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

what a good mistress I could make. I know I could make you love me whether you wanted to or not; whether I loved you or not. I could make other men love me, if I could make up my mind to do it--make them tell me all their hopes and dreams, and think I had a fine mind and a wonderful understanding. Oh, it's too easy--it's too hatefully easy!

"Do you know why I told you that? Because if you believe it and understand it, you will see why I can't go on living on your love. Because how can you be sure, knowing that my position in the world, my friends--oh, the very clothes on my back, and the roof over my head, are dependent on your love,--how are you going to be sure that my love for you is honest and disinterested? What's to keep you from wondering--asking questions? Love's got to be free, Roddy. The only way to make it free is to have friendship growing alongside it. So, when I can be your partner and your friend, I'll be your mistress, too. But not--not again, Roddy, till I can find a way. I'll have to find it for myself. I'll have to go...."

She broke down there over a word she couldn't at first say, buried her face in her arms and let a deep racking sob or two have their own way with her. But presently she sat erect again and, with a supreme effort of will, forced her voice to utter the word.

"I've got to go somewhere alone--away from you, and stay until I find it. If I ever do, and you want me, I'll come back."


CHAPTER XVI

ROSE OPENS THE DOOR

The struggle between them lasted a week--a ghastly week, during which, as far as the surface of things showed, their life flowed along in its accustomed channels. It was a little worse than that, really, because the week included, so an ironic Fate had decreed, Thanksgiving Day and a jolly family party at Frederica's, with congratulations on the past, plans for the future. And Rose and Rodney, as civilized persons will do, kept their faces, accepted congratulations, made gay plans for the twins; smiled or laughed when necessary--somehow or other, got through with it.

But at all sorts of times, and in all sorts of places when they were alone together, the great battle was renewed; mostly through the dead hours of the night, in Rose's bedroom, she sitting up in bed, he tramping up and down, shivering and shuddering in a big bath-robe. It had a horrible way of interrupting itself for small domestic commonplaces, which in their assumption of the permanency of their old life, their blind disregard of the impending disaster, had an almost unendurable poignancy. A breakfast on the morning of an execution is something like that.

The hardest thing about it all for Rose--the thing that came nearest to breaking down her courage--was to see how slowly Rodney came to realize it at all. He was like a trapped animal pacing the four sides of his cage confident that in a moment or two he would find the way out, and then, incredulously, dazedly, coming to the surmise that there was no way out. She really meant to go away and leave him--leave the babies; go somewhere where his care and protection could not reach her! She was actually planning to do it--planning the details of doing it! By the end of one of their long talks, it would seem to her he had grasped this monstrous intention and accepted it. But before the beginning of the next one, he seemed to manage somehow to dismiss the thing as an impossible nightmare.

An invitation came in from the Crawfords for a dance at the Blackstone, the fifth of December, and he said something about accepting it.

"I shan't be here then, Roddy, you know," she said.

He went completely to pieces at that, as if the notion of her going away had never really reached his mind before.

The struggle ranged through the widest possible gamut of moods. They had their moments of rapturous love--passionate attempts at self-surrender. They had long hours of cool discussion, as impersonal as if they had been talking about the characters out of a hook instead of about themselves. They had stormy nerve-tearing hours of blind agonizing, around and around in circles, lacerating each other, lashing out at each other, getting nowhere. They had moments of incandescent anger.

He tried, just once, early in the fight, to take the ground he had taken once before; that she was irresponsible, obsessed. There was a fracture somewhere, as James Randolph's jargon had it, in her unconscious mind. She didn't let him go far with that. He saw her blaze up in a splendid burst of wrath, as she had blazed once--oh, an eternity ago, at a street-car conductor. Her challenge rang like a sword out of a scabbard.

"We'll settle that before we go any further," she said. "Telephone for James Randolph, or any other alienist you like. Let him take me and put me in a sanatorium somewhere and keep me under observation as long as he pleases, until he's satisfied whether I'm out of my mind or not. But unless you're willing to do that, don't call me irresponsible."

He grew more reasonable as a belief in her complete seriousness and determination sobered him. He made desperate efforts to recover his self-control--to get his big, cool, fine mechanism of a mind into action. But his mind, to his complete bewilderment, betrayed him. He'd always looked at Rose before, through the lens of his emotions. But now that he forced himself to look at her through the non-refracting window from which he looked at the rest of the world, she compelled him again and again to admit that she was right.

"Why shouldn't I be right?" she said with a woebegone smile. "These are all just things I've learned from you."

After a long and rather angry struggle with himself, he made up his mind to a compromise, and in one of their cooler talks together, he offered it.

"We've both of us pretty well lost our sense of proportion, it seems to me," he said. "This whole ghastly business started from my refusing to let Mrs. Ruston go and get a nurse who'd allow you to be your own nurse-maid. Well, I'm willing to give up completely on that point. You can let Mrs. Ruston go as soon as you like and get a nurse who'll meet with your ideas."

"You're doing that," said Rose thoughtfully, "rather than let me go away. That's the way it is, isn't it?"

"Why, yes, of course," he admitted. "I was looking at things from the children's point of view, and I thought I was right. From their point of view, I still think so."

She drew in a long sigh and shook her head. "It won't do, Roddy. Can't you see you're giving way practically under a threat--because I'll go away if you don't? But think what it would mean if I did stay, on those terms. The thing would rankle always. And if anything did happen to one of the babies because the new nurse wasn't quite so good, you'd never forgive me--not in all the world.

"And," she added a little later, "that would be just as true of any other compromise. I mean like going and living in a flat and letting me do the housework--any of the things we've talked about. I can say I am going away, don't you see, but I couldn't say I'd go away--_unless_ ... I couldn't use that threat to extort things from you without killing our whole life dead. Can't you see that?"

His mind infuriated him by agreeing with her--goaded him into another passionate outburst during which he accused her of bad faith, of being tired of him, anxious to get away from him--seizing pretexts. But he offered no more compromises. The thing he fell back on after that was a plea for delay. The question must be decided coolly; not like this. Let them just put it out of their minds for a while, go on with the old routine as if nothing threatened it and see if things didn't work somewhat better--see if they weren't, after all, better friends than she thought.

"If I were ill, Roddy," she said, "and there was an operation talked about; if they said to you that there was something I might drag along for years, half alive, without, but that if I had it, it would either kill or cure, you wouldn't urge delay. We'd decide for or against it and be done. It's--it's taking just all the courage I've got to face this thing now that I am excited--now that I've thought it out and talked it out with you--now that I've got the big hope before my eyes. But to wait until I was tangled in the old routine and the babies began to get a little older and more--human, so that they knew me, and then do it in cold blood! I couldn't do that. We'd patch up some sort of a life, pretending a little, quarreling a little, and when my feelings got especially hurt about something, I'd try to make myself think, and you, that I was going away. And we'd both know down inside that we were cowards."

He protested against the word, but she stuck to it.

"We're both afraid now," she insisted. "That's one of the things that makes us so cruel to each other when we talk--fear. The world's a terrible place to me, Roddy. I've never ventured out alone in it; not a step. A year ago, I don't think I'd have been so frightened. I didn't know then--I'd never really thought about it--what a hard dangerous thing it is, just to earn enough to keep yourself alive. I haven't any illusions now that it's easy--not after the things I've heard Barry Lake tell about. But sometimes I think you're more afraid than I; and that you've got a more intolerable thing to fear--ridicule--an intangible sort of pitying ridicule that you can't get hold of; guessing at the sort of things people will say and never really quite knowing. And we have each got the other's fear to suffer under, too.--Oh, Roddy, Roddy, don't hate me too bitterly ...! But I think if we can both endure it, stand the gaff, as you said once, and know that the other's standing it, too, perhaps that'll be the real beginning of the new life."

Somehow or other, during their calmer moments toward the end, practical details managed to get talked about--settled after a fashion, without the admission really being made on his part that the thing was going to happen at all.

"I'd do everything I could of course, to make it easier," she said. "We could have a story for people that I'd gone to California to make mother a long visit. You could bring Harriet home from Washington to keep house while I was gone. I'd take my trunks, you see, and really go. People would suspect of course, after a while, but they'll always pretend to believe anything that's comfortable--anything that saves scenes and shocks and explanations."

"Where would you go, really?" he demanded. "Have you any plan at all?"

"I have a sort of plan," she said. "I think I know of a way of earning a living."

But she didn't offer to go on and tell him what it was, and after a little silence, he commented bitterly on this omission.

"You won't even