_The End of the Salon_
Terry's love for Marie was partly due, as we have seen, to his passion
for social propaganda: that she represented the "social limit" was a
strong charm to him. She, woman-like, always insisted on the personal
relation, and for a long time his interest in her personality as such,
combined with his social enthusiasm, was strong enough to keep the bond
intact. When, however, his social enthusiasm paled, and his merely
individualistic anarchism became stronger, his interest in Marie
weakened. The times grew more frequent with him when he doubted the
social side of anarchism itself--when this social propaganda seemed as
hollow and as unlovely as society itself; and when he saw the weaknesses
and vanities of his associates, how far they were from realising any
ideal. Then, more and more, he was thrown back upon himself, for as his
hope in the new society weakened, his hope in Marie as an embodiment of
it weakened also.
Marie's sex interests, always freely and boldly expressed, played, at
first, no part in the growing irritability of their relations. Marie's
occasional "affairs" with other men, sometimes taking her away from the
salon for a time, were taken by Terry in silence. Even when he came face
to face with the fact of Marie's absence of restraint in this respect,
lack of delicacy and feeling for him, he did not complain. To do so was
against his principles of personal freedom; and the fling in the face of
society envolved in Marie's conduct pleased him rather than otherwise;
also there was in him a subtle feeling of superiority over other men, in
the fact that he was without physiological jealousy, or if not, that he
could at least control it.
Even Marie's jealousy of him, whenever he was in the society of another
woman, he took with a patient shrug. Terry's interest in other women was
not a passionate one: in it was always an element of the pale cast of
thought, and Marie had no real cause for jealousy. But Terry tolerantly
took it as a feminine weakness and tried to shield Marie from this
unreasonable unhappiness. On her account he gave up many a desire to
talk intimately with some female comrade. But Marie had no such
tolerance for him. Not only was she quite free with other men and to the
limit, but she often went into a real tantrum of jealousy. One day she
followed Terry all over town, fearing that he had an appointment with a
well-known radical woman. Marie often acknowledged to me her
inconsistency. "But, you know," she would say, "our principles and ideas
do not count much when our fundamental emotions are concerned."
This was a true remark of Marie's, and I have often had occasion to
perceive the great degree of it throughout the radical world. Men and
women often try in that society to be tolerant; they give one another
free rein sometimes for years, but generally in the end, the resistance
of one or the other weakens; human nature or prejudice, whichever it is,
asserts itself, and tragedy results. This I had occasion to see over and
over again: how nature triumphed over the most resolute idealism and
brought about in the end either ugly passion or pathetic unhappiness.
As Terry began to doubt his deepest hope, as he began to turn away from
the ideas about which his salon was formed, he saw and felt more
clearly the limitations of Marie's personal character; and her acts
began to hurt him. Perhaps he began to lose faith in both--Marie and the
Salon--at the same time.
"I am afraid," he wrote, "that the days of the salon are numbered. I am
of the opinion that most of our latter-day radicals are on a par with
our latter-day Christians. They have grown weary, or wary, of their
original purpose. They seem to think Liberty a beautiful goddess who
will never come: they willingly believe in her as long as there is no
danger of or in her 'coming.' How frantically most of the radicals
signal back the 'waiting' reply: the track is not clear for the coming
of Liberty!--and they do not want to have it cleared!...
"You will be surprised to know that I have dropped the radicals, with
the exception of Thomson, and I fear he too must walk the plank and go
by the board. I am becoming quite implacable toward these intelligent
people, and the salon will soon be void of my presence. The spirit of it
has gone already and cannot be revived. That is why I left my mother's
home--because the spirit of home had gone--and why I must leave the
salon. I cannot submit to being a discordant spirit; therefore I must be
a wandering one.
"So I must leave Katie and Marie. If I could make a living I would work
for it, as I did when I thought so. But I shall never work--or toil
rather--for sheer subsistence except behind the bars. I am driven to be
a parasite, for honest living there is none. The time is up, and I must
leave. Several years ago I ruined whatever robustness I had by tending
bar so that Katie might knock down some three hundred dollars. At one
meal a day and a place to try to sleep, I think that she and I are about
even; she also thinks so, though she never says so, to me. She is
willing and able to take care of Marie, for she has five hundred dollars
in the bank and a great love for the girl."
Terry, sometimes terribly frank, is extremely reticent about Marie; and
the account of their misunderstanding comes mainly from her letters:
"I have had such a bad misunderstanding with Terry, or he with me, I
don't know which it is. My God, but women can be brutal, though! You
ought to read Jack London's 'The Call of the Wild.' You might
substitute women for dogs. Some years ago I was a feast for the dogs
(women), and now I see much of this same fierce brutality in myself, and
poor Terry is feeling it. I have been away with a man, and Terry somehow
feels it much more keenly than ever before.
"And yet I love Terry: surely if I ever knew what love means, I love him
and have loved him always. Though I am the most brutal person on earth,
I am so without intention, without knowing it even, at times. And I am
so tired that sometimes I have no feeling for anything, not even for
Terry, and he does not understand that. I feel out of harmony with every
one just now. It is hardly indifference, rather a terrible weariness.
Perhaps my recent reading of Nietzsche has helped to give me a feeling
of weary hopelessness. And then, too, the spirit of our salon is gone; I
don't know exactly why. Even Terry has changed very much in his feelings
and ideas. He is not much interested in the things he used to be
absorbed in. He is more cynical, especially of social science, and yet
he seems to me to be making a very science of looking at things
unscientifically. He seems to be holding his emotions in check, is less
impulsive than ever, and is losing much of that delicacy of feeling and
expression which was so admirable in him.
"I too am growing cynical, and I hate to do so. I should like to accept
people at their apparent value and not always look for motives, as I am
getting more and more to do. I should like to approach everything and
everybody with a perfectly open heart, as a child does, but I find that
I no longer do that, that I am always prejudiced. I am sure that this is
due to Terry's influence, for he more and more excludes everything:
nothing is good enough for him. He passes up one person after another
and he has no joy in life. His personality is so much stronger than mine
that I am like a little thin shadow, weaker than water, and he can
always bring me around to see his way of looking at people and things."
This note in Marie--protest against Terry's tendency to cut out the
simple joy of life--grew very strong at a later time; now, however, it
was only suggested, and played no important part.
Indeed, the idea of his leaving her was to her an intolerable thought;
and yet there is many a letter which suggests the approaching
dissolution of the salon and of their relation. They were both, at
times, terribly tired of life: with no strenuous occupation, the word of
Nietzsche and of world pessimism, of excessive individuality, tortured
their nerves and made everything seem of no avail.
Work takes one away from life, is a buffer between sensitive nerves and
intensest experience. Strong natures who for some reason are dislocated
and therefore do not work, or work only fragmentarily, come too much in
contact with life and often cannot bear it; it burns and palls at once.
So it was with Terry and Marie. Without either work or children, they
were forced into strenuous personal relations with one another and into
a feverish relation with "life."
"I feel so depressed," she wrote; "so many things have happened this
last year which seemed trivial at the time, but have had big results,
while other things which seemed events have turned out to be only
incidents, and very small ones. Thus, a careless remark of mine
resulted in a quarrel between Terry and me which did not lessen with
time, but grew larger and larger, until now the relations of us two
idyllic lovers are anything but pleasant. And a very serious attack of
love from which I suffered last summer has passed as quickly and lightly
as a breath of wind, while another light love of mine, which came to me
last February, has assumed large proportions simply because I have been
abused for it by Terry, whom no one could ever displace in my heart. I
was bound to defend my lover from the attacks of Terry, whom I had
always regarded as above such a common display of irritation in such
matters. So this other man became a sort of ideal lover in my mind, and
all because of Terry's opposition. This man had wooed me in a great,
glorious, godless fashion. He was a big man in the labour world, and he
flattered me immensely, but I should never have cared for him, if
Terry's nature had not suddenly seemed to weaken....
"I have been so uneasy about Terry lately. He has been talking so much
about joining the criminal class. He seems to be losing his interest in
our movement and to be looking for some other way of escape, as he
calls it. He says his liberty is only a figment of his mind, that he has
now reached the time for which he had all along been unconsciously
preparing himself. I am, of course, used to this kind of talk from
Terry. He has been in the depths of despondency often enough, but
nothing ever came of it except a saloon brawl. He would usually seek
Harris; they would break a mirror or a few glasses in some saloon, and
the next day Terry would have a headache, after which he was usually
content to browse around his philosophy in that mild and subtle way of
his, for a week or so.
"But now Harris is gone, and Terry does not know any other person quite
so strenuous in the fine art of breaking glasses and barroom fixtures in
general, so, finding no vent for his accumulated despondency, he may
possibly do real things. I feel so sadly for him and wish I could help
him. The Lord knows I would be willing to break any amount of glassware
with him, but he has not much confidence in my aim, I guess; women never
can throw straight. In fact, he has little confidence in me in any way
lately, for he never tells me the details of his schemes, but only
throws out dark and terrible hints....
"Truly, something may indeed happen this time. He is so anti-social. He
positively won't go out anywhere to meet people, won't go to our picnics
or socials, and in manner is very strange, distant, cold, and polite to
Katie and me. One would think he had been introduced to us just five
minutes before. Perhaps he thinks that Katie and I want him to go to
work--common, vulgar work, I mean, for Katie has lost her job and we are
living in the most economical way, for we don't know when another
desirable job can be found. Now, Terry really ought to know that I
shouldn't have him work for anything in the world. I know that Katie has
not said the least word to him, but he is so terribly sensitive that
perhaps he suspects what she may be thinking.
"Katie is despondent, too, and nearly makes me crazy talking of her
life, past, present, and future, in the most doleful way. Last night,
after talking to me for two hours about the misery of life, she made the
startling proposal that she and I commit suicide. 'For,' said she, 'I
cannot see anything ahead of me but work, work, like a cart-horse, until
I am dead. I'd rather die now and be done with everything, and you had
better come with me, for you haven't anything, and if I went alone, what
would become of you, such a poor helpless creature; see how thin you
are, I can almost look through your bones! Who would take care of you?'
"After talking in this strain for what seemed to me hours and hours,
Katie went to bed and to sleep, and then came Terry from his solitary
walk--he usually goes for a walk if there are any indications that Katie
will do any talking--and entertained me by carelessly, carefully hinting
at one of his dark, mysterious plots. Then he, too, went to bed, and I,
too, had forty winks and seventy thousand nightmares."
But Marie, even in this growing strain, never failed in her love and
admiration for the strange man with whom she lived. On the heels of the
above came the following:
"Terry is one of those characters who has not lost any of his distinct
individuality. His is a nature which will never become confounded or
obliterated in one's memory. The instantaneous impression of large
soul, sincerity, and truthfulness he made upon me at our first meeting
has never left me. This impression must have been very strong, for
generally these impressions grow weaker, if people live together so
closely as poor people must. All his faults, as well as perhaps his
virtues, come from the fact that he is not at all practical. In spite of
his experience, he does not know the world, and is a dreamer of dreams.
His wild outbursts are the result, I think, of his sedentary life.
Sometimes we two remain at our home for weeks without venturing out,
without hardly speaking to each other, and then suddenly we burst out
into the wildest extravagances of speech!"
A few days later there was a wilder burst than ever, and Terry left the
salon. Marie wrote:
"Last week we all had a row, and Terry has not been seen or heard of
since. The last words he uttered were that he should return for his
belongings in a few days. I am dreadfully sorry about it, especially
that we could not have parted good friends. I realise and always shall
be sensible of the great good I had from him and shall always think of
him with the best feeling and greatest respect. The parting has not
been a great surprise to me, for it really has been taking place for a
long time, ever since he withdrew his confidence from me, now months
past, and I have been acting with other men without his knowledge.
Nothing mattered in our relation but mutual confidence, but when that
went, it was, I suppose, only a question of time. And, at the same time
that he withdrew spiritually from me, he seemed to lose his interest in
the movement, and grew more and more solitary and hopeless.
"I don't know what Terry is doing, or where he has gone, and I am
uneasy. I would not fancy this beautiful bohemian life alone with Katie,
and I don't know what to do."
"Terry is still away," she wrote a few days later, "and my horizon looks
bleak and lonely. I want to be alone where I can collect my thoughts,
but, even when Katie is out, I cannot think, but sit by the window
staring at the old women hanging up the clothes which everlastingly flap
on the lines tied between the poor old gnarled willow trees. Poor old
trees, their fate has been very like that of the old women. They bear
their burden uncomplainingly, groan dolefully in the wind, and shake
their old palsied heads. Even the sparrows, true hoboes of the air,
disdain to seek shelter in their twisted arms. They will die as they
have lived, withering away.
"I try to interest myself in household affairs, but that is so stale and
unprofitable. Neither can I read: my thoughts wander away and Terry
intrudes himself constantly on my mind. I may get so desperate that I
will seek a job as a possible remedy: perhaps in that way I could get
tired enough to sleep....
"I have been trying to meet Terry, but he is as elusive as any vagrant
sunbeam. I feel it would do me a world of good to have a long
heart-to-heart talk with him. If I could only see him once a week and
have him sympathise with me in a brotherly fashion and hear him say, in
his old way: 'Cheer up, Marie, the worst is yet to come,' I should be
comparatively happy and satisfied."
Several more days passed, and with the lapse of time Marie's mood grew
blacker. Her next letter to me had a deep note of sorrow and regret and
remorse:
"Terry has been away since August thirteenth. He came, while I was out,
for his things. I fear it is his farewell visit; for he has not shown
the slightest disposition to meet me and talk things over. I have tried
in every way to see him again, but he has thus far ignored my existence.
I had an idea that we two were made for each other, but I have been an
awful fool. Last February, as you know, I had an affair, if it may be
dignified by even that name, and just for the fun of the thing I went
with this light love to Detroit, and came home ill, as you already know.
I returned to Terry full of love and regret and most properly chastened
by my illness and disappointment; for other men almost always disappoint
me. But I found him positively beastly. The way he abused that poor man
was terrible, and I had to defend him, for I know that Terry was unjust
to him. I begged him to blame me, not the other man, for it was all my
doing, but that only made matters worse.
"I know that some people can conceal their obnoxious qualities and show
only the sweet and lovely side of themselves. I sometimes like to see
the reverse side of the medal, and I expected Terry, as a student of
humanity and an anarchist, to welcome any phase of character which might
enable him to understand me more completely.
"I must hesitate in attributing Terry's attitude to jealousy, for I have
had some affairs before, and he never seemed to care about them in the
least; indeed, I often felt piqued, and thought he did not mind because
he did not care about me enough. The following two weeks were, I can
truly say, the most infernal and awful that ever happened to me, and I
wished thousands of times that I might die, and I did come very close to
it. I cannot describe that hellish time or give you any idea of Terry's
conduct during those weeks. He was no longer the calm, philosophical
Terry that you know, but the most terribly cruel thing the mind of man
can conceive.
"Now, I know these are strong words, and I don't know if you can imagine
Terry that way, or if you can believe me when I say it is so. I have
thought of it so many times, and I have come to the conclusion that
perhaps while I was away, he and Harris had a great debauch together and
that Terry must have taken some dope which unbalanced him for a while."
I do not think it needs "dope" to explain Terry's conduct. Marie,
perhaps, could not understand the possible cruelty of a disappointed
idealist. When Terry began to see that neither the anarchists nor Marie
would ultimately fit into his scheme of things, when his idealistic hope
began to break against the hard rocks of reality, he was capable, in his
despair, of any hard, desperate, and cruel act.
Marie continued:
"During this awful time I did not blame Terry, dope or no dope. I
considered it all coming to me, and even wished it would keep on coming
until it killed. But I made up my mind right then and there that if it
was fated that I should keep in the game, there should be no more
'affairs' for me. And so help me God I have not had any from that
time--six months ago--till the day Terry left me. And that other man's
name has not once passed my lips in Terry's presence, and when it was
mentioned by others when he and I were there, I grew dizzy and sick.
"In time, these dreadful things were thought of as little as might be,
and Terry and I became excellent, though platonic friends, a novel and
fascinating relation, wherein sex had no part. Night after night have we
sat around this table, discussing books and people, trying to penetrate
the mystery of things strange and new to us. I should rather say that he
talked, and I was his eager listener. Often, after tossing restlessly on
our pillows, when no sleep would come 'to weight our eyelids down,' the
rest of the night would be spent in reciting poetry, the inevitable
cigarette in one hand, the other gesticulating in the most fanciful and
fervid manner. He would recite in passionate whispers--so as not to
awaken Katie--for hours at a time, poems from Shakespeare to Shelley,
and Verlaine to Whitman, poems tender and sweet, bitter and ironical and
revolutionary, just as the mood suited him. His feeling for poetry and
nature seemed to grow as his hope for human society grew less.
"So our relations were ideally platonic--the kind you read about in
books. Nevertheless, some of the old bitterness remained in Terry's
heart, for at times he became depressed and melancholy and so sensitive
about the least little thing that I was nervous and in hot water all
the time for fear I might inadvertently say or do something to hurt him
or make him angry. I admit I am not as placid as I look, and Katie, too,
is very inflammable, so you can understand how tense the atmosphere was
at times.
"Not very long ago, at the breakfast table one Sunday morning, I urged
Terry to come to a meeting of the 'radicals,' adding that he was
becoming a regular hermit and that it would do him good to have more
social pleasure. He turned on me savagely, called me a hypocrite, and a
contemptible one at that, and made a few more remarks of the kind. After
a few days of strained politeness on both sides I made bold to ask him
for some explanation--and I have got it coming yet!
"These are just the facts. I don't go into all the little details of our
many little vulgar rows, about the most trivial things. I am sure, if
Terry writes you about this, that his innate delicacy would never permit
him to go into these sordid details, too many of which I have perhaps
told you. But I am made of rougher stuff than he. I am never quite as
unreasonable as he can be at times, but I am commoner."
Terry did, indeed, express himself in a much more laconic way about the
quarrel, than Marie. On the day he left, August thirteenth, he wrote me
the following note:
"The premonition in my last letter is fulfilled: the salon knows me no
more."
A later talk I had with both Katie and Terry throws light upon the
precipitating cause of Terry's departure on the thirteenth of August. It
was due to Terry's sensitiveness about his money relationship to Katie.
On that morning Terry was asleep on the couch, when Katie got up, made
breakfast, and she and Marie asked Terry to join them.
"Not me," said he.
"I think you have been eating on me long enough," rejoined Katie. "It's
time you got out."
Katie had never allowed herself a remark of this kind before. But she
had not found another job and the three had been on edge for some time.
The remark brought about the climax so long preparing.
"I'll go," he replied, "as soon as I have finished this cigarette."
"In the wordy war that followed," said Terry, "we all three went the
limit in throwing things up to each other. I told Katie that if it had
not been for me and Marie she would not have had anybody to steal for;
that I was eating on her stealings and mine, too. And then I left."
Although, as we shall see, this was not the end of the relation between
Terry and Marie, it was in reality the sordid end of the idealistic
Salon.