NOT a shadow of doubt lingered. She was gone; I was free. Her manner had been the manner of finality. Her reluctance and her sadness were little more than the convention of mourning which human beings feel compelled to display on mortuary occasions of all kinds. Beneath the crepe I saw a not discontented resignation, a conviction of the truth that life together was impossible for her and me.
My male readers—those who have a thinking apparatus and use it—will probably wonder, as I did then, that she had overlooked certain obvious advantages to be gained through refusing to divorce me. She knew me well enough to be certain I would not compel her to go to America and live with me, but if she insisted would let her stay in Europe or wander where she pleased. This would have given her all the advantages of widowhood. Free, with plenty of money, she could have led her own life, without ever having to consult the conveniences and caprices of a husband. It seemed to me singularly stupid of her to resign this signal advantage, to tie herself to a husband she could not ignore, a husband she already saw would bore her, as poseurs invariably bore each other—to tie herself to such a man with no compensating advantage but a title. Indeed, so stupid did it seem that from the moment she began to waver about confirming the divorce I all but lost hope of freedom.
My women readers will understand her. A man cannot appreciate how hampered a woman of the lady class is without a legitimate male attachment of some kind—a husband, a brother, or a father in constant attendance, ready for use the instant the need arises. Our whole society is built upon the theory that woman is the dependent, the appendage of man. Freedom is impossible for a woman, except at a price almost no woman voluntarily pays. To have any measure of freedom a woman must bind herself to some man, and the bondage has to be cruel indeed not to be preferable to the so-called freedom of the unattached female. Thus it was not altogether snobbishness, it may not have been chiefly snobbishness, that moved Edna to transfer herself to a husband who would be a more or less unpleasant actuality. She had to have a man. She wished to live abroad and to be in fashionable society. She chose shrewdly. I imagine, from several things she said, that she had measured Frascatoni with calm impartiality, had discovered many serious disadvantages in him as husband to a woman of her fondness for her own way. But estimating the disadvantages at their worst, the balance still tipped heavily toward him.
I am glad I was not born a woman. I pity the women of our day, bred and educated in the tastes of men, yet compelled to be dependents, and certain of defeat in a finish contest with man.
Though there was now no reasonable doubt of Edna’s having the decree of divorce made final, I, through overcaution or oversensitiveness as to Mary Kirkwood’s rights, or what motive you please, would not let myself leave London until a cable from my lawyers in New York informed me that the decree had been entered and that I was legally free. The newspapers had given much space to our affairs. It was assumed that I had come abroad “to make last desperate efforts to win back the beautiful and charming wife, the favorite of fashionable European society.” Stories had been published, giving in minute detail accounts of the bribes I had offered. And when the final decree was entered, my chagrin and fury were pictured vividly.
I did nothing to discredit this, but, on the contrary, helped along the campaign for the preservation of the literary and journalistic fiction that the American woman is a kind of divine autocrat over mankind. If I had been so vain and so ungallant as to try to make the public see the truth I should have failed. You can discredit the truth to the foolish race of men; but you cannot discredit, nor even cast a shade of doubt upon, a generally accepted fiction of sentimentality. And of all the sentimental fictions that everyone slobbers over, but no one in his heart believes with the living and only valid faith of works, the fictions about woman are the most sacred. Further, how many men are there who believe that a man could get enough of a physically lovely woman, however trying she might be? Once in a while in a novel—not often, but once in a while—there are scenes portraying with some approach to fidelity what happens between a woman and a man who is of the sort that is attractive to women. Invariably such scenes are derided or denounced by the critics. Why? For an obvious reason. A critic is, to put it charitably, an average man. He has no insight; he must rely for his knowledge of life solely upon experience. Now what is the average man’s experience of women? He treats them in a certain dull, conventional way, and they treat him—as he invites and compels. So when he reads how women act toward a man who does not leave them cold or indifferent, who rouses in them some sensation other than wonder whether they would be able to stomach him as a husband, the critic scoffs and waxes wroth. The very idea that women might be less reserved, less queenly, less grudgingly gracious than woman has ever been to him sends shooting pains through his vanity—and toothache and sciatica are mild compared with the torturings of a pain-shotten vanity.
Edna scored heavily in the newspapers. You would never have suspected it was her late husband’s money that had given her everything, that had made her throughout; for, what had she, and what was she, except a product of lavishly squandered money? Think about that carefully, gentle reader, before you damn me and commiserate her as in these pages a victim of my venomous malice.... She was the newspaper heroine of the hour. If she had been content with this— But I shall not anticipate.
My cable message from New York came at five o’clock. At half-past six, accompanied only by my valet, I was journeying toward Switzerland.
Mrs. Kirkwood, I had learned from her brother, was at Territet, at the Hotel Excelsior, with the Horace Armstrongs. At four the following afternoon I descended at Montreux from the Milan express; at five, with travel stains removed, I was in the garden of the Excelsior having tea with Mrs. Armstrong and listening to her raptures over the Savoy Alps. Doubtless you know Mrs. Armstrong’s (Neva Carlin’s) work. Her portrait of Edna is famous, is one of the best examples I know of inside-outness. Edna does not like it, perhaps for that reason.
Mary and Horace Armstrong had gone up to Caux. “But,” said Neva, “they’ll surely be back in a few minutes. Count von Tilzer-Borgfeldt is coming at half-past five.”
I instantly recognized that name as the one Edna gave in telling me that Mary had gone shopping for a title and had invested. I had thought Edna’s jeer produced no effect upon me. I might have known better. My nature has, inevitably, been made morbidly suspicious by my business career. Also, I had found out Robert Armitage as a well-veneered snob, and this could not but have put me in an attitude of watchfulness toward his sister, so like him mentally. Also my investigations of that most important phenomenon of American life, the American woman, had compelled me to the conclusion that the disease of snobbishness had infected them all, with a few doubtful exceptions. So, without my realizing it, my mind was prepared to believe that Mary Kirkwood was like the rest. When Neva Armstrong pronounced the name Edna had given, there shot through me that horrible feeling of insufferable heat and insufferable cold which it would be useless to attempt to describe; for those who have felt it will understand at once, and those who have not could not be made to understand. And then I recalled Hartley Beechman’s jeer, “She’s laughing at us both.” But my voice was natural as I said:
“Tilzer-Borgfeldt. That’s the chap she’s engaged to just now, isn’t it?”
Mrs. Armstrong, who is a loyal friend, flushed angrily. “Mary isn’t that sort, and you know it, for you’ve known her a long time.”
“Then she’s not engaged to him?” said I.
“Yes, she is,” replied Neva. “And if you knew him, you’d not wonder at it. I don’t like foreigners, but if I weren’t bespoke I think I’d have to take Tilzer-Borgfeldt if he asked me.”
“No doubt it’s a first-class title,” said I.
“You know perfectly well, Godfrey Loring, that I don’t mean the title.” She happened to glance toward the entrance to the garden. “Here he comes now. You’ll judge for yourself.”
Advancing toward us was a big, happy blond man of the pattern from which nine out of ten German upper-class men are cut. He had the expression of simple, unaffected joy natural to a big, healthy, happy blond youth looking forward to seeing his best girl. He had youth, good looks, unusual personal magnetism—and you will imagine what effect this produced upon my mood. I could not deny that Neva was right. Without a title this man would have all the chances in his favor when he went courting. He had not a trace of aristocratic futility.
You would have admired the frank cordiality of my greeting. Instead of sitting down again I glanced at my watch and said:
“Well, my time’s up. I shall have to go without seeing Horace and Mary.”
“But you’ll come to dinner?” said Mrs. Armstrong.
“I’m taking the first express back to Paris,” said I. “I found a telegram waiting for me at my hotel.”
“Mary will be disappointed,” said Neva. “You’ll give Mrs. Loring my best?”
I remembered that the English papers, with the news doubtless in it, would not reach Territet until late that evening or the following morning. But I could not well tell her what had occurred. “Good-by,” said I, shaking hands. “Tell them how sorry I was. I may see you all in Paris.”
And away I went, with not an outward sign of my internal state. In less than half an hour I was in the Paris express.
I stopped at Paris a month. A letter came from her—a bulky letter. I tossed it unopened into the fire. A week, and a second letter came. It was not so bulky. I flung it unopened into the fire. About two weeks, and a third letter came. I got Rossiter to address an envelope to her. I inclosed her unopened letter in the envelope and mailed it. I was giving myself an exquisite pleasure, the keener because it was seasoned with exquisite pain.
All this time I had been amusing my idle days in the usual fashion. My readers who lead quiet lives—the women who sit thinking what they would do if only they were men—the men who slip away occasionally for a scampish holiday, and return to their sober routine with the cheering impression that they have been most fearfully and wonderfully devilish—those women and those men will regret that I refrain from details of how I amused myself. But to my notion I have said enough when I have said “in the usual fashion.” It passed the time as probably nothing else in the circumstances would have passed such tenacious hours, every one lingering to be counted. But I confess I have never been virtuous enough to be especially raptured by so-called vice. No doubt those who divide actions into good and bad, using the good for steady diet and the bad for dessert, have advantages in enjoyment over those who simply regard things as interesting and uninteresting. For, curiously enough, on that latter basis of division practically all the things esteemed by most human beings as the delightful but devilish dessert of life fall into the class of more or less uninteresting. But for the stimulus of the notion that he is doing something courageously, daringly wicked, I doubt if any but a dull fellow would perpetrate vice enough to lift the most easily scandalized hands in the world. The trouble with vice is that it is so tiresome—and so bad for the health. And most of it is so vulgar. Drinking to excess and gambling, for instance. I have indulged in both at times, when hard pressed for ways to pass the time or when in those stupid moods of obstinate unreasonableness in which a man takes a savage pleasure in disgusting himself with himself. Drinking has a certain coarse appeal to the imagination—coarse and slight but definite. But gambling is sheer vulgarity. I have been called money-mad, because I have made money, finding it easy and occupying to attend to business. Yet never have I cared about money sufficiently to take the faintest interest in the gaming table. Gambling—all forms of it—is for those sordid creatures who love money, and who have no intelligent appreciation of its value. Gambling—all the vices, for that matter—is essentially aristocratic; for, as I believe I have explained, aristocracy analyzes into the quintessence of vulgarity. The two incompetent classes—the topmost and the bottommost—are steeped in vice, for the same reason of their incompetence to think or to act.
A fourth letter, the bulkiest of all, came from Mary Kirkwood. A few hours before it was delivered a telegram came from her:
“A letter is on the way. Godfrey, I beg you to read it. I love you.”
I tore up the telegram, sent back the letter without opening it. You are denouncing me as inhuman, gentle reader. Perhaps you are right. But permit me to point out to you that, if I had not in my composition a vein of iron, I should never have risen from the mosquito-haunted flats of the Passaic. Also, gentle reader, if I had been a man of the ordinary sort would Mary Kirkwood have been sufficiently interested in me to send those letters and that telegram?
A day or so after the return of her last letter I was seized—I can’t say why—with a longing to see my father and mother and sister, on that lonely farm out in New Jersey. I had never felt that desire since I first left home, but had made my few and brief visits out of a sense of duty—no, of shame. The thought of them gave me no sensation of horror, as it gave Edna and her daughter. When I remembered them it was simply as one remembers any random fact. They did not understand me; and in them there was nothing to understand. We had few subjects for conversation, and those not wildly interesting and soon exhausted. You will smile when I say I loved them. Yet it is the truth. We do not always love those we like to be with; we do not always like to be with those we love.
There was nothing to detain me in Paris. The hours hung like guests who do not know how to take leave. So not many days elapsed between my seizure and my appearance at the spacious and comfortable stone farmhouse where the four old people were awaiting in a semi-comatose or dozing state what they firmly believed was a summons to a higher life. Their belief in it, like that of most religious people, was not strong enough to make them impatient to get it; still they believed, and found the belief a satisfactory way of employing such small part of their minds as remained awake.
I had not seen them or their place in several years, so I was astonished by the changes. My sister Polly—a homely old maid—and Edna’s father had some glimmerings of enterprise. Polly took in and read several magazines, and from them gathered odds and ends of up-to-date ideas about dress, about furnishing, about gardens. With the valuable assistance of old Weeping Willie she had wrought a most creditable transformation. The old people now “looked like something,” as the saying is. And the place had a real smartness—both within and without.
Polly—she was about eight years my senior, but looked old enough to be my mother—Polly watched me anxiously as I strolled and nosed about. My delight filled her with delight.
“You’re not so ashamed of us, perhaps?” said she.
“I never have been,” replied I. Nor did I put an accent on the personal pronoun that would have been a hint about somebody else’s feelings.
“Well—you ought to have been,” said she. “We were mighty far behind even the tail of the procession.”
“I’ll admit I like this better than the way we used to live in Passaic. Polly, you’ve got the best there is going. All the rest—all the luxury and other nonsense—is nothing but a source of unhappiness.”
She did not answer. I noted a touching sadness in her expression.
“You don’t agree with me?” said I.
“Yes, I do,” replied she emphatically. “I wasn’t thinking of that.”
“What have you got to be unhappy about?”
“You think I’m ungrateful to you,” said she, with quick sensitiveness. “But I’m not, Godfrey—indeed I’m not.”
“Ungrateful?” I laughed. “Don’t talk nonsense.”
“You’ve done all you could—all anyone could. And in a way I am happy. But——”
“Yes?” I urged, as she hesitated.
“Well, I’ve found out—looking back over my life—I’ve found out that I— It seems to me I’ve got all the tools of happiness, but nothing to work on. I keep thinking, ‘How happy I could be if I only had something to work on!’”
I was silent. A shadow crept out of a black corner of my heart and cast a somberness and a chill over me.
“You understand?” said she.
I nodded.
“I thought you would,” she went on. “Godfrey, I’ve often felt sorry for you—sorrier than I do for myself.” She laid her hand on my arm. “But you’re a man—a handsome, attractive, young man. You’ll have only yourself to blame if you waste your life as mine’s been wasted.”
“You don’t realize how lucky you’ve been,” said I, with a bitterness that surprised me. “You’ve at least escaped marriage.”
“I wish to God I hadn’t,” cried she with an energy that startled me. There was a fierce look of pain in her eyes. “I thought you understood. But I see you don’t.”
“What do you mean, Polly Ann?” said I gently.
“The real unhappiness isn’t an unhappy marriage,” replied she. “It’s being not married at all—not having any children. You know what I am—an old maid. You think that means the same thing as old bachelor. Well, it don’t.”
“An old bachelor—nine times out of ten that means simply an old, selfish, comfortable man. But an old maid— The nature of woman’s different from the nature of man. A woman’s got to have a home—her home—her nest, with her children in it. And I’m an old maid. If I’d been a man—” She turned on me. “I’m ugly, ain’t I? You know I am. I know it. Dress me up in men’s clothes and I’d be a good-looking person—as a man. But as a woman I’m ugly. If I’d have been a man I could have got a mighty nice, mighty nice-looking wife—one that’d have been grateful to me for taking her and would have cared for me. But as a woman I couldn’t get a husband.”
“You can get a very good one,” said I. “Money—what would have bought you a wife as a man—what buys most men their wives—will buy you a husband. And he’ll be grateful and loving, so long as you manage the purse strings well—just as most wives are loving and grateful if their husbands don’t treat them too indulgently.”
“It’s different, and you know it is,” retorted she. “Custom has made it different. And I’m ugly—and that’s fatal in a woman.”
“Charm will beat beauty every time,” said I.
“I’ve got no charm—none on the outside. And that’s where a woman’s charm has to be. No, I’ve thought out my case. It’s hopeless. I’m a born old maid. No man ever asked me to marry him. No man ever said a word of love to me. Do you know what that means, Godfrey?”
I was silent. A choke in my throat made speech impossible.
“Never a word of love,” she went on monotonously. “Yet I don’t suppose any woman ever wanted to hear it more. And no children. Yet I know no woman ever wanted them more. No, not adopted children—but my own flesh and blood. I’ve heard women complain of the burden of bearing a child. It made me wild to listen to them—the fools—the selfish fools! What wouldn’t I have given to have felt a child within me. Does it scandalize you to hear me talk like this?”
“No,” said I. “No.”
“It’s a wonder,” said she, with a grim smile. She was quieting down, was hiding the heart from which she had on impulse snatched the veil, was ashamed of her outburst. “A woman can talk about having a cancer, or a tumor, or any frightful disease inside her, and nobody’s modesty is shocked. But if she speaks of having a child within her—a wonderful, living human being—a lovely baby—why, it’s immodest!” She gave a scornful laugh. “What a world! What a world!”
I looked at her and marveled. What a world, indeed!—where this was one of the sort of relatives of whom pushing arrived people were ashamed!
I think I forced myself to stay three days with them. I cannot recall; perhaps I left the second day. However that may be, I have the sense of a long, a very long visit. To one who has the city habit the country is oppressively deliberate even when it is interesting. It makes you realize how there is room, and to spare, for sixty minutes in an hour, for sixty seconds in each minute. The city entertains; the country compels you to seek entertainment, to make entertainment. People whose mentality tapers away from mediocrity grow old and dull rapidly in the country as soon as childhood’s torrential life begins to slacken. For men of thought the country ought to be ideal, I should say, once they formed its habit and lost the city habit of waiting in confident expectation of being amused. But for men of action like myself, for men whose whole life is dealing directly with their fellow men, to acquire the country habit is a matter of years, of a complete revolution.
I brought a sore and a sick heart to the country. I took back to town one that was on the way toward the normal. And I owed the improvement not to the country directly, but to my sister. Polly Ann had reminded me of the futility of graveyard mooning, of its egotism and hypocrisy. She had reminded me that only the fool walks backward through life. I believed I had been guilty of the folly of blowing a bubble of delusion, pretending to myself that it was no bubble, but permanent, substantial, real. The bubble had burst, as bubbles must—had burst with a mocking and irritating dash of cold spray straight into my face. Well!—the sensible thing to do, the only thing to do, was to laugh and blow no more bubbles.
I went back to finance; I busied myself to the uttermost of my capacity for work. But I could not uproot the idea Mary Kirkwood had set growing in my mind. I saw ever more clearly that my sister was eternally right. Some men might be successful bachelors. I could be fairly successful at that selfish and solitary profession for a few years, perhaps for ten or fifteen years longer. But I knew with the clearness of a vision trained to search the horizon of the future that the feeling of loneliness, of complete futility which already shadowed me, would become a black pall. I must have companionship; and to companionship there is but the one way—the way of wife and children. A poor, an uncertain way; nevertheless the only way.
You have, perhaps, observed the marriages of the rich. You have noted that every rich man and every rich woman is surrounded by a smaller or larger army of satellites—persons nominally their social equals, often distinctly their mental superiors, salaried persons, wearers of cast-off clothing, eaters of luncheons and dinners, permanent free lodgers, constant or occasional pensioners more or less disguised. Family life fails with the rich as it fails with the well off, or with the poor. But while other classes revert to the herd life, the life of clubs, saloons, teas, receptions, the rich take up the parasite-beset life, each rich person aloof with his or her particular circle of flatterers, attendants, coat-holders, joke-makers, and boot-lickers.
Now it so happened that for me there could be no enduring of this standing apart in the meadow, switching my tail while parasites bit and tickled, buzzed and burrowed. Riches, like any other heavy and constantly growing responsibility, usually rob a man of his sense of humor and turn his thoughts in upon himself and make him a ridiculous ass of an egotist. They had not had that effect upon me. I can give no reason; I simply state the fact. So, with my sense of humor active, and my sense of proportion fairly well balanced, I could not give myself up to the dreary life custom assigns to the rich. I retained the normal human instincts.
I had hoped to satisfy them to the uttermost with the aid of Mary Kirkwood. That hope had fallen dead. I must search on—not for the best conceivable, but for the best possible.
You are not surprised at my lack of sentiment, gentle reader. By this time, I am sure, I could not surprise you with any exhibition of that or other depravity. But it confirms your conviction of my utter sordidness. So? Then you imagine, do you, that there are many love marriages in the world, leaving out of the count those in novels and in the twaddling gossip men and women repeat as the true heart stories of this and that person? Yes, I should say your intelligence was about rudimentary enough to give you such a false notion of life as it is lived. Marriages of passion there are a-plenty. Rarely, indeed, does a man become bill-payer to a woman for life—not to speak of the insurance—without having been more or less agitated by her physical charms; and usually the woman, eager to be married, whips up for him a return feeling that looks well, convinces the man and herself, and makes you, gentle reader, sigh and wipe your sloppy eyes. But love-marriage—that’s a wholly different matter. I should say it almost never occurs. Where love, a sentiment of slow and reluctant growth, does happen occasionally to come afterwards, because the two are really congenial, really mated—where love does come afterwards, it did not exist when the wedding bells rang. And I doubt not that love has grown as often, if not oftener, where the motives that led to the marriage were practical and even sordid than where they were the bright, swift fading, and in death most foul-smelling, flowers of passion.
I was willing to buy a wife, if I could find a woman who promised to wear well, to improve on acquaintance, or, at least, not to deteriorate. And, beyond question, with my money I could have taken my pick. Almost any girl anywhere, engaged or unengaged, would have fallen in love with me as soon as she discovered my charms—of person and of purse. Yes, would have fallen in love, gentle reader. Don’t you know that a nice, pure girl always makes herself, or lets herself, fall in love, before she gives herself? And don’t you know that, except falling out of love—out of that kind of love—there’s nothing easier, especially for an inexperienced girl, than falling in love—in that kind of love?
But where was I to find a woman with enough solid quality to give me a reasonable hope that she would aid me in my quest for family happiness?
Do not denounce me, gentle reader. Epithet and hiss are not reply. Answer my question.
You say there are millions of such girls. Yes? But where?
You say there are millions of pure, sweet, charming girls, intelligent and domestic. Yes. No doubt. But how long would they remain so if tempted by wealth, by the example of all the money-mad, luxury-mad, society-mad women about them?
Mind you, I did not want a stupid rotter, a cow, a sitter and lounger and taker on of fat and slougher off of intelligence. I did not want the lazy slattern who poses as domestic, who is fond of home in exactly the same way that a pig is fond of an alley wallow.
You laugh at me. You say: “He is a conceited fool!—to think that he could attract and absorb an intelligent woman with a complex woman’s soul!” Not so, gentle reader. I did not wish to attract and to absorb her. As for the “complex woman’s soul,” the less I saw or heard of it, the better pleased I’d be. I simply wanted a woman who would join me in being attracted by and absorbed in family life.
You are still smiling mockingly. But let me tell you a few secrets of wisdom and happiness. First—Friendship is divine, but intimacy is the devil himself—unless it is the intimacy of the family. Second—To love your neighbor as yourself, he must be and must remain your neighbor, that is to say, within hail, but not within touch. Third—Husband, wife, and children are the only natural intimates—intimate because they have the bond of common interest. The family that looks abroad for intimates has ceased to be a family. Finally—A man who has his wife and children for intimates has neither need nor time for other intimates; and unless a man’s wife and children are his intimates, he has, in fact, no wife and no children. Let me add, for the benefit of—perhaps of you and your husband, gentle reader—that the only career worth having is built upon and with efficient work; careers made with friendships, gaddings, pulls, and the like would better be left unmade.
You are smiling still, in your smug, supercilious fashion—smiling at what you promptly call old-fashioned trite truisms. I am not sure that, after they have been thought about a while, they would seem old-fashioned or stale. Rather, I flatter myself, they are the statement of a new philosophy of life. For the old theory with which you are confusing these truths was that the family is the social unit. In fact, it is not; the only social units are individuals—capable individuals. My theory, or rather my philosophy—for it is more than a theory—my philosophy is that the family is the unit of happiness. Society can—and does—get along fairly well with little or no happiness. But happiness is an excellent thing, nevertheless. And I wanted it.
Now, perhaps, you see why I was not looking forward with any exuberance of optimism to finding the woman whom I needed and wanted, and who needed and wanted me. Prompted by my experiences and guided somewhat by my shrewd and cynical friend Bob Armitage, I had been giving no small amount of spare time to observing and thinking about the American woman. And while I admired that charming lady and found her an amusing companion for an occasional leisure hour, I saw that she was not to be taken seriously by a serious person. She knew how to look well, how to make a good “front,” how to get perhaps a hundred dollars worth of pleasing surface results by squandering a thousand or two thousand dollars. As a