The Real Adventure by Henry Kitchell Webster (pdf to ebook reader txt) 📕

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