AMONG my acquaintances, both in and out of fashionable society, there were not a few jealous husbands. I knew one man who, in the evening, made his wife account for every moment of the day, and tell him in detail how she was going to spend the following day, and during business hours he called up irregularly on the telephone. He was not content with the effective system of espionage which a retinue of servants automatically establishes. Another man—to give a typical instance of each of the two types—hired detectives from time to time to watch his wife living abroad “for her health and to educate her children.” In a decently ordered society this sort of jealousy is rare. Only where the women are luxuriously supported parasites and the men are attaching but the one value to the women—the only value they possess for them—only there do you find this defiling jealousy the rule instead of the exception. Naturally, if the woman is mere property the man guards her as he guards the rest of his material possessions; and the woman who consents to be mere property probably needs guarding if she has qualities of desirability discoverable by other eyes than those of her overprizing owner.
This jealousy was in the air of the offices and clubs I frequented. But it had somehow or other never infected me. Was I occupied too deeply with other matters? Was I indifferent? Did my own disinclination to dalliance make me slow to appreciate the large part dalliance now plays in American life? I do not know why I was free from jealousy. I only know that never once had my mind been shadowed by a sinister thought as to what my wife might be about, far away and free. Possibly my knowledge of her absorption in social ambition kept me quiet. Certainly a woman whose whole mind and heart are set upon social climbing is about the last person a seeker for dalliance would invest.
I had never heard a word or a hint of a scandal about her—for the best of reasons; she did nothing to cause that kind of talk. But, how curious is coincidence! On the very evening of the day of our divorce discussion Edna had her first experience of scandal, and I immediately knew of it. After leaving her I went to the Federal Club, where I often took a hand in a rather stiff game of bridge before dinner. I drifted into the reading room, glanced idly at the long row of current magazines. In full view lay the weekly purveyor of social news, a paper I had not looked at half a dozen times in my life, and then only because some one had asked me to read a particular paragraph. The week’s issue of this scandal monger had just come in. I threw back the cover, let my glance drop upon the page. I was hardly aware that I was reading—for my thoughts were elsewhere—when I became vaguely conscious that the print had some relation to me. I reread it; it was a veiled attack upon Edna. All unsuspected by her husband—so the story ran—she had come to America to divorce him that she might marry a German nobleman of almost royal rank. A voice close beside me said:
“What is it amuses you so in that dirty sheet?”
It was Armitage. I started guiltily. Then my common sense asserted itself, and I pointed to the paragraph. When he had read it I said:
“Who’s the German? I’m not well enough up on the nobility to be able to guess, though it’s probably plainly told.”
“The Count von Biestrich,” said he.
“Thanks,” said I, no wiser than before, and we went up to play bridge.
A year or so before I might possibly have talked freely with Armitage; but the day of our closest intimacy had passed. He was still my intimate friend; I was his—with several large reservations. Why? Chiefly because when he passed the critical age his mind took the turn for the worse. At forty to forty-five a man begins to reap his harvest. Armitage had many and varied interests, but the one that affected his nature most profoundly was women. He mocked at them; he was always inventing or relating stories about them of the more or less gamey sort. But, somewhat like his pretensions of disdain for birth and fashion, his wordy scorn of women concealed a slavish weakness for them. After forty this began to disclose itself in his features. Their handsome intellectuality began to be marred by a sensual heaviness; and presently his wit degenerated toward a repellent coarseness. It takes delicate juggling to make filth attractive. After forty a man does well to be careful how he attempts it; for, after forty, the hand loses its lightness. I rather avoided Armitage; not that I was squeamish, but my sense of humor somehow rarely has responded to rude rootings and pawings in the garbage barrel.
About an hour after dinner Edna called me to the telephone and asked me to come to her. I found her in high excitement, her color vivid, her manner nervous beyond its natural vivacity even as now expanded upon the best Continental models. “I got rid of my guests,” said she, “and sent for you as soon as I could. Have you heard?”
“About von Biestrich?” said I.
“It is hideous!—hideous!” she cried. “I who have kept my name unsullied—I who have——”
“I’m sure of that,” I interrupted. “I’m dead tired and, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go home.”
She caught me by the arm. “Godfrey, you think this was what I had in mind. I swear to you——”
“I’m sure you’ve been all that a wife is expected to be,” said I, in my usual manner of good-natured raillery. “And I’m also sure you would wait until you were free, and would deliberate very carefully before deciding——”
“Godfrey, how can you!” cried she, in her most exaggerated tone for outraged spirituality. “Have you no heart? Have you no respect for me—your wife, the mother of your daughter?”
“Have I not said I did not suspect you?” remonstrated I. “Why so agitated, my dear? Do you wish to make me begin to suspect?”
She shrank and began to cool down. “I’ve never had such an experience before,” she apologized. “I don’t know how to take it.”
“It’s nothing—nothing,” I declared.
“I give you my word of honor that if I were free I should not consider marrying that German.”
“I believe you.” I put out a friendly hand. “Good night.”
“This ends all talk of divorce,” said she.
I dropped my hand. “I don’t see that the situation is changed in the least.”
“That’s because you are not a woman,” replied she. “You can’t appreciate how I feel.”
“You wished to be free before this paragraph appeared. You still wish to be free.”
“Oh, how can you be so insensible!” cried she, all unstrung again and, I could not but see, genuinely so. “I never could face the scandal of a divorce. I didn’t realize. It would kill me. How did Hilda face it?—and all these other nice women? I should hide and never show my face again.”
She was agitating me so wildly that I felt I could not much longer conceal it. “I must go,” said I, pretending to yawn. “Sleep on it. Perhaps to-morrow you’ll feel differently.”
She tried to detain me, but I broke away and fled. To be almost free and then to have freedom snatched away! Not out of reach, but where it can be reached easily if one will simply stretch out his hand somewhat ruthlessly. By no means so ruthless as my wife had been a score of times in gaining her ends without regard to me. Why not be ruthless? Had she not been ruthless? Had she not given me the right to compel her to free me? More, did she not herself wish to be free? And was she not now restrained, not by consideration for me, not by any decent instinct whatsoever, but solely by a snobbish groveling fear of public opinion?—a senseless fear, too?
We are constantly criticising people—by way of patting ourselves on the back—because they take what they want regardless of the feelings of others. A form of self-righteousness as shameless as common; for we happen not to fancy the things they show themselves inconsiderate and swinish about. But—when we really do want a thing—what then? How industrious we become in appeal to conscience—that most perfect of courtiers—to show us how just and right it is that we should have this thing we want! Having set myself drastically to cure self-fooling years before—when first I realized how dangerous it is and how common a cause of failure and ruin—I was unable to conceal from myself the cruelty of forcing Edna to divorce me. My conscience—as sly a sophist and flatterer as yours, gentle reader—my conscience could not convince me. Cruel things I had never done—that is, not directly. Of course I, like all men of action, had again and again been compelled to do them indirectly. But not by my own direct act had I ever made any human being suffer. I would not begin now. I would not commit the stupidity of trying to found my happiness upon the wretchedness of another. I could feel the withering scorn that would blaze in Mary Kirkwood’s honest eyes if I should go to her after having freed myself by force, and she should find it out. I see your sarcastic smile, gentle reader, as I thus ingenuously confess the selfish fear that was the hidden spring of my virtue. Your smile betrays your shallowness. If you knew human nature you would know that all real motives are selfish. The differences of character in human beings are not differences between selfish and unselfish. They are differences between petty, short-sighted selfishness and broad, far-sighted selfishness.
When I saw Edna again she was still wavering. She had come to America with her mind made up for divorce, if I could by hook or by crook be induced to consent. She had been frightened by this attack upon her—frightened as only those who live a life of complete self-deception can be frightened by a sudden and public holding up of the mirror to reflect their naked selves. She was, of course, easily able to convince herself that her own motives in seeking a divorce were fine and high and self-martyring. But she could now see no way to convince others. In the public estimation she saw she would be classed with Lady Blankenship, with Mrs. Ramsdell, with all the other women who had got divorces to better themselves socially or financially.
Instead of dying out the scandal grew. The daily papers took up the hints in the society journal’s veiled paragraph, had long cabled accounts of Count von Biestrich, of his attentions to Edna, told when and where they had been guests at the same châteaus and country houses, made it appear that they had been no better than they should be for nearly a year. Edna was prostrated.
“There’s only one answer to these attacks,” she said to me. “You must give up your apartment and move to this hotel. We must open the house and live in it together and entertain together.”
I was not unprepared. I had threshed out the whole matter with myself, had made my choice between the two courses open to me—or, rather, had forced myself to see the truth that there was in decency but the one course. “Very well,” said I to her—and that was all.
I moved to the Plaza the same day; I was seen constantly with her; I did my best to show the world that all was serene between us. In fact, if you saw us during those scandal-clouded days you may have thought us a couple on a honeymoon. Behind the scenes we quarreled—about anything, about everything, about nothing—as people do when forced to play in public the farce of billing and cooing lovers. Especially if one of them has not the faintest glimmer of a sense of humor. But in public——
The newspapers soon had to drop their campaign of slander by insinuation.
So it came to pass that by the opening of the season Edna and I were installed in the big house, decidedly improved now thanks to the collecting both of ideas and of things she had done abroad. And we were giving all kinds of parties, with me taking part to an extent I should have laughed at beforehand as impossible. She had become so irritating to me that the mere sight of her put me in a rage. Have you ever been forced into intimate daily contact with a nature that is thoroughly artificial—after you have discovered its artificiality, its lack of sincerity, its vanity and pretense and sex trickery? There is, as we all know, in everyone of us a streak of artificiality, of self-consciousness, a fondness for posing to seem better than we are. But somewhere beneath the pose there is usually a core of sincerity, a genuine individuality, perhaps a poor thing but still a real thing. It may be there was this reality somewhere in Edna. I can only say that I was never granted a sight of it. And I rather suspect that she, like most of the fashion-rotted women and men, had lost by a process of atrophy through suppression and disuse the last fragment of reality. Had Gabriel’s trumpet sounded and the great light from the Throne revealed the secrets of all hearts, it would have penetrated in her to nothing but posing within posing.
I shall get no sympathy from man or woman—or fellow-beast—after talking thus of a woman and a lady. It is the convention to speak gallant lies to and about women—and to treat them as if they were beneath contempt. So my habit of treating them well and speaking the truth about them will be condemned and denounced with the triple curse. Well—I shall try to live through it.
Except in occasional outbursts when her rude candor toward me would anger me into retort in kind, I concealed my feeling about her. I knew it was just, yet I was ashamed of it. Our quarrels were all surface affairs—outbursts of irritation—the blowing off of surplus steam, not the bursting of the boiler and the wrecking of the machinery. If you happen to take into your employ any of the servants we had in those days—Edna’s maids or my valet or any other of the menials so placed that they could spy upon our innermost privacy—I am confident that in return for your adroit, searching questionings you will hear we were no more inharmonious than the usual married couple past the best-foot-foremost stage. I did not swear at her; she did not throw bric-à-brac at me. And once, I remember, when I had a bad headache she stayed home from the opera—on a Monday night, too—to read to me. It is true the new dress in which she had expected to show herself was not ready. But that is a detail for a cynic to linger upon.
Three months of New York, and she was bored to extinction. I had confidently been expecting this. I watched the signs of it with gnawing anxiety, for I was very near to the end of my good behavior. If possible I wished to stay on and help her toward a rational frame of mind—one in which she would see that divorce was the only possible solution of our impossible situation. But I began to fear I should have to give up and fly—to hunt or to inspect western mines and railways. She was bored by the women; they seemed shallow dabblers in culture after the European women. She was offended by their nervousness about their position; it made them seem common in contrast with the Europeans, born swells and impregnably ensconced. She was bored by the men—by their fewness, by the insufferable dullness of those few—all of them feeble imitations of the European type of elegant loafer.
“These men have no subtlety,” she cried. “They have no conversation. When they’re alone with a woman—you should hear them try to flatter. They are as different from the European men as—as——”
“As a fence-painter from an artist,” I suggested.
“Quite that,” said she, and I saw her making a mental note of the comparison for future use—one of her best tricks. “Really, I prefer the business men to them. But one cannot get the business men. What a country, where everyone who has any brains is at work!”
“If you are unhappy here, why not go abroad?” said I amiably. “Margot is always waiting for you.”
“But how can I go abroad?” railed she. “There’ll be another outbreak of scandal. Was ever a woman so wretchedly placed! What shall I do! If I had some one to advise me!”
It was interesting to hear her, determined, self-reliant character though she was, thus confess to the universal weakness of the female sex. Women, not trained to act for themselves, can hardly overcome this fundamental defect. That is why you so often see an apparently, and probably, superior woman weaken and yield where a distinctly ordinary man would be strong and would march ahead. The trouble with Edna was that she had no definite man behind her, spurring her on to action. In all she had done from the beginning of our married life she had felt that she had me to fall back on, should emergency arise—an unconscious dependence, one she would have scornfully denied, but none the less real. In this affair there was no man to fall back on.
I saw this. Yet I refrained from giving her the support she needed and all but asked. Her cry, “If I had some one to advise me,” meant, “If I had some one to give me the courage to act.” I knew what it meant. But eager though I was to be quit of her, I would not give her the thrust toward divorce that would have put into her the courage of anger and of the feeling that she was a martyr to my brutality. Why did I hold myself in check? Candidly, I do not know. I distrust the suggestion that it may have been due to essential goodness of heart. At any rate, I did restrain myself. She—naturally enough—misunderstood; and she proceeded to explain it to the gratifying of her vanity. I saw in her eyes, in her way of treating me, that she thought me her secret adorer, convinced of my unworthiness, of her god-to-mortal superiority; not daring openly to resist her desire to be free from me, but opposing it humbly, silently. I saw that she pitied me. Did this add to my anger? Not in the least. I have a perhaps queer sense of humor. I rather welcomed the chance to get a little amusement out of a situation otherwise dreary and infuriating.
Curiously enough, it was Armitage who came to her rescue—and to mine.
Bob had been in retirement several weeks, having himself rejuvenated by a beauty doctor. You are astonished, gentle reader, perhaps incredulous, that a man of his position—high both socially and financially—should stoop to such triviality—not a woman but a man. And the serious, masculine sort of man he was, I assure you. But you, being a confirmed accepter of the trash written and talked about human nature, do not appreciate what a power physical vanity is in the world. Of course, if you are a man, you know about your own carefully hid physical vanity. But you think it in yourself a virtue, quite natural, not a vanity at all. Bob Armitage was not vain enough to fail to see the beginning of the ravages of time and dissipation. Another man would have looked in the glass and would have seen a reflection ever handsomer as the years went by, would have discovered in the creases and crow’s-feet and lengthening wattles a superb beauty of manly strength of character showing at last in the face. Bob was not that sort of fool. He wished to fascinate the ladies; so, he strove to retain the fair insignia of youth as long as he possibly could. He knew as well as the next man that his wealth had value with the women far beyond any degree of beauty or charm. But like most men he wished to feel that he was at least not a “winner” in spite of his personal self; and his young good looks even helped toward the pleasantest of delusions—that he was loved for himself chiefly.
The beauty doctor did well by him, I must say. He looked ten years younger, would have passed in artificial light for a youth of thirty or thereabouts. He reappeared in his haunts, freshened up mentally, too; for physical content reacts powerfully upon the mind, and while it is true that feeling young helps one to look young, it is truer that looking young compels one to feel young.
With him came a Prince Frascatoni, head of one of the great families of Italy, one of the few that have retained German titles and estates from the days of the Holy Roman Empire. Frascatoni was sufficiently rich for all ordinary purposes, and could therefore pose as a traveler for pleasure with no matrimonial designs. He was, in fact, poor for a grand seigneur and was on the same business in America that has attracted here every other visiting foreigner of rank—except those who come for political purposes, and those who come to shoot in the West. And those classes give our fashionable society as wide a berth as they would its middle-class prototype in their home countries.
The first time I saw Frascatoni—when he and Armitage strolled into the reading room of the Federal Club together—I thought him about the handsomest and, in a certain way, the most distinguished-looking man I had ever seen. He was a black Italian—dark olive skin, coal-black hair, dark-gray eyes that seemed black or brown at a glance. They were weary-looking eyes; they gazed at you with the ineffable dreamy satiric repose of a sphinx who has seen the futile human procession march into the grave for countless centuries. He had a slow sweet smile, a manner made superior by the effacement of every trace of superiority. He had the quiet, leisurely voice of one used to being listened to attentively.
“Loring—the Prince Frascatoni. Prince, I particularly wish you to know my friend Godfrey Loring. Don’t be deceived by his look of the honest simple youth into thinking him either young or unsophisticated.”
The prince gave me his hand. As it had also been my habit ever since I learned the valuable trick merely to give my hand, the gesture was a draw. Neither had trapped the other into making an advance. We talked commonplaces of New York sky line, American energy and business enthusiasm for perhaps half an hour. Then we three and some one else, a professional cultivator of millionaires named Chassory, I believe, played bridge and afterwards dined together. It came out sometime during the evening that Frascatoni had met my wife in Rome and in Paris, and that he knew my son-in-law—not surprising, as the fashionable set is international, and is small enough to be acquainted all round.
Armitage must have told him that my wife and I were not altogether inconsolable if we did not see too much of each other. For, the prince, taking Edna in to dinner a few nights later, laid siege at once. I recall noting how he would talk to her in his quiet, leisurely way until she looked at him; then, how his weary eyes would suddenly light up with interest—not with ardor—nothing so banal as that—but a fleeting gleam of interest that was more flattering than the ardor of another man would have been. As Frascatoni, an unusual type, attracted me, I saved myself from boredom by observing him all evening. And it was highly instructive in the art of winning—whether women or men—to see how he led her on to try to make that fascinating fugitive gleam reappear in his eyes. I afterwards discovered that he accompanied the gleam with a peculiar veiled caress of inflection in his calm, even voice—a trick that doubly reënforced the flattery of the gleam.
“What a charming man Prince Frascatoni is,” said my wife, when our guests were gone.
“Very,” said I. “If I were writing a novel I’d make him the hero—or the villain.”
“He is one of the greatest nobles in Europe.”
“He looks it and acts it,” said I.
“Why, I thought him very simple and natural,” protested she.
“Exactly,” said I. “So many of the nobles I’ve met looked and acted like frauds. They seemed afraid it wouldn’t be known that they were of the aristocracy.”
“You are prejudiced,” said Edna.
“Then why do I size up Frascatoni so well?”
“You happen to like him.”
“But I don’t,” replied I.
“Of course not,” said Edna with sarcasm. “He isn’t in business.”
“Precisely,” I answered. “He couldn’t do anything—build a railroad, run a factory, write a book, paint a picture. He and his kind are simply amateurs at life, and their pretense that they could be professionals if they chose ought to deceive nobody. He probably could ride a horse a little worse than a professional jockey, or handle a foil almost as well as a fencing master, or play on the piano or the violin passably. I don’t admire that sort of people, and I can’t like where I don’t admire.”
Edna yawned and prepared to go up to her own rooms. “I hope he’ll stay a while,” said she. “And I hope he’ll let me see something of him. He’s the first ray of interest I’ve had this winter.”
“You will see something of him,” said I. “He liked you.”
“You think so?” said she, seating herself on the arm of a chair.
“I know it. Unless he finds what he’s looking for, he’ll attach himself to you.”
“What is he looking for?”
“A very rich wife,” said I. “But she must be attractive as well as rich, Armitage tells me. Frascatoni doesn’t need money badly enough to annex a frump. And Armitage says that while Englishmen and Germans and the heiress-hunting sort of French don’t care a rap what the lady looks like, the Italians—of the old families—are rather particular—not exacting, but particular. Unless, of course, the fortune is huge.”
Edna yawned again. That sort of talk either irritated or bored her.
Frascatoni was constantly with her thenceforth—not pointedly or scandalously so; there are discreet ways of doing those things, and of discretion in all its forms the Italian was a supreme master. The game of man and woman had been his especial game from precocious and maddeningly handsome boyhood. He had learned both by being conquered and by conquering. They say—and I believe it—that of all the foreigners a clean Italian nobleman is the most fascinating.
The Hungarian or Russian is a wild, barbaric love-maker, the German a wordy sentimentalist, the Englishman dominates and absorbs, the Frenchman knows how to flatter the most subtly, how to make the woman feel that life with him would be full of interest and charm. But the right sort of Italian combines the best of all these qualities, and adds to them the allure of the unfathomably mysterious. He constantly satisfies yet always baffles. He reveals himself, only to disclose in the inner wall of what seemed to be his innermost self a strangely carved door ajar.
My first intimation of what Frascatoni was about came from my wife. Not words, of course, but actions. She abruptly ceased quarreling, rebuking, reproaching, scoffing. She soothed, sympathized, agreed. She became as sweet as she had formerly been. I was puzzled, and waited for light. It came with her next move. She began to talk of going back to Europe, to deplore that scandalmongers would not let her. She began to chaff me on my love of a bachelor’s life, on my dislike of married life. She said with reproachful, yet smiling gentleness, that I made her feel ashamed to stay on.
“Admit,” said she, “that you’d be better pleased if I were in Guinea.”
“You oughtn’t have given me so many years of freedom,” said I.
“You’d have been glad if I had gone on and gotten a divorce,” pursued she.
My drowsing soul startled and listened. “I was willing that you should do as you liked,” said I. “Divorce is a matter of more importance to the woman than to the man—just as marriage is.”
“And it’s a sensible thing, too—isn’t it?”
“Very,” said I.
“Godfrey, would you honestly be willing?”
“I’d not lay a straw in your way.”
“What nonsense we’re talking!” cried she, with a nervous laugh. “And yet there’s no denying that we don’t get on together. I see how trying it is to you to have me about.”
“And you want to be free and living abroad.”
“I wonder how much I’d really mind the scandal,” pursued she. “I don’t care especially about these New York people. And at the worst what harm could they do me?”
“None,” said I.
“They could only talk. How they’d blame me!”
“Behind your back, perhaps,” said I. “Unless they thought I was to blame—which is more likely.”
“You talk of divorce as if it were nothing.”
“It’s merely a means to an end,” said I. “You’ve got only the one life, you know.”
“And I’m no longer so dreadfully young. Though, I heard that Armitage said the other day he would never dream I was over twenty-eight if he didn’t know.”
She laughed with the pleasure we all take in a compliment that is genuine; for she knew as well as did Armitage that she could pass for twenty-eight—and a radiant twenty-eight—even in her least lovely hour.
“No one has youth to waste,” observed I. “In your heart you wish to be free—don’t you?”
“We are not suited to each other, Godfrey,” said she with gentle friendliness.
“There’s not a doubt of that,” said I.
“Why should we spoil each other’s lives? I conceal it from you, but I am so unhappy here.”
“You can’t blame me,” said I. “I’m not detaining you.”
A long silence, then she said: “Suppose I were to consent—” I laughed, she reddened, corrected herself: “Suppose we were to decide to do it—what then?”
“Why—a divorce,” said I.
“Can’t those things be done quietly?”
“Certainly. No publicity until the decree is entered and the papers sealed.”
“Does that mean no scandal beyond just the fact?”
“No scandal at all. Just the fact, and some newspaper comment.”
“And we needn’t be here.”
“Not then.”
“Would it take long?”
I reflected. “Let me see—if you begin action say within a month, the divorce would take— I could have it pushed through in another month or so, and then—by next fall you’d be free.”
“But doesn’t one have to have grounds for divorce, beside not wanting to be married?”
“All that easily arranges itself,” said I.
She lapsed into a deep study, I furtively watching her. I saw an expression of fright, at the daring of her thoughts, gather—fright, yet fascination, too. Said she in