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

people can't. It's got to--grow out of them somehow."

He assented with a nod. "But in this case who gave it a chance to grow? Where would it have been if I'd had my way? If you hadn't pulled me up and set me straight?"

"For that matter," she said, "where would it have been if I had had mine? If I'd run away and tried for a fresh start, as I'd have done if you hadn't set me right?"

"Make it so," he said. "Say we've equal rights in it. Still you needn't worry about my not getting my share of the benefits."

"You _are_ content with it, aren't you? Like this? I haven't--cheated? Used you? It's easy for a woman to do that, I think. It isn't ...?" She asked that last question by taking her hand off his shoulder.

"No, put it back," he said. "It's all right." He smoked in silence for a minute; then went on. "Why, 'content' is hardly the word for it. When I think what it was I wanted and what you've given me instead ...! It wasn't self-denial or any other high moral principle that kept me from flaring up when you took hold of me just now. It's because I've got a better thing. Something I wouldn't trade for all the love in the world. 'Content'!"

"I'd like to believe it was a better thing," she said; "but I'm afraid I can't."

"Neither could I when I was--how old are you?--twenty-four. Perhaps when you're fifty-one you can."

"I suppose so," she said absently. "Perhaps if it were a question of choosing between a love that hadn't any friendship in it and a friendship ... But it _can't_ be like that!--Can it? Can't one have both? Can't a man--love a woman and be her friend and partner all at the same time?"

"I can't answer for every man," he said reflectively. "There are all kinds of men. And that's not mentioning the queers, who aren't real men at all. Take a dozen sound, normal, healthy men and if you could find out the truth about them, which it would be pretty hard to do, you'd find immense differences in their wants, habits, feelings; in the way things _took_ them. But I've a notion that nine out of the dozen, if you could get down to the actual bedrock facts about them, would own up that if they were in love with a woman--really, you know, all the way--they wouldn't want her for a partner, and wouldn't be able to see her as a friend. That's just a guess, of course. But there's one thing I know, and that is that I couldn't."

She gave a little shiver. "_Oh_, what a mess it is!" she said. "What a perfectly hopeless blunder it is!" She slid down from the wall. "Come; let's walk."

He fell in beside her and they tramped sturdily along for a while in silence. At last she said, "Can you tell me why? Suppose there hadn't been any one else with me; suppose I'd felt toward you the way you did toward me, then; why couldn't you have gone on being my friend and partner as well as my lover? You'd have known I was worth it; have known I understood the things you were interested in and--yes, and was able to help you to work them out. Why would all that have had to go?"

"Oh, I don't know that I can explain it," he said. "But I don't think I'd call it a blunder that a strip of spring steel can't bend in your fingers like copper and still go on being a spring. You see, a man wants his work and then he wants something that isn't his work; that's altogether apart from his work; doesn't remind him of it. Love's about as far away as anything he can get. So that the notion of our working ourselves half to death over the same job, and then going home together ..."

"Yes," she admitted. "I can see that. But that doesn't cover friendship."

He owned that it didn't. "But when I'm in love with a woman--this isn't a fact I'm proud of, but it's true--I'm jealous of her. Not of other men alone, though I'm that, too, but jealous of everything. I want to be all around her. I want to be everything to her. I want her to think there's nobody like me; that nobody else could be right and I be wrong. And I want to be able to think the same of her. I want her to hide, from me, the things about herself that I wouldn't like. When I ask her what she thinks about something, I want her to say--what I want her to think. I know what I want her to think, and if she doesn't say it she hurts my feelings."

He thought it over a bit longer and then went on. "No, I've been in love with women I could suspect of anything. Women I thought were lying to me, cheating me; women I've hated; women I've known hated me. But I've never been in love with a woman who was my friend. I'd never figured it out before, but it's so."

In the process of figuring it out he'd more or less forgotten Rose. He had been tramping along communing with his pipe; thinking aloud. If he'd been watching her face he wouldn't have gone so far.

"Well, if it's like that," she said, and the quality of her voice drew his full attention instantly--"if love has to be like that, then the game doesn't seem worth going on with. You can't live with it, and you can't live--without it." Her voice dropped a little, but gained in intensity. "At least I can't. I don't believe I can." She stopped and faced him. "What can one _do_?" she demanded. "Wait, I suppose you'll say, till you're fifty. Well, you're fifty, and the thing can still torment you; spring on you when you aren't looking; twist you about." She turned away with a despairing gesture and stood gazing out, tear-blinded, over the little valley the hilltop they had reached commanded.

"You want to remember this," he said at last. "I've been talking about myself. I haven't even pretended to guess for more than nine of those twelve men. That leaves three who are, I am pretty sure, different. I might have been different myself, a little anyway, if I'd got a different sort of start. If my first love-affair had been an altogether different thing. If it had been the kind that gave me a home and kids. So you don't want to take what I've said for anything more than just the truth about me. And I'm not, thank God, a fair sample."

He stood behind her, miserably helpless to say or do anything to comfort her. An instinct told him she didn't want his hands on her just then, and he couldn't unsay the things he had told her any further than he had already.

Presently she turned back to him, slid her hand inside his arm, and started down the road with him. "My love-affair brought me a home and--kids," she said. "There are two of them--twins--a year and a half old now; and I went off and left them; left him. And all I did it for was to make myself over, into somebody he could be friends with, instead of just--as I said then--his mistress. I'd never known a woman then who was a man's mistress, really, and I didn't see why he should be so angry over my using the word. I thought it was fair enough. And the day I left his house I came to you and got a job in the chorus in _The Girl Up-stairs_. I thought that by earning my own way, building a life that he didn't--surround, as you say--I could win his friendship. And have his love besides. I don't suppose you would have believed there could be such a fool in the world as I was to do that."

He took a while digesting this truly amazing statement of hers, a half-mile perhaps of steady silent tramping. But at last he said, "No, I wouldn't call you a fool. I call a fool a person who thinks he can get something for nothing. You didn't think that. You were willing to pay--a heavy price it must have been, too--for what you wanted. And I've an idea, you know, that you never really pay without getting something; though you don't always get what you expect. You've got something now. A knowledge of what you can do; of what you are worth; and I don't believe you'd trade it for what you had the day before you came to me for a job."

"I don't know," she said raggedly. "Perhaps ..." A sob clutched at her throat and she did not try to conclude the sentence.

"As to whether you did right or wrong in leaving him," he went on, "you've got to figure it this way. It isn't fair to say, 'Knowing what I know now and being what I am now, but in the situation I was in then, I'd have done differently.' The thing you've got to take into account is, being what you were then, suppose you hadn't gone? You thought then that you were just his mistress, not knowing what a real mistress was like; and you thought that by going away you could make yourself his friend. You thought that was your great chance. Well, you couldn't have stayed without feeling that you had thrown away your chance; without knowing that you'd had your big thing to do and had been afraid to do it. And that knowledge would have gone a long way toward making you the thing you thought you were.

"Well, you did your big thing. And a person who's done that has stayed alive anyway; and he knows that when his next big thing comes along he'll do that too. I don't pretend that you'll always come out right in the end if you do the big thing, but I'm pretty sure of this; that you never come out at all if you refuse it."

His amazement over what she had done increased as he thought about it and was testified to every now and then by grunts and snorts and little exclamations, but he made no more articulate comment.

There was a seven-thirty train she thought she ought to take back to town and as their walk had led in that direction they finished it at the station, where he waited with her for the train to come in.

"It's been a good day," she said. "I feel as if you'd somehow pulled me through."

"And I," he said, "feel like a wind-bag. I've talked and talked; smug comfortable preaching."

"No, it's helped," she insisted. "Or something has. Just having you there, perhaps. I feel better, anyway."

But after she'd got her last look at him on the platform, when the train had carried her off, an observer, seeing the way the color faded out of her face, and the look in the eyes, which, so wide open and so unseeing, stared straight ahead, would have said that the benefit hadn't lasted long. There was about her the look of somber terror, just verging on panic, which you have seen in a child's face when he has been sent up-stairs to bed alone in the dark.

Fragments of Galbraith's talk came back to her. It was by ceasing to be her lover and her partner that he had become her friend. Rodney, it seemed