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The Real Adventure by Henry Kitchell Webster

H >> Henry Kitchell Webster >> The Real Adventure




"Hello. What is it?"

"Hello, Harry," she said. "This is Rose Aldrich. Do you remember
me?--Rose Stanton, you know."

The ensuing silence was so long, that she said "Hello" again to make
sure that he was still there.

"Y--yes," he said. "Of--of course I haven't forgotten. I--I only ...
I ..."

She wondered what he was so embarrassed about, but to save the
situation, she interrupted.

"Are you going to be awfully busy this afternoon? Because, if you
aren't, there's something you can do for me. You're in the law school
this year, aren't you?"

"Yes," he said. "Of course I'm not busy at all."

"It'll take quite a little while," she warned him, "an hour or so, and I
don't want to interfere with anything you've got to do."

Again he assured her that he hadn't anything.

"Well, then," she said rather dubiously, because his voice sounded still
so constrained and unnatural, "I'll come down in the car and pick you up
about half past one. Is that all right?"

"Yes," he said. "Yes, of course. Thank you very much."

Had inclination led Rose to do a little imaginative thinking about the
half-back, from his own point of view, she might, without much trouble,
have approximated the cause of his embarrassment.

Here is a poor but honest young man, who has devoted himself, heart,
brain and good right arm, to the service of a beautiful young fellow
student at the university. They must wait for each other, of course,
until he can graduate and get admitted to the bar and make a success
that will enable him to support her as she deserves to be supported. The
girl declines to wait. A much older man--a great, trampling brute of a
man, possessed of wealth and fame, and a social altitude positively
vertiginous--asks her to marry him. She, woman-weak, yields to the
temptation of all the gauds and baubles that go with his name, and
marries him. Indeed, few young men at the university ever have as valid
an excuse for becoming broken-hearted misogynists as the half-back. He
would he faithful, of course, though she was not. And some day, years
later, it might he, she would come hack broken-hearted to him, confess
the fatal mistake that she had made; seek his protection, perhaps,
against the cruelties of the monster she had come to hate. He would
forgive her, console her--in a perfectly moral way, of course--and for a
while, they would just be friends. Then the wicked husband would
conveniently die, and after long years, they could find happiness.

It made a very pretty idea to entertain during the semi-somnolent hours
of dull lectures and while he was waiting for the last possible moment
to leap out of bed in the morning and make a dash for his first
recitation. Written down on paper, the imaginary conversation between
them would have filled volumes.

But to be called actually to the telephone--she had telephoned to him a
thousand times in the dream--and hear her say, just as in the dream she
had said--"This is Rose; do you remember me?" was enough to make even
his herculean knees knock together. To be sure her voice wasn't choked
with sobs, but you never could tell over the telephone.

What did she want to do? Confront her husband with him, perhaps, this
very afternoon, and say, "Here is the man I love?" And what would he do
then? He'd have to back her up, of course--and until his next mouth's
allowance came in, he had only a dollar and eighty-five cents in the
world!

Rose couldn't have filled in all the details, of course, but she might
have approximated the final result. Indeed, I think she had done so,
unconsciously, by half past one, when her car stopped in front of the
fraternity house and, instantaneously, like a cuckoo out of a clock, the
half-back appeared. He was portentously solemn, and Rose thought he
looked a little pale.

"Get in," she said holding out a hand to him. "I'm going to take you
down-town to do an errand for me--well, two errands, really. My, but
it's a long time since I've seen you!"

She didn't look tragic, to be sure--not as if there were livid bruises
underneath her furs. And nothing about the manner of her greeting
suggested that she was on the point of sobbing out a plea to be
forgiven. Still, what did she mean by an errand? It might be anything.

"You see," she explained, "I happened to remember that you were going to
begin studying law this year, and that you were just the person who
wouldn't mind doing what I want."

"Divorce!" thought the half-back with a shudder.

"I want you," she went on, "to tell me just how you begin studying
law--what text-books you get, and where you get them. I want you to come
along and pick them out for me. You see, I've decided to study it
myself."

It was a fact that the half-back was enormously relieved. But it was a
brutal derisive fact--an unescapable one. He wasn't heart-broken over
the dashing of a suddenly raised hope. He was, in his heart of hearts,
saying, "Thank the Lord!"

If he had been pale before, he was red enough now. He felt ridiculous
and irritable.

"Your husband knows all that a great deal better than I, of course," he
said.

"Yes, of course," Rose was thoughtless enough to admit, "but you see, I
don't want him to know." She flushed a little herself. "It's going to be
a--surprise for him," she said.

"And, after we've got the books," she went on, "I want you to do
something else. He's making an argument in court to-day, and I want to
go and hear him. Only--I'm so ignorant, you see, I don't know how to do
it and I didn't want to tell him I was going. So you're to find out
where the court room is and how to get me in. Now, tell me all about
everything and what's been happening since I went away. I saw you made
the all-American last fall, and meant to write you a note about it, but
I didn't get a chance. That was great!"

But even at this new angle, the talk didn't run smoothly. Because,
precisely as the half-back forgot his terrors and the hopes that had
prompted them, and the absurdity of both--precisely as he began to feel,
after all, that it was a very superb and grown-up thing to be a familiar
friend of a married woman with a limousine and a respectful chauffeur,
and wonderful clothes and an air of taking them all for
granted--precisely as he made up his mind to this, he became so very
mature, and wise and blase, modeled his manners and his conversation so
strictly on John Drew in his attempt to rise to the situation, that the
schoolboy topics she suggested froze on his tongue. So that, by the time
he had picked out the books for her and seen them stowed away in the
car, and then had telephoned Rodney's office to find what court he was
appearing before, and finally taken her up to the eighth floor in the
Federal Building and left her there, she was, though grateful,
distinctly glad to be rid of him.

What heightened this feeling was that just as she caught herself smiling
a little, down inside, over his callow absurdity, she reflected that a
year ago they had been equals; that, as far as actual intelligence went,
he was no doubt her equal to-day--her superior, perhaps. He'd gone on
studying and she hadn't. Except for the long-circuited sex attraction
that Doctor Randolph had been talking about last night, he was as
capable of being an intellectual companion to her husband as she was.
That idea stung the red of resolution into her cheeks. She would study
law. She'd study it with all her might!

She was successful in her project of slipping into the rear of the court
room without attracting her husband's attention, and for two hours and a
half, she listened with mingled feelings, to his argument. A good part
of the time she was occupied in fighting off, fiercely, an almost
overwhelming drowsiness. The court room was hot of course, the glare
from the skylight pressed down her eyelids; she hadn't slept much the
night before. And then, there was no use pretending that she could
follow her husband's reasoning. Listening to it had something the same
effect on her as watching some enormous, complicated, smooth-running
mass of machinery. She was conscious of the power of it, though
ignorant of what made it go, and of what it was accomplishing.

The three stolid figures behind the high mahogany bench seemed to be
following it attentively, though they irritated her bitterly, sometimes,
by indulging in whispered conversations. Toward the end, though, as
Rodney opened the last phase of his argument, one of them, the
youngest--a man with a thick neck and a square head--hunched forward and
interrupted him with a question; evidently a penetrating one, for the
man sitting across the table from Rodney looked up and grinned, and
interjected a remark of his own.

"I simply followed the cases cited in _Aldrich on Quasi Contracts_," he
said. "I have a copy of the work here, in case Mr. Aldrich didn't bring
one along himself, which I'd be glad to submit to the Court."

Rose gasped. It was his own book they were quoting against him.

"I propose to show," said Rodney, "if the Court please, that an
absolutely vital distinction is to be made between the cases cited in
the section of _Aldrich on Quasi Contracts_, which my honorable opponent
refers to, and the case before the Court."

Then the other judges spoke up. They knew the cases, it appeared, and
didn't want to look at the book, but it was clear that they were
skeptical about the distinction. For five minutes the formal argument
was lost in swift flashing phrases in which everybody took a part.
Rodney was defending himself against them all. And Rose, in an agony
because she couldn't understand it, was reminded, grotesquely enough, of
the Gentleman of France, or some other of the sword-and-cloak heroes of
her girlhood, defending the head of the stairway against the
simultaneous assault of half a dozen enemies. And then suddenly it was
over. The judges settled back again, the argument went on.

At half past four, the oldest judge, who sat in the middle, interrupted
again to tell Rodney, with what seemed to Rose brutally bad manners,
what time it was.

"If you can finish your argument in fifteen minutes, Mr. Aldrich, we'll
hear you out. If it's going to take longer than that, the Court will
adjourn till to-morrow morning."

"I don't think I shall want more than fifteen minutes," said Rodney, and
he went on again.

And, presently, he just stopped talking and began stacking up his notes.
The oldest judge mumbled something, everybody stood up and the three
stiff formidable figures filed out by a side door. It was all over.

But nothing had happened!

Rose had been looking forward, you see, to a driving finish; to a
dramatic summoning of reserves, a mighty onslaught. And at the end of
it, as from the umpire at a ball game, to a decision. She had expected
to leave the court room in the blissful knowledge of Rodney's victory or
the tragic acceptance of his defeat. In her surprise over the failure of
this climax to materialize, she almost neglected to make her escape
before he discovered her there.

One practical advantage she had gained out of what was, on the whole, a
rather unsatisfactory afternoon. When she had gone home and changed into
the sort of frock she thought he'd like and come down-stairs in it in
answer to his shouted greeting from the lower hall, she didn't say, as
otherwise she would have done, "How did it come out, Roddy? Did you
win?"

In the light of her newly-acquired knowledge, she could see how a
question of that sort would irritate him. Instead of that, she said:
"You dear old boy, how dog tired you must be! How do you think it went?
Do you think you impressed them? I bet you did."

And not having been rubbed the wrong way by a foolish question, he held
her off with both hands for a moment, then hugged her up and told her
she was a trump.

"I had a sort of uneasy feeling," he confessed, "that after last
night--the way I threw you out of my office, fairly, I'd find
you--tragic. I might have known I could count on you. Lord, but it's
good to have you like this! Is there anywhere we have got to go? Or can
we just stay home?"

He didn't want to flounder through an emotional morass, you see. A firm
smooth-bearing surface, that was what, for every-day use, he wanted her
to provide him with; lightly given, casual caresses that could be
accepted with a smile, pleasantness, a confident security that she
wouldn't be "tragic." And on the assumption that she couldn't walk
beside him on the main path of his life, it was just and sensible. But
it wasn't good enough for Rose.

So the very next morning, she stripped the cover off the first of the
books the half-back had picked out for her, and really went to work. She
bit down, angrily, the yawns that blinded her eyes with tears; she made
desperate efforts to flog her mind into grappling with the endless
succession of meaningless pages spread out before her, to find a germ of
meaning somewhere in it that would bring the dead verbiage to life. She
tried to recall the thrill in Rodney's voice when he had told her, on
that wonderful wind-swept afternoon, that the law was the finest
profession in the world. Also, he had told her, he'd never been bored
with it--it was immoral to be bored. It was a confession of defeat,
anyway, she could see that. And she wouldn't--she absolutely would not
be defeated.

In a variety of moods which included everything except real hope and
confidence, she kept the thing up for weeks--didn't give up indeed,
until Fate stepped in, in her ironic way, and took the decision out of
her hands. She was very secretive about it; developed an almost morbid
fear that Rodney would discover what she was doing and laugh his big
laugh at her. She resisted innumerable questions she wanted to propound
to him, from a fear that they'd betray her secret.

She even forbore to ask him about the case--it was The Case in her
mind--the one she knew about, and as she struggled along with her heavy
text-books, and a realization grew in her mind of the countless hours of
such struggling on his part which must have lain behind his ability to
make that argument that day, the thing accumulated importance to her.
How could he, under the suspense of waiting for that decision,
concentrate his mind on anything else?

She discovered in the newspaper one day, a column summary of court
decisions that had been handed down, and though The Case wasn't in it,
she kept, from that day forward, a careful watch--discovered where the
legal news was printed, and never overlooked a paragraph. And at last
she found it--just the bare statement "Judgment affirmed." Rodney, she
knew, had represented the appellant. He was beaten.

For a moment the thing bruised her like a blow. She had never succeeded
in entertaining, seriously, the possibility that it could end otherwise
than in victory for him. She read it again and made sure. She remembered
the names of both parties to the suit, and she knew which side Rodney
was on. There couldn't be any mistake about it. And the certainty
weighed down her spirits with a leaden depression.

And then, all at once, in the indrawing of a single breath, she saw it
differently. Now that it had happened--and she couldn't help its
happening--didn't it give her, after all, the very opportunity she
wanted? She remembered what he had said the night he had turned her out
of his office. He wasn't sick or discouraged. He was in an intellectual
quandary that couldn't be solved by having his hand held or his eyes
kissed.

She saw now, that that had been just enough. She couldn't help him out
of his intellectual quandaries--yet. But under the discouragement and
lassitude of defeat, couldn't she help him? She remembered how many
times she had gone to him for help like that. In panicky moments when
the new world she had been transplanted into seemed terrible to her; in
moments when she feared she had made hideous mistakes; and, most
notably, during the three or four days of an acute illness of her
mother's, when she had been brought face to face with the monstrous,
incredible possibility of losing her, how she had clung to him, how his
tenderness had soothed and quieted her--how his strength and steady
confidence had run through her veins like wine!

He had never come to her like that. She knew now it was a thing she had
unconsciously longed for. And to-night she'd have a chance! Oddly
enough, it turned out to be the happiest day she'd known in a long
while. There was a mounting excitement in her, as the hours passed--a
thrilling suspense. Perhaps, after all, it wasn't going to be necessary
to grind through all those law-books in order to win the place beside
him that she wanted. If she could comfort him--mother him in his defeat
and discouragement--hold him fast when his world reeled around him, that
would be the basis of a better companionship than mere ability to chop
legal logic with him. She could he content with the shallow sparkle of
the stream of their life together, if it deepened, now and then, into
still pools like this.

She resisted the impulse to call him up on the telephone, and a stronger
one to go straight to him at his office. She'd wait until he came home
to her. She had been feeling wretched lately--headachy, nervous,
sickish;--probably, she thought, from staying in the house too much and
bending over her heavy law-books. Perhaps she had strained her eyes. But
to-day these discomforts were forgotten. Every little while she
straightened up and stood at an open window drawing in long breaths. He
should see her at her best to-night--serene--triumphant. The pallor of
her cheeks he had commented on lately, shouldn't be there to trouble
him.

For two hours that afternoon, she listened for his latch-key, and when
at last she heard it she stole down the stairs. He didn't shout her name
from the hall, as he often did. He didn't hear her coming, and she got a
look at his face as he stood at the table absently turning over some
mail that lay there. He looked tired, she thought.

He saw her when she reached the lower landing, but for just a fraction
of a second his gaze left her and went back to the letter he held in his
hand, as if to satisfy himself it was of no importance before he tossed
it away. Then he came to meet her.

"Oh!" he said. "I thought you were going to be off somewhere with
Frederica this afternoon. It's been a great day. I hope you haven't
spent the whole of it indoors. You're looking great, anyway. Come here
and give me a kiss."

Because she had hesitated, a little perplexed. Did he mean not to tell
her--to "spare" her, as he'd have said? The kiss she gave had a
different quality from those that ordinarily constituted her greetings,
and the arms that went round his neck, didn't give him their customary
hug. But they stayed there.

"You poor dear old boy!" she said. And then, "Don't you care, Roddy!"

He returned the caress with interest, before he seemed to realize the
different significance of it. Then he pushed her away by the shoulders
and held her where he could look into her face.

"What do you mean?" he asked. "Don't care about what?"

It didn't seem like bravado--like an acted out pretense, and yet of
course it must be.

"Don't," she said. "Because I know. I've known all day. I read it in the
paper this morning."

From puzzled concern, the look in his face took on a deeper intensity.
"Tell me what it is," he said very quietly. "I don't know. I didn't read
the paper this morning. Is it Harriet?" Harriet was his other
sister--married, and not very happily, it was beginning to appear, to an
Italian count.

A revulsion--a sort of sick misgiving took the color out of Rose's
cheeks.

"It isn't any one," she said. "It's nothing like that. It's--it's that
case." Her lips stumbled over the title of it. "It's been decided
against you. Didn't you know?"

For a moment his expression was simply the absence of all expression
whatever. "Good lord!" he murmured. Then, "But how the dickens did you
know anything about it? How did you happen to see it in the paper? How
did you know the title of it?"

"I was in the court the day you argued it," she said unevenly. "And when
I found they printed those things in the paper, I kept watch. And to-day
..."

"Why, you dear child!" he said. And the queer ragged quality of his
voice drew her eyes back to his, so that she saw, wonderingly, that they
were bright with tears. "And you never said a word, and you've been
bothering your dear little head about it all the time. Why, you
darling!"

He sat down on the edge of the table, and pulled her up tight into his
arms again. She was glad to put her head down--didn't want to look at
his face; she knew that there was a smile there along with the tears.

"And you thought I was worrying about it," he persisted, "and that I'd
be unhappy because I was beaten?" He patted her shoulder consolingly
with a big hand. "But that's all in the day's work, child. I'm beaten
somewhere nearly as often as I win. And really, down inside, leaving out
a little superficial pleasure, I don't care a damn whether I win or
lose. A man couldn't be any good as a lawyer, if he did care, any more
than a surgeon could be any good if he did. You've got to keep a cold
mind or you can't do your best work. And if you've done your best work,
there's nothing to care about. I honestly haven't thought about the
thing once from that day to this. Don't you see how it is?"

He couldn't see how it was, that was plain enough. What he very
reasonably expected was that after so lucid an explanation, she would
turn her wet face up to his, with her old wide smile on it. But that was
not what happened at all. Instead, she just went limp in his arms, and
the sobs that shook her seemed to be meeting no resistance whatever. It
wasn't like her to work herself up in that way over trifles, either;
yet, surely a trifle was all this could be called--a laughable mistake
he couldn't help loving her for, or a touching demonstration of
affection that he couldn't help smiling at. Either way you took it, it
was nothing to make a scene about. Where was her sense of humor? That
was the thing to do--get her quiet first, and then persuade her to laugh
at the whole affair with him.

He was saved from carrying out this program by the fact that Rose, of
her own accord, anticipated him. At least she controlled, rather
suddenly, her sobs, sat up, wiped her eyes and, after a fashion, smiled.
Not at him, though; resolutely away from him, he might almost have
thought--as if she didn't want him to see.

"That's right," he said, craning round to make sure that the smile was
there. "Have a look at the funny side of it."

She winced at that as from a blow and pulled herself away from him.
Then she controlled herself and, in answer to his look of troubled
amazement, said:

"It's all right. Only it happens that you're the one who d-doesn't know
how awfully funny it really is." Her voice shook, but she got it in hand
again. "No, I don't mean anything by that. Here! Give me a kiss and then
let me wash my face."

And for the whole evening, and again next morning until he left the
house, she managed to keep him in the only half-questioning belief that
nothing was the matter.

It was about an hour after that, that her maid came into her bedroom,
where she had had her breakfast, and said that Miss Stanton wanted to
see her.




CHAPTER VI

THE DAMASCUS ROAD


It argued no real lack of sisterly affection that Rose didn't want to
see Portia that morning. Even if there had been no other reason, being
found in bed at half past ten in the morning by a sister who inflexibly
opened her little shop at half past eight, regardless of bad weather,
backaches and other potentially valid excuses, was enough to make one
feel apologetic and worthless. Rose could truthfully say that she was
feeling wretched. But Portia would sit there, slim and erect, in a
little straight-backed chair, and whatever perfunctory commiseration she
might manage to express, the look of her fine eyebrows would be
skeptical. Justly, too. Rose could never deny that. Not so long as she
could remember the innumerable times when she had yielded to her
mother's persuasions that she was over-tired and that a morning in bed
was just what she needed. Portia, so far as she could remember, had
never been the subject of these persuasions.

But this was only the beginning of Rose's troubles to-day. She was
paying the price of yesterday's exaltation and her spirits had sunk down
to nowhere. What a fool's paradise yesterday had been with its vision of
her big self-sufficient husband coming to her for mothering because he
had lost a law-suit! What a piece of mordant irony it was, that she
should have found herself, after all her silly hopes, sobbing in his
arms, while he comforted her for her bitter disappointment over not
being able to comfort him! She had told the truth when she said he was
the one, really, who didn't know how funny it was.

Well, and wasn't her other effort just as ridiculous? If ever he found
her heap of law-books and learned of the wretched hours she had spent
trying to discover what they were all about in the hope of promoting
herself to a true intellectual companionship with him, wouldn't he take
the discovery in exactly the same way--be touched by the childish
futility of it and yet amused at the same time--cuddle her indulgently
in his arms and soothe her disappointment;--and then urge her to look at
the funny side of it? He must know hundreds of practising lawyers. Were
there a dozen out of them all whose minds had the power to stimulate and
bring into action the full powers of his own?

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