Chapter 21

A BIRTHDAY

Rodney heard young Craig, who deviled up law for him, saying good night to the stenographer; glanced at his watch and opened the door to his outer office.

"You may go home, Miss Beach," he said. "I'm staying on for a while but I shan't want you." Then, to the office boy: "You, too, Albert."

He waited till he heard them go, then went out and disconnected his own desk telephone, which the office boy, on going home, always left plugged through; went back into his inner office again and shut the door after him.

There was more than enough pressing work on his desk to fill the clear hour that remained to him before he had to start for home. But he didn't mean to do it. He didn't mean to do anything except drink down thirstily the sixty minutes of pure solitude that were before him; to let his mind run free from the clutch of circumstance. That hour had become a habit with him lately, like--he smiled at the comparison--like taking a drug. When something happened that forced him to forego it, he felt cheated--irrationally irritable. He was furtive about it, too. He never corrected Rose's assumption that the thing which kept him late at the office so much of the time nowadays was a press of work. He even concealed the fact that he pulled his telephone plug, by sticking it back again every night just before he left.

He tried to laugh that guilty feeling out of existence. But he couldn't. He knew too well whence it sprang. He knew whom he was stealing that hour from. It wasn't the world in general he intrenched himself against. It was his wife. The real purpose of that sixty minutes was to enable him to stop thinking and feeling about her.

It was not that she had faded for him--become less the poignant, vivid, irresistible thing he had first fallen in love with. Rather the contrary. The simple rapture of desire that had characterized the period of their engagement and the first months of their marriage, had lost something--not so much, either--of its tension. But it had broadened--deepened into something more compelling, more pervasive--more, in his present mood, formidable.

She hadn't seemed quite well, lately, nor altogether happy, and he had not been able to find out why. He had attributed it at first to the shock occasioned by her mother's illness and her departure with Portia to California, but this explanation seemed not to cover the ground. Why couldn't she have talked freely with him about that? Inquiries about her health, attempts--clumsily executed, no doubt--to treat her with special tenderness and guard her against overexertion, only irritated her, drove her to the very edge of her self-control--or over it. She was all right, she always said. He couldn't force confidences from her of course. But her pale face and eyes wide with a trouble in them he could not fathom stirred something deeper in him than the former glow and glory had ever reached.

And there was a new thing that gripped him in a positively terrifying way--a realization of his importance to her. The after-effect of her invasion of his office the night of the Randolphs' dinner and of his learning of the tremulous interest with which she had afterward followed the case he was then working on, had been very different from his first irritation and his first amusement.

He had discovered, too, one day--a fortnight or so ago, in the course of a rummage after some article he had mislaid, a heap of law-books that weren't his. He had guessed the explanation of them, but had said nothing to Rose about it--had found it curiously impossible to say anything. If only she had taken up something of her own! It seemed as essentially a law of her being to attempt to absorb herself in him, as it was a law of his to resist that absorption of himself in her.

But resistance was difficult. The tendency was, after his perfectly solid, recognizable duties had been given their places in the cubic content of his day, that Rose should fill up the rest. It was as if you had a bucket half full of irregularly shaped stones and filled it up with water. And yet there was a man in him who was neither the hard-working, successful advocate, nor Rose's husband--a man whose existence Rose didn't seem to suspect. (Was there then in her no woman that corresponded to him?) That man had to fight now for a chance to breathe.

He got a pipe out of a drawer in his desk, loaded and lighted it, stretched his arms, and sat down in his desk chair. In the middle of his blotter was a stack of papers his stenographer had laid there just before she went out. On top of the heap was a memorandum in her handwriting, and mechanically he read it.

"Please ask Mrs. Aldrich about this bill," it read. "The work done seems to be the same that was paid for last month."

The rest of the month's bills lay beneath, all neatly scheduled and totaled; and the total came to more than three thousand dollars. He damned them cordially and moved them over to one side.

But the mood of quiet contentment he had, for just a moment, captured, had given place to angry exasperation. He felt like a bull out in a ring tormented by the glare and the clamor and the flutter of little red flags.

There was nothing ruinous about his way of living. Including his inherited income with what he could earn, working the way he had been working lately, he could meet an expenditure of thirty-six thousand dollars a year well enough. It meant thinking about his fees of course, seeing to it that the work he undertook was profitable as well as interesting. Only, declared the man who was not Rose's husband, it was senseless--suffocating! Rodney tried, with an athletic sweep of his will, to crowd that train of thought out of his mind as, with his hand, he had swept the papers that gave rise to it.

He leaned his elbows on the cleared blotter and propped up his chin on his fists. The thing exactly in front of his eyes was his desk calendar. There was something familiar about the date--some subconscious association that couldn't quite rise to the surface. Was there something he had to do to-day, that he'd forgotten? No, Miss Beach would have reminded him of anything except a social engagement. And he distinctly remembered that Rose had said this morning that the evening was clear. And yet, surely ... Then, with a grunt of relief and amusement, he got it. It was his birthday! Another mile-stone.

Where had he been, what had he been doing a year ago to-day? It would be interesting if he could manage to remember.

A year ago--why, good lord! That was the day it had all begun. He'd sold the old house that day and then had started to walk over to Frederica's for dinner, and got caught in the rain and taken a street-car. He had heard a vibrant young voice say, "Don't dare touch me like that," and, turning, had seen the blazing glorious creature who held the conductor pinned by both wrists. That had been Rose--his Rose; whom he was spending these sixty minutes out of the twenty-four hours trying to forget about!

And that was only a year ago. It was curiously hard to realize. Their identities had shifted so strangely--his own as well as hers. Well, and in what direction had, he changed? How did he compare--the man who sat here now, with the man who had unhesitatingly jumped off the car to follow a new adventure--the man who had turned up water-logged at Frederica's dinner and made hay of her plan to marry him off to Hermione Woodruff?

They had had a great old talk that night, Frederica and he, he remembered. He remembered what he had talked about, and he smiled grimly over the recollection--space and leisure; the defective intelligence that trapped men into cluttering their lives with useless junk; so many things to have and to do that they couldn't turn around without breaking something. Had he been a fool then, or was he a fool now? Both, perhaps. But how old Frederica must have grinned over the naiveté of him. Which of the two of him in her candid opinion would be the better man?

He believed he could answer that question. Oh, he was succeeding all right--increasing his practise, making money, getting cautious--prudent; he didn't bolt the track any more. And the quality of his work was good, he couldn't quarrel with that. Only, the old big free dreams that had glorified it, were gone. He was in harness, drawing a cart; following a bundle of hay.

He sprang impatiently to his feet, thrust back his chair so violently as he did so that it tipped over with a crash. The one really footling, futile, fool thing to do, was what he was doing now--lamenting his old way of life and making no effort to recapture it! Let him either accept the situation, make up his mind to it and stop complaining, or else offer it some effective resistance--sweep the flummery out of his life--clear decks for action.

Well, and that was the most asinine consideration of all. Because of course he couldn't do one thing or the other. As long as the man who wasn't Rose's husband remained alive in him, he'd protest--struggle--clamor for his old freedom. And yet, as long as the million tiny cords that bound hum, Gulliver-like, went back to Rose, talk of breaking them was sophomoric foolishness. He'd better go home!

The building was pretty well deserted by now, and against the silence he heard the buzzer in his telephone switchboard proclaiming insistently that some one was trying to get him on the telephone. His hour of recollection hadn't been a success, but the invasion of it irritated him none the less. He thought at first he wouldn't answer. He didn't care who was on the wire. He didn't want to talk to anybody. But no one can resist the mechanical bell-ringers they use in exchanges nowadays--the even-spaced ring and wait, ring and wait, so manifestly incapable of discouragement. At the end of forty-five seconds, he snatched open his door, punched the jack into its socket, caught up the head-piece, and bellowed, "Hello!" into the dangling transmitter.

And then the look of annoyance in his face changed to one of incredulous pleasure. "Good God!" he said. "Is that you, Barry Lake? Are you here in Chicago? And Jane, too? How long you going to be here?... Lord, but that's immense!"

And five minutes later he was calling Rose on the wire. "Rose, listen to this! Barry Lake and his wife are here. He just called up. They got in from New York at five o'clock, and I've asked them out to dinner. Barry Lake and Jane! What's the matter? Can't you hear me?... Why, they're about the best friends I've got. The magazine writer, you know, and his wife. And they're coming out to dinner--coming right out. I told them not to dress. I'll come straight home myself--get there before they do, I guess.... Why, Rose, what's the matter? Aren't you well? Look here! If you're below par, and don't feel like having them come, I can call it off and go over to the hotel and dine with them.... You'd rather we came out to the house? You're sure? Because they won't mind a bit. I can take them to a restaurant or anywhere.... All right, if you're sure it won't be too much for you. I'll be home in fifteen minutes. Lord, but it was good to hear old Barry's voice again! I haven't seen him for over a year. You're sure you'd rather?... All right. Good-by."

But he sat there frowning in a puzzled sort of way for half a minute after he'd pulled the plug. Rose's voice had certainly sounded queer. He was sure she hadn't planned anything else for to-night. He distinctly remembered her saying just before he left for the office that they'd have the evening to themselves. And it was incredible that she minded his bringing home two old friends like the Lakes on the spur of the moment, to take pot-luck. Oh, well, you couldn't tell about people's voices over the telephone. There must have been something funny about the connection.

An opportune taxi just passing the entrance to his office building as he came out, enabled him to better the fifteen minutes he'd allowed for getting home. But in spite of this he found Rose rather splendidly gowned for her expected guests.

"Good gracious!" he cried excitedly. "What did you do that for? I thought I told you over the phone the Lakes weren't going to dress."

"I was--dressed like this when you telephoned," Rose said. "And I was afraid there wouldn't be time to change into anything else."

"We weren't going anywhere, were we?" he asked. "There's nothing I've forgotten?"

"No," she said, "we weren't going anywhere."

"And you dressed like that just for a--treat for me?"

She nodded. "Just for you," she said. "Roddy, who are the Lakes? Oh, I know his articles, I think! But where were they friends of yours, and when?"

"Why, for years, until they moved to New York. They used to live here. I know I must have told you about them. I was always having dinner with them--either out in Rogers Park, where they lived, or at queer, terrible little restaurants down-town. They were always game to try anything, once. He's the longest, leanest, angularest, absent-mindedest chap in the world. And just about the best. And his wife fits all his angles. She's a good chap, too. That's the way you have to think of her. They're a great pair. She writes, too. Oh, you're sure to like them! They're going to be out here for months, he says. He's going to specialize in women, and he's come back here where they've got the vote and all, to make headquarters. Lord, but it's great! I haven't had a real talk with anybody since he went away, over a year ago!"

Then, at the sound of the bell, he cried out, "There they are!" and dashed down into the hall ahead of the parlor maid, as eagerly as a schoolboy anticipating a birthday present.

Rose followed more slowly, and by the time she had reached the landing she found him slapping Barry on the back and shaking both hands with Jane, and trying to help both of them out of their wraps at once.

The last thing she could have thought of just then, was of making, for herself, an effective entrance on the scene. But it worked out rather that way. The three of them, Rodney and the Lakes, at the foot of the stairs, in the clothes they had been working and traveling in all day, looked up simultaneously and saw Rose, gowned for a treat for Rodney, on the first landing; a wonderful rose-colored Boucher tapestry (guaranteed authentic by Bertie Willis) on the wall behind her for a background, and the carved Gothic newel-post bringing out the whiteness of the hand that rested upon it. The picture would have won a moment's silence from anybody. And Barry and Jane simply gazed at her wide-eyed.

Rodney was the first to speak. "It's really the Lakes, Rose. I couldn't quite believe it till I saw them. And the lady on the landing," he went on, turning to his guests, "is really my wife. It's all a little incredible, isn't it?"

When the greetings were over and they were on the way up-stairs again, he said: "I told Rose we weren't going to dress, but she explained she didn't put on this coronation robe for you, but for a treat for me before I telephoned, and hadn't time to change back."

And when Jane cried out, as they entered the drawing room, "Good heavens, Rodney, what a house!" he answered: "It isn't ours, thank God! We rented it for a year in a sort of honeymoon delirium, I guess. We don't live up to it, of course. Nobody could, but the woman who built it. But we do our damnedest."

The gaiety in his voice clouded a little as he said it, and his grin, for a moment, had a rueful twist. But for a moment only. Then his untempered delight in the possession of his old friends took him again and, with the exception of one or two equally momentary cloud-shadows, lasted all evening.

They talked--heavens how they talked! It was like the breaking up of a log-jam. The two men would rush along, side by side, in perfect agreement for a while, catching each other's half expressed ideas, and hurling them forward, and then suddenly they'd meet, head on, in collision over some fundamental difference of opinion, amid a prismatic spray of epigram. Jane kept up a sort of obbligato to the show, inserting provocative little witticisms here and there, sometimes as Rodney's ally, sometimes as her husband's, and luring them, when she could, into the quiet backwaters of metaphysics, where she was more than a match for the two of them. Jane could juggle Plato, Bergson and William James, with one hand tied behind her. But when she incautiously ventured out of this domain, as occasionally she did--when, for example, she confessed herself in favor of a censorship of the drama, she was instantly demolished.

"The state's got no business with morals," said Barry.

"That's the real cause of most of our municipal corruption," said Rodney. "A city administration, for instance, is corrupt exactly in ratio to its attempt to be moral. The more moral issues you import into politics--gambling, prostitution, Sunday closing, censored movies, and the rest--the more corrupt and helpless and inefficient your government will be." And, between them, for the next half-hour, they kept on demonstrating it until the roar of their heavy artillery fairly drove Jane from her trenches.

But all this was preliminary to the main topic of the evening, which got launched when Rodney seized the advantage of a pause to say:

"A series of articles on women, eh! What are you going to do to them?"

With that the topic of feminism was on the carpet and it was never thereafter abandoned. "Utopia to Brass Tacks," was the slogan Barry's chief had provided him with, he said. We were about the end of the heroic age of the movement, the age of myths and saints and prophecies. A transition was about due to smaller, more immediate things. The quality of the leaders would probably change. The heroines of the last three or four decades, women like Naomi Rutledge Stanton, to take a fine type of them.

"She's my mother," said Rose.

Barry Lake's aplomb was equal to most situations, but it failed him here; for a moment he could only stare. The contrast between the picture in his mind's eye, of the plain, square-toed, high-principled and rather pathetic champion of the Cause--pathetic in the light of what she hoped from it--facing indifference and ridicule with the calm smile of one who has climbed her mountain and looked into the promised land,--between that and the lovely, sensitive, sensuous creature he was staring at, was enough to stagger anybody. He got himself together in a moment, said very simply and gravely how much he admired her and how high a value, he believed, the future would put on her work; then he picked up his sentence where Rose had broken it.

The heroines and the prophets were going to be replaced, he believed, by leaders much more practical and less scrupulous, and the movement would follow the leaders. As far as polities went, he not only looked for no millennium, but for a reaction in the other direction. There'd be more open graft, he thought.

Rose asked him if he meant that he thought women were less honest than men.

"It isn't a lack of old-fashioned honesty that makes a man a grafter," he said. "It's seeing the duties and privileges of a public office in a private and personal way, instead of in a public, impersonal one; being kind to old friends who need a helping hand, and grateful to people who've held out helping hands to you. Well, and women have been trained for hundreds of years to see things in that private and personal way, and to exalt the private and personal virtues. Just as they've been trained to stick to rule of thumb methods that more or less work, rather than to try experiments. So, on the whole, I think their getting the vote will mean that politics will be crookeder and more reactionary than they've been in a good many years. All the same I'm for it, because it's a part of democracy, and I'm for democracy all the way. Not because you get good government out of it; you don't. You get as good as you deserve, and in the long run I think a society that has to deserve as good a government as it gets, grows stronger and healthier than one that gets a better government than it deserves."

"That old tory radical over there," said Jane, with a nod at Rodney, "has been grinning away for half an hour without saying a word. I'd like to know what you think about it."

"'Tory radical'?" questioned Rose.

"That's what Barry calls him," Jane explained. "He's so conservative about the law that he calls Blackstone an upstart and a faker, but the things he'd do, when it comes, down to cases--on good old common law principles, of course, would make the average Progressive's hair curl. Why, when people were getting excited over Roosevelt's recall of judicial decisions--remember?--Rodney was for abolishing the Bill of Rights altogether."

"What's the Bill of Rights?" asked Rose.

Jane headed Rodney off. "Oh, life, liberty and property without due process of law," she said. "Neither of these men has any opinion of rights. The only natural inalienable right you've got, they say, is to take what you can get and keep it until somebody stronger than you, that you can't run away from, catches you. What you call your individual rights are just what society has made and doesn't for the moment need, to keep itself going. If it does need them, it takes them back. Only, of course, it has got to keep itself going. If it doesn't, people get up and kick it to bits and start again." She turned to Rodney. "But what do you think about it, really? What Barry's been talking about, I mean. Are you for it?"

"For what?" Rodney wanted to know.

"For what women want," said Jane. "Economic independence, equality, easy divorce--all the new stuff."

"I'm not against it," Rodney said, "any more than I'm against to-morrow being Tuesday. It's going to be Tuesday whether I like it or not. But that conviction keeps me from crusading for it very hard. What I'm curious about is how it's going to work. When they get what they want, do you suppose they're going to want what they get?"

"I knew there was something deadly about your grin," said Jane. "What are you so cantankerous about?"

"Why, the thing," said Rodney, "that sours my naturally sweet disposition is this economic independence. I've been hearing it at dinner tables all winter. When I hear a woman with five hundred dollars' worth of clothes on--well, no, not on her back--and anything you like in jewelry, talking about economic independence as if it were something nice--jam on the pantry shelf that we men were too greedy to let them have a share of--I have to put on the brakes in order to stay on the rails.

"We men have to fight for economic independence from the time we're twenty, more or less, till the time we die. It's a sentence to hard labor for life; that's what economic independence is. How does that woman think she'd set about it, to make her professional services worth a hundred dollars a day--or fifty, or ten? What's she got that has a market value? What is there that she can capitalize? She's got her physical charm, of course, and there are various professions besides the oldest one, where she can make it pay. Well, and what else?"

"She can bear children," said Jane. "She ought to be paid well for that."

"You're only paid well," Rodney replied, "for something you can do exceptionally well, or for something that few people can do at all. As long as the vast majority of women can bear children, the only women who could get well paid for it would be those exceptionally qualified, or exceptionally proficient. This is economics, now we're talking. Other considerations are left out. No, I tell you. Economic independence, if she really got it--the kind of woman I've been talking about--would make her very, very sick."

"She'd get over being sick though, wouldn't she," said Rose, "after a while? And then, don't you think she'd be glad?"

Rodney laughed. "The sort of woman I've been talking about," he said, "would feel, when all was said, that she'd got a gold brick."

Rose poured his coffee with a steady hand. They were in the library by now.

"If that's so," she said, "then the kind of woman you've been talking about has already got a profession--the one you were just speaking of as--as the oldest. As Doctor Randolph says, she's cashed in on her ankles. But maybe you're mistaken in thinking she wouldn't choose something else if she had a chance. Maybe she wouldn't have done it, except because her husband wanted her to and she was in love with him and tried to please. You can't always tell."

It was almost her first contribution to the talk that evening. She had asked a few questions and said the things a hostess has to say. The other three were manifestly taken by surprise--Rodney as well as his guests.

But surprise was not the only effect she produced. Her husband had never seen her look just like that before (remember, he had not been a guest at the Randolphs' dinner on the night he had turned her out of his office), the flash in her eyes, the splash of bright color in her cheeks.

Barry saved him the necessity of trying to answer, by taking up the cudgels himself. Rodney didn't feel like answering, nor, for the moment, like listening to Barry. His interest in the discussion was eclipsed for the moment, by the thrill and wonder of his wife's beauty.

He walked round behind her chair, on the pretext of getting his coffee cup, and rested his hand, for an instant, on her bare shoulder. He was puzzled at the absence of response to the caress. For there was none, unless you could call it a response that she sat as still as ivory until he took his hand away. And looking into her face, he thought she had gone pale. Evidently though, it was nothing. Her color came back in a moment, and for the next half-hour she matched wits with Barry Lake very prettily.

When Jane declared that they must go, her husband protested.

"I haven't managed yet to get a word out of Rodney about any of his things. He dodged when I asked him how his Criminal Procedure Reform Society was getting on, and he changed the subject when I wanted to know about his model Expert Testimony Act." He turned on Rodney. "But there's one thing you're not going to get out of. I want to know how far you've come along with your book on Actual Government. It was a great start you had on that, and a bully plan. I shan't let you off any details. I want the whole thing. Now."

"I've had my fling," said Rodney, with a sort of embarrassed good humor. "And I don't say I shall never have another. But just now, there are no more intellectual wild-oats for me. What I sow, I sow in a field and in a furrow. And I take good care to be on hand to gather the crop. Model Acts and Reform of Procedure! Have you forgotten you're talking to a married man?"

On learning their determination to walk down-town, he said he'd go with them part of the way. Would Rose go, too? But she thought not.

"Well, I can't pretend to think you need it," he admitted. Then, turning to the Lakes: "You people must spend a lot of evenings with us like this. You've done Rose a world of good. I haven't seen her look so well in a month of Sundays."