Part 14
This speech so depressed the ladies that their last remnant of vivacity fled, not to return. You are sympathizing with them, gentle reader, and they are welcome to your sympathy. We drove in silence the rest of the way to the hotel in Piccadilly, where they were installed in pompous luxury and had made equally luxurious provision for me. When I was alone with my valet I reasoned myself out of the grouchy mood into which the evidences of my family’s fresh access of folly had thrown me. To quarrel with them, to be irritated against them, was about as unreasonable as attacking a black man for not being white. I had long since realized, as the result of much experience and reflection, that character is no more to be changed than any other inborn quality. My wife had been born an aristocrat, and had brought into the world an aristocratic daughter. She was to be blamed neither for the one thing nor for the other. And it ill became my pretensions to superior intellect to gird at her and at Margot. The thing for me to do was to let them alone--keep away.
At dinner, which was served in our apartment, I took a different tone with them, and they met me more than half way. So cheered was my lovely daughter that after dinner she perched on the arm of my chair and ventured to bring up the dangerous subject. Said she:
“You’re not going to be mean to me and run away, are you, papa?”
Looking at Edna, but addressing Margot, I replied: “Your mother will tell you that it’s best. We three never can agree in our ideas of things. I’m an irritation. I spoil your pleasure.”
“No--no, indeed!” cried the girl. “I’ve been looking forward to your coming. I’ve been telling everybody how handsome and superior you are. And I want them to see for themselves.”
Most pleasant to hear from such rare prettiness, and most sincerely spoken.
“So many of the American men in society over here are common,” proceeded she, “and even those who aren’t so very common somehow seem so. They are down on their knees before titles, and they act--like servants. Even Mr. Howard-- He oughtn’t to show his feelings so plainly. Of course we all feel impressed and honored by being taken up by real titled people of old families, but it’s such bad form to show, and it interferes with getting on. When I’m talking to Lord Crossley about that drawing-room, I act as if it were nothing.”
“I see you are being well educated,” said I, laughing.
“Oh, yes. Mamma and I have worked. We’ve not had an idle moment.”
“I believe you,” said I.
“You _will_ stay, papa--won’t you?”
I shook my head. But it was no longer the positive gesture. My besetting sin, my good nature, had possession of me. Remember, it was after dinner, and my beautiful daughter was caressing my cheek and was pleading in a voice whose modulations had been cultivated by the best masters in Paris.
“But I don’t want people to think I was deceiving them about my papa.”
“I’m willing to be exhibited to a select few in the next two or three days,” I conceded. “They will tell the others.”
And with that they had to be content. In the faint hope of inducing me to change my mind, Edna--the devoid of the sense of humor--took me to a tailor’s and had me shown pictures and models of the court costume I would wear. But I remained firm. A sense of humor would have warned her that a person of my sort would have an aversion to liveries of every kind, to any costume that stamps a man as one of a class. I am perhaps foolishly jealous of my own individuality. But I cannot help it. A king in his robes, a general in his uniform--except in battle where it’s as necessary and useful as night shirt or pajamas in bed--any sort of livery seems pitiful and contemptible to me. I will wear the distinguishing dress of the human race and the male sex, but further than that classification I refuse to move. Also, what business had I, citizen of a democracy whose chief idea is the barbarism and silliness of aristocracy--what business had I going to see a king and a queen? I should have felt that I was aiding them in the triumph of dragging democracy at their chariot wheels. No, I would not go to levees and drawing-rooms. You may say I showed myself an absurd extremist. Well, perhaps so. But, as it seems to be necessary to go to one extreme or the other, I prefer the extreme of exaggerated and vainglorious self-respect.
“The king and queen are no doubt nice people,” said I to Margot. “But if I meet them, it must be on terms of equality--and for some purpose less inane than exchanging a few set phrases.”
Edna and Margot seemed to feel that they had, on the whole, a presentable specimen of male relative to exhibit; for they made the most of the four days I gave them. Through Hilda Armitage, now Lady Blankenship, and much freshened up by the more congenial atmosphere, they had got in with the set that is the least easy of access to Americans--though, of course, it is not actually difficult for any American with plenty of money and a willingness to spend and good guidance in how to spend. And I must admit I enjoyed myself in those four days. The women were, for the most part, rather slow, though I recall two who had real intelligence, and I don’t think there was a single one quite so devoid of knowledge of important subjects as our boasted “bright” American women. The men were distinctly attractive. They had information, they had breadth--the thing the upper-class men of America often lack. Also, they were entirely free from that ill-at-easeness about their own and their neighbor’s position in society which makes the American upper classes tiresome and ridiculous.
It amused me to observe the Americans in this environment. Both our women and our men seemed uneasy, small, pinched. You could distinguish the American man instantly by his pinched, tight expression of an upper servant out for a holiday. I could feel the same thing in our women, but I doubt not their looks and dress and vivacity concealed it from the Englishmen. Anyhow, women are used to being nothing in themselves, to taking rank and form from their surroundings. While with us it seems to be true that the women are wholly responsible for social position with all its nonsense, the deeper truth is that they owe everything to the possessions of their fathers or husbands. Without that backing they would be nothing. Everything must ultimately rest upon a substantiality. In themselves, unsupported, the women’s swollen pretensions would vanish into thin air.
Lord Crossley was to have dined with us my first evening in London, but was prevented by suddenly arising business in the country. Next day he came to lunch, and I at once saw that he was after Margot hammer and tongs. I discovered it not by the way he treated her, but by his attitude toward her mother and me. He seemed a thoroughly satisfactory young man in every way, and I especially liked his frankness and simplicity. Edna had devoted a large part of a long sight-seeing tour with me to an account of his grandeur in the British aristocracy. Having had experience at that time of the American brand of aristocracy only, I was ignorant of the European kinds that have the aristocratic instinct in the most acute form--the ingrowing form. I know now that our own sort, unpleasant and unsightly though it is, cannot compare in malignance, in littleness and meanness of soul with the European sort. Just as the noisy blowhard is a modest fellow and harmless, and on acquaintance lovable in comparison with the silent, brooding egotist, just so is the American aristocrat in comparison with the European. An American aristocrat has been known to forget himself and be human. I recall no instance of that sort in an European born and bred to the notion that his flesh and blood are of a subtler material than the flesh and blood of most men. However, as I was saying, at the time of my first visit to Europe I knew nothing of these matters, and Lord Crossley seemed to me a simple, ingenuous young man, most attractively boyish for his years.
“That chap wants to marry Margot,” said I to Edna when we were alone later in the afternoon.
“I think so,” said she. “Several young men wish to marry her. But she is in no hurry. She’s not nineteen yet, and she would like a duke.”
“To be sure,” said I. “But she may not be able to love a duke.”
“I never heard of a girl who wouldn’t love a duke if she got the chance,” said Edna. “There are only five--English dukes, I mean--who are eligible. Margot has met three of them--and one, the Duke of Brestwell, has taken quite a fancy to her.” Carelessly, but with nervous anxiety underneath, “You wouldn’t have any objection?”
“I? Why?”
“Oh--you are so--so peculiar in some ways.”
“Anyone who pleases Margot will suit me,” said I.
“We were afraid you’d be prejudiced against titles. You’ve been with that eccentric Mr. Armitage so much--and you always have been against the sort of things Margot and I like.”
“I’ve no objection to titles,” said I. “In fact, I think Margot will be happier if she marries a title. You’ve educated her so well that she’ll never see the man or think of him.”
“How little you know her!” cried Edna, pathetically. “And how unjust to me your prejudices make you. I’ve brought her up to be all refinement--all sentiment--all heart. She looks only at the highest and best.”
“At the duke,” said I.
“Certainly at the duke,” said she. “Her tastes are for the life where a woman can show her beauty of soul to the best advantage and can do the most good. There is no career for a woman in America. But over here a woman married into the aristocracy has a real career.”
“At what?” said I.
“As a recognized social leader. As a leader in charities and all sorts of good movements.”
“Ah, I see,” said I--and there I stopped, for I had learned not to argue with my wife--or with anyone else, male or female--when the subject is sheer twaddle. “Yes, I think Margot would do well to marry over here and to have a dazzling career. I’m sure she’d never get tired of this--pardon me--treadmill. I observe that it’s better organized than the imitation one we have over in ‘the States.’”
“I should say!” cried Edna. “You’ve no idea how cheap and common the best you have in New York is beside the social life here. I’ve been here only a year, but already there have been the greatest changes in me. Don’t you notice?”
“I do,” said I. “And I can honestly say you have changed for the better. You’ve learned to cover it up.”
She looked inquiringly at me, but I did not care to explain what the “it” was that she had learned to cover. A slight flush appeared in her cheeks, and I knew intuitively that she thought I was alluding to her humble origin. I did not disabuse her mind of this impression. She would have been angry had I explained that I meant her social ambitions which I thought vulgar and she thought refined. Both she and Margot, except in occasional unguarded moments in privacy, had indeed vastly improved in manners. They had learned the trick of the aristocrats they associated with--the trick of affecting simplicity and equality and quietly confident ease. There was a notable difference, and altogether in their favor, between their manners and the manners of the former Mrs. Armitage and other American women. Whatever might justly be said in the way of criticism of my wife, it assuredly could not be said that she was lacking in agility at “catching on.” Armitage once said to me, “Your wife is a marvelous woman. I never saw or heard of her making a break.” This tribute can be appreciated only when you recall whence she sprung--and how much of her origin remained with her--necessarily--through all her climbings and soarings.
“You prefer it over here?” said I--we were still driving.
“If it weren’t for you, I’d never go back,” said she.
“For me?” said I. “Oh, don’t bother about me.”
“But I do,” replied she sweetly. And her hand covertly stole into mine for a moment. “Sometimes I get so homesick, Godfrey, that’s it all I can do to fight off the impulse to take the first steamer.”
I tried to look as a man should on hearing such pleasant and praiseworthy sentiments from the wife of his bosom.
“You’ve acted cold and--and reserved with me,” she went on. “I wanted to come to you last night. But I hadn’t the courage. You are such a mixture of tenderness and--and aloofness. You have the power to make even me feel like a stranger.”
“I’m sure I don’t mean to be that way,” said I, thoroughly uncomfortable.
“Margot was speaking of it,” proceeded Edna. “She said--poor affectionate child--that she hardly dared put her arms round you and kiss you. You oughtn’t to repulse the child that way, Godfrey. She has a tender, loving heart. And she adores you. She and I talk of you a long time every day. I’d insist on it as a matter of duty--for I’d not let your child forget you. But I don’t need to insist. She refers everything to you, and whenever she’s unusually happy, she always says: ‘If papa could only be enjoying this with us!’”
I saw that she had worked herself up into a state of excitement. My good sense told me that there was no genuineness in either her affection or Margot’s. But I had no doubt they both thought themselves genuine. And that was quite enough to give me, the easy-going American slob of a husband and father, an acute attack of guilty conscience. The upshot was----
But you who have an impressionable heart and a keen sense of your own shortcomings can guess what it was. Edna and I resumed the relations of affectionate husband and wife for the rest of my--brief--stop in London. I remained several days longer than I had intended--stayed on because I did not wish to hurt her feelings. And I bought her and Margot all sorts of jewelry and gew-gaws, largely increased her personal fortune, did not utter a word that would ruffle either of them. And I left them convinced that I was going only because business not to be neglected compelled.
They say that the hypocrite wife is a common occurrence. I wonder if the hypocrite husband is rare. I wonder if there are not more instances than this one of the husband and the wife playing a cross game of hypocrisy, with each fancying the other deceived?
So busy was I with my own laborings to deceive my wife as to the true state of my feelings toward her that not until I was halfway across the Atlantic did I happen to think the obvious thought. You, gentle reader, have not thought it. But perhaps some more intelligent species of reader has. In mid-Atlantic, I suddenly thought: “Why she--she and Margot--were playing a game--the same game. For what purpose?”
It was not many months before I found out.
VII
That summer Armitage was spending the week ends out on Long Island at the country place of his sister, Mrs. Kirkwood. He kept his yacht in the tiny harbor there and made short cruises in the Sound and up the New England coast. Naturally I often went with him. Those parties usually amused me. He knew a dozen interesting people--working people--such as Boris Raphael, the painter, and his wife, the architect, the Horace Armstrongs who had been divorced and remarried, a novelist named Beechman who wrote about the woods and lived in the wilderness in the Southwest most of the year, Susan Lenox the actress--several others of the same kind. Then there was his sister--Mary Kirkwood.
For a reason which will presently appear I have not before spoken of Mrs. Kirkwood, though I had known her longer than I had known Armitage. Her husband had been treasurer of the road when I was an under Vice President. He speculated in the road’s funds and it so happened that, when he was about to be caught, I was the only man who could save him from exposure. Instead of asking me directly, he sent his wife to me. I can see her now as she was that day--pale, haggard, but with that perfect composure which deceives the average human being into thinking, “Here is a person without nerves.” She told me the whole story in the manner of one relating a matter in which he has a sympathetic but remote interest. She made not the smallest attempt to work upon my feelings, to move me to pity. “And,” she ended, “if you will help him cover up the shortage, it will be made good and he will resign. I shall see to it that he does not take another position of trust.”
“Why didn’t he come to me, himself?” said I. “Why did he send you?”
She looked at me--a steady gaze from a pair of melancholy gray eyes. “I cannot answer that,” said she.
“I beg your pardon,” stammered I; for I guessed the answer to my question even as I was asking it. I knew the man--an arrogant coward, with the vanity to lure him into doing preposterous things and wilting weakness the instant trouble began to gather. “You wish me to save him?” I said, still confused and not knowing how to meet the situation.
“I am asking rather for myself,” replied she. “I married him against my father’s wishes and warning. I have not loved him since the second month of our marriage. If he should be exposed, I think the disgrace would kill me.” Her lip curled in self-scorn. “A queer kind of pride, isn’t it?” she said. “To be able to live through the real shame, and to shrink only from the false.”
“I’ll do it,” said I, with a sudden complete change of intention. “That is, if you promise me he will resign and not try to get a similar position elsewhere.”
“I promise,” said she, rising, to show that she was taking not a moment more of my time than was unavoidable. “And I thank you”--and that was all.
I kept my part of the agreement; she kept hers. In about two years she divorced him because he was flagrantly untrue to her. He married the woman and supported her and himself on the allowance Mary Kirkwood made him as soon as her father’s death let her into her share of the property. When I saw her again--one night at dinner at her brother’s house, before his wife divorced him--we met as if we were entire strangers. Neither of us made the remotest allusion to that first meeting.
Going down to her house with Armitage often and being with her on the yacht for days together, I became fairly well acquainted with her, although she maintained the reserve which she did not increase for a stranger or drop even with her brother. You felt as if her personality were a large and interesting house, with room after room worth seeing, most attractive--but that no one ever was admitted beyond the drawing-room, not for a glimpse.
Don’t picture her as of the somber sort of person. A real tragedy can befall only a person with a highly sensitive nature. Such persons always have sense of proportion and sense of humor. They do not exaggerate themselves; they see the amusing side of the antics of the human animal. So they do not pull long faces and swathe themselves in yards of crêpe and try to create an impression of dark and gloomy sorrow. They do not find woe a luxury; they know it in its grim horror. They strive to get the joy out of life. So, looking at Mary Kirkwood, you would never have suspected a secret of sadness, a blighted life. As her reserve did not come from self-consciousness--either the self-consciousness of haughtiness or that of shyness and greenness--you did not even suspect reserve until you had known her long and had tried in vain to get as well acquainted with her as you thought you were at first. I imagine that in our talk in my office about her husband I got further into the secret of her than anyone else ever had.
One detail I shall put by itself, so important does it seem to me. She had a keen sense of humor. It was not merely passive, merely appreciation, as the sense of humor is apt to be in women--where it exists at all. It was also active; she said droll and even witty things. When her sense of humor was aroused, her eyes were bewitching.
What did she look like? The women all wish to know this; for, being fond of the evanescent triumphs over the male which beauty of face or form gives, and as a rule having experience only of those petty victories, they fancy that looks are the important factor, the all-important factor. In fact, the real conquests of women are not won by looks. Beauty, or, rather, physical charm of some kind, is the lure that draws the desired male within range. If after pausing a while he finds nothing more, he is off again.
Perhaps, probably, my experience with Edna has made me more indifferent to looks than the average man who has never realized his longing to possess a physically beautiful woman. However that may be, Mary Kirkwood certainly had no cause to complain that Nature had not been generous to her in the matter of looks. She was tall, she was slender. She had a delicate oval face, a skin that was clear and smooth and dark with the much prized olive tints in it. She had a beautiful long neck, a great quantity of almost black hair. Her nose suggested pride, her mouth mockery, her eyes sincerity. She was the kind of woman who exercises a powerful physical fascination over men, and at the same time makes them afraid to show their feelings. Women like that tantalize with visions of what they could and would give the man they loved, but make each man feel that it would be idle for him to hope. In character she was very different from her cynical, mocking brother--was, I imagine, more like her father. Mentally the resemblance between the brother and sister was strong--but she took pains to conceal how much she knew, where he found his chief pleasure in “showing off.” I feel I have fallen pitifully short of doing her justice in this description. But who can put into words such a subtlety as charm? She had it--for men. Women did not like her--nor she them. I state this without fear of prejudicing either women or men against her. Why is it, by the way, that to say a man does not like men and is not liked by them is to damn him utterly, while to say that a woman neither likes nor is liked by her own sex is rather to speak in her favor? You cry indignantly, “Not true!” gentle reader. But--do _you_ know what is true and what not true? And, if you did, would you confess it, even to yourself?
You are proceeding to revenge yourself upon me. You are saying, “_Now_ we know _why_ he was indifferent to his beautiful wife and to his lovely daughter!--_Now_ we understand that fit of guilty conscience in London!”
Do you know? Perhaps. I am not sure. I am not conscious of any especial interest in Mary Kirkwood until after I came back from London. I had seen her but a few times. We had never talked so long as five consecutive minutes, and then we had talked commonplaces. Not the commonplaces of fashionable people, but the commonplaces of intelligent people. There’s an enormous difference.
The first time my memory records her with the vividness of moving pictures is, of course, at that meeting in my office. The next time is a few days after my return from London. I had been surfeited both in London and on the steamer with the inane amateurs at life, the shallow elegant dabblers in it, interesting themselves only in coaching, bridge, and similar pastimes worthy an asylum for the feeble-minded. I went down to the Kirkwood place with Armitage. As his sister was not in the house we set out for a walk through the grounds to find her. At the outer edge of the gardens a workman told us that if we would follow a path through the swampy woods we could not miss her.
The path was the roughest kind of a trail. Our journey was beset with swarms of insects, most of them mosquitoes in savage humor. It lay along the course of a sluggish narrow stream that looked malarious and undoubtedly was. “Landscape gardening is one of Mary’s fads,” explained her brother. “She has been planning to tackle this swamp for several years. Now she is at it.”