Part 28

“You can get a very good one,” said I. “Money--what would have bought you a wife as a man--what buys most men their wives--will buy you a husband. And he’ll be grateful and loving, so long as you manage the purse strings well--just as most wives are loving and grateful if their husbands don’t treat them too indulgently.”

“It’s different, and you know it is,” retorted she. “Custom has made it different. And I’m ugly--and that’s fatal in a woman.”

“Charm will beat beauty every time,” said I.

“I’ve got no charm--none on the outside. And that’s where a woman’s charm has to be. No, I’ve thought out my case. It’s hopeless. I’m a born old maid. No man ever asked me to marry him. No man ever said a word of love to me. Do you know what that means, Godfrey?”

I was silent. A choke in my throat made speech impossible.

“Never a word of love,” she went on monotonously. “Yet I don’t suppose any woman ever wanted to hear it more. And no children. Yet I know no woman ever wanted them more. No, not adopted children--but my own flesh and blood. I’ve heard women complain of the burden of bearing a child. It made me wild to listen to them--the fools--the selfish fools! What wouldn’t I have given to have felt a child within me. Does it scandalize you to hear me talk like this?”

“No,” said I. “No.”

“It’s a wonder,” said she, with a grim smile. She was quieting down, was hiding the heart from which she had on impulse snatched the veil, was ashamed of her outburst. “A woman can talk about having a cancer, or a tumor, or any frightful disease inside her, and nobody’s modesty is shocked. But if she speaks of having a child within her--a wonderful, living human being--a lovely baby--why, it’s immodest!” She gave a scornful laugh. “What a world! What a world!”

I looked at her and marveled. What a world, indeed!--where _this_ was one of the sort of relatives of whom pushing arrived people were ashamed!

* * * * *

I think I forced myself to stay three days with them. I cannot recall; perhaps I left the second day. However that may be, I have the sense of a long, a very long visit. To one who has the city habit the country is oppressively deliberate even when it is interesting. It makes you realize how there is room, and to spare, for sixty minutes in an hour, for sixty seconds in each minute. The city entertains; the country compels you to seek entertainment, to make entertainment. People whose mentality tapers away from mediocrity grow old and dull rapidly in the country as soon as childhood’s torrential life begins to slacken. For men of thought the country ought to be ideal, I should say, once they formed its habit and lost the city habit of waiting in confident expectation of being amused. But for men of action like myself, for men whose whole life is dealing directly with their fellow men, to acquire the country habit is a matter of years, of a complete revolution.

I brought a sore and a sick heart to the country. I took back to town one that was on the way toward the normal. And I owed the improvement not to the country directly, but to my sister. Polly Ann had reminded me of the futility of graveyard mooning, of its egotism and hypocrisy. She had reminded me that only the fool walks backward through life. I believed I had been guilty of the folly of blowing a bubble of delusion, pretending to myself that it was no bubble, but permanent, substantial, real. The bubble had burst, as bubbles must--had burst with a mocking and irritating dash of cold spray straight into my face. Well!--the sensible thing to do, the only thing to do, was to laugh and blow no more bubbles.

I went back to finance; I busied myself to the uttermost of my capacity for work. But I could not uproot the idea Mary Kirkwood had set growing in my mind. I saw ever more clearly that my sister was eternally right. Some men might be successful bachelors. I could be fairly successful at that selfish and solitary profession for a few years, perhaps for ten or fifteen years longer. But I knew with the clearness of a vision trained to search the horizon of the future that the feeling of loneliness, of complete futility which already shadowed me, would become a black pall. I _must_ have companionship; and to companionship there is but the one way--the way of wife and children. A poor, an uncertain way; nevertheless the only way.

You have, perhaps, observed the marriages of the rich. You have noted that every rich man and every rich woman is surrounded by a smaller or larger army of satellites--persons nominally their social equals, often distinctly their mental superiors, salaried persons, wearers of cast-off clothing, eaters of luncheons and dinners, permanent free lodgers, constant or occasional pensioners more or less disguised. Family life fails with the rich as it fails with the well off, or with the poor. But while other classes revert to the herd life, the life of clubs, saloons, teas, receptions, the rich take up the parasite-beset life, each rich person aloof with his or her particular circle of flatterers, attendants, coat-holders, joke-makers, and boot-lickers.

Now it so happened that for me there could be no enduring of this standing apart in the meadow, switching my tail while parasites bit and tickled, buzzed and burrowed. Riches, like any other heavy and constantly growing responsibility, usually rob a man of his sense of humor and turn his thoughts in upon himself and make him a ridiculous ass of an egotist. They had not had that effect upon me. I can give no reason; I simply state the fact. So, with my sense of humor active, and my sense of proportion fairly well balanced, I could not give myself up to the dreary life custom assigns to the rich. I retained the normal human instincts.

I had hoped to satisfy them to the uttermost with the aid of Mary Kirkwood. That hope had fallen dead. I must search on--not for the best conceivable, but for the best possible.

You are not surprised at my lack of sentiment, gentle reader. By this time, I am sure, I could not surprise you with any exhibition of that or other depravity. But it confirms your conviction of my utter sordidness. So? Then you imagine, do you, that there are many love marriages in the world, leaving out of the count those in novels and in the twaddling gossip men and women repeat as the true heart stories of this and that person? Yes, I should say your intelligence was about rudimentary enough to give you such a false notion of life as it is lived. Marriages of passion there are a-plenty. Rarely, indeed, does a man become bill-payer to a woman for life--not to speak of the insurance--without having been more or less agitated by her physical charms; and usually the woman, eager to be married, whips up for him a return feeling that looks well, convinces the man and herself, and makes you, gentle reader, sigh and wipe your sloppy eyes. But love-marriage--that’s a wholly different matter. I should say it almost never occurs. Where love, a sentiment of slow and reluctant growth, does happen occasionally to come afterwards, because the two are really congenial, really mated--where love does come afterwards, it did not exist when the wedding bells rang. And I doubt not that love has grown as often, if not oftener, where the motives that led to the marriage were practical and even sordid than where they were the bright, swift fading, and in death most foul-smelling, flowers of passion.

I was willing to buy a wife, if I could find a woman who promised to wear well, to improve on acquaintance, or, at least, not to deteriorate. And, beyond question, with my money I could have taken my pick. Almost any girl anywhere, engaged or unengaged, would have fallen in love with me as soon as she discovered my charms--of person and of purse. Yes, would have fallen in love, gentle reader. Don’t you know that a nice, pure girl always makes herself, or lets herself, fall in love, before she gives herself? And don’t you know that, except falling out of love--out of that kind of love--there’s nothing easier, especially for an inexperienced girl, than falling in love--in that kind of love?

But where was I to find a woman with enough solid quality to give me a reasonable hope that she would aid me in my quest for family happiness?

Do not denounce me, gentle reader. Epithet and hiss are not reply. Answer my question.

You say there are millions of such girls. Yes? But where?

You say there are millions of pure, sweet, charming girls, intelligent and domestic. Yes. No doubt. But how long would they remain so if tempted by wealth, by the example of all the money-mad, luxury-mad, society-mad women about them?

Mind you, I did not want a stupid rotter, a cow, a sitter and lounger and taker on of fat and slougher off of intelligence. I did not want the lazy slattern who poses as domestic, who is fond of home in exactly the same way that a pig is fond of an alley wallow.

You laugh at me. You say: “He is a conceited fool!--to think that _he_ could attract and absorb an intelligent woman with a complex woman’s soul!” Not so, gentle reader. I did not wish to attract and to absorb her. As for the “complex woman’s soul,” the less I saw or heard of it, the better pleased I’d be. I simply wanted a woman who would join me in being attracted by and absorbed in family life.

You are still smiling mockingly. But let me tell you a few secrets of wisdom and happiness. First--Friendship is divine, but intimacy is the devil himself--unless it is the intimacy of the family. Second--To love your neighbor as yourself, he must be and must remain your neighbor, that is to say, within hail, but not within touch. Third--Husband, wife, and children are the only natural intimates--intimate because they have the bond of common interest. The family that looks abroad for intimates has ceased to be a family. Finally--A man who has his wife and children for intimates has neither need nor time for other intimates; and unless a man’s wife and children are his intimates, he has, in fact, no wife and no children. Let me add, for the benefit of--perhaps of you and your husband, gentle reader--that the only career worth having is built upon and with efficient work; careers made with friendships, gaddings, pulls, and the like would better be left unmade.

You are smiling still, in your smug, supercilious fashion--smiling at what you promptly call old-fashioned trite truisms. I am not sure that, after they have been thought about a while, they would seem old-fashioned or stale. Rather, I flatter myself, they are the statement of a new philosophy of life. For the old theory with which you are confusing these truths was that the family is the _social unit_. In fact, it is not; the only _social_ units are individuals--capable individuals. My theory, or rather my philosophy--for it is more than a theory--my philosophy is that the family is the _unit of happiness_. Society can--and does--get along fairly well with little or no happiness. But happiness is an excellent thing, nevertheless. And _I_ wanted it.

Now, perhaps, you see why I was not looking forward with any exuberance of optimism to finding the woman whom I needed and wanted, and who needed and wanted me. Prompted by my experiences and guided somewhat by my shrewd and cynical friend Bob Armitage, I had been giving no small amount of spare time to observing and thinking about the American woman. And while I admired that charming lady and found her an amusing companion for an occasional leisure hour, I saw that she was not to be taken seriously by a serious person. She knew how to look well, how to make a good “front,” how to get perhaps a hundred dollars worth of pleasing surface results by squandering a thousand or two thousand dollars. As an ornament, a decoration, as a basket of rare inedible fruit to irradiate lovely costliness, she could not be beaten. As wife to a showy plutocrat, ignorant of the art of comfortable living, as head mistress to an European noble with servants trained to maintain his state in splendid and orderly discomfort, she would do excellently well. But not for the practical uses of sensible life. She had no training for them, no taste for them, no intention of adapting herself to them, whatever she might pretend in order to catch a bill-payer.

Still, I did not despair. I dared not despair. If I had, loneliness--and heartache, yes, heartache--and my sense of present and future futility would have become intolerable. On the other hand, while there was every reason for haste--when happiness was my goal, and life is short and uncertain--I was resolved to be deliberate. If I should be deceived--perhaps by the girl’s honest self-deception--into choosing wrong, how she would hate me! For not again would, or could I let a woman use me as Edna had used me. A fool is a grown-up person who has never grown up. I had grown up--had become a definite person, knowing what I wanted and what I did not want. Such persons are hated by those who try in vain to use them. My one chance lay in finding a woman with the same definite tastes as mine. Only disaster could come through the woman who might marry me, pretending to agree with me and secretly resolved to “redeem” me once she got me firmly in her grasp.

Armitage was back in New York, was eager to resume our old relations. But that could not be. I had outgrown him. And he, at the dangerous age, was allowing himself to harden into all the habits of the rich class and of middle life. Despite his efforts to conceal it, I saw that he had even reached the pass where a man of property regards a new idea as a menace to society. If it is a new invention, it may make some stock he owns worthless. If it is a new social or political idea it may make his laborers demand higher wages, or in some other way affect his dividends. And, of course, whenever a man speaks of a menace to society, he means a menace to himself whom he naturally regards as the most precious and vital thread in the social fabric. Compelled by my need for ideas to occupy me in supplement to the now thoroughly familiar and rather monotonous routine of investing and reinvesting, organizing and reorganizing, I was associating more and more with artists and writers of the sort who feel suffocated in the society of the merely rich.

Material conditions force upon men inexorable modes of life. And every mode of life breeds a definite, distinct set of ideas. Men fancy themselves original because they suddenly discover certain ideas in their brains. As well might a hen who has just eaten hot bran fancy herself original because she laid an egg. The idea was not from the man, but from his material conditions--lawyer idea, politician idea, banker idea, anarchist idea, big or little merchant idea, dog-fighter idea, professor idea, preacher idea, and so on. I was fighting to escape this to me repellent molding process--and I was making headway. But poor Armitage was rapidly yielding; his struggle, I fear, had been in its best days in large part a brassy make-believe--the valor of the trumpet, not of the sword.

He was a sorry sight. His once handsome face was taking on that petty, pinched, frost-bitten Fifth Avenue expression. And he had been driven for companionship into forming the familiar parasite circle. The chief figures in it were a decaying dandy of an old New York family who had been fawner and crumb snapper all his days, and a broken-down plutocrat who had squandered his fortune on fine women, fine wine, and fine food. The dandy gave Bob the fashionable gossip; the broken-down plutocrat gave him the gossip and scandal of the giddy part of town, also the latest gamey stories; also he--perhaps both--arranged for him the peculiar pleasures of the rich man with the palate that needs strong sensations to make it respond.

Armitage was out of the question for me. Then----

I drifted into the Amsterdam Club one evening--to write a note or send a telegram--and there sat Hartley Beechman. The instant he saw me he sprang up and made straight for me. His expression was puzzling, but not hostile--still, I was unobtrusively ready. Said he in a straight, frank fashion:

“Loring, I want to apologize to you. I made a damned ass of myself in Green Park last summer. My excuse is that I was more than half crazy----”

I put out my hand. “I half guessed at the time,” said I. “I know all about it now.”

We looked at each other with the friendliness that has become the stronger by a mended break--for broken hearts and broken lives and broken friendships are much the stronger if the break mends. Said he:

“One way of measuring the strength of a man is the length of the intervals between the times when he makes a fool of himself about a woman. My first came at eighteen, my next at thirty-eight. Not a bad showing, I flatter myself--eh?”

“Uncommonly good,” said I.

“And the second shall be the last.”

“Optimism!” I warned him laughingly. “Beware of optimism!”

“No. I shall write about women, but I’ll see no more of them. I’ve got hold of myself again. I’m as good as ever--better than ever, probably. But--it cost! And I’ll not pay that price again. For a while I thought it was you who had upset my happiness. Then--” He gave a loud, unnatural laugh--“That German purchase! I saw she had been simply playing with me. You know how fond women of that sort are of playing with romantic or sentimental ideas. But when it came to the test--why, she would have married only a fortune or a title.”

I made no comment. He was saying only what I thought, what I believed true. But I hated to hear it.

“I may wrong her,” pursued he reflectively. “Not altogether, but to a certain extent. I rather think the impulse to something saner and less vulgar was there--actually there.”

As he was looking at me inquiringly I said: “I think so.”

“But--nothing came of it. And there’s little in these fine impulses of which nothing comes.”

“Little?” laughed I. “Why, they produce the most beautiful decorative effects. Life would be barren without them. What a repulsive sight the poor little human animal would be, grunting and grubbing about, thinking always of its beloved self--what a repulsive sight if it didn’t wear the flowers of high ideals in its ears--and the jewels of fine impulses ringed in its nose.”

“_I_ think it would look better without them,” said he. “Less ridiculous--less contemptible.”

“To you--yes. Because you’re like I am--coarse. But not to itself and its fellows.”

“I’m going back to the woods to-morrow,” said he.

“Better come on a yachting trip to South America with me,” said I.

He flushed. “Thank you--but I can’t do that,” replied he. “I can’t afford it.”

It was my turn to flush. “I beg your pardon,” I said. “I spoke without thinking--spoke on impulse. You are quite right.”

“A man’s a fool or a sycophant who goes where he can’t pay his own way,” continued he. “I’ve come to realize that. I’ll do it no more. I’ll stick to my own class. I’ve been justly punished for blundering out of it. But not so severely punished as I should have been had my--” he smiled ironically--“my love affair prospered.”

He thought for several minutes, then he said: “I wonder--when the clash came--would I have gone with her or she with me?”

I did not reply.

He pulled himself together, smiled mockingly at his own folly of lingering near the unsightly and not too aromatic corpse. “I must get into the woods and breathe it out of my system. Did you see the account of the arrangements for her approaching marriage in this evening’s paper? Nearly a page--and I read every line.”

When he had finished his drink he rose and departed--and I have not talked with him since. He resumed his career; we all know how brilliant it is. As I have said before, I have no sympathy with the silly notion, bruited about by silly flabby people that women ruin the lives of strong men. Now and then a woman may be the proverbial last straw that breaks the camel’s back. But there’s a vast difference between woman the actuality, woman the mere last straw, and woman the vampire, the scarlet destroyer as portrayed in novels and so-called histories. Those mighty men, made or ruined by women--why do we never _see_ them, why do we only read about them?

I resisted the temptation to follow Beechman’s example and read the newspaper account of Mary Kirkwood’s approaching apotheosis into the heaven that is the dream of all true American ladies. There is but one way to do a thing--and that is to do it. I had destroyed or sent back the letters; I had resisted the telegram. I could not yet bar my mind from wandering to her. But I could avoid leading it to her--and I did. So it was by accident that, the following week, I one morning let my eye take in the whole of a four-line newspaper paragraph before I realized what it was about. The purport was that the engagement between Count von Tilzer-Borgfeldt and Mrs. Kirkwood had been broken off because of a “failure to agree as to settlements.” This, in the same newspaper that contained two columns descriptive of the quietly gorgeous marriage of Frascatoni and Edna in my son-in-law’s new house near London.

“Failure to agree as to settlements--” Faugh!

I had calmed until all my anger against her was gone and I was thinking of her as merely human, as the result of her environment like everyone else. I believed now that where she had deceived me she had also deceived herself. And I saw as clearly as in the days of my infatuation that she and I had been made for each other, that our coming together had been one of those rare meetings of two who are entirely congenial. It filled me with sadness that fate had not been kind instead of sardonically cruel, had not brought us together ten years earlier, before the world had poisoned her originally simple and sincere nature. But how absurd to linger over impossible might-have-beens! I had gone as far as I cared to go in the company of those who have made fools of themselves for love.

I believed I could trust myself with her in the same neighborhood. But I was not sure, and I would take no chance. A few days after I read of the broken engagement I departed on the yachting trip to South America.

XIV

There were but two in my party--Dugdale, the playwright, and myself. A more amusing man than Dugdale never lived. He was amusing both consciously and unconsciously. A mountain of a man--bone and muscle, little fat. He had eyes that were large, but were so habitually squinted, the better to see every detail of everything, that they seemed small; and his expression, severe to the verge of savageness, changed the instant he spoke into childlike simplicity and good humor. He made money easily--large sums of money--for he had the talent for success. But he spent long before he made. I think it must have been his secret ambition to owe everybody in the world--except his friends. From a friend he never borrowed. The general belief was that he had never paid back a loan--and I have no reason to doubt it. What did he do with his borrowings? Loaned them to his friends who were hard up. If the list of those he owed was long, the list of those who owed him was longer. If he never paid back, neither was he ever paid.

He could work at sea, or anywhere else--no doubt even in a balloon. On that trip he toiled prodigiously, crouched over a foolish little table in his cabin, smoking endless cigarettes and setting down with incredible rapidity illegible words in a tiny writing that contrasted grotesquely with the enormous hand holding the pencil. He labored altogether at night, after I had gone to bed. He was always astir before me. He slept unbelievably little, probably kept up on the quantities of whisky he drank. However that may be, he was as active by day physically as he was mentally by night. He was all over the boat, always finding something to do--something for me as well as for himself.