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

it pleased her that this should be so--that the ascetic in him should pay her the tribute of fear.

Afterward, of course, she felt like lashing herself for having felt like that and for having replied, in a spirit of pure coquetry, in a voice of studied, cool, indifferent good humor:

"That's a good idea, Roddy. I'm glad you're not coming back. Good night."


CHAPTER V

RODNEY SMILED

It was with a reminiscent smile that Rose sat down before her telephone the next morning and called a number from memory. Less than a year ago, it had been such a thrilling adventure to call the number of that fraternity house down at the university and ask, in what she conceived to be a businesslike way, for Mr. Haines. And then, presently, to hear the voice of the greatest half-back the varsity had boasted of in years, saying in answer to her "Hello, Harry," "Hello, Rose."

It was really less than a year, and yet it was so immensely long ago, judged by anything but the calendar, that the natural way to think of him was as a married man with a family somewhere and faint memories of the days when he was a student and used to flirt with a girl called Rose something--Rose Stanton, that was it!

It was during one of the interminable waking hours of last night that she had thought of the half-back as a person who might be able, and willing, to do her the service she wanted, and she had spent a long while wondering how she could get track of him. Then the logic of the calendar had forced the conviction on her, that he was, in all probability still at the university, dozing through recitations, or lounging about the corridors, in a blue serge suit and a sweater with a C on it, waiting for some other girl to come out of her class-room; and that between the hours of ten-fifteen and eleven, it was altogether likely that she'd find him again, as she had so many times in the past, at his fraternity house, going through the motions of getting up an eleven o'clock recitation. It was absurd enough now to find herself calling the old number and asking again for Mr. Haines. The dreamlike unreality of it grew stronger, when the voice that answered said, "Just a minute," and then bellowed out his old nickname--"Hello, Tiny! Phone!" and, after a wait, she heard his own very deep bass.

"Hello. What is it?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Again he assured her that he hadn't anything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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