Chapter 12

“I know it will not be in a church with ushers and bridesmaids and a crowd gaping at us. I suppose there is a public side to marriage since the state makes one enter into a formal contract. But that can be done privately. I should as soon think of driving down the Avenue with my arms about your neck as of a public wedding.”

“Thank you,” he laughed. “I was afraid--well, women are usually so fond of--but you’re not usual. Let us see. The minister is absolutely necessary, I suppose. Would one feel married if there were not a minister?”

“I don’t know--I feel--”

She hesitated and blushed but looked straight at him with that expression in her eyes which always made him think of their love as their religion.

“Feel--go on. I want to hear that very, very much.”

“I feel as if I were just as much married to you now as I ever could be.”

“And that is how I have felt ever since the day, when I hardly knew you, when you suddenly came into my life--my real, inner life where no one had been before--and sat down and at once made it look as if it were your home. And the place that had been lonely was lonely no more, and has not been since.”

She put her hand in his and he saw that there were tears in her eyes.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Only that--that I am so happy. It--it frightens me. It seems so like a dream.”

“It’s going to be a long, long dream, isn’t it?” He lifted her hand and kissed it, then put it down in her lap again gently as if he feared a sudden movement might awaken them. “Perhaps it had better be at Mrs. Carnarvon’s house--some morning just before luncheon and we could go quietly away afterward.”

“Yes--and--tell me,” she said, “wouldn’t it be better for us not to go far away--and not to stay long? It seems to me that I most want to begin--begin our life together just as it will be.”

“Are you afraid you wouldn’t know what to do with me if I were idling about all day long?”

“Not exactly that. But I’d rather not take a vacation until we had earned it together.”

“What a beautiful idea! I’ll see what I can do.”

They postponed the wedding until Howard had the “art-department” of the _News-Record_ well established. It was on a bright winter day in the second week of January that they stood up together and were married by the Mayor whom Howard had helped to elect. Only Mr. and Mrs. Carnarvon and Marian’s brother were there. Then the six sat down to luncheon, and at three o’clock Howard and his wife started for Lakewood.

When they arrived a victoria was waiting. As soon as they were seated, Howard said “Home.” The coachman touched his hat and the horses set out at a swift trot. The sun was setting and the dry, still air was saturated with the perfume of the snow-draped pines. Within five minutes the carriage was at a pretty little cottage with wide, glass-enclosed porches. They entered the hall. In the rooms on either side open fires were blazing an ecstatic welcome.

“How do you like ‘home’?” asked Howard.

“I don’t quite understand.”

“You remember your plan of beginning at once. Well--this is the compromise. Stokely has let me have his house here for a month--we may keep it two if we like it. There is a telephone. The office isn’t two hours away by rail. The newspapers are here early. We can combine work and play.”

The manservant had left the room, a sort of library-reception room. Marian was seated in a big chair drawn near the fire. She had thrown back her wraps and was slowly drawing off her gloves. Howard stood at the side of the fire, leaning against the mantel and looking down at her.

“Before you definitely decide to stay--” he paused.

“Yes,” she said, her colour heightening as she slowly lifted her eyes to his, “yes--why this solemn tone?”

“If ever--in the days that come--one never knows what may happen--if ever you should find that you had changed toward me----”

“Yes?”

“I ask you--don’t promise--I never want you to promise me anything--I want you always--at every moment--to be perfectly free. So I just ask that you will let me see it. Then we can talk about it frankly, and we can decide what is best to do.”

“But--suppose--you see I might still not wish to wound you--” she suggested, half teasing, half in earnest.

“It seems to me now that it is impossible that we can ever change. It seems to me--” he sat on the wide arm of her chair, and leaned over until his head touched hers, “that if you were to change it would break my heart. But if you were to change and were to hide it from me, I should find it out some day and----”

“And what----”

“It would be worse--a broken heart, a horror of myself, a--a contempt for you.”

“Whatever comes, I’ll be myself or try to be. Is that what you mean?”

“Exactly.”

“And if you change?”

“But I shall not!”

“Why do you say that so positively?”

“Because--well, there are some things that we wish to believe and half believe, and some things that we believe that we believe, and somethings that we _know_. I _know_ about you--about my love for you.”

“It is strange in a way, isn’t it?” Marian was gently drawing her fingers through his. “This is all so different from what I used to think love would be. I used to picture to myself a man, something like you in appearance, only taller and fair, who would be my master, who would make me do what he wished. I think a woman always dreams of a lover who will be strong enough to be her ruler. And here----”

“So I am not the strong man that you look up to and tremble before? We shall see.”

“Don’t laugh at me. I mean that instead I have a man who makes me rule myself. You make me feel strong, not weak, and proud, not humble. You make me respect myself so.”

“The democracy of love--freedom, equality, fraternity. Don’t you like it?”

“Madame is served.” It was the servant holding back one of the portières, his face expressionless, his eyes down.

* * * * *

Happiness evades description or analysis. We can only say that it reaches its highest point when a man and a woman, intelligent, appreciative, sympathetic, endowed with youth, health and freedom, are devoting their energies solely and determinedly to verifying each a preconceived idea of the other.

“And what do you think of it by this time?”

Marian asked the question in the pause after a twenty minutes’ canter over a straightaway stretch through the pines.

“Of what?” Howard inquired. “I mean of what phase of it. Of you?”

“Well,--yes, of me--after a week.”

“As I expected, only more so--more than I could have imagined. And you, what do you think?”

“It’s very different from what I expected. It seemed to me beforehand that you, even you, would ‘get on my nerves’ just a little at times. I didn’t expect you to appreciate--to feel my moods and to avoid doing--or is it that you simply cannot do--anything jarring. You have amazing instincts or else--” Marian looked at him and smiled mischievously, “or else you have been well educated. Oh, I don’t mind--not in the least. No matter what the cause, I’m glad--glad--glad that you have been taught how to treat a woman.”

“I see you are determined to destroy me,” Howard was in jest, yet in earnest. “I am not used to being flattered. I have never had but one critic, and I have trained him to be severe and uncharitable. Now if you set me up on a high altar and wave the censers and cry ‘glory, glory, glory,’ I’ll lose my head. You have a terrible responsibility. I trust you and I believe everything you say.”

“I’ll begin my duties as critic as soon as we go back to--to earth. But at present I’m going to be selfish. You see it makes me happier to blind myself to your faults.”

They rode in silence for a few moments and then she said:

“I wish I had your feeling about--about democracy. I see your point of view but I can’t take it. I know that you are right but I’m afraid my education is too strong for me. I don’t believe in the people as you do. It’s beautiful when you say it. I like to hear you. And I would not wish you to feel as I do. I’d hate it if you did. It would be stooping, grovelling for you to make distinctions among people. But----”

“Oh, but I do make distinctions among people--so much so that I have never had a friend in my life until you came. I have been on intimate terms with many, but no one except you has been on intimate terms with me. Oh, yes, I’m one of the most exclusive persons in the world.”

“That sounds like autocracy, doesn’t it?” laughed Marian. “But you know I don’t mean that. You think all the others are just as good as you are, only in different ways, whereas I feel that they’re not. You don’t mind vulgarity and underbreeding because you are perfectly indifferent to people so long as they don’t try to jump the fence about your own little private enclosure.”

“Oh, I believe in letting other people alone, and I insist upon being let alone myself. You see you make the whole world revolve about social distinctions. The fact is, isn’t it, that social distinctions are mere trifles--”

“You oughtn’t to waste time arguing with a prejudice. I admit that what I believe and feel is unreasonable. But I can’t change an instinct. To me some people are better than others and are entitled to more, and ought to be looked up to and respected.”

Howard had an answer on the tip of his tongue. His passion for high principle seemed to have been rekindled for the time by his love and in this tranquillising environment. He felt strongly tempted to reason with her unreasonableness, thus practically boasted as a virtue. It seemed so unworthy, this streak of snobbery, so senseless in an American at most three generations away from manual labour. But he had made up his mind long ago to trust to new surroundings, new interests to create in her a spirit more in sympathy with his career.

“She is too intelligent, too high-minded,” he often reassured himself, “to cling to this stupidity of class-feeling. She has heard nothing but class-distinction all her life. Now that she is away from those people, with their petty routine of petty ideas, she will begin to see things as they are.”

So he suppressed the argument and, instead, said in a tone of mock-pity: “Poor fallen queen--to marry beneath her. How she must have fought against the idea of such a plebeian partner.”

“Plebeian--you?” Marian looked at him proudly. “Why, one has only to see you to know.”

“Yes, plebeian. I shall conceal it no longer. My ancestors were plain, ordinary, common, untitled Americans.”

“Why, so were mine,” she laughed.

“Don’t! You distress me. I should never have married you had I known that.”

“I _am_ absurd, am I not?” Marian said gaily. “But let me have my craze for well-mannered people and I’ll leave you your craze for the--the masses.”

They began to canter. Howard was smiling in spite of his irritation; for it always irritated him to have her refuse to see his point in this matter--his distinction between a person as a friend and a person as a sociological unit.

He worked for an hour or two every morning and sometimes in the evening, Marian not far from his desk, so seated that when she turned the page of her book she could lift her eyes and look at him. She read the papers diligently every day for the first week. At the outset she thought she was interested. But she knew so little about newspaper details that she soon had to confess to herself that she was in fact interested in Howard as her husband and lover, and that his career interested her only in a broad, general way. What he talked about, that she understood and liked and was able to discuss. But the newspapers and the news direct suggested nothing to her, bored her.

“Just read that,” he would say, pointing to an item. She would read it and wonder what he meant.

“It seems to me,” she would think, “that it wouldn’t in the least matter if that had not been printed.” Then she would ask evasively but with an assumption of interest, “What are you going to do about it?”

And he would explain the meaning between the lines; the hinted facts that ought to be brought out; the possibilities of getting a piece of news that would attract wide attention. And she would see it, sometimes clearly, usually vaguely; and she would admire him, but resume her unconquerable indifference to news.

She was soon looking at the paper only to read what he wrote; and she often thought how much more interesting he was as a talker than as a writer. “I’ll start right when we get to town,” she was constantly promising herself. “It must, must, must be _our_ work.”

Howard was, as she had told him, acutely sensitive to her moods. He did not formulate it to himself but simply obeyed an instinct which defined for him the limits of her interest. Before they had been at Lakewood a month, he was working alone without any expectation of sympathy or interest from her and without the slightest sense of loss in not getting it. Why should he miss that which he had never had, had never counted upon getting? He had always been mentally alone, most alone in the plans and actions bearing directly upon his own career. He was perfectly content to have her as the companion of his leisure.

Possibly, if he had been insistent, or if they had been in real sympathy instead of in only surface sympathy in most respects, she might have become interested in his work, might have impelled him to right development. But her distaste and inertia and his habit of debating and deciding questions as to the paper in his own mind, the fear of boring her, the dread of intruding upon her rights to her own individual tastes and feelings, restrained him without his having a sense of restraint.

When, after two months, they went up to town to stay, their course of life was settled, though Marian was protesting that it was not and Howard was unconscious of there having been any settlement, or anything to settle.

XXI.

WAVERING.

Their home was an apartment at Twenty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue--just large enough for two with its eleven rooms, all bearing the stamp of Marian’s individuality. She had a keen sense of the beautiful and she had given her thought and most of her time between the early autumn and the wedding to making an attractive home. He had not seen her work until they came together in the late afternoon of a day in the last week of February.

“You--everywhere you,” he said, as they inspected room after room. “I don’t see how I could add anything to that. It is beautiful--the things you have brought together, I mean, the furniture, curtains, carpets, pictures, all beautiful in themselves, but--”

He was looking at her in that way which made her feel his great love for her even more deeply than when he put his arms about her and kissed her. “It reminds me of what I so often think about you. Nature gave you beauty but you make it wonderful because _you_ shine through it, give it the force, the expression of your individuality. Other women have noses, eyes, chins, mouths as beautiful as yours. But only you produce such effects with the materials. I don’t express it very well but--you understand?”

“Yes, I understand.” She was leaning against him, her head resting upon his shoulder. “And you like your home?”

“We shall be happy here. I feel it in the air. This is a temple of the three great gods--Freedom, Love and Happiness. And--we’ll keep the fires on the altars blazing, won’t we?”

His hours were most irregular. Sometimes he was off to work early in the morning. Again he would not rise until noon. Sometimes he did not go to the office after dinner, and again he came hurriedly to dinner, not having the time to dress, and left immediately afterward to be gone until two, three or even four in the morning. At first Marian tried to follow his irregularities; but she was soon compelled to give up. As he most often breakfasted about ten o’clock, she arranged to breakfast regularly at that hour. If he was not yet up, she waited about the house until she had seen him, listened while he talked of those “everlasting newspapers,” praised his work a great deal, criticised it little and that gently. She made few and feeble struggles to interest herself in newspapers as newspapers. But he did not encourage her; other interests, domestic and social, clamoured for her time; and the idea of being directly useful to him in his work faded from her mind.

If she had loved him more sympathetically, if she had not been so super-sensitive to his passion for complete freedom, she would have resented what in another kind of man would have seemed frank neglect of her. But she thought she understood him and was deceived by his self-deceiving conviction that his work was her service and that the highest proof of his devotion to her was devotion to “our” career. Thus there was no bitterness or reproach of him, rarely much intensity, in her regret that they were together so little.

“Good morning, stranger!” she said, as he came into the dining room one day in early June.

He kissed her hand and then the “topknot” as he called the point into which her hair was gathered at the crown of her head. “It has been four days since I saw you,” he said. And he sat opposite her looking at her with an expression of sadness which she had not seen since the first days of their acquaintance.

“I have missed you--you know,” she was trying to look cheerful, “but I understand--”

“Yes,” he interrupted. “You understand what I intend, understand that I mean my life to be for _us_. But sometimes--this morning--I think I am mistaken. It seems to me that I am letting this--” he threw his hand contemptuously toward the heap of morning newspapers beside him, “this trash comes between us. You are my real career, not these, and under the pretense of working for us I am spending my whole life, my one life, my one chance to help to make us happy, upon these.” And he pushed the bundle of papers off the table.

“Something has depressed you.” She was leaning her elbow upon the table and her chin upon her hand and was looking at him wistfully. “I wouldn’t have you any different. You must follow the law of your nature. You must work at your ideal of being useful and influential in the world. You would not be satisfied to take my hand and trudge off with me through Arcadia to pick flowers and weave them into crowns for me. Nor should I,” she laughed, “or I try to think I shouldn’t.”

“Let us go abroad for two months,” he said. “I am tired, so tired. I am so weary of all these others, men and things.”

“Can you spare the time?”

“I”--he corrected himself--“we have earned a vacation. It will be for me the first real vacation since I left Yale--thirteen years ago. I am growing narrow and stale. Let us get away and forget. Shall we?”

“The sooner the better--if this is not a passing mood. What has depressed you?” she persisted.

“What seems to be a piece of very good luck.” He laughed almost sneeringly. “They have given me a share in the paper, twenty thousand in stock--which means a fixed income of five thousand a year so long as the paper pays what it does now--twenty-five per cent. And they offer me twenty thousand more at par to be paid for within two years. We are in a fair way to be rich.”

“They don’t want to lose you, evidently,” she said. “But why does this make you sad? We are independent now--absolutely independent, both of us.”

“Yes--we are rich. Together we have more than thirty-five thousand a year. But it is not what I wanted. I wanted to be free. Can a man be free who is rich, and rich in the way we are? Will my mind be open? Shall I dare to act and speak the truth? Or will our property, our environment, speak for me?”

“I can’t imagine you a slave to mere dollars.”

“Can’t you? Well, I am afraid--I’m really afraid. I have always said that if I wished to--enslave a people I would make them prosperous, would give them property, make them dependent upon their dollars. Then the fear of losing their dollars, their investments, would make them endure any oppression. Freedom’s battles were never fought by men with full stomachs and full purses.”

“But rich men have given up everything for freedom--Washington was a rich man.”

“Ah, but how many Washingtons has the world produced? I see the time coming when I shall have to choose. I see it and--I dread it.”

She rose and stood behind him leaning over with her arms about his neck and her check against his.

“You are brave. You are strong,” she whispered. “You will meet that crisis if it comes and I have no fear, Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, as to how the battle will go.”

He was glad that he did not have to face her eyes just then. “We will go abroad next Wednesday week,” he whispered, “and we’ll be happy in France--in Switzerland--in Holland--I want to see the park at the Hague again; and the tall trees with their straight big trunks green with moss; and the boughs meeting over the canals and making the clear water so black; and the snow-white swans sailing statelily about.”

* * * * *

With the Atlantic between him and his work, he was able to suspend the habit of so many years. You would have fancied them just married, at whatever stage of their wanderings you might have met them. They were always laughing and talking--an endless flow of high spirits, absorption each in the other. They rose when they pleased, went to bed when it suited them. They had a manservant and a maid with them to relieve them of all the details. They travelled only in the afternoons, and then not far. If they missed one train, they cheerfully waited for another.

“I think we are achieving my ideal of vacation,” he said.

“What is that--perfect idleness? We certainly are idle. I shouldn’t have believed you could be so idle.”

“Perfect idleness--yes. But more than that. I aimed far higher. My ideal was perfect irresponsibility. We have become like the wind that bloweth where it listeth.”

And again, she said: “Let me see, what day is this?”

“I think it is Thursday or Friday,” he replied. “But it may be Sunday. I can assure you that it is afternoon, late afternoon, and I think we ought to dress for dinner soon. After dinner, if you still care to know, and will remind me, I’ll try to find out the day. But I’m sure we shall have forgotten before to-morrow.”

Howard got an extension of his leave of absence and they roamed about England in August, reaching New York on the first day of September. Marian went on to Mrs. Carnarvon at Newport and Howard took rooms at the Waldorf. She stayed away a full week, then came to town, opened their apartment, and surprised him with a formal invitation to dinner.

He came like a guest and they went through all the formalities of meeting for the first time, of increasing intimacy--condensing a complete courtship into one evening.

“I thought you had had enough of me for the time,” he said, as they sat in the wide window-seat, he tracing with his forefinger the line of the straps over her bare shoulders.

“And I thought that I would give you a chance to forget how nice I am and so give you the pleasure of learning all over again. But it was so lonely and miserable up there. ‘Who can come after the king?’”

“Sometimes I think I ought to stir about more--meet the men who lead in the city. But it seems such a waste of time when I can come and call upon you.”

“But might it not be better in the long run if you did meet these men? Mightn’t it make your getting on quicker and easier?”

“Perhaps--if I were a gregarious animal, but I’m not. I’m shy and solitary and hard to get acquainted with. And it takes time to make friends. Besides, in making friends you also make enemies, and one enemy can do you more harm than all your friends can do you good. Then too, friends take up too much time. We have so little time and--we can spend it to so much better advantage--can’t we?”