her lover and her partner that he had become her friend. Rodney, it
seemed from his letters, was becoming her friend too. Was it because he,
too, had ceased to be her lover? if ever she stood face to face with him
again would she search in vain for that look of hunger--of ages-old
hunger and need--that she'd last seen when they stood face to face in
her little room on Clark Street?
She walked down-town to her apartment from the Pennsylvania station end,
though the natural effect of fatigue was to quicken her pace, and though
she was indubitably tired, she walked slowly; slowly, and still more
slowly. She found she dreaded going back to that apartment of hers and
shutting herself in for the night, alone.
She found two corners of white projecting from under her door. And when
she'd unlocked and opened it she stooped and picked them up, a visiting
card and a folded bit of paper. She turned the card over and gave a
little half-suffocated cry.
It was Rodney's card and on it he'd written, "Sorry to have missed you.
I'll come back at eight."
Her shaking fingers fumbled pitifully over the folds of the note, but
she got it open at last. It was from him too. It read:
"DEAR ROSE:
"This is hard luck. I suppose you're off for a week-end somewhere. I
want very much to see you. When you come back and have leisure for
me, will you call me up? I know how busy you are so I'll wait until
I hear from you.
"RODNEY."
Her heart felt like lead when she'd read it. Dazedly, a little giddily,
she pulled her door shut, went into her room and sat down.
He was in New York! He'd been to see her this afternoon--and left a
card! And the note he'd written after his second visit was what Howard
West might have written, or any other quite casual, slightly over-polite
acquaintance. And it was from Rodney to her!
She couldn't see him if he felt like that; couldn't stand it to see him
if he felt like that! Bitterness, contempt, hatred, anything would be
easier to bear than that. She was to call up his hotel, was she? Well,
she wouldn't!
And then suddenly she spread the note open again and read it once more.
Turned it over and scrutinized the reverse side of the paper, and
uttered a little sobbing laugh. If he'd been as cool, unmoved,
self-possessed, as that note had tried to sound, would he have forgotten
to tell her at what hotel she was to call him up?
Then, with a gasp, she wondered how she _could_ call him up. He'd think
she knew where he was; he'd wait; and after he'd waited a while, in
default of word from her, wouldn't he take her silence for an answer and
go back to Chicago?
She clenched her hands at that and tried to think. Well, the obvious
thing to do seemed to be the only one. She must try one hotel after
another until she found him. After all, there probably weren't more than
a dozen to choose among. It wouldn't be easy looking up numbers with
everything dancing before her eyes like this, but if she took the
likeliest ones first she mightn't have to go very far. And, indeed, at a
third attempt she found him.
When the telephone girl switched her to the information desk, and the
information clerk said, "Mr. Rodney Aldrich? Just a moment," and then;
"Mr. Aldrich is in fifteen naught five," the dry contraction in her
throat made it impossible for her to speak.
But the switchboard girl had evidently been listening in and plugged her
through, because she heard the throb of another ring, a click of a
receiver and then--then Rodney's voice.
She couldn't answer his first "Hello," and he said it again, sharply,
"Hello, what is it?"
And then suddenly her voice came back. A voice that startled her with
its distinctness. "Hello, Rodney," she said; "this is Rose."
There was a perfectly blank silence after that and, then the crisp voice
of an operator somewhere--"Waiting?"
"Yes," she heard Rodney say, "get off the line." And then to her. "I
came to see you this afternoon and again to-night."
"Yes, I know," she said. "I just this minute got in. Can't you come back
again now?"
How in the world, she had wondered, could she manage her voice like
that! From the way it sounded she might have been speaking to Alice
Perosini; and yet her shaking hand could hardly hold the receiver. She
heard him say:
"It's pretty late, isn't it? I don't want to ... You'll be tired
and ..."
"It's not too late for me," she said, "only you might come straight
along before it gets any later."
She managed to wait until she heard him say, "All right," before she
hung up the receiver. Then a big racking sob, not to be denied any
longer, pounced on her and shook her.
CHAPTER IV
COULEUR-DE-ROSE
The fact that the length of time it would take a taxi to bring him down
from his hotel to her apartment was not enough to decide anything in,
plan anything in, was no more than enough, indeed, to give her a chance
to stop crying and wash her face, was a saving factor in the situation.
In the back of her mind, as with a hairpin or two she righted her hair
and decided, glancing down over herself, against attempting to change
even her tumbled blouse or her dusty boots, was an echoing consciousness
of something Galbraith had said that afternoon--"And you know when your
next big thing comes along you will do that too."
Without actually quoting those words to herself, she experienced a
sudden confidence that was almost serene. In a few minutes now, not more
than five, probably--she hoped not more than that--something
incalculable, tremendous, was going to begin happening to her. A thing
whose issue would in all likelihood determine the course of her whole
life. There might be a struggle, a tempest, but she made no effort to
foresee the nature of it. She just relaxed physical and spiritual
muscles and waited. Only she hoped she wouldn't have to wait long.
No--there was the bell.
It was altogether fortunate for Rose that she had attempted no
preparation, because the situation she found herself in when she'd
opened the door for her husband, shaken hands with him, led him into her
sitting-room and asked him to sit down, was one that the wildest cast of
her imagination would never have suggested as a possible one for her and
Rodney. And it lasted--recurred, at least, whenever they were
together--almost unaltered, for two whole days.
It was his manner, she felt sure, that had created it; and yet, so
prompt and automatic had been her response that she couldn't be sure,
not for the first half-hour or so, anyway, that he wasn't attributing it
to her. It wasn't so much the first words he said, when, opening her
door, she saw him standing in the hallway, as it was his attitude; his
rather formal attitude; the way he held his hat; the fact--this was
absurd, of course, but she reconstructed the memory very clearly
afterward--that his clothes were freshly pressed. It was the slightly
anxious, very determined attitude of an estimable and rather shy young
man making his first call on a young lady, on whom he is desperately
desirous of making a favorable impression.
What he said was something not very coherent about being very glad and
its being very good of her, and almost simultaneously she gasped out
that she was glad, and wouldn't he come in. She held out her hand to
him, politely, and he, compensating for an imperceptible hesitation with
a kind of clumsy haste, took it and released it almost as hastily. She
showed him where to hang his coat and hat, conducted him into her
sitting-room and invited him to sit down. And there they were.
And he was Rodney, and she was Rose! It was like an absurd dream.
For a while she talked desperately, under the same sort of delirious
conviction one has in dreams that if he desists one moment from some
grotesquely futile form of activity a cosmic disaster will instantly
take place. A moment of silence between them would be, she felt,
something unthinkably terrible. It was not a fear of what might emerge
from such a silence, the sudden rending of veils and the confrontation
of two realities; it was a dread, purely, of the silence itself. But the
feeling did not last very long.
"Won't you smoke?" she asked suddenly; and hurried on when he hesitated,
"I don't do it myself, but most of my friends do, and I keep the
things." From a drawer in her writing-desk she produced a tin box of
cigarettes. "They're your kind--unless you've changed," she commented,
and went over to the mantel shelf for an ash-tray and a match-safe. The
match-safe was empty and she left the room to get a fresh supply from
her kitchenette.
On the inner face of her front door was a big mirror, and in it, as she
came back through the unlighted passage, she saw her husband. He was
sitting just as she'd left him, and as his face was partly turned away
from her, it could not have been from the expression of it that she got
her revelation. But she stopped there in the dark and caught her breath
and leaned back against the wall and squeezed the tears out of her eyes.
Perhaps it was just because he was sitting so still, a thing it was
utterly unlike him to do. The Rodney of her memories was always ranging
about the rooms that confined him. Or the grip of the one hand she could
see upon the chair-arm it rested on may have had something to do with
it. But it was not, really, a consciously deductive process at all; just
a clairvoyant look--_into_ him, and a sudden, complete, utterly
confident understanding.
He had come down here to New York to make another beginning. He meant to
assert no rights, not even in their common memories, he would make no
appeal. But something that he felt he had forfeited he was going to try
to earn back. What was the thing he sought--her friendship, or her love?
She knew! No plea that the inspired rhetoric of passion could be capable
of could have convinced her of his love for her and of his need for her
love as did the divine absurdity of this attempt of his to show her that
she need give him--nothing. She knew. Oh, how she knew!
She stole back into her little kitchen and shut the door and leaned
giddily against it, trying to get her breath to coming steadily again.
At last she straightened up and wiped her eyes. A smile played across
her lips; the smile of deep maternal tenderness. Then she picked up her
box of matches and carried them to him in the sitting-room.
He stayed that first evening a little less than an hour, and when he got
up to go, she made no effort to detain him. The thing had been, as its
unbroken surface could testify, a highly successful first call. Before
she let him go, though, she asked him how long he was going to be in New
York, and on getting a very indeterminate answer that offered a minimum
of "two or three days" and a maximum that could not even be guessed at,
she said:
"I hope you're not going to be too dreadfully busy for us to see a lot
of each other. I wish we might manage it once every day."
That shook him; for a moment, she thought the lightning was going to
strike and stood very still holding her breath, waiting for it.
But he steadied himself, said he could certainly manage that if she
could, and as the elevator came up in response to her ring, said that he
would call her up in the morning at her office.
She puzzled a little during the intermittent processes of undressing,
over why she had let him go like that. She found it easy to name some of
the things that were _not_ the reason. It was not--oh, a thousand times
it was not!--that she wasn't quite sure of him. There was no expressing
the completeness of her certainty that, with a look, a sudden holding
out of the hands to him, the release of one little love-cry from her
lips, a half-articulate, "Come and take me, Roddy! That's all I want!"
she could have shattered, annihilated, that brittle restraint of his;
released the full tempest of his passion; found herself--lost
herself--in his embrace.
Certainly it was no doubt of that that had held her back. And, no more
than doubt, was it pride or modesty. The one thing her whole being was
crying out for was a complete surrender to him.
But the real reason seemed rather absurd, when she tried to state it to
herself. She had felt that it would be a _brutal_ thing to do. Really,
her feeling toward him was that of a mother toward a child who, having,
he thinks, merited her displeasure, offers her, by way of atonement,
some dearly prized possession; an iron fire-engine, a woolly sheep. What
mother wouldn't accept an offering like that gravely!
This thing that Rodney had offered her, the valiant, heart breaking
pretense that she needn't give him anything--to her, whose aching need
was to give him everything she had!--was just as absurd as the child's
toy could have been. But it had cost him.... Oh, what must it not have
cost him in struggle and sacrifice, to construct that pitiful,
transparent pretense!--to maintain that manner! And the struggle and the
sacrifice must not be cheapened, made absurd by a sudden shattering
demonstration that they'd been unnecessary. His pretense must be melted,
not shattered. And until it could be melted, that aching need of hers
must wait.
And then she realized that the ache was gone--the tormenting restless
hunger for him that had been nagging at her ever since the first rush of
spring was somehow appeased. She'd have said, twenty-four hours ago,
that to be with him, have him near her, in any other relation than that
of her lover, would be unendurable. Twenty-four hours ago! She thought
of that as she was winding her watch. It seemed incredible that it was
no longer than that since the saccharine little sob in John McCormack's
voice as he had sung "Just a little love, a li-ttle ki-iss," had driven
her frantic.
She turned out her light and opened her bedroom window. The phonograph
across the court was going again. But now, evidently, its master had
come back from Pittsburgh, for it was singing lustily, "That's why I
wish again that I was in Michigan, back on the farm."
Rose smiled her old wide smile, and cuddled her cheek into the pillow.
She was the happiest person in the world.
When he called her up the next morning, she asked him to come down to
the premises of Dane & Company (it was a loft on lower Fifth Avenue)
about noon and go out to lunch with her, and she made no secret of her
motive in selecting their rendezvous. "I'd like to have you see what our
place is like;" she said, "though it isn't like anything much just now,
between seasons this way. Still you can get an idea."
He said he would be immensely interested to see the place, and from the
cadence of his voice was apparently prepared to let the conversation end
there. But she prolonged it a little.
"Do you hear from--Chicago while you're down here, Roddy?" she asked.
"Whether everything's all right--at home, I mean?"
It was a second or two before he answered, but when he did, his voice
was perfectly steady.
"Yes," he said. "I get a night-letter every morning from Miss French.
(This was Mrs. Ruston's successor.) It's--everything's all right."
"Good-by, then, till noon," she said. And if he could have seen the
smile that was on her lips, and the brightness that was in her eyes as
she said it ...!
It was a part, you see, of his Quixotic determination to make no claims,
that he had not said a word, during his evening call, about the
twins--her babies!
On the stroke of twelve his card was brought to her, and she went out
into their bare little waiting-room to meet him.
"We aren't a regular dressmaking establishment, you see," she said. "The
people we have to impress aren't the ones we make the clothes for. So we
can be as shabby down here as we please, and Alice says--Alice Perosini,
you know--that our shabbiness really does impress them. Shows we don't
care what they think.
"You're sure you've plenty of time to see around in?" she went on. "That
it won't cut into your time for lunch?"
He made it plain that he had plenty of time, and she took him into her
own studio, a big north-lighted room at the back of the building, with
the painter's manikins that Jimmy Wallace had told about, standing about
in it, and some queer-looking electric-light fixtures suggestive of the
stage; a big tin-lined box with half a dozen powerful tungsten lamps in
it, and grooves in the mouth of it for the reception of colored slides.
And a sort of search-light that swung on a pivot. There was a high
cutting-table with a deep indentation in it, in which Rose could stand
with her work all around her. On a shelf in a corner he noticed two or
three little figures twelve inches high or so that he'd have thought of
as dolls had it not been that their small heads gave them the scale of
adults. Rose followed his glance.
"I play with those," she said. "Dress them in all sorts of
things--tissue-paper mostly. It seems easier to catch an idea small in
the tips of my fingers, and then let it grow up. You have to find out
for yourself how you can do things, don't you?"
Then she took him out into the workroom, where there were more
cutting-tables and power-driven sewing-machines.
"'It never rains but it pours,' is the motto of this business," she told
him. "Nobody ever knows what he wants until the very last minute, and
then he wants it the next, and everybody wants it at once. And then this
place is like a madhouse. We simply go out of our heads. It was like
that when Jimmy Wallace was down here. I hadn't a minute for him."
She added deliberately, "I'm glad you didn't come down then," and went
swiftly on to explain to him a sort of pantograph arrangement which
could be set with reference to the measurements of the manikin Rose had
designed the costume upon, and those of the girl who was going to wear
it, so that the pattern for the costume itself, as distinct from Rose's
master-pattern, was cut almost automatically to fit.
"It's not really automatic, of course," she said. "No costume's done
until I have seen it on the girl who's going to wear it. But it does
save time."
Alice Perosini came in just then, and a breath-taking spectacle she'd
have been to most men in the frock she had on. But it was not Rodney who
gasped. It was Alice herself who almost did, when Rose introduced him to
her, without explanations, as Mr. Aldrich and said she was going out to
lunch with him.
"And there's no telling when I'll be back," she added, "so if there's
anything to talk about, you'd better seize the chance and tell me now."
Alice couldn't be blamed if her face was a study. She knew that Aldrich
was the name of Rose's abandoned husband, and it would have been natural
to believe that this highly impressive-looking person, whom Rose so
casually introduced, was he. But the matter-of-fact way in which Rose
was trotting him about the shop, and spoke of carrying him off to lunch,
seemed to make such a conclusion fantastic.
There was nothing casual about the man, though, she reflected
afterward. He'd taken his part, adequately and politely, of course, in
the introduction and the fragmentary word or two of small-talk that had
followed it, but Alice doubted if he'd really seen her at all. And when
a man didn't see Alice--this was a line of reasoning she was quite
candidly capable of--it meant an intensity of preoccupation that one
might call monstrous--portentous, anyway.
Rose asked him if he minded the Brevoort, which was near by and airy, on
a warm spring day like this, and he assented to it with enthusiasm. He
hadn't been there in years, he said. She wished, a little later, that
she had thought twice and had taken him somewhere else, where she wasn't
quite so obviously well acquainted. The cordial salutation of the head
waiter, the number of people who nodded at her from this table or that,
might well have been dispensed with on an occasion like this. And the
climax was when the table waiter, well accustomed to having her bring
guests of either sex to lunch with her, and on confidential terms with
her gustatory preferences, handed her a menu--as a matter of form--told
her what he thought she'd like to-day, and, getting out his pencil and
his card, prepared to write it down. She saw Rodney looking pretty
blank, so she checked the waiter and said:
"I think I _did_ ask you to lunch with me, but if you'd rather I lunched
with you ... You can have it whichever way you like."
He hesitated just an instant; then said he'd like to lunch with her. And
somehow their eyes met over that in a way that, once more, made Rose
hold her breath. But the lightning didn't strike that time.
Even so, their hour wasn't wasted on the polite topics of custom-made
conversation, as, for a while, she had feared it would be; because he
asked her, presently--and she could see he really wanted to know--how
she had got started in this costuming business. It was evidently a thing
she had a genius for, but how had she found it out, and how had she
worked out that technique which, even to the eyes of his ignorance, was
clearly extraordinary?
And Rose, beginning a little timidly, because she knew there were rocks
ahead for him, told him the tale that had its beginning in Lessing's
store; the story of Mrs. Goldsmith and her bad taste, of the Poiret
model that had suggested her great idea, of the offer she had made
Galbraith, the way she had bought her dressmaker's form and her bolts of
paper-cambric out of the Christmas rush, and had cut out her patterns in
the dead of nights after rehearsals, up in her little room on Clark
Street. She told him of the wild rush with which the costumes themselves
got made down under the stage at the Globe; of Galbraith's enthusiasm,
of the bargain she'd driven with Goldsmith and Block--the unwittingly
good bargain that had left her a profit of over two hundred dollars. She
told him how Goldsmith and Block had driven a good bargain of their own,
hiring her at her chorus-girl's salary for the last two delirious weeks;
how insanely hard she'd worked, and how, at last, after the opening
performance, Galbraith had offered her a job in New York when he should
be ready for her.
Somehow, while she told it, though it was only occasionally that she
glanced up at him--somehow, as she told it, she seemed to be hearing it
with his ears--to be thinking, actually, the very thoughts that were
going through his mind.
The central cord of it all, that everything else depended from, was, she
knew, the reflection that this triumphant narrative he was listening to
now, had been waiting on her lips to be told to him that night in the
room on Clark Street, and that the smoking smoldering fires of his
outraged pride and masculine sense of possession, had made the telling
impossible--had made everything impossible but that dull outcry of hers
that it had ended--like this.
But he never winced. Indeed, now and then when she tried to run ahead in
a way to elide this incident or that, he asked questions that brought
out all the details, and at the end he said with undisguised gravity,
but quite steadily:
"So after the play opened you were just waiting for Galbraith to send
for you. Why--why did you go on the road, instead of to New York?"
"He hadn't sent for me yet, and I'd made up my mind, by that time, that
he meant not to. And I was too tired just then to come down here and try
for anything else. I went on the road for a sort of rest-cure."
He sat for a good while after that in a reflective silence. And, at the
end of it, deliberately introduced a new and entirely harmless topic of
conversation. She knew why he did that. She understood now that there
was more on his program than his manner last night had indicated. That
had been a preliminary, but the past wasn't to be ignored forever. A
time was coming when the issue between them should be brought up and
settled. But the time was not now, nor the place this crowded
restaurant.
She was perfectly docile to his new conversational lead, but the fact
that she yielded, that she knew it would be beyond her powers to force
that issue until he was ready for it, thrilled her--brought the blood
into her cheeks. The thing he was doing might be absurd, but his way of
doing it was not absurd. He had changed, somehow, or something had
changed between them. She engaged all his powers. If there should be a
struggle now, his mind would not betray him.
Just before they left the restaurant he asked her if she would dine with
him some night and go to a show afterward, and when she said she would
he asked what night would be convenient to her.
Her inflection was perfectly demure and even casual, but nothing could
keep the sudden "richening" that Jimmy Wallace had tried to describe out
of her voice, and the light of mischief danced openly in her eyes when
she said:
"Why, to-night's all right for me." She added, "If that's not too soon
for you."
He flushed and dropped his hands from the edge of the table where they'd
been resting, but he answered evenly enough:
"No, it's not too soon for me."
And then force of habit betrayed Rose into a stupid blunder that almost
precipitated a small quarrel.
"Tell me what you'd like to see," she said, "and I'll telephone for the
seats."
Then, at his horrified stare, she gasped out an explanation. "Roddy, I
didn't mean _buy_ the seats! I don't have to buy seats at any theater.
And at this time of year they're so glad to have somebody to give them
to that it seems sort of--wicked to pay real money."
"It's my mistake," he said. "Naturally, going to the theater wouldn't be
much of a--treat to you. I'd forgotten that."
"Going with _you_ would be a treat to me," she said earnestly. "That's
why I didn't think about the other part of it. But I needn't have been
so stupid as that. Will you forget I said it, please?"
He smiled now at himself, the first smile of genuine amusement she had
seen on his lips for--how long?
"And I needn't have been quite so horrified," he admitted. "All the
same, I hope I may manage to hit on a restaurant up-town somewhere,
where the waiter won't hand you the check."
It was on this note that he parted from her at Dane & Company's doorway.
But the ice didn't melt so fast as she had expected it would, and she
went to bed that night, after he'd brought her home in a taxi and,
having told the chauffeur to wait, formally escorted her to her
elevator, in a state of mind not quite so serenely happy as that of the
night before. She had held her breath a good many times during the
dinner, and even in the theater, where certain old memories and
associations sprang at them both, as it were, from ambush. But always,
at the breaking point, he managed to summon up unexpected reserves for
resistance, intrenched himself in the manner of his first call.
Rose both smiled and wept over her review of this evening, and was a
long while getting off to sleep. She felt she couldn't stand this state
of things much longer.
But it was not required of her. With the last of the next day's light,
the ice broke up and the floods came.
She had taken him to a studio tea in the upper sixties just off West End
Avenue, the proprietors of the studio being a tousled, bearded, blond
anarchist of a painter and his exceedingly pretty, smart,
frivolous-looking wife--who had more sense than she was willing to let
appear. They had lived in Paris for years, but the fact that he had a
German-sounding name had driven them back to New York. It was through
Gertrude that Rose had got acquainted with them--she having wrung from
Abe Shuman permission for the painter to prowl around back-stage and
make notes for a series of queerly lighted pictures of chorus-girls and
dancers--"Degas--and then some," as his admirers said. Gertrude was at
the tea and two or three others. It wasn't a party.
The two men had instinctively drawn controversial swords almost at sight
of each other and for the hour and a half that they were together the
combat raged mightily, to the unmixed satisfaction of both participants.
The feelings of the bystanders were perhaps more diverse, but Rose, at
least, enjoyed herself thoroughly, not only over seeing her husband's
big, formidable, finely poised mind in action again, but over a change
that had taken place in the nature of some of his ideas. The talk, of
course, ranged everywhere: Socialism, feminism, law and its crimes, art
and the social mind. Gertrude took a hand in it now and then, and it was
something Rodney said to her, in answer to a remark about dependent
wives, that really made Rose sit up.
"Wives aren't dependents," he said, "except as they let their husbands
make them think they are. Or only in very rare cases. Certainly I don't
know of a wife who doesn't render her husband valuable economic services
in exchange for her support. I can hardly imagine one. Of course if they
don't recognize that these services are valuable, they can be made to
feel dependent all right."
Gertrude demurred. She was willing to admit that a wife who took care of
a husband's house, cooked his meals, brought up his children, did him an
economic service and that if she didn't feel that she was earning her
way in the world it was because she had been imposed on. But here in New
York, anyway--she didn't know how it might be out in Chicago--one didn't
have to resort to his imagination to conjure up a wife who rendered none
of these services whatever. "They live, thousands of them, in smart
up-town apartments, don't do a lick of work, choke up Fifth Avenue with
their limousines in the afternoon, dress like birds of paradise, or as
near to it as they can come, dine with their husbands in the
restaurants, go to the first nights, eat lobster Newburg afterward, and
spend the next morning in bed getting over it. Those that can't afford
that kind of life scrape along giving the best imitation of it they know
how. Thousands of them--thousands and thousands. If they aren't
dependents ..."
"They're not, though," said Rodney. "Not a bit of it. They're giving
their husbands an economic service of a peculiarly indispensable sort.
The first requisite for success to the husbands of women who live like
that is the appearance of success. Their status, their front, is the one
thing they can't do without. Well, and it's a curious fact that a man
can't keep up his own front. If he tries to dress extravagantly, wear
diamonds, spend his money on himself, he doesn't look prosperous. He
looks a fool. People won't take him seriously. If he can get a wife
who's ornamental, who has attractive manners, who can convey the
appearance of being expensive without being vulgar, she's of a perfectly
enormous economic advantage to him. She'd only have to quit buying the
sort of clothes he could parade her in, and begin spoiling her looks
with a menial domestic routine, to draw howls of protest from him.
Only, so long as she doesn't call his bluff, she leaves him free
to think that he's doing it all for her and that except for her
extravagance--extravagance, mind you, that nine times out of ten he's
absolutely rammed down her throat--he'd be as rich, really, as he has to
try to pretend he is. He tells her so, with perfect sincerity--and she
believes it." Rose enjoyed the look in Gertrude's face as she listened
to that.
It was half past six or thereabout when they left the studio, and the
late May afternoon was at its loveliest. It was the sort of day, as
Rodney said, that convicted you, the minute you came out of it, of
abysmal folly in having wasted any of it indoors.
"I want to walk," said Rose, "after that tea, if I'm ever to want any
dinner."
He nodded a little absently, she thought, and fell in step beside her.
There was no mention at any time, of their destination.
It was a good while before Rose got the key to his preoccupation. They
had turned into the park at Sixty-sixth Street, and were half-way over
to the Fifth Avenue corner at Fifty-ninth, before he spoke out.
"On a day like this," he said, "to have sat there for two or three
mortal hours arguing about stale ideas! Threshing over the straw--almost
as silly an occupation as chess--when we might have been out here, being
alive! But it must have seemed natural to you to hear me going on like
that." And then with a burst, before she could speak:
"You must remember me as the most blindly opinionated fool in the
world!"
She caught her breath, then said very quietly, with a warm little laugh
in her voice, "That's not how I remember you, Rodney."
She declined to help him when he tried to scramble back to the safe
shores of conventional conversation. That sort of thing had lasted long
enough. She just walked along in step with him and, for her part, in
silence. It wasn't long before he fell silent too.
A thing that Rose hadn't counted on was the effect produced on both of
them just by walking along like this together, side by side, in step.
Just the rhythm of it established a sort of communion--and it was a
communion fortified by many associations. Practically the whole of their
courtship, from the day when he dropped off the street-car with her in
the rain and walked her over to the elevated and kept her note-books,
down to the day on the bridge over the Drainage Canal in the swirl of
that March blizzard, when she'd felt his first embrace, had been on foot
like this, tramping along side by side; miles and miles and miles, as
she'd told her mother. And there had been other walks since. Do you
remember the last time they had walked together? It was from the stage
door of the Globe theater to her little room on North Clark Street. Rose
remembered it and she felt sure that he did. The same singing wire of
memories and associations that had vibrated between them then was
vibrating between them now and drawing up palpably tighter with every
half-mile they walked. Their pace quickened a little.
Straight down Fifth Avenue they walked to the corner of Thirteenth
Street, and then west. And when they stopped and faced each other in the
entrance to the gray brick building where Rose's apartment was, it was
at the end of a mile or more of absolutely unbroken silence. And facing
each other there, all that was said between them was her:
"You'll come in, won't you?" and his, "Yes."
But the gravity with which she'd uttered the invitation and the
tenseness of his acceptance of it, the square look that passed between
them, marked an end of something and the beginning of something new.
She left him in her sitting-room while she went through into her bedroom
to take off her hat and jacket and take a glance into her mirror. When
she came back, she found him standing at her window looking out. He
didn't turn when she came in, but almost immediately he began speaking.
She went rather limp at the sound of his voice and dropped down on a
cushioned ottoman in front of the fireplace, and squeezed her hands
together between her knees.
"I don't know how much you will have understood," he began, "probably a
good deal. You told me in Dubuque--as you were quite right to tell
me--that I mustn't come back to you. And now I've disobeyed you and
come. What I hope you will have guessed is that I wouldn't have come
except that I'd something to tell you--something different from
the--idiocies I tormented you with in Dubuque;--something I felt you
were entitled to be told. But I felt--this is what you won't have
understood--I felt that I hadn't any right to speak to you at all, about
anything vital, about anything that concerned us, until I'd given you
some sort of guarantee--until I'd shown you that I was a person it was
possible to deal reasonably with."
She smiled, then pressed her hands suddenly to her eyes.
"I understood," she said.
"Well, then ..." But he didn't at once go on. Stood there a while longer
at the window, then crossed the room and brought up before her
book-shelves, staring blindly at the titles. He hadn't looked at her
even as he crossed the room.
"Oh, it's a presumptuous thing to try to say," he broke out at last, "a
pitifully unnecessary thing to say, because you must know it without my
telling you. But when you went away you said--you said it was because
you hadn't--my--friendship! You said that was the thing you wanted and
that you were going to try to earn it. And in Dubuque you told me that
I'd evidently never be able to understand that you could have been happy
in that room on Clark Street, that I'd wanted to 'rescue' you from; that
I'd never be able to see that the thing you were doing there was a fine
thing, worth doing, entitled to my respect. Well, the things I'd been
saying to you and the things I'd been doing, justified you in thinking
that. But what I've come down here to say is--is that now--at last--I do
see it."
She would have spoken then if she could have commanded her voice, and as
it was, the sound she made conveyed her intention to him, for he turned
on her quickly as if to interrupt the unspoken words, and went on with
an almost savage bitterness.
"Oh, I'm under no illusions about it. I had my chance to see, when
seeing would have meant something to you--helped you. When any one but
the blindest sort of fool would have seen. I didn't. Now, when the thing
is patent for the world to see--now that Violet Williamson has seen it
and Constance, and God knows who of the rest of them, who were so
tactful and sympathetic about my 'disgrace'--now that you've won your
fight without any help from me ... Without any help! In spite of every
hindrance that my idiocy could put in your way! Now, after all--I come
and tell you that you've earned the thing you've set out to get."
There was a little silence after that. She got up and took the post he
had abandoned at the window.
"Why did you do it, Roddy?" she asked. "I mean, why did you want to come
and tell me?"
"Why, in the first place," he said, "I wanted to get back a little of my
self-respect. I couldn't get that until I'd told you."
This time the silence was longer.
"What else did you want?" she asked. "What--in the second place?"
"I don't know why I put it like that," he said. "Please don't think ...
I can't bear to have you think that I came down here to--ask anything of
you--anything in the way of a reward for having seen what is so plain to
every one. I haven't any--claim at all. I want to earn your friendship.
It's the biggest thing I've got to hope for. But I've no idea that you
can hand it out to me ready-made. I believe you'd do it if you could.
But you said once, yourself, that it wasn't a thing that could be given.
It was a thing that had to be earned. And you were right about that, as
you were about so many other things. Well, I'm going to try to earn it."
"Is that--all you want?" she asked, and then hearing the little gasp he
gave, she swung round quickly and looked at him. It was pretty dark in
the room, but his face in the dusk seemed to have whitened.
"Is friendship all you want of me, Roddy?" she asked again.
She stood there waiting, a full minute, in silence. Then she said, "You
don't have to tell me that. Because I know. Oh--oh, my dear, how well I
know!"
He didn't come to her; just stood there, gripping the corner of her
bookcase and staring at her silhouette, which was about all he could see
of her against the window. At last he said, in a strained dry voice
she'd hardly have known for his:
"If you know that--if I've let you see that, then I've done just
about the last despicable thing there was left for me to do. I've
come down here and--made you feel sorry for me. So that with
that--divine--kindliness of yours, you're willing to give
me--everything."
He straightened up and came a step nearer. "Well, I won't have it, I
tell you! I don't know how you guessed. If I'd dreamed I was betraying
that to you ...! Don't I know--it's burnt into me so that I'll never
forget--what the memory of my love must be to you--the memory of the
hideous things it's done to you. And now, after all that--after you've
won your fight--alone--and stand where you stand now--for me to come
begging! And take a gift like that! I tell you it _is_ pity. It can't be
anything else."
There was another minute of silence, and then he heard her make a little
noise in her throat, a noise that would have been a sob had there not
been something like a laugh in it. The next moment she said, "Come over
here, Roddy," and as he hesitated, as if he hadn't understood, she
added, "I want you to look at me. Over here by the window, where there's
light enough to see me by."
He came wonderingly, very slowly, but at last, with her outstretched
hand she reached him and drew him around between her and the window.
"Look into my face," she commanded. "Look into my eyes; as far in as you
can. Is it--oh, my dearest"--the sob of pure joy came again--"is it pity
that you see?"
She'd had her hands upon his shoulders, but now they clasped themselves
behind his head. Her vision of him had swum away in a blur, and without
the support she got from him she'd have been swaying giddily.
"Roddy, old man," she said, "if I hadn't seen--in the first--ten
minutes, the thing you--meant so hard I shouldn't see--I think it would
have--killed me. If I hadn't seen that you loved me--after all; after
everything. After all the tortures you'd suffered, through me. Because
that's all I want--in the world."
At that he put his arms around her and pulled her up to him. But the
manner of it was so different from his old embraces that presently she
drew him around so that what little light there was fell on his face,
and searched it thoughtfully.
"You _do_ believe me, Roddy, don't you--that there isn't any pity about
it? There isn't any room for pity. There's nothing in me at all but just
a great big--want of you. Don't you understand that?"
He did understand it with his mind, but he was a little dazed, like
one who has stood too near where the lightning struck. The hope
he had kept buried alive so long--buried alive because it wouldn't
die--could not be brought out into a blinding glory like this without
shrinking--pain--exquisite terrifying pain.
The knowledge she had acquired by her own suffering stood her in good
stead now. She did not mistake, as the Rose he had married might have
done, the weakness of his response for coldness--indifference.
She went back and began making love to him more gently; released herself
from his arms, led him over to her one big chair, and made him sit down
in it, settled herself upon the arm of it and contented herself with one
of his hands. Presently he took one of hers, bent his face down over it
and brushed the back of it with his lips.
The timidity of that caress, with all it revealed to her, was too much
for her. She swallowed one sob, and another, but the next one got away
from her and she broke out in a passionate fit of weeping.
That roused him from his daze a little, and he pulled her down in his
arms--held her tight--comforted her.
When she got herself in hand again, she got up, went away to wash her
face, and coming back in the room again, lighted a reading-lamp and drew
down the blinds.
"Rose," he said presently, "what are we going to do?"
She knew she was not answering the true intent of his question when she
said:
"Well, for one thing we can get a little supper. I don't know what we've
got to eat, but we won't care--to-night."
There was a ring of decision in his voice that startled her a little
when he said:
"No, we won't do that to-night. We'll go out somewhere to a
restaurant."
Their eyes met--unwavering.
"Yes," she said, "that's what we'll do."
They didn't talk much across the table in the deserted little Italian
restaurant they went to. Neither of them afterward could remember
anything they'd said. They ate their meal in a sort of grave contented
happiness that was reaching down deeper and deeper into them every
minute, and they walked back to the gray brick building in Thirteenth
Street, arm in arm, hand in hand, in silence. But when she stopped
there, he said:
"Let's walk a little farther, Rose. There are things we've got to
decide, and--and I'm not going in with you again to-night."
She caught her breath at that, and her hand tightened its hold on his.
But she walked on with him.
He said, presently, "You understand, don't you?"
She answered, "Oh, my dear!--yes." But she added, a little shakily, "I
wish we had a magic-carpet right here, that we could fly home on."
Then they walked a while in silence.
At last he said: "There's this we can do. I can go back to my hotel
to-night, and tell them that I'm expecting you--that I'm expecting my
wife to join me there. To-morrow? And then I can come and get you and
bring you there. It's not home, and it's not the place I'd choose
for--for a honeymoon, but ..."
The way she echoed the word set him thinking. But before his thoughts
had got to their destination she said:
"Shall we make it a real honeymoon, Roddy--make it as complete as we
can? Forget everything and let all the world be ..."
He supplied a word for her, "Rose-color?"
She accepted it with a caressing little laugh, "... for a while?"
"That's what I was fumbling for," he said, "but I can't think very
straight to-night. I've got it now, though. That cottage we had--before
the twins were born--down on the Cape. There won't be a soul there this
time of the year. We'd have the world to ourselves."
"Yes," she said, "for a little while, we'd want it like that. But after
a while--after a day or two, could we have the babies? Could the nurse
bring them on to me and then go straight back, so that I could have
them--and you, altogether?"
He said, "You darling!" But he couldn't manage more than that.
A little later he suggested that they could get the place by telegraph
and could set out for it to-morrow.
She laughed and asked, "Will you let me be as silly as I like for once?
Will you give me a week--well, till Saturday; that would do--to get
ready in?"
"Get ready?" he echoed.
"Clothes and thinks," she said. "A--trousseau, don't you see? I've been
so busy making clothes for other people that I've got just about nothing
myself. And I'd like ... But I don't really care, Roddy. I'll go with
you to-morrow, 'as is,' if you want me to."
"No," he said. "We'll do it the other way."
And then he took her back to the gray brick entrance and, just out of
range of the elevator man, kissed her good night.
"But will you telephone to me as soon as you wake up in the morning, so
that I'll know it's true?"
She nodded. Then her eyes went wide and she clung to him.
"_Is_ it true, Roddy? Is it possible for a thing to come back like that?
Are we really the old Rodney and Rose, planning our honeymoon again? It
wasn't quite three years ago. Three years next month. Will it be like
that?"
"Not like that, perhaps," he said, "exactly. It will be better by all
we've learned and suffered since."
CHAPTER V
THE BEGINNING
There was a sense in which this prediction of Rodney's about their
honeymoon was altogether true, They had great hours--hours of an
emotional intensity greater than any they had known during that former
honeymoon, greater by all they had learned and suffered since--hours
that repaid all that suffering, and could not have been captured at any
smaller price. There were hours when the whole of their two selves
literally seemed transfused into one essence; when there was nothing of
either of them that was not the other; when all their thoughts,
impulses, desires, flowered spontaneously out of a common mind. There
was no precalculating these experiences. They came upon them, seized
them, carried them off.
One of these, that neither of them will ever forget, came at the end of
a long tramp through the dawn of their second day. They had been
swinging along in almost unbroken silence through the gray mist, had
mounted a little hillock and halted, hand in hand, as the first lance of
sunlight transfixed and flushed the still vaporous air, and it had
seemed to them, as they watched, breathless, while the sun mounted, that
the whole of the life that lay before them was a track of gold like that
which blazed across the sea, leading to an intolerable glory.
And there were other hours of equally memorable transfiguration, which
their surroundings had nothing whatever to do with--hours lighted only
by the flame that flared up from their two selves.
But life, of course, can not be made up of hours like that. No sane
person can even want to live in a perpetual ecstasy. What makes a
mountain peak is the fall away into the surrounding valleys.
In their valleys of commonplace, every-day existence--and these
occurred even in their first days together--they were stiff, shy,
self-conscious with each other. And their attempt to ignore this fact
only made the self-consciousness the worse. It troubled and bewildered
both of them.
Rose's misgiving had been justified. They weren't the old Rodney and
Rose. Those two splendid careless savages, who had lived for a fortnight
on an island in the midst of Martin Whitney's carefully preserved
solitude in Northern Wisconsin, accepting the gifts of the gods with
such joyous confidence that none of them could ever turn bitter, those
two zestful children, had ceased to exist.
John Galbraith had spoken truth when he said there was no such thing as
a fresh start. For good or evil, you were the product of your
yesterdays. The nightmare tour on the road with _The Girl Up-stairs_
company was a part of Rose; the day in Centropolis, the night when
Galbraith had made love to her. The hour in the University Club, when
Rodney's heart had first shrunk from an unacknowledged fear; the days
and weeks of humiliation and distress that had succeeded it, were a part
of him--an ineffaceable part.
So it was natural enough--though not, therefore, the less
distressing--that Rose should note, with wonder, a tendency in him to
revert to the manner which had characterized his first call on her in
New York; a tendency to be--of all things--polite. He didn't swear any
more, nor contradict. He chose his words, got up when she did, picked up
things she dropped. And when she was quite sure she was safe from
discovery, she sometimes wept forlornly, for the rough, outrageous,
absent-minded, imperious lover of the old days.
She did not know that she was different too--as remote from the girl she
had been during the first six months of their marriage--the girl who,
"all eyes," had held her breath while Doctor Randolph told her things;
the girl who had smiled over Bertie Willis' love-making, because she
didn't know that such things happened except in books--as he was from
the old Rodney. Even Violet had seen, in the glimpse she'd caught across
two taxicabs, that her smile was somehow different, and James Randolph
had come back from his tea with her in the Knickerbocker, saying that
she was a thousand years old.
So it was not wonderful that Rodney should have found a new mystery in
her; nor that, seeing in her look, sometimes--especially when it was not
meeting his own--the reflections of a thousand experiences he had not
shared with her, he should have felt that she was a long way off. And
his heart ached for the old Rose, whom he had so completely
"surrounded"--the Rose who had consulted him about the menus for her
dinners, who had brought him all her little troubles; who had
tried--bless her!--to study law, and had stolen into court to hear his
argument, so that she could talk with him. Whatever the future might
have for him, it would never bring that Rose back.
The arrival of the twins, in the convoy of a badly flustered--and, to
tell the truth, a somewhat scandalized--Miss French, simplified the
situation a little--by complicating it! They absolutely enforced a
routine. They had needs that must be met on the minute. And they gave
Rose and Rodney so many occupations that the contemplation of their
complicated states of mind was much abridged.
But even her babies brought Rose a disappointment along with them. From
the time of the receipt of Miss French's telegram acknowledging Rodney's
and telling them what train she and the twins would take, Rose had been
telling off the hours in mounting excitement. The two utterly adorable
little creatures, as the pictures of them in Rodney's pocketbook showed
them to be, who were, miraculously--incredibly--hers, were coming to
bring motherhood to her; a long-deferred payment for the labor and the
agony with which she had borne them; the realization of half-forgotten
hopes that had, during the period of her pregnancy, been the mainstay of
her life. There was now no Mrs. Ruston, no Harriet, no plausible
physician to keep them away from her. Rose had a smile of tender pity
for the memory of the girl who had struggled so ineffectually and yet
with such heart-breaking earnestness to break the filaments of the web
they'd spun around her.
No, it wouldn't be like that now. Rodney had agreed explicitly that
Miss French was to be allowed to stay only as long as Rose wanted her;
only for the few days--or hours--she would need for making herself
mistress of their régime. Then the nurse was to be sent away on a
vacation and Rose should have her children to herself.
She didn't go to Boston with Rodney to meet them; nor even to the
station; stayed in the cottage, ostensibly to see to it, up to the very
last minute, that the fires were right (June had come in cold and rainy)
and in general to be ready on the moment to produce anything that their
rather unforeseeable needs might call for. Her real reason was a
shrinking from having her first meeting with them in the confusion of
arrival on a station platform, under the eyes of the world, amid the
distractions of things like luggage.
Rodney understood this well enough, and arriving at the cottage, he
clambered out of the wagon with them and carried them both straight in
to Rose, leaving the nurse and the bewildering paraphernalia of travel
for a second trip.
Rose, in the passionate surge of gratified desire that came with the
sight of them, caught them from him, crushed them up tight against her
breast--and frightened them half to death. So that without
dissimulation, they howled and brought Miss French flying to the rescue.
Rose didn't make a tragedy of it; managed a smile at herself, though she
suspected she'd cry when she got the chance, and subjected her ideas to
an instantaneous revision. They were--_persons_, those two funnily
indignant little mites, with their own ideas, their own preferences, and
the perfectly adequate conviction of being entitled to them. How would
she herself have liked it, to have a total stranger, fifteen feet high
or so, snatch at her like that?
She was rather apologetic all day, and got her reward; especially from
the boy, who was an adventurous and rather truculent baby, much she
fancied, as his father must once have been, and who took to her more
quickly than the girl did. Indeed, the second Rodney fell in love with
her almost as promptly as his father had done before him. But little
Portia wasn't very far behind. Two days sufficed for the conquest of
the pair of them.
The really disquieting discovery awaited the time when the wire-edge of
novelty about this adventure in motherhood had worn off; when she could
bathe them, dress them, feed them their very strictly regimented meals,
without being spurred to the highest pitch of alertness by the fear of
making a mistake--forgetting something, like the juice of a half orange
at ten o'clock in the morning, the omission of which might have--who
knew what disastrous consequences!
That attitude can't last any woman long, and Rose, with her wonderfully
clever hands, her wits trained--as the wits of persons who had worked
for John Galbraith were always trained--not to be told the same thing
twice, her pride keeping in sharp focus the determination that Rodney
should see that she could be as good a nurse as Miss French--Rose wore
off that nervous tenseness over her new job very quickly. Within a week
she had a routine established that was noiseless--frictionless.
But do you remember how aghast she was over the forty weeks John
Galbraith had talked about as the probable run of _The Girl Up-stairs_;
her consternation over the idea of just going on doing the same thing
over and over again, "around and round, like a horse at the end of a
pole"? What she would like to do, she had told him, now that this was
done, was to begin on something else.
Well, it was with something the same feeling of consternation that,
having thrown herself heart and soul into the task of planning and
setting in motion a routine for two year-and-a-half-old babies, she
found herself straightening up and saying "What next?" And realizing,
that as far as this job was concerned, there was no "next." The supreme
merit of her care, from now on, would be--barring emergencies--the
placid continuation of that routine. There were no heroics about
motherhood--save in emergency, once more. It was a question of
remembering a hundred trivial details, and executing them in the same
way every day. It was a question of doing a thousand little services,
not one of which was serious enough to occupy her mind, every one of
which was capable of being done almost automatically--but not quite! The
whole of the attention was never quite taken, and yet it was never, all
the way around the clock, entirely left free. And her love for them,
which had become almost as intense and overmastering a thing as her love
for her husband, could never be expressed fully, as was her love for
him. It would be cruelly unfair, she recognized that, to emotionalize
over them--force them.
It was a fine relation. It was, perhaps, the very finest in the world.
But as a job, it wasn't so satisfactory. Four-fifths of it, anyway,
could be done with better results for the children by a placid,
unimaginative, tolerably stupid person, who had no stronger feeling for
them than the mild temporary affection they could excite in any one not
a monster. And the other fifth of it wasn't strictly a job at all.
On the whole, then, leaving their miraculous hours out of the
account--and, being incommensurable, imponderable, they couldn't be
included in an inventory--their honeymoon, considered as an attempt to
revisit Arcady, to seize a golden day that looked neither toward the
past nor toward the future, complete in itself, perfect--was a failure.
It was not until, pretty ruefully, they acknowledged this, tore up their
artificial resolution not to look at the future, and deliberately set
themselves to the contemplation of a life that would have to take into
account complex and baffling considerations, that their honeymoon became
a success. It was well along in their month that this happened.
Rose had spent a maddening sort of day, a day that had been all edges,
trying not to let herself feel hurt over fantastic secondary meanings
which it was possible to attach to some of the things Rodney had said,
frying to be cheerful and sensible, and to ignore the patent fact that
his cheerfulness was as forced and unnatural a thing as hers. The
children--as a rule the best-behaved little things in the world--had
been refractory. They'd refused to take their morning nap for some
reason or other, and had been fractious ever since. So, after their
supper, when they'd finally gone off to sleep, and Rose had rejoined
Rodney in the sitting-room, she was in a state where it did not take
much to set her off.
It was not much that did; nothing more, indeed, than the fact that she
found her husband brooding in front of the fire, and that the smile with
which he greeted her was a little too quick and bright and mechanical,
and that it soon faded out. The Rodney of her memories had never done
things like that. If you found him sitting in a chair, you found him
reading a book. When he was thinking something out he tramped back and
forth, twisted his face up, made gestures! That habit couldn't have
changed. It was just that he wasn't being natural with her! Couldn't
feel at home with her! Before she knew it, she was crying.
He asked, in consternation, what the matter was. What had happened?
"Nothing," she said. "Absolutely nothing. Really."
"Then it's just--that you're not happy. With me, like this." He brought
that out gravely, a word at a time; as though they hurt.
"Are you happy? With me--like this?" she countered.
It was a question he could not answer categorically and she did not give
him time for anything else. "What's the matter with us, Roddy?" she
demanded. "We ought to be happy. We meant to be. We said that we'd been
through a lot, and that probably there was a lot mere to go through--in
the way of working things out, at least--and that we'd take a month just
for nothing but to be happy in--just for pure joy." Her voice broke in a
sob over that. "And here we are--like this!"
"It hasn't all been like this," he said. "There have been hours, a day
or two, that I'd go through the whole thing for, again, if necessary."
She nodded assent to that. "But the rest of the time!" she cried. "Why
can't we be--comfortable together? Why ... Roddy, why can't you be
natural with me? Like your old self. Why don't you roar at me any more?
And swear when you run into things? I've never seen you formal before
--not with anybody. Not even with strangers. And now you're formal with
me."
The rueful grin with which he acknowledged the truth of this indictment
was more like him, and it cheered her immensely. She answered it with
one of her own, dried her eyes and asked again, more collectedly:
"Well, can you tell me why?"
"Why, it seemed to me," he said, "that it was you who were different.
And you have changed, of course, down inside, more than I have. You've
been through things in the last year and a half; found out things that I
know nothing about, except as I have read about them in books. I've
never had to ask a stranger for a job. I've never been--brought to bay,
the way you were in that damned town of Centropolis (I'd like to burn
it). And other things--horrible things, have--have come so near you,
that if it hadn't been for that--white flame of yours, they'd have
marked you. When I think of those things I feel like a schoolboy beside
you. You've no idea how--how innocent a man can be, Rose. That's not the
tradition, but it's true. So, when I remember how things used to be
between us, how I used to be the one who knew things, and how I preached
and spouted, I get to feeling that the man you remember must look to you
now, like--well, like a schoolboy. Showing off."
She stared at him incredulously. "But that's downright morbid," she
said. "You don't have to go--into the gutter to learn things. And what
you say about innocence ... A man can't keep his innocence by being
ignorant, Roddy. If he's kept it, he must have--fought for it. I know
that."
She was still deeply disturbed. "It's horrible that I should make you
feel like that," she concluded.
"It isn't you," he told her. "It's just--the situation. I can't help
feeling that I'm taken--on approval. Oh, it's _got_ to be like that!
There are things that, with all the forgiveness in the world, you can't
forget. And until you have seen that I am different, that I have made
myself different...."
"What things?" she demanded.
"Well--a thing," he amended. "You know what I mean. The night I came to
the stage door of the Globe for you."
She colored at that, and then, to his amazement, she smiled.
"I've been such a coward about that," she said. "I've tried to tell you
a dozen times up here, and I've been afraid you'd be--shocked. I expect
you will be, now. But I've got to tell you just the same.
"Roddy, when you were talking to me, there in the hotel at Dubuque,
telling me how horrified you were over that, it came over me all at once
that I had nothing to forgive; that if the thing was a fault at all, it
was mine as much as yours, and that it wasn't so much of a fault as
an--accident. You couldn't help hating me, and you couldn't help loving
me. And you did both at once. And I, when I could have told you
something that would have made you--well, hate me less, anyhow--didn't
take the trouble. I said to myself then that it was too bad it happened,
but that it wasn't, at least, your fault. And I was afraid to tell you
so.
"But, Roddy, during these last months, down here in New York, I've
been--glad it happened. It's been something to hold on to, that your
love of me was strong enough, so that the hate couldn't kill it. It
helped me to hope that it would be strong enough, some day or other, to
bring you back to me. And without that hope, I couldn't have gone on.
It's what I have lived on. The only thing that any of my--successes has
meant has been that perhaps it brought that nearer."
She gave a shaky laugh. "On approval!" Her eyes filled again. "Roddy,
you can't mean that."
She came over and sat down in his lap, and slid her arm around his neck.
"This is where we'll begin!" she said. "That I'll never--whatever
happens--walk out on you again. Whether things go well or badly with us,
we'll work it out, somehow, together."
It was not until she heard the long shuddering sigh he drew at that, and
felt him go limp under her, that she realized how genuine his fear had
been--the perfectly preposterous fear that if their new experiment
didn't come up to her anticipation she'd tell him so, and leave him
once more. This time for good.
It was a good while before they took up a rational discussion again, but
at last she said:
"It will take working out, though. We've been shirking that. Hadn't we
better begin?"
He assented. "Only, you'll have to get up," he said, "and sit down
somewhere else. Out of reach."
She smiled as she obeyed him. "It's hard for a woman to remember," she
said, "that a man can't think about other things when he's making love,
and can't think about the person he's in love with when he's doing other
things. Because, that's about the easiest thing a woman does."
She saw by the expression that went over his face that her remark had
chilled him a little. He didn't like to think of her as "a woman," nor
as of his relation to her as accounted for by the fact that he was "a
man." He'd generalize fast enough about the world at large, but it would
always be hard for him to include her and himself in his
generalizations.
"Well," he said when he'd got his pipe alight, "it's the first question
I asked you after--after I got my eyes open: What are we going to do?"
"I told Alice Perosini," she said, "the day before we left to come up
here, that I'd come back in a month, and that I'd stay until I'd
finished all the work that we were contracted for. I felt I had to do
that. It would have been so beastly unfair not to. You understand, don't
you?"
"Of course," he said. "You couldn't consider anything else. But then
what?"
"Then," she said after a silence, "then, if it's what you want me to do,
Roddy, I'll come back to Chicago--for good."
"Give up your business, you mean?" he asked quickly.
She nodded. "It can't be done out there," she said. "All the big
productions that there's any money in are made in New York. I'll come
back and just be your wife. I'll keep your house and mother the
children, and--what was it you said to Gertrude?--maintain your status,
if you don't think I'm spoiled for that."
That last phrase, though, was said with a smile, which he answered with
one of his own and threw in in parenthesis, "You ought to hear Violet go
on, and Constance." But with an instant return to seriousness, he said:
"I've not asked that, Rose. I wouldn't dream of asking it!"
"I know," she said. "It's a thing I'm glad you let me give--unasked. But
I mean it, Roddy. I've meant it from the first, when I told you you were
all I wanted. There wasn't any string tied to that."
"I know," he said. "But all the same, it wouldn't work, Rose."
"There's a real job there," she persisted, "just in being successfully
the wife of a successful man. I can see that now. I never saw it when it
was my job. Hardly caught a glimpse of it. I didn't even see my bills;
let you pay them down at the office, with all your own work that you had
to do."
"It wasn't me," he said. "It was Miss Beach."
She stared at that and gave a short laugh. "If I'd known that ...!" she
said.
Then she came back to the point.
"It is a real job, and I think I could learn to do it pretty well. And
of course a wife's the only person who can do it properly."
Still he shook his head. But he hadn't, as yet, any reasoned answer to
make, except as before, that it wouldn't work.
"I shouldn't mind the money end of it," she said. "I mean living on
yours. I know I can earn my way, and I know you know it. So that
wouldn't matter. I'd never feel like a beggar again, Roddy."
"I know," he agreed. "But that isn't it. It isn't a question of what
you'd like to be, or are willing to be. It's a question of what you are.
You're something more than just my wife. You've got certain
talents--certain proved capacities. That's as true as that I am
something besides--just your husband. There you are! Try it on the other
way around. Suppose I should offer to give up my practise and come down
here to live with you--be just your husband and, say, your business
manager. You can see that that's preposterous. Or, for that matter, we
could both quit. I've made a devil of a lot of money lately. I've an
income from my investments of from twenty-five to thirty thousand a year
that we could live on, and not do a blessed thing but be husband and
wife to each other. Like the McCreas. But it wouldn't work. You've got
to be what you are, that's the point, and somehow or other, cut your
life to fit. I expect that's one of the things that's been the trouble
with us down here. We've both been trying so damned hard to _be_
something. And that won't work."
"What will work then?" she asked. And this was a question he couldn't
answer.
"We've just got to go ahead," he said at last, "and see what happens.
Perhaps you can work it out so that you can do part of your work at
home. We could move the nursery and give you Florence's old studio. And
then it would do if you only came down here for your two big
seasons--fall and spring."
"That doesn't seem fair to you," she protested. "You deserve a real
wife, Roddy; not somebody dashing in and dashing out."
"I don't deserve anything I can't get," he said. "I'd rather have a part
interest in you than to possess, lock, stock and barrel, any other woman
I can think of."
She came back to him again and settled down in his arms.
"You used to possess me, lock, stock and barrel," she said. "You can do
it again, if you'll say the word, Rodney."
He shook his head. "That's just what I can't do," he told her. "That's
gone and we'll never get it back. And I don't believe I'd have it back
if I could. For one thing, you can't possess without being possessed. I
know that back in those days you're talking about I used to try to fight
you out of my thoughts. Used to stay down late at the office, not
working, just--trying not to think about you. Trying to save out part of
myself from being--saturated with you. It was the fact that I was so
terribly important to you that used to make me feel like that; the fact
of your--dependence--I don't mean for money--on me. I used to think--it
wasn't your lover that thought that; it was the other man--that it
would be a perfectly wonderful relief to me if you could just get some
interest that left me out. And all the while the lover in me was trying
to have all of you there was. It's a hard thing to talk sense about."
"A man told me," Rose said, "--John Galbraith told me, that he couldn't
be a woman's friend and her lover at the same time, any more than a
steel spring could be made soft so that it would bend in your fingers
like copper, and still be a spring. He said that was true of him,
anyway, and he felt sure it was true of nine men out of a dozen. Do you
think it's true? Have we got to decide which we'll be?"
"We can't decide," he said with an impatient laugh. "That's just what
I've been telling you. We've got to take what we can get. We've got to
work out the relation between ourselves that is _our_ relation--the Rose
and Rodney relation. It'll probably be a little different from any
other. There'll be friendship in it, and there'll be love in it. Imagine
our 'deciding' that we wouldn't be lovers! But I guess that what
Galbraith said was true to this extent: that each of those will be more
or less at the expense of the other. It won't spring quite so well, and
it will bend a little."
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.