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The Real Adventure by Henry Kitchell Webster

H >> Henry Kitchell Webster >> The Real Adventure




She was still disposed to rebel at this conclusion. "I don't see why it
has to be that way," she insisted. "Why it can't be a perfect thing
instead of just a compromise. Why being friends and partners shouldn't
make us better lovers, and why being lovers shouldn't make us better
friends."

"Like the doctrine of the Trinity," he murmured. "'Three in one; one in
three. Without confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.' It's
a wonderful idea, certainly."

"Well, then," she demanded, "isn't it what we ought to try for? The very
best there is?"

"That's what they tell us," he admitted. "'Aim high,' they say. I'm not
sure it isn't better sense to aim at something you can hit. Why, look at
us, these last three weeks! We said we were going to have a month of
pure happiness. One hundred per cent. pure. We waked up every morning
telling ourselves we'd got to be happy, and we made ourselves miserable
every night wondering if we'd been happy enough."

"I'm glad you were miserable, too," she said. "I was _so_ ashamed of
myself for being."

After a while he said, "Here's what we've got to build on: Whatever else
it may or may not be, this relation between us is a permanent thing.
We've lived with each other and without each other, and we know which we
want. If we find it has its limitations and drawbacks we needn't worry.
Just go ahead and make the best of it we can. There's no law that
decrees we've got to be happy. When we _are_ happy it'll be so much to
the good. And when we aren't ..."

She gave a contented little laugh and cuddled closer down against him.
"You talk like Solomon in all his solemnity," she said. "But you can't
imagine that we're going to be unhappy. Really."

His answer was that perhaps he couldn't imagine it, but that he knew it,
just the same. "Even an ordinary marriage isn't any too easy; a
marriage, I mean, where it's quite well understood which of the parties
to it shall always submit to the other; and which of them is the
important one who's always to have the right of way. There's generally
something perfectly unescapable that decides that question. But with us
there isn't. So the question who's got to give in will have to be
decided on its merits every time a difference arises."

She burlesqued a look of extreme apprehension. She was deeply and
utterly content with life just then. But he wouldn't be diverted.

"There's another reason," he went on. "I've a notion that the thing
we're after is about the finest thing there is. If that's so, we'll have
to pay for it, in one way or another. But we aren't going to worry about
it. We'll just go ahead--and see what happens."

"Do you remember when you said that before?" asked Rose. "You told me
that marriage was an adventure anyway, and that the only thing to do was
to try it--and see what happened."

He grunted. "The real adventure's just begun," he said.

"Anyhow," she murmured drowsily, "you can talk to me again. Just as if
we weren't married."

* * * * *

And there is just about where they stand to-day--at the beginning, or
hardly past the beginning, of what he spoke of as their real adventure;
they are going forward prepared to make the best of it and see what
happens.

What did happen within two or three days after this last conversation of
theirs that I have chronicled was that Rose went back with Rodney and
the twins to Chicago, stayed there only until Miss French could be
summoned back from her vacation, and then went on to New York to a badly
worried Alice and the now extremely urgent affairs of Dane & Company.

Summer is a slack time for a lawyer, of course, since judges are
gentlemen who like long vacations. So Rodney persuaded Rose to take a
bigger apartment in the same building and to put a card in the mail-box
that would account for him as well as for herself. He came down pretty
often, and always had, it must be owned, a rather hard time of it. The
spectacle of Rose driving along an ungodly number of hours a day while
he idled about doing nothing was one he found it hard to get used to. It
didn't altogether reconcile him to it to have her point out that there
were times when he drove like that. They had two or three good Sundays,
though; one of them out on Long Island with John Galbraith--a meeting
and the beginning of a friendship that Rose had been very keen to bring
about.

Her work ended with a terrific climax in September, just about as his
began, and Rose came back to Chicago, spent a joyous month with the
twins and with the little of Rodney his office could spare of him. Then,
taking the babies and their nurse with her, she went out to California
to see her mother and Portia.

Without any special incentive, just the natural desire of a daughter and
a sister for reunion after so long a parting would have taken her there.

But Rose had a special incentive. She wanted to talk to Portia. They
hadn't had a real talk since that devastating day--ages ago--when,
yielding to an impulse of passionate self-revelation, Portia had
exhibited her great sacrifice and her equally great, though thwarted
desire; had said to Rose, "I am the branch they cut off so that you
could grow. You're living my life as well as yours. The only thing I
ever could hate you for would be for failing." She wanted to tell Portia
how the life she had given up the chance of living had grown in her
sister's trust. She wanted Portia's, "Well done."

Also, as a practical matter of justice, she wanted to repay, as far as
money could repay--what Portia, at such a cost, had given her. It was a
project that had often been in her thoughts; at first, just as a dream,
latterly, as a realizable hope.

Considered just as a visit to her mother and sister, the journey to
California was a success. Her mother, especially, got a vast
satisfaction out of the twins, and Rose herself an equal satisfaction
out of seeing how happy and content she was.

She was writing a book--a sort of autobiography. Not that her life, as
she modestly said, was worth writing about, but that the progress of the
Cause she had devoted her life to could hardly be illustrated in a
better way than with an account of that life; of the ideas she had found
current in her girlhood; of the long struggle by means of which those
ideas had become modified; and, last and most important, of the danger
lest, now that the old fixed ideas had become fluid, they should flow in
the wrong direction. Portia was acting as her amanuensis--faithful,
competent, devoted, and just as of old--or perhaps more so, Rose
couldn't be sure--ironic; a little acrid.

Mrs. Stanton's attitude toward Rose's own adventure perplexed and amused
her a little. She'd half expected to be embarrassed with approbation.
She was prepared to deprecate a little the idea that by the example of
her revolt and her attained independence she had done a service to the
great Cause. She didn't feel at all sure that she had; couldn't believe
that she and Rodney, with all their struggles, had settled anything;
and she had hesitated as to how far she could convey that doubt to her
mother.

But she might have spared her pains. Mrs. Stanton's attitude, while it
fell short of "the less said the better," was one, at least, of
suspended judgment. She couldn't, conceivably, ever have left Henry
Stanton. She couldn't, evidently, understand why Rose mightn't have done
her wifely duty and been content with that. She felt it incumbent on
women to demonstrate to men that the new liberties they sought would
not, when granted, lead them to disregard the ties that were the
essential foundations of Christian society. But Rose belonged to the new
generation--a generation that confronted, no doubt, new problems, and
would have to solve them for itself.

This suited Rose well enough. What she wanted from her mother, anyway,
was just the old look of love and trust and confidence. And she got that
abundantly.

The thing she wanted from Portia she didn't get. As long as any one else
was by--her mother, or Miss French in charge of the twins--she and
Portia chatted easily, on the best of terms. But, left alone with
her--as it seemed to Rose she actually took pains not to be--Portia's
manner took on that old ironic aloofness that had always silenced her
when she was a girl. She made at last a resolute effort to break
through.

"One of the things I came out for," she said, "was to talk to you--talk
it all out with you. I want to know what sort of job you think I've made
of it."

"You've evidently made a good job of the costume business," said Portia.
"I read that little article about you in _Vanity_ about a month ago.
That didn't seem to leave much doubt as to who's who."

"I don't mean that," said Rose. "I mean what sort of job of it
altogether; of the--of the life that's yours as well as mine."

She stopped there and waited, but all the assent she got from Portia was
that she forbore to change the subject. They were sitting in the study
which her mother had just abandoned for her afternoon nap, and Portia
had busied herself sorting over the litter of papers her mother's
activities always left.

"I want to tell you all about it," Rose said. "I'd like to tell you
every smallest thing about it, if it were possible, so that you
could--remember it as I do."

She tried to do this; to give her sister--not a narrative (her letters,
after all, had put Portia in possession of the outlines of the
story)--but at least an interpretation of it that would go to the
bottom; things she couldn't write in her letters, the actuating desires
and hopes that lay behind the things she'd done. But the attempt
collapsed. She was talking in a vacuum. Her phrases grew more disjointed
until she felt that they were meaningless. At least, scrambling back to
solid ground again, she told Portia that she wanted to pay back to her
the cost of her education, as well as that could be calculated, and of
her trousseau.

Portia's negative of this proposition was as keen and straight as a
knife-edge. The thing wasn't to be discussed; not to be considered for
an instant. "We're perfectly well off, mother and I. We're living easily
within our income out here, and--we're as contented as possible." The
cadence of those last three words had a finality about it that closed
the subject.

Portia didn't want to share, vicariously, in the life she'd made
possible for Rose. The branch had withered indeed and didn't want the
pain of feeling the sap struggling up under its bark again. The ashes
had better be left banked up about the fading coal. The silence was like
the click of a closing door. Then Portia said:

"What does the North Side bunch think of you now you've come back? And
those Lake Forest friends of yours? They must have been hideously
scandalized. Are they going to forgive you?"

"Oh, they're lovely to me," said Rose. "The only one I've lost out with
is Frederica. She'll be a long time making it up with me, if she ever
does."

"She saw what Rodney went through while you were away, I expect,"
Portia suggested.

"That, of course," said Rose. "And then--well, my going away like that,
especially as she began to see what the idea was, must have seemed a
sort of criticism on her own way of life, which she's every reason to
feel perfectly satisfied with. And that, after she'd let herself get
really fond of me, and had brought me up by hand--which is what she did
that first season, must be pretty hard to forgive. She has forgiven me,
of course. She's a dear. But we've--sort of got to begin again."

Portia wanted to know about all the others: that pretty Williamson
woman, and a few more whose names she remembered.

Rose told her; showed a feverish interest in the rather indifferent
topic just to bury the memory of the one that had failed so dismally.
She described a dinner or two she had been to since her return, and told
of the little triumph that had been made for her on the occasion of the
Chicago opening of _Come On In_. Everybody had been there and the
Crawfords had given a supper dance for her at the Blackstone afterward.
And driving in the last nail, she told of the feeble little witticism
old Mrs. Crawford had made apropos of her return--a remark whose tinge
of malice was so mild that it was felt by all to constitute an official
sanction of her social rehabilitation.

Portia honestly enjoyed all that, but Rose went back to the hotel
feeling pretty blue. (They were stopping at the hotel. The twins alone,
to say nothing of Miss French and herself, would have been too much for
the modest confines of the bungalow.) She wished she could have a good
long talk, to-night, with Rodney.

She had a sense of somebody, away up above all mundane affairs--not
responsible for them, perhaps, but capable, at all events, of thoroughly
taking them in--smiling at them all with a sort of ferocious cynicism.
In the foreground of this impression were the good friends--the really
good friends she had just been telling Portia about, who had taken her
back with so warm a welcome--because she'd succeeded; got away with it!

It was with a deeper feeling of melancholy that she thought of Portia
and her mother. Portia, who had fought so gallantly and deserved so
much, thwarted, withered, huddling her ashes around her so that her coal
of fire might never be fanned into flame again. Her mother, living
gently in the afterglow of an outworn gospel. Must every one come to an
end like that when some initial store of energy was spent? Begin walling
himself in against life? Stuffing new experiences into pigeonholes,
unscrutinized? Would the time come when little Portia would have to
begin treating _her_ with the same tender-patronage that Rose felt now
for her mother? Would little Portia, some day, smile over her like that,
and wonder whether she'd ever--really lived?

She did wish she could have a talk with Rodney.

The telephone switchboard in the lobby gave her an idea. It was five
o'clock, now; seven in Chicago. He'd just be sitting down to dinner, all
by himself, poor dear, most likely, and wishing for a talk with her.
Well, why not?

She rather electrified the hotel office when she put in that call. The
whole place wore an important air for the next half-hour. She went up to
her room to wait for it, and before the line was put through she thought
of something that would have prevented her doing it if she'd thought in
time. He'd probably think something horrible had happened to one of
them. So the moment she heard his voice--it was faint and far-away but
clear enough that she could detect the straining urgency of it--she
said:

"It's all right, Roddy. There isn't a thing the matter. Did I frighten
you half to death?"

He said, "Thank God!" And then, "I don't suppose it was two minutes I
waited for your voice, but it seemed a year. What is it?"

"I'm ashamed to tell you, after a scare like that. It's nothing, Roddy.
Just to hear you say hello. It seems a pretty unjust sort of world,
to-night, and I wanted to be reminded that you were in it. That's all."

She had to say it all over again before she could make him believe he'd
heard her straight, and by that time she was feeling pretty foolish over
the impulse she had yielded to. But just the sound of his good big
laugh, when he understood, was worth it.

"You aren't running it, you know," he told her. "Leave the worry to the
Authorities. I can't philosophize any better than that at twenty dollars
a minute. I wish you were here."

"I wish so too," she said. "I will be next week."

When she had hung up the receiver, she had to squeeze the tears out of
her eyes before she could see to do anything else. But it was with her
own smile that she contemplated what she meant to do next. She went into
the adjoining room, relegated Miss French to the side lines and
undressed the twins herself.

The twins adored her and had the most ineffably delicious ways of
showing it. But an added attraction for Rose resided in the fact that
this incursion of hers always--just a little--annoyed Miss French.
Clever as the nurse was about handling the twins, she could not manage
even the pretense to that professional superiority which is the
prerogative of nurses toward mothers. Rose, with those highly trained
hands of hers, a twin in each of them, could exhibit a dazzling
virtuosity that left Miss French nowhere.

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