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

in her right mind--that she hasn't just wandered off as people do sometimes without knowing who they are?"

"There's nothing in that notion," he said. "It's Rose all right, and she knows what she's doing."

"You mean you've seen her off the stage--talked with her?"

He nodded.

She pulled in a long sigh of anticipatory relief.

"Well, then," she demanded, "what did she say? How did she explain how she _could_ have done such a thing as that?"

"I didn't ask her to explain," said Rodney. "I asked her to come home, and she wouldn't."

"Oh, it's wicked!" she cried. "It's the most abominably selfish thing I ever heard of!"

He made a gesture of protest, but it didn't stop her.

"Oh, I suppose," she flashed, "she didn't _mean_ any harm--wasn't just trying to do the cruelest thing she could to you. But it would be a little less infuriating if she had."

"Pull up, Freddy!" he said. Rather gently though, for him. "There's no good going on like that. And besides ... You were saying Harriet would do anything in the world for me. Well, there's something _you_ can do. You're the only person I know who can."

Her answer was to come around behind his chair, put her cheek down beside his, and reach for his hands.

"Let's get away from this miserable breakfast table," she said. "Come up to where I live, where we can be safely by ourselves; then tell me about it."

In front of her boudoir fire, looking down on her as she sat in her flowered wing chair, an enormously distended rug-covered pillow beside her knees waiting for him to drop down on when he felt like it, he began rather cautiously to tell her what he wanted.

"I'll tell you the reason why I've come to you," he began, "and then you'll see. Do you remember nearly two years ago, the night I got wet coming down here to dinner--the night you were going to marry me off to Hermione Woodruff? We had a long talk afterward, and you said, speaking of the chances people took getting married, that it wasn't me you worried about, but the girl, whoever she might be, who married me."

The little gesture she made admitted the recollection, but denied its relevancy. She'd have said something to that effect, but he prevented her.

"No," he insisted, "it wasn't just talk. There was something to it. Afterward, when we were engaged, two or three times, you gave me tips about things. And since we've been married ... Well, somehow, I've had the feeling that you were on her side; that you saw things her way--things that I didn't see."

"Little things," she protested; "little tiny things that couldn't possibly matter--things that any woman would be on another woman's--side, as you say, about."

But she contradicted this statement at once. "Oh, I _did_ love her!" she said fiercely. "Not just because she loved you, but because I thought she was altogether adorable. I couldn't help it. And of course that's what makes me so perfectly furious now--that she should have done a thing like this to you."

"All right," he said. "Never mind about that. This is what I want you to do. I want you to go to see her, and I want you to ask her, in the first place, to try to forgive me."

"What for?" Frederica demanded.

"I want you to tell her," he went on, "that it's impossible that she should be more horrified at the thing I did than I am myself. I want you to ask her, whatever she thinks my deserts are, to do just one thing for me, and that is to let me take her out of that perfectly hideous place. I don't ask anything else but that. She can make any terms she likes. She can live where or how she likes. Only--not like that. Maybe it's a deserved punishment, but I can't stand it!"

There was the crystallization of what little thinking he had managed to do in the two purgatorial days he'd spent in that down-state hotel--in the intervals of fighting off the torturing jingle of that tune, and the memory of the dull frozen agony he'd seen in Rose's face as he left her. No great result, truly. The mountain had labored and brought forth a mouse.

But reflect for a moment what Rodney's life had been; how gently, for all his buoyant theories about the acceptance of discipline, the world, in its material aspect at any rate, had dealt with him. How completely that boyish arrogance of his had been allowed to grow unbruised by circumstance. He'd always been rich, in the sense that his means had always been sufficient to his wants. He'd never in his life had an experience that even resembled Portia's with that old unpaid grocery bill. He'd enjoyed wearing shabby clothes, but he'd never worn them because he could afford no better. He'd always been democratic in the narrower social sense, but he'd never realized how easy that sort of democracy is and how little it means to a man never associated with persons who assert a social superiority over him. He'd always made a point of despising luxuries, to be sure. But it hadn't been brought to his attention at how high a level he drew the line between luxuries and mere decent necessities.

He wasn't then, near so much of a Spartan as he thought. His long association with the Lakes and their friends might, you'd think, have brought him the consolatory reflection that a woman who earned even a successful chorus-girl's wages, needn't be pitied too lamentably on the score of poverty; that Rose could, no doubt, have afforded a better room than that, if she'd wanted to. And that even a three-dollar room, a whole room that you hadn't to share with anybody, would--if the rent of it left you money enough to send out your clothes to the laundry and to buy adequate meals in restaurants--represent luxury--well, to more people than one likes to think about.

Rodney knew that well enough, of course. He'd read the Sage Foundation reports on housing; he was familiar with the results of the Pittsburgh Survey. But the person in question now, wasn't the Working Girl. It was his Rose!

Out of all the chaos of thought and feeling that had been boiling within him since the night he had gone with Rose to her room, there emerged, then, two outstanding ideas. One was that he had outraged her; the other that she simply couldn't be allowed to go on living as he had found her.

Frederica, naturally, was mystified. "That's absurd, of course, Roddy," she said gently. "You haven't done anything to Rose to be forgiven for."

"You'll just have to take my word for it," he said shortly. "I'm not exaggerating."

"But, Roddy!" she persisted. "You must be sensible. Oh, it's no wonder! You're all worn out. You look as if you hadn't slept for nights. I wish you'd sit down and be a little bit comfortable. But I _know_ you're wrong about that!

"I went out to California with the idea that you might have been--well, awfully stupid about something and hurt Rose dreadfully without knowing it. I was perfectly ready to be--on her side, as you say. I thought we'd have a good talk and I'd find out what it was all about, and then come home and pack you out there yourself.

"Well, of course I didn't see Rose, and Portia wasn't very communicative. She'd always been a little stiff with me. I never managed to get her altogether. But she was clear enough about it at any rate, that Rose was more in love with you than ever and she didn't blame you for a thing. The thing that she seemed most anxious about was that her mother shouldn't blame you. Of course that took the wind out of my sails and I had to come back. So it's absurd for you to be talking as if she had a real reason for--detesting you."

"She hadn't, then," said Rodney, and he walked uneasily away to the window.

"Well, if you mean the other night, the only time you've seen her since, then it's all the more ridiculous. What if you were angry and lost your temper and hurt her feelings? Heavens! Weren't you entitled to, after what she'd done? And when she'd left you to find it out like that?"

"I tell you you don't know the first thing about it."

"I don't suppose you--beat her, did you?" It was too infuriating, having him meek like this!

His reply was barely audible. "I might better have done it."

Frederica sprang to her feet. "Well, then, I'll tell you!" she said. "I won't go to her. I'll go if you'll give me a free hand. If you'll let me tell her what I think of what she's done and the way she's done it--not letting you know--not giving you a chance. But go and beg her to forgive _you_, I won't.

"All right," he said dully. "You're within your rights, of course."

The miserable scene dragged on a little longer. Frederica cried and pleaded and stormed, without moving him at all. He seemed distressed at her grief, urged her to treat his request as if he hadn't made it; but he explained nothing, answered none of her questions.

It was an enormous relief to her, and, she fancied, to him, for that matter, when, after a premonitory knock at the door, Harriet walked in on them.

The situation didn't need much explaining, but Frederica summed it up while the others exchanged their coolly friendly greetings, with the statement:

"Rod's been trying to get me to go to Rose and say that it was all his fault, and I won't."

"Why not?" said Harriet. "What earthly thing does it matter whose fault it is? He can have it his fault if he likes."

"You know it isn't," Frederica muttered rebelliously.

Harriet seated herself delicately and deliberately in one of the curving ends of a little Victorian sofa, and stretched her slim legs out in front of her.

"Certainly I don't care whose fault it is," she said. "You never get anywhere by trying to decide a question like that. What I'm interested in is what can be done about it. It's not a very nice situation. Nobody likes it--at least I should _think_ Rose would be pretty sick of it by now. She may have been crazy for a stage career, but she's probably seen that the chorus of a third-rate musical comedy won't take her anywhere.

"The thing's simply a mess, and the only thing to do, is to clear it up as quickly and as decently as we can--and it can be cleared up, if we go at it right. Only, for the love of Heaven, Freddy, before you let Rod go out of the house, give him a dose of veronal and pack him off to a quiet room up-stairs to sleep around the clock! The way he looks now, he's a proclamation of calamity across the street!"

She wasn't at all disturbed by the outburst this provoked from Rodney. Indeed, Frederica, from a glimpse she got of her face as she sat listening to his blistering denunciation of this apparently whole-hearted concern for appearances, and his passionate denial that they meant anything at all to him, suspected that her sister's words had been calculated to produce just this result. When it had subsided, Harriet's first words proved it.

"All right," she observed.