The Real Adventure

by Henry Kitchell Webster

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....