VI
Armitageand I were together every day. He attracted me for the usual reason of congeniality, and also because he was giving me a liberal education. I have never cared for books or, with two or three exceptions, for book men. About both there is for me an atmosphere of staleness, of tedium. I prefer to get what is in the few worth-while books through the medium of some clear and original mind—such a mind as Armitage had. He ought to have been a great man. No, he was a great man; what I mean to say is that his talents ought to have won his greatness recognition. He did not lack capacity or energy; he showed a high degree of both in the management and increase of his fortune. He lacked that species of vanity, I guess it is, which spurs a man to make himself conspicuous. Also he had a kind of laziness, and chose to be active only in the way that was easiest and most agreeable for him—the making of money.
His father had been rich, and his grandfather; his great grandfather had been one of the richest men in Revolutionary times. His father was regarded as a crank because he had imagination, and therefore despised the conventional ideas of his own generation; to be regarded as thoroughly sane and sensible, youmust be careful to be neither, but to pattern yourself painstakingly upon the particular form of feeble-mindedness and conventional silliness current in your time. Armitage’s father resolved that his son should not have his individuality clipped and moulded and patterned by college and caste into the familiar type of upper-class man. So Armitage went to public school, graduated from it into a factory, then into an office, himself earned the money to carry out the ambitions for study and travel with which his father had inspired him.
I think there was nothing worth the knowing about which Armitage had not accurate essential information—books, plays, pictures, music, literature, history, economics, science, medicine, law, finance. He was a good shot and a good horseman, could run an automobile, take it to pieces, put it together again. He was a practical mechanic and a practical railroad man. He had a successful model farm. “It doesn’t take long to learn the essentials about anything,” said he, “if you will only put your whole mind on it and not let up till you’ve got what you want. And the trouble with most people—why, they are narrow and ignorant and incompetent—it isn’t lack of mind, but lack of interest. They have no curiosity.” Nor was my friend Armitage a smatterer. He didn’t try todoeverything; he contented himself with knowledge, anddidonly one thing—made money out of railroads.
When he saw that I really wished to be educated, he amused himself by educating me. Not in a formal way, of course; but simply talking along, about whateverhappened to come up. I have never known a man to get anywhere, who did not have an excellent memory. Lack of memory—which means lack of the habit and power of giving attention—is the cause of more failures than all other defects put together. If you don’t believe it, test the failures you know; perhaps you might even test your own not too successful self. I had an unusual memory; and I don’t think Armitage or anyone ever told me anything worth knowing that I did not stick to it and keep it where I could use it instantly.
Several months after his wife and mine departed, we were walking in the park one afternoon—the usual tramp round the upper reservoir to reduce or to keep in condition. He said in the most casual way:
“My wife is coming next week, and will get her divorce at once.”
Taking my cue from his manner I showed even less surprise then I felt. “This is the first I’ve heard of it,” said I.
“Really?” said he carelessly. “Everyone knows.” He laughed to himself. “She is to marry Lord Blankenship—the Earl of Blankenship.”
“And the children?” said I.
He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. Her people will look after them. She has spoiled them beyond repair. I have no interest in them—nor they in me.” After a little tramping in silence, he halted and rested his hands on the railing and looked away across the lakelike reservoir, its surface tossed up into whitecaps by the wind. “I loved her when we were married,” said he. “That caused all the mischief. I let her do as she pleased. She was a fine girl—good family but poor. She pretended to be in sympathy with my ideas.” His lip curled in good-humored contempt. “I believed in her enthusiasm. My father—wonderfully sane old man—warned me she was only after our money, but I wouldn’t listen. Tried to quarrel with him. He wouldn’t have it—gave me my way. It’s not strange I believed in her. She looked all that’s high-minded—and delicate—and what they call aristocratic. Well, itisaristocratic—the reality of aristocracy.”
“Perhaps she was sincere,” said I, out of the depths of my own experience, “perhaps she honestly imagined she liked and wanted the sort of life you pictured. We are all hypocrites, but most of us are unconscious hypocrites.”
“No doubt she did deceive herself—in part at least,” he admitted. “For a year or so after our marriage she kept up the bluff. I didn’t catch on—didn’t find her out—until we began to differ about bringing up the children. Even then, I loved her so that I let her have her way until it was too late.”
“But,” said I, “don’t you owe it to them to——”
He interrupted with an impatient, “Didn’t I try? But it was hopeless. To succeed in this day, I’d have had to take the children away off into the woods, with the chances that even there the servants I’d be compelled to have would spoil them—would keep them reminded of the rotten snobbishness they’ve been taught.” Helaughed at me with mocking irony. “You have a daughter,” said he. “What about her?”
“I was thinking of your boy,” said I.
He frowned and looked away. After a long pause—“Hopeless—hopeless,” said he. “Believe me—hopeless. The boy is like her. No, I’ll have to begin all over again.”
I gave an inquiring look.
“Marry again,” explained he. “Another sort of woman, and keep her and her children away from this world of ours. I’d like to try the experiment. But—” He laughed apologetically. “I’m afraid I love the city and its amusements too well. I’m not as determined nor as ardent as I once was. What does it matter, anyway? So long as we are comfortable and well amused, why should we bother?” After a silence, “Another mistake I made—the initial mistake—was in giving her a fortune. She is almost as well fixed as I am. Don’t make that mistake, Godfrey.”
“I’ve already done it,” said I. “And I shall never be sorry that I did. I gave my wife the first large sum I made, and I’ve added to it from time to time. I wanted her and Margot to be safe, no matter what happened to me.”
“A mistake,” he said. “A sad mistake. I know how you felt. I felt the same way. But there’s something worse than the more or less sentimental aversion to being loved and considered merely for the money they can get out of you and can’t get without you.”
“Nothing worse,” I declared.
“Yes,” he replied. “It’s worse to give a foolishwoman the power to make a fool of herself, of her children, and of you.”
“That is bad, I’ll admit,” said I. “But the other is worse—at least to me.”
“You’d refuse to make a child behave itself, through the selfish fear that it would hate you for doing so.”
I laughed. “You know my weakness, I see,” said I.
“There’s the foolish American husband and father. No wonder all the classes that ought to be leaders in development and civilization are leaders only in luxury and folly.”
“Oh, let them have a good time—what they call a good time,” said I. “As you said a moment ago, it doesn’t matter.”
“If it only were a good time—to be ignorant and snobbish and lazy, to drive instead of walking, to eat and drink instead of thinking, to be waited upon instead of getting the education and the happiness that come from serving others. Don’t laugh at me. After all, while you and I—all our sort of men—are greedy, selfish grabbers, making thousands work for us, still we do build up big enterprises, we do set things to moving, and we do teach men the discipline of regular work by forcing them to work for us at more or less useful things.”
No doubt you, gentle reader, have fallen asleep over this conversation. I understand perfectly that it is beyond you; for you have no conception of the deep underlying principles of the relations of men and men or men and women. But there may be among my readers a few who will see interest and importance in this talkwith Armitage. It is time the writers of stories concerned themselves with the realities of life instead of with the showy and sensational things that obscure or hide the realities. What would you think of the physiologist who issued a treatise on physiology with no mention or account of the blood? Yet you read stories about what purports to be life with no mention or account of money—this, when in any society money is the all-important factor. Put aside, if you can, the prejudices of your miseducation and æsthetics, of your false culture and your false refinement, open your mind,think, and you will see that I am right.
When we were well down toward the end of the Park, Armitage said: “Pardon me a direct question. Have you and your wife separated?”
“No,” said I. “She has gone abroad to round out Margot’s education—and her own.”
“You know what that means?”
“In a general way,” replied I. “I’m letting them amuse themselves. They don’t need me, nor I them. Perhaps when they come back—” I did not finish my sentence.
He laughed. “That means you don’t really care what happens when they come back.”
My smile was an admission of the correctness of his guess. We dropped our domestic affairs and took up the matters that were more interesting and more important to us.
If you have good sight, unimpaired eyes, you go about assuming—when you think of it at all—that good sight is the rule in the world and impaired eyes the exception.But let your sight begin to fail, let your eyes become darkened, and soon you discover that you are one of thousands—that good sight is the exception, that almost everyone has something the matter with his eyes. The reason human beings know so little about human nature, the reason the sentimental flapdoodle about human virtues, in the present not very far-advanced stage of human evolution, is so widely believed and doubt of it so indignantly denounced as cynicism, lies in the fact that the average human being is ignorant of the afflictions of his own soul. This would be pleasant and harmless enough, and to destroy the delusion would be wickedly cruel, were it not that the only way to cure ailments of whatever sort is to diagnose them. What hope is there for the man devoured of a fever who fancies and insists that he is healthy? What hope is there for the man who eats pleasant-tasting slow poison under the impression that it is food? What a quaint notion it is that the truth, the sole source of health and happiness, is bad for some people, chiefly for those sick unto death through the falsehoods of ignorance and vanity! We humans are like the animal that claws and bites the surgeon who is trying to set its broken leg.
But I am wandering a little. Discover that you have any ailment of body or of soul, and you soon discover how widespread that ailment is. You do not even appreciate how widespread, incessant, and poignant are the ravages of death until your own family and friends begin to die off. I had no notion of the extent of the social or domestic malady of abandoned husbands and fathers until I became one of that curious class.
Among the masses there is the great and growing pestilence of abandoned wives—husbands, worn out by the uncertainties of the laboring man’s income, and disgusted with the incompetence of their wives and with the exasperations of the badly brought up children—such husbands flying by tens of thousands to escape what they cannot cure or endure. Among the classes, from the plutocracy down to and through the small merchants and professional men, I now discovered that there was a corresponding and reversed disease—the abandoned husband.
The husband and father, working hard and presently accumulating enough for ease in his particular station of life, suddenly finds himself supporting, with perhaps all the money he can scrape together, a distant and completely detached family. He mails his money regularly, and with a fidelity that will appear grotesque, noble, or pitiful according to the point of view. In return he gets occasional letters from the loved ones—perfunctory these letters somehow sound, or would sound to the critical, though they are liberally sprinkled with loving, even fawning phrases, such as “dear, sweet papa” and “darling husband.” Where are “the loved ones?” If the family home is in a small town or country, they are in New York or some other city of America usually. If the family home is in the city, they are abroad. What are they doing? Sacrificing themselves! Especially poor wife and mother. She would infinitely prefer being at home with beloved husband. But she must not be selfish. She must carry her part of their common burden. Whilehetoils to provide for the children,shetoils in the loneliness or unhappiness of New York or Paris or Rome or Dresden or Genoa. And what is she toiling at in those desert places? Why, at educating the children!
Sometimes it’s music. Sometimes it’s painting. Again it’s “finishing,” whatever that may mean, or plain, vague “education.” There was a time when men of any sort could be instantly abashed, silenced and abased by the mere pronouncing of the word education. That happy day for mental fakers is nearing its close. Now, at the sound of the sacred word many a sensible, practical man has the courage to put on a grin. I have been credited with saying that a revival of the declining child-bearing among American women might be looked for, now that they have found the usefulness of children as an excuse for escape from home and husband. I admit having said this, but I meant it as a jest. However, there is truth in the jest. I don’t especially blame the women. Why should they stay at home when they have no sympathy with the things that necessarily engross the husband? Why stay at home when it bores them even to see that the servants carry on the house decently? Why stay at home when they simply show there from day to day how little they know about housekeeping? Why stay at home when there is an amiable fool willing to mail them his money, while they amuse themselves gadding about Europe or some big city of America?
Abandoned wives at the one end of the social scale, abandoned husbands at the other end. Please note that in both cases the deep underlying cause is the same—money.Too little money, and the husband flies; too much money, and it is the wife who breaks up the family.
As soon as I discovered, by being elected to membership, the existence of the universal order of abandoned husbands I took the liveliest interest in it. I was eager to learn whether there was another fool quite so foolish as myself, also whether the other fools were aware of their own folly. I found that most of them were rather proud of their membership, indulged in a ludicrous cocking of the comb and waggling of the wattles when they spoke of “my family over on the other side for a few years,” or of “my wife, poor woman, exiled in Paris to cultivate my daughter’s voice,” or of “my invalid wife—she has to live in the south of France. It’s a sad trial to us both.”
Then—but this came much later—I discovered that these credulous, money-mailing fools, including myself, were not quite so imbecile, as a class, as they seemed to be. I discovered that they were secretly, often unconsciously, glad to be rid of their uncongenial families, and regarded any money they mailed as money well spent. They toiled cheerfully at distasteful tasks to get the wherewithal to keep their loved ones far, far away!
The absence of Edna and Margot was an enormous relief to me. Edna was constantly annoying me to accompanying her to places to which I did not care to go. I like the theatre and I rather like some operas, but when I go to either it is for the sake of the performance. Going with Edna and her friends meant a tedious social function. We arrived late; we did not hear the play orthe opera. As for the purely social functions, they were intolerable. Perhaps I should not have been so unhappy had I been the kind of man who likes to talk for the sake of hearing his own voice. Women are attentive listeners when the man who is talking is worth flattering. But I talk only for purpose, and when I listen I wish it to be to some purpose also. So, Edna, always urging me to do something distasteful or giving me the sense that she was about to ask me, or was irritated against me for being “disobliging”—Edna made me uncomfortable, increasingly uncomfortable as I grew more intelligent, more critical, more discriminating. As for Margot, I could not talk with her ten minutes without seeing protrude from her sweet loveliness some vulgarity of snobbishness. It irritated me to hear her speak to a servant. I had to rebuke her privately several times for the tone she used in addressing her governess or my secretary—this when her mother and all her mother’s friends used precisely the same repellent “gracious” tone in the same circumstances. I saw that she, sometimes instinctively, again deliberately tried to hide her real self from me, that I was making a hypocrite of her. Any sort of frankness or sympathy between her and me was impossible.
A few weeks after their departure I closed the house. It came to me that I need endure its discomforts no longer, that I could get rid of those smelly, dull-witted, low-minded foreign animals, that I need not endure food sent up from a kitchen as to which I had from time to time disgusting proofs that it was not clean. I closed the house and left the mice and roaches and other insectsto such short provender as would be provided by caretaker and family. I took an apartment in a first-class hotel.
When Armitage got clear of his wife he took the adjoining apartment. And how comfortable and how cheerful we were!
The women with their incompetence and indifference have about destroyed the American home. To get good service, to have capable people assisting you, you must yourself be capable. The incapacity of the “ladies” has driven good servants out of the business of domestic service, has left in it only the worthless and unreliable creatures who now take care of the homes. If you find any part of the laboring class deteriorating, don’t blame them. To do that is to get nowhere, is to be unjust and shallow to boot. Instead, look at the employers of that labor. Every time, you will find the fault is there, just as an ill-mannered or a bad child means unfaithful parents. The masses of mankind must have leadership, guidance, example. My experience has been that they respond when the dominating classes do their duty—that is, pay proper wages, demand good service,and know what good service is.
What a relief and a joy that hotel was! Armitage and I had our own cook, and so could have the simple dishes we liked. We attended to the marketing—and both knew what sort of meat and vegetables and fruit to buy, and were not long trifled with by our butcher, our grocer, and our dairyman, spoiled though they were by the ladies. And our apartments were clean—really clean, and after the first few weeks our servants werecontented, and abandoned the evil ways slip-shod mistresses had got them into. Pushing my inquiries, I found that not only our hotel, but every first-class hotel in the fashionable district was filled with the remnants of shattered homes—husbands who had compelled their wives to give up the expensive and dirty attempts at housekeeping; husbands who had abandoned their families in country homes or in other cities and towns and had, surreptitiously or boldly, returned to bachelor bliss; husbands who had been abandoned by their families, none of these last cases being more heart-breaking than Armitage’s or my own. The story ran that he was on the verge of melancholia because his beautiful wife had cast him off. There was no more truth in this than there would have been in a tale of my lonely grief. Had it not been for Armitage, pointing out to me the truth, I might have fancied myself a deserted unfortunate. It would not have been an isolated instance of a human being not knowing when he is well off.
I did not see my family again until the following spring. Business compelled me to go abroad, and they had come over to London for the season.
When I descended from the train at Euston, a little confused by the strangeness, I saw my wife a few yards down the platform. Beside her stood a tall, beautiful young woman, whom I did not instantly recognize as my daughter. Both were dressed with the perfection of taste and of detail that has made the American woman famous throughout the world. I like well-dressed women—and well-dressed men, too. I should certainlyhave been convicted of poor taste had I not been dazzled by those two charming examples of fashion and style. They looked like two lovely sisters, the elder not more than five or six years in advance of the younger. I was a youthful-looking man, myself—except, perhaps, when I was in the midst of affairs and took on the air of responsibility that cannot appear in the face of youth. But no one would have believed there were so few years between Edna and me. Nor was she in the least made-up. The youth was genuinely there.
That meeting must have impressed the by-standers, who were observing the two women with admiring interest. I felt a glow of enthusiasm at sight of these elegant beauties. I was proud to be able to claim them. As for them, they became radiant the instant they saw me.
“Godfrey!” cried Edna loudly, rushing toward me.
“Papa—dear old papa!” cried Margot, waving her arms in a pretty gesture of impatient adoration while her mother was detaining me from her embrace.
“Well—well!” cried I. “What a pair of girls! My, but you’re tearing it off!”
They laughed gayly, and hugged and kissed me all over again. For a moment I felt that I had been missed—and that I had missed them. A good-looking, shortish and shy young man, dressed and groomed in the attractive English upper-class way of exquisiteness with no sacrifice of manliness, was now brought forward.
“Lord Crossley—my husband,” said Edna.
“Pleased, I’m sure,” murmured the young man, giving me his hand with an awkwardness that was somehownot awkward—or, rather, that conveyed a subtle impression of good breeding. “Now that you’ve got him—or that he’s got you,” proceeded he, “I’ll toddle along.”
My wife gave him her hand carelessly. “Until dinner,” she said.
Margot shook hands with him, and nodded and smiled. When he was gone I observed the carriage near which we were standing—and I knew at once that it was my wife’s carriage. It was a grand car of state, yet quiet and simple. I often looked at it afterwards, trying to puzzle out how it contrived to convey two exactly opposite impressions. I could never solve the mystery. On the lofty box sat the most perfect model of a coachman I had seen up to that time. Beside the open door in the shallow, loftily hung body of the carriage stood an equally perfect footman. I was soon to get used to that marvelous English ability at specializing men—a system by which a man intended for a certain career is arrested in every other kind of growth, except only that which tends to make him more perfect for his purpose. Observing an English coachman, or valet or butler or what not, you say, “Here is a remarkably clever man.” Yet you soon find out that he is practically imbecile in every other respect but his specialty.
We entered the carriage, I sitting opposite the ladies—and most uncomfortable I was; for the carriage was designed to show off its occupants, and to look well in it they had to know precisely how to sit, which I did not. No one noticed me, however. There was too much pleasure to be got out of observing Edna and Margot,who were looking like duchesses out of a storybook. I knew they were delightfully conscious of the sensation they were making, yet they talked and laughed as if they were alone in their own sitting room—a trick which is part of that “education” of which you have heard something, and will hear still more. The conversation seemed easy. In fact, it was only animated. It was a fair specimen of that whole mode of life. You have seen the wonderful peaches that come to New York from South Africa early in the winter—have delighted in their exquisite perfection of color and form. But have you ever tasted them? I would as lief eat sawdust; I would rather eat it—for, of sawdust I should expect nothing.
“That young man is the Marquis of Crossley,” said my wife.
I liked to hear her pronounce a title in private. It gave you the sense of something that tasted fine—made you envy her the sensation she was getting. “Who is he?” said I.
Margot laughed naïvely—an entrancing display of white teeth and rose-lined mouth. “Marquis of Crossley, papa,” she said. “That’s all—and quite enough it is.”
“I don’t know much about the big men in England,” said I. “He looked rather young to amount to very much.”
“He’s as old as you are,” said Edna, a flash of ill-humor appearing and vanishing.
I was astonished. “I thought him a boy,” said I.
“He’s one of the greatest nobles in England—oneof the greatest in Europe,” said Edna—and I saw Margot’s eyes sparkling.
“He seemed a nice fellow,” said I amiably. “How you have grown, Margot!”
“Hasn’t she, though!” cried my wife. “Aren’t you proud of her?”
“I’m proud of you both,” said I. “You make me feel old and dingy.”
“You’ve been working too hard, poor dear,” said Edna tenderly. “If you only would stay over here and learn the art of leisure.”
“I’m afraid I’d be dismally bored,” said I.
I had heard much about the art of loafing as practiced by Europeans, and I had not been attracted by what I had heard. It was inconceivable to me that intelligent grown men could pass their time at things about equal to marbles and tops. But I suppose I am abnormal, as they allege. Many men seem to look on mental effort of any kind as toilsome, and seize the first opportunity to return to the mindless frolickings of the beasts of the field. To me mental effort is a keen pleasure. And I must add I can’t help thinking it is to everybody who has real brains.
The conversation would have died in distressing agony had it not been for the indomitable pluck of my wife. She struggled desperately—perhaps may even have deceived herself into thinking that she was glad to see me and that the carriage was the scene of a happy reunion. But I, who had a thorough training in quickly sizing up situations, saw the truth—that I was a rank outsider, to both wife and daughter; that they werestrangers to me. I began to debate what was the shortest time I could decently stop in London.
“We are to be presented at Court next week,” said Edna.
Margot’s eyes were again sparkling. It was the sort of look the novelists put on the sweet young girl’s face when she sees her lover coming.
“Yes—next week—next Thursday,” said Edna. “And so another of the little duchess’s dreams is coming true.”
“Is it exciting?” said I to Margot. Somehow reference to the “little duchess” irritated me.
“Rather!” exclaimed Margot, fairly glowing with ecstasy. “You put on the most wonderful dress, and you drive in a long, long line of wonderful carriages, with all the women in wonderful dresses. And you go into the palace through lines and lines of gorgeous liveries and uniforms—and you wait in a huge grand room for an hour or so, frightened to death—and then you walk into the next room and make the courtesy you have been practicing for weeks—and you pass on.”
“Good!” cried I. “What then?”
“Why you go home, half dead from the nervous shock. Oh, it’s wonderful!”
It seemed to me—for I was becoming somewhat critical, as is the habit in moods of irritation—it seemed to me that Margot’s elaborate and costly education might have included the acquiring of a more extensive vocabulary. That word wonderful was beginning to get on my nerves. Still, this was hyper-criticism. A lovely woman does not need a vocabulary,or anything else but a lovely dress and plenty of money to provide background. “Yes—it must be—wonderful,” said I.
“We’ve been working at it for weeks, mamma and I,” continued she. “I’m sure we shall do well. I can hardly wait. Just fancy! I’m to meet thekingand thequeen!”
I saw that Edna was in the same ecstatic trance. I leaned back and tried to distract myself with the novelty of London houses and crowds. It may be you understand the mingling of pity, contempt, anger, and amusement that filled my breast. If you do not understand, explanation would merely weary you. I was no longer proud of my beautiful family; I wished to get away from them, to forget them. Edna and Margot chatted on and on about the king and queen, about the various titled people they knew or hoped to know, about the thrills of aristocratic society. I tried not to listen. After a while I said, with I hope not unsuccessful attempt at amiability:
“I’m sorry I shan’t be here to witness your triumph.”
Across Edna’s face swept a flash of vivid—I had almost said vicious—annoyance. “You’re not going before the drawing-room at Buckingham Palace!” cried she.
“I’ll have to,” said I.
“But you can’t!” protested Margot, tears of vexation in her eyes. “Everyone will think it’s dreadfully queer.”
“Don’t fret about that, my dear,” replied I lightly.“I know how it is over here. So long as you’ve got the cash they’ll never ask a question. We Americans mean money to them—and that’s all.”
“Oh, papa!” cried Margot.
“Don’t put such ideas into the child’s head, Godfrey,” said my wife, restraining herself in a most ladylike manner.
“She knows,” said I. “So do you. Money is everything with aristocracies everywhere. They must live luxuriously without work. That can’t be done without money—lots of money. So aristocrats seriously think of nothing else, whatever they may talk.”
“You’ll have a better opinion of them when you know them,” said Edna, once more serene and sweetly friendly.
“I don’t think badly of them,” I replied. “I admire their cleverness. But you mustn’t ask me to respect them. They hardly expect it. They don’t respect themselves. If they did, they’d not be stealing, but working.”
Margot listened with lowered eyes. I saw that she was ashamed of and for me. Edna concealed her feelings better. She forced an amiable smile. “I don’t know much about these things,” she said politely. “But, Godfrey, you mustn’t desert us, at least not until after the drawing-room. I’ve told our ambassador you’re to be here, and he has gone to no end of trouble to arrange for you.”
“Howard?” said I. “That pup! I despise him. He’s a rotten old snob. They tell me his toadyism turns the stomach of even the English. He’s a disgrace toour country. But I suppose he’s little if any worse than most of our ambassadors over here. They’ve all bought their jobs to gratify their own and their wives’ taste for shoe polish.”
This speech so depressed the ladies that their last remnant of vivacity fled, not to return. You are sympathizing with them, gentle reader, and they are welcome to your sympathy. We drove in silence the rest of the way to the hotel in Piccadilly, where they were installed in pompous luxury and had made equally luxurious provision for me. When I was alone with my valet I reasoned myself out of the grouchy mood into which the evidences of my family’s fresh access of folly had thrown me. To quarrel with them, to be irritated against them, was about as unreasonable as attacking a black man for not being white. I had long since realized, as the result of much experience and reflection, that character is no more to be changed than any other inborn quality. My wife had been born an aristocrat, and had brought into the world an aristocratic daughter. She was to be blamed neither for the one thing nor for the other. And it ill became my pretensions to superior intellect to gird at her and at Margot. The thing for me to do was to let them alone—keep away.
At dinner, which was served in our apartment, I took a different tone with them, and they met me more than half way. So cheered was my lovely daughter that after dinner she perched on the arm of my chair and ventured to bring up the dangerous subject. Said she:
“You’re not going to be mean to me and run away, are you, papa?”
Looking at Edna, but addressing Margot, I replied: “Your mother will tell you that it’s best. We three never can agree in our ideas of things. I’m an irritation. I spoil your pleasure.”
“No—no, indeed!” cried the girl. “I’ve been looking forward to your coming. I’ve been telling everybody how handsome and superior you are. And I want them to see for themselves.”
Most pleasant to hear from such rare prettiness, and most sincerely spoken.
“So many of the American men in society over here are common,” proceeded she, “and even those who aren’t so very common somehow seem so. They are down on their knees before titles, and they act—like servants. Even Mr. Howard— He oughtn’t to show his feelings so plainly. Of course we all feel impressed and honored by being taken up by real titled people of old families, but it’s such bad form to show, and it interferes with getting on. When I’m talking to Lord Crossley about that drawing-room, I act as if it were nothing.”
“I see you are being well educated,” said I, laughing.
“Oh, yes. Mamma and I have worked. We’ve not had an idle moment.”
“I believe you,” said I.
“Youwillstay, papa—won’t you?”
I shook my head. But it was no longer the positive gesture. My besetting sin, my good nature, had possession of me. Remember, it was after dinner, and my beautiful daughter was caressing my cheek and waspleading in a voice whose modulations had been cultivated by the best masters in Paris.
“But I don’t want people to think I was deceiving them about my papa.”
“I’m willing to be exhibited to a select few in the next two or three days,” I conceded. “They will tell the others.”
And with that they had to be content. In the faint hope of inducing me to change my mind, Edna—the devoid of the sense of humor—took me to a tailor’s and had me shown pictures and models of the court costume I would wear. But I remained firm. A sense of humor would have warned her that a person of my sort would have an aversion to liveries of every kind, to any costume that stamps a man as one of a class. I am perhaps foolishly jealous of my own individuality. But I cannot help it. A king in his robes, a general in his uniform—except in battle where it’s as necessary and useful as night shirt or pajamas in bed—any sort of livery seems pitiful and contemptible to me. I will wear the distinguishing dress of the human race and the male sex, but further than that classification I refuse to move. Also, what business had I, citizen of a democracy whose chief idea is the barbarism and silliness of aristocracy—what business had I going to see a king and a queen? I should have felt that I was aiding them in the triumph of dragging democracy at their chariot wheels. No, I would not go to levees and drawing-rooms. You may say I showed myself an absurd extremist. Well, perhaps so. But, as it seems to be necessary to go to one extreme or the other, Iprefer the extreme of exaggerated and vainglorious self-respect.
“The king and queen are no doubt nice people,” said I to Margot. “But if I meet them, it must be on terms of equality—and for some purpose less inane than exchanging a few set phrases.”
Edna and Margot seemed to feel that they had, on the whole, a presentable specimen of male relative to exhibit; for they made the most of the four days I gave them. Through Hilda Armitage, now Lady Blankenship, and much freshened up by the more congenial atmosphere, they had got in with the set that is the least easy of access to Americans—though, of course, it is not actually difficult for any American with plenty of money and a willingness to spend and good guidance in how to spend. And I must admit I enjoyed myself in those four days. The women were, for the most part, rather slow, though I recall two who had real intelligence, and I don’t think there was a single one quite so devoid of knowledge of important subjects as our boasted “bright” American women. The men were distinctly attractive. They had information, they had breadth—the thing the upper-class men of America often lack. Also, they were entirely free from that ill-at-easeness about their own and their neighbor’s position in society which makes the American upper classes tiresome and ridiculous.
It amused me to observe the Americans in this environment. Both our women and our men seemed uneasy, small, pinched. You could distinguish the Americanman instantly by his pinched, tight expression of an upper servant out for a holiday. I could feel the same thing in our women, but I doubt not their looks and dress and vivacity concealed it from the Englishmen. Anyhow, women are used to being nothing in themselves, to taking rank and form from their surroundings. While with us it seems to be true that the women are wholly responsible for social position with all its nonsense, the deeper truth is that they owe everything to the possessions of their fathers or husbands. Without that backing they would be nothing. Everything must ultimately rest upon a substantiality. In themselves, unsupported, the women’s swollen pretensions would vanish into thin air.
Lord Crossley was to have dined with us my first evening in London, but was prevented by suddenly arising business in the country. Next day he came to lunch, and I at once saw that he was after Margot hammer and tongs. I discovered it not by the way he treated her, but by his attitude toward her mother and me. He seemed a thoroughly satisfactory young man in every way, and I especially liked his frankness and simplicity. Edna had devoted a large part of a long sight-seeing tour with me to an account of his grandeur in the British aristocracy. Having had experience at that time of the American brand of aristocracy only, I was ignorant of the European kinds that have the aristocratic instinct in the most acute form—the ingrowing form. I know now that our own sort, unpleasant and unsightly though it is, cannot compare in malignance, in littleness and meanness of soul withthe European sort. Just as the noisy blowhard is a modest fellow and harmless, and on acquaintance lovable in comparison with the silent, brooding egotist, just so is the American aristocrat in comparison with the European. An American aristocrat has been known to forget himself and be human. I recall no instance of that sort in an European born and bred to the notion that his flesh and blood are of a subtler material than the flesh and blood of most men. However, as I was saying, at the time of my first visit to Europe I knew nothing of these matters, and Lord Crossley seemed to me a simple, ingenuous young man, most attractively boyish for his years.
“That chap wants to marry Margot,” said I to Edna when we were alone later in the afternoon.
“I think so,” said she. “Several young men wish to marry her. But she is in no hurry. She’s not nineteen yet, and she would like a duke.”
“To be sure,” said I. “But she may not be able to love a duke.”
“I never heard of a girl who wouldn’t love a duke if she got the chance,” said Edna. “There are only five—English dukes, I mean—who are eligible. Margot has met three of them—and one, the Duke of Brestwell, has taken quite a fancy to her.” Carelessly, but with nervous anxiety underneath, “You wouldn’t have any objection?”
“I? Why?”
“Oh—you are so—so peculiar in some ways.”
“Anyone who pleases Margot will suit me,” said I.
“We were afraid you’d be prejudiced againsttitles. You’ve been with that eccentric Mr. Armitage so much—and you always have been against the sort of things Margot and I like.”
“I’ve no objection to titles,” said I. “In fact, I think Margot will be happier if she marries a title. You’ve educated her so well that she’ll never see the man or think of him.”
“How little you know her!” cried Edna, pathetically. “And how unjust to me your prejudices make you. I’ve brought her up to be all refinement—all sentiment—all heart. She looks only at the highest and best.”
“At the duke,” said I.
“Certainly at the duke,” said she. “Her tastes are for the life where a woman can show her beauty of soul to the best advantage and can do the most good. There is no career for a woman in America. But over here a woman married into the aristocracy has a real career.”
“At what?” said I.
“As a recognized social leader. As a leader in charities and all sorts of good movements.”
“Ah, I see,” said I—and there I stopped, for I had learned not to argue with my wife—or with anyone else, male or female—when the subject is sheer twaddle. “Yes, I think Margot would do well to marry over here and to have a dazzling career. I’m sure she’d never get tired of this—pardon me—treadmill. I observe that it’s better organized than the imitation one we have over in ‘the States.’”
“I should say!” cried Edna. “You’ve no ideahow cheap and common the best you have in New York is beside the social life here. I’ve been here only a year, but already there have been the greatest changes in me. Don’t you notice?”
“I do,” said I. “And I can honestly say you have changed for the better. You’ve learned to cover it up.”
She looked inquiringly at me, but I did not care to explain what the “it” was that she had learned to cover. A slight flush appeared in her cheeks, and I knew intuitively that she thought I was alluding to her humble origin. I did not disabuse her mind of this impression. She would have been angry had I explained that I meant her social ambitions which I thought vulgar and she thought refined. Both she and Margot, except in occasional unguarded moments in privacy, had indeed vastly improved in manners. They had learned the trick of the aristocrats they associated with—the trick of affecting simplicity and equality and quietly confident ease. There was a notable difference, and altogether in their favor, between their manners and the manners of the former Mrs. Armitage and other American women. Whatever might justly be said in the way of criticism of my wife, it assuredly could not be said that she was lacking in agility at “catching on.” Armitage once said to me, “Your wife is a marvelous woman. I never saw or heard of her making a break.” This tribute can be appreciated only when you recall whence she sprung—and how much of her origin remained with her—necessarily—through all her climbings and soarings.
“You prefer it over here?” said I—we were still driving.
“If it weren’t for you, I’d never go back,” said she.
“For me?” said I. “Oh, don’t bother about me.”
“But I do,” replied she sweetly. And her hand covertly stole into mine for a moment. “Sometimes I get so homesick, Godfrey, that’s it all I can do to fight off the impulse to take the first steamer.”
I tried to look as a man should on hearing such pleasant and praiseworthy sentiments from the wife of his bosom.
“You’ve acted cold and—and reserved with me,” she went on. “I wanted to come to you last night. But I hadn’t the courage. You are such a mixture of tenderness and—and aloofness. You have the power to make even me feel like a stranger.”
“I’m sure I don’t mean to be that way,” said I, thoroughly uncomfortable.
“Margot was speaking of it,” proceeded Edna. “She said—poor affectionate child—that she hardly dared put her arms round you and kiss you. You oughtn’t to repulse the child that way, Godfrey. She has a tender, loving heart. And she adores you. She and I talk of you a long time every day. I’d insist on it as a matter of duty—for I’d not let your child forget you. But I don’t need to insist. She refers everything to you, and whenever she’s unusually happy, she always says: ‘If papa could only be enjoying this with us!’”
I saw that she had worked herself up into a state of excitement. My good sense told me that there wasno genuineness in either her affection or Margot’s. But I had no doubt they both thought themselves genuine. And that was quite enough to give me, the easy-going American slob of a husband and father, an acute attack of guilty conscience. The upshot was——
But you who have an impressionable heart and a keen sense of your own shortcomings can guess what it was. Edna and I resumed the relations of affectionate husband and wife for the rest of my—brief—stop in London. I remained several days longer than I had intended—stayed on because I did not wish to hurt her feelings. And I bought her and Margot all sorts of jewelry and gew-gaws, largely increased her personal fortune, did not utter a word that would ruffle either of them. And I left them convinced that I was going only because business not to be neglected compelled.
They say that the hypocrite wife is a common occurrence. I wonder if the hypocrite husband is rare. I wonder if there are not more instances than this one of the husband and the wife playing a cross game of hypocrisy, with each fancying the other deceived?
So busy was I with my own laborings to deceive my wife as to the true state of my feelings toward her that not until I was halfway across the Atlantic did I happen to think the obvious thought. You, gentle reader, have not thought it. But perhaps some more intelligent species of reader has. In mid-Atlantic, I suddenly thought: “Why she—she and Margot—were playing a game—the same game. For what purpose?”
It was not many months before I found out.