Part 8

There is a shallow fashion of describing this or that as peculiarly New York, usually snobbishness or domestic unhappiness or wealth worship, dishonest business men or worthless wives. It is time to have done with such nonsense. New York is in no way peculiar, nor is any other place, beyond trifling surface differences. New York is nothing but the epitome of the whole country, just as Chicago is. If you wish to understand America, study New York or Chicago, our two universal cities. There you find in one place and in admirable perspective a complete museum of specimens of what is scattered over three and a half million square miles. For, don’t forget, New York is not the few blocks of fashionable district alone. It is four million people of all conditions, tastes, and activities. And the dominant force of struggle for money and fashion is no more dominant in New York than it is in the rest of America. New York is more truly representative of America than is Chicago, for in Chicago the Eastern and Southern elements are lacking and the Western element is strong out of proportion.

I was telling of my wife’s blossoming as Lady Bountiful in search not of a heavenly crown, but of what human Lady Bountiful always seeks--social position. Charity covers a multitude of sins; the greatest of them is hypocrisy. I have yet to see a charitable man or woman or child whose chief and only noteworthy object was not self-glorification. The people who believe in brotherhood do not go in for charity. They wish to abolish poverty, whereas charity revels in poverty and seeks to increase it, to change it from miserable poverty which might die into comfortable pauperism which can live on, and fester and breed on, and fawn on and give vanity ever more and more exquisite titillations. Holy Cross, my wife’s new spiritual guide, was past master of the pauper-making and pauper-utilizing arts. Its rector and his staff of slimy sycophants had the small standing army of its worthy poor trained to perfection. When my wife went down among them, she returned home with face aglow and eyes heavenly. What a treat those wretches had given her! And in the first blush of her enthusiasm she dispensed lavishly, where the older members of the church exacted the full measure of titillation for every dollar invested and awarded extra sums only to some novelty in lickspittling or toadeating.

Were I not sure I should quite wear out the forbearance of gentle reader, I should linger to describe this marvelous charity plant for providing idle or social-position-hunting rich women with spiritual pleasures-- I had almost said debaucheries, but that would be intruding my private and perhaps prejudiced opinion. I have no desire to irritate, much less shake the faith of, those who believe in Holy Cross and its “uplift” work. And I don’t suppose Holy Cross does any great amount of harm. The poor who prostitute themselves to its purposes are weak things, beyond redemption. As for the rich who waste time and money there, would they not simply waste elsewhere were there no Holy Cross?

My wife was, at that time, a very ignorant woman, thinly covered with a veneer of what I now know was a rather low grade of culture. That veneer impressed me. It had impressed our Brooklyn friends of St. Mary’s. But I fancy it must have looked cheap to expert eyes. Where her surpassing shrewdness showed itself was in that she herself recognized her own shortcomings. Rare and precious is the vanity that comforts and sustains without self-deception. She knew she wasn’t the real thing, knew she had not yet got hold of the real thing. And when she began to move about, cautiously and quietly, in Holy Cross, she realized that at last she was in the presence of the real thing.

My big responsibilities, my associations in finance, had been giving me a superb training in worldly wisdom. I think I had almost as strong a natural aptitude for “catching on” to the better thing in speech and manner and in dress as had Edna. It is not self-flattery for me to say that up to the Holy Cross period I was further advanced than she. Certainly I ought to have been, for a man has a much better opportunity than a woman, and one of the essentials of equipment for great affairs is ability to observe accurately the little no less than the large. Looking back, I recall things which lead me to suspect that Edna saw my superiority in certain matters most important to her, and was irritated by it. However that may be, a few months in Holy Cross and she had grasped the essentials of the social art as I, or any other masculine man, never could grasp it. And her veneer of “middle-class” culture disappeared under a thick and enduring coating of the best New York manner.

“What has become of _you_?” I said to her. “I haven’t seen you in weeks.”

“I don’t understand,” said she, ruffling as she always did when she suspected me of indulging in my coarse and detestable sense of humor.

“Why, you don’t act like yourself at all,” said I. “Even when we’re alone you give the uncomfortable sense of dressed-up--not as if _you_ were ‘dressed-up,’ but as if _I_ were. I feel like a plowboy before a princess.”

She was delighted!

“You,” I went on, “are now exactly like the rest of those women in Holy Cross. I suppose it’s all right to look and talk and act that way before people. At least, I’ve no objection if it pleases you. But for heaven’s sake, Edna, don’t spoil our privacy with it. The queen doesn’t wear her coronation robes all the time.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” said she.

“Don’t you?” cried I, laughing. “What a charming fraud you are!” And I seized her in my arms and kissed her. And she seemed to yield and to return my caresses. But I was uncomfortable. She would not drop that new manner. The incident seems trifling enough; perhaps it was trifling. But it stands out in my memory. It marks the change in our relationship. I recall it all distinctly--how she looked, how young and charming and cold, what she was wearing, the delicate simple dress that ought to have made her most alluring to me, yet made me feel as if she were indeed alluring, but not for _me_. A subtle difference there, but abysmal; the difference between the woman who tries to make herself attractive for the sake of her husband and the woman who makes toilets in the conscious or half-conscious longing successfully to prostitute herself to the eyes of the public. I recall every detail of that incident; yet I have only the vaguest recollection of our beginning to occupy separate bedrooms. By that time the feeling of alienation must have grown so strong that I took the radical change in our habits as the matter of course.

Many are the women, in all parts of the earth, who have sought to climb into the world of fashion by the broad and apparently easy stairway of charity. But most of them have failed because they were unaware of the secret of that stairway, an unsuspected secret which I shall proceed to point out. It seems, as I have said, a particularly easy stairway--broad, roomy, with invalid steps. It is, in fact, a moving stairway so cunningly contrived that she--it is usually she--who ascends keeps in the same place. She goes up, but at exactly her ascending rate the stairway goes down. She sees other women making apparently no more effort than she ascending rapidly, and presently entering the earthly heaven at the top. Yet there she stands, marking time, moving not one inch upward, and there she will stand until she wearies, relaxes her efforts, and finds herself rapidly descending. But how do the women who ascend accomplish it? I do not know. You must ask them. I only know the cause of the failure of the women who do not ascend. If I knew why the others succeeded I should not tell it. I would not deprive fashionable women of the joy of occupying a difficult height from which they can indulge themselves in the happiness of sneering and spitting down at their lowlier sisters. And I have no sympathy with the aspirations or the humiliations of those lowlier sisters.

My energetic and aspiring wife presently found herself on this stairway, with no hint as to its secret, much less as to the way of overcoming its peculiarity. She toiled daily in Holy Cross. She subscribed to everything, she helped in everything. She was the proud recipient of the rector’s loud praises as his “most devoted, least worldly, most spiritual helper.” But--not an invitation of the kind she wanted. Everyone was “just lovely” to her. Whenever any charitable or spiritual matter was to be discussed, no matter how grand and exclusive the house in which the discussion was to be held, there was my wife in a place of honor, eagerly consulted--and urged to subscribe. But nothing unworldly. They understood how spiritual she was, did those sweet, good people. They knew Saint Edna wished no social frivolities--no dinners or theater parties, no bridge or dancing.

She was a wise lady. She hid her burning impatience. She smiled and purred when she yearned to scowl and scratch. She waited, and prayed for some lucky accident that would swing her across the invisible, apparently nonexistent but actually impassable dead line. She had expected snubs and cold shoulders. Never a snub, never a cold shoulder. Always smiles and gracious handshakings and amiable familiarities, but those always of the kind that serve to accentuate caste distinction instead of removing it. For the first time in her life, I think, she was completely stumped. She could combat obstacles. She might even have found a way to fight fog. But how ridiculous to make struggles and thrust out fists when there is nothing but empty, sunny air!

She held church lunches and dinners at our house--of course, had me on duty at the dinners. All in vain. The distinction between the spiritual and the temporal remained in force. The grand people came, acted as if they were delighted, complimented her on her house, on her hospitality, went away, to invite her to similar dreary functions at their houses. And my, how it did cost her! No wonder Holy Cross made a pet of her and elected me to the board of vestrymen.

Once in a while she would find something in her net, so slyly cast, so softly drawn. She would have a wild spasm of joy; then the something would turn out to be another climber like herself. Those climbers avoided each other as devils dodge the font of holy water. The climber she would have caught would be one who, ignorant of the intricacies of New York society, was under the impression that the Mrs. Godfrey Loring so conspicuous in Holy Cross must be a social personage. They would examine each other--at a series of joyous entertainments each would provide for the other, would discover their mutual mistake--and-- You know the contemptuous toss with which the fisherman rids himself of a bloater; you know the hysterical leap of the released bloater back into the water.

But how it was funny! My wife did not take me into her confidence as to her social struggles. She maintained with me the same sweet, elegant exterior of spiritual placidity with which she faced the rest of the world. Nevertheless, in a dim sort of way I had some notion of what she was about--though, as I was presently to discover, I was wholly mistaken in my idea of her progress.

“What has happened to Mrs. Lestrange?” I said to her one evening at dinner. “Is she ill?”

She cast a quick, nervous glance in the direction of the butler. I, looking at him by way of a mirror, thought I saw upon his aristocratic countenance a faint trace of that insolent secret glee which fills servants when their betters are humiliated before them. “Mrs. Lestrange?” she said carelessly. “Oh, I see her now and then.”

“But you’ve been inseparable until lately,” said I. “A quarrel, I suppose?”

“Not at all,” said my wife tartly.

And she shifted abruptly to another subject. When I went to the little study adjoining my sitting room to smoke she came with me. There she said:

“Please don’t mention Mrs. Lestrange before the servants again.”

“Why, what’s up?” said I. “Did she turn out to be a crook?”

“Heavens, no! How coarse you are, Godfrey. Simply that I was terribly mistaken in her.”

“She looked like a confidence woman or a madam,” said I. “Didn’t you tell me she was a howling swell?”

“I thought she was,” said my wife, and I knew something important was coming; only that theory would account for her admitting she had made a mistake. “And in a way she was. But they caught her several years ago taking money to get some dreadful low Western people into society. Since then she’s asked--she herself--because she’s well connected and amusing. But she can’t help anyone else.”

“Oh, I see,” said I. “And you don’t feel strong enough socially as yet to be able to afford the luxury of her friendship.”

“Strong enough!” said Edna with intense bitterness. “I have no position at all--none whatever.”

I was surprised, for until that moment I had been assuming she was on or near the top of the wave, moving swiftly toward triumphant success. “You want too much,” said I. “You’ve really got all there is to get. At that last reception of yours you had all the heavy swells. My valet told me so.”

“Reception to raise funds for the orphanage,” said Edna with a vicious sneer--the unloveliest expression I had ever seen on her lovely face--and I had seen not a few unlovely expressions there in our many married years, some of them extremely trying years. “I tell you I am nobody socially. They take my money for their rotten old charities. They use me for their tiresome church work--and they do nothing for me--nothing! How I _hate_ them!”

I sat smoking my cigar and watching her face. It was a wonderfully young face. Not that she was so old; on the contrary, she was still young in years. I call her face wonderfully young because it had that look of inexhaustible, eternal youth which is rare even in the faces of boys and girls. But that evening I was not thinking so much of her youth and her beauty as of a certain expression of hardness, of evil passions rampant--envy and hatred and jealousy, savage disappointment over defeats in sordid battles.

“Edna,” said I, hesitatingly, “why don’t you drop all that? Can’t you see there’s nothing in it? You’re tempting the worst things in your nature to grow and destroy all that’s good and sweet--all that makes you--and me--happy. People aren’t necessary to us. And if you must have friends, surely _all_ the attractive people in New York aren’t in that little fashionable set. Judging from what I’ve seen of them, they’re a lot of bores.”

“They look bored here,” retorted she. “And no wonder! They come as a Christian duty.”

I laughed. “Now, honestly, are those fashionable people the best educated, the best in any way--any real way? I’ve talked with the men, and the younger ones--the ones that go in for society--are unspeakable rotters. I wouldn’t have them about.”

Edna’s eyes flashed, and her form quivered in a gust of hysterical fury--the breaking of long-pent passion, of anger and despair, taking me as an excuse for vent. “Oh, it’s terrible to be married to a man who _always_ misunderstands!--one who can’t sympathize!” cried she. It was a remark she often made, but never before had she put so much energy, so much bitterness into it.

“What do I misunderstand?” I asked, more hurt than I cared to show. “Where don’t I sympathize?”

“Let’s not talk about it!” exclaimed she. “If I weren’t a remarkable woman I’d have given up long ago--I’d give up now.”

Before you smile at her egotism, gentle reader, please remember that husband and wife were talking alone; also that with a few pitiful exceptions all human beings think surpassingly well of themselves, and do not hesitate to express that good opinion privately. I guess there’s more lying done about lack of egotism and of vanity generally than about all other matters put together.

Said I: “You are indeed a wonder, dear. In this country one sees many astonishing transformations. But I doubt if there have been many equal to the transformation of the girl I married into the girl who’s sitting before me.”

“And what good has it done me?” demanded she. “How I’ve worked away at myself--inside and out--and all for nothing!”

“You’ve still got _me_,” said I jovially, yet in earnest too. “Lots of women lose their husbands. I’ve never had a single impulse to wander.”

In the candor of that intimacy she gave me a most unflattering look--a look a woman does well not to cast at a man unless she is more absolutely sure of him than anyone can be of anything in this uncertain world. I laughed as if I thought she meant that look as a jest; I put the look away in my memory with a mark on it that meant “to be taken out and examined at leisure.” But she was absorbed in her chagrin over her social failure; she probably hardly realized I was there.

“Well, what’s the next move?” inquired I presently.

“You’ve got to help,” replied she--and I knew this was what she had been revolving in her mind all evening.

“Anything that doesn’t take me away from business, or keep me up too late to fit myself for the next day.”

“Business--always business,” said she, in deepest disgust. “Do you _never_ think of anything else?”

“My business and my family--that’s my life,” said I.

“Not your family,” replied she. “You care nothing about them.”

“Edna,” I said sharply, “that is unjust and untrue.”

“Oh, you give them money, if that’s what you mean,” said she disdainfully.

“And I give them love,” said I. “The trouble is I give so freely that you don’t value it.”

“Oh, you are a good husband,” said she carelessly. “But I want you to take an interest.”

“In your social climbing?”

“How insulting you are!” she cried, with flashing eyes. “I am trying to claim the position we are entitled to, and you speak of me as if I were one of those vulgar pushers.”

“I beg your pardon,” said I humbly. “I was merely joking.”

“I’ve often told you that your idea of humor was revolting.”

I felt distressed for her in her chagrin and despair. I was ready to bear almost anything she might see fit to inflict. “What do you want me to do?” I asked. “Whatever it is, I’ll do it. Do you need more money?”

“I need help--real help,” said she.

“Money’s god over the realm of fashion, the same as it is over that of--of religion--of politics--or anything you please. And luckily I’ve got that little god in my employ, my dear.”

“If you are so powerful,” said she, “put me into fashionable society--make these people receive me and come to my house.”

“But they do,” I reminded her.

“I mean _socially_,” cried she. “_Can’t_ I make you understand? Why are business men so dumb at anything else? Compel these people to take me as one of them.”

“Now, Edna, my dear,” protested I, “be reasonable. How can I do that?”

“Easily, if you’ve got real power,” rejoined she. “It’s been done often, I’ve found out lately. At least half the leaders in society got in originally by compelling it. But you, going round among men intimately--you must know it--must have known all along. If you’d been the right sort of man I’d not have to humiliate myself by asking you--by saying these dreadful things.” Her eyes were flashing and her bosom was heaving. “Women have hated men for less. But I must bear my cross. You insist on degrading me. Very well. I’ll let myself be degraded. I’ll say the things a decent man would not ask a woman to say----”

“Edna, darling,” I pleaded. “Honestly, I don’t understand. You’ll have to tell me. And it’s not degrading. We have no secrets from each other. We who love each other can say anything to each other--anything. What do you wish me to do?”

“Use your power over the men. Frighten them into ordering their wives to invite us and to accept our invitations. You do business with a lot of the men, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said I.

“You can benefit or injure them, as you please, can’t you?--can take money away from them--can put them in the way of making it?”

“Yes,” said I; “to a certain extent.”

“And how do you use this power?”

“In building up great enterprises. I am founding a city just now, for instance, where there was nothing but a swamp beside a lake, and----”

“In making more and more money for yourself,” she cut in, “you think only of yourself.”

“And you--what do _you_ think of?” said I.

“Not of myself,” cried she indignantly. “Never of myself. Of Margot. Of you. Of the family. I am working to build _us_ up--to make _us_ somebody and not mere low money grubbers.”

I did not see it from her point of view. But I was not inclined to aggravate her excitement and anger.

“Why shouldn’t you use your powers for some unselfish purpose?” she went on. “Why not try to have higher ambition?”

I observed her narrowly. She was sincere.

“I want you to help me--for Margot’s sake, for your own sake,” she went on in a kind of exaltation. “Margot is coming on. She’ll be out in less than three years. We’ve got to make a position for her.”

“I thought, up there at Miss Ryper’s she was----”

“That shows how little interest you take!” cried Edna. “Don’t you know what is happening? Why, already the fashionable girls at her school are beginning to shy off from her----”

“Don’t be absurd!” laughed I. “That simply could not be. She’s lovely, sweet, attractive in every way. Any girls anywhere would be proud to have her as a friend.”

“How _can_ you be so ignorant of the world!” cried Edna in a frenzy of exasperation. “Oh, you’ll drive me mad with your stupidity! Can’t you realize how _low_ fashionable people are. The girls who were her friends so long as they were all mere children are now taking a positive delight in snubbing her, because she’s so pretty and will be an heiress. It gives them a sense of power to treat her as an inferior, to make her suffer.”

I flung away the cigar and sat up in the chair. “How long has this been going on?” I demanded.

“Nearly a year,” replied my wife. “It began as soon as she lost her childishness and developed toward a woman. I’m glad I’ve roused you at last. So long as she was a mere baby they liked her--invited her to their children’s parties--came to hers. But now they’re dropping her. Oh, it’s maddening! They are so sweet and smooth, the vile little daughters of vile mothers!”

“Incredible!” said I. “Surely not those sweet, well-mannered girls I’ve seen here at her parties? _They_ couldn’t do that sort of thing. Why, what do those babies know about social position and such nonsense?”

“What do they know? What _don’t_ they know?” cried Edna, trembling with rage at her humiliation and at my incredulity. “You _are_ an innocent! There ought to be a new proverb--innocent as a married man. Why, nowadays the children begin their social training in the cradle. They soon learn to know a nurse or a butler from a lady or a gentleman before they learn to walk. They hear the servants talk. They hear their parents talk. Except innocent you everyone nowadays thinks and talks about these things.”

“But Margot--our Margot--she doesn’t know!” I said with conviction.

Edna laughed harshly. “Know? What kind of mother do you think I am? Of course she knows. Haven’t I been teaching her ever since she began to talk? Why do you suppose I’ve always called her the little duchess?”

“She suggests a superior little person,” said I, groping vaguely.

“She suggests a superior person because I gave her that name and brought her up to look and act and feel the part. She expects to be a real duchess some day--” Edna reared proudly, and her voice rang out confidently as she added--“and she shall be!”

I stared at her. It seemed to me she must be out of her mind. Oh, I was indeed innocent, gentle reader.