CHAPTER XII

WHAT HARRIET DID

She must wait for her miracle. As the weeks and months wore away, and as

the season of violent and high-frequency alternations between summer and

winter, which the Chicagoan calls spring, gave place to summer itself,

Rose was driven to intrench herself more and more deeply behind this

great expectation. It was like a dam holding back waters that otherwise

would have rushed down upon her and swept her away.

The problems went on mounting up behind the dam, of course. All the

minor luxuries of their way of living, which had been so keen a delight

to her during the first unthinking months of their married life; all the

sumptuous little elaborations of existence which she had explored with

such adventurous delight, had changed--now that she knew they had been

bought by the abridgment of her husband's freedom, by the invasion of

the clear space about himself which he had always so jealously

guarded--into a cloud of buzzing stinging distractions.

And they were the harder to bear now that she recognized how hard they

were going to be to drive away. It would have to be effected without

wounding Rodney's primitive masculine pride--without convicting him of

being an inadequate provider.

The baffling thing about him was that he had, quite unconsciously and

sincerely, two points of view. His affection for her, his wife, lover,

mistress, was a lens through which he sometimes looked out on the world.

As she refracted the facts of life for him they presented themselves in

the primitive old-fashioned way.

But there was another window in his soul through which he saw life with

no refractions whatever; remorselessly, logically. Looking through the

window, as he did when he talked to Barry Lake, or James Randolph, he

saw life as a mass of unyielding reciprocities. You got what you paid

for. You paid for what you got. And he saw both men and women--though

chiefly women--tangling and nullifying their lives in futile efforts to

evade this principle; looking for an Eldorado where something was to be

had for nothing; for panaceas; for the soft without the hard.

He was perfectly capable of seeing and describing an abstract wife like

that in blistering terms that would make an industrious street-walker

look almost respectable by comparison. But when he looked at Rose, he

saw her through the lens, as some one to be loved and desired,--and

prevented, if possible, from paying anything.

Somehow or other those two views must be reconciled before a life of

real comradeship between them was possible; before the really big thing

she had promised Portia to fight for could be anything more than a

tormenting dream.

Would the miracle solve this? It must. It was the only thing left to

hope for. In the shelter of the great dam she could wait serene.

And then came Harriet, and the pressure behind the dam rose higher.

Rose had tried, rather unsuccessfully, to realize, when during the

earlier days of her marriage she had heard Harriet talked about, that

there was actually in existence another woman who occupied, by blood

anyway, the same position toward Rodney and herself that Frederica did.

She felt almost like a real sister toward Frederica. But without quite

putting the notion into words, she had always felt it was just as well

that Harriet was an Italian _contessa_ four thousand miles away. Rodney

and Frederica spoke of her affectionately, to be sure, but their

references made a picture of a rather formidably correct, seriously

aristocratic sort of person. Harriet had always had, Rose could see, a

very effective voice in the family councils. She hadn't much of a mind,

perhaps; Rodney described it once as a small, well oiled, easy running

sort of mind that stitched away without misgivings, to its conclusions.

Rodney never could have been very fond of her. But she had something he

knew he lacked, and in matters which he regarded as of minor

importance--things that he didn't consider worth bothering much about

one way or the other--he'd submit to her guidance, it appeared, without

much question.

She had written, on the occasion of Rodney's marriage, a letter to Rose,

professing with perfect adequacy, to give her a sisterly welcome into

the family. But Rose felt pretty sure (a fragment of talk she overheard,

an impatient laugh of Rodney's, and Frederica's "Oh, that's Harriet of

course," had perhaps suggested it) that the _contessa_ regarded Rodney's

marriage as a _mésalliance_. She had entertained this notion the more

easily because at that time what Harriet thought--whatever Harriet might

think--seemed a matter of infinitesimal importance.

She'd discovered, along in the winter sometime, that Harriet's affairs

were going rather badly. Neither Rodney nor Frederica had gone into

details. But it was plain enough that both of them were looking for a

smash of some sort. It was in May that the cable came to Frederica

announcing that Harriet was coming back for a long visit. "That's all

she said," Rodney explained to Rose. "But I suppose it means the finish.

She said she didn't want any fuss made, but she hinted she'd like to

have Freddy meet her in New York, and Freddy's going. Poor old Harriet!

That's rather a pill for her to swallow, if it's so. We must try to

cheer her up."

She didn't seem much in need of cheering up, Rose thought, when they

first met. All that showed on the _contessa's_ highly polished surface

was a disposition to talk humorously over old times with her old

friends, including her brother and sister, and a sort of dismayed

acquiescence in the smoky seriousness, the inadequate civilization, the

sprawling formlessness of the city of her birth, not excluding that part

of it which called itself society.

In broad strokes, you could describe Harriet by saying she was as

different as a beautiful woman could be from Frederica. She wasn't so

beautiful as Frederica, to be sure, but together they made a

wonderfully contrasted pair--Harriet almost as perfect a brunette type

as Frederica was a blonde, and got up with her ear-rings and her hair

and all to look rather exotic. Her speech, too, and the cultivated

things she could do with her shoulders, carried out the impression. She

had a trick--when she wanted to be disagreeable an ill-natured observer

would have said--of making remarks in Italian and then translating them.

She wasn't disagreeable though--not malicious anyway, and the very hard

finish she carried, had been developed probably as a matter of

protection. She must have been through a good deal in the last few

years. She'd had two children stillborn, for one thing, and she was

frankly afraid to try it again. She never wanted any sympathy from

anybody. If it came down to that, she'd prefer arsenic. She resisted

Rose's rather poignant charm, as she resisted any other appeal to her

emotions. With the charm left out, Rose was simply a well meaning,

somewhat insufficiently civilized young person, the beneficiary, through

her marriage with Rodney, of a piece of unmerited good fortune. She

didn't in the least mean to be unkind to her, however, and didn't dream

that she was giving Rose an inkling how she thought of her.

Her manner toward this new member of the family was studiously

affectionate. She avoided being either disagreeable or patronizing. Rose

could see, indeed, how carefully she avoided it. She knew, too, that

Frederica saw the same thing and tried to compensate for it by a little

extra affectionateness. She even thought--though perhaps this was mere

self-consciousness--that she detected a trace of the same thing in

Rodney.

The tie of blood is a powerful thing. Rose had never realized before how

powerful. With Harriet's arrival, she became aware of the Aldrich family

as a sodality--something she didn't belong to and never could. It was

quite true, as Frederica had said, that she and Rodney had always been

special pals. Harriet fitted into the family on the other side of

Frederica from her brother. She was a person with a good deal of what

one calls magnetism, and she attracted Frederica toward herself--made

her, when she was about, a somewhat different Frederica. She even

attracted Rodney a little in the same way.

The time of the year (it was after the end of the social season) made it

natural for them to be together a good deal. And of course Harriet's

return, after an absence of years, made them seek such meetings. The

result was that Rose, at the end of almost a year of marriage, got her

first real taste of lonesomeness. When the four of them were together,

Rose felt like an outsider intruding on intimates. They didn't mean her

to feel that way--made a distinct effort, Rodney and Frederica, anyway,

to prevent her feeling that way; which of course only pointed it. They

had old memories to talk about; old friendships. They had, like all

close knit families, a sort of shorthand language to talk in. If Rose

came into the room where they were, she'd often be made aware that the

current subject of the conversation had been dropped and a new one was

getting started; or else there'd be laborious explanations.

It wouldn't have mattered--not so much anyway, if Rose had had a similar

sodality of her own to fall back on--a mass of roots extending out into

indigenous soil. But Rose, you see, had been transplanted. Her two

brothers were hardly more than faint memories of her childhood. One was

a high-school principal down in Pennsylvania; the other a professor of

history at one of the western state universities. Both of them had

married young and had been very much married--on small incomes--ever

since. The only family she had that counted, was her mother and Portia.

And they were gone now to California.

She had had a world of what she called friends, of course, of her own

age, at the high school and at the university. But her popularity in

those circles, her easy way of liking everybody, and her energetic

preoccupation with things to do, had prevented any of these friendships

from biting in very deep. None of them had been solidly founded enough

to withstand the wavelike rush of Rodney Aldrich into her life. She had

gone over altogether into her husband's world. The world that had been

her own, hadn't much more existence, except for her mother and sister

out in California, than the memory of a dream.

But it took Harriet's arrival to make her realize this. And the

realization, when it was pressed home particularly hard, brought with it

moments of downright panic. Everything--everything she had in the world,

went back to Rodney. Except for him, she was living in an absolute

vacuum. What would happen if the stoutly twisted cable that bound her to

him should be broken, as the cable that bound Harriet to her husband

was, apparently, broken? What would she have then of which she could

say, "This much is mine"? Well, she'd have the child. That would be,

partly at least, hers.

But Harriet's contribution to Rose's difficulties, to the mounting

pressure behind the dam, was destined to be more serious--more actual,

anyway--before very long.

The question where Rose and Rodney were going to live after their lease

on the McCrea house ended, had begun to press for an answer. October

first was when the lease expired and it wasn't far from the date at

which they expected the baby. Rose wouldn't be in any condition for

house hunting during the hot summer months. Things would have to be

settled somehow before then. A heavy calendar of important cases had

kept Rodney from giving as much attention to the problem as he himself

felt it needed. He had delighted Rose with the suggestion that they go

out into the country somewhere. Not the real country of course, but up

along the shore, where the train service was good and the motor a

possible alternative.

They spent some very lovely afternoons during the early days of the

emerging spring, cruising about looking at possible places. They talked

of building at first, but long before they could make up their minds

what they wanted it had become too late for that, and they shifted to

the notion of buying an old place somewhere and remodeling it. One

reason why they made no more progress was because they were looking for

such different things. Rodney wanted acres. He'd never gardened a bit,

and never would; was an altogether urban person, despite the physical

energy which took him pounding off on long country walks. But when he

heard there was a tract just west of Martin Whitney's, up at Lake

Forest, that could be had at a bargain--thirty-five thousand dollars--he

let his eye rove over it appreciatively. And Frank Crawford and Howard

West knew of advantageous sites, also, on which to expatiate with

convincing enthusiasm. The kind of house you'd have to build on that

sort of place would cost you an easy thirty thousand more.

Rose didn't even yet know much about money, to be sure, but she knew

enough to be aghast at all that. What she tried to make Rodney look for

was a much more modest establishment--a yard big enough to hold a tennis

court, perhaps, and a house, well, that could be added to as they needed

room.

Neither of them stuck very close to the main point on these expeditions.

They always had too good a time together--more like a pair of children

on a picnic than serious home-hunters, and they frittered a good deal of

time away that they couldn't well afford.

This was the situation when Harriet took a hand in it. It was a

situation made to order for Harriet to take a hand in. She'd sized it up

at a glance, made up her mind in three minutes what was the sensible

thing for them to do, written a note to Florence McCrea in Paris, and

then bided her opportunity to put her idea into effect. She went out

cruising with Rose in the car two or three times, looking at places, but

gave her no indications that she felt more than the most languid

interest in the problem. She could seem less interested in a thing

without being quite impolite, than any one Rose knew.

When she got Florence McCrea's answer to her letter, she took the first

occasion to get Rodney off by himself and talk a little common sense

into him.

"What about where to live, Rodney?" she asked. "Made up your mind about

it yet? I suppose you know how many months there are between the first

of June and the first of October."

"We haven't got much of anywhere," he admitted. "We know we want to live

in the country, that's about all."

"Out in the country just as winter's getting started?" she asked.

"Settling into a new place--Rose with a new baby--everybody else back in

town;--simply no _chance_ of keeping servants? Roddy, old man, you're

entitled to be a babe in the woods, of course. Any man is who does the

kind of work you do. But it is time some one with a little common sense

straightened you out about this."

Harriet couldn't be sure from the length of time he took seeing that his

pipe was properly alight, whether he altogether liked this method of

approach or not.

"Common sense always was a sort of specialty of yours, sis," he said at

last, "and straightening out. You were always pretty good at it." Then,

out of a cloud of his own smoke, "Fire away."

"Well, in the first place;" she said, "remodeling is the slowest work in

the world, and the fussiest. And you can't just tell an architect, with

a wave of the hand, to go ahead. You have to do your own fussing, which

would drive you crazy. If you had your house to-day, you'd be lucky if

the paint was dry and the thing was fit to move into by the first of

September. And next September, if it's blazing hot, won't be exactly the

time for Rose to go ramping around trying to buy furniture for a whole

establishment--because you haven't a stick yourselves, of course--and

getting settled in, hiring servants, getting the thing going. You can't

be sure you'll have till the first of October. Things like that don't

always happen exactly as they are expected to. But suppose you have good

luck and manage it. Then where are you? Out in the woods somewhere at

the beginning of winter, just when you ought to be settled comfortably

somewhere in town.

"Oh, I know it's all very poetic, sitting in front of a roaring fire of

logs, while the wind bangs the shutters, and that sort of thing, Rose

singing to the baby and all. But you're not an Arcadian one bit. Neither

is she, really, and you'll simply perish out there, both of you, and be

back in town before the holidays.

"Rose oughtn't to be in town this summer. But she'll have to be to put

this through. She ought to be down at York Harbor, or one of those Cape

Cod places, instead of in this horrible smoky hole. Because she's not so

very fit, really do you think? Bit moody, I'd say."

"But good lord, Harriet, we've got to get out of here anyway, in

October. And that means we've got to have some sort of place to get

into. It is an awkward time, I'll admit."

"No, you haven't," she said. "You can stay right here another six

months, if you like. I've heard from Florence. I met her in Paris in

April, and found she wasn't a bit keen to come back and take this house

on. Their securities have gone down again, and they're feeling hard-up.

Florence has got an old barn of an _atelier_, and she's puttering around

in the mud thinking she's making statuary. Well, when I found how things

stood here, I wrote and asked her if she'd lease for six months more if

she got the chance, and she wrote back and simply grabbed at it. All

you've got to do is to send her a five-word cable and you're fixed.

Then, next spring, when your troubles are over, and you know what you

want, you can look out a place up the shore and have the summer there."

Rodney smoked half-way through his pipe before he made any comment on

this suggestion.

"This house isn't just what we want," he said. "In the first place, it's

damned expensive."

Harriet shrugged her shoulders, found herself a cigarette and lighted

it; picked up one of Florence's poetry books and eyed the heavily tooled

binding with a satirical smile before she replied. She could feel him

looking at her, and she knew he'd wait till she got ready to go on.

"I'd an idea there was that in it," she said at last. "Freddy said

something ... Rose had been talking to her." Then after another little

silence, and with a sudden access of vehemence, "You don't want to go

and do a regular _fool_ thing, Roddy. You're getting on perfectly

splendidly. You'll be at the head of the bar out here in ten years, if

you keep on. Frank Crawford was telling me about you the other day.

You've settled down, and we thought you never would. It was a corking

move, your taking this house, just because it made you settle down. You

can earn forty thousand dollars next year, just with your practise, if

you want to. But if you pull up and go to live in a barn somewhere, and

stop seeing anybody--people that count, I mean ..."

Rodney grunted. "You're beyond your depth, sis," he said. "Come back

where you don't have to swim. The expense isn't a capital consideration,

I'll admit that. Now go on from there."

"That's like old times," she observed with a not ill-humored grimace. "I

wonder if you talk to Rose like that. Oh, I know the house is rather

solemn and absurd. It's Florence herself all over, that's the size of

it, and I suppose you are getting pretty well fed up with it. But what

does that matter for six months more? Heavens! You won't know where

you're living. But the place is comfortable, and there's room in it for

nurses and all and the best doctor in town in the line you'll want, is

right around the corner. And, as I say, when your troubles are over and

you know what you want ..."

He pocketed his pipe and got up out of this chair.

"There's something in it," he admitted. "I'll think it over."

"Better cable Florence as soon as you can," she advised. "She'll want to

know ..."

Rose protested when the plan for living six months more in Florence

McCrea's house was broached to her. She made the best fight she could.

But Harriet's arguments, re-stated now by Rodney with full conviction,

were too much for her. When she broke down and cried, as she couldn't

help doing, Rodney soothed and comforted her, assured her that this

notion of hers about the expensiveness of it all, was just a

notion--obsession was the word he finally came to--which she must

struggle against as best she could. She'd see things in a truer

proportion afterward.

Then it came out that he had made all his plans for a long summer

vacation. There was no court work in July and August anyway. He was

going to carry her off to a quiet little place out on Cape Cod that he

knew about, and just luxuriate in her; have her all to himself--not a

soul they knew about them. They would lie about in the sands all day,

building air castles. If she got tired of him, any person she wanted to

see should be telegraphed for forthwith. The one thing she had to bear

in mind was that she was to be happy and not bother about things; leave

everything to him.

This plan was carried out, and in a paradise, made up of blue sea, white

sands, warm sun and Rodney--Rodney always there, and queerly content to

drowse away the time with her, she almost forgot the great dam and the

pressure of the waters that had mounted up behind it. Was it an

obsession just as Rodney said? Would she find when it was all over and

she rallied herself for the great endeavor, that there was, after all,

no battle to be fought--nothing but a baby at her breast?