ARMITAGE and I were together every day. He attracted me for the usual reason of congeniality, and also because he was giving me a liberal education. I have never cared for books or, with two or three exceptions, for book men. About both there is for me an atmosphere of staleness, of tedium. I prefer to get what is in the few worth-while books through the medium of some clear and original mind—such a mind as Armitage had. He ought to have been a great man. No, he was a great man; what I mean to say is that his talents ought to have won his greatness recognition. He did not lack capacity or energy; he showed a high degree of both in the management and increase of his fortune. He lacked that species of vanity, I guess it is, which spurs a man to make himself conspicuous. Also he had a kind of laziness, and chose to be active only in the way that was easiest and most agreeable for him—the making of money.
His father had been rich, and his grandfather; his great grandfather had been one of the richest men in Revolutionary times. His father was regarded as a crank because he had imagination, and therefore despised the conventional ideas of his own generation; to be regarded as thoroughly sane and sensible, you must be careful to be neither, but to pattern yourself painstakingly upon the particular form of feeble-mindedness and conventional silliness current in your time. Armitage’s father resolved that his son should not have his individuality clipped and moulded and patterned by college and caste into the familiar type of upper-class man. So Armitage went to public school, graduated from it into a factory, then into an office, himself earned the money to carry out the ambitions for study and travel with which his father had inspired him.
I think there was nothing worth the knowing about which Armitage had not accurate essential information—books, plays, pictures, music, literature, history, economics, science, medicine, law, finance. He was a good shot and a good horseman, could run an automobile, take it to pieces, put it together again. He was a practical mechanic and a practical railroad man. He had a successful model farm. “It doesn’t take long to learn the essentials about anything,” said he, “if you will only put your whole mind on it and not let up till you’ve got what you want. And the trouble with most people—why, they are narrow and ignorant and incompetent—it isn’t lack of mind, but lack of interest. They have no curiosity.” Nor was my friend Armitage a smatterer. He didn’t try to do everything; he contented himself with knowledge, and did only one thing—made money out of railroads.
When he saw that I really wished to be educated, he amused himself by educating me. Not in a formal way, of course; but simply talking along, about whatever happened to come up. I have never known a man to get anywhere, who did not have an excellent memory. Lack of memory—which means lack of the habit and power of giving attention—is the cause of more failures than all other defects put together. If you don’t believe it, test the failures you know; perhaps you might even test your own not too successful self. I had an unusual memory; and I don’t think Armitage or anyone ever told me anything worth knowing that I did not stick to it and keep it where I could use it instantly.
Several months after his wife and mine departed, we were walking in the park one afternoon—the usual tramp round the upper reservoir to reduce or to keep in condition. He said in the most casual way:
“My wife is coming next week, and will get her divorce at once.”
Taking my cue from his manner I showed even less surprise then I felt. “This is the first I’ve heard of it,” said I.
“Really?” said he carelessly. “Everyone knows.” He laughed to himself. “She is to marry Lord Blankenship—the Earl of Blankenship.”
“And the children?” said I.
He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. Her people will look after them. She has spoiled them beyond repair. I have no interest in them—nor they in me.” After a little tramping in silence, he halted and rested his hands on the railing and looked away across the lakelike reservoir, its surface tossed up into white caps by the wind. “I loved her when we were married,” said he. “That caused all the mischief. I let her do as she pleased. She was a fine girl—good family but poor. She pretended to be in sympathy with my ideas.” His lip curled in good-humored contempt. “I believed in her enthusiasm. My father—wonderfully sane old man—warned me she was only after our money, but I wouldn’t listen. Tried to quarrel with him. He wouldn’t have it—gave me my way. It’s not strange I believed in her. She looked all that’s high-minded—and delicate—and what they call aristocratic. Well, it is aristocratic—the reality of aristocracy.”
“Perhaps she was sincere,” said I, out of the depths of my own experience, “perhaps she honestly imagined she liked and wanted the sort of life you pictured. We are all hypocrites, but most of us are unconscious hypocrites.”
“No doubt she did deceive herself—in part at least,” he admitted. “For a year or so after our marriage she kept up the bluff. I didn’t catch on—didn’t find her out—until we began to differ about bringing up the children. Even then, I loved her so that I let her have her way until it was too late.”
“But,” said I, “don’t you owe it to them to——”
He interrupted with an impatient, “Didn’t I try? But it was hopeless. To succeed in this day, I’d have had to take the children away off into the woods, with the chances that even there the servants I’d be compelled to have would spoil them—would keep them reminded of the rotten snobbishness they’ve been taught.” He laughed at me with mocking irony. “You have a daughter,” said he. “What about her?”
“I was thinking of your boy,” said I.
He frowned and looked away. After a long pause—“Hopeless—hopeless,” said he. “Believe me—hopeless. The boy is like her. No, I’ll have to begin all over again.”
I gave an inquiring look.
“Marry again,” explained he. “Another sort of woman, and keep her and her children away from this world of ours. I’d like to try the experiment. But—” He laughed apologetically. “I’m afraid I love the city and its amusements too well. I’m not as determined nor as ardent as I once was. What does it matter, anyway? So long as we are comfortable and well amused, why should we bother?” After a silence, “Another mistake I made—the initial mistake—was in giving her a fortune. She is almost as well fixed as I am. Don’t make that mistake, Godfrey.”
“I’ve already done it,” said I. “And I shall never be sorry that I did. I gave my wife the first large sum I made, and I’ve added to it from time to time. I wanted her and Margot to be safe, no matter what happened to me.”
“A mistake,” he said. “A sad mistake. I know how you felt. I felt the same way. But there’s something worse than the more or less sentimental aversion to being loved and considered merely for the money they can get out of you and can’t get without you.”
“Nothing worse,” I declared.
“Yes,” he replied. “It’s worse to give a foolish woman the power to make a fool of herself, of her children, and of you.”
“That is bad, I’ll admit,” said I. “But the other is worse—at least to me.”
“You’d refuse to make a child behave itself, through the selfish fear that it would hate you for doing so.”
I laughed. “You know my weakness, I see,” said I.
“There’s the foolish American husband and father. No wonder all the classes that ought to be leaders in development and civilization are leaders only in luxury and folly.”
“Oh, let them have a good time—what they call a good time,” said I. “As you said a moment ago, it doesn’t matter.”
“If it only were a good time—to be ignorant and snobbish and lazy, to drive instead of walking, to eat and drink instead of thinking, to be waited upon instead of getting the education and the happiness that come from serving others. Don’t laugh at me. After all, while you and I—all our sort of men—are greedy, selfish grabbers, making thousands work for us, still we do build up big enterprises, we do set things to moving, and we do teach men the discipline of regular work by forcing them to work for us at more or less useful things.”
No doubt you, gentle reader, have fallen asleep over this conversation. I understand perfectly that it is beyond you; for you have no conception of the deep underlying principles of the relations of men and men or men and women. But there may be among my readers a few who will see interest and importance in this talk with Armitage. It is time the writers of stories concerned themselves with the realities of life instead of with the showy and sensational things that obscure or hide the realities. What would you think of the physiologist who issued a treatise on physiology with no mention or account of the blood? Yet you read stories about what purports to be life with no mention or account of money—this, when in any society money is the all-important factor. Put aside, if you can, the prejudices of your miseducation and æsthetics, of your false culture and your false refinement, open your mind, think, and you will see that I am right.
When we were well down toward the end of the Park, Armitage said: “Pardon me a direct question. Have you and your wife separated?”
“No,” said I. “She has gone abroad to round out Margot’s education—and her own.”
“You know what that means?”
“In a general way,” replied I. “I’m letting them amuse themselves. They don’t need me, nor I them. Perhaps when they come back—” I did not finish my sentence.
He laughed. “That means you don’t really care what happens when they come back.”
My smile was an admission of the correctness of his guess. We dropped our domestic affairs and took up the matters that were more interesting and more important to us.
If you have good sight, unimpaired eyes, you go about assuming—when you think of it at all—that good sight is the rule in the world and impaired eyes the exception. But let your sight begin to fail, let your eyes become darkened, and soon you discover that you are one of thousands—that good sight is the exception, that almost everyone has something the matter with his eyes. The reason human beings know so little about human nature, the reason the sentimental flapdoodle about human virtues, in the present not very far-advanced stage of human evolution, is so widely believed and doubt of it so indignantly denounced as cynicism, lies in the fact that the average human being is ignorant of the afflictions of his own soul. This would be pleasant and harmless enough, and to destroy the delusion would be wickedly cruel, were it not that the only way to cure ailments of whatever sort is to diagnose them. What hope is there for the man devoured of a fever who fancies and insists that he is healthy? What hope is there for the man who eats pleasant-tasting slow poison under the impression that it is food? What a quaint notion it is that the truth, the sole source of health and happiness, is bad for some people, chiefly for those sick unto death through the falsehoods of ignorance and vanity! We humans are like the animal that claws and bites the surgeon who is trying to set its broken leg.
But I am wandering a little. Discover that you have any ailment of body or of soul, and you soon discover how widespread that ailment is. You do not even appreciate how widespread, incessant, and poignant are the ravages of death until your own family and friends begin to die off. I had no notion of the extent of the social or domestic malady of abandoned husbands and fathers until I became one of that curious class.
Among the masses there is the great and growing pestilence of abandoned wives—husbands, worn out by the uncertainties of the laboring man’s income, and disgusted with the incompetence of their wives and with the exasperations of the badly brought up children—such husbands flying by tens of thousands to escape what they cannot cure or endure. Among the classes, from the plutocracy down to and through the small merchants and professional men, I now discovered that there was a corresponding and reversed disease—the abandoned husband.
The husband and father, working hard and presently accumulating enough for ease in his particular station of life, suddenly finds himself supporting, with perhaps all the money he can scrape together, a distant and completely detached family. He mails his money regularly, and with a fidelity that will appear grotesque, noble, or pitiful according to the point of view. In return he gets occasional letters from the loved ones—perfunctory these letters somehow sound, or would sound to the critical, though they are liberally sprinkled with loving, even fawning phrases, such as “dear, sweet papa” and “darling husband.” Where are “the loved ones?” If the family home is in a small town or country, they are in New York or some other city of America usually. If the family home is in the city, they are abroad. What are they doing? Sacrificing themselves! Especially poor wife and mother. She would infinitely prefer being at home with beloved husband. But she must not be selfish. She must carry her part of their common burden. While he toils to provide for the children, she toils in the loneliness or unhappiness of New York or Paris or Rome or Dresden or Genoa. And what is she toiling at in those desert places? Why, at educating the children!
Sometimes it’s music. Sometimes it’s painting. Again it’s “finishing,” whatever that may mean, or plain, vague “education.” There was a time when men of any sort could be instantly abashed, silenced and abased by the mere pronouncing of the word education. That happy day for mental fakers is nearing its close. Now, at the sound of the sacred word many a sensible, practical man has the courage to put on a grin. I have been credited with saying that a revival of the declining child-bearing among American women might be looked for, now that they have found the usefulness of children as an excuse for escape from home and husband. I admit having said this, but I meant it as a jest. However, there is truth in the jest. I don’t especially blame the women. Why should they stay at home when they have no sympathy with the things that necessarily engross the husband? Why stay at home when it bores them even to see that the servants carry on the house decently? Why stay at home when they simply show there from day to day how little they know about housekeeping? Why stay at home when there is an amiable fool willing to mail them his money, while they amuse themselves gadding about Europe or some big city of America?
Abandoned wives at the one end of the social scale, abandoned husbands at the other end. Please note that in both cases the deep underlying cause is the same—money. Too little money, and the husband flies; too much money, and it is the wife who breaks up the family.
As soon as I discovered, by being elected to membership, the existence of the universal order of abandoned husbands I took the liveliest interest in it. I was eager to learn whether there was another fool quite so foolish as myself, also whether the other fools were aware of their own folly. I found that most of them were rather proud of their membership, indulged in a ludicrous cocking of the comb and waggling of the wattles when they spoke of “my family over on the other side for a few years,” or of “my wife, poor woman, exiled in Paris to cultivate my daughter’s voice,” or of “my invalid wife—she has to live in the south of France. It’s a sad trial to us both.”
Then—but this came much later—I discovered that these credulous, money-mailing fools, including myself, were not quite so imbecile, as a class, as they seemed to be. I discovered that they were secretly, often unconsciously, glad to be rid of their uncongenial families, and regarded any money they mailed as money well spent. They toiled cheerfully at distasteful tasks to get the wherewithal to keep their loved ones far, far away!
The absence of Edna and Margot was an enormous relief to me. Edna was constantly annoying me to accompanying her to places to which I did not care to go. I like the theatre and I rather like some operas, but when I go to either it is for the sake of the performance. Going with Edna and her friends meant a tedious social function. We arrived late; we did not hear the play or the opera. As for the purely social functions, they were intolerable. Perhaps I should not have been so unhappy had I been the kind of man who likes to talk for the sake of hearing his own voice. Women are attentive listeners when the man who is talking is worth flattering. But I talk only for purpose, and when I listen I wish it to be to some purpose also. So, Edna, always urging me to do something distasteful or giving me the sense that she was about to ask me, or was irritated against me for being “disobliging”—Edna made me uncomfortable, increasingly uncomfortable as I grew more intelligent, more critical, more discriminating. As for Margot, I could not talk with her ten minutes without seeing protrude from her sweet loveliness some vulgarity of snobbishness. It irritated me to hear her speak to a servant. I had to rebuke her privately several times for the tone she used in addressing her governess or my secretary—this when her mother and all her mother’s friends used precisely the same repellent “gracious” tone in the same circumstances. I saw that she, sometimes instinctively, again deliberately tried to hide her real self from me, that I was making a hypocrite of her. Any sort of frankness or sympathy between her and me was impossible.
A few weeks after their departure I closed the house. It came to me that I need endure its discomforts no longer, that I could get rid of those smelly, dull-witted, low-minded foreign animals, that I need not endure food sent up from a kitchen as to which I had from time to time disgusting proofs that it was not clean. I closed the house and left the mice and roaches and other insects to such short provender as would be provided by caretaker and family. I took an apartment in a first-class hotel.
When Armitage got clear of his wife he took the adjoining apartment. And how comfortable and how cheerful we were!
The women with their incompetence and indifference have about destroyed the American home. To get good service, to have capable people assisting you, you must yourself be capable. The incapacity of the “ladies” has driven good servants out of the business of domestic service, has left in it only the worthless and unreliable creatures who now take care of the homes. If you find any part of the laboring class deteriorating, don’t blame them. To do that is to get nowhere, is to be unjust and shallow to boot. Instead, look at the employers of that labor. Every time, you will find the fault is there, just as an ill-mannered or a bad child means unfaithful parents. The masses of mankind must have leadership, guidance, example. My experience has been that they respond when the dominating classes do their duty—that is, pay proper wages, demand good service, and know what good service is.
What a relief and a joy that hotel was! Armitage and I had our own cook, and so could have the simple dishes we liked. We attended to the marketing—and both knew what sort of meat and vegetables and fruit to buy, and were not long trifled with by our butcher, our grocer, and our dairyman, spoiled though they were by the ladies. And our apartments were clean—really clean, and after the first few weeks our servants were contented, and abandoned the evil ways slip-shod mistresses had got them into. Pushing my inquiries, I found that not only our hotel, but every first-class hotel in the fashionable district was filled with the remnants of shattered homes—husbands who had compelled their wives to give up the expensive and dirty attempts at housekeeping; husbands who had abandoned their families in country homes or in other cities and towns and had, surreptitiously or boldly, returned to bachelor bliss; husbands who had been abandoned by their families, none of these last cases being more heart-breaking than Armitage’s or my own. The story ran that he was on the verge of melancholia because his beautiful wife had cast him off. There was no more truth in this than there would have been in a tale of my lonely grief. Had it not been for Armitage, pointing out to me the truth, I might have fancied myself a deserted unfortunate. It would not have been an isolated instance of a human being not knowing when he is well off.
I did not see my family again until the following spring. Business compelled me to go abroad, and they had come over to London for the season.
When I descended from the train at Euston, a little confused by the strangeness, I saw my wife a few yards down the platform. Beside her stood a tall, beautiful young woman, whom I did not instantly recognize as my daughter. Both were dressed with the perfection of taste and of detail that has made the American woman famous throughout the world. I like well-dressed women—and well-dressed men, too. I should certainly have been convicted of poor taste had I not been dazzled by those two charming examples of fashion and style. They looked like two lovely sisters, the elder not more than five or six years in advance of the younger. I was a youthful-looking man, myself—except, perhaps, when I was in the midst of affairs and took on the air of responsibility that cannot appear in the face of youth. But no one would have believed there were so few years between Edna and me. Nor was she in the least made-up. The youth was genuinely there.
That meeting must have impressed the by-standers, who were observing the two women with admiring interest. I felt a glow of enthusiasm at sight of these elegant beauties. I was proud to be able to claim them. As for them, they became radiant the instant they saw me.
“Godfrey!” cried Edna loudly, rushing toward me.
“Papa—dear old papa!” cried Margot, waving her arms in a pretty gesture of impatient adoration while her mother was detaining me from her embrace.
“Well—well!” cried I. “What a pair of girls! My, but you’re tearing it off!”
They laughed gayly, and hugged and kissed me all over again. For a moment I felt that I had been missed—and that I had missed them. A good-looking, shortish and shy young man, dressed and groomed in the attractive English upper-class way of exquisiteness with no sacrifice of manliness, was now brought forward.
“Lord Crossley—my husband,” said Edna.
“Pleased, I’m sure,” murmured the young man, giving me his hand with an awkwardness that was somehow not awkward—or, rather, that conveyed a subtle impression of good breeding. “Now that you’ve got him—or that he’s got you,” proceeded he, “I’ll toddle along.”
My wife gave him her hand carelessly. “Until dinner,” she said.
Margot shook hands with him, and nodded and smiled. When he was gone I observed the carriage near which we were standing—and I knew at once that it was my wife’s carriage. It was a grand car of state, yet quiet and simple. I often looked at it afterwards, trying to puzzle out how it contrived to convey two exactly opposite impressions. I could never solve the mystery. On the lofty box sat the most perfect model of a coachman I had seen up to that time. Beside the open door in the shallow, loftily hung body of the carriage stood an equally perfect footman. I was soon to get used to that marvelous English ability at specializing men—a system by which a man intended for a certain career is arrested in every other kind of growth, except only that which tends to make him more perfect for his purpose. Observing an English coachman, or valet or butler or what not, you say, “Here is a remarkably clever man.” Yet you soon find out that he is practically imbecile in every other respect but his specialty.
We entered the carriage, I sitting opposite the ladies—and most uncomfortable I was; for the carriage was designed to show off its occupants, and to look well in it they had to know precisely how to sit, which I did not. No one noticed me, however. There was too much pleasure to be got out of observing Edna and Margot, who were looking like duchesses out of a storybook. I knew they were delightfully conscious of the sensation they were making, yet they talked and laughed as if they were alone in their own sitting room—a trick which is part of that “education” of which you have heard something, and will hear still more. The conversation seemed easy. In fact, it was only animated. It was a fair specimen of that whole mode of life. You have seen the wonderful peaches that come to New York from South Africa early in the winter—have delighted in their exquisite perfection of color and form. But have you ever tasted them? I would as lief eat sawdust; I would rather eat it—for, of sawdust I should expect nothing.
“That young man is the Marquis of Crossley,” said my wife.
I liked to hear her pronounce a title in private. It gave you the sense of something that tasted fine—made you envy her the sensation she was getting. “Who is he?” said I.
Margot laughed naïvely—an entrancing display of white teeth and rose-lined mouth. “Marquis of Crossley, papa,” she said. “That’s all—and quite enough it is.”
“I don’t know much about the big men in England,” said I. “He looked rather young to amount to very much.”
“He’s as old as you are,” said Edna, a flash of ill-humor appearing and vanishing.
I was astonished. “I thought him a boy,” said I.
“He’s one of the greatest nobles in England—one of the greatest in Europe,” said Edna—and I saw Margot’s eyes sparkling.
“He seemed a nice fellow,” said I amiably. “How you have grown, Margot!”
“Hasn’t she, though!” cried my wife. “Aren’t you proud of her?”
“I’m proud of you both,” said I. “You make me feel old and dingy.”
“You’ve been working too hard, poor dear,” said Edna tenderly. “If you only would stay over here and learn the art of leisure.”
“I’m afraid I’d be dismally bored,” said I.
I had heard much about the art of loafing as practiced by Europeans, and I had not been attracted by what I had heard. It was inconceivable to me that intelligent grown men could pass their time at things about equal to marbles and tops. But I suppose I am abnormal, as they allege. Many men seem to look on mental effort of any kind as toilsome, and seize the first opportunity to return to the mindless frolickings of the beasts of the field. To me mental effort is a keen pleasure. And I must add I can’t help thinking it is to everybody who has real brains.
The conversation would have died in distressing agony had it not been for the indomitable pluck of my wife. She struggled desperately—perhaps may even have deceived herself into thinking that she was glad to see me and that the carriage was the scene of a happy reunion. But I, who had a thorough training in quickly sizing up situations, saw the truth—that I was a rank outsider, to both wife and daughter; that they were strangers to me. I began to debate what was the shortest time I could decently stop in London.
“We are to be presented at Court next week,” said Edna.
Margot’s eyes were again sparkling. It was the sort of look the novelists put on the sweet young girl’s face when she sees her lover coming.
“Yes—next week—next Thursday,” said Edna. “And so another of the little duchess’s dreams is coming true.”
“Is it exciting?” said I to Margot. Somehow reference to the “little duchess” irritated me.
“Rather!” exclaimed Margot, fairly glowing with ecstasy. “You put on the most wonderful dress, and you drive in a long, long line of wonderful carriages, with all the women in wonderful dresses. And you go into the palace through lines and lines of gorgeous liveries and uniforms—and you wait in a huge grand room for an hour or so, frightened to death—and then you walk into the next room and make the courtesy you have been practicing for weeks—and you pass on.”
“Good!” cried I. “What then?”
“Why you go home, half dead from the nervous shock. Oh, it’s wonderful!”
It seemed to me—for I was becoming somewhat critical, as is the habit in moods of irritation—it seemed to me that Margot’s elaborate and costly education might have included the acquiring of a more extensive vocabulary. That word wonderful was beginning to get on my nerves. Still, this was hyper-criticism. A lovely woman does not need a vocabulary, or anything else but a lovely dress and plenty of money to provide background. “Yes—it must be—wonderful,” said I.
“We’ve been working at it for weeks, mamma and I,” continued she. “I’m sure we shall do well. I can hardly wait. Just fancy! I’m to meet the king and the queen!”
I saw that Edna was in the same ecstatic trance. I leaned back and tried to distract myself with the novelty of London houses and crowds. It may be you understand the mingling of pity, contempt, anger, and amusement that filled my breast. If you do not understand, explanation would merely weary you. I was no longer proud of my beautiful family; I wished to get away from them, to forget them. Edna and Margot chatted on and on about the king and queen, about the various titled people they knew or hoped to know, about the thrills of aristocratic society. I tried not to listen. After a while I said, with I hope not unsuccessful attempt at amiability:
“I’m sorry I shan’t be here to witness your triumph.”
Across Edna’s face swept a flash of vivid—I had almost said vicious—annoyance. “You’re not going before the drawing-room at Buckingham Palace!” cried she.
“I’ll have to,” said I.
“But you can’t!” protested Margot, tears of vexation in her eyes. “Everyone will think it’s dreadfully queer.”
“Don’t fret about that, my dear,” replied I lightly. “I know how it is over here. So long as you’ve got the cash they’ll never ask a question. We Americans mean money to them—an