Part 21

“No doubt,” I went on, “you’re willing to stay here where you’re unhappy, and for my sake to jam the house night after night with people you care nothing about, and disport yourself in splendor to make the world envy me. I appreciate your nobility of character, but I positively can’t allow it.”

“We must do our duty,” said she. “Society expects certain things of us, and we must do them.”

“Not I, my dear. Open the house if you like. But I stick to my bachelor apartment.”

“Do you want me to go back to Europe?” said she with a fine show of quiet melancholy.

“I want you to do as you please,” was my answer.

“But unless I stay here, and you and I take our place in society together, I--” She hesitated. “Now that Margot is settled,” she went on desperately, “I am adrift. And--Godfrey, we _can’t_ go on as we are.”

“I see that,” said I. “What do you propose?”

“To stay in New York,” replied she, with the promptness of the skilled fencer. “To stay here and be the mistress of your establishment.”

“My establishment is an apartment at Sherry’s.”

“But that’s impossible!” remonstrated she.

“Be calm, my dear. I don’t ask you to lead my kind of life.”

“Then--what do you propose?” ventured she.

I shrugged my shoulders and settled myself more comfortably in her luxurious motor. I gazed with absorbed interest at the bunch of orchids in the flower-holder.

“I don’t see how we can continue neither free nor bound,” pursued she.

“Whatever you like,” said I. “Only--no fashionable capering for me.”

“Do you want me to get a divorce, Godfrey?” said she.

“I want you to be happy,” said I. “Divorce has no terrors for me. Aren’t we practically divorced already?”

“That’s true,” said she. “We never did have much in common.” Then she reddened--for, she could not quite forget those first days of our married life, before I got the money to feed her ambition. “You make me feel as if you were a--no, not a stranger, but only a friend.”

“And we _are_ friends,” said I heartily. “And always shall be.” For I was beginning to like her, to take the amiably indifferent outsider’s view of her, now that she was freeing me.

“Godfrey, do you want to marry again?” she asked with a sudden shrewd look straight into my eyes.

I laughed easily. “That question might better come from me,” said I. “You will never be happy, I suppose, until you are the Duchess or Princess Something-or-other.”

A flush stole over her small sweet face, making it lovelier than ever. “I never thought of such a thing,” she protested--but too energetically.

“Nonsense,” said I. “You’ve dreamed it for years. Be honest with me, Edna.”

“How could I dream it?” replied she. “It would take an awful lot of money.”

“You have quite a bunch,” said I. “And if we parted, naturally I’d give you more.”

Once again--but this time slowly--the searching gaze turned upon me.

I bore it well. “You can’t live as I live,” I went on. “I won’t live as you live. You say that means divorce. I don’t think so. Many rich American couples live apart without divorce. I believe usually the reason is the wife has found she couldn’t get a large enough slice of the husband’s fortune, if she divorced him. Still, for whatever reason, they stay married. You don’t like the idea. So I say, if you want to go I’ll give you as much as I gave Margot--in addition to what you already have--and my blessing. I’ve some sentiment about the past, but it is as a past.”

“I am--stunned,” said she. And I think her vanity was.

“It’s what you want?” rejoined I.

“You put me in a hard position, Godfrey. You give me no alternative but to accept.”

“I am a hard man,” said I suavely.

“You are really willing to let me go?”

“You expected to have a difficult time persuading me?” laughed I.

She looked at me reproachfully. “Do be serious, Godfrey, about these serious things.”

“All right. What do you say, Edna? Yes or no?”

“I must have time to think,” replied she. “This is a very solemn moment.”

“Why fake?” said I pleasantly. “You have it all thought out.”

“It is solemn to _me_, Godfrey.”

“There’s nothing solemn about our married life. It’s a farce.”

But she was searching for confirmation of her fear of some kind of trap. “You really mean that you wish to free me?” she said.

“I mean precisely what I say,” replied I. “Freedom and the cash are yours for the asking. But you must ask, my dear. I’ll not have any more of your favorite comedy of making yourself out a martyr.”

“You don’t know how you hurt me,” cried she. “But you always have hurt me--always. I know--” very gently--“that you didn’t mean to, but you haven’t understood.”

“I did my best,” said I, with the pleasant smile of which she was so intolerant. “But what can be expected of a plain, coarse materialist of a business man?”

“Yet you are generous in many ways,” mused she. “It’s simply that you can’t understand me.”

“Perhaps it’s _you_ that don’t understand _me_,” said I.

“What do you mean?” inquired she.

“Oh, nothing,” I replied carelessly. How hope to make a vain woman, obsessed of the notion that she has a profound and mysterious soul when she simply has a fog-bank--how hope to make her see the truth about herself? “It isn’t worth explaining. Only--when you are free and you find some one who appreciates and sympathizes with that soul of yours, be careful to pay him well, and to keep on paying. You can always be flattered and fooled, if you pay for it. But if you don’t pay-- Look out. You may hear the truth.”

“What a cynic you are!” she cried. “Thank God, I haven’t your low views of life.”

“Keep your views, by all means,” said I. “But don’t forget my advice. You are lovely. You are charming. You dress beautifully and have good taste. But it’s the money, my dear, that causes the excitement about those charms and graces. Hold on to your principal, and spend your income freely but judiciously.”

“If I could only convince you that there is something beside money in the world.”

“Not for those to whom money is the breath of life,” replied I.

When we returned to her hotel she urged me to come in for tea. We went into the greenroom, to listen to the music and to observe the crowds. There was a sprinkling of men, but two thirds were women--women of all classes and conditions, above the working class. Women obviously fashionable as well as rich. Women obviously only rich. Women living off men respectably. Women “trimming” here and there. An army of pretty women--well-cared-for bodies, attractive faces, inviting the various kinds of sensual attack from the subtlest to the frankest. This woman at the next table is rather cheaply dressed, except a gorgeous hat. That woman yonder has contrived to “trim” only a handsome set of furs; it looks grotesque with the rest of the costume. A third has a huge gilt bag as her sole claim to sisterhood with the throng of fair pampered parasites upon husbands, fathers, lovers. A charming and a useless throng. No, not charming, unless a man happens to be in the mood in which he succumbs to the trimming process with pleasure--and then, he would not think them altogether useless.

“New York grows more and more like Europe,” said my wife, gazing around with shining eyes, and inhaling the heavily scented atmosphere with dilating nostrils. “More and more like Europe.”

“More and more,” replied I. “Especially the women.”

“Oh, they’re ahead of the European women,” said she.

“So they are,” said I. “Yes--they beat the European women at it. But I’m not sure whether that’s because they are really cleverer, or merely because our men trim more readily.”

She regarded me with an expression of mildly interested perplexity, as if she couldn’t imagine what was the “it” I was talking about. “You must admit they are lovely,” said she.

“Admit it?” said I. “I proclaim it. If a man’s notion of dinner is only the dessert, he couldn’t do better.”

She looked still more vague--one of her tricks when she wished to avoid or to ignore. “I never touch desserts,” said she.

As I was leaving--for we were not dining together that evening--she said:

“I shall think about your proposal.”

I looked straight at her. “Tell me whether you will or will not confirm your own proposal,” said I. “And don’t delay too long. Unfinished business makes me nervous.”

She returned my look with quiet composure. “I shall let you know to-morrow,” said she.

X

Among my acquaintances, both in and out of fashionable society, there were not a few jealous husbands. I knew one man who, in the evening, made his wife account for every moment of the day, and tell him in detail how she was going to spend the following day, and during business hours he called up irregularly on the telephone. He was not content with the effective system of espionage which a retinue of servants automatically establishes. Another man--to give a typical instance of each of the two types--hired detectives from time to time to watch his wife living abroad “for her health and to educate her children.” In a decently ordered society this sort of jealousy is rare. Only where the women are luxuriously supported parasites and the men are attaching but the one value to the women--the only value they possess for them--only there do you find this defiling jealousy the rule instead of the exception. Naturally, if the woman is mere property the man guards her as he guards the rest of his material possessions; and the woman who consents to be mere property probably needs guarding if she has qualities of desirability discoverable by other eyes than those of her overprizing owner.

This jealousy was in the air of the offices and clubs I frequented. But it had somehow or other never infected me. Was I occupied too deeply with other matters? Was I indifferent? Did my own disinclination to dalliance make me slow to appreciate the large part dalliance now plays in American life? I do not know why I was free from jealousy. I only know that never once had my mind been shadowed by a sinister thought as to what my wife might be about, far away and free. Possibly my knowledge of her absorption in social ambition kept me quiet. Certainly a woman whose whole mind and heart are set upon social climbing is about the last person a seeker for dalliance would invest.

I had never heard a word or a hint of a scandal about her--for the best of reasons; she did nothing to cause that kind of talk. But, how curious is coincidence! On the very evening of the day of our divorce discussion Edna had her first experience of scandal, and I immediately knew of it. After leaving her I went to the Federal Club, where I often took a hand in a rather stiff game of bridge before dinner. I drifted into the reading room, glanced idly at the long row of current magazines. In full view lay the weekly purveyor of social news, a paper I had not looked at half a dozen times in my life, and then only because some one had asked me to read a particular paragraph. The week’s issue of this scandal monger had just come in. I threw back the cover, let my glance drop upon the page. I was hardly aware that I was reading--for my thoughts were elsewhere--when I became vaguely conscious that the print had some relation to me. I reread it; it was a veiled attack upon Edna. All unsuspected by her husband--so the story ran--she had come to America to divorce him that she might marry a German nobleman of almost royal rank. A voice close beside me said:

“What is it amuses you so in that dirty sheet?”

It was Armitage. I started guiltily. Then my common sense asserted itself, and I pointed to the paragraph. When he had read it I said:

“Who’s the German? I’m not well enough up on the nobility to be able to guess, though it’s probably plainly told.”

“The Count von Biestrich,” said he.

“Thanks,” said I, no wiser than before, and we went up to play bridge.

A year or so before I might possibly have talked freely with Armitage; but the day of our closest intimacy had passed. He was still my intimate friend; I was his--with several large reservations. Why? Chiefly because when he passed the critical age his mind took the turn for the worse. At forty to forty-five a man begins to reap his harvest. Armitage had many and varied interests, but the one that affected his nature most profoundly was women. He mocked at them; he was always inventing or relating stories about them of the more or less gamey sort. But, somewhat like his pretensions of disdain for birth and fashion, his wordy scorn of women concealed a slavish weakness for them. After forty this began to disclose itself in his features. Their handsome intellectuality began to be marred by a sensual heaviness; and presently his wit degenerated toward a repellent coarseness. It takes delicate juggling to make filth attractive. After forty a man does well to be careful how he attempts it; for, after forty, the hand loses its lightness. I rather avoided Armitage; not that I was squeamish, but my sense of humor somehow rarely has responded to rude rootings and pawings in the garbage barrel.

About an hour after dinner Edna called me to the telephone and asked me to come to her. I found her in high excitement, her color vivid, her manner nervous beyond its natural vivacity even as now expanded upon the best Continental models. “I got rid of my guests,” said she, “and sent for you as soon as I could. Have you heard?”

“About von Biestrich?” said I.

“It is hideous!--hideous!” she cried. “I who have kept my name unsullied--I who have----”

“I’m sure of that,” I interrupted. “I’m dead tired and, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go home.”

She caught me by the arm. “Godfrey, you think this was what I had in mind. I swear to you----”

“I’m sure you’ve been all that a wife is expected to be,” said I, in my usual manner of good-natured raillery. “And I’m also sure you would wait until you were free, and would deliberate very carefully before deciding----”

“Godfrey, how can you!” cried she, in her most exaggerated tone for outraged spirituality. “Have you _no_ heart? Have you no respect for me--your wife, the mother of your daughter?”

“Have I not said I did not suspect you?” remonstrated I. “Why so agitated, my dear? Do you wish to make me begin to suspect?”

She shrank and began to cool down. “I’ve never had such an experience before,” she apologized. “I don’t know how to take it.”

“It’s nothing--nothing,” I declared.

“I give you my word of honor that if I were free I should not consider marrying that German.”

“I believe you.” I put out a friendly hand. “Good night.”

“This ends all talk of divorce,” said she.

I dropped my hand. “I don’t see that the situation is changed in the least.”

“That’s because you are not a woman,” replied she. “You can’t appreciate how I feel.”

“You wished to be free before this paragraph appeared. You still wish to be free.”

“Oh, _how_ can you be so insensible!” cried she, all unstrung again and, I could not but see, genuinely so. “I _never_ could face the scandal of a divorce. I didn’t realize. It would kill me. How _did_ Hilda face it?--and all these other nice women? I should hide and never show my face again.”

She was agitating me so wildly that I felt I could not much longer conceal it. “I must go,” said I, pretending to yawn. “Sleep on it. Perhaps to-morrow you’ll feel differently.”

She tried to detain me, but I broke away and fled. To be almost free and then to have freedom snatched away! Not out of reach, but where it can be reached easily if one will simply stretch out his hand somewhat ruthlessly. By no means so ruthless as my wife had been a score of times in gaining her ends without regard to me. Why not be ruthless? Had she not been ruthless? Had she not given me the right to compel her to free me? More, did she not herself wish to be free? And was she not now restrained, not by consideration for me, not by any decent instinct whatsoever, but solely by a snobbish groveling fear of public opinion?--a senseless fear, too?

We are constantly criticising people--by way of patting ourselves on the back--because they take what they want regardless of the feelings of others. A form of self-righteousness as shameless as common; for we happen not to fancy the things they show themselves inconsiderate and swinish about. But--when we really do want a thing--what then? How industrious we become in appeal to conscience--that most perfect of courtiers--to show us how just and right it is that we should have this thing _we_ want! Having set myself drastically to cure self-fooling years before--when first I realized how dangerous it is and how common a cause of failure and ruin--I was unable to conceal from myself the cruelty of forcing Edna to divorce me. My conscience--as sly a sophist and flatterer as yours, gentle reader--my conscience could not convince me. Cruel things I had never done--that is, not directly. Of course I, like all men of action, had again and again been compelled to do them indirectly. But not by my own direct act had I ever made any human being suffer. I would not begin now. I would not commit the stupidity of trying to found my happiness upon the wretchedness of another. I could feel the withering scorn that would blaze in Mary Kirkwood’s honest eyes if I should go to her after having freed myself by force, and she should find it out. I see your sarcastic smile, gentle reader, as I thus ingenuously confess the selfish fear that was the hidden spring of my virtue. Your smile betrays your shallowness. If you knew human nature you would know that all _real_ motives are selfish. The differences of character in human beings are not differences between selfish and unselfish. They are differences between petty, short-sighted selfishness and broad, far-sighted selfishness.

When I saw Edna again she was still wavering. She had come to America with her mind made up for divorce, if I could by hook or by crook be induced to consent. She had been frightened by this attack upon her--frightened as only those who live a life of complete self-deception can be frightened by a sudden and public holding up of the mirror to reflect their naked selves. She was, of course, easily able to convince herself that her own motives in seeking a divorce were fine and high and self-martyring. But she could now see no way to convince others. In the public estimation she saw she would be classed with Lady Blankenship, with Mrs. Ramsdell, with all the other women who had got divorces to better themselves socially or financially.

Instead of dying out the scandal grew. The daily papers took up the hints in the society journal’s veiled paragraph, had long cabled accounts of Count von Biestrich, of his attentions to Edna, told when and where they had been guests at the same châteaus and country houses, made it appear that they had been no better than they should be for nearly a year. Edna was prostrated.

“There’s only one answer to these attacks,” she said to me. “You must give up your apartment and move to this hotel. We must open the house and live in it together and entertain together.”

I was not unprepared. I had threshed out the whole matter with myself, had made my choice between the two courses open to me--or, rather, had forced myself to see the truth that there was in decency but the one course. “Very well,” said I to her--and that was all.

I moved to the Plaza the same day; I was seen constantly with her; I did my best to show the world that all was serene between us. In fact, if you saw us during those scandal-clouded days you may have thought us a couple on a honeymoon. Behind the scenes we quarreled--about anything, about everything, about nothing--as people do when forced to play in public the farce of billing and cooing lovers. Especially if one of them has not the faintest glimmer of a sense of humor. But in public----

The newspapers soon had to drop their campaign of slander by insinuation.

So it came to pass that by the opening of the season Edna and I were installed in the big house, decidedly improved now thanks to the collecting both of ideas and of things she had done abroad. And we were giving all kinds of parties, with me taking part to an extent I should have laughed at beforehand as impossible. She had become so irritating to me that the mere sight of her put me in a rage. Have you ever been forced into intimate daily contact with a nature that is thoroughly artificial--after you have discovered its artificiality, its lack of sincerity, its vanity and pretense and sex trickery? There is, as we all know, in everyone of us a streak of artificiality, of self-consciousness, a fondness for posing to seem better than we are. But somewhere beneath the pose there is usually a core of sincerity, a genuine individuality, perhaps a poor thing but still a real thing. It may be there was this reality somewhere in Edna. I can only say that I was never granted a sight of it. And I rather suspect that she, like most of the fashion-rotted women and men, had lost by a process of atrophy through suppression and disuse the last fragment of reality. Had Gabriel’s trumpet sounded and the great light from the Throne revealed the secrets of all hearts, it would have penetrated in her to nothing but posing within posing.

I shall get no sympathy from man or woman--or fellow-beast--after talking thus of a woman and a lady. It is the convention to speak gallant lies to and about women--and to treat them as if they were beneath contempt. So my habit of treating them well and speaking the truth about them will be condemned and denounced with the triple curse. Well--I shall try to live through it.

Except in occasional outbursts when her rude candor toward me would anger me into retort in kind, I concealed my feeling about her. I knew it was just, yet I was ashamed of it. Our quarrels were all surface affairs--outbursts of irritation--the blowing off of surplus steam, not the bursting of the boiler and the wrecking of the machinery. If you happen to take into your employ any of the servants we had in those days--Edna’s maids or my valet or any other of the menials so placed that they could spy upon our innermost privacy--I am confident that in return for your adroit, searching questionings you will hear we were no more inharmonious than the usual married couple past the best-foot-foremost stage. I did not swear at her; she did not throw bric-à-brac at me. And once, I remember, when I had a bad headache she stayed home from the opera--on a Monday night, too--to read to me. It is true the new dress in which she had expected to show herself was not ready. But that is a detail for a cynic to linger upon.

Three months of New York, and she was bored to extinction. I had confidently been expecting this. I watched the signs of it with gnawing anxiety, for I was very near to the end of my good behavior. If possible I wished to stay on and help her toward a rational frame of mind--one in which she would see that divorce was the only possible solution of our impossible situation. But I began to fear I should have to give up and fly--to hunt or to inspect western mines and railways. She was bored by the women; they seemed shallow dabblers in culture after the European women. She was offended by their nervousness about their position; it made them seem common in contrast with the Europeans, born swells and impregnably ensconced. She was bored by the men--by their fewness, by the insufferable dullness of those few--all of them feeble imitations of the European type of elegant loafer.

“These men have no subtlety,” she cried. “They have no conversation. When they’re alone with a woman--you should hear them try to flatter. They are as different from the European men as--as----”

“As a fence-painter from an artist,” I suggested.