MY cable to Norman was answered the next day but one by a note from him, stopping in the same hotel. I shall not detail the negotiations that followed—the long and stormy scenes between him and Dawkins, solicitor to the Marquis of Crossley. It is sufficient to say that Norman had the novel sensation of being beaten on every point. Not outwitted, for he had wit enough and to spare for any contest of cunning; but beaten by the centuries-old precedents and customs and requirements in matters of dower and settlement. The mercenary marriage is an ancient habit of the human race; in fact, the scientists have proved that it began with marriage itself, that there was no marriage in the civilized sense until there was property to marry for. Perhaps the mercenary marriage is not so recent in America as our idyllists declare. Do we not read that the father of his country married solely for money an almost feeble-minded woman whom everybody knew he did not love? And, inasmuch as marriage is first of all a business—the business of providing for the material needs and wants of two and their children—may it not barely be possible that the unqualifiedly sentimental view of marriage can be—perhaps has been—overdone? In America, where the marriage for sentiment prevails to an extent unknown anywhere else in the world—is not the institution of marriage there in its most uneasy state? And may not that be the reason?
What a world of twaddle it is! If men and women could only learn to build their ideals on the firm foundation—the only firm foundation—of the practical instead of upon the quicksand of lies and pretenses, wouldn’t the tower climb less shakily, if more slowly, toward the stars?
You may be sure there was nothing of the stars in those talks between Norman and Dawkins—or in my talks with Norman—or in Crossley’s talks with Dawkins. Crossley had had me looked up—had discovered as much about my finances as it is possible to discover about the private business of an American. He had got the usual exaggerated estimate of my wealth, and he was resolved that he would not be cheated of a single dollar he might wring from me. From my standpoint it was obvious that he and Margot must have plenty of money or they could not be happy. All I desired was to prevent him from feeling financially free—and therefore under the aristocratic code, morally free—to show and to act, after marriage, the contempt I knew he felt for all things and persons American—except the dollars, which could be exchanged into sovereigns. I fought hard, but he stood fast. Either Margot must lose him or I must give him about what he asked—a fortune in his own right for him. If I choose I could dower her; but as to dowering him he would not permit the question of alternative to be raised.
“All right,” said I at last to Norman. “Give them their minimum.”
He was astounded, was furious—and as he is not the ordinary lick-spittle lawyer but a man of arrogant independence, he did not hesitate to let me see that his anger—and scorn—were for myself. “Do you mean that?” he said.
“Yes,” replied I carelessly—as if I were now indifferent about the whole business. “My girl wants his title. And why let a question of money come between her and happiness?”
“I can’t refrain from saying, Loring, that I’d not have believed this of you.”
“She’s not fit to live in America,” said I. “Her mother hasn’t educated her for it. American mothers don’t educate their daughters nowadays to be wives of American men. Honestly, do you know an American man able to do for himself who would be foolish enough to marry that sort of girl?”
His silence was assent.
“You see. I’ve got to buy her a husband—that is, a title—over here. This offering seems as good as there is in the market—at the price. So—why not?”
“That’s one view of it,” said he coldly.
I laid my hand on his shoulder. “Come now—be sensible,” said I. “What else can I do?”
“It would be an impertinence for me to say,” replied he.
“I can guess,” said I. “You needn’t trouble yourself to say it. You evidently don’t know the circumstances. And I may add that so long as I’ve got to buy Margot a title I might as well buy her a good one.”
He eyed me sharply. But I did not take him into my confidence—nor shall I confide in you at present, gentle reader. I did not even let him see that I was holding back anything. I went on with good-humored raillery:
“I’m doing better than Hanley or Vanderveld or Pattison or any of the others who’ve dealt in these markets. For a marquis Crossley is selling cheap. He’s far from penniless, you know. It’s simply that he wants more money. Why, really, old man, it’s what’s called a love match. They always call it a love match when the nobleman isn’t absolutely on his uppers.”
“You are certainly a philosopher, Loring,” said Norman, anxious, I saw, to finish and drop the affair.
“And I became one in the usual way—necessity,” said I. “I’m as eager to have this thing dispatched as you are. I want to get out to sea, where perhaps the stench of aristocracy will blow out of my nostrils, and stay out of them till I reach the other shore. Then I’ll get it again. It blows down the bay to meet the incoming ships.”
“Yes, we’re pretty bad,” admitted Norman. “Not so bad as we used to be, but pretty bad.” He laughed. “They accuse us of loving money. Why, we are mere beginners at it. We haven’t learned how to idle or how to spend money except in crude, tiresome ways. And to love money deeply you must know how to idle and how to spend. Money’s the passion with these people. How they do need it!”
Neither shall I linger over the details of the engagement and the wedding. For all that was important about either I refer you to the newspapers of London and New York. They gave everything that makes a snob’s eyes glisten and a snob’s mouth water. My wife has somewhere—she knows exactly where—a scrapbook, and my daughter has another of the same kind. Those scrapbooks are strongly bound and the pages are of the heaviest time- and wear-resisting paper. In them are pasted columns on columns of lists of titles, of descriptions of jewels and dresses, of enumerations of wedding gifts. Margot received things costing small fortunes from people she barely knew well enough to invite. They gave in the hope—the good hope—of gaining the valuable favor of the Marchioness of Crossley, a great lady by reason of her title, a greater lady by reason of the ancientness of the Massingford family, and at the top and summit of greatness by reason of her wealth.
That last item, by the way, was vastly overestimated. Everyone assumed that Crossley had sold much more dearly. No one but those intimately concerned dreamed what a bargain I had got.
You may be picturing a sordid affair, redolent of the stenches of commercialism. If you are, gentle reader, you are showing yourself unworthy of your own soulfulness, unworthy of the elegant society into which I have introduced you. I have been giving simply the plain facts—a mere skeleton upon which you, versed in society columns and society novels, and skilled in the art of hiding ugly truths under pretty lies, may readily drape the flesh and the garments of sentimentality and snobbishness. You will then have the truth as it appeared to the world—a handsome, manly groom, every inch of him the patrician; a wondrous lovely, innocent, pure young bride, looking the worthy mate of the great noble she had won with her beauty and her sweetness; a background of magnificent houses and equipages, of grand society people, of lackeys in livery without number; an atmosphere of luxury, refinement, perfumed with the fairest flowers and the most delicate artificial scents. You are seeing also the high and noble motives of all concerned—the joy of parents in a daughter sentimentally wooed and won to happiness; the generous and kindly feelings of all the friends; the lavish and affectionate overflowing of costly gifts; above all, the ecstatic young couple wrapped up in their love for each other. Flesh up and beautify the skeleton to your taste, gentle reader. You will not go amiss.
I must linger a moment on the happiness of my daughter. It was too spiritual to be of this earth. As soon as the miserable, unimportant money matters were settled, and her mother gave her full leave to love, she threw herself into it with all the ardor of the heroine of a novel. She had two diamond hearts made—at the most fashionable jewelers in Paris, you may be sure. Upon the inside of the one she kept she had engraved, under his picture, “From Hugh to Margot.” In the one she gave him there surrounded her picture in diamond inlay, “To Hugh from his dear love Margot.”
Each was to wear the heart round the neck until death. Again and again I caught her dreaming over hers, sometimes with tears in her limpid eyes. Again and again I caught her scribbling, “Margot, Marchioness of Crossley, Viscountess Brear, Countess of Felday and Noth, Baroness de Selve,” and so on through a list of titles which gentle reader will find in “Burke’s” and the “Almanach de Gotha.”
And she had a reverent way of looking at him and a tender way of touching him. Her mother, you will believe, spared neither expense nor pains in getting together the trousseau. But Margot was not satisfied. “Not nearly fine enough for his bride,” she would say. “I’m so afraid he’ll be disappointed.” Then the tears would spring. “Oh, mamma! If he should be disappointed in me!”
“Not so bad as if you were to be disappointed in him,” I put in with no other motive than to cheer her up.
But it only shocked her. “In Hugh!” she exclaimed, meaning in Cecil Robert Grunleigh Percival Hugh Massingford, Marquis of Crossley, etc. “I disappointed in him! Oh, papa! You don’t realize!”
“No, I suppose not,” said I, getting myself away as speedily as my legs would carry me.
Through these joyous scenes of youth and love and luxury I moved gloomily—restless, bitter, tormented by self-reproaches and by thoughts of the woman I loved. What Edna had said about her, though I knew it was by way of precautionary cattishness, put into my mind the inevitable suspicion—no, not actual suspicion, but germ of suspicion—the almost harmless germ from which the most poisonous suspicions may develop. I went round and round my mental image of Mary Kirkwood. I viewed it from all angles. But I could not find a trace of the flaw Edna had asserted. I analyzed her with all the analytical skill I possessed, and that, I flatter myself, is not a little. No one who has not the faculty of analysis ever gets anywhere; no one who has that faculty ever escapes the charge of cynicism. Shallow people—the sort that make such a charge—will regard it as proof of my utter cynicism, my absolute lack of sentiment, that I was able to analyze the woman I loved, or pretended I loved. But I assure you, gentle reader, that not even love and passion suspend the habitual processes of a good mind. The reason you have read the contrary so often is because precious few writers about men of the superior sort have the capacity to comprehend the intellects they try to picture. To the man of large affairs, the average—and many a one above the average—biography or novel about a great man reads like the attempt of a straddle bug to give his fellow straddle bugs an account of an elephant.
I was the only inharmonious figure in that round of festivals. But no one observed me. I simply got the reputation of being a man of reserve, a thinker rather than a talker—as if there ever lived a thinker who did not overflow with torrents of talk like a spring fed from a glacier; but, of course, the spring flows only when The conditions are favorable, not when it is ice-bound. I was not even interested in observing. There is a monotony about the actions of fashionable people that soon reduces a spectator of agile mind to stupor. The same thing over and over again, with variations so slight that only a nit-wit would be interested in them— Could there be a worse indictment of the intelligence of the human race than that so large a part of its presumably most intelligent classes engage in the social farce, which is an example of aimless activity about on a level with a dog’s chasing its own tail?
But Edna——
As I look back on those weeks of days, each one crowded like a ragbag with rubbish, the figure of Edna stands out radiant. You would never have thought her the mother of the bride—or, indeed, a mother at all. A woman who for many years leads a virginal or almost virginal life gets back the vestal air of the unmarried girl. This air had returned to Edna. She had it as markedly as had Margot. It was most becoming to her piquant style of beauty, giving it the allure of the height that invites ascent and capture, yet has never been desecrated. And how she did enjoy the grandeur—the great names, the gorgeous presents of curiously and costlily wrought gold and silver and crystal, and precious stones, the succession of panoramas of ultra-fashionable life, with herself and Margot always the center.
I used to stand aside and watch her and feel as if I were hypnotized into vivid hallucinations. I recalled the incidents of our early life—Brooklyn, the Passaic flat, the squat and squalid homes of our childhood. I recalled our people—hers and mine—tucked away in homely obscurity among the New Jersey hills. But by no effort of mind could I associate her with these realities. She had literally been born again. I looked at the other Americans of humble beginnings—and there were not a few of them in that society. All had retained some traces of their origin, had some characteristics that made it not difficult to connect their present with their past. But not Edna.
At the wedding—in the most fashionable church in the West End—Margot looked weary and rather old, gone slightly stale from too long and hard preliminary training. Edna was at her best—delicate, fragile, radiant. How the other women hated her for that time-defying beauty of hers! Many of the women of her still youthful age retained much of the physical attractiveness of youth. But there was not another one who was not beginning to show the effects of dissipation—of too much food and wine and cigarettes, of lives devoid of elevating sensations, of minds used only for petty, mean thoughts. But Edna seemed in the flower of that period when the secrets of the soul have as yet made no marks upon the countenance. You would have said she was a merry and romantic girl. I could not fathom that mystery. I cannot fathom it now. Its clew must be in her truly amazing powers of self-deception and also in that unique capacity of hers for forgetting the thing, no matter what, that is disagreeable to remember.
When we were at last alone, with the young couple off for the yacht Lord Shangway had loaned them for the honeymoon, with the last guest gone and the last powdered flunkey vanished—when she and I were alone, she settled herself with a sigh and said:
“I wish I could make it begin all over again!”
“You must be built of steel,” said I.
“I am supremely happy,” said she, “and have been for weeks. Nothing agrees with me so thoroughly as happiness.”
I looked at her scrutinizingly. No, she was not the least tired; she was as fresh as if that moment risen from a long sleep in the air of seashore or mountains.
She went on: “I’m going over to Paris to-morrow. I’ve a lot of engagements there. And I must get some clothes. I’ve worn out all I brought with me.”
“Worn out” meant worn once or at most twice; for in a society where everyone is seeing everyone else all the time a woman with a reputation for dress cannot afford to reappear in clothes once seen. In some circles this would sound delightfully prodigal, in others delightfully impossible, and perhaps in still others delightfully criminal. But then all that sort of thing is relative—like everything else in the world.
“Won’t you come along?” said she in a perfunctory tone.
“No, thanks,” I replied. “I’m off for Russia with a party of bankers to look at some mining properties.”
“I thought you were returning to New York?”
“Not for several months,” said I.
“How can you stay away so long from your beloved America?”
“Business—always business.”
She eyed me somewhat as one eyes a strange, mildly interesting specimen. “Well—you must enjoy it, or you wouldn’t keep at it year in and year out.”
“One has to pass the time,” said I.
“How does Mary Kirkwood pass the time?”
This unexpected and—except sub-consciously—accidental question, staggered me for an instant. “I don’t know much about it,” said I. “She has a house—and she looks after it, herself. She reads, I believe. She has gardens—and they use up a lot of time. Then she rides.”
Edna yawned. “It sounds dull,” she said. “But domestic people are always dull. And she is certainly domestic. I wonder why she doesn’t marry again.”
I was silent.
“Are any men attentive to her? It seems to me I heard something about a novelist—some poor man who is after her money.”
I was choking with rage and jealousy.
“Did you see any such man about?”
I contrived to compose myself for a calm reply. “No one answering to your description,” said I.
“Do you like her?”
“You asked me that once before,” said I.
“Oh—I forgot. It seems to me you and she would have exactly suited each other. You like domestic women. That is, you think you do. Really, you’d probably fly from a woman of that sort.”
“And a woman of the other sort would fly from me,” said I, laughing.
She looked at me thoughtfully. “You must admit you’re not easy to get on with—except at a distance,” observed she. “But men of positive individuality are never easy to get on with. A big tree blights all the little trees and bushes that try to grow in its neighborhood.... No, Godfrey dear, you weren’t made for domestic life—you and I. Domestic life is successful only where there are two very small and very much alike. People like us have to live alone.”
I rose abruptly. There was for me a sound in that “alone” like the slam of a graveyard gate.
“You never will appreciate me—how satisfactory I’ve been,” she went on, “until you marry again.”
“I must make my final arrangements for Russia,” said I.
“Shall I see you in the morning? I’m leaving rather early.”
“Probably not,” said I.
“Then we’ll meet when you come back. We’ll visit Margot at Sothewell Abbey.” She rose, drew herself to her full height with a graceful gesture of triumph. “Don’t you honestly rather like it, being the father of a Marchioness?”
I could not speak. I looked at her.
“How solemn you are!” laughed she. “Well, good-by, dear.” And she held out her hand and turned her face upward for me to kiss her lips.
“Oh, I’ll probably see you in the morning,” I said, “or to-night.” And away I went.
From Russia I drifted to India, intending to return home by the Pacific. At Bombay I met Lord Blankenship, and he persuaded me to cross to East Africa. I found him a companion exactly to my taste. He was a silent chap having nothing to think about and nothing to think with—a typical and model product of the aristocratic education that completes a man as a sculptor completes an image, and prepares him to stand in his appointed niche until decay tumbles him down as rubbish. I had lost all my former passion for talking and listening. I wished to confine myself—my thoughts—to the trivial matters of the senses, to lingering over and tinkering with the physical details of life. The silent and vacant Blankenship set me a perfect example, one easy to fall into the habit of following.
At Paris, I picked up my private secretary, Markham, and resumed attention to my affairs. I had arranged for things to go on without me, when I set out for East Africa. I found that my guess as to how they would go had been correct. For a month or so there was confusion—the confusion that is inevitable when a man who has attended to everything abruptly throws up his leadership. Then the affairs in which he fancied himself indispensable begin to move as well as if he were at the throttle—perhaps better. The most substantial result of my neglect seemed to be that I had become much richer, had more than recovered what my purchase of a son-in-law had cost me.
Markham, who had been at Cairo two months, had got himself engaged to be married. For several years I had been promising him a good position, that is to say, one more fitting a grown man of real capacity. But he made himself so useful that I put off redeeming my promise and eased my conscience and quieted his ambition with a succession of increases of salary. Now, however, I could no longer delay releasing him. So I must go back to New York, to find some one to take his place. Blankenship was wavering between a trip through West Africa and going to America with me, on the chance of my accompanying him on a shooting trip through British Columbia. He decided to stick to me, and as I had grown thoroughly used to having him about I was rather glad. It is astonishing how much comfort one can get out of the society of a silent man, when one feels that he is a good fellow and a devoted friend.
I telegraphed Edna that I would be unable to come to London, where she then was. But she defeated my plan for not seeing her. When I reached Paris there she was waiting for me at the Ritz. She had a swarm of French, Italians, and English about her—I believe there were some Germans or Austrians, also. I refused to be annoyed with them, and we dined quietly with Blankenship, Markham, and a pretty little Countess de Salevac to act us buffers between us. I tried to avoid being left alone with her, but she would not have it so. She insisted on my coming to her sitting room after the others had gone.
“I know you are tired,” said she, “but I shan’t detain you long.”
“Please don’t,” said I. “The journey has knocked me out. I’ve not slept for two nights.”
“It’s a shame to worry you——”
I made for the door. “Not to-night—no worries. They’ll keep until to-morrow.”
“No, Godfrey dear,” she said. “I must tell you at once. There is serious trouble between Margot and Hugh.”
“Why, they haven’t been married a year.”
“He has been treating her shamefully from the outset. In fact, he cut short the honeymoon to hurry back to that music-hall person.”
“Yes—the same one—that notorious Jupey What’s-her-name. Isn’t it dreadful! Margot’s pride is up in arms. Nothing I say will quiet her.”
“Um,” said I.
“She refuses to understand that over here husbands are allowed a—a——”
“Latitude,” I suggested.
“More latitude than in America. I have talked with Hugh, too. He is—very difficult. Really, he isn’t at all as he seemed. He is a—he is horribly coarse.”
“People who think of nothing but how to get money without work and how to spend it without usefulness are apt to be coarse, when you probe through to the reality of them.”
“He is—defiant,” pursued she, too femininely practical to have interest in or patience with philosophy. “He— Godfrey, he says he hates her. He won’t speak to her. And there’s no prospect of an heir. He says he wants to get rid of her.”
These successive admissions of a worse and worse mess were forced from her by my air of indifference. “What has she done?” I asked.
“Done? I don’t understand——”
“What has she done to drive him to extremes?”
“Godfrey!” she cried in a shocked tone. “You—taking sides against your daughter—your only child! Have you no paternal feeling, either?”
“Not much,” said I. “You see, I’ve seen little of Margot—not enough to get acquainted with her. And you educated her so that we are uncongenial. No—since you set me to thinking, I find I haven’t much paternal feeling for her. I used to have in Passaic, when I wheeled her about the streets on Sundays.”
I paused to enjoy the shame my wife was struggling with.
“But soon after we moved to Brooklyn——”
Edna winced and shivered.
“You sent her away to begin to be a lady. And a lady she is—and ladies are not daughters—are not women even.”
“You must help me, Godfrey,” said Edna, after a strained silence. “Margot is wretched, and a dreadful scandal may break out in time. Already people are talking. Margot is ashamed to show herself in public. She thinks everyone is laughing at her.”
“No doubt she’s right,” said I. “A woman who loses her husband on the honeymoon is likely to be laughed at.... What did she do?”
“Why do you persist in saying that?” cried she, so irritated that she could not altogether restrain herself. “Your dislike of women has become a mania with you.”
“But I don’t dislike them,” replied I. “On the contrary, I like them—like them so well that their worthlessness angers me like the treachery of a friend. And I believe so much in their power that, when things go wrong, I blame them. They have dominion over the men and over the children. And whenever they use their powers it is to make fools of the men and weaklings of the children. I don’t know which is the worse influence—the wishy-washy, unpractical, preacher morality of the good woman or the lazy, idle, irresponsible dissipation of the—the ladies and near-ladies and lady-climbers and lady-imitators.”
“But this has nothing to do with poor Margot!” exclaimed she impatiently.
“Everything to do with her,” replied I. “Still—it’s a spilt pail of milk. As for the present—and future— How can I do anything to help her?”
“You can’t, if you condemn her unheard.”
“I don’t condemn her. I am simply recognizing that there are two sides to this quarrel. And I assure you, you only make matters worse when you interfere without recognizing that fact. So I say again, what did she do?”
My wife calmed slightly and replied: “He says she made him ridiculous with the airs she put on.”
I laughed. “After the education you gave her?”
“That’s right! Blame me!”
“And aren’t you to be blamed?” urged I. “Didn’t you have full charge of her from the time she was born? Couldn’t you have made what you pleased of her? Didn’t you make what you pleased of her?”
Edna tossed her head indignantly. “I never taught her to be a vulgar snob.”
“Why, I thought that was her whole education.”
Edna ignored this interruption. “It’s all very well for the women of noble families to act the snob,” pursued she. “Lots of them do, and no one criticises. But Margot ought to have had sense enough to realize that she, a mere American, couldn’t afford to do it. I warned her that her cue was sweetness and an air of equality. I told her that her title in itself would keep people at their proper distance. But she lost her head.”
“Then the thing for her to do is to behave herself.”
“It’s too late, I’m afraid. The tide has turned against her. All the women—especially the titled English women of good family—were against her—hated her—were ready to stab her in the back. And her haughtiness and condescension gave them the chance.”
“Well, what do you propose? To give him more money?”
Edna showed none of her familiar scorn of sordid things. She reflected, said uncertainly: “I wonder would that do any good?”
“To win anyone give them what they most want,” said I. “What do your friends over here want above everything and anything?”
“Perhaps you are right,” confessed she. Consider, gentle reader, what this confession involved, how it exposed the rotten insincerity of all her and her fine friends’ pretenses. “Yes, I guess you’re right, Godfrey.” She pressed her hands to her temples. “It simply must be straightened out. I am quite distracted. I can’t afford to lose sleep and to be harrowed up. Those things mean ruin to a woman’s looks. And what would I do if she were flung back on my hands in this disgraceful fashion!”
“You want me to go to London?”
“Godfrey, you must go. You must see her, and him, too.”
“I was thinking it would be enough to see him. But perhaps you’re right.”
“She is clean mad,” cried Edna, with sudden fury against her daughter. “She doesn’t appreciate the peril of her position. One minute she’s all for groveling. The next she talks like an idiot about her rank and power. Oh, she is a fool—a fool! I always knew she was—though I wouldn’t admit it to myself. You never will know what a time I’ve had training her to hide it enough to make a pleasing appearance. She is a brainless fool.”
“A fool, but not brainless,” said I. “Her education made her a fool and paralyzed her brain. You see, she didn’t have the advantages you had in your early training. In your early days you had the chance to learn something—the useful things that have saved you from the consequences of such folly as you’ve taught her.”
“What nonsense!” cried Edna in disgust. “But we mustn’t quarrel. I’m agitated enough already. You will go to London?”
“Yes,” said I, after reflecting. “I’ll go.”
“When?”
“To-morrow.”
“And I’ll go with you.”
“No,” said I firmly. “Either I manage this affair alone or I have nothing to do with it.”
“But, Godfrey, there are so many