Evening Republican, Volume 59, Number 105, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 May 1917 — The Real Adventure [ARTICLE]

The Real Adventure

A NOVEL.

By Henry Kitchell Webster

(Copyright 1918. The Bobb.-Merrill Company) CHAPTER XXV—Continued. —l7 It was a good while before Rose got the key to his preoccupation. They had turned into the park at Sixty-sixth street, and were half-way over to the Fifth avenue corner at Fifty-ninth, before he spoke out. “On a day like this,” he said, “to have sat there for two or fhfeemortal hours arguing about stale ideas —when we might have been out here, being alive! But it must have seemed natural to you to hear me going on like that.” And then with a burst, before she could speak: “You must remember me as the most blindly opinionated fool in the world!” She caught her breath, then said very quietly, with a warm little laugh In her voice: “That’s not how I remember you, Roddy.” She declined to help him when he tried to scramble back to the safe shores of conventional conversation. That sort of thing had lasted long ■enough. And when they stopped and trance to the building where Rose’s apartment was, it was at the end of a mile or more of absolutely unbroken silence. And facing each other there, all that was said between them was her: “You’ll come in, won’t you?” and his “Yes." But the gravity with which she’d uttered the invitation and the tenseness of his acceptance of it, the square look that passed between them, marked an end of something and the beginning of something new. She left him In her sitting room ■while she went into her room to take off her hat and jacket and take a glance into her mirror. When she came hack she found him standing at her window, looking out. He didn’t turn when she came in. but almost immediately he began speaking? She —went rather limp at the sound 4>f voice and dropped down on an ottoman in front of fireplace, and squeezed her hands together between her knees. “I don’t know how much you will have understood.” he began; “probably a good deal. What. I Tidpe you will J»ave guessed is that I wouldn’t have come except that I’d something to tell you—something I felt you were entitled to he told. But I felt —this is what you won't have understood —I felt that I hadn’t any right to speak to you at all. about anything vital, until I’d given you some sort of guaranty until I’d shown you that I was a person it was possible to deal reasonably with.” “ She smiled, then pressed her hands suddenly to her eyes. “I understood,” she said. “Well then . . .” But he didn’t at once go on. Stood there a while longer at the window, then crossed the room and brought up before her bookshelves, staring blindly at the titles. He hadn’t looked at her even aS he crossed the room. “Oh, it’s a presumptuous thing to try to say,” he broke out at last, “a pitifully unnecessary thing to say, because you must know it without my telling you. But when you went away you said —you said it was. because you hadn’t my—friendship! You said that was the thing you wanted, and that you were going to try and earn it. And you told me that I’d never be able to see that the thing you were doing there was a fine thing, worth doing, entitled to my respect. But what I’ve come down here to say is—is that now, at last —I do see it.” She would have spoken then if she could have commanded her voice, and as it was, the sound she made conveyed her intention to him,-for he turned upon her quickly as if to interrupt the unspoken words, and went on with an almost savage bitterness: “Oh, I’m under no illusions about it. I had my chance to see, when seeing would have meant something to you—helped you* When anyone but the blindest sort of fool would have seen. I didn’t. Now, when the thing is patent for the world tosee—now that you’ve won your fight without any help from me . . . Without any help! In spite of every hindrance that my fdlocy could put in your way-!- Now/ after all —I come and tell you that you’ve earned the thing you’ve set out to get.” There was a little silence after that. She got up and took the post he had abandoned at the window. “Why did you do It. Roddy?" she asked. “I mean, why did you want to come and tell me?” ’“Why, in the first place,” he said, “I wanted to get back a little of my self-respect. I couldn’t get that until Td. told you.” This time the silence was longer. “What else did you want?” she asked. "What —in the second place?” “I want to earn ypur friendship. It’s the biggest thing 1 can hope for. But I’ve no idea that you can hand it out to me ready-made. I believe you’d do it if you could. But you said once, yourself, that it wasn’t a thing that could be given. It was a

thing that had to be earned. And you were right about that, as you were about so many other things. Well, I’m going to try to earn it.” “Is that —all you want?” she asked, and then, hearing the little gasp he gave, she swung around quickly and looked at him. It -was pretty dark in the room, but his face in the dusk seemed to have whitened. “Is friendship all you want of me, Roddy?” she asked again. She stood there waiting, a full minute, in silence. Then she said: “You don’t have to tell me that. Because I know. Oh — oh. my dear, how welt F-know!"/ Hie didn’t come to her; just stood there, gripping the corner of her bookcase and staring at her silhouette, which was about all he could see of her against the window. At last he said, in a strained, dry voice she’d hardly have known for his: “If you know that —if I’ve let you see that —then I’ve done just about the last despicable thing there was left for me to do. I’ve come down here and — made you feel sorry for me. So that with that —divine kindliness of yours, you’re willing to give thing.?’He straightened up and came a step nearer. “WelL I won’t have it. T fen you. I don’t know how you guessed. If I’d dreamed I was betraying that to you . . . ! Don’t I know —it’s burnt into me so that I’ll never forget —what the memory of my love must be to you? The memory of the hideous things it’s done to you? And noff, after all that—after you’ve won your sight —alone —and stand where you stand now—for ine to come begging! And take a gift like that! I tell you it Is pity. It can’t be anything else.” There was another minute of silence, and then he heard her make a little noise in her throat, a noise that would have been a sob had there not been something like a laugh in it. The next moment she said. “Come over here. Roddy,” and as he hesitated, as if he hadn’t understood, she added: “I want you to look at me. Over here, where •there’s. light emmgh to see me by.” He came, wraderingly. very slowly, but at last with her outstretched hand she reached him and drew him around between her and the window.

“Look into my face,” she commanded. “Look into my eyes—as far in as you can. Oh, my dearest —” the sob of pure joy came again—“is it pity that you see? Don’t you understand?” He did understand it with his mind, but he was a little dazed, like one who lias stood too near wheye the lightning struck. The hope he had kept buried alive so long—buried alive because it wouldn’t die —could not be brought out into a blinding glory like this without pain—exquisite, terrifying pain. The knowledge she had acquired by her own suffering stood her in good stead now. She did not mistake, as the Rose he had married might have done, the weakness of his response for coldness —indifference. She led him over "to her’one big chair and made him sit down in it. settled herself upon the arm of it. and contented herself with one of his hands. Presently he took one of hers, bent his face down over it, and brushed the back of it with his lips. The timidity of that caress, with all it revealed to her, was too much for her. She swallowed one sob, and another? but the next one got away from her and she broke out in a passionate fit of weeping. That roused him from his daze a little, and he pulled her down in his arms—held her tight—comforted her. When she got herself in hand again, she got up, went away to wash her face, and, coming back in the room again, lighted a reading lamp and drew down the blinds. “Rose,” he said presently, “what are we going to do?” :;; “Shall we make it a real honeymoon, Roddy—make it as complete as we can? Forget everything and let all the world be . . .” He supplied the word for her, “Rosecolor?” She accepted it with a little laugh , . .“for a while?” “That’s what I was fumbling for,” he said, “but I can’t think very straight tonight. I’ve got it now, though. That cottage we had —before the twins were born —down on the Cape. There won’t be a soul- there this time of year. We’d have the world to ourselves." “Yes," she said, “for a little while, we’d want it like that. But after a while —after a day or two, could we have the babies? Could the nurse bring them on to me and then go straight back, so that I could have them, and you, all together?” He said, “You darling!” But he couldn’t manage more thanthat At the entrance and just out of range of the elevaterjnan, he kissed her good night.” - “But will you telephone to me as soon as you wake up in the morning, so -that I’llknow it’s-true?” She nodded. Then her eyes went wide and she clung to him. “Is it true, Roddy? Is it possible for a thing to come back like that? Are we really the old Rodney and Itose, planning our honeymoon again? It wasn’t quite three years ago. Will it be like that?” “Not like that, perhaps,” he said, “exactly. It win be better by all we’ve learned and suffered since.” CHAPTER XXVI. The Beginning. There was a sense in which this prediction of Rodney’s about their honeymoon was altogether true. They had great hours—hours of an emotional intensity greater than any they had known during that former honeymoon, greater by all they had learned and suffered since—hours that repaid all that suffering, and could not have

been captured at any smaller price. But life, of course, cannot be made up of hours like 'that. No sane person can even want to live In a perpetual ecstilsy. What makes a mountain peak is the fall away into the surrounding valleys. In their valleys of commonplace, everyday existence —and these occurred even in their first days together —they were stiff, shy. self-conscious with each other. And their attempt to ignore,, this fact only made the selfconsciousness the worse. It troubled and bewildered both of them. The arrival, of the twins, in the convoy of a badly flustered —and. to tell the truth, a somewhat scandalized— Miss French, simplified the situation somewhat—by complicating it! They absolutely enforced routine. And they gave Rose and Rodney so many occupations that the contemplation of their complicated states of mind was much abridged. But even her babies brought Rose a disappointment along with them. From the time of the receipt of Miss French’s telegram, telling them what train she and the twins would take. Rose had been telling off the hours In mounting excitement. The two utterly adorable little creatures, as the pictures of them in Rodney’s'pocketbook showed them to be. who were miraculously. Incredibly hers, were coming to bring motherhood to her— She didn’t go to Boston with Rodney to meet them: stayed behind in the cottage, ostensibly to see to it. up to the very last minute, that the fires were right (June had come in cold and rainy) and, in general, to be ready, on the moment, to produce anything that their rather unforeseeable needs might call for. Her real reason was a shrinking from having her first meeting with them in the confusion of arrival on a station platform; "un<!w _ TEe _ eyesro} r understood this well enough, and. arriving at the cottage, he clambered out of the wagon with them and carried them both straight in to Rose, leaving the nurse and the bewildering paraphernalia of travel for a second trip. Rose, in the passionate surge of gratified desire that came with the sight of them, caught them from him, crushed them up against her breast — and frightened them half to death. So that, without dissimulation, they howled and brought Miss French flying to the rescue. Rose didn't make a tragedy of it; managed a smile at herself, though she suspected she’d cry when she got the chance. and siibjected her ideas to aa instantaneous revision. They were—persons, those two funnily indignant little mites, with their own ideas, their own preferences, and the perfectly adequate conviction of being entitled to them. How would she herself have liked it, to have a total stranger, fifteen feet high or so, snatch her like that? She was rather apologetic all day, and got her reward, especially from the boy, who was an adventurous and rather truculent baby, much, she fancied, as his father must once have been, and who took to her more quickly than the girl did. Indeed, the second Rodney fell in love with her almost as promptly as his father had done before him. But little Portia wasn’t very far behind. Two days sufficed for the conquest of the pair of them. The really disquieting discovery awaited the time when the wire edge of novelty about this adventure in motherhood had worn off; when she could bathe them, dress them, feed them their very strictly regimented meals, without being spurred to the highest pitch of alertness by the fear of making a mistake —forgetting some-thtag-like-the-juice of a half-orange at ten o’clock in the morning, the omission of which might have —who knew what disastrous consequences! That attitude can’t last any woman long, and Rose, with her wonderfully clever bunds, her wits trained not to be told the same thing twice, her pride keeping in sharp focus the determination that Rodney should see that she could be as good a nurse as Miss French—Rose wore off that nervous tenseness over her new job very quickly. Within a week she had a routine established that was noiseless —friet ionless. ~ ■

But, do you remember how aghast she was over the forty weeks John Galbraith had talked about as the probable run of “The Girl Up-Stairs;” her consternation over the idea of just going on doing the same thing over and over again, "around and around, like a horse at the end of a pole?” Well, It was with something the same feeling of consternation that, having thrown herself heart and soul into the task of planning and setting in motion a routine for two year-and-a-half-old babies, she should find herself straightening up and saying: “What next?” and realizing that, so far as ~thls job was concerned, there was no “next.” The supreme merit of her care from now on would be —• barring emergencies—the placid continuation of that routine. There were no heroics about motherhood —save in emergency, once more. It was a fine relation. It was, perhaps, the very finest in the world. But as a job, it wasn’t so satisfactory. Four-fifths of it, anyway, could be done with better results, for the children, by a placid, unimaginative, tolerably stupid person who had no stronger feeling for them than the mild, temporally affection they could excite in anyone not a monster. And the other fifth of. it Wasn’t a job at all. - On the whole, then, tearing their miraculous hours out of the account, their honeymoon, considered as an attempt to revisit Arcady, to seize a

golden day which looked neither toward the future, complete in itself, perfect—was a failure. It was not until, pretty ruefully, they acknowledged this, tore up their artificial resolution not to look at the future, and deliberately set themselves to the contemplation of a life that would have to take into account complex and baffling considerations, that their honeymoon became a success. It was well along in their mon{h that this happened. Rose had spent a maddening sort of day, a day that had been all edges, trying not to let herself feel hurt over fantastic secondary meanings which It was possible to attach to some of the things Rodney had said, trying to be cheerful and sensible, and to ignore the patent fact that his cheerfulness was ns forced and unnatural a thing as hers. The children —as a rule the best-behaved little things in the world —had been refractory. So. after their supper, when they’d finally gone off to sleep, and Rose had rejoined Rodney in the sitting room, she was in a state where it did not take much to set her off. It was not much that did; nothing more, indeed, than the fact that she found her husband brooding in front of the fire, and that the smile with which he greeted her was a little too quick and bright and mechanical, and that it soon faded out. The Rodney of her memories had never done things like that. If you found him sitting in a chair, you found him reading a book. When he was thinking something out he tramped back and forth, twisted his face up, made gestures. That habit couldn’t have changed. It was just that he didn’t care to be natural with her! Couldn’t feel at home with Tier! Before she knew it, she was crying. He asked, in consternation, what the matter was. ” ~~~~ ~ “Nothing,” she said. “Absolutely nothing. Really.” “Then it’s just—that you’re not happy, with me, like this.” He brought that out gravely, a word at a time, as though they hurt. “Are you happy, with me—like this?” she countered. It was a question he could not answer categorically, and she not j give him time for anything else. “What’s the matter with us, Roddy?” she demanded. “We ought to be happy. We meant to be.” Her voice broke in a sob over that. “And here we are—like this!” * “Ifhasn’t all been like this,” he said. “There have been hours, a day or two that Fd go through the whole thing for, again, if necessary.” She nodded assent to that. “But the rest of the time!” she cried. “Why can’t we be —comfortable together? Why . . . Roddy, why can’t you be natural with me? Like your old self. Why don’t you roar at me, any more? And swear when you run into things? I’ve never seen you formal before — not ..with anybody. Not . even with strangers. And now you’re formal with me.”

The rueful grin with which he acknowledged the truth of this indictment was more like him, and it cheered her Immensely. She answered it with one of her own, dried her eyes, and asked again, more collectedly: “Well, can you tell me why?” “Why, it seemed to me,” he said, “that it was you who were different. And you have changed, of course, down inside, more than I have. You’ve been through things in the last year and a half, found out things that I know nothing about, except as I have read about them in books. So, when I remember how* things used to be between us, how I used to be the one who knew thidgs. and how I preached and spouted, I get to feeling that the man you remember must look to you now, like—well, like a schoolboy showing off.”

She stared at him incredulously. “But that’s downright morbid,” she said. “It’s horrible that I should make you feel like that,” she concluded. "It isn’t you,” he told her. “It’s just the situation. I can’t help feeling that I’m taken on approval. Oh, it’s got to be like that! There are things that, with all the forgiveness in the world, you can’t forget. And until you have seen that I am different, that I have made myself different. . . She gave a shaky laugh. “On approval!” Her eyes filled again. “Roddy. you can’t mean that.” She came over and sat down in his lap, and slid her arm around his neck. “Thig Is where we’ll begin!” she said, “That I’ll never—whatever happens—walk out on you again. Whether things go well or badly with us, we’ll work it out, somehow, together." It was not until she heard the long, shuddering sigh he drew at that, and felt him go limp under her, that she realized how genuine his fear had been —the perfectly preposterous feat that if their new experiment didn’t 'come up to her antlcipatlon. she’d tell ■him so. and leave him once more. This time, for good. Tt was a good white- before they took up a rational discussion again, but at last she said: “It will take working out, though. We’ve been shirking that. Hadn’t we better begin T’ “Well.” he said when he’d got his pipe alight. “It’s the first question I asked you after—after I got my eyes open: What are we going to do?” “I told Alice Perosini,” she said, “the day before we left to eorne up here, that Td come back in a month, and that I'd stay until I’d finished all the work that we were contracted for. I felt I had to do that. You..understand, don’t you?” “Of course,” he said. “You couldn’t consider anything else. But then what?” * “Then.” she said after a little si-

lence, “then, if it’s what you want me to do, Roddy, HI come buck to Chicago for good.”, “Give up yout business, you mean?” he asked quickly. She nodded. “It can’t be done out there.” she said. “All the big productions that there’s any money in are made in New York. m cofne back and just be your wife. I’ll keep youfr house and mother the children, and — maintain your status, if you don’t think I’m spoiled for that.” That last phrase, though, was said with a smile, which he answered with one of his. own. But with an Instant return to seriousness, he said: “I’ve not asked that. Rose..! wouldn’t dream of asking it” “There’s a real Job there.” she persisted, “just in being successfully the wife of a successful man. I can see that now. I never saw it when It was my Job. Hardly caught a glimpse of it I didn’t even see my hills: let you pay them down at the office, with all your own work that you had to do.” “It wasn’t me,” he said. “It was Miss Beach.” She stared at that and gave a short laugh. “If I’d known that ... !” she said. Then she came back to the point. “It is a real job. and I think I could learn to do it pretty well. And of course a wife’s the only person who can do it properly." Still he shook his head*. But he hadn’t, as yet. any reasoned answer to make, except as before, that it wouldn’t work. "What will work, then?” she asked. And this he couldn’t answer. “We’ve Just got to go ahead.” he said at last, “and see what Perhaps you can work it out so that you can do part of your work at home. We could move the nursery and give you Florence’s old studio. And then it would do if you only came down horo for >-onr two big seasons—fall and spring.” “That doesn’t seem fair to you,” she protested. “You deserve a real wife. Roddy; not somebody dashing in and dashing out.” “I don’t deserve anything I can’t get,” he said. ‘Td rather have a part interest in you than to possess, lock, stock and barrel, any other woman I can think of.” She came back to him again and settled in his arms. “A man told me." she said, “John Galbraith told me that he couldn't be a woman’s friend and her lover at the same time, any more., than a steel spring could be made soft so that it would bend in your fingers, like copper, and stilt be a spring. He said that was true of him, anyway, and he felt sure it was true o's nine men out of a dozen, Do you think It’s true? Have we got to decide which we’ll be?” “We can’t decide,” he said with an impatient laugh. “That's just what I’ve been telling' you. We’ve got to take what we can get. We’ve got to work out the relation between ourselves that .Is our relation—the Rose and Rodney relation. It’ll probably be a little different from any other. There’ll be friendship in it, and there’ll be love in it. Imagine our ‘deciding’ that we wouldn’t be lovers! But I guess that what Galbraith said was true to this extent: that each of those will be more or less at the expense of the other. It won’t spring quite so well, and It will bend a little.” After a while he said: “Here’s what we’ve got to build on: Whatever else it may or may not be, this relation between us is a permanent thing. We’ve lived with each other and without each other, and we know which we want. If we find it has its limitations and drawbacks, we needn’t worry. Just go ahead and make the best of it we can. There‘B no law that decrees we’ve got to be happy. When we are happy it’ll be so much to the good. And when we aren’t ...” . ' She gave a contented little laugh and cuddled closer down against him. “You talk like Solomon in all his so-, lemnity,” she said. “But you can’t imagine that we’re going to be unhappy. Really?” His answer was that perhaps he couldn’t imagine It, but that he knew It, just the same. “Even an ordinary marriage isn’t any too easy;’a marriage, I mean, where it’s quite well understood which of the parties to it shall always submit to the other,' and which of them is the Important one who’s always to have the right of, way. There’s generally something perfectly unescapable that decides that question. But with us there isn’t. So the question who’s got to give In will have to be decided on its merits every time a difference arises.” She burlesqued a look of extreme apprehension. She was deeply and utterly content with life Just then. But he wouldn’t be diverted. “There’s another reason,” he went-on. “I've a notion that the thing we’re after is about the finest thing there is. If that’s so. we’ll have to pay for it in one way or another. But we aren’t going to worry about it. We’ll Just go ahead —and see what happens.” “Do you remember when you said that before?” asked Rose. “You told me that marriage was an adventure anyway, and that the only thing to do was to try it—and see what happened." He grunted. “The real adventure’® just begun,” be said. “Anyhow,” she murmured drowsily, “you can talk to me again. Just as if we weren’t married.” And there is Just about where they stand today—at the beginning, or hardly past the beginning, of what he spoke of as their real adventure; they are going forward prepared to make the best of it and see what happens. THE END. Electric tanning machinery is needed in Spain.