor old Portia! She's always been jealous because mother
liked me best, and now she's just green with envy because I'm going to
marry Rodney Aldrich.'"

She wouldn't stop to hear Rose's protest. "I know it couldn't," she went
on. "That's what I say. And yet there's more than a little truth in it,
I suppose. Oh, I don't mean I'm sorry you're going to be happy--I
believe you are, you know. I'm just a little sorry for myself. Curious,
anyway, to see where I've missed all the big important things you've
kept. I've been afraid of my instincts, I suppose. Never able to take a
leap because I've always stopped to look, first. I'm too narrow between
the cheek-bones, perhaps. Anyhow, here I stay, grinding along, wondering
what it's all about and what after all's the use.... While you, you
baby! are going to find out."

What Rose wanted to do was to gather her sister up in her arms and kiss
her. But the faint ironic smile on Portia's fine lips, the twist of her
eyebrows, the poise of her body as she sat up in bed watching the
blue-brown smoke rising in a straight thin line from her diminishing
cigarette, combined to make such a demonstration altogether impossible.

"Mother thinks, I guess," she said, to break the silence, "that I ought
to have looked a little longer. She thinks Rodney would have 'wanted' me
more, if I hadn't thrown myself at him like that."

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