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

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In many ways Galbraith and her husband were a good deal alike. Both were rough, direct, a little remorseless, and there was in both of them, right alongside the best and finest and clearest things they had, an unaccountable vein of childishness. She'd never been willing to call it by that name in Rodney. But when she saw it in Galbraith, too, she wondered. Was that just the man of it? Were they all like that; at least all the best of them? Did a man, as long as he lived, need somebody in the role of--mother? The thought all but suffocated her.

She did not return Galbraith's confidences with any detailed account of her own life, and the one great emotional experience of it that seemed to have absorbed all the rest and drawn it up into itself. But she had a comforting sense that, scanty as was the framework of facts he had to go on, he knew, somehow, all about it; all the essentials of it; knew infinitely more about her than Alice Perosini did, although from time to time she had told Alice a good deal.

Spring came on them with a rush that year; swept a vivid flush of green over the parks and squares, all in a day; pumped the sap up madly into the little buds, so that they could hardly swell fast enough, and burst at last into a perfectly riotous fanfare through the shrubberies. It pumped blood, too, as well as sap, and made hearts flutter to strange irregular rhythms with the languorous insolence of its perfumes, and the soft caressing pressures of its south wind.

It worried Rose nearly mad. She was bound to have gone slack anyway; to have experienced the well-earned, honest lassitude of a finished struggle and an achieved victory. Dane & Company had any amount of work in sight, to be sure--a success of such triumphant proportions as they had had with _Come On In_, made that inevitable--but it would be months before any of the new work was wanted.

Alice, who could see plainly enough that something was the matter, kept urging Rose to run away somewhere for a long vacation. Why not, if it came to that, put in a few weeks in London and Paris? She was almost sure to pick up some valuable ideas over there. Rose declined that suggestion almost sharply. If she'd had any practical training as a nurse, she'd go over to Paris and stay, but to use that magnificently courageous tragic city as a source of ideas for a Shuman _revue_ was out of the question. As for the quiet place in the Virginia mountains, which Alice had suggested as an alternative, Rose would die of ennui there within three days. The only thing to do was to stick to her routine as well as she could, and worry along.

These weren't reasons that she gave Alice, they were excuses. The reason, which she tried to avoid stating, even to herself, was that she couldn't bear the thought of going one step farther away from Rodney than she was already.

A letter from him was always in the first Saturday morning delivery and she never left for her atelier till she got it. She had perceived, what he had not, the steadily growing friendliness of these letters. It wasn't a made-up thing, either. He was not telling her things because he thought she'd like to be told, but because it had insensibly become a need of his to tell her.

A year ago those letters would have made her wildly happy; would have filled her with the confidence that the end she sought was in sight at last. Now they drove her half mad with disappointment. She never opened one of those dearly familiar envelopes without the irrepressible hope that it contained a love-letter; a passionate demand that she come back to him; leave all she had and come back to him; his woman to her man. And her disappointment and inconsistency bewildered her.

Her two chance encounters, first with Jimmy Wallace in the theater, and later with James Randolph, made her restlessness more nearly unendurable. The thought that they were going back to Chicago and would, no doubt, within a few days after their talks with her, see and talk with him, was like the cup of Tantalus. And if she could encounter them by chance, like that, why mightn't she encounter him? Why mightn't he come to New York on business? She never walked anywhere, nowadays, without watching for him.

She didn't yield, passively, to these thoughts and feelings. She fought them relentlessly, methodically. She went to a women's gymnasium every evening, threw a medicine ball around for a while, and then played a hard game of squash, in the sometimes successful attempt to get tired enough so that she'd have to sleep. Also she tried riding in the park, mornings, but that didn't work so well, and she gave it up.

There came a Saturday morning, toward the end of May, which brought no letter from Rodney, and she stayed in all day, from one delivery to the next, waiting for it. She tried to disguise her excitement over its failure to arrive, as a fear lest something might have gone wrong with him or with the twins, but did not succeed. If anything had gone wrong she knew she'd have heard. The thing that kept clutching at her heart was hope. The hope that the letter wouldn't come at all; that there'd be a telephone call instead--and Rodney's voice.

The telephone did ring just before noon, but the voice was Galbraith's. He wanted to know if she wouldn't come over to his Long Island farm the following morning and spend the day.

She had visited the place two or three times and had always enjoyed it immensely there. It wasn't much of a farm, but there was a delightful old Revolutionary farmhouse on it, with ceilings seven feet high and casement windows, and the floors of all the rooms on different levels; and Galbraith, there, was always quite at his best. His sister and her husband, whom he had brought over from England when he bought the place, ran it for him. They were the simplest sort of peasant people who had hardly stirred from their little Surrey hamlet until that meteoric brother of theirs had summoned them on their breath-taking voyage to America, and for whom now, on this little Long Island farm, New York might have been almost as far away as London. Mrs. Flaxman did all the work of the house and farmyard without the aid of a servant, and her husband raised vegetables for the New York market.

What the pair really thought of the life John Galbraith led, or of the guests he sometimes brought out for week-end visits, no one knew. But the pleasant sort of homely hospitality one always found there was extremely attractive to Rose, and with Rodney's regular Saturday letter at hand she'd have accepted the invitation eagerly. As it was, she answered almost shortly that she couldn't come. Then, contrite, she hastened to dilute her refusal with an elaboration of regrets and hastily contrived reasons.

"All right," he said good-humoredly, "I shan't ask any one else, but if you happen to change your mind call me on the phone in the morning. Tell me what train you're coming down on and I'll meet you."

She didn't expect to change her mind, but a phonograph did it for her. This instrument was domesticated across the court somewhere--she had never bothered to discover just which pair of windows the sound of it issued from--and it was addicted to fox-trots, comic recitations in negro dialect, and the melodies of Mr. Irving Berlin. It was jolly and companionable and Rose regarded it as a friend. But on this Saturday night, perversely enough, perhaps because its master was in Pittsburgh on a business trip and hadn't come home as expected, the thing turned sentimental. It sang _I'm on My Way to Mandalay_, under the impression that Mandalay was an island somewhere. It played _The Rosary_, done as a solo on the cornet; and over and over again it sang, with the thickest, sirupiest sentiment that John McCormack at his best is capable of,

"Just a little love, a li--ttle kiss,
Just an hour that holds a world of bliss,
Eyes that tremble like the stars above me,
And the little word that says you love me."

It was a song that had tormented Rose before with the abysmal fatuity of its phrases, its silly sloppy melody, and yet--this was the infuriating thing--the way it had of getting into her, somehow, reaching bare nerves and setting them all aquiver.

To-night it broke her down. She closed the windows, despite the sultriness of the night, but the tune, having once got in, couldn't be shut out. Whether she heard it or only fancied she did, didn't matter. The words bored their way into her brain.

"Just a little love, a little kiss, I would give you all my life for this, As I hold you fast and bend above you ..."

It was a white night for Rose. The morning sun had been streaming into her bedroom for an hour before she finally fell asleep. And at nine o'clock, when she wakened, she heard the phonograph going again. It was now on its way to Mandalay, but John McCormack was no doubt waiting in the background. She went to the telephone and called up Galbraith, telling him she'd come by the first train she could get.

He met her with a dog-cart and a fat pony, and when they had jogged their way to their destination they spent what was left of the morning looking over the farm. Then there was a midday farm dinner that Rose astonished herself by dealing with as it deserved and by feeling sleepy at the conclusion of. Galbraith caught her biting down a yawn and packed her off to the big Gloucester swing in the veranda, the one addition he'd built on the place, for a nap; and obediently she did as he bade her.

Coming into the veranda about four o'clock, and finding her awake, he suggested that they go for a walk. She had dressed, in anticipation of this, in a short skirt and heavy walking boots, so they set out across the fields. Two hours later, having swung her legs over a stone wall that had a comfortably inviting flat top, she remained sitting there and let her gaze rest, unfocused, on the pleasant farm land that lay below them.

After a glance at her he leaned back against the wall at her side and began filling his pipe. She dropped her hand on his nearer shoulder. After all these months of friendship it was the first approach to a caress that had passed between them.

"You're a good friend," she said, and then the hand that had rested on him so lightly suddenly gripped hard. "And I guess I need one," she ended.

He went on filling his pipe. "Anything special you need one for?" he asked quietly.

She gave a ragged little laugh. "I guess not. Just somebody strong and steady to hold on to like this."

"Well," he said very deliberately, "you want to realize this: You say I'm a friend and I am, but if there is anything in this friendship which can be of use to you you're entitled to it; to everything there is in it. Because you made it."

"One person can't make a friendship," she said. "Even two