Chapter 22

A DEFEAT

The gown that Rodney had spoken of apologetically to the Lakes as a coronation robe, was put away; the maid was sent to bed. Rose, huddled into a big quilted bath-robe, and in spite of the comfortable warmth of the room, feeling cold clear in to the bones--cold and tremulous, and sure that when she tried to talk her teeth would chatter--sat waiting for Rodney to come back from seeing the Lakes part way home.

It was over an hour since they had gone, but she was in no hurry for his return. She wanted time for getting things straight before he came--for letting the welter subside and getting the two or three essentials clear in her mind. She hadn't cried a tear.

The old Rose would have cried--the Rose of a month ago, before that devastating, blinding scene with Portia, and what had happened since. She even managed to smile a little satirically, now, over the way that child would have taken it. Here it was their first anniversary of the day--the great day in their two lives--their birthday, as well as his! And he'd forgotten it! He had remained oblivious that morning, in spite of all the little evocative references she had made. She hadn't let herself be hurt about that--not much, anyway; had managed to smile affectionately over his masculine obtuseness, as if it had meant no more to her than it would have, say, to Frederica. She had impressed him strongly, though--or tried to--with the idea that the evening was to be kept clear just for their two selves. And then she had arranged a feast--a homely little feast that was to culminate in a cake with a hedge of little candles around the edge for his birthday, and a single red one in the center, for theirs.

Well, and that was only part of it. She had planned, when the cake should have come in, all lighted up, and the servants had gone away and the other lights had been put out,--she had planned to tell him her great news. She hadn't told him yet, though it was over a fortnight since her visit to the doctor.

She had no reasoned explanation of her postponement of it. The instinct that led her to keep it wholly to herself, was probably one of the reflections of that morning with Portia. She was still in a penitential mood when she went to the doctor--a mood which the contemplation of Portia's frustrated life and her own undeservedly happy one, had bitten deep into her soul. It was a mood that nothing but pain could satisfy. The only relief she could get during that fortnight of packing and leave-taking, came in flogging herself to do hard things--things that hurt, physically and literally, I mean; that made her back ache and cramped the muscles of her arms. Her spiritual aches were too contemptible to pay any attention to.

Conversely, in that mood, the thing she couldn't endure, that made her want to scream, was precisely what, all her life, she had taken for granted; tenderness, concern, the smoothing away of little difficulties for which the people about her had always sacrificed themselves. That mood made it hard to go to the doctor. But, after she had fainted dead away twice in one morning, a saving remnant of common sense--the reflection that if there were anything organically wrong with her, it would be a poor trick to play on Rodney, not to take remedial measures as soon as possible--dictated the action.

When the doctor told her what had happened, she was a little bewildered. She hadn't, in her mind, any prepared background for the news. She and Rodney had decided at the beginning not to have any children for the first year or two--in view of Rose's extreme youth, the postponement seemed sensible--and the decision once made, neither of them had thought much more about it.

Rodney's vigorously objective mind had always been so fully occupied with things as they were that it found little leisure for speculation on things as they might be. The day's work was always so vividly absorbing to him that day-dreams never got a chance. His sex impulses had always been crowded down to the smallest possible compass, not because he was a Puritan, but because he was, spiritually and mentally, an athlete. He had never thought of marriage as a serious possibility, Frederica's efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, until, in a moment of bewilderment, he found himself head over ears in love with Rose Stanton. That this emotion had been able to fight its way into the fortress of his life spoke volumes for the power and the vitality of it. Once it got inside, it formed a part of the garrison of the fort. And, just as the contemplation of marriage had had to wait until there was a Rose Stanton to make it concrete and irresistible, so the contemplation of fatherhood would have to wait for a concrete fact to drive it home.

With certain important differences, Rose was a good deal like him. She had never had time to dream much. The pretending games of childhood--playing with dolls, playing house--had never attracted her away from more vigorous and athletic enterprises. A superb physique gave her an outlet for her emotional energy, so that she satisfied her wants pretty much as she became aware of them. And, conversely, she remained unaware of possibilities she had not, as yet, the means to realize.

They were both rather abnormally normal about this. Persons of robust emotions seldom think very much about them. The temperament that cultivates its emotional soil assiduously, warms it, waters it and watches anxiously for the first sprouts, gets a rather anemic growth for its pains. Which of these facts is cause and which effect, one need not pretend to say: whether it is a lack of vitality in the seed that prompts the instinct of cultivation, or whether it is the cultivation that prevents a sturdy growth. But, feeble as the results of cultivation may be, they produce at least the apparent advantage of running true to form. The thing that sprouts in cultivated soil will be what was planted there--will be, at all events, appropriate.

But in Rose's penitential mood, and in the absence of a prepared background, it was the processes of her pregnancy rather than the issue of it, that got into the foreground of her mind. She was in for an experience now that no one could call trivial. She had months of misery ahead of her, she assumed, reasoning from the one she had just gone through with, surmounted by hours of agony and peril that even Portia wouldn't deny the authenticity of.

Well, she was glad of it; glad she was going to be hurt. She could get back some of her self-respect, she thought, by enduring it all, first the wretchedness, then the pain, with a Spartan fortitude. There would he a sort of savage satisfaction in marching through all her miseries with her head up.

She couldn't do that if Rodney knew. He wouldn't let her. He'd want to care for her, comfort her, pack her in cotton-wool. And there was a terrible yearning down in her heart, to let him. For just that reason, he mustn't be told.

But, as the sharp edges of this mood wore off, she saw a little more justly. Already he suspected something. She caught, now and again, a puzzled, worried, almost frightened look in his face. It was a poor penance that others had to share. So, at the end of her feast to-night, when the candles were lighted and the servants gone away, she'd tell him. And, oh, what a comfort it would be to have him know!

That was the moment she was waiting for when he telephoned that he was bringing the Lakes out for dinner. The old Rose might well have cried.

But now, as she sat trembling in front of her little boudoir fire, the door open behind her so that she'd surely hear him when he came in, the disappointment and the hurt that had clutched at her throat when she turned from the telephone, were wholly forgotten. As I said, she hadn't shed a tear.

The situation she was confronted with now was beyond tears. Portia's stinging words went over and over through her mind. "If you let the big thing slip out of your hands because you haven't the pluck to fight ..." and her own, "I promise I won't do that." It would mean a fight. She must keep her head.

She gave a last panicky shiver when she heard his latch-key, then pulled herself together.

"Come in here, Roddy," she called, as he reached the head of the stairs. "I want to talk about something."

He had hoped, evidently, to find her abed and fast asleep. His cautious footfalls on the stairs made clear his intention not to waken her.

"Oh, I'm sorry," he said, pausing in the doorway to her dressing-room, but not coming in. "I didn't know you meant to sit up for me. If I'd known you were waiting, I'd have come back sooner. But we got to talking and we were at the hotel before we knew it, and it was so long since I'd seen them ..."

"I haven't minded," she told him. "I've been glad of a chance to think. But now ... Oh, please come in and shut the door!"

He did come in, but with manifest reluctance, and he stayed near the door in an attitude of arrested departure.

"It's pretty late," he protested with a nonchalance that rang a little flat. "You must be awfully tired. Hadn't we better put off our pow-wow?"

She understood well enough. The look in her face, some uncontrolled inflection in the voice she had meant to keep so even, had given her away. He suspected she was going to be "tragic." If he didn't look out, there'd be a "scene."

"We can't put it off," she said. "I let you have your talk out with the Lakes, but you'll have to talk with me now."

"We spent most of the time talking about you, anyway," he said pleasantly. "They're both mad about you. Barry says you've got a fine mind."

She laughed at that, a little raggedly. Whereupon Rodney looked hurt and protested against this imputation of insincerity against his friend.

"When you know him better," he said, "you will see he couldn't say a thing like that unless he meant it."

"Oh, he meant it, all right," said Rose. And she added incomprehensibly, "It isn't his fault, of course. It's just the way the world's made."

She had been in good looks to-night, she knew; hurt, humiliated, confronted with a crisis, she had rallied her powers just as she had done at the Randolphs' dinner. She had been aware of the color in her cheeks, the brightness in her eyes, the edge to her voice. Each of the two men had responded to the effect she produced. Barry had talked with her all the last part of the evening--brilliantly, eagerly, and had come away saying she had a fine mind. Her husband had come across to her and put his hand on her bare shoulder. And the two of them had responded to an identical impulse, although they translated it so differently--one over the long circuit, the other over the short.

Lacking the clue, Rodney, of course, didn't understand. The look in Rose's eyes softened suddenly.

"Don't mind, dear;" she said. "I'm truly glad if they liked me. It will make things a lot easier."

At that his eyes lighted up. "Do you seriously think any one could resist you, you darling?" he said. "You were a perfect miracle to-night, when they were here. But now, like this ..." He came over to her with his arms out.

But she cried out "Don't!" and sprang away from him. "Please don't, Roddy--not to-night! I can't stand it to have you touch me to-night!"

He stared at her, gave a shrug of exasperation, and then turned away. "You _are_ angry about something then," he said. "I thought so when I first came in. But I honestly don't know what it's about."

"I'm _not_ angry," she said as steadily as she could. She mustn't let it go on like this. They were getting started all wrong somehow. "You didn't want me to touch you, the night when I came to your office, when you were working on that case. But it wasn't because you were angry with me. Well, I'm like that to-night. There's something that's got to be thought out. Only, I'm not like you. I can't do it alone. I've got to have help. I don't want to be soothed and comforted like a child, and I don't want to be made love to. I just want to be treated like a human being."

"I see," he said. Very deliberately he lighted a cigarette, found himself an ash-tray and settled down astride a spindling little chair. (It was lucky for Florence McCrea's peace of mind that she didn't see him do it.) "All right," he said. "Now, come on with your troubles." He didn't say "little troubles," but his voice did and his smile. The whole thing would probably turn out to be a question about a housemaid, or a hat.

Rose steadied herself as well as she could. She simply mustn't let herself think of things like that. If she lost her temper she'd have no chance.

"We've made a horrible mistake," she began. "I don't suppose it's either of our faults exactly. It's been mine in a way of course, because it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been--thoughtless and ignorant. I might have seen it if I'd thought to look. But I didn't--not really, until to-night."

He wanted to know what the mistake was. He was still smiling in good-humored amusement over her seriousness.

"It's pretty near everything," she said, "about the way we've lived--renting this house in the first place."

He frowned and flushed. "Good heavens, child!" he said. "Can't you take a joke? I didn't mean anything by what I said about the house--except that--well, it is a precious, soulful, sacred--High Church sort of house, and we're not the sort of people, thank God--I'll say it again--who'd have built it and furnished it for ourselves. You _aren't_ right, Rose. You're run down and very tired and hypersensitive, or you wouldn't have spent an evening worrying over a thing like that."

"You can make jokes about a thing that's true," she persisted. "And it's true that you've hated the way we've lived--the way this house has made us live.--No, please listen and let me talk. I can't help it if my voice chokes up. My mind's just as cool as yours and you've got to listen. It isn't the first time I've thought of it. It's always made me feel a little unhappy when people have laughed about the 'new leaf' you've turned over; how 'civilized' you've got, learning all the new dances and going out all the time and not doing any of the--wild things you used to do. In a joking sort of way, people have congratulated me about it, as if it were some sort of triumph of mine. I haven't liked it, really. But I never stopped to think out what it meant."

"What it does mean," he said, with a good deal of attention to his cigarette, "is that I've fallen in love with you and married you and that things are desirable to me now, because I am in love with you, that weren't desirable before. And things that were desirable before, are less so. I don't see anything terrible about that."

"There isn't," she said, "when--when you're in love with me."

He shot a frowning look at her and echoed her phrase interrogatively. She nodded.

"Because you aren't in love with me all the time. And when you aren't, you must see what I've done to you. You must--hate me for what I've done to you. I remember the first day we ever talked--when you laughed at my note-books. You talked about people who wore blinders and drew a cart and followed a bundle of hay. That's what I've made you do."

His face flushed deep. He sprang to his feet and threw his cigarette into the fire. "That's perfectly outrageous nonsense," he said. "I won't listen to it."

"If it weren't true," she persisted, "you wouldn't be excited like that. If I hadn't known it before, I'd have known it when I saw you with the Lakes. You can give them something you can't give me, not with all the love in the world. I never heard about them till to-night--not in a way I'd remember. And there are other people--you spoke of some of them at dinner--who are living here, that you've never mentioned to me before. You've tried to sweep them all out of your life; to go to dances and the opera and things with me. You did it because you loved me, but it wasn't fair to either of us, Roddy. Because you can't love me all the time. I don't believe a man--a real man--_can_ love a woman all the time. And if she makes him hate her when he doesn't love her, he'll get so he hates loving her."

"You're talking nonsense!" he said again roughly. He was pacing the room by now. "Stark staring nonsense!"

Of course the reason it caught him like that was simply that it echoed so uncannily the things that went through his own head sometimes in his stolen hours of solitude--thoughts he had often tried, unavailingly, to stamp out of existence.

"I'd like to know where you get that stuff. Is it from James Randolph? He's dangerous, that fellow. Oh, he's interesting, and I like him, but he's a cynic. He doesn't want anybody to be happier than he is. But what may be true of him, isn't true of me. I've never stopped loving you since the first day we talked together. And I should think I'd done enough to prove it."

"That's it," she said. "You've done too much. And you're so sorry for me when you don't love me, that it makes you do all the more."

She had found another joint in his armor. She was absolutely clairvoyant to-night, and this time he fairly cried out, "Stop it!"

Then he got himself together and begged her pardon. "After all, I don't see what it comes to," he said. "I don't know what we're fighting about to-night. You're saying you think we ought to do more playing around with the Lakes and people like that; not spend all our time with the Casino set, as we have done this winter. Well, that may be good sense. I've no objection certainly."

"Well, then," she said, "that's settled--that's one thing settled. But there's something else. Oh, it all comes to the same thing, really. Roddy,"--she had to gulp and draw a long breath and steady herself before this--"Roddy, how much money have you got, and how much are we spending?"

"Oh, good lord!" he cried. "_Please_ don't go into that now, Rose. It's after one o'clock, and you're worn to a frazzle. If we've got to go into it, let's do it some other time, when we can be sensible about it."

"When I am, you mean?"

"Yes," he said.

"Well, I'm sensible now. I can't help it if my--voice chokes and my eyes fill up. That's silly, of course, but down in my mind, I don't believe I've ever been as sensible as I am right now. And I've had the nerve to ask--I don't know when I will again--and I know you won't bring the subject up by yourself. I've been trying to for ever so long. But money's always seemed the one thing I couldn't b-bear to talk about with you.

"You see, when I first told mother and Portia about you--about how you helped me with the conductor that night, I told them your name, and Portia said she didn't think it could be you, because you were a millionaire. I supposed she knew. Anyway, I didn't think very much about it. You yourself,--just being with you and hearing you talk, were so much more important. After we got engaged, and you began doing all sorts of lovely things for me, I enjoyed it of course. But it was just something that went with you. After we were married and took this house ... Well, I knew, of course, I hadn't married you for money, but I thought it would sound sort of queer and prying to ask questions about it; because I hadn't anything."

He had looked up two or three times and drawn in his breath for a protest, but apparently he couldn't think of anything effective to say. Now though, he cried out, "Rose! Please!"

But she went steadily on. "You were always so dear about it. You never let me feel like a beggar, and--well, it was the easy way, and I took it. I got worried once during the winter when I heard the Crawfords talking. All those people were millionaires, I'd supposed. They were going on at a dinner here, one night, about being awfully hard up, and I began to wonder if we were. I spent a week trying to--get up my courage to ask you about it. But then Constance got a new necklace on her birthday, and they went off to Palm Beach the next week, so I persuaded myself it was all a joke. The thing's come up again several times since, but never so that I couldn't side-step it some way, until to-night. But to-night--oh, Roddy ...!" Her silly ragged voice choked there and stopped and the tears brimmed up and spilled down her cheeks. But she kept her face steadfastly turned to his.

"That's what I said about being married and not sowing wild oats, I suppose," he said glumly. "It was a joke. Do you suppose I'd have said it if I meant it?"

"It wasn't only that," she managed to go on. "It was the way they looked at the house; the way you apologized for my dress; the way you looked when you tried to get out of answering Barry Lake's questions about what you were doing. Oh, how I despised myself! And how I knew you and they must be despising me!"

"The one thing I felt about you all evening," he said, with the patience that marks the last stage of exasperation, "was pride. I was rather crazily proud of you."

"As my lover you were proud of me," she said. "But the other man--the man that's more truly you--was ashamed, as I was ashamed. Oh, it doesn't matter! Being ashamed won't accomplish anything. But what we'll _do_ is going to accomplish something."

"What do you mean to do?" he asked.

"I want you to tell me first," she said, "how much money we have, and how much we've been spending."

"I don't know," he said stubbornly. "I don't know exactly."

"You've got enough, haven't you, of your own ... I mean, there's enough that comes in every year, to live on, if you didn't earn a cent by practising law? Well, what I want to do, is to live on that. I want to live however and wherever we have to to live on that--out in the suburbs somewhere, or in a flat, so that you will be free; and I can work--be some sort of help. Barry and the others--your real friends, that you really care about, won't mind. And as long as we want to get rid of the other people anyway, that's the way to do it."

"You can wash the dishes and scrub the floors," he supplemented, "and I can carry my lunch to the office with me in a little tin box." He looked at his watch. "And now that the thing's reduced to an absurdity, let's go to bed. It's getting along toward two o'clock."

"You don't have to get to the office till nine to-morrow morning," said Rose. "And I want to talk it out now. And I don't think I said anything that was absurd."

The devil of it was she hadn't. The precise quality about her suggestions that pointed and barbed them, was their fantastic logic. It would be ridiculous--impossible--to uproot their life as she wanted it done. One simply couldn't do such a thing. Serious discussion of it was preposterous. But to explain why ...! He was apt enough at explanations generally. This one seemed to present difficulties.

"I shouldn't have called it absurd," he admitted after a rather long silence. "But it's exaggerated and unnecessary. I don't care to make a public proclamation that I'm not able to support you and run our domestic establishment in a way that we find natural and agreeable;--and that I've been a fool to try. The situation doesn't call for it. You've made a mountain out of an ant-hill. When our lease is up, if we think this house is more than we want, we can find something simpler."

"But we'll begin economizing now," she pleaded; "change things as much as we can, even if we do have to go on living in this house. It won't hurt me a bit to work, and you could go back to your book. We'd both be happier, if I were something besides just a drag on you."

"Discharge a couple of maids, you mean," he asked, "and sweep and make beds and that sort of thing yourself?"

"I don't know exactly how we'd do it," she said. "That's why I said I needed your help in figuring it out. Something like that, I suppose. Sweeping and making beds isn't very much, but it's something."

"The most we could save that way," he said, "would be a few hundred dollars a year. It wouldn't be a drop in the bucket. But everything would run at cross-purposes. You'd be tired out all the time--you're that pretty much as it is lately, we'd have to stop having people in; you'd be bored and I'd be worried. When you start living on a certain scale, everything about your life has to be done on that scale. Next October, as I said, when the lease on this house runs out, we can manage, perhaps, to change the scale a little. There you are! Now do stop worrying about it and let's go to bed."

But she sat there just as she was, staring at the dying fire, her hands lying slack in her lap, all as if she hadn't heard. The long silence irked him. He pulled out his watch, looked at it and began winding it. He mended the fire so that it would be safe for the night; bolted a window. Every minute or two, he stole a look at her, but she was always just the same. Except for the faint rise and fall of her bosom, she might have been a picture, not a woman.

At last he said again, "Come along, Rose, dear."

"It'll be too late in October," she said. "That's why I wanted to decide things to-night. Because we must begin right away." Then she looked up into his face. "It will be too late in October," she repeated, "unless we begin now."

The deep tense seriousness of her voice and her look arrested his full attention.

"Why?" he asked. And then, "Rose, what do you mean?"

"We're going to have a baby in October," she said.

He stared at her for a minute without a word, then drew in a deep breath and pressed his hands against his eyes. All he could say at first was just her name. But he dropped down beside her and got her in his arms.

"So that's it," he said raggedly at last. "Oh, Rose, darling, it's such a relief! I've been so terrified about you--so afraid something had gone wrong. And you wouldn't let me ask, and you seemed so unhappy. I'd even thought of talking to Randolph. I might have guessed, I suppose. I've been stupid about it. But, you darling, I understand it all now."

She didn't see just what he meant by that, but she didn't care. It was such a wonderful thing to stop fighting and let the tension relax, cuddle close into his embrace, and know nothing in the world but the one fact that he loved her; that their tale of golden hours wasn't spent--was, perhaps, illimitable. She was even too drowsily happy to think what he meant when he said a little later:

"So now you won't let anything trouble you, will you, child? And if queer worrying ideas get into your head about the way we live, and about being a drag on me and making me hate you, you'll laugh at them? You'll be able to laugh, because you'll know why they're there."

It wasn't until the next day that she recalled that remark of his and analyzed it. It meant, of course, that she was beaten; that her first fight for the big thing had been in vain. There would be no use, for the present, in renewing the struggle. He'd taken the one ground that was impregnable. So long as he could go on honestly interpreting every plea of hers for a share in the hard part of his life as well as in the soft part of it, for a way of life that would make them something more than lovers--as wholly subjective to herself, the inevitable accompaniment of her physical condition--the pleas and the struggles would indeed be wasted. She'd have to wait.