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

from his letters, was becoming her friend too. Was it because he, too, had ceased to be her lover? if ever she stood face to face with him again would she search in vain for that look of hunger--of ages-old hunger and need--that she'd last seen when they stood face to face in her little room on Clark Street?

She walked down-town to her apartment from the Pennsylvania station end, though the natural effect of fatigue was to quicken her pace, and though she was indubitably tired, she walked slowly; slowly, and still more slowly. She found she dreaded going back to that apartment of hers and shutting herself in for the night, alone.

She found two corners of white projecting from under her door. And when she'd unlocked and opened it she stooped and picked them up, a visiting card and a folded bit of paper. She turned the card over and gave a little half-suffocated cry.

It was Rodney's card and on it he'd written, "Sorry to have missed you. I'll come back at eight."

Her shaking fingers fumbled pitifully over the folds of the note, but she got it open at last. It was from him too. It read:

"DEAR ROSE:

"This is hard luck. I suppose you're off for a week-end somewhere. I
want very much to see you. When you come back and have leisure for
me, will you call me up? I know how busy you are so I'll wait until
I hear from you.

"RODNEY."

Her heart felt like lead when she'd read it. Dazedly, a little giddily, she pulled her door shut, went into her room and sat down.

He was in New York! He'd been to see her this afternoon--and left a card! And the note he'd written after his second visit was what Howard West might have written, or any other quite casual, slightly over-polite acquaintance. And it was from Rodney to her!

She couldn't see him if he felt like that; couldn't stand it to see him if he felt like that! Bitterness, contempt, hatred, anything would be easier to bear than that. She was to call up his hotel, was she? Well, she wouldn't!

And then suddenly she spread the note open again and read it once more. Turned it over and scrutinized the reverse side of the paper, and uttered a little sobbing laugh. If he'd been as cool, unmoved, self-possessed, as that note had tried to sound, would he have forgotten to tell her at what hotel she was to call him up?

Then, with a gasp, she wondered how she _could_ call him up. He'd think she knew where he was; he'd wait; and after he'd waited a while, in default of word from her, wouldn't he take her silence for an answer and go back to Chicago?

She clenched her hands at that and tried to think. Well, the obvious thing to do seemed to be the only one. She must try one hotel after another until she found him. After all, there probably weren't more than a dozen to choose among. It wouldn't be easy looking up numbers with everything dancing before her eyes like this, but if she took the likeliest ones first she mightn't have to go very far. And, indeed, at a third attempt she found him.

When the telephone girl switched her to the information desk, and the information clerk said, "Mr. Rodney Aldrich? Just a moment," and then; "Mr. Aldrich is in fifteen naught five," the dry contraction in her throat made it impossible for her to speak.

But the switchboard girl had evidently been listening in and plugged her through, because she heard the throb of another ring, a click of a receiver and then--then Rodney's voice.

She couldn't answer his first "Hello," and he said it again, sharply, "Hello, what is it?"

And then suddenly her voice came back. A voice that startled her with its distinctness. "Hello, Rodney," she said; "this is Rose."

There was a perfectly blank silence after that and, then the crisp voice of an operator somewhere--"Waiting?"

"Yes," she heard Rodney say, "get off the line." And then to her. "I came to see you this afternoon and again to-night."

"Yes, I know," she said. "I just this minute got in. Can't you come back again now?"

How in the world, she had wondered, could she manage her voice like that! From the way it sounded she might have been speaking to Alice Perosini; and yet her shaking hand could hardly hold the receiver. She heard him say:

"It's pretty late, isn't it? I don't want to ... You'll be tired and ..."

"It's not too late for me," she said, "only you might come straight along before it gets any later."

She managed to wait until she heard him say, "All right," before she hung up the receiver. Then a big racking sob, not to be denied any longer, pounced on her and shook her.


CHAPTER IV

COULEUR-DE-ROSE

The fact that the length of time it would take a taxi to bring him down from his hotel to her apartment was not enough to decide anything in, plan anything in, was no more than enough, indeed, to give her a chance to stop crying and wash her face, was a saving factor in the situation.

In the back of her mind, as with a hairpin or two she righted her hair and decided, glancing down over herself, against attempting to change even her tumbled blouse or her dusty boots, was an echoing consciousness of something Galbraith had said that afternoon--"And you know when your next big thing comes along you will do that too."

Without actually quoting those words to herself, she experienced a sudden confidence that was almost serene. In a few minutes now, not more than five, probably--she hoped not more than that--something incalculable, tremendous, was going to begin happening to her. A thing whose issue would in all likelihood determine the course of her whole life. There might be a struggle, a tempest, but she made no effort to foresee the nature of it. She just relaxed physical and spiritual muscles and waited. Only she hoped she wouldn't have to wait long.

No--there was the bell.

It was altogether fortunate for Rose that she had attempted no preparation, because the situation she found herself in when she'd opened the door for her husband, shaken hands with him, led him into her sitting-room and asked him to sit down, was one that the wildest cast of her imagination would never have suggested as a possible one for her and Rodney. And it lasted--recurred, at least, whenever they were together--almost unaltered, for two whole days.

It was his manner, she felt sure, that had created it; and yet, so prompt and automatic had been her response that she couldn't be sure, not for the first half-hour or so, anyway, that he wasn't attributing it to her. It wasn't so much the first words he said, when, opening her door, she saw him standing in the hallway, as it was his attitude; his rather formal attitude; the way he held his hat; the fact--this was absurd, of course, but she reconstructed the memory very clearly afterward--that his clothes were freshly pressed. It was the slightly anxious, very determined attitude of an estimable and rather shy young man making his first call on a young lady, on whom he is desperately desirous of making a favorable impression.

What he said was something not very coherent about being very glad and its being very good of her, and almost simultaneously she gasped out that she was glad, and wouldn't he come in. She held out her hand to him, politely, and he, compensating for an imperceptible hesitation with a kind of clumsy haste, took it and released it almost as hastily. She showed him where to hang his coat and hat, conducted him into her sitting-room and invited him to sit down. And there they were.

And he was Rodney, and she was Rose! It was like an absurd dream.

For a while she talked desperately, under the same sort of delirious conviction one has in dreams that if he desists one moment from some grotesquely futile form of activity a cosmic disaster will instantly take place. A moment of silence between them would be, she felt, something unthinkably terrible. It was not a fear of what might emerge from such a silence, the sudden rending of veils and the confrontation of two realities; it was a dread, purely, of the silence itself. But the feeling did not last very long.

"Won't you smoke?" she asked suddenly; and hurried on when he hesitated, "I don't do it myself, but most of my friends do, and I keep the things." From a drawer in her writing-desk she produced a tin box of cigarettes. "They're your kind--unless you've changed," she commented, and went over to the mantel shelf for an ash-tray and a match-safe. The match-safe was empty and she left the room to get a fresh supply from her kitchenette.

On the inner face of her front door was a big mirror, and in it, as she came back through the unlighted passage, she saw her husband. He was sitting just as she'd left him, and as his face was partly turned away from her, it could not have been from the expression of it that she got her revelation. But she stopped there in the dark and caught her breath and leaned back against the wall and squeezed the tears out of her eyes.

Perhaps it was just because he was sitting so still, a thing it was utterly unlike him to do. The Rodney of her memories was always ranging about the rooms that confined him. Or the grip of the one hand she could see upon the chair-arm it rested on may have had something to do with it. But it was not, really, a consciously deductive process at all; just a clairvoyant look--_into_ him, and a sudden, complete, utterly confident understanding.

He had come down here to New York to make another beginning. He meant to assert no rights, not even in their common memories, he would make no appeal. But something that he felt he had forfeited he was going to try to earn back. What was the thing he sought--her friendship, or her love? She knew! No plea that the inspired rhetoric of passion could be capable of could have convinced her of his love for her and of his need for her love as did the divine absurdity of this attempt of his to show her that she need give him--nothing. She knew. Oh, how she knew!

She stole back into her little kitchen and shut the door and leaned giddily against it, trying to get her breath to coming steadily again. At last she straightened up and wiped her eyes. A smile played across her lips; the smile of deep maternal tenderness. Then she picked up her box of matches and carried them to him in the sitting-room.

He stayed that first evening a little less than an hour, and when he got up to go, she made no effort to detain him. The thing had been, as its unbroken surface could testify, a highly successful first call. Before she let him go, though, she asked him how long he was going to be in New York, and on