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

But there was a look in her eyes ...! Oh, she knew--everything. Knew what that kid was headed for. Knew there was nothing to be done about it. She had no flutters about it, didn't pull a long face, didn't, as I told you, say a word. But there was a look in her eyes, behind her eyes, somehow, that understood and _faced_--God!--everything. And then we went in and had our tea.

"I had a thousand curiosities about her. I'd have found out anything I could. But it was she who did the finding out. Beyond inquiring about you, how lately I'd seen you, and so on, she hardly asked a question; talked about indifferent things: New York, the theaters, how we passed the time out here, I don't know what. But pretty soon I saw that she understood me, saw right into me like through an open window into a lighted room. As easily as that. She knew what was the matter with me; knew what I'd made of myself. And by God, Aldrich, she didn't even despise me!

"I came back here to kick this damned thing to pieces, give myself a fresh start. And when I got here, I hadn't the sand. I get drunk instead."

He poured himself another long drink and sipped it slowly. "Everybody knows," he said at last, "that prostitutes almost invariably take to drugs or drink. But I know why they do."

That remark stung Rodney out of his long silence. During the whole of Randolph's recital of his encounter with Rose, he'd never once lifted his eyes from the gray ash of his cigar, and the violet filament of smoke that arose from it. He didn't want to look at Randolph, nor think about him. Just wanted to remember every word he said, so that he could carry the picture away intact. Now that the picture was finished, he wanted to get out of that room, with it; out into the dark and loneliness of the streets, where he could walk and think.

There was something peculiarly horrifying to him in the exhibition Randolph was making of himself. He'd never in his life taken a drink, except convivially, and then he took as little as would pass muster. He'd always found it hard to be sensibly tolerant of the things men said and did in liquor, even when their condition had overtaken them unawares. Going off alone and deliberately fuddling one's self as a means of escaping unpleasant realities, struck him as an act of the basest cowardice. Whether Randolph's revelation of himself were true or distorted by alcohol, didn't seem much to matter. But for that picture of Rose, he'd have gone long ago and left the man to his bemused reflections. Only ...

He'd said that Rose understood everything and didn't despise him. A drunken fancy likely enough. She had seen something though. Her letter proved that. And having seen it, she'd asked him to drop in on the doctor for a visit. Did she mean she wanted him to try to help?

He tried, though not very successfully, to conceal his violent disrelish of the task, when he said:

"Look here, Jim! What the devil is the matter with you? Are you sober enough to tell me?"

Randolph put down his glass. "I have told you," he said. "It's a thing that can be told in one word. I'm a prostitute. I'm Eleanor's kept man. Well kept, oh, yes. Beautifully kept. I'm nothing in God's world but a possession of hers! A trophy of sorts, an ornament. I'm something she's made. I have a hell of a big practise. I'm the most fashionable doctor in Chicago. They come here, the women, damn them, in shoals. That's Eleanor's doing. I'm a faker, a fraud, a damned actor. I pose for them. I play up. I give them what they want. And that's her doing. They go silly about me; fancy they're in love with me. That's what she wants them to do. It increases my value for her as a possession.

"I haven't done a lick of honest work in the last year. I can't work. She won't let me work. She--smothers me. Wherever I turn, there she is, smoothing things out, trying to making it easy, trying to anticipate my wants. I've only one want. That's to be let alone. She can't do that. She's insatiable. She can't help it. There's something drives her on so that she never can feel sure that she possesses me completely enough. There's always something more she's trying to get, and I'm always trying to keep something away from her, and failing.

"And why? Do you want to know why, Aldrich? That's the cream of the thing. Because we're so damnably in love with each other. She wants me to live on her love. To have nothing else to live on. Do you know why she won't have any children? Because she's jealous of them. Afraid they'd get between us. She tries to make me jealous with that poodle of hers--and she succeeds. With that! I'd like to wring his neck.

"Do you want to know what my notion of Heaven is? It would be to go off alone, with one suit of clothes in a handbag, oh, and fifty or a hundred dollars in my pocket--I wouldn't mind that; I don't want to be a tramp--to some mining town, or mill town, or slum, where I could start a general practise; where the things I'd get would be accident cases, confinement cases; real things, urgent things, that night and day are all alike to. I'd like to start again and be poor; get this stink of easy money out of my nostrils. I'd like to see if I could make good on my own; have something I could look at and say, 'That's mine. I did that. I had to sweat for it.'

"I've been thinking about that for two years. It makes quite a fancy-picture. There are a million details I can fill into it. A rotten little office over a drug-store somewhere; people coming in with real ills, and I curing them up and charging them a dollar, and sending them away happy. I smoke a pipe because I can't afford cigars; get my meals at lunch-counters. I sit up here--in this room--and think about it.

"I came back from New York, after that look at Rose, meaning to do it; meaning to talk it out with Eleanor and tell her why, and then go. Well, I talked. Talk's cheap. But I didn't go. I'll never go. I'll go on getting softer and more of a fake; more dependent. And Eleanor will go on eating me up, until the last thing in me that's me myself, is gone. And then, some day, she'll look at me and see that I'm nothing. That I have nothing left to love her with."

Then, with suddenly thickened speech (an affectation, perhaps) he looked up at Rodney and demanded:

"What the hell are you looking so s-solemn about? Can't you take a joke? Come along and have another drink. The night's young."

"No," Rodney said, "I'm going. And you'd better get to bed." "A couple more drinks," Randolph said, "to put the cap on a jolly evening. Always get drunk th-thoroughly. Then in the morning, you wake up a wiser man. Wise enough to forget what a damned fool you've been. You don't want to forget that, Aldrich. You've been drunk and you've talked like a damned fool. And I've been drunk and I've talked like a damned fool. But we'll both be wiser in the morning."

Rodney walked home that night like a man dazed. The vividness of one blazing idea blinded him. The thing that Randolph had seen and lacked the courage to do; the thing Rodney despised him for a coward for having failed to do, that thing Rose had done. Line by line, the parallel presented itself to him, as the design comes through in a half-developed photographic plate.

Without knowing it, yielding to a blind, unscrutinized instinct, he'd wanted Rose to live on his love. He'd tried to smooth things out for her, anticipate her wants. He'd wanted her soft, helpless, dependent. As a trophy? That was what Randolph had said. Had he been as bad as that? From what other desire of his than that could have come the sting of exasperation he'd always felt when she'd urged him to let her work for him; help him to economize, dust and make beds, so that he could go on writing his book? She'd seen, even then, something he'd been blind to--something he'd blinded himself to; that love, by itself, was not enough. That it could poison, as well as feed.

And, seeing, she had the courage ... He pressed his hands against his eyes.

When there could be friendship as well as love between them, she said, she'd come back. Would she come back now, even for his friendship? He doubted it. Dared not hope. There came up before him that face of frozen agony that had confronted him in the room on Clark Street, and he remembered what she'd said then--with a shudder--about it all ending "like this." Ending!

His love had played her false; had tried, instinctively, to smother her, and defeated at that, had outraged and tortured her. She couldn't possibly look at it any way but that. And now that she was free, self-discovered, victorious, was it likely she would submit to its blind caprices again? The thing Randolph had said was his notion of Heaven, she'd triumphantly attained. Wouldn't it be her notion of Heaven too?

But she had won, among the rest of her spoils of victory, the thing she had originally set out to get. His friendship and respect. Friendship, he remembered her saying, was a thing you had to earn. When you'd earned it, it couldn't be withheld from you. Well, it was right she should be told that; made to understand it to the full. He couldn't ask her to come back to him. But she must know that her respect was as necessary now to him, as she'd once said his was to her. He must tell her that. He must see her and tell her that.

He stopped abruptly in his walk. His bones, as the Psalmist said, turned to water. How should he confront that gaze of hers, which knew so much and understood so deeply--he with the memory of his two last ignominious encounters with her, behind him?


CHAPTER III

FRIENDS

Except for the vacuum where the core and heart of it all ought to have been, Rose's life in New York during the year that put her on the high road to success as a designer of costumes for the theater, was a good life, broadening, stimulating, seasoning. It rested, to begin with, on a foundation of adequate material comfort which the unwonted physical privations of the six months that preceded it--the room on Clark Street, the nightmare tour on the road, and even the little back room in Miss Gibbons' apartment over the drug-store in Centropolis--made seem like positive luxury.

After a preliminary fortnight in a little hotel off Washington Square, which she had heard Jane Lake speak of once as a possible place for a respectable young woman of modest means to live in, she found an apartment in Thirteenth Street, not far west of Sixth Avenue. It was in a quiet block of old private residences. But this building was clean and new, with plenty of white tile and modern plumbing, and an elevator. Her apartment had two rooms in it, one of them really spacious to poor