Читать книгу The Real Adventure - Henry Kitchell Webster - Страница 32

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But within a day or two, when a conversation overheard at a luncheon table recalled the architect to her mind, a rather perplexing question propounded itself to her. Why had it infuriated him so—why had he glared at her with that air of astounded incredulity, on discovering that she wasn't prepared to take him seriously? There could be only one answer to that question. He could not have expected Rose to be properly impressed and fluttered, unless that were the effect he was in the habit of producing on other women. These others, much older that Rose all of them (because no débutantes were ever invited to belong to the hareem), these new, brilliant, sophisticated friends her marriage with Rodney had brought her, did not, evidently, regard the dapper little architect with feelings anything like the mild, faintly contemptuous mirth that he had roused so spontaneously and irresistibly in Rose. Every one of them had a husband of her own, hadn't she? And they were happily married, too. Well, then … !

She found Violet Williamson in Frederica's box at the Symphony concert one Friday afternoon, and took them both home to tea with her afterward. And when the talk fairly got going, she tossed her problem about Bertie Willis and his hareem into the vortex to see what would come of it.

It was always easy to talk with Frederica and Violet, there was so much real affection under the amusement they freely expressed over her youth and inexperience and simplicity. They always laughed at her, but they came over and hugged her afterward.

"I'm turned out of the hareem," she said, apropos of the mention of him, "in disgrace."

Violet wanted to know whatever in the world she had done to him. "Because, he's been positively—what do you call it?—dithyrambic about you for the last three months."

"I laughed," Rose acknowledged; "in the wrong place of course."

The two older women exchanged glances.

"Do you suppose it's ever been done to him before," asked Frederica, "in the last fifteen years, anyway?" And Violet solemnly shook her head.

"But why?" demanded Rose. "That's what I want to know. How can any one help thinking he's ridiculous. Of course if you were alone on a desert island with him like the Bab Ballad, I suppose you'd make the best of him. But with any one else that was—real, you know, around … "

Only a very high vacuum—this was the idea Rose seemed to be getting at—might be expected, faute de mieux, to tolerate Bertie. So if you found him tolerated seriously in a woman's life, you couldn't resist the presumption that there was a vacuum there.

"Don't ask me about him," said Frederica. "He never would have anything to do with me; said I was a classic type and they always bored him stiff. But Violet, here … "

"Oh, yes," said Violet, "I lasted one season, and then he dropped me. He beat me to it by about a minute. All the same—oh, I can understand it well enough. You see, what he builds on is that a woman's husband is always the least interesting man in the world. Oh, I don't mean we don't love them, or that we want to change them—permanently, you know. Take Frederica and me. We wouldn't exchange for anything. Yet, we used to have long arguments. I've said that Martin was more—interesting, witty, you know, and all that, than John. And Frederica says John is more interesting than Martin. Oh, just to talk to, I mean. Not about anything in particular, but when you haven't anything else to do."

She paused long enough to take a tentative sip or two of boiling hot tea. But the way she had hung up the ending to her sentence, told them she wasn't through with the topic yet.

"It's funny about that, too," she went on, "because really, we see each other so much and have known each other so long, that I know Martin's—repertory, about as well as Frederica. I mean, it isn't like Walter Mill, when he was just back from the Legation at Pekin, or even like Jimmy Wallace, who spends half his time playing around with all sorts of impossible people—chorus-girls and such, and tells you queer stories about them. There's something besides the—familiarness that makes husbands dull. And that's what makes Bertie amusing."

"Oh, of course," said Frederica, "everybody likes to flirt—whether they have to or not."

"Have to?" Rose echoed. She didn't want to miss anything.

Frederica hesitated. Then, rather tentatively, began her exegesis.

"Why, there are a lot of women—especially of our sort, I suppose, who are always … well, it's like taking your own temperature—sticking a thermometer into their mouths and looking at it. They think they know how they ought to feel about certain things, and they're always looking to see if they do. And when they don't, they think their emotional natures are being starved, or some silly thing like that. And of course, if you're that way, you're always trying experiments, just the way people do with health foods. In the end, they generally settle on Bertie. He's perfectly safe, you know—just as anxious as they are not to do anything really outrageous. Bertie keeps them in a pleasant sort of flutter, and maybe he does them good. I don't know.—Drink your tea, Violet. We've got to run."

That was explicit enough anyway. But it didn't solve Rose's problem—broadened and deepened it rather, and gave it a greater basis of reality. It was silly, of course, always to be asking yourself questions. But after all, you didn't question a thing that wasn't questionable. There had been no necessity for a compromise between romance and reality in her own case. She hadn't any need of a thermometer. Why had they?

Of course she knew well enough that marriage was not always the blissful transformation it had been for her. There were unhappy marriages. There were such things in the world as unfaithful husbands and brutal drunken husbands, who had to be divorced. And equally, too, there were cold-blooded, designing, mercenary wives. (In the back of her mind was the unacknowledged notion that these people existed generally in novels. She knew, of course, that those characters must have real prototypes somewhere. Only, it hadn't occurred to her to identify them with people of her own acquaintance.) But the idea had been that, barring these tragic and disastrous types, marriage was a state whose happy satisfactoriness could, more or less, be taken for granted.

Oh, there were bumps and bruises, of course. She hadn't forgotten that tragic hour in the canoe last summer. There had, indeed, been two or three minor variants on the same theme since. She had seen Rodney drop off now and again into a scowling abstraction, during which it was so evident he didn't want to talk to her, or even be reminded that she was about, that she had gone away flushed and wondering, and needing an effort to hold back the tears.

These weren't frequent occurrences, though. Once settled into what apparently was going to be their winter's routine, they had so little time alone together that these moments, when they came, had almost the tension of those that unmarried lovers enjoy. They were something to look forward to and make the delicious utmost of.

So, until she got to wondering about Bertie, Rose's instinctive attitude toward the group of young to middle-aged married people into which her own marriage had introduced her, was founded on the assumption that, allowing for occasional exceptions, the husbands and wives felt toward each other as she and Rodney did—were held together by the same irresistible, unanalyzable attraction, could remember severally, their vivid intoxicating hours, just as she remembered the hour when Rodney had told her the story and the philosophy of his life.

Bertie, or rather the demand for what Bertie supplied, together with Frederica's explanation of it, brought her the misgiving that marriage was not, perhaps, even between people who loved each other—between husbands who were not "unfaithful" and wives who were not "mercenary"—quite so simple as it seemed.

The misgiving was not very serious at first—half amused, and wholly academic, because she hadn't, as yet, the remotest notion that the thing concerned, or ever could concern, herself; but the point was, it formed a nucleus, and the property of a nucleus is that it has the power of attracting to itself particles out of the surrounding nebulous vapor. It grows as it attracts, and it attracts more strongly as it grows.

An illustration of this principle is in the fact that, but for the misgiving, she would hardly have asked Simone Gréville what she meant by saying that though she had always supposed the fundamental sex attraction between men and women to be the same in its essentials, in all epochs and in all civilizations, her acquaintance with upper-class American women was leading her to admit a possible exception.

Since that amiable celestial, Wu Ting Fang, made his survey of our western civilization and left us wondering whether after all we had the right name for it, no one has studied our leisured and cultivated classes with more candor and penetration than this great Franco-Austrian actress. She had ample opportunities for observation, because during the first week of her tour the precise people who count the most in our informal social hierarchy took her up and, upon examination, took her in. Playing in English as she did, and with an American supporting company, she did not make a great financial success (the Continental technique, especially when contrasted so intimately with the one we are familiar with does not attract us), but socially she was a sensation. So during her four weeks in Chicago, while she played to houses that couldn't be dressed to look more than a third full, she was enormously in demand for luncheons, teas, dinners, suppers, Christmas bazaars, charity dances and so on. (If it had only been possible to establish a scale of fees for these functions, her manager used to reflect despairingly, he might have come out even after all.) Any other sort of engagement melted away like snow in the face of an opportunity of meeting Simone Gréville.

Rose had met her a number of times before the incident referred to happened, but had always surveyed the lioness from afar. What could she, whose acquaintance with Europe was limited to one three-months trip, undertaken by the family during the summer after she graduated from high school, have to say to an omniscient cosmopolite like that?

So she hung about, within ear-shot when it was possible, and watched, leaving the active duties of entertainment to heavily cultured illuminati like the Howard Wests, or to clever creatures like Hermione Woodruff and Frederica, and Constance Crawford, whose French was good enough to fill in the interstices in Madame Gréville's English.

She was standing about like that at a tea one afternoon, when she heard the actress make the remark already quoted, to the effect that American women seemed to her to be an exception to what she always supposed to be the general law of sex attraction.

It was taken, by the rather tense little circle gathered around her, as a compliment; exactly as, no doubt, Gréville intended it to be taken. But her look flashed out beyond the confines of the circle and encountered a pair of big luminous eyes, under brows that had a perplexed pucker in them. Whereupon she laughed straight into Rose's face and said, lifting her head a little, but not her voice:

"Come here, my child, and tell me who you are and why you were looking at me like that."

Rose flushed, smiled that irresistible wide smile of hers, and came, not frightened a bit, nor, exactly, embarrassed; certainly not into pretending she was not surprised, and a little breathlessly at a loss what to say.

"I'm Rose Aldrich." She didn't, in words, say, "I'm just Rose Aldrich." It was the little bend in her voice that carried that impression. "And I suppose I was—looking that way, because I was wishing I knew exactly what you meant by what you said."

Gréville's eyes, somehow, concentrated and intensified their gaze upon the flushed young face; took a sort of plunge, so it seemed to Rose, to the very depths of her own. It was an electrifying thing to have happen to you.

"Mon dieu," she said, "j'ai grande envie de vous le dire." She hesitated the fraction of a moment, glanced at a tiny watch set in a ring upon the middle finger of her right hand, took Rose by the arm as if to keep her from getting away, and turned to her hostess.

"You must forgive me," she said, "if I make my farewells a little soon. I am under orders to have some air each day before I go to the theater, and if it is to be done to-day, it must be now. I am sorry. I have had a very pleasant afternoon.—Make your farewells, also, my child," she concluded, turning to her prisoner, "because you are going with me."

There was something Olympian about the way she did it. The excuse was made, and the regret expressed in the interest of courtesy, but neither was insisted on as a fact, nor was seriously intended, it appeared, even to disguise the fact, which was simply that she had found something better worth her while, for the moment, than that tea. It occurred to Rose that there wasn't a woman in town—not even terrible old Mrs. Crawford, Constance's mother-in-law, who could have done that thing in just that way; no one who felt herself detached, or, in a sense, superior enough, to have done it without a trace of self-consciousness, and consequently without offense. An empress must do things a good deal like that.

The effect on Rose was to make complete frankness seem the easiest thing in the world. And frankness seemed to be the thing called for. Because no sooner were they seated in the actress' car and headed north along the drive, than she, instead of answering Rose's question, repeated one of her own.

"I ask who you are, and you say your name—Rose something. But that tells me nothing. Who are you—one of them?"

"No, not exactly," said Rose. "Only by accident. The man I married is—one of them, in a way. I mean, because of his family and all that. And so they take me in."

"So you are married," said the French woman. "But not since long?"

"Six months," said Rose.

She said it so with the air of regarding it as a very considerable period of time that Gréville laughed.

"But tell me about him then, this husband of yours. I saw him perhaps at the tea this afternoon?"

Rose laughed. "No, he draws the line at teas," she said. "He says that from seven o'clock on, until as late as I like, he's—game, you know—willing to do whatever I like. But until seven, there are no—well, he says, siren songs for him."

"Tell me—you will forgive the indiscretions of a stranger?—how has it arrived that you married him? Was it one of your American romances?"

"It didn't seem very romantic," said Rose. "I mean not much like the romantic stories you read, and of course one couldn't make a story about it, because there was nothing to tell. We just happened to get acquainted, and we knew almost straight off that we wanted to marry each other, so we did. Some people thought it was a little—headlong, I suppose, but he said it was an adventure anyway, and that people could never tell how it was going to come out until they tried. So we tried, and—it came out very well."

"It 'came out'?" questioned the actress.

"Yes," said Rose. "Ended happily, you know."

"Ended!" Madame Gréville echoed. Then she laughed.

Rose flushed and smiled at herself. "Of course I don't mean that," she admitted, "and I suppose six months isn't so very long. Still you could find out quite a good deal … "

"What is his affair?" The actress preferred asking another question, it seemed, to committing herself to an answer to Rose's unspoken one. "Is he one of your—what you call tired business men?"

"He's never tired," said Rose, "and he isn't a business man. He's a lawyer—a rather special kind of lawyer. He has other lawyers, mostly, for his clients, he's awfully enthusiastic about it. He says it's the finest profession in the world, if you don't let yourself get dragged down into the stupid routine of it. It certainly sounds thrilling when he tells about it."

The actress looked round at her. "So," she said, "you follow his work as he follows your play? He talks seriously to you about his affairs?"

"Why, yes," said Rose, "we have wonderful talks." Then she hesitated. "At least we used to have. There hasn't seemed to be much—time, lately. I suppose that's it."

"One question more," said the French woman, "and not an idle one—you will believe that? Alors! You love your husband. No need to ask that. But how do you love him? Are you a little indulgent, a little cool, a little contemptuous of the grossness of masculine clay, and still willing to tolerate it as part of your bargain? Is that what you mean by love? Or do you mean something different altogether—something vital and strong and essential—the meeting of thought with thought, need with need, desire with desire?"

"Yes," said Rose after a little silence, "that's what I mean."

She said it quietly, but without embarrassment and with full meaning; and as if conscious of the adequacy of her answer, she forbore to embroider on the theme. There was a momentary silence, while the French woman gazed contemplatively out of the open window of the limousine, at a skyscraping apartment building which jutted boldly into a curve of the parkway they were flying along.

"That's a beauty, isn't it?" said Rose, following her gaze. "Every apartment in that building has its own garage that you get to with an elevator."

The actress nodded. "You Americans do that;" she said, "better than any one else in the world. The—surfaces of your lives are to marvel at."

"But with nothing inside?" asked Rose. "Is that what you mean? Is—that what you mean about—American women, that you said you'd tell me?"

Madame Gréville took her time about answering. "They are an enigma to me," she said, "I confess it. I have never seen such women anywhere, as these upper-class Americans. They are beautiful, clever, they know how to dress. For the first hour, or day, or week, of an acquaintance, they have a charm quite incomparable. And, up to a certain point, they exercise it. Your jeunes filles are amazing. All over the world, men go mad about them. But when they marry … " She finished the sentence with the ghost of a shrug, and turned to Rose. "Can you account for them? Were you wondering at them, too, with those great eyes of yours? Alors! Are we puzzled by the same thing? What is it, to you, they lack?"

Rose stirred a little uneasily. "I don't know very much," she said. "I don't know them well at all, and of course I shouldn't criticize … "

"Ah, child," broke in the actress, "there you mistake yourself. One must always criticize. It is by the power of criticism and the courage of criticism, that we have become different from the beasts."

"I don't know," said Rose, "except that some of them seem a little dissatisfied and restless, as if—well, as if they wanted something they haven't got."

"But do they truly want it?" Madame Gréville demanded. "I am willing to be convinced, but myself, I find of your women of the aristocrat class, the type most characteristic is"—she paused and said the thing first to herself in French, then translated—"is a passive epicure in sensations; sensations mostly mental, irritating or soothing—a pleasant variety. She waits to be made to feel; she perpetually—tastes. One may demand whether it is that their precocity has exhausted them before they are ripe, or whether your Puritan strain survives to make all passion reprehensible, or whether simply they have too many ideas to leave room for anything else. But, from whatever cause, they give to a stranger like me, the impression of being perfectly frigid, perfectly passionless. And so, as you say, of missing the great thing altogether.

"A few of your women are great, but not as women, and of second-rate men in petticoats, you have a vast number. But a woman, great by the qualities of her sex, an artist in womanhood, I have not seen."

"Oh, I wish," cried Rose, "that I knew what you meant by that!"

"Why, regard now," said the actress. "In every capital of Europe—and I know them all—wherever you find great affairs—matters of state, diplomacy, politics—you find the influence of women in them; women of the great world, sometimes, sometimes of the half-world; great women, at all events, with the power to make or ruin great careers; women at whose feet men of the first class lay all they have; women the tact of whose hands is trusted to determine great matters. They may not be beautiful (I have seen a faded little woman of fifty, of no family or wealth, whose salon attracted ministers of state), they haven't the education, nor the liberties that your women enjoy, and, in the mass, they are not regarded—how do you say?—chivalrously. Yet there they are!

"And why? Because they are capable of great passions, great desires. They are willing to take the art of womanhood seriously, make sacrifices for it, as one must for any art, in order to triumph in it."

Rose thought this over rather dubiously. It was a new notion to her—or almost new. Portia had told her once she never would have any trouble making her husband "want" her as much as she liked. This idea of making a serious art of your power to attract and influence men, seemed to range itself in the same category.

"But suppose," she objected, "one doesn't want to triumph at it? Suppose one wants to be a—person, rather than just a woman?"

"There are other careers indeed," Madame Gréville admitted, "and one can follow them in the same spirit, make the sacrifices—pay the price they demand. Mon dieu! How I have preached. Now you shall talk to me. It was for that I took you captive and ran away with you."

For the next half-hour, until the car stopped in front of her house, Rose acted on this request; told about her life before and since her marriage to Rodney, about her friends, her amusements—anything that came into her mind. But she lingered before getting out of the car, to say:

"I hope I haven't forgotten a single word of your—preaching. You said so many things I want to think about."

"Don't trouble your soul with that, child," said the actress. "All the sermon you need can be boiled down into a sentence, and until you have found it out for yourself, you won't believe it."

"Try me," said Rose.

"Then attend.—How shall I say it?—Nothing worth having comes as a gift, nor even can be bought—cheap. Everything of value in your life will cost you dear; and some time or other you'll have to pay the price of it."

It was with a very thoughtful, perplexed face that Rose watched the car drive away, and then walked slowly into her house—the ideal house that had cost Florence McCrea and Bertie Willis so many hours and so many hair-line decisions—and allowed herself to be relieved of her wraps by the perfect maid, who had all but been put in the lease.

The actress had said many strange and puzzling things during their ride; things to be accepted only cautiously, after a careful thinking out. But strangest of all was this last observation of hers; that there was nothing of worth in your life that you hadn't to pay a heavy price for.

Certainly it contradicted violently everything in Rose's experience, for everything she valued had come to her precisely as a gift. Her mother's and Portia's love of her, the life that had surrounded her in school and at the university, the friends; and then, with her marriage, the sudden change in her estate, the thrills, the excitement, the comparative luxuries of the new life. Why—even Rodney himself, about whom everything else swung in an orbit! What price had she paid for him, or for any of the rest of it? It was all as free as the air she breathed. It had come to her without having cost even a wish. Was Rodney's love for her, therefore, valueless? No, the French woman was certainly wrong about that.