CHAPTER XIX.
EMILY REFUSES CONSOLATION.
THE Waylands took a small house at Neuilly for the summer, and Emily spent a great deal of time there. She found Theresa less lively but also less jarring than in their boarding-house days. Neither ever spoke of those days, or of Demorest and Marlowe—Theresa, because she had no wish to recall that she had been other than the fashionable and preeminently respectable personage she had rapidly developed into; Emily, because her heart was still sore, and the place where Marlowe had been was still an uncomfortable and at times an aching void.
In midsummer came the third member of the Wayland family—Edgar. Like his father, he had changed, had developed into a type of the respectable radically different from anything of which she had thought him capable. A cleaner mind now looked from his commonplace face, and he watched with approving interest the pleasing, if monotonous, spectacle of his father’s domestic solidity. On the very day on which Emily received her copy of the decree of the Petersville court, he took her out to dinner.
She had sat in her little salon with the three documents in the case before her—the two tangible documents, the marriage certificate and the decree of divorce; and the intangible but most powerful document, her memory of Marlowe from first scene to last. When it was time for her to dress, she went to her bedroom window, tore the two papers into bits and sent them fluttering away over the housetops on the breeze. “The incident is closed,” she said, with a queer short laugh that was also a sob. She had Wayland take her to a little restaurant in the Rue Marivaux, her and Marlowe’s favourite dining place—a small room, with tasteful dark furnishings and rose-coloured lights that made it somewhat brighter than clear twilight.
As they sat there, with the orchestra sending down from a plant-screened alcove high in the wall the softest and gentlest intimations of melody, Emily deliberately gave herself up to the mood that had been growing all the afternoon.
Edgar knew her well enough to leave her to her thoughts through the long wait and into the second course. Then he remonstrated. “You’re not drinking. You’re not eating. You’re not listening—I’ve asked you a question twice.”
“Yes, I was listening,” replied Emily—“listening to a voice I don’t like to hear, yet wouldn’t silence if I could—the voice of experience.”
“Well—you look as if you’d had a lot of experience—I was going to say, you look sadder, but it isn’t that. And—you’re more beautiful than ever, Emily. You always did have remarkable eyes, and now they’re—simply wonderful and mysterious.”
Emily laughed. “Oh, they’re hiding such secrets—such secrets!”
“Yes, I suppose you have been through a lot. You talk more like a married woman than a young girl. But of course you don’t know life as a man knows it. No nice woman can.”
“Can a nice man?”
“Oh, there aren’t any nice men. At least you’d hate a nice man. I think a fellow ought to be experienced, ought to go around and learn what’s what, and then he ought to settle down. Don’t you?”
“I’m not sure. I’m afraid a good many of that kind of fellows are no more attractive than the ‘nice’ men. Still, it’s surprising how little of you men’s badness gets beyond the surface. You come in and hold up your dirty hands and faces for us women to wash. And we wash them, and you are shiny and clean and all ready to be husbands and fathers. I think I’ve seen signs of late that little Edgar Wayland wishes to have his hands and face washed.”
The red wine at this restaurant in the Rue Marivaux is mild and smooth, but full of sentiment and courage. Edgar had made up for Emily’s neglect of it, and it enabled him to advance boldly to the settlement of a matter which he had long had in mind, as Emily would have seen, had she not been so intent upon her own affairs.
“Yes—I do want my hands and face washed,” he said nervously, turning his glass by its stem round and round upon the table. “And I want you to do it, Emmy.”
Emily was grateful to him for proposing to her just then. And her courage was so impaired by her depression that she could not summarily reject a chance to settle herself for life in the way that is usually called “well.” “Haven’t I been making a mistake?” she had been saying to herself all that day—and in vaguer form on many preceding days. “Is the game worth the struggle? Freedom and independence haven’t brought me happiness. Wasn’t George right, after all? Why should I expect so much in a man, expect so much from life?” It seemed to her at the moment that she had better have stopped thinking, had better have cast aside her ideals of self-respect and pride, and have sunk with Marlowe. “And Edgar would let me alone. Why not marry him?”
She evaded his proposal by teasing him about his flight from her two years before—“Only two years,” she thought. “How full and swift life is, if one keeps in midstream.”
“Don’t talk about that, Emmy, please,” begged Edgar humbly. “I don’t need any reminder that I once had a chance and threw it away.”
“But you didn’t have a chance,” replied Emily.
“No, I suppose not. I suppose you wouldn’t have had me, if it had come to the point.”
“I don’t mean that. I’d have had you, but you wouldn’t, couldn’t, have had me. The I of those days and the I of to-day aren’t at all the same person. If I’d married you then, there would have been one kind of a me. As it is, there is a different kind of a me, as different as—as the limits of life permit.”
“What has done it—love?” he asked.
“Chiefly freedom. Freedom!” Her sensitive face was suddenly all in a glow.
“I know I’m not up to you, Emily,” he said. “But——”
“Let’s not talk about it, Edgar. Why spoil our evening?”
Theresa came the next afternoon and took her for a drive. “Has Edgar been proposing to you?” she asked.
“I think he’s feeling more or less sentimental,” Emily replied, not liking the intimate question.
“Now, don’t think I’m meddling. Edgar told me, and has been talking about you all morning. He wished me to help him.”
“Well, what do you think?”
“Marry him, Emily. He’d make a model husband. He’s not very mean about money, and he’s fond of home and children. I’d like it on my own account, of course. It would be just the thing in every way.”
“But then there’s my work, my independence, my freedom.”
“Do be sensible. You can work as hard as ever you like, even if you are married. And you’d be freer than now and would have a lots better time, no matter what your idea of a good time is.”
“But I don’t love him. I’m not sure that I even like him.”
“So much the better. Then you’ll be agreeably disappointed. If you expect nothing or worse, you get the right kind of a surprise; whereas, when a woman loves a man, she idealises him and is sure to get the wrong kind of a surprise.”
“You can’t possibly know how wise what you’ve just said is, Theresa Dunham,” said Emily. “But there is one thing wiser—and that is, not to marry, not to risk. I’m able to make my living. My extravagant tastes are under control. And I’m content—except in ways in which nothing he can give me could help.”
Theresa was irritated that Emily’s “queer ideas” were a force in her life, not a mere mask for disappointment at not having been able to marry well. And Emily could not discuss the situation with her. Theresa might admit that it was barely possible for a woman to refuse to marry except for love. But a woman disputing the necessity of marriage for any and all women, if they were not to make a disgraceful failure of life—Emily could see Theresa pooh-poohing the idea that such a creature really existed among the sane. Further, if Emily explained her point of view, she would be by implication assailing Theresa for her marriage.
“I’m sure,” Theresa went on, “that Edgar’s father would be satisfied. If he didn’t know you he wouldn’t like it. He has such strict ideas on the subject of women. He thinks a woman’s mission is to be a wife and mother. He says nature plainly intended woman to have motherhood as her mission.”
“Not any more, I should say, than she intended man to have fatherhood as his mission.”
“Well, at any rate, he thinks so, and it gives him something to talk about. He thinks a woman who is not at least a wife ought to be ashamed of herself.”
“But if no man will have her?”
“Then she ought to sit out of sight, where she will offend as little as possible.”
“But if she has to make a living?”
“Oh, she can do something quiet and respectable, like sewing or housework.”
“But why shouldn’t she work at whatever will produce the best living?”
“She ought to be careful not to be unwomanly.”
“Womanliness, as you call it, won’t bring in bread or clothes or pay rent,” said Emily. “And I can’t quite see why it should be womanly to make a poor living at drudgery and unwomanly to make a good living at agreeable work.”
“Oh, well, you know, Emmy, that nature never intended women to work.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what nature intended. Sometimes I’ve an idea she’s like a painter who, when they asked him what his canvas was going to be, said, ‘Oh, as it may happen.’ But whatever nature’s intentions, women do work. I’m not thinking about an unimportant little class of women who spend their time in dressing and simpering at one another. I’m thinking of women—the race of women. They work as the men work. They bear more than half the burden. They work side by side with the men—in the shops and offices and schoolrooms, on the farms and in the homes. They toil as hard and as intelligently and as usefully as the men; and, if they’re married, they usually make a bare living. The average husband thinks he’s doing his wife a favour by letting her live with him. And he is furious if she asks what he’s doing with their joint earnings.”
“You put it well,” said Theresa. “You ought to say that to Percival. I suppose he could answer you.”
“No doubt I’m boring you,” said Emily. “But it makes me indignant for women to accept men’s absurd ideas on the subject of themselves—to think that they’ve got to submit and play the hypocrite in order to fit men’s silly so-called ideals of them. And the worst of it is——”
Emily stopped and when she began again, talked of the faces and clothes in the passing carriages. She had intended to go on to denounce herself for weakness in being unable to follow reason and altogether shake off ideas which she regarded as false and foolish and discreditable. “As if,” she thought “any toil in making my own living could possibly equal the misery of being tied to a commonplace fellow like Edgar, with my life one long denial of all that I believe honest and true. I his wife, the mother of his children, and listening to his narrow prosings day in and day out—it’s impossible!”
She straightened herself and drew in a long breath of the bright air of the Bois.
“Listen to me, Theresa,” she said. “Suppose you were walking along a road alone—not an especially pleasant road—a little dusty and, at times rough—but still on the whole not a bad road. And suppose you saw a clumsy, heavy manikin, dropped by some showman and lying by the wayside. Would you say, ‘I am tired. The road is rough. I’ll pick up this manikin and strap it on my back to make the journey lighter?’”
“Whatever do you mean?” asked Theresa.
“Why, I mean that I’m not going to marry—not just yet—I think.”