IN refusing Edna her heart’s desire thus promptly and tersely I had an object. I assumed she would protest and argue; in the discussion that would follow some light might come to me, utterly befogged as to what course to take about my family affairs. I knew something should be done—something quick and drastic. But what? It was no new experience to me to be faced with complex and well-nigh impossible situations. My business life had been a succession of such experiences. And while I had learned much as to handling them, I had also learned how dangerous it is to rush in recklessly and to begin action before one has discovered what to do—and what not to do. The world is full of Hasty Hals and Hatties who pride themselves on their emergency minds, on knowing just what to do in any situation the instant it arises; and fine spectacles they are, lying buried and broken amid the ruins they have aggravated if not created.
How recover my wife? How rescue my daughter? I could think of no plan—of no beginning toward a plan. And when Edna, by receiving my refusal in cold silence, defeated my hope of a possibly illuminating discussion, I did not know which way to turn.
Why had I refused to help her in the way she suggested? Not on moral grounds, gentle reader. There I should have been as free from scruple as you yourself would have been, as you perhaps have been in your social climbing or maneuvering in your native town, wherever it is. Nor yet through fear of failure. I did not know the social game, but I did know something of human nature. And I had found out that the triumphant class, far from being the gentlest and most civilized, as its dominant position in civilization would indicate, was in fact the most barbarous, was saturated with the raw savage spirit of the right of might. I am speaking of actualities, not of pretenses—of deeds, not of words. To find a class approaching it in frank savagery of will and action you would have to descend through the social strata until you came to the class that wields the blackjack and picks pockets and dynamites safes. The triumphant class became triumphant not by refinement and courtesy and consideration, but by defiance of those fundamentals of civilization—by successful defiance of them. It remained the triumphant class by keeping that primal savagery of nature. As soon as any member of it began to grow tame—gentle, considerate, except where consideration for others would increase his own wealth and power, became really a disciple of the sweet gospel he professed and urged upon others—just so soon did he begin to lose his wealth into the strong unscrupulous hands ever reaching for it—and with waning wealth naturally power and prestige waned.
No, I did not refuse because I thought the triumphant class would contemptuously repel any attempt to carry its social doors by assault. I saw plainly enough that I could compel enough of these society leaders to receive my wife and daughters to insure their position. You have seen swine gathered about a trough, comfortably swilling; you have seen a huge porker come running with angry squeal to join the banquet. You have observed how rudely, how fiercely he is resented and fought off by the others. This, until he by biting and thrusting has made a place for himself; then the fact that he is an intruder and the method of his getting a place are forgotten, and the swilling goes peacefully forward. So it is, gentle reader, though it horrifies your hypocrisy to be told it, so do human beings conduct themselves round a financial or political or social swill trough. I should have had small difficulty in biting and kicking a satisfactory place for Edna and Margot at the social swill trough; I should have had no difficulty at all in keeping it for them. But——
You will be incredulous, gentle reader, devoured of snobbishness and dazzled by what you have heard and read of the glories of fashionable society in the metropolis. You will be incredulous, because you, too, like the overwhelming majority of the comfortable classes in this great democracy—and many of the not so comfortable classes as well—because you, too, are infected of the mania for looking about for some one who refuses to associate with you on the ground that you are “common,” and for straightway making it your heart’s dearest desire to compel that person to associate with you. You will be incredulous when I tell you my sole reason was my hatred and horror of what seemed to me the degrading, vulgar, and rotten longings that filled my wife and that had infected my daughter. That hatred and horror had thrown me into a state of mind I did not dare confess to myself. You are incredulous; but perhaps you will admit I may be truthful when I explain that the reason for my moral and sentimental revolt was perhaps in large part my dense ignorance of the whole society side of life.
No doubt in the Passaic public school of my boyhood there had been as much snobbishness as there is in Fifth Avenue. But I had somehow never happened to notice it. It must have been there; it must be elemental in human nature; how else account for my wife? We hear more about the snobbishness of Fifth Avenue than we do about the snobbishness of the tenements. But that is solely because Fifth Avenue is more conspicuous. Also, Fifth Avenue, supposedly educated, supposedly broadened by knowledge and taste, has no excuse for petty vanities that belong only to the ignorant. And if Fifth Avenue were really educated, really had knowledge and taste, it could not be snobbish. However, my busy life had never been touched by social snobbishness. I preferred to know and to associate with men better educated and richer than I, but for excellent practical reasons—because from such men I could get the knowledge and the wealth I needed. But I would not have wasted a moment of my precious time upon the men most exalted in fashionable life—the ignorant incompetents who had inherited their wealth. They seemed ridiculous and worthless to me, a man of thought and action.
So, the sudden exposure of my wife’s and my little girl’s disease gave me a shock hardly to be measured by the man or woman used all his life to the social craze. It was much as if I had suddenly seen upon their bared bosoms the disgusting ravages of cancer.
As I could not devise any line of action that, however faintly, promised results, I kept away from home. I absorbed myself in some new enterprises that filled my evenings, which I spent at my club with the men I drew into them. At the mention of club, gentle reader, I see your ears pricking. You are wondering what sort of club I belonged to. I shall explain.
It was the Amsterdam Club. You may have seen and gawked at its vast and imposing red sandstone front in middle Fifth Avenue. As you drove by in the “rubber-neck” wagon, the man with the megaphone may have shouted: “The Amsterdam Club, otherwise known as the Palace of Plutocracy. The total wealth of its members is one tenth of the total wealth of the United States. Every great millionaire in New York City belongs to it. The reason you see no one in the magnificent windows is because the plutocrats are afraid of cranks with pistol or bomb.” And you stared and envied and craned your neck backward as the sight-seeing car rolled on. A fairly accurate description of my club. But you will calm as I go on to tell you the inside truth about it. It was built to provide a club for those rich men of New York who had no social position, and so could not be admitted to the fashionable clubs. It was not built by those outcasts for whom it was intended, but by the rich men of the fashionable world. They did not build it out of pity nor yet out of generosity, but for freedom and convenience.
You must know that the rich, both the fashionables and the excludeds, are intimately associated in business. Now, in the days before the Amsterdam Club, if a rich fashionable wished to talk business out of office hours with a rich unfashionable, he had to take him to his home or to his club, one or the other. You will readily appreciate that either course involved disagreeable complications. The rich unfashionable would say: “Why am I not invited to this snob’s house socially? Why does not this hound see that I am elected to his elegant club? I’ll teach this wrinkle-snout how to spit at me. I’ll slip a stiletto into his back, damn him.” As the number of rich unfashionables increased, as the number of stealthy financial stilettoings for social insult grew and swelled, the demand for a “way out” became more clamorous and panicky. The final result was the Amsterdam Club—perhaps by inspiration, perhaps by accident. And so it has come to pass that now, when a rich fashionable wishes to talk finance with a rich pariah, he does not have to run the risk of defiling his home or his exclusive club. With the gracious cordiality wherefor aristocracy is famed in song and story, he says: “Let us go to our club”—for, the rich fashionables see to it that every rich pariah is elected to the Amsterdam immediately he becomes a person of financial consequence. And I fancy that not one in ten of the rich pariah members dreams how he is being insulted and tricked. All, or nearly all, imagine they are elected by favor of the great fashionable plutocrats to about the most exclusive club in New York. Also, not one in a dozen of the fashionable members appreciates how he is degrading himself—for, to my quaint mind, the snob degrades only himself.
Well! Not many months after we moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan I was elected to the Amsterdam—I, in serene ignorance of the trick that was being played upon me by my sponsors, associates in large financial deals and members of several exclusive really fashionable clubs. They pulled regretful faces as they talked of the “long waiting lists at most of the clubs.” They brightened as they spoke of the Amsterdam—“the finest and, take it all round, the most satisfactory of the whole bunch, old man. And we believe we’ve got pull enough to put you in there pretty soon. We’ll work it, somehow.” If I had known the shrivel-hearted trick behind their genial friendliness, I should not have minded, should probably have laughed. For, human littlenesses do not irritate me; and I have a vanity—I prefer to call it a pride—that lifts me out of their reach. I am of the one aristocracy that is truly exclusive, the only one that needs no artificial barriers to keep it so. But I shall not bore you, gentle reader, by explaining about it. You are interested only in the aristocracies of rank and title and wealth that are nothing but the tawdry realization of the tawdry fancies of the yokel among his kine and the scullery maid among her pots. For, who but a tossed-up yokel or scullery maid would indulge in such vulgarities as sitting upon a gold throne or living in a draughty, cheerless palace or seeking to make himself more ridiculous by aggravating his littleness with a title, like the ass in the lion’s skin? Did it ever occur to you, gentle reader, that aristocracy is essentially common, essentially vulgar? To a large vision the distinction between king and carpenter, between the man with a million dollars and the million men with one dollar looks trivial and unimportant. Only a squat and squinting soul in a cellar and blinking through the twilight could discover agitating differences of rank between Fifth Avenue and Grand Street, between first floor front and attic rear, between flesh ripening to rot in silk and flesh ripening to rot in cotton. To an infinitesimal insect an infinite gulf yawns between the molecules of a razor’s edge.
I often found my club a convenience, for in those busiest days of my financial career I had much private conferring—or conspiring, if you choose. Never had I found it so convenient as when for the first time there was pain and shrinking at the thought of going home, of seeing my wife and Margot. My Margot! When she was a baby how proudly I had wheeled her along the sidewalks of Passaic in the showy perambulator we bought for her—and the twenty-five dollars it cost loomed mighty big even to Edna. And in Brooklyn, what happy Sundays Edna and I had had with her, when I would hire a buggy at the livery stable round the corner and we would go out for the day to some Long Island woods; or when we would take her down to the respectable end of Coney Island to dig in the sand and to wade after the receding tide. My Margot! No longer mine; never again to be mine.
One evening I had an appointment at the Amsterdam with a Western millionaire, Charles Murdock, whom I had interested in a Canada railway to tap a Hudson Bay spruce forest. He was having trouble with his wife and something of it had come out in the afternoon newspapers. At the last moment his secretary—who, by the way, afterwards married the divorced Mrs. Murdock—telephoned that Murdock could not keep his engagement to dine. I looked about for some one to help me eat the dinner I had ordered. There are never many disengaged men in the Amsterdam. The fashionable rich come only when they have business with the pariahs. The pariahs prefer their own houses or the barrooms and cafés of the big hotels. I therefore thought myself lucky when I found Bob Armitage sulking in a huge leather chair and got him to share my dinner. Armitage was one of my railway directors. He had helped me carry through the big stroke that made me, had joined in half a dozen of my enterprises in all of which I had been successful. There was no man of my acquaintance I knew and liked so well as Armitage. Yet it had so happened that we had never talked much with each other, except about business.
It promised to be a silent dinner. He was as deep in his thoughts as I was in mine—and our faces showed that neither of us was cogitating anything cheerful. On impulse I suddenly said:
“Bob, do you know about fashionable New York society?”
I knew that he did; that is to say, I had often heard he was one of the heavy swells, having all three titles to fashion—wealth, birth, and marriage. But I now pretended ignorance of the fact; when you wish to inform yourself thoroughly on a subject you should always select an expert, tell him you know nothing and bid him enlighten you from the alphabet up.
“Why do you ask?” said Armitage. “Do you want to get in? I had a notion you didn’t care for society—you and your wife.”
Armitage didn’t go to Holy Cross, but to St. Bartholomew’s. So he had never known of my wife’s activities, knew only the sort of man I was.
“Oh, I forgot,” he went on. “You’ve a daughter almost grown. I suppose you want her looked after. All right. I’ll attend to it for you. Your wife won’t mind my wife’s calling? I’d have sent her long ago—in fact, I apologize for not having done it. But I hate the fashionable crowd. They bore me. However, your wife may like them. Women usually do.”
It was at my lips to thank him and decline his offer. Then it flashed into my mind that perhaps my one hope of getting back my wife and daughter, of restoring them to sanity, lay in letting them have what they wanted. Another sort of man might have deluded himself with the notion that he could set his foot down, stamp out revolt, compel his family to do as he willed. But I happen not to be of that instinctively tyrannical and therefore inherently stupid temperament.
Armitage ate in silence for a few moments, then said:
“I’ll have you elected to the Federal Club.”
“This club is all I need,” said I.
He smiled sardonically. I didn’t understand that smile then, because I didn’t know anything about caste in New York. “You let me look after you,” said he. “You’re a child in the social game.”
“I’ve no objection to remaining so,” said I.
“Quite right. There’s nothing in it,” said he. “But you must remember you’re living in a world of rather cheap fools, and they are impressed by that nothing. On the other side of the Atlantic the social prizes have a large substantial value. Over here the value’s small. Still it’s something. You wouldn’t refuse even a trading stamp, would you?”
I laughed. “I refuse nothing,” said I. “I take whatever’s offered me. If I find I don’t want it, why, what’s easier than to throw it away?”
“Then I’ll put you in the Federal Club. You could have made me do it, if you had happened to want it. So, why shouldn’t I do it anyhow, in appreciation of your forbearance? You don’t realize, but I’m doing for you what about two thirds of the members of this club would lick my boots to get me to do for them.”
“I had no idea the taste for shoe polish was so general here,” said I.
“It’s a human taste, my dear Loring,” replied he. “It’s as common as the taste for bread. All the men have it. As for the women they like nothing so well. Having one’s boots licked is the highest human joy. Next comes licking boots.”
“You don’t believe that?” said I, for his tone was almost too bitter for jest.
“You aren’t acquainted with your kind, old man,” retorted he.
“I don’t know the kind you know,” said I. And then I remembered my wife and my daughter. There must be truth in what Armitage had said; for, my beautiful wife and my sweet daughter, both looking so proud—surely they could not be rare exceptions in their insensibility to what seemed to me elemental self-respect.
“You don’t know your kind,” he went on, “because you don’t indulge in cringing and don’t encourage it. You’re like the cold, pure-minded woman who goes through the world imagining it a chaste and austere place because her very face silences and awes sensuality. You are part of the small advance guard of a race that is to come.” He grinned satirically. “Perhaps you’ll drop out in the next few months. We’ll see.”
When the silence was again broken, it was broken by me. “Do you know a school kept by a woman named Ryper?” I inquired.
“Sure I do,” replied he. He gave me a shrewd laughing glance. “The daughter isn’t learning anything?”
“Nothing but mischief,” said I.
“That’s what Ryper’s for. But what does it matter? Why should a woman learn anything? They’re of no consequence. The less a man has to do with them the better off he will be.”
“They’re of the highest consequence,” said I bitterly. “They have the control of the coming generation.”
“And a hell of a generation it’s to be,” cried he, suddenly rousing from the state of bored apathy in which he seemed to pass most of his time. “You’ve got me started on the subject that’s a craze with me. I have only one strong feeling—and that is my contempt for woman—the American woman. I’m not speaking about the masses. They don’t count. They never did. They never will. No one counts until he gets some education and some property. I suppose the women of the masses do as well as could be expected. But how about the women of the classes with education and property? Do you know why the world advances so slowly?—why the upper classes are always tumbling back and everything has to be begun all over again?”
“I’ve a suspicion,” said I. “Because the men are fools about the women.”
“The sex question!” cried Armitage. “That’s the only question worth agitating about. Until it’s settled—or begins to be settled—and settled right, it’s useless to attempt anything else. The men climb up. The women they take on their backs become a heavier and heavier burden—and down they both drop—and the children with them. Selfish, vain, extravagant mothers, crazy about snobbishness, bringing up their children in extravagance, ignorance and snobbishness—that’s America to-day!”
“The men are fools about the women, and they let the women make fools of themselves.”
“The men are fools—but not about the women,” said Armitage. “How much time and thought for your family have you averaged daily in the last ten years?”
“I’ve been busy,” said I. “I’ve had to look out for the bread and butter, you know.”
“Exactly!” exclaimed he, in triumph. “You think you’re fond of your family. No doubt you are. But the bottom truth is you’re indifferent to your family. I can prove it in a sentence: You attend to anything you care about; and you haven’t attended to them.”
I stared at him like a man dazzled by a sudden light—which, in fact, I was.
“Guilty or not guilty?” said he, laughing.
“Guilty,” said I.
“The American man, too busy to be bothered, turns the American woman loose—gives her absolute freedom. And what is she? A child in education, a child in experience, a child in taste. He turns her loose, bids her do as she likes—and, up to the limit of his ability gives her all the money she wants. He prefers her a child. Her childishness rests his tired brain. And he doesn’t mind if she’s a little mischievous—that makes her more amusing.”
“You are married—have children,” said I, too serious to bother about tact. “How is it with you?”
He laughed cynically. “Don’t speak of my family,” said he. “I tried the other way. But I’ve given up—several years ago. What can one do in a crazy crowd?”
“Not much,” confessed I, deeply depressed.
“The women stampede each other,” he went on. “Besides, no American woman—none that I know—has been brought up with education enough to enable her to make a life for herself, even when the man tries to help her. To like an occupation, to do anything at it, you’ve got to understand it. Being a husband and father is an occupation, the most important one in the world for a man. Being a wife and mother is an occupation—the most important one in the world for a woman. Are American men and women brought up to those occupations—trained in them—prepared for them? The most they know is a smatter at the pastime of lover and mistress—and they’re none too adept at that.”
“I believe,” said I, “that in my whole life I’ve never learned so much in so short a time.”
“It’ll do you no good to have learned,” rejoined Armitage. “It will only make you sad or bitter, according to your mood. Or, perhaps some day you may reach my plane of indifference—and be amused.”
“Nothing is hopeless,” said I.
“The American woman is hopeless,” said he. “Her vanity is triple-plated, copper-riveted. She’s hopeless so long as the American man will give her the money to buy flattery at home and abroad; for, so long as you can buy flattery, you never find out the truth about yourself. And the American man will give her the money as long as he can, because it buys him peace and freedom. He doesn’t want to be bothered with the American woman—except when he’s in a certain mood that doesn’t last long.”
“There are exceptions,” said I—not clear as to what I meant.
“Yes—there are exceptions,” said he. “There are American men who spend time with the American woman. And what does she do to them? Look at the poor asses!—neglecting their business, letting their minds go to seed. They don’t make her wise. She makes them foolish—as foolish as herself—and her children.”
You may perhaps imagine into what a state this talk of Armitage’s threw me. He was talking generalities. But every word he spoke went straight home to me. He had torn the coverings from my inmost family life, had exposed its soul, naked and ugly, to my fascinated gaze.
He finished dinner, lighted a cigarette—sat back watching me with a mysterious smile, half amused, wholly sympathetic, upon his handsome face, younger than his forty-five years—for he was considerably older than I. I was hardly more than barely conscious of that look of his, or of his presence. Suddenly I struck my fist with violence upon the arm of my chair. And I said:
“I will do something! It is not hopeless!”
He shook his head slowly, at the same time exhaling a cloud of smoke. “I tried, Godfrey,” said he, “and I had a better chance of success than you could possibly have. For my wife had been brought up by a sensible father and mother in a sensible way, and she had been used to fashionable society all her life and, when I married her, seemed to have proved herself immune. A few years and—” His cynical smile may not have been genuine. “She leads the simpletons. But you’ll see for yourself.”
“When you know what to do, and feel as you do,” said I, “why did you suggest our going into your society?”
“It isn’t mine,” laughed he. “It’s my wife’s. It doesn’t belong to the men. It belongs to the women.”
“Into your wife’s society?” persisted I.
“Why did I suggest it? Because I wished to please you, and I know you like to please your wife. And she’s an American woman—therefore, society mad. She has her daughter at the Ryper joint, hasn’t she?”
I sat morosely silent.
“Oh, come now! Cheer up!” cried he, with laughing irony. “After all, you can’t blame the American woman. She has no training for the career of woman. She has no training for any serious career. She’s got to do something, hasn’t she? Well, what is there open to her but the career of lady? That doesn’t call for brains or for education or for taste. The dressmaker and milliner supply the toilet. The architect and decorator and housekeeper and staff supply the grand background. Father or husband supplies the cash. A dip into a novel or book of culture essays supplies the gibble-gabble. A nice easy profession, is lady—and universally admired and envied. No, Loring, it isn’t fair to blame her.”
We strolled down Fifth Avenue. After he had watched the stream of elegant carriages and automobiles, some of the too elegant automobiles having their interiors brightly lighted that the passersby might not fail to see the elaborate toilets of the occupants—after he had observed this procession of extravagance and vanity, with only an occasional derisive laugh or “Look there! Don’t miss that lady!” he burst out again in his pleasantly ironical tone:
“How fat the women are getting!—the automobile women! And how the candy shops are multiplying. Candy and automobiles!—and culture. Let us not forget culture.”
“No, indeed,” said I grimly. “Let’s not forget the culture.”
“I was telling my wife yesterday,” said Armitage, “what culture is. It is talking in language that means nothing about things that mean less than nothing. But watch the ladies stream by, all got up in their gorgeous raiment and jewels. What have they ever done, what are they doing, that entitles them to so much more than their poor sisters scuffling along on the sidewalk here?”
“They’ve talked and are talking about culture,” said I. “And don’t forget charity.”
“Ah—charity!” cried he gayly. “Thank you. I see we understand each other.” He linked his arm affectionately in mine. “Charity! It’s the other half of a lady’s occupation. Charity! Having no fancy for attending to her own business, she meddles in the business of the poor, tempting them to become liars and paupers. Your fine lady is a professional patronizer. She has no usefulness to contribute to the world. So, she patronizes—the arts with her culture—the poor with her charity, and the human race with her snobbishness.”
He was so amused by his train of thought that he lapsed into silence the more fully to enjoy it; for, every thought has its shadings that cannot be expressed in words yet give the keenest enjoyment. When he spoke again, it was to repeat:
“And what have these ladies done to entitle them to this luxury? Are they, perchance, being paid for giving to the world, and for inspiring, the noble sons and daughters who drive coaches and marry titles?”
“But what do we men do? What do I do—that entitles me to so much more than that chap perched on the hansom? I often think of it. Don’t you?”
“Never,” laughed Armitage. “I never claw my own sore spots. There’s no fun in that. Always claw the other fellow’s. There’s a laugh and distraction for your own troubles in seeing him wince.”
“Is that why you’ve been clawing mine?” said I.
We were pausing before his big house, at the corner of the Avenue. “If I have been I didn’t know it,” said he. He glanced up at his windows with a satirical smile. “This evening I’ve been breaking my rule and clawing at my own.” He put out his hand. “Let the social business take its course,” advised he with impressive friendliness. “You and I can’t make the world over. To fight against the inevitable merely increases everyone’s discomfort.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” said I.
I agreed with his conclusion that it was best to let things alone, though I reached that conclusion by a different route. I had in mind my forlorn hope of good results from a homeopathic treatment. I saw how impossible it was to undo the practically completed training of a grown girl. I appreciated the absurdity of an attempt radically to change Edna’s character—an absurdity as great as an attempt to make her a foot taller or to alter the color of her eyes. The one hope, it seemed to me—and I still think I was right—was that, when they had social position, when there should no longer be excuse for fretting lest some one were thinking them common, they might calm down toward some sort of sanity.
Bear in mind, please, that at the time I did not have the situation, nor any idea of it, and of how to deal with it, definitely and clearly in mind. I was groping, was seeing dimly, was not even sure that I saw at all. I was like a thousand other busy American men who, after years of absorption in affairs, are abruptly and rudely awakened to the fact that there is something wrong at home where they had been flattering themselves everything was all right.
The things Armitage had said occupied my mind, almost to the exclusion of my business. The longer I revolved them, the better I understood the situation at home. I could not but wonder what wretched catastrophe in his domestic life had made him so insultingly bitter against women. I felt that he was unfair to them; any judgment that condemned a class for possessing universal human weakness must be unfair. At the same time I believed he had excuse for being unfair—the excuse of a man whose domestic life is in ruins. I began to see toward the bottom of the woman question—the nature and the cause of the crisis through which women were passing.