CHAPTER XI
John Wilburunwittingly brought about the crisis he wished to avoid. Monday morning, on his way to the city, he called at the house of his clergyman,—Dr. Driver, a divine celebrated locally for his eloquence, for the prosperity of his parish, and for his influence over successful business men and their fashionable wives. It seemed to John Wilbur that his wife’s condition was one that demanded the services of a spiritual physician, and he explained the case briefly to his minister.
Consequently Mrs. Wilbur had scarcely reached her home after the visit in Lake Forest before Dr. Driver’s card was brought to her. Thinking that he had come probably for some assistance in church-work, she went down to the drawing-room at once without laying aside her wraps or hat. Dr. Driver was a tall, sallow-faced, black-moustached man, who wore his thick black hair brushed away from his forehead a little affectedly. His bony figure, protruding under the correct black coat, made many awkward lines. Dr. Driver, after the experience of years in ministering to fashionable parishes in Minneapolis and Chicago, could not be called uncouth, yet Mrs. Wilbur always saw in him the earnest, raw young man from the seminary, his white eyelidsglued in the fervour of extempore prayer, his white linen cravat creeping up over the large collar button in his wrestling with his thought. He had been successful—that appealed to his congregation; they liked a man to be successful in whatever “line” of “work” he had chosen. Dr. Driver’s success had been marked by such tangible evidences as the two “handsome edifices” erected during his pastorates in Minneapolis and Chicago. His florid style did not appeal to Mrs. Wilbur, but her husband’s admiration of him and the fact that many of their friends were prominent in his church had overcome her aversion to the minister’s rhetorical flights and mixed metaphors. Dr. Driver was also a poet, and one or both of his little volumes, “Little Lyrics of Grace,” or “Growing Leaves,” might be found on the tables of his parishioners; and in the columns of theThunderer, cheek by jowl with Capitalist Dick’s American editorials, appeared Dr. Driver’s patriotic songs.
The pastor gathered his coat-tails about his thin thighs, seated himself on the edge of a divan, and opened a general conversation upon the new house and Mrs. Wilbur’s gratification in her husband’s wonderful success. Mrs. Wilbur listened, perplexed by this general harangue, for the regular pastoral call had occurred scarcely a month before.
“Mrs. Wilbur,” he exclaimed at last, his eyes rising above her head restlessly, “what a privilege is yours, with the ability and the means to further the moral and material welfare of this great city! Chicago is the great home for intelligent woman. Here she moulds the destinies,the civilization of millions of eager human beings. In our vast city,” his voice rose and fell in prophetic intonations, “woman does not creep as the humble hand-maiden of charity; she organizes immense reforms, she institutes educational benefits, she advances shoulder to shoulder with men in a common fight against the demons of want and vice.”
His victim sat in mystified silence. She saw before her eyes the new church, three blocks away on a neighbouring boulevard, its auditorium in the form of a theatre, with the stage crowned by a high pulpit, which Dr. Driver mounted. Behind were rows of shiny organ pipes, and below at the wing a small door that led to the club-rooms, and eating-rooms, and kitchens, and carpeted assembly-rooms, all in polished oak panelling and furniture, with every modern device of the up-to-date house of God. The doctor should be there, exhorting his comfortable audience, not here distracting her mind during the hours she needed most for clear thinking and clear feeling. Dr. Driver came soon, however, to more specific matter.
“My dear Mrs. Wilbur,” he lowered his voice and eyes simultaneously. “I have prayed over you, wondering if you have realized to the fullest your powers and opportunities to do God’s work.”
“I trust so,” his parishioner replied impatiently, feeling that now he was drawing to the purpose of his visit.
“Are you not planning,” Dr. Driver’s voice grew deeper, more threatening, “in your breast to-day, this very hour, to abandon God’s work in his appointed pasture, to turn back like Lot’s wife from the vineyard beforeyou, to forsake husband and home in the pursuit of vain pleasures, of a vainglorious conceited refinement of culture? Are you not planning, I ask you as a daughter of the church, to make a god of your intellectual belly?”
Mrs. Wilbur’s face flushed resentfully. “My husband, has told you of my proposal to leave his home,” she interposed in the torrent of rhetoric.
“Yes. He came to me in the travail of his soul this morning, to his spiritual counsellor, for my poor help in his trouble.”
“He did a very foolish thing,” Mrs. Wilbur replied haughtily.
“I trust not so. You love your husband, you loved your little child,hischild, and you will love others yet to be—”
At another time Mrs. Wilbur could have tolerated Dr. Driver’s exhortation as merely an exhibition of well-meaning bad taste. To-day she was capable of blasphemies against the bed-rock truths of her fellowmen. If they goaded her, stung her like little flies, she would give the lie to her heart and commit outrages.
“I prefer not to discuss this question.” She rose to close the interview, relying upon the frigid dignity that she could throw into her smallest action, to restrain this earnest, vulgar man.
“It is mydutyto warn you, to counsel you, to say that in abandoning this mighty world of opportunity to which God has called you, the help of these millions of souls,—” he stretched out his arms in his favourite gesture of immensity and numbers.
Mrs. Wilbur asked with a wicked smile,—“Suppose, Dr. Driver, I have no interest in ‘millions,’ that I believe it is a foolish labour to advance the masses and thus help create more ‘millions’? Suppose I believe it is morally wrong to make humanity all a common dull level, and that we ought to strive to produce quality, beauty, single great lives of distinction?”
This wholesale tossing aside the axiom of his life staggered the doctor. “Not long to bring to God all these souls?” He laboured in search of an argumentative basis.
“Mere size, mere numbers, mere collections of human beings who may be made industrious, neat, thrifty, and happy—that picture doesn’t stir my enthusiasm any more than mere miles of dwellings or mere millions of bushels of wheat!”
She was becoming tangled in an argument, when Molly Parker dashed in to take her away to a reception. Dr. Driver left at once, and to his wife that night he confided his belief that poor Wilbur had a heavy cross in his misguided wife. She was a proud, haughty, self-interested, and intellectually vain creature, and if she left her home to indulge her conceit in “European salons” she would be lost. It is needless to add that in a few days it was reported quite openly, “Jack Wilbur’s wife is going to leave him”; or, as some put it with an additional touch of imagination, “going to cut off with that painter-fellow.”
Mrs. Wilbur chatted with her friend as the carriage carried them swiftly to the Remsens’ that afternoon,strangely at peace with herself, and determined. Her attention was preternaturally keen, as if her mind was eager to gather last impressions, to fortify itself. She ran across Erard in her first assault on the crowded rooms at the Remsens’, and she lingered to talk with him alone for the benefit of a roomful of curious people, well aware that she was adding powder to her husband’s guns.
“I called on you the other evening,” Erard remarked with intention.
“Yes?” Mrs. Wilbur’s voice expressed no concern.
“And you were out. I shall not call again.”
“Perhaps it is just as well,” Mrs. Wilbur answered indifferently. “Anyway, I shall be going away soon.”
“So you have made up your mind. What are you going to do with yourself?”
“How do I know? What can a woman who has dabbled in life all round do with herself, except begin over and dabble all round again?”
“Why don’t you make a profession of freedom, now you have given up trying the straddle?”
She did not like the phrase, “profession of freedom”: it sounded like a fine way of saying “abandon yourself.” Just then some one touched her elbow, and Erard was swallowed up in the surrounding hubbub. She never saw him again in Chicago.
She found herself talking excitedly, yet with a grateful calm at her heart. The room, and the people who were constantly addressing her, seemed very unsubstantial. They belonged to her house on the boulevard, tothe traction stocks, the little child who had gone, to the drunken governor who had sold himself to Mephisto, to Dr. Driver, and the rest of it. They were not a part of her now, and she was gay in the thought.
“Molly,” she said at last, “dismiss Thornton Jennings and go fetch your wrap. I am going to drive you home.”
Molly Parker faltered, “You are going to tell me something dreadful.”
But Mrs. Wilbur, if she had anything dreadful on her mind, appeared serene on their drive home. She talked about Jennings a good deal, and watched her companion slyly. “Would you like to leave Chicagonow, Molly?”
Miss Parker blushed and kissed her. At the iron gate of the Wilbur house she stepped out of the carriage, directing the coachman to drive Miss Parker home. Then as if to communicate a last nothing, she put her head through the window, and said hurriedly, “Molly, I’m going away soon. I promised to let you know.”
She hurried up the steps without waiting to look at the startled face in the carriage. It had been a hard day, but her nerves were strung to a high pitch that evening, for she foresaw another long debate with her husband. The sooner the final break was made now that Dr. Driver had been taken into their confidence the better.
“John,” Mrs. Wilbur’s eyes glittered as she began, when they were alone in the library, “that was unkind of you, and foolish, to send Dr. Driver here to talk to me.”
“I hoped he could make you see the wicked and unchristian character of the act you are contemplating.” He understood faintly that his scheme had failed; indeed, had driven her further away.
“We must finish now at once,” Mrs. Wilbur continued.
“Have you anything to complain of in your house or in me?” Wilbur asked defiantly. The other evening she might have said in answer something about the traction stocks. But after Jennings had read her soul so easily, she refrained. For one didn’t leave one’s husband because he was callous in business. Was she the kind of woman to shrink from such misfortune? He went on, “You don’t realize the blow you are dealing me and yourself in all the talk your step will make. It will be in the papers twenty-four hours after, that you have run away.”
Now that she had discovered what dread was uppermost, it was easy enough to urge her suit. She had thought over this question and had a plan ready. If he had been unconscious of the possible injury to himself and his ambitions, her task would have been harder.
“I don’t think you need worry about that,” she replied a little disdainfully, “for your friends’ sympathy will be entirely with you, and nobody else need know until later. All I ask is to leave you—it may be said for a few months, as other wives leave their husbands, to travel. The house can go on, and doubtless mother will be glad to remain here and—”
“A nice plan,” Wilbur interrupted hotly, “to make me a blind for your goings-on with another man.”
Mrs. Wilbur flushed quickly, then became white and calm again. “You persist in that insult. Very well, then, you can proceed at once to a divorce. But I think that you will see how much more sensible my plan is. Later you can get a divorce quietly.”
“Would you ever come back?” Wilbur asked wistfully.
“I don’t believe that you will want me to,” she replied more gently, wondering at the man. “If I did return it would be a new beginning, arealmarriage. I can’t tell about that. I must befreefirst.”
“It doesn’t seem to me you are much of a slave!”
“No?” she was minded to refer to the money that had been used to build their home, but refrained. Suddenly passion broke through her calm manner. “A woman isn’t a slave—there is no question of it—when husband and wife are bound together. It makes no difference,—the desert, the mechanical routine of living,—then. She can starve well enough. But when they begin to live and to think apart—when I saw you and judged you and condemned you, then all the real freedom wasyours, and I was degraded.”
“You use big words like the women nowadays. When did we separate and what ‘degradation’ do you bear?”
“We separated when you took ill-gotten gains—no! I mean I saw that we had made a mistake then, we had never really married, and from that time I began to want—some other satisfaction, and to hate Chicago and all there is in it.”
Wilbur waited, disturbed and mystified.
“Yes,” she went on passionately, “and degraded too.It is degradation to live another one’s life, or to live with him and bear his children—unless they come as the natural fruit of common passion.”
“Oh! that’s it—you want your husband to be always honeymooning it?”
“Yes,” she answered exhausted. “Otherwise, like Eve, a woman discovers that she is naked, and is ashamed. But this is useless. The fact remains—weare divorced, andImust go and get my life. You may say all the bitter things you wish. But I am not one who accepts,” she ended, with a thought back on what Jennings had told her.
“So,” said Wilbur cynically, from his position of the partner to whom marriage was naturally more episodic than ultimate. “You believe a woman should experiment, should break her vows if she finds after three years of apparent happiness that she prefers to run about Europe and moon over pictures to sitting by her husband’s fireside. Does a vow mean nothing to you?”
“Yes,” her voice broke, “a great deal. But I shouldn’t advise you to hold me to it.”
“You never loved me,” Wilbur wandered back to the vital point. “You took me because you were bored or because you couldn’t marry Erard, or something of the sort.”
“That is a lie,” Mrs. Wilbur answered composedly. “If I had known then that on such provocation you would make such low guesses—I should not have married you.” She remembered the scene in the Paris salon, the solemnity of it, and a wave of compassion for himand for herself overcame her. “Don’t kill it all, John! Let us part with some respect and honour for one another, not like a man and his mistress.”
“Go!” Wilbur exclaimed, excited by the impalpability of the reasons for this absurd and unexpected wrong he was made to suffer. “Go! and don’t think I shall follow you and beg you to come back. No, if you crawl here along the boulevard, and pray to be forgiven, I will shut the door on you and curse you.”
Mrs. Wilbur opened her lips, then checked herself. “Good-by, John. I am sorry, so sorry you cannot understand.”
Wilbur laughed sneeringly. “But your sense of duty is so keen!”
“I must, must,” she broke into tears. “I am suffocating here. I may be all wrong. I shall suffer for it!”
“I hope so.” He watched her leave the room and grasp the handrail of the stairs to support herself. An old, savage instinct surged up in him, the desire to kill what you could not keep in any other way. That she should calmly decide to walk out of his life after three years of marriage, for no provocation that any reasonable man would consider for a moment,—that was intolerable! And society merely enfeebled the men who had to stand, as he stood, passive. He would like to feel his arms about her, his hand at her throat, and to have her know that for hate as well as for love, she washisfor ever.
But she walked out of his life.