CHAPTER IX
Amongthe men who had been watching the procession from the comfortable armchairs of the Metropolis Club was John Wilbur. He had recently been received as a member,—an event deeply gratifying to him. In his “hustling years,” as he called the period before the opening of the new house, he had not thought much about clubs. But success translated itself this way. He had become much more zealous for all possible social distinctions than his wife, for she had always lived abreast of the society where she had been placed.
This afternoon Wilbur had noticed his wife’s carriage caught in the jam of the street below, and he had watched the conversation between her and Erard, and finally their disappearance. At the club he had heard a good deal more about Erard than at his own home. He found that he was considered a source of reliable information about Erard by those few men who were interested enough in the young man to remember him. It irritated Wilbur because, apart from his indifference to Erard, it always chafed him to feel that certain aspects of his wife were outside his comprehension. He even suspected at times that, now they no longer had business interests in common, he bored her. Bored his wife! Thus this afternoon Erard made a very significant figure in thelandscape. All the crude instincts of the man from a Michigan farm were stirred. Erard should “get”; no gossip about his home!
Wilbur proceeded in this business about as delicately as he would if he had had a clerk to censure. His wife had been given too free a rein: she must feel that his interests, if not propriety, were to be considered. In this mood he followed his wife into the house, where he found her sitting idly by the west window of her little room. A book had fallen on the seat by her side; she seemed to be brooding over difficult thoughts.
“Ady,” Wilbur’s voice roused her like a roll of thunder, “I saw you talking to Erard this afternoon under the windows of the club, and then take him away with you.”
Mrs. Wilbur opened her eyes and waited. Wilbur fumed. It was like a thunderstorm without the rain,—oppressive, with no hope of after-relief. “When does he get out of here?”
“How should I pretend to know! He is visiting Mrs. Stevans.”
“A man doesn’t want his wife talked about at all the clubs,” he began again in bungling fashion. Mrs. Wilbur’s eyes grew cold.
“You mean?”
“I mean that you have been foolish about that Erard ever since you knew him, by all accounts.”
“Stop!” Mrs. Wilbur raised her hand. “That is quite enough. I am sorry you have been listening to gossip.”
Wilbur was a churchgoing Presbyterian Christian. What he was doing he regarded, not only as manly, but as conscientious. He had no other traditions of conduct in such affairs.
“It isn’t enough, unless you promise to send him away the next time he calls here. I don’t want you receiving his visits, now there’s talk.”
“No,” his wife replied, growing colder, her words falling like little flakes of ice. “I cannot do that; I see no reason for it. You can instruct the footman to keep him out of the house if you like. But I shall never refuse to see him; and,”—she turned to her writing-table and prepared to answer a note,—“I shouldn’t take that course, if I were you.”
She had not intended this last remark as a threat: it had been prompted by a desire to make the situation endurable. It would precipitate a crisis, if he should become aggressive and humiliate her before her servants. Wilbur, however, had had the uncomfortable feeling of living in reproof ever since the call at the Remsens; now he intended to exercisehismoral sense.
When a few minutes later Mrs. Wilbur ascended the stairs, which swept in a gentle curve around the north side of the hall, she could hear her husband below her, giving orders to the butler. He was concluding in loud tones, “Smith, if Mr. Erard calls after this, we shall not be at home. Remember and tell the footman that we shall always be out to Mr. Erard.”
“Yes, sir,” she heard Smith’s galvanic voice reply. It was the first order of the kind ever given in that house.
Some acquaintances came in during the evening, and the conversation grew warm over one of the innumerable strikes in the city. Wilbur was emphatic, as usual, in behalf of the capitalists, “the right of a man to do what he wanted with his own.” His wife remembered that this illiberal attitude had grown steadily since his first success. He had become more and more convinced that the poor man’s poverty was his own crime. She leaned her white face against the soft cushion in her chair, and closed her eyes to shut out thought.
Yet she could not help thinking of the procession, of the loathsome figure on horseback, and the absent Mephisto—and of her husband, in some way united to this crew. She had not triumphed; she had not held him to the finer courses of conduct. And she had not even kept her home unspotted: this house was really Mephisto’s; he had merely tossed it to a hanger-on.
She looked again at that husband, regarding him for the first time objectively, as if he were an outsider—with a dangerous perception of the doubleness of their personalities. To perceive that, marks the end of marriage. She had no harsh feelings, no great resentment at his clownish reproof; he was not her mind and thought and heart. He was simply a man whom she knew uncommonly well, and on whose points good and bad she was an authority. She could be very fair to the good points,—that was a fatal sign! He had not deteriorated in the years of marriage, had developed no vices or brutality. He was the same confident, shrewd, adaptable American she had married three yearsago. A little more eager then and impulsive; more fluid, perhaps, at the age when nothing is impossible of accomplishment, at least in the belief of an admiring woman. The fire of the struggle in Chicago had left him less fluid, but more powerful. Alas! it had burned out all minor alloys, leaving him a steel weapon, fashioned by modern society, for use in converting the earth into the hands of plutocracy.
The wealth that had come to them early in life, and her own social powers, had suddenly placed him in a world for which he had no traditions ready to assist him. He was the American peasant. He did not eat with his knife, nor break any commonplace amenity. He was educated, too, even if merely in a varnishing way, much more than hosts of his comrades. But he was, nevertheless, the peasant. Anywhere else there would have been intermediate stages in the social evolution where he would have stuck, his descendants to go on as they proved ready and had imbibed the ideas of service and honour that befitted the possessors of great power. But Wilbur with one powerful effort had gained the heights, and he had no humbleness, no distrust,—nothing was too good for a clever man who had made his money.
Whycouldshe see all this so clearly? Had she ever loved him? For, had she loved him, her eyes would have shrunk from the sore. When did she begin to fail in loving him? Her grave face still rested upon her husband in this searching wonder, until she noticed that he was uncomfortable. Once she heard the footman crossthe hall to answer a ring; after an interval he returned with a card which he left on the hall table. Erard had called and been dismissed. She had little personal interest in the fact: Erard, indeed, was quite an unimportant person.
When the last visitor had left and Mrs. Anthon had talked herself into sleepiness from the lack of any conversational opposition, Wilbur prepared to put the lights out as usual.
“Wait a minute, John.” These were the first words she had spoken to him since their conversation before dinner. “I have something to say to you, and I had rather say it here where we meet—on a more formal footing.”
Wilbur, who had seen the card on the table, squared himself in front of the fireplace and prepared to be kind and firm and just.
“I know that you will think what I am going to propose is queer,” she began gently, “and I am afraid that you will think it wrong. But I must, I must do it.”
Wilbur’s face wore a frightened look, as though he feared a confession of deadly sin.
“I want to leave you, to go away somewhere, to Europe probably.”
“What for?”
“Because I am not happy here. I cannot take the interest I had in Chicago or in our affairs, and I am thinking constantly of other things. I am no longer a good wife, I believe.” She had no idea how literally Wilbur would take this admission.
“You don’t mean to say it’s come to that with Erard.” Wilbur’s face assumed a sneer, as an outward reflection of his opinion of Erard. Mrs. Wilbur rose as if suddenly whipped.
“What do you mean? No! you needn’t explain. I understand.” Her manner changed to a contemptuous coolness. “I am sorry that my determination to leave your house should coincide so exactly with your vulgar outbreak over my old friend. No, I shall not leave Chicago with him! Had I thought of doing so, I should probably not have consulted you, though you and my mother have done what you could to goad a woman to that.”
“But,” she continued firmly, “my feelings, my determination, have been growing, growing,” she repeated the word hopelessly, seeing how difficult it was to make her conduct seem rational, not mere caprice. “And it may be for only a few months. I want to get away by myself.”
Wilbur would not abandon the Erard motive.
“I didn’t suppose you meant to run away with him, but he’s stirred you up; got you all out of gear, with his twaddle and sentiment.”
“Perhaps he has hastened matters,” Mrs. Wilbur admitted, anxious to do justice to any reasonable arguments. “But that is immaterial really. He merely made me think faster—although we never referred to my married life.”
“Do you pretend to justify your conduct?” Wilbur fumed. He was plainly embarrassed by the suddenness of this great question.
“Not at all,” Mrs. Wilbur replied, with a touch of sarcasm, “all the justification will be on your side. There’s no excuse for me, since you have not threatened my life nor committed adultery. You will have universal sympathy.”
They thought silently for a few minutes. Then she added,—“And I should want you to have this house and all the money I had when we were married—in any event.”
“Have you any objections to me?” Wilbur asked roughly.
And thus they continued to discuss the matter in the still room of the still house that Mrs. Wilbur had likened to a tomb. The man’s sense of wanton, unprovoked injury increased as each bend of the argument revealed itself. He was so irreproachably right! a truth which his wife did not attempt to deny.
“But why do you want to retain a despicable woman?” she asked coldly, at last.
If he loved her, she thought, he would not try to convince her with arguments of propriety and religious exhortations. And if he showed that he loved her passionately she would not have the courage to leave him. One expression of longing love would have bound her hand and foot.
He did love her, in his way, as a busy man married nearly four years, who could not devote himself exclusively to sentiments, does love. He admired her, was proud of her fine presence in dress, thought she was a clever woman—indeed the most superb creature of hersex he had ever seen. And he loved domesticity in itself. He had an honest loathing for immorality, and a healthy respect for the home. He hoped for a family of children “to put ahead in the world.” He was prepared to be a good husband and father, and, now! a catastrophe from a clear sky. A man’s pride receives a severe cuff when the handsome woman he has secured, as he thinks, on a life-tenure, shows the world that she is sick of the bargain.
They gave up the subject in sheer exhaustion that night, Mrs. Wilbur agreeing to take no final step without further consideration. As she left the room, her husband said blankly, “You couldn’t have cared much all along!”
She turned with a gleam of irritation.
“It was to be a partnership, wasn’t it? There was too much of that idea. Marriage isn’t a partnership. It’s—”
He waited expectantly.
“I don’t know,” she moaned. “I have done you a wrong, somehow.”