IV
Itis hardly necessary to say that I threw overboard my partners and saved myself. Indeed, I emerged from the crisis—liberally bespattered with mud, it is true—but richer than when I entered it. Since I was doing the act that was the supreme proof of my possessing the courage and the skill for leadership in business—since I was definitely breaking with the old-fashioned morality—I felt it was the part of wisdom to do the thing so thoroughly, so profitably, that instead of being execrated I should be admired. There were attacks on me in the newspapers; there were painful interviews with my partners—not so painful to me as they would have been had I not been able to remind them of their own unsuccessful treacheries and to enforce the spoken reminder with the documentary proof. But on the whole I came off excellently well—as who does not that “gets away with the goods?”
In these days of increased intelligence and consequent lessened hypocrisy, the big business man is the object of only perfunctory hypocrisies from outraged morality. It has been discovered that the farmer watering his milk or the grocer using solder-“mended” scales is as bad as the man who “reorganizes” a railway or manipulatesa stock—is worse actually because the massed mischief of the million little business rascals is greater than the sensational misdeeds of the few great rascals. It has been discovered that human nature is good or bad only according to the opportunities and necessities, not according to abstract moral standards. And the cry is no longer, “Kill the scoundrel,” but, “That fellow had the sense to outwit us. We must learn from him how to sharpen our wits so that we won’t let ourselves be robbed.” A healthful sign this, that masses of men are ceasing from twaddle about vague ideals and are educating themselves in practical horse sense. It may be that some day the honest husbandman will learn to guard his granary not only against the robber with the sack in the dark of the morn, but also against the rats and mice who pilfer ten bushels to every one that is stolen. Of one thing I am certain—until men learn to take heed in the small, they will remain easy prey in the large.
Far from doing me harm, my bold stroke was of the greatest benefit—from the standpoint of material success, and that is the only point of view I am here considering. It did me as much good with the world as it has done me with you, gentle reader. For while you are exclaiming against my wickedness you are in your secret heart confessing that if I had chosen the ideally honest course, had retired to obscurity and poverty, you would have approved—and would have lost interest in me. Why, if I had chosen that ideal course, I doubt not I should have lost my railway position. My directors would have waxed enthusiastic over my “old-fashionedhonesty,” and would have looked round for another and shrewder and stronger man to whom to intrust the management of their railway—which would not pay dividends were it run along the lines of old-fashioned honesty. The outburst of denunciation soon spent itself, like a summer storm beating the giant cliffs of a mountain. Of what use to rage futilely against my splendid immovable fortune? The attacks, the talk about my bold stroke, the exaggerations of the size of the fortune I had made, all served to attract attention to me, to make me a formidable and an interesting figure. I leaped from obscurity into fame and power—and I had the money to maintain the position I had won.
Long before, indeed as soon as we moved to Manhattan, my wife had joined fashionable and exclusive Holy Cross Church and had plunged straightway into its charity work. A highly important part of her Brooklyn education had been got in St. Mary’s, in learning how to do charity work and how to make it count socially. Edna genuinely loved charity work. She loved to patronize, loved to receive those fawning blessings and handkissings which city poverty becomes adept at giving the rich it lives off of. The poor family understands perfectly that the rich visit and help not through mere empty sentimental nonsense of brotherhood, but to have their vanities tickled in exchange for the graciousness of their condescending presence and for the money they lay out. As the poor want the money and have no objection to paying for itwith that cheap and plentiful commodity, cringing—scantily screening mockery and contempt—rich and poor meet most comfortably in our cities. Not New York alone, but any center of population, for human nature is the same, city and country, San Francisco, Bangor—Pekin or Paris, for that matter.
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 themis 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 thesocial 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 ofyou?” 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 ifyouwere ‘dressed-up,’ but as ifIwere. 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 delicatesimple dress that ought to have made her most alluring to me, yet made me feel as if she were indeed alluring, but not forme. 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 failureof 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 himselfof 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 Ihatethem!”
I sat smoking my cigar and watching her face. Itwas 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, surelyallthe 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 whoalwaysmisunderstands!—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 gotme,” 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 youneverthink 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 meansocially,” cried she. “Can’tI 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 doyouthink of?” said I.
“Not of myself,” cried she indignantly. “Never of myself. Of Margot. Of you. Of the family. I am working to buildusup—to makeussomebody 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.”
“Howcanyou 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 howlowfashionable 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?Theycouldn’t do that sort of thing. Why, what do those babies know about social position and such nonsense?”
“What do they know? Whatdon’tthey know?” cried Edna, trembling with rage at her humiliation and at my incredulity. “Youarean 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.
“I’ve always treated her as a duchess, and have made the servants do it, and have trained her to treatthem as if she were a duchess.” A proud smile came into her face, transforming it suddenly back to its loveliness. “The first time I ever read about a duchess—read, knowing what I was reading about—I decided that I would have a daughter and that she should be a duchess.”
At any previous time such a sally would have made me laugh. But not then, for I saw that she meant it profoundly, and for the first time I was realizing what had been going on in my family, all unsuspected by me.
“But first,” proceeded Edna, “she shall have the highest social position in New York. And you must help if I am to succeed.” The fury burst into her face again. “Those little wretches, snubbing her!—dropping her! I’ll make them pay for it.”
“Do you mean to tell me that Margot realizes all this?” said I.
“Poor child, she’s wretched about it. Only yesterday she said to me: ‘Mamma, is it true that you and papa are very common, and that we haven’t anything but a lot of stolen money? One of the girls got mad at me because I was so good-looking and so proud, and taunted me with it.’”
“Incredible!” said I, dazed.
“She’s horribly unhappy,” Edna went on. “And it cuts her to the heart to be losing all her dearest friends. I did my duty and taught her which girls to cultivate, and she was intimate only with the right sort of New York girls.”
“I expect she has been indiscreet,” said I. “They’ve found out why she made friends with them and——”
“You will drive me crazy!” cried Edna. “Can’tyou understand? All the mothers and the governesses—all the grown people in respectable families teach the children. Those mothers who don’t teach it directly see that it’s taught by the governesses, or else select the proper friends for their little girls and see that they drop any who aren’t proper.”
I dropped back in my chair. I was stunned. It seemed to me I had never heard anything quite so infamous in my life. And as I reflected on what she had said I wondered that I had not realized it before. I recalled a hundred significant facts that had come out in talks I had had with men, women, and children in this fashionable world from which we were excluded, yet with which we were in constant and close communication.
“The question is, what areyougoing to do,” proceeded Edna.
I shook my head, probably looking as dazed as I felt.
“What does that headshake mean?” demanded she.
“You—taughtMargotto be a—a—like those other girls?” said I.
“Oh, you fool!” cried Edna. And in excuse for her, please remember I had ever been a dotingly bored slave of hers—as uxorious a husband as you ever saw—and therefore inevitably despised, for women have so little intelligence that they despise a man who loves them and lets them rule. “You fool!” she repeated. “Yes, I brought her up like a lady—taught her to cultivate nice things and nice people. What should Iteach her? To associate with common people? To drop back toward where we came from—whereyoubelong?”
“Yes, I guess I do,” said I.
Up to that time I had interested myself in only one aspect of human nature—the aspect that concerned me as a business man. But from that time I began to study the human animal in all his—and her—aspects. And it was not long before I learned what that animal is forced to become when exposed to the powerful thrusts and temptings of wealth and social position. In our alternations of pride and humility we habitually take undue credit or give undue blame to ourselves for what is wholly the result of circumstance. The truth is, we are like flocks of birds in a high wind. Some of us fly more steadily than others, some are quite beaten down, others seem almost self-directing; but all, great and small, weak and strong, are controlled by the wind, and those who make the best showing are those who adapt themselves most skillfully to the will of the wind.
At the time when Edna and I were talking I had not become a philosopher. I was in the primitive stages of development in which most men and nearly all women remain their whole lives through—the stage in which you live, gentle reader, with your shallow mistaken notions of what is and your shallower mistaken notions of what ought to be. So, as Edna uncovered herself to me, I shrank in horror. It was fortunate—for her, at least—that I had always trained myself never to make hasty speeches. My expertness in that habit has probably been the principal cause of my business success, of my ability to outwit even abler men than myself.I did not yield to the impulse to burst out against her. I compressed my lips and silently watched as she lifted the veil over our family life and revealed to me the truth about it.
“What are you going to do?” she asked impatiently, yet with a certain uneasiness born no doubt of a something in my manner that made her vaguely afraid, for while she knew I was her slave and despised me, as I was to learn, for being so weak before a mere woman, she also knew that, outside of her domain, I was not her slave nor anybody’s, but planned and executed at the pleasure of my own will.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” said I slowly. “I must think. All this is new to me.”
“If you haven’t any pride in yourself, or in me,” said she, “still you surely must have pride for Margot.”
“I think so,” said I.
“If you could know how they have made the poor child suffer!”
I made no reply, nor did I encourage her to talk further. In fact, when she began again I stopped her with: “I’ve heard enough, my dear. And I’ve some important business to attend to.”
She, preparing to leave me alone with my papers, came and put her arms round my neck and pressed her cheek against mine. I think she was uneasy about the posture of the affair in my mind—feared stupid commercial I could not appreciate these vital things of life. I suspect my tranquil reception of her caresses did not tend to allay her uneasiness. Never before had she failed to interest me in her physical self; and the onlyreason she then failed was that in the general upsetting of all my ideas of what my family life was there had been tossed up to the surface an undefined suspicion of her sincerity as a wife. I was not altogether blind as to the relations of men and women, as to the fact that women often coolly played upon the passions of men for their own purposes of money getting in its various forms. My wife was right in her sneer at the innocence of married men. But there are exceptions, and a woman with a husband intelligent in every way except in seeing through women would do well to take care how she tempts his intelligence to shake off its indifference in that respect.
The next morning I was breakfasting alone as usual. No, gentle reader, I am not girding at my poor wife as you hastily accuse. I am sure I do not deceive myself when I say I never was of those men who fuss about trifles. Thank heaven, as soon as we had a servant my wife kept away from breakfast. It was one of the things I loved her for. If I had been married to a woman who appeared at breakfast looking lovely and smiling sweetly, I should have become a bad-tempered tyrant. I want no sentimentalities in the early-morning hours. I wake up uncomfortable and sour, and I quarrel with myself and look about for trouble until I have had something to eat and coffee. Further in the same direction, I took particular pleasure in my wife’s small personal slovenlinesses, in her curl papers, in her occasional overlaying of her face with cold cream and the like, in her careless negligee worn in her own rooms. There is, I guess, no nature so prodigal that it has not some smalleconomies. Edna had, probably still has, a fondness for wearing out thoroughly, in secluded privacy, house dresses, underclothes, and night gowns.
It took nothing from my delight in her beauty that she was not invariably beautiful. I’ve rarely seen her lovely early in the morning. Who is? I should have taken habitual early-morning loveliness as a personal insult. I’ve seen her homely all day long, and for several days at a time. She was as attractive to me than as at her most beautiful. I detest monotony. Thank heaven, she was never monotonous to look at; one rather expectsmentalmonotony in women unless one is a fool. I didn’t mind her times of homeliness, because she could be so far, far the opposite of homely. I did not mind her way of getting herself up in odds and ends, mussily, but, mind you, never after the Passaic days unclean—never! I did not mind her dishevelments because, when she set out to dress, she did it so bang up well. She was born with a talent for dress; she rapidly developed it into an art. You know what I mean. You’ve seen the girl with hardly five dollars’ worth of clothing on her, including the hat, yet making the woman from the best dressmaker in Paris look a frump.
I never had to join the innumerable and pitiful army of men who give the woman their money to squander upon bad fits and bad taste, and are bowed down with shame when they have to issue forth with her. I can honestly say, and Edna will bear me out, that I gave her money freely. No doubt the reason in part was I found it so easy to make money that I was indifferent to extravagance. But the chief reason, I believe, wasEdna’s skill at dress. The woman who is physically alluring to her husband, and who knows how to dress, rarely has difficulty in getting money from him, though he be a miser. But, gentle lady reader, can you in your heart blame a man for grudging his earnings to a woman who isn’t fit to dress and who doesn’t know how, either?
As I had begun to tell when I interrupted myself, I was breakfasting alone the morning after that memorable talk with Edna, and Margot came down to glance in for a smile at me on her way to school.
In theory Margot was still classed as a child, and would be so classed for two years longer. In fact she was, and had been for two years and more, a full-fledged young lady. That is the way American children of the rank for which my wife was training Margot are being brought up nowadays. She had her own apartment, dressing room and bath, sitting room, reception room—as many rooms as my wife and I had altogether when we began married life, and about four times the room. As for luxury, a comparison would be ridiculous. Also Margot had her own staff of servants—companion, maid, maid’s assistant—and her own automobile with chauffeur, used by no one else. It would be hard to find more helpless creatures than these young aspirants to aristocracy. And they prided themselves upon their ignorance of the realities, and their mothers, often with hypocritical pretense of distress, boasted it. At that time I thought it amusing. The serious side of it was entirely out of my range. We American men of the comfortable and luxurious classes are addicted to the habit of regardingour wives and children as toys, as mere sources of amusement not to be taken seriously. It isn’t strange that the children should not mind this, but what a commentary upon the real mentality of the women that they tolerate and encourage it! Our women are always, with a fine show of earnestness, demanding that they be taken seriously. But woe unto the man who believes them in earnest and tries to treat them as his equals instead of as dainty toys, odalisques. How he will be denounced, hated, and, if proper alimony can be got, divorced!
Margot’s parties differed in no respect from grown-up parties, except that there were restrictions in the matter of hours and also as to the serving of drinks. For, I believe my wife did not follow the extreme of fashionable custom, but forbade wines and punch at these parties. In this matter, as in the matter of using slang and in many others, she held that only people of long-established social position, people with what is called tradition, could safely make excursions beyond the bounds of conventionality; that it was safest, wisest for people like herself to stay well within the bounds, to be prim even, and so to avoid any possible criticism as vulgar. A very shrewd woman was Edna. If her intelligence had been equal to her shrewdness and energy, and if she had possessed a gleam of the sense of humor! However——
In no essential respect did Margot’s routine of life differ from that of her mother—and her mother’s routine of inane and worthless time-killing was modeled exactly upon that of all the fashionable women and apersof fashionable women. Edna did a vast amount of studying, with and without teachers. It was all shallow and showy. Margot’s studies were also beneath contempt. I amused myself from time to time by inquiring—with pretense of gravity—into what they were teaching her at the Ryper school for the turning out of fashionable womanhood. Such a mess of trash! She was learning much about social usages, from how to sit in a carriage—a rare art that, I assure you, gentle reader—to how to receive guests at a large dinner. She was studying some of the vulgarities—science, history, literature, and the like—but in no vulgar way. She would get only the thinnest smatter of talkable stuff about them—nothing “unsettling,” nothing that might possibly rouse the mind to think or distract the attention from the “high” things of life. She was dabbling in music, in drawing, in several similar costly fripperies. And the sum total of expense!—well, no wonder Miss Ryper was fast becoming as rich as some of the asteroids in the plutocracy she adored.
I regarded Margot’s education as a species of joke. It never occurred to me that our pretty baby had the right to be educated to become a wife and a mother. And why should it have occurred to me? Where is that being done? Who is thinking of it? In all the oceans of twaddle about the elevation of woman where is there a drop of good sense aboutrealeducation? You say I was criminally negligent as to my daughter’s education. But how about your own? The truth is, we all still look upon education as a frill, an ornament. We never think of it, whether for our sonsor for our daughters, as nothing more or less than teaching a human being how to live. It is high time to end this idiotic ignorant exaltation of tomfoolery into culture!
Poor Margot! How the little girls in plain clothes—and machine-made underwear—must have envied her as she swept along in her limousine, dressed with that enormously costly simplicity which only the rich can afford. No wonder many of the other girls at the Ryper school hated her. For, her mother was in one respect unlike most of the fashionable mothers who are too busy doing things not worth doing to attend to their children. Her mother gave her loving care, spent many hours—of anxious thought, no doubt—in planning to make her the most luxurious, the most helpless, the most envied girl in the school. We hear unendingly about the good that love does in the world. Not too much—no, indeed! But at the same time might it not be well if we also heard about the harm love can do—and does? How many sons and daughters have been ruined by loving parents! How many husbands have been wrecked by the flatteries and the assiduities of loving wives! How many wives have been lured to decay and destruction by the over-indulgent love of their husbands! What we need in this world is not more sentiment, but more intelligence. Sentiment is a force that rushes far and crazily inbothdirections, gentle reader, unless it has well-balanced intelligence to guide it.
Margot, smiling in the doorway of the breakfast room, put me at once into a less somber humor. She was tall and slim—an inch taller than her mother andwith the same supple, well-proportioned figure. She had her mother’s small, tip-tilted face and luminous eyes, but they were of an intense dark gray that gave her an expression of poetic thoughtfulness and mystery. Whiter or more perfectly formed teeth I have never seen. In former days children’s teeth were neglected. But my wife, with her peculiar reach for all matters having to do with appearances, had learned the modern methods of caring for the body when Margot was still in the period when the body is almost as formable as sculptor’s clay. Thus Margot’s teeth had been looked after and made perfect and kept so. Her hair hung loose upon her shoulders like a wonderful changeable veil of golden brown. Often at first glance you are dazzled by these carefully fed and carefully groomed children of the rich, only to note at the second glance that the best showing has been made of precious little in the way of natural charm. But this was not true of Margot. The longer you looked, and the more attentively, the finer she seemed to be—like a rare perfect specimen from a connoisseur’s greenhouses. There’s no doubt about it, Edna did know the physical side of life. She would have got notable results even had we been poor. As it was, with all the money she cared to spend, she performed what looked like miracles.
“Come and kiss me, Margot,” said I.
She obeyed, with a charming air of restrained eagerness that is regarded as ladylike. “My car is waiting,” said she. “I’m late.”
“Is that Therese”—her maid—“out in the hall waiting to go with you?”
“Yes. Miss Parnell”—her companion—“has a headache, poor creature!”
Margot had caught to perfection the refined, elegant, fashionable tone of speaking of the servile classes. Though I was in a critical mood that morning, I was not critical of my beloved little Margot, and her airs entertained me as much as ever. Said I:
“Sit down, little duchess”—the familiar name slipped out unconsciously—“and talk to me a few minutes.”
“But I’m shockingly late, papa,” pleaded she.
“No matter. I’ll telephone Miss Ryper, if you wish.” To the butler, who was serving me: “Sackville, go tell Therese that I’m detaining Miss Margot. And close the door behind you.”
Sackville retired. Margot seated herself with alacrity. She did not like her useless school any better than other children like more or less useful schools. “Are you taking me to the theater Saturday afternoon, as you promised?” said she. “And do get a box and let me ask two of the girls.”
“Certainly,” said I. “If I can’t go, Miss Parnell will chaperon you.”
“No, I want you, papa. It’s so nice to have a man.”
“How are you getting on at school? Not with the studies”—I laughed at the absurdity of calling her fiddle-faddle studies—“but with the girls?”
Her face clouded. “Has mamma told you?”
“Told me what?”
She hesitated.
“Go on, dear,” said I. “What’s the trouble?”
“Oh, it’s always the same thing,” she sighed, with a grown-up air that was both humorous and pathetic. “Some of the girls are down on me—about—about social position. You see, we don’t gosociallywith their families.”
“Why should we?” said I. “We don’t know them nor they us. Naturally, they don’t care anything about us, nor we about them.”
She hung her head. “But I want to go with them,” said she doggedly.
“Why?” said I.
“Because—because—it’s the proper thing to do. If you don’t go with them everybody looks down on you.” She lifted her head, and her flashing eyes reminded me of her mother. “It makes me justwildto be looked down on.”
“I should say so,” said I. “Those little girls at Miss Ryper’s must be an ill-bred lot. We must take you away from there and put you in a school with nice girls.”
“Oh, no, father!” she cried in a panic. “Those girls are thenicest—the only nice girls in any school in New York. All the other schools look up to ours. I’d cry my eyes out in any other school.”
“Why?” said I.
“I’d feel—low.” Her eyes had filled and her cheeks were flushed. “I’d be out of place except among the richest and most aristocratic girls.”
“But you don’t like them,” said I gently. I began to feel a sensation of sickness at the heart.
“Ihatethem!” cried she with passionate energy.“But I want to stay on there andmakethem be friendly with me. I’ve got too much pride, papa, to run away.”
“Pride,” said I, and my tone must have been sad. “That isn’t pride, dear. You ought to choose your friends by liking. You ought to feel above girls with such cheap ideas.”
“But I’m not above them,” protested she. “And I couldn’t like any girl I’d be ashamed to be seen with, unless she were a sort of servant. Oh, papa, you don’t appreciate how proud I am.”
“Proud of what, dear? Of your parents? Of yourself?”
She hung her head.
“Of what, dear?” I urged.
“It hurts me not to be treated as—as the inside clique of girls in our secret society treat each other.” She was almost crying. “They don’t even call me by my first name any more. They speak to me as Miss Loring—andsopolitely—exactly as I speak to Miss Parnell or one of the teachers or a servant. Oh, I’m so proud! I’d love to be like Gracie Fortescue. She speaks even to Miss Ryper as I would to Miss Parnell.”
My digestion wasn’t any too good, even in those days. My whole breakfast suddenly went wrong—turned to poison inside me, I suppose. A hot wave of rage against I knew not whom or what rolled up into my brain. I pushed away my plate abruptly. “Run along, child,” I said in a hoarse voice I did not recognize as my own.
She threw her arms round my neck with a gesture and an expression that made me realize how close a copyof her mother she was. “You wouldn’t take me away from my school, would you, papa dear?” she pleaded.
“All I want is to make you happy,” said I, patting and stroking that thick and lovely veil of flowing hair.
She assumed that I meant she was to stay on with the viperous Ryper brood, and went away almost happy. She had awakened to the fact that there were fates even worse than being snubbed and addressed like a teacher or a companion or a servant or some other lower animal—yes, far worse fates. For instance, not being able to feel that she was, on whatever degrading terms, at least associated with the adored fashionables.
That evening when my wife again accompanied me to my study, after dinner, I said to her:
“I’ve been turning over our talk last night. I haven’t been able to reach a conclusion as yet, except on one point. I can’t help you socially in the way you suggested.”
I glanced at her as I said this. She was looking at me. Her pale, intense expression fascinated me.
“I don’t think you have thought about it fully,” said she slowly.
“Yes,” said I, with my utmost deliberateness; “and my decision is final.”
She rose, stood beside her chair, rubbing her hand softly along the top of the back. “Very well,” said she quietly. And she left me alone.