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

/>
"Yes, he's busy," she repeated absently and in a tone still more coldly hostile, though Rodney perceived that the hostility was not meant for him. And so plainly did the tone and the look and the arrested attitude proclaim that she was following out a train of thought and hadn't as yet got to the end of it, that he stood as still as she was.

Bertie, irreproachably correct as always, settled his shoulders inside his coat, and took his stick in his right hand again. Eleanor now looked around at him.

"Wait two minutes," she said, "if you don't mind." Then, to Rodney, "Come along." And she led the way up the lustrous, velvety teakwood stair.

He followed her. But arrived at the drawing-room floor, he protested.

"Look here!" he said. "If Jim's busy ..."

"You've never been in here before, have you?" she asked. "How's Rose? Jim saw her, you know, in New York."

"Yes," he said. "Rose wrote to me she'd seen him, and I thought I'd drop around for a chat. But if he's busy ..."

"Oh, don't be _too_ dense, Rodney!" she said. "A man has to be busy when he's known to be in the house and won't entertain his wife's guests. Go up one flight more and to the door that corresponds to that one. It won't do you any good to knock. He'll either not answer or else tell you to go to hell. Just sing out who you are and go right in."

She gave him a nod and a hard little smile, and went down-stairs again to Bertie.

Rodney stood where she had left him, in two minds whether to carry out her instructions or to wait until he heard her and Bertie go out and then quietly follow them. It was a beastly situation, dragged into a family quarrel like that; forced to commit an intrusion that was so plainly labeled in advance. And on the other hand, it was a decidedly interesting situation. If Eleanor was as reckless as that with facts most women keep to themselves as long as possible, what would her outspoken husband be. But if he were full of his grievances, he probably wouldn't talk about Rose.

What really determined his action was Eleanor's discovery, or pretended discovery down in the hall below, that her gloves weren't what she wanted and her instructions to the maid to go up and get her a fresh pair. It would be too ridiculous to be caught there--lurking.

So he mounted the next flight, found the door Eleanor had indicated, knocked smartly on it, and to forestall his getting told to go to hell, sang out at the same time, "This is Rodney Aldrich. May I come in?"

"Come in, of course," Randolph called. "I'm glad to see you," he added, coming to meet his guest. "But do you mind telling me how the devil you got in here? Some poor wretch will lose his job, you know, if Eleanor finds out about this. When I'm in this room, sacred to reflection and research, it's a first-class crime to let me be disturbed."

It didn't need his sardonic grin to point the satire of his words. The way he had uttered "sacred to reflection and research," was positively savage.

Rodney said curtly, "Eleanor sent me up herself. I didn't much want to come, to tell the truth, when I heard you were busy."

"Eleanor!" her husband repeated. "I thought she'd gone out--with her poodle."

Rodney said, with unconcealed distaste, "They were on the point of going out when I came in. That's how Eleanor happened to see me."

With a visible effort, Randolph recovered a more normal manner. "I'm glad it happened that way," he said. "Get yourself a drink. You'll find anything you want over there, I guess, and something to smoke; then we'll sit down and have an old-fashioned talk."

The source of drinks he indicated was a well-stocked cellarette at the other side of the room. But Rodney's eye fell first on a decanter and siphon on the table, within reach of the chair Randolph had been sitting in. His host's glance followed his.

"This is Bourbon I've got over here," he added. "I suppose you prefer Scotch."

"I don't believe I want anything more to drink just now," Rodney said. And as he turned to the smoking table to get a cigar, Randolph allowed himself another sardonic grin.

The preliminaries were gone through rather elaborately; chairs drawn up and adjusted, ash-trays put within reach; cigars got going satisfactorily. But the talk they were supposed to prepare the way for didn't at once begin.

Randolph took another stiffish drink and settled back into a dull sullen abstraction.

Rodney wanted to say, "I hear from Rose you had a little visit with her in New York." But, with his host's mood what it was, he shrank from introducing that topic. Finally, for the sake of saying something, he remarked:

"This is a wonderful room, isn't it?"

Randolph roused himself. "Never been in here before?" he asked.

"I've never been in the house before, I'm ashamed to say."

"What!" Randolph cried. "My God! Well, then, come along."

Rodney resisted a little. He was comfortable. They could look over the house later. But Randolph wouldn't listen.

"That's the first thing to do," he insisted. "Indispensable preliminary. You can't enjoy the opera without a libretto. Come along."

It was a remarkable house. Before the first fifteen minutes of their inspection were over, Rodney had come to the conclusion that though Bertie Willis might be an ass, was indeed an indisputable ass, he was no fool. It was almost uncannily clever, the way all the latest devices for modern comfort wore, so demurely, the mask of a perfectly consistent medievalism. And there were some effects that were really magnificent. The view of the drawing-room, for instance, from the recessed dais at the far end of it, where the grand piano stood--a piano that contrived to look as if it might have been played upon by the second wife of Henry VIII,--down toward the magnificent stone chimney at the other; the octagonal dining-room with the mysterious audacity of its lighting; the kitchen with its flag floor (only they were not flags, but an artful linoleum), its great wrought-iron chains and hoods beneath which all the cooking was done--by electricity.

Randolph took him over the whole thing from bottom to top. Through it all, he kept up the glib patter of a showman; the ironic intent of it becoming more and more marked all the while.

They brought up at last in the study they had started from.

"Oh, but wait a moment!" Randolph said. "Here's two more rooms for you to see."

The first one explained its purpose at a glance, with a desk and typewriter, and filing cabinets around the walls.

"Rubber floor," Randolph pointed out, "felt ceiling; absolutely sound-proof. Here's where my stenographer sits all day, ready,--like a fireman. And this," he concluded, leading the way to the other room, "is the holy of holies."

It had a rubber floor, too, and Rodney supposed, a felt ceiling. But its only furniture was one straight-back chair and a canvas cot.

"Sound-proof too," said Randolph. "But sounding-boards or something in all the walls. I press this button, start a dictaphone, and talk in any direction, anywhere. It's all taken down. Here's where I'm supposed to think, make discoveries, and things. No distractions. One hundred per cent. efficient. My God! I tried it for a while. Felt like a fool actor in a Belasco play. Do you remember? The one with the laboratory and the doctor?"

They went back into the study.

"Clever beasts, though--poodles," he remarked, as he nodded Rodney to his chair and poured himself another drink. "Learn their tricks very nicely. But good Heavens, Aldrich, think of him as a man! Think what our American married women are up against, when they want somebody to play off against their husbands and have to fall back on tired little beasts like that. In all the older countries there are plenty of men, real men who've got something, that a married woman can fall back on. But think of a woman of Eleanor's attractions having to take up a thing like that. There's nothing else for her. Would _you_ come around and hold her hand and make love to her, or any other man like you? Not once in a thousand times. Eleanor doesn't mean anything. She's trying to make me jealous. That's her newest experiment. But it's downright pitiful, I say."

Rodney got up out of his chair. It wasn't a possible conversation.

"I'll be running along, I think," he said. "I've a lot of proof to correct to-night, and you've got work of your own, I expect."

"Sit down again," said Randolph sharply. "I'm just getting drunk. But that can wait. I'm going to talk. I've got to talk. And if you go, I swear I'll call up Eleanor's butler and talk to him. You'll keep it to yourself, anyway."

He added, as Rodney hesitated, "I want to tell you about Rose. I saw her in New York, you know."

Rodney sat down again. "Yes," he said, "so she wrote. Tell me how she looked. She's been working tremendously hard, and I'm a little afraid she's overdoing it."

"She looks," Randolph said very deliberately, "a thousand years old." He laughed at the sharp contraction of Rodney's brows. "Oh, not like that! She's as beautiful as ever. More. Facial planes just a hair's breadth more defined perhaps--a bit more of what that painter Burton calls edge. But not a line, not a mark. Her skin's still got that bloom on it, and she still flushes up when she smiles. She's lost five pounds, perhaps, but that's just condition. And vitality! My God!--But a thousand years old just the same."

"I'd like to know what you mean by that," said Rodney. He added, "if you mean anything," but the words were unspoken.

Randolph did mean something.

"Why, look here," he said. "You know what a kid she was when you married her. Schoolgirl! I used to tell her things and she'd listen, all eyes--holding her breath! Until I felt almost as wise as she thought I was. She was always game, even then. If she started a thing, she saw it through. If she said, 'Tell it to me straight,' why she took it, whatever it might be, standing up. She wasn't afraid of anything. Courage of innocence. Because she didn't know.

"Well, she's courageous now, because she knows. She's been through it all and beaten it all, and she knows she can beat it again. She understands--I tell you--everything.

"Why, look here! We all but ran into each other on the corner, there, of Broadway and Forty-second Street; shook hands, said howdy-do. How long was I here for? Was Eleanor with me? And so on. If I had a spare half-hour, would I come in and have tea with her at the Knickerbocker? She'd nodded at two or three passing people while we stood there. And then somebody said, 'Hello, Dane,' and stopped. A miserable, shabby, shivering little painted thing. Rose said, 'Hello,' and asked how she was getting along. Was she working now? She said no; did Rose know of anything? Rose said, 'Give me your address and if I can find anything, I'll let you know.' The horrible little beast told where she lived and went away. Rose didn't say anything to me, except that she was somebody who'd been out in a road company with her.