Part 27

She did not reply. After reflecting she burst out with, “You ought to have _made_ me, Godfrey--ought to have trained me to your taste. Women have to be _made_.”

“Even if that had been possible in this case,” I observed, “I didn’t know enough.”

Again she thought a long time; then with a sigh she said: “But it’s too late now. You’re right. It’s too late.”

It puzzled me to note how much the world had taught her in some ways, and how little in others. But that is a familiar puzzle--the unexpected, startling ways in which knowledge juts out into ignorance and ignorance closes in upon knowledge, forming a coast line between the land of knowledge and the sea of ignorance more jagged than that of Alaska or Norway. The result is that each of us is a confused contention of wisdom and folly in which the imperious instincts of elemental passions and appetites, by their steady persistence, easily get their way.

“Since I’ve begun to look at these foreign men seriously,” she went on, “to study them-- It’s one thing to size them up, as you say in America, with the idea that they’re mere outsiders--acquaintances--social friends. It’s very different to measure them with a view to serious relations. I’m not altogether a fool--even from your standpoint--am I, Godfrey?”

“Distinctly not,” said I.

“Since I’ve been _studying_ these upper-class men over here--I’ve changed my mind in some respects. I’m not a child, you know. I haven’t done what I’ve done without using some judgment of men and women.” She flooded me with a smile of gratitude. “I owe my judgment to you, Godfrey. You taught me.”

“You never agreed with anything I said--when I did occasionally venture an opinion.”

“Because a woman disagrees and scorns--it doesn’t follow that she isn’t convinced.”

“You’ve changed your mind about these men?” said I, for my curiosity was aroused.

“I find a lack in them. You’re right to a certain extent, Godfrey. They _are_ futile--the cleverest of them. Culture gives a great deal, of course.”

“What?” said I.

“It’s too long and involved to explain. And you don’t believe in it.”

“I’m willing to,” said I. “But first, I’d like to know what it is, and second, I’d like to know what it _does_. I’ve never been able to get anything but words in answer to either question.”

“Well, _I_ see that it gives a great deal. But I must admit that it takes away something--yes, much--strength from the mind and softness from the heart.”

I was astonished at this admission from her--at the admission itself, at the fresh evidences of what a good natural mind she had. But I had no desire to discuss with her. I had long outgrown the folly of discussion with futile people. I was tempted to air my own views of this so-called culture--how it emasculated where it pretended to soften; how it discovered nothing, invented nothing, produced nothing, did not feed, or clothe, or shelter, or in any way contribute to the sane happiness of a human being; how it unfitted men and women for active life, made them pitiful spectators merely, scoffing or smiling superciliously at the battle. But I refrained. I knew she believed the rôle of spectator the only one worthy a lady or a gentleman--and certainly it is the only one either lady or gentleman could take without being exposed as ridiculous. I knew that her wise observations were clever conversation merely, after the manner of futile people--that when the time for action came her snobbishness dominated her.

“I wish these men were not so--so----”

“Good-for-nothing?” I suggested.

She accepted the phrase, though she would have preferred one less mercilessly truthful.

“You can’t find everything in one person,” said I.

That kind of tame generality--lack of interest thinly veiled in a polite show of interest--kills conversation and sets a tarrying caller to moving where dead silence produces a nervous tendency to linger. Edna extended her arm, resting her hand upon the crook of her parasol in a gesture of approaching departure. Yet she seemed loth to go. She rose, but counterbalanced with:

“You know, I suppose, that it’s likely to be Frascatoni?”

I rose, replied indifferently, “So I hear.”

She stood, smiling vaguely down at the gloved hand on the crook of the parasol. “If I were only younger--or more credulous,” said she. And I knew that there was a thin, sour after-taste to the sparkling wine of the prince’s love-making. I smiled--pleasant, noncommittal.

“I ask too much of life,” said she impatiently. “Isn’t it irritating that I should become critical just as I am in a position to get everything I’ve longed for and worked for?”

“Those moods pass,” said I.

“No doubt,” said she. “Well--good-by.” She put out her hand with a radiant smile. “I’ll not annoy you any more.”

My answering smile and pressure of the hand were friendly, but cautiously so, for I felt I was still on thin ice. I opened the door for her. We shook hands again. Our eyes met. I think it must have given each of us a shock to see in the other’s face the polite, distant look of strangers parting. How easy it is for two to become like one--and when they are, how impossible it seems that they could ever be aliens. How easy it is for two that are as one to become utter strangers; the sea is wide, and its currents curve rapidly away from each other.

“Rossiter,” said I--he was at work in the anteroom, “take Mrs. Loring to her carriage, please.”

So--she was gone; I was free!

XIII

Not a shadow of doubt lingered. She was gone; I was free. Her manner had been the manner of finality. Her reluctance and her sadness were little more than the convention of mourning which human beings feel compelled to display on mortuary occasions of all kinds. Beneath the crepe I saw a not discontented resignation, a conviction of the truth that life together was impossible for her and me.

My male readers--those who have a thinking apparatus and use it--will probably wonder, as I did then, that she had overlooked certain obvious advantages to be gained through refusing to divorce me. She knew me well enough to be certain I would not compel her to go to America and live with me, but if she insisted would let her stay in Europe or wander where she pleased. This would have given her all the advantages of widowhood. Free, with plenty of money, she could have led her own life, without ever having to consult the conveniences and caprices of a husband. It seemed to me singularly stupid of her to resign this signal advantage, to tie herself to a husband she could not ignore, a husband she already saw would bore her, as poseurs invariably bore each other--to tie herself to such a man with no compensating advantage but a title. Indeed, so stupid did it seem that from the moment she began to waver about confirming the divorce I all but lost hope of freedom.

My women readers will understand her. A man cannot appreciate how hampered a woman of the lady class is without a legitimate male attachment of some kind--a husband, a brother, or a father in constant attendance, ready for use the instant the need arises. Our whole society is built upon the theory that woman is the dependent, the appendage of man. Freedom is impossible for a woman, except at a price almost no woman voluntarily pays. To have any measure of freedom a woman must bind herself to some man, and the bondage has to be cruel indeed not to be preferable to the so-called freedom of the unattached female. Thus it was not altogether snobbishness, it may not have been chiefly snobbishness, that moved Edna to transfer herself to a husband who would be a more or less unpleasant actuality. She had to have a man. She wished to live abroad and to be in fashionable society. She chose shrewdly. I imagine, from several things she said, that she had measured Frascatoni with calm impartiality, had discovered many serious disadvantages in him as husband to a woman of her fondness for her own way. But estimating the disadvantages at their worst, the balance still tipped heavily toward him.

I am glad I was not born a woman. I pity the women of our day, bred and educated in the tastes of men, yet compelled to be dependents, and certain of defeat in a finish contest with man.

Though there was now no reasonable doubt of Edna’s having the decree of divorce made final, I, through overcaution or oversensitiveness as to Mary Kirkwood’s rights, or what motive you please, would not let myself leave London until a cable from my lawyers in New York informed me that the decree had been entered and that I was legally free. The newspapers had given much space to our affairs. It was assumed that I had come abroad “to make last desperate efforts to win back the beautiful and charming wife, the favorite of fashionable European society.” Stories had been published, giving in minute detail accounts of the bribes I had offered. And when the final decree was entered, my chagrin and fury were pictured vividly.

I did nothing to discredit this, but, on the contrary, helped along the campaign for the preservation of the literary and journalistic fiction that the American woman is a kind of divine autocrat over mankind. If I had been so vain and so ungallant as to try to make the public see the truth I should have failed. You can discredit the truth to the foolish race of men; but you cannot discredit, nor even cast a shade of doubt upon, a generally accepted fiction of sentimentality. And of all the sentimental fictions that everyone slobbers over, but no one in his heart believes with the living and only valid faith of works, the fictions about woman are the most sacred. Further, how many men are there who believe that a man could get enough of a physically lovely woman, however trying she might be? Once in a while in a novel--not often, but once in a while--there are scenes portraying with some approach to fidelity what happens between a woman and a man who is of the sort that is attractive to women. Invariably such scenes are derided or denounced by the critics. Why? For an obvious reason. A critic is, to put it charitably, an average man. He has no insight; he must rely for his knowledge of life solely upon experience. Now what is the average man’s experience of women? He treats them in a certain dull, conventional way, and they treat him--as he invites and compels. So when he reads how women act toward a man who does not leave them cold or indifferent, who rouses in them some sensation other than wonder whether they would be able to stomach him as a husband, the critic scoffs and waxes wroth. The very idea that women might be less reserved, less queenly, less grudgingly gracious than woman has ever been to him sends shooting pains through his vanity--and toothache and sciatica are mild compared with the torturings of a pain-shotten vanity.

Edna scored heavily in the newspapers. You would never have suspected it was her late husband’s money that had given her everything, that had made her throughout; for, what had she, and what was she, except a product of lavishly squandered money? Think about that carefully, gentle reader, before you damn me and commiserate her as in these pages a victim of my venomous malice.... She was the newspaper heroine of the hour. If she had been content with this-- But I shall not anticipate.

My cable message from New York came at five o’clock. At half-past six, accompanied only by my valet, I was journeying toward Switzerland.

Mrs. Kirkwood, I had learned from her brother, was at Territet, at the Hotel Excelsior, with the Horace Armstrongs. At four the following afternoon I descended at Montreux from the Milan express; at five, with travel stains removed, I was in the garden of the Excelsior having tea with Mrs. Armstrong and listening to her raptures over the Savoy Alps. Doubtless you know Mrs. Armstrong’s (Neva Carlin’s) work. Her portrait of Edna is famous, is one of the best examples I know of inside-outness. Edna does not like it, perhaps for that reason.

Mary and Horace Armstrong had gone up to Caux. “But,” said Neva, “they’ll surely be back in a few minutes. Count von Tilzer-Borgfeldt is coming at half-past five.”

I instantly recognized that name as the one Edna gave in telling me that Mary had gone shopping for a title and had invested. I had thought Edna’s jeer produced no effect upon me. I might have known better. My nature has, inevitably, been made morbidly suspicious by my business career. Also, I had found out Robert Armitage as a well-veneered snob, and this could not but have put me in an attitude of watchfulness toward his sister, so like him mentally. Also my investigations of that most important phenomenon of American life, the American woman, had compelled me to the conclusion that the disease of snobbishness had infected them all, with a few doubtful exceptions. So, without my realizing it, my mind was prepared to believe that Mary Kirkwood was like the rest. When Neva Armstrong pronounced the name Edna had given, there shot through me that horrible feeling of insufferable heat and insufferable cold which it would be useless to attempt to describe; for those who have felt it will understand at once, and those who have not could not be made to understand. And then I recalled Hartley Beechman’s jeer, “She’s laughing at us both.” But my voice was natural as I said:

“Tilzer-Borgfeldt. That’s the chap she’s engaged to just now, isn’t it?”

Mrs. Armstrong, who is a loyal friend, flushed angrily. “Mary isn’t that sort, and you know it, for you’ve known her a long time.”

“Then she’s not engaged to him?” said I.

“Yes, she is,” replied Neva. “And if you knew him, you’d not wonder at it. I don’t like foreigners, but if I weren’t bespoke I think I’d have to take Tilzer-Borgfeldt if he asked me.”

“No doubt it’s a first-class title,” said I.

“You know perfectly well, Godfrey Loring, that I don’t mean the title.” She happened to glance toward the entrance to the garden. “Here he comes now. You’ll judge for yourself.”

Advancing toward us was a big, happy blond man of the pattern from which nine out of ten German upper-class men are cut. He had the expression of simple, unaffected joy natural to a big, healthy, happy blond youth looking forward to seeing his best girl. He had youth, good looks, unusual personal magnetism--and you will imagine what effect this produced upon my mood. I could not deny that Neva was right. Without a title this man would have all the chances in his favor when he went courting. He had not a trace of aristocratic futility.

You would have admired the frank cordiality of my greeting. Instead of sitting down again I glanced at my watch and said:

“Well, my time’s up. I shall have to go without seeing Horace and Mary.”

“But you’ll come to dinner?” said Mrs. Armstrong.

“I’m taking the first express back to Paris,” said I. “I found a telegram waiting for me at my hotel.”

“Mary will be disappointed,” said Neva. “You’ll give Mrs. Loring my best?”

I remembered that the English papers, with the news doubtless in it, would not reach Territet until late that evening or the following morning. But I could not well tell her what had occurred. “Good-by,” said I, shaking hands. “Tell them how sorry I was. I may see you all in Paris.”

And away I went, with not an outward sign of my internal state. In less than half an hour I was in the Paris express.

* * * * *

I stopped at Paris a month. A letter came from her--a bulky letter. I tossed it unopened into the fire. A week, and a second letter came. It was not so bulky. I flung it unopened into the fire. About two weeks, and a third letter came. I got Rossiter to address an envelope to her. I inclosed her unopened letter in the envelope and mailed it. I was giving myself an exquisite pleasure, the keener because it was seasoned with exquisite pain.

All this time I had been amusing my idle days in the usual fashion. My readers who lead quiet lives--the women who sit thinking what they would do if only they were men--the men who slip away occasionally for a scampish holiday, and return to their sober routine with the cheering impression that they have been most fearfully and wonderfully devilish--those women and those men will regret that I refrain from details of how I amused myself. But to my notion I have said enough when I have said “in the usual fashion.” It passed the time as probably nothing else in the circumstances would have passed such tenacious hours, every one lingering to be counted. But I confess I have never been virtuous enough to be especially raptured by so-called vice. No doubt those who divide actions into good and bad, using the good for steady diet and the bad for dessert, have advantages in enjoyment over those who simply regard things as interesting and uninteresting. For, curiously enough, on that latter basis of division practically all the things esteemed by most human beings as the delightful but devilish dessert of life fall into the class of more or less uninteresting. But for the stimulus of the notion that he is doing something courageously, daringly wicked, I doubt if any but a dull fellow would perpetrate vice enough to lift the most easily scandalized hands in the world. The trouble with vice is that it is so tiresome--and so bad for the health. And most of it is so vulgar. Drinking to excess and gambling, for instance. I have indulged in both at times, when hard pressed for ways to pass the time or when in those stupid moods of obstinate unreasonableness in which a man takes a savage pleasure in disgusting himself with himself. Drinking has a certain coarse appeal to the imagination--coarse and slight but definite. But gambling is sheer vulgarity. I have been called money-mad, because I have made money, finding it easy and occupying to attend to business. Yet never have I cared about money sufficiently to take the faintest interest in the gaming table. Gambling--all forms of it--is for those sordid creatures who love money, and who have no intelligent appreciation of its value. Gambling--all the vices, for that matter--is essentially aristocratic; for, as I believe I have explained, aristocracy analyzes into the quintessence of vulgarity. The two incompetent classes--the topmost and the bottommost--are steeped in vice, for the same reason of their incompetence to think or to act.

A fourth letter, the bulkiest of all, came from Mary Kirkwood. A few hours before it was delivered a telegram came from her:

“A letter is on the way. Godfrey, I beg you to read it. I love you.”

I tore up the telegram, sent back the letter without opening it. You are denouncing me as inhuman, gentle reader. Perhaps you are right. But permit me to point out to you that, if I had not in my composition a vein of iron, I should never have risen from the mosquito-haunted flats of the Passaic. Also, gentle reader, if I had been a man of the ordinary sort would Mary Kirkwood have been sufficiently interested in me to send those letters and that telegram?

A day or so after the return of her last letter I was seized--I can’t say why--with a longing to see my father and mother and sister, on that lonely farm out in New Jersey. I had never felt that desire since I first left home, but had made my few and brief visits out of a sense of duty--no, of shame. The thought of them gave me no sensation of horror, as it gave Edna and her daughter. When I remembered them it was simply as one remembers any random fact. They did not understand me; and in them there was nothing to understand. We had few subjects for conversation, and those not wildly interesting and soon exhausted. You will smile when I say I loved them. Yet it is the truth. We do not always love those we like to be with; we do not always like to be with those we love.

There was nothing to detain me in Paris. The hours hung like guests who do not know how to take leave. So not many days elapsed between my seizure and my appearance at the spacious and comfortable stone farmhouse where the four old people were awaiting in a semi-comatose or dozing state what they firmly believed was a summons to a higher life. Their belief in it, like that of most religious people, was not strong enough to make them impatient to get it; still they believed, and found the belief a satisfactory way of employing such small part of their minds as remained awake.

I had not seen them or their place in several years, so I was astonished by the changes. My sister Polly--a homely old maid--and Edna’s father had some glimmerings of enterprise. Polly took in and read several magazines, and from them gathered odds and ends of up-to-date ideas about dress, about furnishing, about gardens. With the valuable assistance of old Weeping Willie she had wrought a most creditable transformation. The old people now “looked like something,” as the saying is. And the place had a real smartness--both within and without.

Polly--she was about eight years my senior, but looked old enough to be my mother--Polly watched me anxiously as I strolled and nosed about. My delight filled her with delight.

“You’re not so ashamed of us, perhaps?” said she.

“I never have been,” replied I. Nor did I put an accent on the personal pronoun that would have been a hint about somebody else’s feelings.

“Well--you ought to have been,” said she. “We were mighty far behind even the tail of the procession.”

“I’ll admit I like this better than the way we used to live in Passaic. Polly, you’ve got the best there is going. All the rest--all the luxury and other nonsense--is nothing but a source of unhappiness.”

She did not answer. I noted a touching sadness in her expression.

“You don’t agree with me?” said I.

“Yes, I do,” replied she emphatically. “I wasn’t thinking of that.”

“What have _you_ got to be unhappy about?”

“You think I’m ungrateful to you,” said she, with quick sensitiveness. “But I’m not, Godfrey--indeed I’m not.”

“Ungrateful?” I laughed. “Don’t talk nonsense.”

“You’ve done all you could--all anyone could. And in a way I am happy. But----”

“Yes?” I urged, as she hesitated.

“Well, I’ve found out--looking back over my life--I’ve found out that I-- It seems to me I’ve got all the _tools_ of happiness, but nothing to _work on_. I keep thinking, ‘How happy I could be if I only had something to work on!’”

I was silent. A shadow crept out of a black corner of my heart and cast a somberness and a chill over me.

“You understand?” said she.

I nodded.

“I thought you would,” she went on. “Godfrey, I’ve often felt sorry for you--sorrier than I do for myself.” She laid her hand on my arm. “But you’re a man--a handsome, attractive, _young_ man. You’ll have only yourself to blame if you waste your life as mine’s been wasted.”

“You don’t realize how lucky you’ve been,” said I, with a bitterness that surprised me. “You’ve at least escaped marriage.”

“I wish to God I hadn’t,” cried she with an energy that startled me. There was a fierce look of pain in her eyes. “I thought you understood. But I see you don’t.”

“What do you mean, Polly Ann?” said I gently.

“The real unhappiness isn’t an unhappy marriage,” replied she. “It’s being not married at all--not having any children. You know what I am--an old maid. You think that means the same thing as old bachelor. Well, it don’t.”

“Why not?”

“An old bachelor--nine times out of ten that means simply an old, selfish, comfortable man. But an old maid-- The nature of woman’s different from the nature of man. A woman’s got to have a home--_her_ home--her nest, with her children in it. And I’m an old maid. If I’d been a man--” She turned on me. “I’m ugly, ain’t I? You know I am. _I_ know it. Dress me up in men’s clothes and I’d be a good-looking person--as a man. But as a woman I’m ugly. If I’d have been a man I could have got a mighty nice, mighty nice-looking wife--one that’d have been grateful to me for taking her and would have cared for me. But as a woman I couldn’t get a husband.”