CHAPTER II

A BROKEN PARALLEL

None of the speculative explanations Rodney's friends advanced for his

having bought that precious solemn house of the McCreas, together with

all its rarified esthetic furniture, exactly covered the ground. He

didn't buy it in the expectation that Rose was coming back to live in

it, and still less with the even remote notion of finding a successor to

her. He hadn't bought it because it was a bargain. He had very little

idea whether it was a bargain or not. And if there was a grain of truth

in John Williamson's explanation, Rodney was only vaguely aware of it.

He'd have said, if he'd set about formulating an explanation, that he

bought the house as a result of eliminating the alternatives to buying

it. Florence meant to sell it to somebody, and if he didn't buy it, he'd

have to move out. Rather disingenuously, he represented to himself that

his dislike of moving out sprang from the trouble that would be involved

in finding some other place to live in, furnishing it, reorganizing his

establishment. Really, he hadn't time for that. Frederica would have

done it for him in a minute, but he ignored that possibility.

Down underneath these shallow practical considerations, lay the fact

that such a reorganization would have been a tacit acknowledgment of

defeat; not only an acknowledgment to the world, which he'd have liked

to pretend didn't matter much, but an acknowledgment of defeat to

himself. What he had been trying to do ever since his return from that

maddening talk with Rose in Dubuque, had been just to sit tight; to go

on living a day at a time; to take the future in as small doses as he

could manage.

Had he been the sort of person who finds comfort in mottoes, he'd have

laid in a stock, such as, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof";

"Holdfast is the only dog"; "Don't cross your bridges until you come to

them." As the period between the night of his discovery of Rose on the

Globe stage and the day of his return from Dubuque receded, and as the

fierceness of the pain of it died away again (because such pains do die

away. They can't keep screwed up into an ecstasy of torment forever) the

part he'd played in the events of it, seemed to him less and less worthy

of the sort of man he'd always considered himself to be; a

self-controlled, self-disciplined adult. He'd acted for a while there,

with the savage egotism of a distracted boy; thrown his dignity to the

winds; made a holy show of himself. Well, that period was over at all

events. Whatever the future might confront him with, he could promise

himself, he thought, to keep his head.

But for a while, he didn't want to be confronted with anything, let

alone to start anything; not until he could get his breath; not until he

had time to think everything out; discover, if possible, where the whole

miserable trouble had begun. He'd go back to the beginning, sometime,

and try to work it all out. It went, probably, a long way back of the

night when that hasty speech of his about not jeopardizing the

children's lives to gratify his wife's whims had set the match to her

resolution to leave him and the babies and live a life for herself.

But, though he told himself every day that he must begin ordering his

old memories, analyzing them, in search of the clue, he didn't begin the

process. Spiritually, he just held himself rigidly still. He might have

compared himself to a man standing off a pack of wolves, knowing that

his slightest move would precipitate a rush upon him. Or, perhaps more

nearly, to a man just recovering consciousness after an accident, afraid

to stir lest the smallest movement might reveal more serious injuries

than he suspected.

His mind had never worked so brilliantly as it was working now. The

problems involved in his clients' affairs were child's play to him. He

took them apart and put them together again with a careless, confident,

infallible perspicacity that amazed his colleagues and his opponents.

And, as Frank Crawford had pointed out, he took a savagely contemptuous

pleasure in making those clients pay through the nose.

But he could look neither back at Rose, nor forward to her. He could

not, by any stretch of resolution, have nerved himself to the point of

giving up that house that had nearly all his memories of her associated

with it. There hadn't been a change of a single piece of furniture in it

since she went away. Her bedroom and her dressing-room were just as she

had left them. Her clothes were just as they had been left after the

packing of that small trunk. She might have been off spending a week-end

somewhere.

The attitude couldn't be kept up forever, he knew. Some time or other

he'd have to cross the next bridge; come to some more definite

understanding with Rose than that inconclusive ridiculous scene there in

Dubuque had left him with. (_What_ a fool he had been that day!) There

were the twins coming along. For the present, their nurse (It wasn't

Mrs. Ruston. He'd taken the first reasonable excuse for supplanting

her.) and the pretty little snub-nosed nurse-maid Rose had liked, could

supply their wants well enough. But the time wasn't so far ahead when

they'd need a mother. What would he do then; let Rose have them half the

time and keep them half the time himself? He'd read a perfectly beastly

book once,--he couldn't remember the title of it--about a child who had

been brought up that way. But, at all events, he needn't do anything

yet.

Meanwhile, it healed his lacerated pride to march along and keep the

routine going. It was with a perfectly immense relief that he snatched

at the chance to buy the McCrea house, and by so doing make the

permanency of his way of life a little more secure. He could keep what

he had, anyway. And he could show the world, and Rose, that he wasn't

the broken frantic creature he knew she'd seen, and suspected it had

glimpsed. John Williamson's explanation wasn't altogether wrong.

Perhaps, had it been possible for Jimmy Wallace to tell him, just as he

told Violet and John Williamson, how Rose's voice "richened up as if

the words tasted good to her," when she mentioned the fact that she

heard from her husband "regularly but not much," he might have drawn the

same favorable augury from it that Violet did. But from her answering

communications, though he drew comfort, he got no hope.

It was Rose herself who began this correspondence, within a month of her

arrival in New York. And Rodney, when he finished reading her letter,

tore it to pieces and flung it into the fire, in a transport of

disappointment and anger. The sight of her writing on the envelope had

brought his heart into his mouth, of course. And when his shaking

fingers had got it open and he saw that it indeed contained a letter

from her, beginning "Dear Rodney," and signed "Rose," the wild surge of

hope that swept over him actually turned him giddy, so that it was two

or three minutes before he could read it.

But the thing ran like another instalment of the talk they had had in

Dubuque. She knew he had been distressed over the shabbiness of her

surroundings, knocking about with that road company, and she was afraid

that in spite of the assurance she had then given him, he was still

worried about her. She was sure he'd be glad to know that she'd quit the

stage for good, as an active performer on it, at least; that she was

earning an excellent salary, fifty dollars a week, doing a highly

congenial kind of work that had good prospects of advancement in it. She

had a very comfortable little apartment (she gave him the address of it)

and was living in a way that--she had written "even Harriet," but

scratched this out--Frederica, for example, would consider entirely

respectable. So he needn't feel another moment's anxiety about her.

She'd have written sooner, but had wanted to get fully settled in her

new job and be sure she was going to be able to keep it, in order that

she might have something definitely reassuring to tell him. And she

hoped he and the babies were well.

It was not until hours afterward, when the letter was an

indistinguishable fluff of white ash in the fireplace, that it occurred

to him that it had no satirical intent whatever and that the purpose of

it had been, quite simply, what it had pretended to be; namely, to

reassure him and put an end to his anxieties.

As he had read it in the revulsion from that literally sickening hope of

his, it had seemed about the most mordant piece of irony that had ever

been launched against him. The assumption of it had seemed to be that he

was the most pitiable snob in the world; that all he'd cared for had

been that she'd disgraced him by going on the stage. He'd be glad to

know that she was once more "respectable."

Well--this was the question which, as I said, he did not ask himself

until hours later--wasn't she justified in believing that? Certainly

that night, in her little room on North Clark Street, he'd given her

reason enough for thinking so. But later, in Dubuque--well, hadn't he

quoted Harriet to her? Hadn't he offered to help her as a favor to

himself, because he couldn't endure it that she should live like this?

Had he exhibited anything to her at all in their two encounters, but an

uncontrolled animal lust and a perfectly contemptible vanity?

He bitterly regretted having destroyed the letter. But the tone of it,

he was sure, except for that well merited jibe about Harriet, which had

been erased, was kindly. Yet he had acted once more, like a spoiled

child about it.

Could he write and thank her? In Dubuque she had asked him not to come

back. Did that prohibition cover writing? Her letter did not explicitly

revoke it. She asked him no questions. But he remembered now a

post-script, which, at the time of reading, he'd taken merely as a final

barb of satire. "I am still Doris Dane down here, of course," it had

read. If she hadn't meant that for a sneering assurance that his

precious name wasn't being taken in vain--and had he ever heard Rose

sneer at anybody?--what could have been the purpose of it except to make

sure that a letter from him wouldn't come addressed "Rose Aldrich," and

so fail to be delivered to her.

It was due only to luck that, in his first disappointment, he hadn't

destroyed her address with the letter. But she had duplicated it on the

flap of the envelope, and the envelope was not thrown in the fire.

He spent hours composing a reply. And the thing he finally sent off,

once it was committed to the post, seemed quite the worst of all his

efforts. His impulse was to send another on the heels of it. But he

waited a week, then wrote again. And this time, the stiffness of

self-consciousness was not quite so paralyzing. He managed to give her a

little real information about the condition of the twins and the

household. About himself, he stated that he was well, though busier than

he liked to be.

He experienced a very vague, faint satisfaction, two days later, over

the reflection that this letter was in her hands, and he came presently

to the audacious resolution that until she forbade him, he would go on

writing to her every week. She'd see that she needn't answer and it

would no doubt add something--how much he didn't dare to try to

estimate--to her happiness, to know that all was going well in the home

that she had left.

She began pretty soon to answer these letters with stiff little notes,

strictly limited to a bulletin of her own activities and a grateful

acknowledgment of the latest one he had sent her. Invariably, every

Tuesday morning, one of these notes arrived. And this state of things

continued, unchanged, for months.

He experienced a bewildering mixture of emotions over these letters of

hers. They drove him, sometimes, into outbursts of petulant rage. Often

the knowledge that one of them was to be expected in the morning,

delivered him up, against all the resistance he could make, to a flood

of tormenting memories of her. And across the mood the letter would find

him in, its cool little commonplaces would sting like the cut of a whip.

The mere facts her letters recounted aroused contradictory emotions in

him, too. They all spelled success and assurance, and almost from week

to week they marked advancement. The first effect of this was always to

make his heart sink; to make her seem farther away from him; to make the

possibility of any future need of him that would give him his

opportunity, seem more and more remote. The other feeling, whose glow he

was never conscious of till later--a feeling so surprising and

irrational that he could hardly call it by name, was pride. What in

God's name had he to be proud of? Was she a possession of his? Could he

claim any credit for her success? But the glow persisted in spite of

these questions.

His satisfaction in his own letters to her was less mixed. They must, he

thought, gradually be restoring in her mind, the image of himself as a

man who, as Harriet said, could take his medicine without making faces;

who could endure pain and punishment without howling about it. Perhaps,

in time, those letters would obliterate the memory of the vain beast

he'd been that night....

If Rodney had done an unthinkable thing; if he had kept copies of his

letters to Rose, along with her answers, in a chronological file the way

Miss Beach kept his business correspondence, he would have made the

discovery that the stiffness of them had gradually worn away and that

they were now a good deal more than mere _pro forma_ bulletins. There

had crept into them, so subtly and so gently that between one of them

and the next no striking difference was to be observed, a friendliness,

quite cool, but wonderfully firm. She was frankly jubilant over the

success of her costumes in _Come On In_ and she enclosed with her letter

a complete set of newspaper reviews of the piece. They reached him a day

or two before Jimmy Wallace telephoned, and this fact perhaps had

something to do with the gruff good humor with which he told Jimmy to go

as far as he liked in his newspaper paragraph.

It was a week later that she wrote:

"I met James Randolph coming up Broadway yesterday afternoon, about five

o'clock. I had a spare half-hour and he said he had nothing else but

spare half-hours; that was what he'd come to New York for. So we turned

into the Knickerbocker and had tea. He's changed, somehow, since I saw

him last; as brilliant as ever, but rather--lurid. Do you suppose things

are going badly between him and Eleanor? I'd hate to think that, but I

shouldn't be surprised. He spoke of calling me up again, but this

morning, instead, I got a note from him saying he was going back to

Chicago. He told me he hadn't seen you forever. Why don't you drop in on

him?"

* * * * *

It was quite true that Rodney had seen very little of the Randolphs

since Rose went away. His liking for James had always been an affair of

the intelligence. The doctor's mind, with its powers of dissecting and

coordinating the phenomena of every-day life, its luminous flashes, its

readiness to go all the way through to the most startling conclusions,

had always so stimulated and attracted his own, that he'd never stopped

to ask whether or not he liked the rest of the man that lay below the

intelligence.

When it came to confronting his friends, in the knowledge that they knew

that Rose had left him for the Globe chorus, he found that James

Randolph was one he didn't care to face. He knew too damned much. He'd

be too infernally curious; too full of surmises, eager for experiments.

The Rodney of a year before, intact, unscarred, without, he'd have said,

a joint in his harness, could afford to enjoy with no more than a

deprecatory grin, the doctor's outrageous and remorseless way of pinning

out on his mental dissecting board, anything that came his way. The

Rodney who came back from Dubuque couldn't grin. He knew too much of the

intimate agony that produced those interesting lesions and

abnormalities. Even in the security, if it could have been had, that his

own situation wouldn't be scientifically dissected and discussed, he'd

still have wanted to keep away from James Randolph.

But Rose's letter put a different face on the matter. He felt perfectly

sure that Randolph hadn't been analyzing her during that spare half-hour

at the Knickerbocker. The shoe, it appeared, had been on the other foot.

The fact that she'd put him, partly at least, in possession of what she

had observed and what she guessed, gave him a sort of shield against the

doctor. He told himself that his principal reason for going was to get a

little bit more information about Rose than her letters provided him

with. But the anticipation he dwelt on with the greatest pleasure,

really, was of saying, "Oh, yes. Rose wrote that she'd seen you."

So one evening, after keeping up the pretense through his solitary

dinner and the cigar that followed it, that he meant presently to go up

to his study and correct galley proofs on an enormous brief, he slipped

out about nine o'clock, and walked around to the Randolphs' new house.

This latest venture of Eleanor's had attracted a good deal of comment

among her friends. Somebody called it, with a rather cruel _double

entendre_, Bertie Willis' last word. In the obvious sense of the phrase,

this was true. Eleanor had given him a free hand, and he had gone his

limit. He'd been working slowly backward from Jacobean, through Tudor.

But this thing was perfect Perpendicular. You could, as John Williamson

said, kid yourself into the notion, when you walked under the

keel-shaped arch to their main doorway, that you were going to church.

And the style was carried out with inexorable rigor, down to the most

minute details. But since everybody knew that the latest thing, the

inevitably coming thing, was the pure unadulterated ugliness of

Georgian, a style that Bertie had opposed venomously (because he

couldn't build it, the uncharitable said); and because even Bertie's

carefully preserved youth was felt to have gone a little stale and it

was no longer fashionable to consider his charms irresistible, the

phrase, "his last word," was instantly understood, as I said, to have a

secondary sense.

No one, of course, could tell Eleanor anything about what the coming

styles were going to be, in architecture or anything else. She was one

of these persons with simply a sixth sense for fashions, and her having

gone to Bertie Willis, instead of to young Mellish of the historic New

York firm, McCleod, Hill, Stone & Black, who was doing such delightfully

hideous things in Georgian, caused, among her friends, a good deal of

comment. Her explanation that medicine was a medieval profession and

that she had to have a medieval house to go with James, was felt to be a

mere evasion.

It was recognized that one had to flirt with Bertie while he was

building her house. And in the days when everybody else had been doing

it, too, it didn't matter. But now that the celebrated _hareem_ had

ceased to exist, it was felt that one would do well to be a little

careful; at least, to put a more or less summary end to the flirtation

when the house was finished. But Eleanor hadn't done that. She was

playing with him more exclusively than ever.

Rodney hadn't been in the house before, and he reflected, as he stood at

the door, after ringing the bell, that his own house was quite meek and

conventional alongside this. The grin that this consideration afforded

him, was still on his lips when, a servant having opened the door, he

found himself face to face with the architect.

Bertie, top-coated and hat in hand, was waiting for Eleanor, who was

coming down the stairs followed by a maid with her carriage coat. He

returned Rodney's nod pretty stiffly, as was natural enough, since

Rodney's grin had distinctly brightened up at sight of him.

Eleanor said, rather negligently, "Hello, Rod. We're just dashing off to

the Palace to see a perfectly exquisite little dancer Bertie's

discovered down there. She comes on at half past nine, so we've got to

fly. Want to come?"

"No," Rodney said. "I came over to see Jim. Is he at home?"

The maid was holding out the coat for Eleanor's arms, Bertie was fussing

around ineffectually, hooking his stick over his left arm to give him a

free right hand to do something with, he didn't quite know what. But

Eleanor, at Rodney's question, just stood for a second quite still. She

wasn't looking at anybody, but the expression in her eyes was sullen.

"Yes, he's at home," she said at last.

"Busy, I suppose;" said Rodney. Her inflection had dictated this reply.

"Yes, he's busy," she repeated absently and in a tone still more coldly

hostile, though Rodney perceived that the hostility was not meant for

him. And so plainly did the tone and the look and the arrested attitude

proclaim that she was following out a train of thought and hadn't as yet

got to the end of it, that he stood as still as she was.

Bertie, irreproachably correct as always, settled his shoulders inside

his coat, and took his stick in his right hand again. Eleanor now looked

around at him.

"Wait two minutes," she said, "if you don't mind." Then, to Rodney,

"Come along." And she led the way up the lustrous, velvety teakwood

stair.

He followed her. But arrived at the drawing-room floor, he protested.

"Look here!" he said. "If Jim's busy ..."

"You've never been in here before, have you?" she asked. "How's Rose?

Jim saw her, you know, in New York."

"Yes," he said. "Rose wrote to me she'd seen him, and I thought I'd drop

around for a chat. But if he's busy ..."

"Oh, don't be _too_ dense, Rodney!" she said. "A man has to be busy when

he's known to be in the house and won't entertain his wife's guests. Go

up one flight more and to the door that corresponds to that one. It

won't do you any good to knock. He'll either not answer or else tell you

to go to hell. Just sing out who you are and go right in."

She gave him a nod and a hard little smile, and went down-stairs again

to Bertie.

Rodney stood where she had left him, in two minds whether to carry out

her instructions or to wait until he heard her and Bertie go out and

then quietly follow them. It was a beastly situation, dragged into a

family quarrel like that; forced to commit an intrusion that was so

plainly labeled in advance. And on the other hand, it was a decidedly

interesting situation. If Eleanor was as reckless as that with facts

most women keep to themselves as long as possible, what would her

outspoken husband be. But if he were full of his grievances, he probably

wouldn't talk about Rose.

What really determined his action was Eleanor's discovery, or pretended

discovery down in the hall below, that her gloves weren't what she

wanted and her instructions to the maid to go up and get her a fresh

pair. It would be too ridiculous to be caught there--lurking.

So he mounted the next flight, found the door Eleanor had indicated,

knocked smartly on it, and to forestall his getting told to go to hell,

sang out at the same time, "This is Rodney Aldrich. May I come in?"

"Come in, of course," Randolph called. "I'm glad to see you," he added,

coming to meet his guest. "But do you mind telling me how the devil you

got in here? Some poor wretch will lose his job, you know, if Eleanor

finds out about this. When I'm in this room, sacred to reflection and

research, it's a first-class crime to let me be disturbed."

It didn't need his sardonic grin to point the satire of his words. The

way he had uttered "sacred to reflection and research," was positively

savage.

Rodney said curtly, "Eleanor sent me up herself. I didn't much want to

come, to tell the truth, when I heard you were busy."

"Eleanor!" her husband repeated. "I thought she'd gone out--with her

poodle."

Rodney said, with unconcealed distaste, "They were on the point of going

out when I came in. That's how Eleanor happened to see me."

With a visible effort, Randolph recovered a more normal manner. "I'm

glad it happened that way," he said. "Get yourself a drink. You'll find

anything you want over there, I guess, and something to smoke; then

we'll sit down and have an old-fashioned talk."

The source of drinks he indicated was a well-stocked cellarette at the

other side of the room. But Rodney's eye fell first on a decanter and

siphon on the table, within reach of the chair Randolph had been sitting

in. His host's glance followed his.

"This is Bourbon I've got over here," he added. "I suppose you prefer

Scotch."

"I don't believe I want anything more to drink just now," Rodney said.

And as he turned to the smoking table to get a cigar, Randolph allowed

himself another sardonic grin.

The preliminaries were gone through rather elaborately; chairs drawn up

and adjusted, ash-trays put within reach; cigars got going

satisfactorily. But the talk they were supposed to prepare the way for

didn't at once begin.

Randolph took another stiffish drink and settled back into a dull

sullen abstraction.

Rodney wanted to say, "I hear from Rose you had a little visit with her

in New York." But, with his host's mood what it was, he shrank from

introducing that topic. Finally, for the sake of saying something, he

remarked:

"This is a wonderful room, isn't it?"

Randolph roused himself. "Never been in here before?" he asked.

"I've never been in the house before, I'm ashamed to say."

"What!" Randolph cried. "My God! Well, then, come along."

Rodney resisted a little. He was comfortable. They could look over the

house later. But Randolph wouldn't listen.

"That's the first thing to do," he insisted. "Indispensable preliminary.

You can't enjoy the opera without a libretto. Come along."

It was a remarkable house. Before the first fifteen minutes of their

inspection were over, Rodney had come to the conclusion that though

Bertie Willis might be an ass, was indeed an indisputable ass, he was no

fool. It was almost uncannily clever, the way all the latest devices for

modern comfort wore, so demurely, the mask of a perfectly consistent

medievalism. And there were some effects that were really magnificent.

The view of the drawing-room, for instance, from the recessed dais at

the far end of it, where the grand piano stood--a piano that contrived

to look as if it might have been played upon by the second wife of Henry

VIII,--down toward the magnificent stone chimney at the other; the

octagonal dining-room with the mysterious audacity of its lighting; the

kitchen with its flag floor (only they were not flags, but an artful

linoleum), its great wrought-iron chains and hoods beneath which all the

cooking was done--by electricity.

Randolph took him over the whole thing from bottom to top. Through it

all, he kept up the glib patter of a showman; the ironic intent of it

becoming more and more marked all the while.

They brought up at last in the study they had started from.

"Oh, but wait a moment!" Randolph said. "Here's two more rooms for you

to see."

The first one explained its purpose at a glance, with a desk and

typewriter, and filing cabinets around the walls.

"Rubber floor," Randolph pointed out, "felt ceiling; absolutely

sound-proof. Here's where my stenographer sits all day, ready,--like a

fireman. And this," he concluded, leading the way to the other room, "is

the holy of holies."

It had a rubber floor, too, and Rodney supposed, a felt ceiling. But its

only furniture was one straight-back chair and a canvas cot.

"Sound-proof too," said Randolph. "But sounding-boards or something in

all the walls. I press this button, start a dictaphone, and talk in any

direction, anywhere. It's all taken down. Here's where I'm supposed to

think, make discoveries, and things. No distractions. One hundred per

cent. efficient. My God! I tried it for a while. Felt like a fool actor

in a Belasco play. Do you remember? The one with the laboratory and the

doctor?"

They went back into the study.

"Clever beasts, though--poodles," he remarked, as he nodded Rodney to

his chair and poured himself another drink. "Learn their tricks very

nicely. But good Heavens, Aldrich, think of him as a man! Think what our

American married women are up against, when they want somebody to play

off against their husbands and have to fall back on tired little beasts

like that. In all the older countries there are plenty of men, real men

who've got something, that a married woman can fall back on. But think

of a woman of Eleanor's attractions having to take up a thing like that.

There's nothing else for her. Would _you_ come around and hold her hand

and make love to her, or any other man like you? Not once in a thousand

times. Eleanor doesn't mean anything. She's trying to make me jealous.

That's her newest experiment. But it's downright pitiful, I say."

Rodney got up out of his chair. It wasn't a possible conversation.

"I'll be running along, I think," he said. "I've a lot of proof to

correct to-night, and you've got work of your own, I expect."

"Sit down again," said Randolph sharply. "I'm just getting drunk. But

that can wait. I'm going to talk. I've got to talk. And if you go, I

swear I'll call up Eleanor's butler and talk to him. You'll keep it to

yourself, anyway."

He added, as Rodney hesitated, "I want to tell you about Rose. I saw her

in New York, you know."

Rodney sat down again. "Yes," he said, "so she wrote. Tell me how she

looked. She's been working tremendously hard, and I'm a little afraid

she's overdoing it."

"She looks," Randolph said very deliberately, "a thousand years old." He

laughed at the sharp contraction of Rodney's brows. "Oh, not like that!

She's as beautiful as ever. More. Facial planes just a hair's breadth

more defined perhaps--a bit more of what that painter Burton calls edge.

But not a line, not a mark. Her skin's still got that bloom on it, and

she still flushes up when she smiles. She's lost five pounds, perhaps,

but that's just condition. And vitality! My God!--But a thousand years

old just the same."

"I'd like to know what you mean by that," said Rodney. He added, "if you

mean anything," but the words were unspoken.

Randolph did mean something.

"Why, look here," he said. "You know what a kid she was when you married

her. Schoolgirl! I used to tell her things and she'd listen, all

eyes--holding her breath! Until I felt almost as wise as she thought I

was. She was always game, even then. If she started a thing, she saw it

through. If she said, 'Tell it to me straight,' why she took it,

whatever it might be, standing up. She wasn't afraid of anything.

Courage of innocence. Because she didn't know.

"Well, she's courageous now, because she knows. She's been through it

all and beaten it all, and she knows she can beat it again. She

understands--I tell you--everything.

"Why, look here! We all but ran into each other on the corner, there, of

Broadway and Forty-second Street; shook hands, said howdy-do. How long

was I here for? Was Eleanor with me? And so on. If I had a spare

half-hour, would I come in and have tea with her at the Knickerbocker?

She'd nodded at two or three passing people while we stood there. And

then somebody said, 'Hello, Dane,' and stopped. A miserable, shabby,

shivering little painted thing. Rose said, 'Hello,' and asked how she

was getting along. Was she working now? She said no; did Rose know of

anything? Rose said, 'Give me your address and if I can find anything,

I'll let you know.' The horrible little beast told where she lived and

went away. Rose didn't say anything to me, except that she was somebody

who'd been out in a road company with her. But there was a look in her

eyes ...! Oh, she knew--everything. Knew what that kid was headed for.

Knew there was nothing to be done about it. She had no flutters about

it, didn't pull a long face, didn't, as I told you, say a word. But

there was a look in her eyes, behind her eyes, somehow, that understood

and _faced_--God!--everything. And then we went in and had our tea.

"I had a thousand curiosities about her. I'd have found out anything I

could. But it was she who did the finding out. Beyond inquiring about

you, how lately I'd seen you, and so on, she hardly asked a question;

talked about indifferent things: New York, the theaters, how we passed

the time out here, I don't know what. But pretty soon I saw that she

understood me, saw right into me like through an open window into a

lighted room. As easily as that. She knew what was the matter with me;

knew what I'd made of myself. And by God, Aldrich, she didn't even

despise me!

"I came back here to kick this damned thing to pieces, give myself a

fresh start. And when I got here, I hadn't the sand. I get drunk

instead."

He poured himself another long drink and sipped it slowly. "Everybody

knows," he said at last, "that prostitutes almost invariably take to

drugs or drink. But I know why they do."

That remark stung Rodney out of his long silence. During the whole of

Randolph's recital of his encounter with Rose, he'd never once lifted

his eyes from the gray ash of his cigar, and the violet filament of

smoke that arose from it. He didn't want to look at Randolph, nor think

about him. Just wanted to remember every word he said, so that he could

carry the picture away intact. Now that the picture was finished, he

wanted to get out of that room, with it; out into the dark and

loneliness of the streets, where he could walk and think.

There was something peculiarly horrifying to him in the exhibition

Randolph was making of himself. He'd never in his life taken a drink,

except convivially, and then he took as little as would pass muster.

He'd always found it hard to be sensibly tolerant of the things men said

and did in liquor, even when their condition had overtaken them

unawares. Going off alone and deliberately fuddling one's self as a

means of escaping unpleasant realities, struck him as an act of the

basest cowardice. Whether Randolph's revelation of himself were true or

distorted by alcohol, didn't seem much to matter. But for that picture

of Rose, he'd have gone long ago and left the man to his bemused

reflections. Only ...

He'd said that Rose understood everything and didn't despise him. A

drunken fancy likely enough. She had seen something though. Her letter

proved that. And having seen it, she'd asked him to drop in on the

doctor for a visit. Did she mean she wanted him to try to help?

He tried, though not very successfully, to conceal his violent disrelish

of the task, when he said:

"Look here, Jim! What the devil is the matter with you? Are you sober

enough to tell me?"

Randolph put down his glass. "I have told you," he said. "It's a thing

that can be told in one word. I'm a prostitute. I'm Eleanor's kept man.

Well kept, oh, yes. Beautifully kept. I'm nothing in God's world but a

possession of hers! A trophy of sorts, an ornament. I'm something she's

made. I have a hell of a big practise. I'm the most fashionable doctor

in Chicago. They come here, the women, damn them, in shoals. That's

Eleanor's doing. I'm a faker, a fraud, a damned actor. I pose for them.

I play up. I give them what they want. And that's her doing. They go

silly about me; fancy they're in love with me. That's what she wants

them to do. It increases my value for her as a possession.

"I haven't done a lick of honest work in the last year. I can't work.

She won't let me work. She--smothers me. Wherever I turn, there she is,

smoothing things out, trying to making it easy, trying to anticipate my

wants. I've only one want. That's to be let alone. She can't do that.

She's insatiable. She can't help it. There's something drives her on so

that she never can feel sure that she possesses me completely enough.

There's always something more she's trying to get, and I'm always trying

to keep something away from her, and failing.

"And why? Do you want to know why, Aldrich? That's the cream of the

thing. Because we're so damnably in love with each other. She wants me

to live on her love. To have nothing else to live on. Do you know why

she won't have any children? Because she's jealous of them. Afraid

they'd get between us. She tries to make me jealous with that poodle of

hers--and she succeeds. With that! I'd like to wring his neck.

"Do you want to know what my notion of Heaven is? It would be to go off

alone, with one suit of clothes in a handbag, oh, and fifty or a hundred

dollars in my pocket--I wouldn't mind that; I don't want to be a

tramp--to some mining town, or mill town, or slum, where I could start a

general practise; where the things I'd get would be accident cases,

confinement cases; real things, urgent things, that night and day are

all alike to. I'd like to start again and be poor; get this stink of

easy money out of my nostrils. I'd like to see if I could make good on

my own; have something I could look at and say, 'That's mine. I did

that. I had to sweat for it.'

"I've been thinking about that for two years. It makes quite a

fancy-picture. There are a million details I can fill into it. A rotten

little office over a drug-store somewhere; people coming in with real

ills, and I curing them up and charging them a dollar, and sending them

away happy. I smoke a pipe because I can't afford cigars; get my meals

at lunch-counters. I sit up here--in this room--and think about it.

"I came back from New York, after that look at Rose, meaning to do it;

meaning to talk it out with Eleanor and tell her why, and then go.

Well, I talked. Talk's cheap. But I didn't go. I'll never go. I'll go on

getting softer and more of a fake; more dependent. And Eleanor will go

on eating me up, until the last thing in me that's me myself, is gone.

And then, some day, she'll look at me and see that I'm nothing. That I

have nothing left to love her with."

Then, with suddenly thickened speech (an affectation, perhaps) he looked

up at Rodney and demanded:

"What the hell are you looking so s-solemn about? Can't you take a joke?

Come along and have another drink. The night's young."

"No," Rodney said, "I'm going. And you'd better get to bed."

"A couple more drinks," Randolph said, "to put the cap on a jolly

evening. Always get drunk th-thoroughly. Then in the morning, you wake

up a wiser man. Wise enough to forget what a damned fool you've been.

You don't want to forget that, Aldrich. You've been drunk and you've

talked like a damned fool. And I've been drunk and I've talked like a

damned fool. But we'll both be wiser in the morning."

Rodney walked home that night like a man dazed. The vividness of one

blazing idea blinded him. The thing that Randolph had seen and lacked

the courage to do; the thing Rodney despised him for a coward for having

failed to do, that thing Rose had done. Line by line, the parallel

presented itself to him, as the design comes through in a half-developed

photographic plate.

Without knowing it, yielding to a blind, unscrutinized instinct, he'd

wanted Rose to live on his love. He'd tried to smooth things out for

her, anticipate her wants. He'd wanted her soft, helpless, dependent. As

a trophy? That was what Randolph had said. Had he been as bad as that?

From what other desire of his than that could have come the sting of

exasperation he'd always felt when she'd urged him to let her work for

him; help him to economize, dust and make beds, so that he could go on

writing his book? She'd seen, even then, something he'd been blind

to--something he'd blinded himself to; that love, by itself, was not

enough. That it could poison, as well as feed.

And, seeing, she had the courage ... He pressed his hands against his

eyes.

When there could be friendship as well as love between them, she said,

she'd come back. Would she come back now, even for his friendship? He

doubted it. Dared not hope. There came up before him that face of frozen

agony that had confronted him in the room on Clark Street, and he

remembered what she'd said then--with a shudder--about it all ending

"like this." Ending!

His love had played her false; had tried, instinctively, to smother her,

and defeated at that, had outraged and tortured her. She couldn't

possibly look at it any way but that. And now that she was free,

self-discovered, victorious, was it likely she would submit to its blind

caprices again? The thing Randolph had said was his notion of Heaven,

she'd triumphantly attained. Wouldn't it be her notion of Heaven too?

But she had won, among the rest of her spoils of victory, the thing she

had originally set out to get. His friendship and respect. Friendship,

he remembered her saying, was a thing you had to earn. When you'd earned

it, it couldn't be withheld from you. Well, it was right she should be

told that; made to understand it to the full. He couldn't ask her to

come back to him. But she must know that her respect was as necessary

now to him, as she'd once said his was to her. He must tell her that. He

must see her and tell her that.

He stopped abruptly in his walk. His bones, as the Psalmist said, turned

to water. How should he confront that gaze of hers, which knew so much

and understood so deeply--he with the memory of his two last ignominious

encounters with her, behind him?