Part 20
She saw him as soon as she could make herself presentable--and her delay gave him a chance to tone up his nerves and to smooth out his face. That afternoon I was able to telegraph Edna that all was well The Crossleys were reconciled; Love had scored another of his famous triumphs. She came over the following day, but I had sailed for America a few hours before.
* * * * *
The day after my arrival in New York I saw Mary Kirkwood and Hartley Beechman lunching together at Delmonico’s. In those days that meant an engagement actual or impending--or, at least, a flirtation far advanced into the stage of loverlike intimacy. I was in the passageway looking through the glass and the screen of palms. I stood there long, noting every detail of her. She was well, perfectly well--of that much her eyes and her color assured me. Is there anything lovelier than a clear dark skin, tastefully set off by black-brown hair? Was she happy? I could not tell. Still in her face was that restless, expectant look--not unlike the expression of a child being shown a picture book and too impatient for the next page rightly to examine the one that is open. An intense interest in life, an intense vitality--that fascinating capacity to love, if she found the right man. And her beauty----
Beauty she undoubtedly had. But charm does not lie in beauty--physical charm, I mean. There is a certain light in the eyes, a certain curve of cheek and throat, of bosom and arm--and the blood flames and rushes. She had charm for me. Her beauty impressed others; it was her charm that made her the one woman to me.
Blankenship came to take me into the café where we were to lunch. I went with the meager consolation that while I had stood there she had given Beechman not a single glance with any suggestion of a feeling it would have wounded me to the quick to see. Should I speak to her? Did I dare risk the attempt? Would not speaking to her be merely a useless torment? After a long struggle that could have but one end, I said: “Excuse me,” rose and went to the palm room. They were gone; the waiter was clearing the table at which they had been sitting. I stared round dazedly, returned to Blankenship.
“You’re not up to the mark--what?” said he.
“New York doesn’t agree with me.”
“I hate towns. They give you such dirty second-hand stuff to breathe. Let’s move on--what?”
“To-morrow,” I said.
But it seemed there was no place on earth for me. Don’t judge me so poorly as to think, or to imagine I thought, this was due wholly to Mary Kirkwood. I wish to be carefully, exactly accurate in this frank recital of a man’s point of view. She was responsible for my forlorn state to the extent that loving her had revealed to me the futility and failure of my own life and had made me see another sort of life that would have been possible with her, that was impossible without her--without love and comradeship. But loving her did not make my life empty; it was already empty, though I had not realized it. I understood now why the big business men, as soon as they reached security, cast about for some real interest. Most of them--nearly all--were as unfortunate in their family relations as I. They had trivial wives and trivial children--mere silly strutters and spenders. They sought interest in art, in science, in religion, in exploration, in philanthropy, in politics, in stamps and butterflies, in old books and antiques, in racing stables and prize fighting, in gambling, in drink, in women. Their craving was now mine. How to find an interest that would make life attractive to me, with Mary Kirkwood left out--there was my problem.
While waiting for the solution, I followed Blankenship to the Northwest. The second day from New York, as he and I were walking up and down the platform during a halt--at St. Paul, I think it was--Hartley Beechman joined us.
“Didn’t I see you in the café at Delmonico’s a few days ago?” said he. “I was getting my hat and stick in a rush. It certainly looked like your back.”
“It was,” said I. And I was seized with a wild longing to escape from him and a wilder longing to hold on to him and to pour out question after question.
“Mrs. Kirkwood and I were lunching together,” he went on. “We talked of you. I told her I thought I had seen you, and she said she heard you were in town and was much hurt because you hadn’t looked her up.”
“I was merely passing through,” said I.
“She has an enormous admiration for you,” continued he. “She says you have imagination--which means that she thinks you in the small class. You know the world divides into sheep and goats on imagination, with the mass in the have-not class. I believe it’s the true distinction between House of Have and House of Have-not.”
“She is well?” said I.
“Always. She knows how to take care of herself. I never knew a woman so sensible--and sensible means the reverse of what it’s usually supposed to mean when applied to a woman.”
This hardly sounded like an engaged man talking of his fiancée. On the other hand, Beechman was a peculiar chap.
“Does she still live in the country?”
“Just now--yes. Last winter she kept house for Bob in New York.”
But you will not be interested in how I drew from him bit by bit a hundred details of her life, stories of what she had said and done. I saw Beechman several hours every day until he left us at Seattle. Alternately I thought him merely her closest man friend and her accepted lover. At times I thought he was not quite sure, himself, in which position he stood. When we were having our last talk together I nerved myself and said:
“I heard in London that she was to be married.”
I felt him drawing in and shutting all doors and windows.
“Have _you_ heard anything of it?” pursued I.
“Oh, in the case of a woman like her,” replied he, “there’s always gossip about this man and that.”
“She ought to marry.”
“She _will_ marry.”
I forced a smile, and, as we knew each other so well, I ventured: “You speak as one having authority.”
“Don’t _you_ know she will?” parried he.
“That sounds like evasion,” laughed I.
“Not at all. She cannot escape. Some man will convince her--surely.”
“But so far as you know, no man has?”
His eyes were frankly mocking. “I did not say that,” said he.
And I could get no further.
* * * * *
Before I returned to New York in the autumn I had added a lot of far western enterprises to my already long list of occupations. Everything I touched seemed to succeed. Even my new secretary, Rossiter, proved better than Markham. Markham had an indifferent memory and a fondness for women that was trying. Rossiter forgot nothing and was as shy of the women, including the ladies, as was Lord Blankenship, who yawned and retreated at the very sight of a skirt. The news from England was altogether satisfactory. An heir was hoped for, and Crossley had become a devoted husband and was about to enter politics. This struck me as a huge joke, the more so because I knew that in England Crossley would be welcomed as a source of real strength to his party. It seemed to me amazing how England could stagger along when she was being managed by such men and was grateful for it. But when I spoke to Blankenship about it, he set me to thinking from a different standpoint.
“My son-in-law is going into politics,” said I. “In America he couldn’t be elected dog-catcher.”
“Oh, I fancy money will do most anything most anywhere,” said he.
The news from Paris was equally good. Edna had settled there after a joyous summer going from country house to country house in Britain, and from château to château in France. She had seen one château which she wished me to buy, and she begged me to come over and inspect it. She did not explicitly say so, but I read between the lines that she was greatly strengthening her social position by giving out that she purposed buying a big place. You may imagine how much enthusiasm for her such an announcement would create among noble down-at-the-heel families eager to exchange unsalable old rook-roosts for American dollars. I could hear her talking--how subtly she would put forth the suggestion, how diplomatically she would discuss each worthless stone heap in turn--and how she would rake in the invitations so difficult to get unless one happens to know how, and so easy when one does know.
But with my arrival in New York I had a reverse. A cable came from Edna saying that she was sailing at once and wished to see me.
I could not imagine what she wanted, and I did not waste much time in making guesses. One evening, when Armitage and I were dining together in the Federal Club--Blankenship had sailed for home--the idea flashed into my mind that perhaps Edna wanted a divorce. Immediately I felt that I had hit upon the precise reason for her coming. You will have no difficulty in imagining what was the next idea in my train of thought. If she divorced me I should be free to marry whom I pleased!
It was stupid of me, but in all my revolvings of my hopeless love for Mary Kirkwood never once had I thought of divorcing my wife. I cannot account for this lapse, except as an instance of the universal human failing for overlooking the obvious. There was no religious scruple in my early training to make me shy of divorce. On the contrary, my parents, like most old-fashioned Americans of faiths other than Episcopal and Catholic--and Episcopalians and Catholics were few in the old American stock, except in New York and Baltimore and South Carolina--most old-fashioned Americans believed that living together in wedlock without love was sin, that divorce was no mere necessary evil, but a religious rite as sacred as marriage itself. A house, they held, is either a House of Hate or a House of Love, and no one should remain in a House of Hate, and no child should be brought up there.
No doubt, if Edna and I had been living under the same roof the idea of divorce would have taken form, actively definite form, long before. But we had no home to be a House of Hate. We did not hate each other; we bored each other. And as we were not poor, we lived far enough apart not to annoy each other in the least. I cheerfully paid any ransom she exacted for leaving me free--and you may be sure she was not inexpensive. She had her own fortune--and it gave her quite an income--but she husbanded that. She insisted upon state and equipage, not to mention such small matters as stockings at fifty dollars a pair and chemises at three hundred dollars apiece--for, she knew how lovely she was and demanded for her beautiful body the most beautiful garments that could be devised by French ingenuity at combining cost and simplicity. I was--by instinct rather than by avowed principles--thoroughly old-fashioned in my family ideas. Indeed, I still am; and I say this with no apology. It may be that woman will some day develop another and higher sphere for herself. But first she would do well--in my humbly heretical opinion--to learn to fill the sphere she now rattles round in like one dry pea in a ten-gallon can. I want to see a few more women up to the modern requirements for wife and mother. I want to see a few more women making a living without using their sex charms--a few less ’tending the typewriter with one eye while the other and busier is on the lookout for a husband. I believe in emancipation of women--in votes for women--in all that sort of thing. The one and only way to learn to swim is in the water. I am sick and tired of woman the irresponsible, woman the cozener and milker of man, woman the dead weight upon man, and drawing the pay of a housewife and shirking all a housewife’s duties. So, you see, I am the friend of woman--not of woman’s vanity and laziness and passion for parasiteism, but of woman’s education and self-respect and independence.
I was thoroughly old-fashioned. My notion of wife was the independent, self-respecting equal of her husband. That is, I had the typical American husband’s ideal--the ideal that dates from the pioneer days of no property and of labor for all, the ideal the American man still lives up to, the one that enables woman to betray him. And, having this ideal, I never permitted myself--no, not even when I spoke to her the contrary in words--I never permitted myself to _feel_ that my wife was not in the main what she should be.
If you have borne me company thus far, gentle reader, turn away now. For, dreadful things are coming. I said to Armitage: “Your sister--she’s still in the country?”
“No, she’s abroad,” replied he. “She’s visiting friends in Budapest. Later on she’s to yacht in the East Mediterranean--she and the Horace Armstrongs and Beechman--and--” He gave several names I do not now recall.
“Is she engaged to Beechman?” I asked carelessly, but the question was not one that could sound other than raw.
He smiled--an expression I did not like. At first I thought it a rebuke to my impertinence. Afterwards I saw no such notion was in his mind. “Beechman? Good Lord, no.”
“You are _sure_?”
“Absolute. He’d not dare go in that direction with _her_.”
“Why not?” said I.
“Oh--well--you see-- She doesn’t care for him,” replied Armitage lamely. I was not liking him so well, now that I knew the world--his world--better and could judge its beliefs and its hypocrisies more accurately.
“He’s an unusual man,” said I. “She might easily care for him.”
“Well, she doesn’t,” retorted he irritably. “I happen to know she doesn’t.”
I was convinced. Armitage’s tone said in effect that he had heard the rumor, had questioned her, had been assured that there was no basis for it.
So, she was abroad--five or six days away. I could not go to her and make a beginning. Would I have gone if she had been within reach? I do not know. I rather think not. As I have said, I was old-fashioned; and the sort of love I felt for her, and my sense of what she had suffered at the hands of the first man she had trusted would have made me wait, I hope, until I was free. Still, love is insidiously compelling. Who can say what love would or would not beguile or goad him into doing? The old-fashioned man, always reminding himself that women haven’t an equal chance with men, was inclined to be considerate in his dealings with a woman. The new-fashioned man lets her look out for herself. I am not sure that he is wrong. Perhaps some who have read thus far will guess the reason for my doubt.
You may imagine how impatiently I waited for Edna to arrive. I am afraid Rossiter found me difficult in those intervening days. Only the weak sort of men and women are easy for an intelligent person to live with. Men and women of positive character have their impossible moods. I made this remark to Mary Kirkwood on that yachting trip in the Sound. And her quick answer was: “Yes, that’s true. But everything worth while is difficult. Weathering the stormy days would have its compensations--and more.” What a woman! No wonder I loved her.
When Edna finally arrived----
What an arrival it was! She was attended by two maids, one French, the other Italian. She had trained them--she and their former fashionable mistresses--to treat her as if she was a royal person, requiring the most minute assistance, incapable even of ascertaining for herself whether it was daylight or dark, rain or shine. She was clad in the latest Paris fashions, adapted and improved for her own especial charms. She wore much jewelry, but nothing noisy. There never was anything noisy about her--any more than there is about a burst of sunshine that fills and floods the whole place, permeating everywhere and dominating everything. She talked by turns in English--with a superb British accent--in French that sounded Parisian and in Italian that seemed as liquid and swift as the Italian maid’s. It was a vast ship, and there were about a thousand passengers, and much luggage. To me, to all on the pier that day, there seemed to be but one landing and but one lot of luggage.
How many trunks had she? Heaven only knows. The customs people were glad to expedite her after a glance at the exhibit imposing both in extent and in costliness. She affected a delightful, most aristocratic unconsciousness of the stir she was making, of the excited admiration of men, of the gaping or jeering envy of women. Yes, it was a great day, and as I accompanied her in the auto to the Plaza, I felt dowdy and insignificant--felt like a humble male menial, a courier or valet.
“I did not fully appreciate your magnificence,” said I, “until I saw you on these humble shores.”
“It is shocking here--isn’t it?” said she. “So incomplete, so crude. No wonder the ideals are low. The surroundings give no inspiration.”
“None--except for work,” said I. “It’s a land for working people only. No doubt you’ll be going back soon?”
“As soon as I can,” replied she. With a friendly but not tender smile: “As soon as you’ll let me.”
The absence of her customary effusiveness confirmed my theory of her coming. I had thought all out with the utmost care. I felt it would be in every way unwise to let her see that I was eager for the divorce. She must open the subject. It had ever been my rule, when I wanted anything, so to maneuver that the other person should propose the exchange. It is the rule of successful operation in every department of life. Therefore, adhering strictly to my prearranged programme, I could only sit tight and wait.
How she tried my patience! I was mad to have the preliminaries over, to have the divorce under way--mad, not with the hysterical impatience of those short-sighted people who mess their purposes through lack of self-restraint, but with the white-hot repressed patience of those who have their way in this world. Day followed day, and she did not speak. I gave up the evenings and a large part of the afternoons to her. I stayed on after dinner until there was no further excuse for lingering. I listened to her interminable recital of fashionable names, dates, gossip, adventure. A week of this, and just as my fortitude was wearing itself out and I had begun to debate opening the subject myself, she said:
“I’ve been down looking at our house. Really it’s not half bad. Why shouldn’t we open it?”
I did not know what to say. Was I mistaken in her purpose in coming? Or was this proposal to open the house the clever move of a clever gamester to force me to speak first?
“This lovely weather!” she went on. “It’s a shame such a climate should be wasted upon such a vulgar city. When I think of the dreadful rains that infest Paris and the rains and fogs of London-- How they would glory in this sun and sparkling air.”
To my notion New York was vastly more attractive than dreary London or rainy, sloppy Paris. But I made no defense of New York. I wished her to think it crude and tiresome.
“And the fashionable society here,” she went on. “What a silly copy of the real thing over there!”
“It must remind you of Passaic,” said I.
She visibly shivered.
I was suddenly seized of a base inspiration. In my despair I did not hesitate. Said I: “That reminds me. We must go over to see the old people.”
“Oh, yes,” she murmured. “I’m so neglectful.”
I felt--I saw--that I was on the right track at last. “When will you go?” I persisted. “Next Sunday?”
“Perhaps,” said she faintly.
“Yes, we’ll go Sunday. They fret because you never write.”
“They are well?”
“In splendid health. There’s no reason why all four of them shouldn’t outlive us.”
“You--you go often?” she faltered.
“I haven’t been for some time,” said I. “You see, I’ve been away.... If we opened the house, we could have them visit us. That would make up to them for the way we’ve acted.”
She gazed at me in large-eyed horror. Suddenly she smiled with patient scorn and shrugged her shoulders. “Oh, I had forgotten your passion for jesting.”
“I am in earnest,” said I--and I was indeed in the full flood of a virtuous penitence whose hypocrisy I did not detect until I was thinking about the matter afterwards. You, gentle reader, would in the same circumstances never have permitted yourself to discover the hypocrisy. I went on: “I’m ashamed of the way I’ve acted.”
“They’ve got everything they need or want,” said Edna.
“Material comfort,” replied I. “But haven’t parents a right to expect something more? And now that our social position is secure, we’ve no excuse for acting snobbishly.”
I enjoyed this virtuous talk for itself; still more, I enjoyed teasing her. Her delicate, refined, ladylike nerves were aristocratically sensitive. Have you observed that peculiarity of lady nerves? A lady will live with the most shocking husband for luxury. She will endure the most degrading humiliations to get dresses, jewels, motor cars. She will crawl in the dirt to gain or to improve social position. She will, without a quiver, kiss her worst enemy, cut her dearest friends, in the furtherance of any ladylike purpose. But talk to her of self-respecting independence, of earning her own living, or of any of the homely decencies of life--of her ignorant old parents or unsightly poor relatives--and what a fairy princess of high-strung nerves she straightway becomes. Yes, Edna was a lady--a perfect lady, as perfect as if she had been born to it.
To my surprise I had daunted her only for the day; the following afternoon she began again. “This heavenly weather!” she exclaimed. “It tempts me to stay on and on.”
“I hope it will last over Sunday,” said I.
She ignored the shaft, and went on with undiminished enthusiasm: “And really New York has improved. In some respects it can be compared to Paris--though, of course, it has no background. A city can be built in a generation or so. But to build up the country--that takes centuries.”
“It’s building up rapidly,” said I. “You’ll be astonished Sunday by the change down where the old folks are. The Fosdicks have bought up twenty farms or so, and are making a park. I saw Amy Siersdorf not long ago and she spoke of having stopped at father’s place and got milk and corn bread.”
“The fluffy little cat,” said Edna, not especially ruffled. “I shall snub her the first time we meet. But I was about to speak of our house. I am arranging to open it. Of course, Margot can’t come over _this_ winter, but I don’t really need her. We owe it to our friends here to do something socially. I want to stop the gossip.”
“The gossip?” said I.
“The talk because we are not living together. It isn’t dangerous, but it’s uncomfortable. I believe people like us ought to maintain the best social traditions--ought to set a good example to the lower classes.”
“Oh, bother!” said I as good-humoredly as I could. “We’ll do as we please. Otherwise, where’s the use in having money?”
A pause which I felt was hopeful. Edna said with affected carelessness: “_You_ don’t think people have a right to--to divorce?”
At last! My intuition had been correct! “Why not?” replied I, my tone as casual as hers. “Certainly, if they wish.”
A long silence. Then she: “Sometimes I feel that way myself. When two people find that they’re uncongenial, that they’d be better off--happier--if free to go their separate ways and to realize to the full their own ideals of life-- Why not?”
“Precisely my view,” said I.
Again a long silence. She finally said: “Has it ever occurred to you, Godfrey, that you and I might be better off--apart?”
I laughed. “It’s a good many years now since we were together,” replied I. “We might as well be divorced as living the way we do.”
“It’s because I’ve been feeling those very things, that I’ve come back,” said she. “It seemed to me that, now I’ve fulfilled my duty to Margot, I ought to do my duty to you.”
“That’s like you,” said I. “For you life is one long sacrifice.”
If she scented irony she dissembled well. “Sacrifice is the woman’s part,” replied she sweetly.