CHAPTER XVI. Anti-Climax

ANTI-CLIMAX

It was a beastly day. A gusty rain, whipping up from the south, by way of answer to the challenge of a heavy snowfall the day before, inflicted a combination of the rigors of winter, with a debilitating, disquieting hint of spring. The train, for which they had been routed out that morning at seven o'clock, had been blistering hot and the necessarily open windows had let in choking clouds of smoke.

The hotel was hot, too. Rose and Dolly, as soon as they had registered, went up to their room and washed off the stains of travel, as well as they could in translucent water that was the color of weak coffee. Then Rose, in a kimono, stretched out on the bed to make up some of the rest their early departure from Cedar Rapids had deprived her of. She did this methodically whenever opportunity offered, but without any great conviction.

Dolly, though she looked a bit hollow-eyed and much more in need of rest than Rose (for she hadn't any stamina at all. She was an under-nourished, and probably anemic little thing, and was always train-sick when their jumps began too early in the morning), went straight ahead with her toilet, tried to correct her pallor with a little too much rouge, and with the glaring falsehood that it was clearing up, put on the pathetic little fifteen-dollar suit that she religiously guarded for occasions.

She was very fidgety, a little bit furtive, and elaborately over-casual about all this; a fact to which Rose was, also a little artificially, oblivious.

Their partnership had not proved, from Dolly's point of view, at any rate, an unqualified success. They'd not been on the road three days before she'd begun to wonder whether she hadn't been hasty in the selection of her chum. Doris Dane was a very magnificent person, of course. She made the rest of the company, including the principals, look (this was a phrase Dolly had unguardedly used the day Rose first appeared at rehearsal) like a bunch of rummies. And of course it was an immense compliment to be singled out by an awe-inspiring person like that, for her particular chum. Only, once the compliment had been paid, its value as an abiding possession became a little doubtful. Awe is not a very comfortable sort of emotion to eat breakfast with.

Evidently the rest of the company felt that way about it, for Dane was not popular. She gave no handle for an active grievance, to be sure. She wasn't superior in the sense in which Dolly used the word. She didn't look haughty nor say withering things to people, nor tell passionately-believed stories designed to convince her hearers that her rightful place in the world was immensely higher than the one she now occupied. One didn't hear her exclaiming under some bit of managerial tyranny, that never, in the course of her whole life, had she been subjected to such an affront. But she had a blank, rather tired way of keeping silence when other people told stories like that, or made protests like that, which was subtly infuriating. The very fact that she never tried to impress the company, was presumptive evidence that the company didn't very greatly impress her. If their common feeling about her had ever crystallized into a phrase, its effect would have been, that all their affairs, personal and professional, past, present and to come, even those she shared with them, were not of sufficient importance to her ever to get quite the whole of her attention. It was a notion that irritated the women and frightened off the men. Probably nothing else could have kept a young woman of Rose's physical attractions from being, on a tour like that, with that sort of company, the object of, at least, experiments.

Men may consider these experiments worth trying in the face of a determined hostility on the part of the subject of them. The most rigorous primness of behavior does not daunt them, nor the assertion of an icily virtuous intangibility. But the sort of good-humored preoccupation that doesn't see them at all, that sees the pattern in the wall-paper behind their backs, that tries, half-heartedly, to be adequately courteous, is too much for them. And the more experienced they are in conquests, and the higher, on the basis of their own experience, they rate the irresistibility of their powers, the less of his particular sort of treatment they can stand. The mere sight of her, after the first day or two, was enough to give a professional "killer" like Max Webber, the creeps.

But Rose's manner not only kept the men away from herself. It kept them away from Dolly. Poor Dolly didn't know what the matter was, at first.

She had been told terrible stories by her mother and her elder brother, about the perils that beset young girls who ran away from good respectable homes. She had been told them with the misguided purpose of keeping her from running away from her own home, which was no doubt respectable, but was also deadly dull. She had run away and it was perils she was looking for. She didn't mean to succumb to them. None of the heroines of the only literature she knew--of the movies, that is to say--succumbed to perils. They were beset by the most terrific perils. It was over perils that they climbed to soul-entrancing heights of romance. It was because they were the almost certain victims of diabolical machinations, that wonderful heroes, with long eyelashes and curly hair, came to their rescue and clasped them in their arms and looked unutterable things into their eyes, just as the picture faded out.

Dolly had joined the chorus of a musical comedy, because that profession offered more alluring wares in the way of perils than any other that was open to her. And then she discovered that her calculations had gone awry. The impalpable shield her formidable friend carried with her, turned the perils aside. The little group of half-grown boys one sometimes found waiting at the stage door, never even spoke to Rose, and Dolly, in her company, partook of this unwelcomed immunity. As for the men in the company, Dolly found them letting her entirely alone.

She was bitterly unhappy at first about this, taking it as an indication of the insufficiency of her charms. But once she got the clue, she set about righting matters. She began taking tentative little strolls about the hotel lobbies by herself, and on her train journeys, when the motion and the odor of the men's pipes didn't make her too sick, she'd kneel upon a seat and look over the back of it into one of the perpetual poker-games they used to pass the time. It was astonishing how quickly she got results.

She wandered over to the cigar-stand at one of their hotels, one afternoon, a week before the arrival in Dubuque, to look at a rack of picture postcards. One of the chorus-men came over to buy some cigarettes. She felt him look at her, and she felt herself flush a little. And then he came a step closer to look at the postcards for himself, and sighed and said he wished he had somebody to send postcards to. He supposed she sent him one every day. Whereupon Dolly said she wasn't going to send him one to-day, anyway. They strolled across the lobby together and sat down in two of the wide-armed unsatisfactory chairs they have at such places; chairs that kept them so far apart they had to shout at each other. So, after a few minutes, it being a fine day, he suggested they go out for a walk. She had on her outdoor wraps and his overcoat lay across a chair.

She had already nodded acquiescence to his proposal, when she saw Rose coming in through the door.

"Wait," she whispered to him. "Don't come out with me. I'll wait outside." And with that she walked up to Rose and told her she was going out to get some cold cream.

Five per cent., perhaps, of the motive that prompted this maneuver, was what it pretended to be, a fear of Rose's disapprobation and a wish to avoid it. The other ninety-five per cent. of it was just instinctive love of intrigue.

The chorus-boy waited, blankly wooden enough to have attracted the suspicion of any eye less preoccupied than Rose's, until she had got around the curve of the stair. Then, joining Dolly on the pavement, he demanded to be told what it was all about.

Dolly, making up her little mystery as she went along, and making herself more interesting at every step, told him. They took a long walk, and by the time they got back to the hotel, they were in love. But they were separated by the malign influence of Dolly's friend. They developed a code of signals for circumventing her watchful eye. They slipped unsigned notes to each other.

So Dolly, on this blustering morning in Dubuque, fidgeting about the room, thinking up a perfectly unnecessary excuse for going out, to give to Rose, answered a knock at the door very promptly and took the folded bit of paper the bell-boy handed her, without listening to what he said, if indeed he said anything at all to her.

She carried it over to the window, turned her back to Rose, unfolded the bit of paper and read it; read it again, frowned in a puzzled way, and said:

"I didn't know there was anybody in the company named Rodney."

"What's his last name?" asked Rose. There was nothing in her tone that challenged Dolly's attention, though the quality of it would have caught a finer ear. And even if Dolly had looked up, she'd have seen nothing. Rose lay there just as she had been lying a moment ago. It would have needed a better observer than Dolly to see that she had stopped breathing.

"There ain't any last name," said Dolly. "He seems to think I'll know him by the first one." It pleased Dolly to make a parade of frankness about this note. She couldn't be sure Rose had been as oblivious as she seemed, to those the chorus-man had been sending her. This, to her rudimentary mind, seemed a good opportunity to allay Dane's suspicions. "See if you can make anything out of it," she said, and handed it over to Rose.

Rose got up off the bed and carried the note to the window. She stood there with it a long time.

"What's the matter?" said Dolly. "Can't you read his writing?"

"Yes," said Rose. "I know who he is. It's meant for me."

The tone, though barely audible, was automatic. It brushed Dolly away as if she had been a buzzing fly, and she felt distinctly aggrieved by it. That Dane, with all her loftily assumed indifference to men, even to a star like Max Webber, should get a note like that, and should have the nerve to betray no confusion over having her pretense thus confounded! Dolly had read the note thoroughly, and it had struck her as cryptic and suggestive in the extreme.

"I want to sec you very much," it said, "and shall wait in the lobby unless you say impossible. I'll submit to any conditions you wish to make. No bad news."

It sounded like a code to Dolly.

Rose stood there a long time. When she turned around, Dolly saw she was pale. She'd crumpled the note tight in one palm, and her hands were trembling. Then, with great swiftness, she began to dress. But though her haste was evident, she didn't ask Dolly to help her; didn't seem to know, indeed, that she was in the room. It was no way for a friend to act!

The thing that had moved Rose to an extent that terrified her was that last phrase. The desire it showed to play fair with her; the unwillingness to take advantage of a fear his coming like that might have inspired her with. And then the way he had made it possible for her, with a single word, to send him away! And the restraint of that "I want to see you very much!" It wasn't like any Rodney she knew, to be humble like that. His humility stripped her of her armor. If he'd been imperious, exigeant, she could have gone down to meet him with her head up. Suppose she found him broken, aged, with a dumb need for her crying out in his eyes, what would she do? What could she trust herself not to do? But just in human mercy to him she mustn't let him see she was wavering.

The Rose he was waiting for, there in the lobby, the only Rose he had been able to picture to himself for more than a fortnight of distressful days, was the Rose he'd last seen in that North Clark Street room; the Rose with a look of dumb frozen agony in her face. The one idea he'd clung to since starting for Dubuque, had been that he mustn't frighten her. She must see, with her first glance at him, that she had nothing to fear from a repetition of his former behavior. She must see that the brute in him--that was the way he put it to himself--was completely tamed.

Their meeting was a shock to both of them; an incredible mocking sort of anti-climax.

He was standing near the foot of the stairs when she came down, with a raincoat on, and a newspaper twisted up in his hands, and at sight of her, he took off his soft wet hat, and crunched it up along with the newspaper. He moved over toward her, but stopped two or three feet away. "It's very good of you to come," he said, his voice lacking a little of the ridiculous stiffness of his words, not much. "Is there some place where we can talk a little more--privately than here? I shan't keep you long."

"There's a room here somewhere," she said. "I noticed it this morning when we came in. Oh, yes! It's over there."

The room she led him to, was an appropriately preposterous setting for the altogether preposterous talk that ensued between them. It had a mosaic floor with a red plush carpet on it, two stained glass windows in yellow and green, flanking an oak mantel, which framed an enormous expanse of mottled purple tile, with a diminutive gas log in the middle. A glassy looking oak table occupied most of the room, and the chairs that were crowded in around it were upholstered in highly polished coffee-colored horse-hide, with very ornate nails. A Moorish archway with a spindling grill across the top, gave access to it. The room served, doubtless, to gratify the proprietor's passion for beauty. The flagrant impossibility of its serving any other purpose, had preserved it in its pristine splendor. One might imagine that no one had ever been in there, barring an occasional awed maid with a dust cloth, until Rodney and Rose descended on it.

"It's dreadfully hot in here," Rose said. "You'd better take off your coat." She squeezed in between the table and one of the chairs, and seated herself.

Rodney threw down his wet hat, his newspaper, and then his raincoat, on the table, and slid into a chair opposite her.

If only one of them could have laughed! But the situation was much too tragic for that.

"I want to tell you first," Rodney said, and his manner was that of a schoolboy reciting to his teacher an apology that has been rehearsed at home under the sanction of paternal authority, "I want to tell you how deeply sorry I am for ... I want to say that you can't be any more horrified over what I did--that night than I am."

He had his newspaper in his hands again and was twisting it up. His eyes didn't once seek her face. But they might have done so in perfect safety, because her own were fixed on his hands and the newspaper they crumpled.

He didn't presume to ask her forgiveness, he told her. He couldn't expect that; at least not at present. He went on lamely, in broken sentences, repeating what he'd said, in still more inadequate words. He was unable to stop talking until she should say something, it hardly mattered what. And she was unable to say anything. There was a reason for this:

The thing that had amazed her by crowding up into her mind, demanding to be said, was that she forgave him utterly--if indeed she had anything more to forgive than he. She'd never thought it before. Now she realized that it was true. He was as guiltless of premeditation on that night as she. If he had yielded to a rush of passion, even while his other instincts felt outraged by the things she had done, hadn't she yielded too, without ever having tried to tell him certain material facts that might change his feeling? They'd both been victims, if one cared to put it like that, of an accident; had ventured, incautiously, into the rim of a whirlpool whose irresistible force they both knew.

She fought the realization down with a frantic repression. It wasn't--it couldn't be true! Why hadn't she seen it was true before? Why must the reflection have come at a moment like this, while he sat there, across the table from her in a public room, laboriously apologizing?

The formality of his phrases got stiffer and finally congealed into a blank silence.

Finally she said, with a gasp: "I have something to ask you to--forgive me for. That's for leaving you to find out--where I was, the way you did. You see, I thought at first that no one would know me, made up and all. And when I found out I would be recognizable, it was too late to stop--or at least it seemed so. Besides, I thought you knew. I saw Jimmy Wallace out there the opening night, and saw he recognized me, and--I thought he'd tell you. And then I kept seeing other people out in front after that, people we knew, who'd come to see for themselves, and I thought, of course, you knew. And--I suppose I was a coward--I waited for you to come. I wasn't, as you thought, trying to hurt you. But I can see how it must have looked like that."

He said quickly: "You're not to blame at all. I remember how you offered to tell me what you intended to do before you went away, and that I wouldn't let you."

Silence froze down on them again.

"I can't forgive myself," he said at last, "for having driven you out--as I'm sure I did--from your position in the Chicago company. I went back to the theater to try and find you, three days after--after that night, but you were gone. I've been trying to find you ever since. I've wanted to take back the things I said that night--about being disgraced and all. I was angry over not having known when the other people did. It wasn't your being on the stage. We're not so bigoted as that.

"I've come to ask a favor of you, though, and that is that you'll let me--let us all, help you. I can't--bear having you live like this, knocking about like this, where all sorts of things can happen to you. And going under an assumed name. I've no right to ask a favor, I know, but I do. I ask you to take your own name again, Rose Aldrich. And I want you to let us help you to get a better position than this; that is, if you haven't changed your mind about being on the stage; a position that will have more hope and promise in it. I want you to feel that we're--with you."

"Who are 'we'?" She accompanied that question with a straight look into his eyes; the first since they had sat down across this table.

"Why," he said, "the only two people I've talked with about it--Frederica and Harriet. I thought you'd be glad to know that they felt as I did."

The first flash of genuine feeling she had shown, was the one that broke through on her repetition of the name "Harriet!"

"Yes," he said, and he had, for about ten seconds, the misguided sense of dialectical triumph. "I know a little how you feel toward her, and maybe she's justified it. But not in this case. Because it was Harriet who made me see that there wasn't anything--disgraceful about your going on the stage. It was her own idea that you ought to use your own name and give us a chance to help you. She'll be only too glad to help. And she knows some people in New York who have influence in such matters."

During the short while she let elapse before she spoke, his confidence in the conviction-carrying power of this statement ebbed somewhat, though he hadn't seen yet what was wrong with it.

"Yes," she said at last, "I think I can see Harriet's view of it. As long as Rose had run away and joined a fifth-rate musical comedy in order to be on the stage, and as long as everybody knew it, the only thing to do was to get her into something respectable so that you could all pretend you liked it. It was all pretty shabby, of course, for the Aldriches, and in a way, what you deserved for marrying a person like that. Still, that was no reason for not putting the best face on it you could.--And that's why you came to find me!"

"No, it isn't," he said furiously. His elaborately assumed manner had broken down, anyway. "I came because I couldn't help coming. I've been sick--sick ever since that night over the way you were living, over the sort of life I'd--driven you to. I've felt I couldn't stand it. I wanted you to know that I'd assent to anything, any sort of terms that you wanted to make that didn't involve--this. If it's the stage, all right.--Or if you'd come home--to the babies. I wouldn't ask anything for myself. You could be as independent of me as you are here...."

He'd have gone on elaborating this program rather further but the look of blank incredulity in her face stopped him.

"I say things wrong," he concluded with a sudden humility that quenched the spark of anger in her eyes. "I was a fool to quote Harriet, and I haven't done much better in speaking for myself. I can't make you see."

"Oh, I can see plainly enough, Roddy," she said, with a tired little grimace that was a sorry reminder of her old smile. "I guess I see too well. I'm sorry to have hurt you and made you miserable. I knew I was going to do that, of course, when I went away, but I hoped that after a while, you'd come to see my side of it. You can't at all. You couldn't believe that I was happy in that little room up on Clark Street; that I thought I was doing something worth doing; something that was making me more nearly a person you could respect and be friends with. And, from what you've said just now, it seems as if you couldn't believe even that I was a person with any decent self-respect. The notion that I could blackmail your family into lending me their name and social position to get me a better job on the stage than I could earn! Or the notion that I could come back to your house and pretend to be your wife without even ...!"

The old possibility of frank talk between them was gone. She couldn't complete the sentence.

"So I guess," she concluded after a silence, "that the only thing for you to do is to go home and forget about me as well as you can and be as little miserable about me as possible. I'll tell you this, that may make it a little easier: you're not to think of me as starving or miserable, or even uncomfortable for want of money. I'm earning plenty to live on, and I've got over two hundred dollars in the bank. So, on that score at least, you needn't worry."

There was a long silence while he sat there twisting the newspaper in his hands, his eyes downcast, his face dull with the look of defeat that had settled over it.

In the security of his averted gaze, she took a long look at him. Then, with a wrench, she looked away.

"You will let me go now, won't you?" she asked. "This is--hard for us both, and it isn't getting us anywhere. And--and I've got to ask you not to come back. Because it's impossible, I guess, for you to see the thing my way. You've done your best to, I can see that."

He got up out of his chair, heavily, tiredly; put on his raincoat and stood, for a moment, crumpling his soft hat in his hands, looking down at her. She hadn't risen. She'd gone limp all at once, and was leaning over the table.

"Good-by," he said at last.

She said, "Good-by, Roddy," and watched him walking across the lobby and out into the rain. He'd left his newspaper. She took it, gripped it in both hands, just as he'd done, then, with an effort, got up and mounted the stairs to her room. Dolly, fortunately, had gone out.

The violent struggle she had had to make during the last few moments in her effort to retain her self-control, had pretty well exhausted her. Only, had it been self-control, after all? That question shook her. Had she meant to be merciless to him like that; to send him away utterly discouraged in his sad humility, when the touch of an outreached hand would have changed the whole face of the world for him? Had she really been as noble as she felt while she was defending the impregnable righteousness of her position and so completely demolishing his?

She remembered a day when he had been beaten in a law-suit, and she had waited for him to come to her in his discouragement for help and comfort. It was thus he had come to her to-day. How helpless he was! What a boy he was!

Her memory flashed back over their not quite two years of life together and she realized that he had always been like that whenever his emotions toward her came into play. All his finely trained, formidable intelligence had always deserted him here. She remembered his having told her, the night he'd turned her out of his office, that his mind had to run cold. She hadn't really known what he meant. She saw now that her own mind didn't run cold, that it never really aroused itself except under the spur of strong emotion. So that just where he was most helpless, she was at her strongest. A victory over him in those circumstances, was about as much to feel triumphant over as one over a small child would be.

She realized now, more fully than before, what a crucifixion of his boyish pride it must have been to see her on the stage. It was no answer to say that with his intellectual concept of the ideal relations between men and women, he shouldn't have felt like that. Shouldn't have felt! The phrase was self-contradictory. Feelings weren't decorative abstractions which you selected according to your best moral and esthetic judgment out of an unlimited stock, and ordered wrapped and sent home. They were things that happened to you. In this case, two violently opposed feelings of terrible intensity had happened to him at once; had torn each other, and, in their struggle, had torn him. Justified or not, it was her act in leaving him, that had turned those feelings loose upon him. It was through her that he had suffered; that was plain enough. It must have been terribly plain to him.

And yet, despite the suffering she had caused him, he had crucified his pride again and come to find her; not with reproaches, with utter contrition and humility. The measures he'd suggested for easing their strained situation were, to be sure, maddeningly beside the mark. The fact that he'd offered them betrayed his complete failure to understand the situation. But it had cost him, evidently, as much pain to work them out and bring them to her, as if they had been the real solvents he took them for. And she had contemptuously torn them to shreds, and sent him away feeling like an unpardoned criminal. She hadn't drawn the sting from one of the barbs she'd planted in him, in her anger, before he'd left her in that North Clark Street room.

She didn't blame herself for the anger, nor for the panic of revulsion that had excited it. That was a feeling that had happened to her. What she did blame herself for was that, seeing them both now, as the victims of a regrettable accident (did she really regret it? Were it in her power to obliterate the memory of it altogether, as a child with a wet sponge can obliterate a misspelled word from a slate, would she do it? She dismissed that question unanswered.), she had allowed him to go away with his burden of guilt unlightened. She had done that, she told herself, out of sheer cowardice. She had been afraid of impairing the luster of her virtuously superior position.

Yet now, she protested, she was being as unfair to herself as she had been to him. What sort of situation would they have found themselves in, had she confessed her true new feelings about the love-storm that had swept over them, that night of the February gale? What good would protestations of love and sympathy for him do, if she had to go on denying him the tangible evidence and guarantee of these feelings?

She must deny them. Could she go home to him now, a repentant prodigal? Or even if, after hearing her story, he denied she was a prodigal; professed to see in it a reason for taking her fully into his life as his friend and partner? They might have a wonderful week together, living up to their new standard, professing all sorts of new understandings. But the thing wasn't to be for a week. It was for the rest of their lives. She'd never be able to feel that, in the bottom of his heart, he wasn't ashamed of her, as his world would say he ought to be. What satisfying guarantee could he ever give her that he wasn't ashamed? She couldn't think of any.

Oh, it was all hopeless! It didn't matter what you did. You didn't do things, anyway. They got done for you--and to you, by a blind force that masqueraded as your own will. The things she and Rodney had been saying to each other hadn't been the things they'd wanted to say. They'd been things wrung out between the rollers of a situation they hadn't produced and couldn't control.

What were they, the pair of them, but chips floating down the current; thrown together by one casual eddy, and parted by another! Half an hour ago, longing for each other unspeakably, they had been within hand's reach. Now, thanks to a few meaningless words, arguments, ideas--what was the good of ideas and words? Why couldn't they be like animals?--they were parted and she was clutching as a sole tangible memento of him, a rolled-up newspaper that she loved because she'd seen his strong lean hands gripping it.

She unrolled it and pressed it against her face, then laid it on her knee and smoothed out its rumpled folds and stroked it.

When Dolly came in a half-hour later, or so, to put on her other suit preparatory to the matinée, Rose opened up the paper and pretended to read. She was glad of the protection of it. As she felt just now, she didn't think she could stand Dolly's chatter without the intervention of some excuse for monosyllabic replies. She didn't notice that Dolly wasn't chattering. Mechanically she read the head-lines: Mortimore Banks Crash! She knew who Mortimore was. Once a powerful boss, now a discredited politician. He'd owned a whole string of banks, it appeared--along with the hitherto unheard of Milligan--whose solvency seemed to have evaporated along with the decay of his prestige.

She read without interest, but just because it was printed in black-faced type, a list of the banks in Chicago that the examiner had closed. But presently she turned back with a look a little more thoughtful, and read it again. The names of banks were so absurdly alike one never could tell. Presently she went over to her suit-case, rummaged in it, and produced a little bank-book. Then she dropped the book and the newspaper together into her bag and shut it.

She smiled a little cynically. Would she have refused Rodney's offer of help, she wondered, if she had known an hour ago, that the two hundred dollars she'd relied on so confidently to pull her out of this rut and give her a fresh start whenever she was ready to attempt it, were gone into the pockets of that fat-faced politician?