THAT summer Armitage was spending the week ends out on Long Island at the country place of his sister, Mrs. Kirkwood. He kept his yacht in the tiny harbor there and made short cruises in the Sound and up the New England coast. Naturally I often went with him. Those parties usually amused me. He knew a dozen interesting people—working people—such as Boris Raphael, the painter, and his wife, the architect, the Horace Armstrongs who had been divorced and remarried, a novelist named Beechman who wrote about the woods and lived in the wilderness in the Southwest most of the year, Susan Lenox the actress—several others of the same kind. Then there was his sister—Mary Kirkwood.
For a reason which will presently appear I have not before spoken of Mrs. Kirkwood, though I had known her longer than I had known Armitage. Her husband had been treasurer of the road when I was an under Vice President. He speculated in the road’s funds and it so happened that, when he was about to be caught, I was the only man who could save him from exposure. Instead of asking me directly, he sent his wife to me. I can see her now as she was that day—pale, haggard, but with that perfect composure which deceives the average human being into thinking, “Here is a person without nerves.” She told me the whole story in the manner of one relating a matter in which he has a sympathetic but remote interest. She made not the smallest attempt to work upon my feelings, to move me to pity. “And,” she ended, “if you will help him cover up the shortage, it will be made good and he will resign. I shall see to it that he does not take another position of trust.”
“Why didn’t he come to me, himself?” said I. “Why did he send you?”
She looked at me—a steady gaze from a pair of melancholy gray eyes. “I cannot answer that,” said she.
“I beg your pardon,” stammered I; for I guessed the answer to my question even as I was asking it. I knew the man—an arrogant coward, with the vanity to lure him into doing preposterous things and wilting weakness the instant trouble began to gather. “You wish me to save him?” I said, still confused and not knowing how to meet the situation.
“I am asking rather for myself,” replied she. “I married him against my father’s wishes and warning. I have not loved him since the second month of our marriage. If he should be exposed, I think the disgrace would kill me.” Her lip curled in self-scorn. “A queer kind of pride, isn’t it?” she said. “To be able to live through the real shame, and to shrink only from the false.”
“I’ll do it,” said I, with a sudden complete change of intention. “That is, if you promise me he will resign and not try to get a similar position elsewhere.”
“I promise,” said she, rising, to show that she was taking not a moment more of my time than was unavoidable. “And I thank you”—and that was all.
I kept my part of the agreement; she kept hers. In about two years she divorced him because he was flagrantly untrue to her. He married the woman and supported her and himself on the allowance Mary Kirkwood made him as soon as her father’s death let her into her share of the property. When I saw her again—one night at dinner at her brother’s house, before his wife divorced him—we met as if we were entire strangers. Neither of us made the remotest allusion to that first meeting.
Going down to her house with Armitage often and being with her on the yacht for days together, I became fairly well acquainted with her, although she maintained the reserve which she did not increase for a stranger or drop even with her brother. You felt as if her personality were a large and interesting house, with room after room worth seeing, most attractive—but that no one ever was admitted beyond the drawing-room, not for a glimpse.
Don’t picture her as of the somber sort of person. A real tragedy can befall only a person with a highly sensitive nature. Such persons always have sense of proportion and sense of humor. They do not exaggerate themselves; they see the amusing side of the antics of the human animal. So they do not pull long faces and swathe themselves in yards of crêpe and try to create an impression of dark and gloomy sorrow. They do not find woe a luxury; they know it in its grim horror. They strive to get the joy out of life. So, looking at Mary Kirkwood, you would never have suspected a secret of sadness, a blighted life. As her reserve did not come from self-consciousness—either the self-consciousness of haughtiness or that of shyness and greenness—you did not even suspect reserve until you had known her long and had tried in vain to get as well acquainted with her as you thought you were at first. I imagine that in our talk in my office about her husband I got further into the secret of her than anyone else ever had.
One detail I shall put by itself, so important does it seem to me. She had a keen sense of humor. It was not merely passive, merely appreciation, as the sense of humor is apt to be in women—where it exists at all. It was also active; she said droll and even witty things. When her sense of humor was aroused, her eyes were bewitching.
What did she look like? The women all wish to know this; for, being fond of the evanescent triumphs over the male which beauty of face or form gives, and as a rule having experience only of those petty victories, they fancy that looks are the important factor, the all-important factor. In fact, the real conquests of women are not won by looks. Beauty, or, rather, physical charm of some kind, is the lure that draws the desired male within range. If after pausing a while he finds nothing more, he is off again.
Perhaps, probably, my experience with Edna has made me more indifferent to looks than the average man who has never realized his longing to possess a physically beautiful woman. However that may be, Mary Kirkwood certainly had no cause to complain that Nature had not been generous to her in the matter of looks. She was tall, she was slender. She had a delicate oval face, a skin that was clear and smooth and dark with the much prized olive tints in it. She had a beautiful long neck, a great quantity of almost black hair. Her nose suggested pride, her mouth mockery, her eyes sincerity. She was the kind of woman who exercises a powerful physical fascination over men, and at the same time makes them afraid to show their feelings. Women like that tantalize with visions of what they could and would give the man they loved, but make each man feel that it would be idle for him to hope. In character she was very different from her cynical, mocking brother—was, I imagine, more like her father. Mentally the resemblance between the brother and sister was strong—but she took pains to conceal how much she knew, where he found his chief pleasure in “showing off.” I feel I have fallen pitifully short of doing her justice in this description. But who can put into words such a subtlety as charm? She had it—for men. Women did not like her—nor she them. I state this without fear of prejudicing either women or men against her. Why is it, by the way, that to say a man does not like men and is not liked by them is to damn him utterly, while to say that a woman neither likes nor is liked by her own sex is rather to speak in her favor? You cry indignantly, “Not true!” gentle reader. But—do you know what is true and what not true? And, if you did, would you confess it, even to yourself?
You are proceeding to revenge yourself upon me. You are saying, “Now we know why he was indifferent to his beautiful wife and to his lovely daughter!—Now we understand that fit of guilty conscience in London!”
Do you know? Perhaps. I am not sure. I am not conscious of any especial interest in Mary Kirkwood until after I came back from London. I had seen her but a few times. We had never talked so long as five consecutive minutes, and then we had talked commonplaces. Not the commonplaces of fashionable people, but the commonplaces of intelligent people. There’s an enormous difference.
The first time my memory records her with the vividness of moving pictures is, of course, at that meeting in my office. The next time is a few days after my return from London. I had been surfeited both in London and on the steamer with the inane amateurs at life, the shallow elegant dabblers in it, interesting themselves only in coaching, bridge, and similar pastimes worthy an asylum for the feeble-minded. I went down to the Kirkwood place with Armitage. As his sister was not in the house we set out for a walk through the grounds to find her. At the outer edge of the gardens a workman told us that if we would follow a path through the swampy woods we could not miss her.
The path was the roughest kind of a trail. Our journey was beset with swarms of insects, most of them mosquitoes in savage humor. It lay along the course of a sluggish narrow stream that looked malarious and undoubtedly was. “Landscape gardening is one of Mary’s fads,” explained her brother. “She has been planning to tackle this swamp for several years. Now she is at it.”
In the depths of the morass we came upon her. She was in man’s clothes—laboring man’s clothes. Her face and neck were protected by veils, her hands by gloves. She was toiling away with a gang of men at clearing the ground where the drains were to center in an artificial lake. Armitage called several times before she heard. Then she dropped her ax and came forward to meet us. There was certainly nothing of what is usually regarded as feminine allure about her. Yet never had I seen a woman more fascinating. There undoubtedly was charm in her face and in her strong, slender figure. But I believe the real charm of charms for me was the spectacle of a woman usefully employed. A woman actually doing something. A woman!
After the greeting she said: “The only way I can get the men to work in this pesthole is by working with them.” She smiled merrily. “One doesn’t look so well as in a fresh tennis suit wielding a racket. But I can’t bear doing things that have no results.”
“My father insisted on bringing us up in the commonest way and with the commonest tastes,” said Armitage, “and Mary has remained even less the lady than I am the gentleman.”
As the mosquitoes were tearing us to pieces Mrs. Kirkwood ordered us back to the house. Before we were out of sight she was leading on her gang and wielding the ax again. At dinner she appeared in all the radiance and grace of the beautiful woman with fondness for and taste in dress. She explained to me her plan—how swamp and sluggish, rotting brook were to be transformed into a wooded park with a swift, clear stream and a succession of cascades. I may add, she carried out the plan, and the results were even beyond what my imagination pictured as she talked.
This first view of her life in the country set me to observing her closely—perhaps more closely and from a different standpoint than a man usually observes a woman. In all she did I saw the same rare and fascinating imagination—the only kind of imagination worth while. Of all its stupidities and follies none so completely convicts the human race of shallowness and bad taste as its notions of what is romantic and idealistic. The more elegant the human animal flatters itself it is, the poorer are its ideals—that is, the further removed from the practical and the useful. So, you rarely find a woman with so much true poetry, true romance, true imagination as to keep house well. But Mary Kirkwood kept house as a truly great artist paints a picture, as a truly great composer creates an opera. In all her house there was not a trace of the crude, costly luxury that rivals the squalor and bareness of poverty in repulsiveness to people of sense and taste. But what comfort! What splendid cooking, what perfection of service. The chairs and sofas, the beds, the linen, the hundred and one small but important devices for facilitating the material side of life, and so putting mind and spirit in the mood for their best— But I despair of making you realize. I should have to catalogue, describe, contrast through page after page. And when I had finished, those who understand what the phrase art of living means would have read only what they already know, while those who do not understand that phrase would be convulsed with the cackling laughter that is the tribute of mush-brain to intellect.
Observing Mary Kirkwood I discovered a great truth about the woman question: the crudest indictment of the intellect of woman is the crude, archaic, futile, and unimaginative way in which is carried on the part of life that is woman’s peculiar work—or, rather, is messed, muddled, slopped, and neglected. No doubt this is not their fault. But it soon will be if they don’t bestir themselves. Already there are American men not a few who apologize for having married as a folly of their green and silly youth.
So, gentle reader, though my enthusiasm tempts me to describe Mary Kirkwood’s housekeeping in detail, I shall spare you. You would not read. You would not understand if you did.
The first time she and I approached the confidential was on an August evening when we were alone on the upper deck of the yacht. The others were in the cabin playing bridge. We had been sitting there perhaps an hour when she rose.
“Don’t go,” said I.
“I thought you wished to be alone,” said she.
“Why did you think that?”
“Your way of answering me. You’ve been almost curt.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t promise to talk if you stay. But I hate to be left alone with my thoughts.”
“I understand,” said she. And she seated herself beside the rail, and with my assistance lighted a cigarette.
There was a moon somewhere above the awning which gave us a roof. By the dim, uncertain light I could make out her features. It seemed to me she was staying as much on her own account as on mine—because she, too, wished not to be alone with her thoughts. I had not in a long time seen her in a frankly serious mood.
“How much better off a man is than a woman,” said I. “A man has his career to think about, while a woman usually has only herself.”
“Only herself,” echoed she absently. “And if one is able to think, oneself is an unsatisfactory subject.”
“Extremely,” said I. “Faults, follies, failures.”
For a time I watched the faintly glowing end of her cigarette and the slim fingers that held it gracefully. Then she said:
“Do you believe in a future life?”
“Does anyone feel sure of any life but this?”
“Then this is one’s only chance to get what one wants—what’s worth while.”
“What is worth while?” I inquired, feeling the charm of her quiet, sweet voice issuing upon the magical stillness. “What is worth while?”
She laughed softly. “What one wants.”
“And what do you want?”
She drew her white scarf closer about her bare shoulders, smiled queerly out over the lazily rippling waters. “Love and children,” she said. “I’m a normal woman.”
That amused me. “Normal? Why, you’re unique—eccentric. Most women want money—and yet more money—and yet more money—for more and more and always more show.”
“You must want the same thing,” retorted she. “You’re too sensible not to know you can’t possibly do any good to others with money. So you must want it for your own selfish purposes. It’s every bit as much for show when you have it tucked away in large masses for people to gape at as if you were throwing it round as the women do.... If anything, your passion is cruder than theirs.”
“I think I make money,” said I, “for the same reasons that a hen lays eggs or a cow gives milk—because I can’t help it; because I can’t do anything else and must do something.”
“Did you ever try to do anything else?”
“No,” I admitted. Then I added, “I never had the chance.”
“True,” she said reflectively. “A hen can’t give milk and a cow can’t lay eggs.”
“For some time,” I went on, “I’ve been trying to find something else to do. Something interesting. No, not exactly that either. I must find some way of reviving my interest in life. The things I am doing would be interesting enough if I could be interested in anything at all. But I’m not.”
She nodded slowly. “I’m in the same state,” said she. “I’ve about decided what to do.”
“Yes?” said I encouragingly.
“Marry again,” replied she.
I laughed outright. “That’s very unoriginal,” said I. “It puts you in with the rest of the women. Marrying is all they can think of doing.”
“But you don’t quite understand,” said she. “I want children. I am thinking of selecting some trustworthy man with good physical and mental qualities. I have had experience. I ought to be able to judge—and not being in love with him I shall not be so likely to make a mistake. I shall marry, and the children will give me love and occupation. You may laugh, but I tell you the only occupation worthy of a man or a woman is bringing up children. All the rest—for men as well as for women—is—is like a hen laying eggs to rot in the weeds.... Bringing up children to develop us, to give us a chance to make them an improvement on ourselves. That’s the best.”
As the full meaning of what she had said unfolded I was filled with astonishment. How clear and simple—how true. Why had I not seen this long ago—why had it been necessary to have it pointed out by another? “I believe—yes, I’m sure—that’s what I’ve been groping for,” I said to her.
“I thought you’d understand,” said she, and most flattering was her tone of pleasure at my obvious admiration.
Thus our friendship was born.
I could not but envy her freedom to seek to satisfy the longing I thus discovered in my own heart. So strongly did the mood for confidence possess me that only my long and hard training in self-restraint held me from the disloyalty of speaking my thoughts. I said:
“It’s dismal to grow old with no ties in the oncoming generation. The sense of the utter futility of life would weigh more and more heavily. I’m surprised that you’ve realized it so young.”
“A woman realizes it earlier than a man,” she reminded me. “For a woman has no career to interfere and prevent her seeing the truth.”
A woman! Rather, a rare occasional Mary Kirkwood. Most women never looked beyond the gratification of the crudest, easiest vanities and appetites. “Yes, you are right,” I continued. “You ought to marry—as soon as you can. The man isn’t important, except in the ways you spoke of. So far as man and woman love is concerned, that quickly passes—where it ever exists at all. But the bond of father, mother, and children is enduring—at least, I’m sure you would make it so.”
We sat lost in thought for some time—I reflecting moodily upon my own baffled and now seemingly hopeless longing, she probably busy with the ideas suggested in her next speech.
“The main trouble is money,” said she. “Except for that my husband would have been all right. When we first met he did not know my family had wealth. He thought I belonged to another and poor branch. And I think he cared for me, and would have been the man I sought but for the money. It roused a dormant side of his nature, and everything went to pieces.”
“Then, marry a rich man,” I suggested.
She shook her head. “I don’t know a single rich man—except possibly my brother—who isn’t obsessed about money. The rich have a craving to be richer that’s worse than the desire of the poor to be rich.... I don’t know what to do. I couldn’t bring up children in the atmosphere of wealth and caste and show—the sort of atmosphere a man or woman crazy about money insists on creating. My father was right. He was a really wise man. I owe to him every good instinct and good idea I have.”
“But you must have seen some man who promised well. I think you can trust to your judgment. You mustn’t defeat your one chance for happiness by overcaution.”
Again she was silent for several minutes. Then she said, with a queer laugh and an embarrassed movement: “I have seen such a man—lately. I like him. I think I could like him more than a little. I’ve an idea he might care for me if I’d let him. But—I don’t know.”
I saw that she longed to confide, but wished to be questioned. “Here on the yacht?” said I.
She nodded.
“Beechman?”
She laughed shyly yet with amusement.
“That was an easy guess,” said I. “He’s the only man of us free to marry.”
“What do you think of him?”
“The very man I’d say,” replied I. “He’s good to look at—clever, healthy, and honest. He isn’t money-mad. He could make quite a splurge with what he has, yet he doesn’t. He is a serious man—does not let them tempt him into fashionable society or any other kind.”
“What are the objections?” said she. “My father trained us to look for the rotten spots, as he called them. He said one ought to hunt them out and examine them carefully. Then if, in spite of them, the thing still looked good, why there was a chance of its being worth taking.”
“That’s precisely my way of proceeding in business,” said I. “It’s a pity it isn’t used in every part of life—from marketing up to choosing a friend or a husband.”
“Well, what are the ‘rotten spots’ in Mr. Beechman?”
“I haven’t looked for them,” said I. “No doubt they’re there, but as they’re not obvious they may be unimportant.”
“Can’t you think of any?”
She was laughing, and so was I. Poor Beechman, down in the cabin absorbed in bridge, how amazed he’d have been if he could have heard! In my mind’s eye I was looking him over—a tall, fair man with good smooth-shaven features.
“He’s getting bald rather rapidly for a man of thirty or thereabouts,” said I.
“I don’t like baldness,” said she. “But I can endure it.”
“He is distinctly vain of his looks and his strength. But he has cause to be.”
“All men are physically vain,” said she. “And they can’t help it, because it is the hereditary quality of the male from fishes and reptiles up.”
“He’s inclined to be opinionated, and his point of view is narrow.”
“I think I might hope to educate him out of that,” said she. “I can be tactful.”
“It’s certainly not a serious objection.”
“Any other spots?”
“He has a certain—a certain—lack of vigor. It’s a thing I’ve observed in all professional men, except those of the first rank, those who are really men of action.”
She nodded. “I was waiting for that,” said she. “It’s the thing that has made me hesitate.” She laughed outright. “What a conceited speech! But I’m exposing myself fully to you.”
“Why not?” said I.
“I am picking him to pieces as if I thought myself perfection. As a matter of fact, I know he’d fly from me if he saw me as I am.” She reflected, laughed quietly. “But he never would know me as I am. An unconventional woman—if she’s sensible—only shows enough of her variation from the pattern to make herself interesting—never enough to be alarming.”
“You are unconventional?”
“You didn’t suspect it?”
“No. You smoke cigarettes—but that has ceased to be unconventional.”
“I rather thought you had a favorable opinion of my intelligence,” said she.
“So I have,” said I. “To be perfectly frank, you seemed to me to have as good a mind as your brother.”
“That is flattering,” said she, immensely pleased, and with reason. “Well, if you thought so favorably of my intelligence, how could you believe me conventional?”
“I see,” said I. “No one who thinks can be conventional.”
“Conventionality,” said she, “was invented to save some people the trouble of thinking and to prevent others from being outrageous through trying to think when they’ve nothing to think with.”
“That is worth remembering and repeating,” laughed I. “Personally, I’m deeply grateful for conventionality. You see, I came up from the bottom, and I find it satisfactory to be able to refer to the rules in all the things I knew nothing about.”
“My brother says the most remarkable thing about you—and your wife— Do you mind my telling you?”
“Go on,” said I.
“He says most people who come up are alternately hopeless barbarians and hopelessly conventional, but that you took the right course. You learned to be conventional—learned the rules—before you ventured to try to make personal variations in them.”
“I’m slow to risk variations,” said I. “Most of the efforts in that direction are—eccentric. And I detest eccentricity as much as I like originality.”
“If Mr. Beechman were only a little less conventional!” sighed she. “I’m afraid he’d be rather—” She hesitated.
“Tiresome?” I ventured to suggest.
“Tiresome,” she assented. “But—there would be the children. Do you think he’d try to interfere with me there?”
“You’ll never know that until you’ve married him,” said I.
“It’s a pity he has an occupation that would keep him round the house most of the time,” said she. “That’s a trial to a woman. She’s always being interrupted when she wishes to be free.”
“You mustn’t expect too much,” said I. “I think the children will be your children.”
She did not reply in words. But a sudden strengthening of her expression made me feel that I was getting a glimpse of her father.
We talked no more of Beechman or of any personalities related to this story. When the bridge party broke up and a supper was served on deck, she and Beechman sat together. And I gathered from the sounds coming from their direction that he was making progress. My spirits gradually oozed away and I sat glumly pretending to listen while Mrs. Raphael talked to me. Usually she interested me because she talked what she knew and knew things worth while. But that night I heard scarcely a word she said. When the party, one by one, began to go below, Mrs. Kirkwood joined me and found an opportunity to say, aside:
“Won’t you talk with Mr. Beechman—and tell me your honest opinion? You know I can’t afford to make another mistake. And I’m in earnest.”
I stood silent, smoking and staring out toward the dim Connecticut shore.
“It wouldn’t be unfair to him,” she urged. “You’re not especially his friend. I can’t ask anyone else, and I believe in your judgment.”
“If I advised you, I’d be taking a heavy responsibility,” said I.
“I’m not that kind—you know I’m not,” replied she. “I don’t ask advice, to have some one to blame if things go wrong. Of course, if there’s a reason why you can’t very well help me— Maybe you already know something against him?—something you’ve no right to tell?”
“Nothing,” said I, emphatically. “And I don’t believe there is anything against him.” Then, on an impulse of fairness and to wipe out the suspicion of Beechman I had unwittingly created, I said: “Really, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t size him up and give you my opinion. I’ll do my best.”
She thanked me with a fine lighting up of the eyes. And the warm friendly pressure of her hand lingered after she had long been below and was no doubt asleep.
What was my reason for hesitating? You have guessed it, but you think I do not intend to admit. You are deceived there. I admit frankly. I felt unable to advise her because I found that I was in love with her, myself. Yes, I was in love, and for the first time in my life. The latest time of falling in love is always the first. As we become older and more experienced, better acquainted with the world, with ourselves, with what we want and do not want—in a word, as we grow, the meaning of love grows. And each time we love, we see, as we look back over the previous times, that what we thought was love was in fact simply educational.
So, when I say I had never loved until I loved Mary Kirkwood, I am speaking a truth which is worth thinking about. I had reached the age, the stage of physical and mental development, at which a man’s capacities are at their largest—at which I could give love and could appreciate love that was given to me. And I, who could not ask or hope love from her, gave her all the love I had to give. Gave because I could not help giving. Who, seeing the best, can help wanting it?
But for my promise to her I should have left the yacht early the following morning. As it was I stayed on, with my mind made up to keep my word. Did I stay because of my promise? Did I stay because I loved her? I do not know. Who can fathom the real motive in such a situation as that? I can only say that I sought Beechman’s society and did my best to take his measure. It had been so long my habit to judge men without regard to my personal feeling about them that, perhaps in spite of myself, I saw this man as he was, not as I should have liked him to be. I found that I had underestimated him. I had been prejudiced by his taking himself too seriously—a form of vanity which I happen particularly to detest. Also his sense of humor was different from mine—a fact that had misled me into thinking he had no sense of humor. I had thought—shall I say hoped?—that I would find him a man she could respect but could not love. I was forced to abandon this idea. So far as a man can judge another for a woman, he could succeed with almost any heart-free woman. I wondered that Mary Kirkwood should be uncertain about him. I might have drawn comfort from her having done so, had I not known how she dreaded making a second