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

very emotion she was trying to capture for them--felt like cradling his head in her weak arms, kissing him, crying over him a little.

She wouldn't have been allowed to do that to the babies anyway. They were going to be terribly well brought up, those twins; that was apparent from the beginning. They had two nurses all to themselves, quite apart from Miss Harris, who looked after Rose: one uncannily infallible person, omniscient in baby lore--thoroughgoing, logical, efficient, remorseless as a German staff officer; and a bright-eyed, snub-nosed, smart little maid, for an assistant, who boiled bottles, washed clothes, and, at certain stated hours, over a previously determined route, at a given number of miles per hour, wheeled the twins out, in a duplex perambulator, which Harriet had acquired as soon as the need for it had become evident.

Miss Harris was to go away to another case at the end of the month. But Mrs. Ruston (she was the staff officer) and Doris, the maid, were destined, it appeared, to be as permanent as the babies. But Rose had the germ of an idea of her own about that.

They got them named with very little difficulty. The boy was Rodney, of course, after his father and grandfather before him. Rose was a little afraid Rodney would want the girl named after her, and was relieved to find he didn't. There'd never in the world be but one Rose for him, he said. So Rose named the girl Portia.

They kept Rose in bed for three weeks; flat on her back as much as possible, which was terribly irksome to her, since her strength and vitality were coming back so fast. The irksomeness was added to by a horrible harness largely of whalebone. Rose got the notion, too, that the purpose of all this was not quite wholly hygienic. Harriet had said once: "You know the most distinguished thing about you, Rose, dear--about your looks, I mean--is that lovely boyish line of yours. It will be a perfect crime if you let yourself spread out."

This wasn't the sort of consideration to make the inactivity any easier to endure. She might have rebelled, had it not been for that germinant idea of hers. It wouldn't do, she saw, in the light of that, to give them any excuse for calling her unreasonable.

At the end of this purgatorial three weeks, she was carried to a chair and allowed to sit up a little, and by the end of another, to walk about--just a few steps at a time of course. One Sunday morning, Rodney carried her up-stairs to the nursery to see her babies bathed. This was a big room at the top of the house which Florence McCrea had always vaguely intended to make into a studio. But, in a paralysis of indecision as to what sort of studio to make it (book-binding, pottery and art weaving called her about equally) she had left the thing bare.

Rodney had given Harriet _carte blanche_ to go ahead and fit it up before he and Rose came back from the seashore, and the layette was a monument to Harriet's thoroughgoing practicality. There had been a wild day of supplementing of course, when it was discovered that there were two babies instead of one.

The room, when they escorted Rose into it, was a terribly impressive place. The spirit of a barren sterile efficiency brooded everywhere. And this appearance of barrenness obtained despite the presence of an enormous number of articles; a pair of scales, a perfect battery of electric heaters of various sorts; rows of vacuum jars for keeping things cold or hot; a small sterilizing oven; instruments and appliances that Rose couldn't guess the uses or the names of. Mrs. Ruston, of course, was master of them all, and Doris flew about to do her bidding, under a watchful and slightly suspicious eye. (Doris was the sort of looking girl who might be suspected of kissing a tiny pink hand when no one was looking.)

Rose surveyed this scene, just as she would have surveyed a laboratory, or a factory where they make something complicated, like watches. That's what it was, really. Those two pink little objects, in their two severely sanitary baskets, were factory products. At precise and unalterable intervals, a highly scientific compound of fats and proteids was put into them. They were inspected, weighed, submitted to a routine of other processes. And in all the routine, there was nothing that their mother, now they were fairly born, was wanted for. Indispensable to a certain point, no doubt. But after that rather the other way about--an obstacle to the routine instead of a part of it.

Rose kept these ideas to herself and kept her eye on young Doris; listened to the orders she got; and studied alertly what she did in the execution of them.

Rodney had a lovely time watching the twins bathed. He stood about in everybody's way, made what he conceived to be alluring noises, in the perfectly unsuccessful attempt to attract the infants' attention, and finally, when the various processes were complete, on schedule, like a limited train, and the thermometrically correct bottles of food were ready, one for each baby, he turned suddenly to his wife and said: "Don't you want to--hold them, Rose?" She'd have held a couple of glowing brands in her arms for him, the way he had looked and the way he had said it. A stab of pain went through her and tears came up into her eyes. "Yes, give them to me," she started to say.

But Mrs. Ruston spoke before she could frame the words. It was their feeding hour, she pointed out; a bad time for them to be excited, and the bottles were heated exactly right.

By that time Rose's idea had flowered into resolution. She knew exactly what she was going to do. But she mustn't jeopardize the success of her plan by trying to put it into effect too soon.

She waited patiently, reasonably, for another fortnight. Harriet by that time had gone off to Washington on a visit, taking Rodney's heartfelt thanks with her. Rose expressed hers just as warmly, and felt ashamed that they were so unreal. She simply mustn't let herself get to resenting Harriet! At the end of the fortnight, the doctor made his final visit. Rose had especially asked Rodney to be on hand to hear his report when the examination was over. Rose and the doctor found him waiting in the library.

"He says," Rose told her husband, "that I'm perfectly well." She turned to the doctor for confirmation, "Don't you?"

The doctor smiled. "As far as my diagnostic resources go, Mrs. Aldrich, you are perfectly well."

Rodney was pleased of course, and expressed this feeling fervently. But he looked across at his glowing radiant wife, with a touch of misgiving.

"What are you trying to put over on me?" he asked.

"Not a thing," said Rose demurely. "I thought you'd be glad to know that I needn't be kept in cotton-wool any more, and that you'd feel surer of it if he told you."

"I feel surer that you've got something up your sleeve," he said. And, to the doctor: "I don't imagine that in saying my wife is perfectly well, you mean to suggest an absence of all reasonable caution."

The doctor took the hint, expatiated largely; it was always well to be careful--one couldn't, in fact, be too careful. The human body at best, more especially the--ah--feminine human body, was a delicate machine, not to be abused without inviting serious consequences. He was even a little reproachful about it.

"But there's no more reason, is there," Rose persisted, "why I should be careful than why any other woman should--my nurse-maid for example? Is she any healthier than I am?"

It was indiscreet of the doctor to look at her before he answered. Her eyes were sparkling, the color bright in her cheeks; unconsciously, she had flattened her shoulders back and drawn a good deep breath down into her lungs. The doctor smiled a smile of surrender and turned back to Rodney. "I'll confess," he said, "that in my experience, Mrs. Aldrich is almost a _lusus naturae_--a perfectly sound, healthy woman."

Rose smiled widely and contentedly on the pair of them. "That's more like it," she said to the doctor. "Thanks very much."

But after he had gone, she did not spring anything on Rodney, as he fully expected she would. She took him out for a tramp through the park in the dusk of a perfect autumn afternoon, and went to a musical show with him in the evening. She might have been, as far as he could see, the Rose of a year ago. She had the same lithe boyish swing. She even wore, though he didn't know it, the same skirt for their walk in the park that she had worn on some of their tramps before they were married. And when they had had their evening at the theater, and a bite of supper somewhere, and come home, she let him drop off to sleep without a word that would explain her insistence on getting a clean bill of health from the doctor.

But the next morning, while Doris was busy in the laundry, she found Mrs. Ruston in the nursery and had a talk with that lady, which was destined to produce seismic upheavals.

"I've decided to make a little change in our arrangements, Mrs. Ruston," she said. "But I don't think it's one that will disturb you very much. I'm going to let Doris go--I'll get her another place, of course--and do her work myself."

Mrs. Ruston compressed her lips, and went on for a minute with what she was doing to one of the twins, as if she hadn't heard.

"Doris is quite satisfactory, madam," she said at last. "I'd not advise making a change. She's a dependable young woman, as such go. Of course I watch her very close."

"I think I can promise to be dependable," Rose said. "I don't know much about babies, of course, but I think I can learn as well as Doris. Anyhow, I can wheel them about and wash their clothes and boil bottles and things as well as she does. For the rest, you can tell me what to do just as you tell her."

Mrs. Ruston took a considerably longer interval to digest this reply. "Then you're meaning to give the girl her notice at once, madam?" she asked.

"I'm not going to give her notice at all," said Rose. "I'm going to find her another place. I shan't have any trouble about it though. As you say, she's a very good nurse-maid, and she's a pleasant sort of a human being besides. But as soon as I can find her another place, I'm going to take over her work."

To this last observation it became evident that Mrs. Ruston meant to make no reply at all. She gave Rose some statistical information about the twins instead, in which Rose showed herself politely interested and presently withdrew.

It soon appeared, however, that though Mrs. Ruston might be slow and sparing of speech, she was capable of acting with a positively Napoleonic dash. Rodney wore a queer expression all through dinner, and when he got Rose alone in the library afterward, he explained it. Mrs. Ruston had made her two-hour constitutional that afternoon into an opportunity for calling on him at his office. She had given him notice, contingently. She made it an inviolable rule of conduct, it appeared, never to undertake the care of two infants without the assistance of