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

temptation to do that and I've always been on guard against it. I've had love-affairs, more or less, all along. But in my vacations. You can't do decent honest work when your mind's on that sort of thing, and I care more about my work than anything else.

"Well, that night in Chicago, after the opening of _The Girl Up-stairs_, when I took you out to supper, I didn't know what I wanted. That's the truth. I'd been fighting my interest in you, my personal interest that is, calling myself all kinds of an old fool. I'd never had a thing get me like that before and I didn't know what to make of it. Well, the business was over, of course. I was entitled to a little vacation. I suppose, that night, if you'd shown the least sense of how I felt, even if it was just by seeming frightened, I might have flared up and made love to you. But you didn't see it at all. You had some sort of--fence around you that held me off. And for a while you even made me forget that I was in love with you. Forget that you were anything but the cleverest person I had known at catching my ideas and putting them over. I saw how enormously valuable you'd be to me, in this job you've got now, and I offered it to you.

"And then, all in a wave the other feeling came back. On my way to New York I decided that as long as I felt like that I'd have nothing more to do with you. A man couldn't possibly do any decent work with a woman he was in love with, either after he'd got her or while he was trying to get her. That's why you didn't hear from me within a month after I'd got back to New York. But as time went on I forgot how strong my feeling had been. I decided. I'd got over it. I'd been looking for some one else to take the place I'd designed for you and I couldn't find anybody.

"I might have got a man, but I didn't want a man, because if he were clever enough to be any good he'd be out after my job from the very first day. It would suit Abe Shuman down to the ground to have me teach a man all I know in two years and then put him in my place at half my pay. As for women, well, I've never seen a woman yet with just your combination of qualities, your drive and your knack. So I persuaded myself that it would be all right. That I could get along without thinking about you the other way. And I sent for you.

"But the minute I saw you I knew I'd have to look out. I've tried to; you know that. I've been treating you like a sweep since you've been down here. I didn't mean to but I couldn't help it. I was in such a rage with myself for going on like a sentimental fool about you. And the way you took it, always good-humored and never afraid, made me all the more ashamed of myself and all the more in love with you. And so last night I burst. In a way I'm glad I did. I think perhaps it will clear the air. But I'll come to that later. I want to know now whether you're convinced that what I said is true. That the fact that I fell in love with you has been against you and not in your favor."

"Yes," Rose said, "I'm convinced of that and I want to thank you for telling me. Because the other feeling was pretty--discouraging."

"All right," he said with a nod, "that's understood. Now, here's my proposition. That you go on working for me exactly as if nothing had happened."

"Oh, but that's impossible!" she said, and when he put in "Why is it?" she told him he had just said so himself. That it was impossible for a man to do decent work with a woman he was in love with.

"That's what I thought last night when I blew up," he admitted, "but I've got things a bit straighter since. In the first place, we have been doing decent work all this last month. We've been doing, between us, the work of two high-priced directors."

She said, "Yes, but I didn't know ..."

"Understanding's better than ignorance," he interrupted, "any time. Between people of sense, that is. We'd get on better together, not worse. Look at us now. We're talking together sensibly enough, aren't we? And we're here in your sitting-room, talking about the fact that I fell in love with you. Couldn't we talk just as sensibly in the theater, about whether a song or number was in the right place or not? Of course we could."

The truth of this argument rather stumped Rose. It didn't seem reasonable, but it was true. Instead of embarrassing and distressing her, this talk with Galbraith was doing her good, restoring her confidence. The air between them was easier to breathe than it had been for weeks.

"You seem different this morning, somehow," she said.

"Why," he told her, "I am different. Permanently different toward you. I am convinced of it. I don't pretend to understand it myself, but somehow--I'm relieved. For one thing, I never wanted to fall in love with you. It was quite against my will that I did it. And then I've always been tortured with curiosity about you. I've wondered. Were you as unconscious of me as you seemed? Was it possible that you didn't know. And if you did know, was it possible that you were--waiting? That it only needed a word of mine to put everything between us on a different basis? I couldn't get rid of that idea. It kept nagging at me. But after what you told me last night--and you certainly told it straight--that idea's exploded. What you said explains everything about you. I know now that I haven't a chance in the world. From now on, I imagine, I'll be able to treat you like a human being. Well, are you willing to try it?"

Up to now they'd been sitting quietly in their two chairs with most of the width of the room between them. But at this last question of his she got up and walked over to the window.

"I don't know," she said at last. "It seems dangerous, somehow; like courting trouble. I know ..." She hesitated, but then decided to say what was in her mind. "I know how terribly strong those feelings are and I've found out how little they've got to do with what it's so easy to decide is reasonable." Now she turned and faced him.

"Don't you think it would be more sensible for me to find another job? So that we could--well, take a fresh start?"

"Child," he said, "don't you know there's no such thing in the world as a fresh start? Or a new leaf? That's a comfortable delusion for cowards. The situation's in a mess, is it? All right, run away. Begin again with a clean slate. But the first thing written down on that slate is that you've just run away. Besides, suppose you do get another job, working, say, for another director. How do you know that he won't fall in love with you?"

That last sentence went by unheard. She was staring at him, almost in consternation. "That's true," she said. "That's perfectly true. That about running away. I--I never thought of it before." She went back to her chair and dropped into it rather limply. She sat there through a long silence, still thinking over his words and apparently almost frightened over her own implications from them.

At last he said, "You've no cause for worry over that, I should think. I don't believe you've ever run away from anything yet."

"I don't know," she answered thoughtfully. "I don't know whether I did or not."

"Well," he came out at last, getting to his feet, "how about it? What shall we do this time? Shall we tackle the situation and try to make the best of it, or ..."

"Yes, that's what we'll do," she said. "And, well, I'm much obliged to you for putting me right."

"I made all the trouble in the first place," said Galbraith, with a rueful sort of grin. "It was up to me to think of something."

And after the elevator she'd escorted him to had carried him down, she stood there in the hallway smiling, with the glow of a quite new friendliness for him warming her heart.

It was natural, of course, that the relation between them after that day should not prove quite so simple and manageable a thing as it had looked that morning. There were breathless days when the storm visibly hung in the sky; there were strained, stiff, self-conscious moments of rigidly enforced politeness. Things got said despite his resolute repression that had, as resolutely, to be ignored.

But in the intervals of these failures there emerged, and endured unbroken for longer periods, the new thing they sought--genuine friendliness, partnership.

It was just after Christmas that Abe Shuman took her away from him and put her to work exclusively on costumes. And the swift sequence of events within a month thereafter launched her in an independent business; the new partnership with Alice Perosini, with the details of which, through Jimmy Wallace, you are already sufficiently acquainted. By the time that happened the friendship had gone so far that Rose's chief reluctance in making the change sprang from a fear that the change would interrupt it.

But the thing worked the other way. Released from the compulsory relation of employer and employee, they frankly sought each other as friends, and found that they got more out of a half-hour together over a hasty lunch than a whole day's struggle over a common task had given them.

There were long stretches of days, of course, when they saw nothing of each other, and Rose, so long as she had plenty to do, was never conscious of missing him. She never, in the course of her own day's work, made an unconscious reference to him, as she was always making them to Rodney. But the prospect of an empty Sunday morning, for instance, was always enormously brightened if he called up to say that it was empty for him, too, and shouldn't they go for a walk or a ferry ride somewhere.

He did the greater part of the talking. Told her, a good deal to his own surprise, stories of his early life in London--a chapter he'd never been willing to refer to, except in the vaguest terms, to anybody else. He told her, too, with more and more freedom and explicitness, as he discovered how straight and honest her mind was, how eager it was for facts instead of for sentimental refractions of them, about certain emotional adventures of his as he was emerging into manhood, and of the marks they had left on him.

All told, she learned more about men, as such, from him than ever she had learned, consciously at least, from Rodney. She'd never been able to regard her husband as a specimen. He was Rodney, _sui generis_, and it had never occurred to her either to generalize from him to other men, or to explain any of the facts she had noted about him, on the mere ground of his masculinity. She began doing that now a little, and the exercise opened her eyes.