never had a friend in my life until you came. I have been on intimate
terms with many, but no one except you has been on intimate terms with
me. Oh, yes, I’m one of the most exclusive persons in the world.”
“That sounds like autocracy, doesn’t it?” laughed Marian. “But you know
I don’t mean that. You think all the others are just as good as you are,
only in different ways, whereas I feel that they’re not. You don’t mind
vulgarity and underbreeding because you are perfectly indifferent to
people so long as they don’t try to jump the fence about your own little
private enclosure.”
“Oh, I believe in letting other people alone, and I insist upon being
let alone myself. You see you make the whole world revolve about social
distinctions. The fact is, isn’t it, that social distinctions are mere
trifles--”
“You oughtn’t to waste time arguing with a prejudice. I admit that what
I believe and feel is unreasonable. But I can’t change an instinct.
To me some people are better than others and are entitled to more, and
ought to be looked up to and respected.”
Howard had an answer on the tip of his tongue. His passion for high
principle seemed to have been rekindled for the time by his love and in
this tranquillising environment. He felt strongly tempted to reason with
her unreasonableness, thus practically boasted as a virtue. It seemed so
unworthy, this streak of snobbery, so senseless in an American at most
three generations away from manual labour. But he had made up his mind
long ago to trust to new surroundings, new interests to create in her a
spirit more in sympathy with his career.
“She is too intelligent, too high-minded,” he often reassured himself,
“to cling to this stupidity of class-feeling. She has heard nothing but
class-distinction all her life. Now that she is away from those people,
with their petty routine of petty ideas, she will begin to see things as
they are.”
So he suppressed the argument and, instead, said in a tone of mock-pity:
“Poor fallen queen--to marry beneath her. How she must have fought
against the idea of such a plebeian partner.”
“Plebeian--you?” Marian looked at him proudly. “Why, one has only to see
you to know.”
“Yes, plebeian. I shall conceal it no longer. My ancestors were plain,
ordinary, common, untitled Americans.”
“Why, so were mine,” she laughed.
“Don’t! You distress me. I should never have married you had I known
that.”
“I _am_ absurd, am I not?” Marian said gaily. “But let me have my craze
for well-mannered people and I’ll leave you your craze for the--the
masses.”
They began to canter. Howard was smiling in spite of his irritation;
for it always irritated him to have her refuse to see his point in this
matter--his distinction between a person as a friend and a person as a
sociological unit.
He worked for an hour or two every morning and sometimes in the evening,
Marian not far from his desk, so seated that when she turned the page
of her book she could lift her eyes and look at him. She read the papers
diligently every day for the first week. At the outset she thought she
was interested. But she knew so little about newspaper details that she
soon had to confess to herself that she was in fact interested in Howard
as her husband and lover, and that his career interested her only in a
broad, general way. What he talked about, that she understood and
liked and was able to discuss. But the newspapers and the news direct
suggested nothing to her, bored her.
“Just read that,” he would say, pointing to an item. She would read it
and wonder what he meant.
“It seems to me,” she would think, “that it wouldn’t in the least matter
if that had not been printed.” Then she would ask evasively but with an
assumption of interest, “What are you going to do about it?”
And he would explain the meaning between the lines; the hinted facts
that ought to be brought out; the possibilities of getting a piece of
news that would attract wide attention. And she would see it, sometimes
clearly, usually vaguely; and she would admire him, but resume her
unconquerable indifference to news.
She was soon looking at the paper only to read what he wrote; and she
often thought how much more interesting he was as a talker than as
a writer. “I’ll start right when we get to town,” she was constantly
promising herself. “It must, must, must be _our_ work.”
Howard was, as she had told him, acutely sensitive to her moods. He did
not formulate it to himself but simply obeyed an instinct which defined
for him the limits of her interest. Before they had been at Lakewood
a month, he was working alone without any expectation of sympathy or
interest from her and without the slightest sense of loss in not getting
it. Why should he miss that which he had never had, had never counted
upon getting? He had always been mentally alone, most alone in the
plans and actions bearing directly upon his own career. He was perfectly
content to have her as the companion of his leisure.
Possibly, if he had been insistent, or if they had been in real sympathy
instead of in only surface sympathy in most respects, she might
have become interested in his work, might have impelled him to right
development. But her distaste and inertia and his habit of debating and
deciding questions as to the paper in his own mind, the fear of boring
her, the dread of intruding upon her rights to her own individual tastes
and feelings, restrained him without his having a sense of restraint.
When, after two months, they went up to town to stay, their course
of life was settled, though Marian was protesting that it was not and
Howard was unconscious of there having been any settlement, or anything
to settle.
XXI.
WAVERING.
Their home was an apartment at Twenty-ninth Street and Madison
Avenue--just large enough for two with its eleven rooms, all bearing the
stamp of Marian’s individuality. She had a keen sense of the beautiful
and she had given her thought and most of her time between the early
autumn and the wedding to making an attractive home. He had not seen her
work until they came together in the late afternoon of a day in the last
week of February.
“You--everywhere you,” he said, as they inspected room after room. “I
don’t see how I could add anything to that. It is beautiful--the things
you have brought together, I mean, the furniture, curtains, carpets,
pictures, all beautiful in themselves, but--”
He was looking at her in that way which made her feel his great love for
her even more deeply than when he put his arms about her and kissed
her. “It reminds me of what I so often think about you. Nature gave you
beauty but you make it wonderful because _you_ shine through it, give it
the force, the expression of your individuality. Other women have noses,
eyes, chins, mouths as beautiful as yours. But only you produce such
effects with the materials. I don’t express it very well but--you
understand?”
“Yes, I understand.” She was leaning against him, her head resting upon
his shoulder. “And you like your home?”
“We shall be happy here. I feel it in the air. This is a temple of the
three great gods--Freedom, Love and Happiness. And--we’ll keep the fires
on the altars blazing, won’t we?”
His hours were most irregular. Sometimes he was off to work early in the
morning. Again he would not rise until noon. Sometimes he did not go
to the office after dinner, and again he came hurriedly to dinner, not
having the time to dress, and left immediately afterward to be gone
until two, three or even four in the morning. At first Marian tried to
follow his irregularities; but she was soon compelled to give up. As
he most often breakfasted about ten o’clock, she arranged to breakfast
regularly at that hour. If he was not yet up, she waited about the house
until she had seen him, listened while he talked of those “everlasting
newspapers,” praised his work a great deal, criticised it little and
that gently. She made few and feeble struggles to interest herself in
newspapers as newspapers. But he did not encourage her; other interests,
domestic and social, clamoured for her time; and the idea of being
directly useful to him in his work faded from her mind.
If she had loved him more sympathetically, if she had not been so
super-sensitive to his passion for complete freedom, she would have
resented what in another kind of man would have seemed frank neglect
of her. But she thought she understood him and was deceived by his
self-deceiving conviction that his work was her service and that the
highest proof of his devotion to her was devotion to “our” career. Thus
there was no bitterness or reproach of him, rarely much intensity, in
her regret that they were together so little.
“Good morning, stranger!” she said, as he came into the dining room one
day in early June.
He kissed her hand and then the “topknot” as he called the point into
which her hair was gathered at the crown of her head. “It has been four
days since I saw you,” he said. And he sat opposite her looking at her
with an expression of sadness which she had not seen since the first
days of their acquaintance.
“I have missed you--you know,” she was trying to look cheerful, “but I
understand--”
“Yes,” he interrupted. “You understand what I intend, understand that I
mean my life to be for _us_. But sometimes--this morning--I think I am
mistaken. It seems to me that I am letting this--” he threw his hand
contemptuously toward the heap of morning newspapers beside him, “this
trash comes between us. You are my real career, not these, and under the
pretense of working for us I am spending my whole life, my one life,
my one chance to help to make us happy, upon these.” And he pushed the
bundle of papers off the table.
“Something has depressed you.” She was leaning her elbow upon the table
and her chin upon her hand and was looking at him wistfully. “I wouldn’t
have you any different. You must follow the law of your nature. You must
work at your ideal of being useful and influential in the world. You
would not be satisfied to take my hand and trudge off with me through
Arcadia to pick flowers and weave them into crowns for me. Nor should
I,” she laughed, “or I try to think I shouldn’t.”
“Let us go abroad for two months,” he said. “I am tired, so tired. I am
so weary of all these others, men and things.”
“Can you spare the time?”
“I”--he corrected himself--“we have earned a vacation. It will be for
me the first real vacation since I left Yale--thirteen years ago. I am
growing narrow and stale. Let us get away and forget. Shall we?”
“The sooner the better--if this is not a passing mood. What has
depressed you?” she persisted.
“What seems to be a piece of very good luck.” He laughed almost
sneeringly. “They have given me a share in the paper, twenty thousand in
stock--which means a fixed income of five thousand a year so long as
the paper pays what it does now--twenty-five per cent. And they offer me
twenty thousand more at par to be paid for within two years. We are in a
fair way to be rich.”
“They don’t want to lose you, evidently,” she said. “But why does this
make you sad? We are independent now--absolutely independent, both of
us.”
“Yes--we are rich. Together we have more than thirty-five thousand a
year. But it is not what I wanted. I wanted to be free. Can a man be
free who is rich, and rich in the way we are? Will my mind be open?
Shall I dare to act and speak the truth? Or will our property, our
environment, speak for me?”
“I can’t imagine you a slave to mere dollars.”
“Can’t you? Well, I am afraid--I’m really afraid. I have always said
that if I wished to--enslave a people I would make them prosperous,
would give them property, make them dependent upon their dollars. Then
the fear of losing their dollars, their investments, would make them
endure any oppression. Freedom’s battles were never fought by men with
full stomachs and full purses.”
“But rich men have given up everything for freedom--Washington was a
rich man.”
“Ah, but how many Washingtons has the world produced? I see the time
coming when I shall have to choose. I see it and--I dread it.”
She rose and stood behind him leaning over with her arms about his neck
and her check against his.
“You are brave. You are strong,” she whispered. “You will meet that
crisis if it comes and I have no fear, Mr. Valiant-for-Truth, as to how
the battle will go.”
He was glad that he did not have to face her eyes just then. “We will
go abroad next Wednesday week,” he whispered, “and we’ll be happy in
France--in Switzerland--in Holland--I want to see the park at the Hague
again; and the tall trees with their straight big trunks green with
moss; and the boughs meeting over the canals and making the clear water
so black; and the snow-white swans sailing statelily about.”
* * * * *
With the Atlantic between him and his work, he was able to suspend the
habit of so many years. You would have fancied them just married, at
whatever stage of their wanderings you might have met them. They were
always laughing and talking--an endless flow of high spirits, absorption
each in the other. They rose when they pleased, went to bed when it
suited them. They had a manservant and a maid with them to relieve them
of all the details. They travelled only in the afternoons, and then not
far. If they missed one train, they cheerfully waited for another.
“I think we are achieving my ideal of vacation,” he said.
“What is that--perfect idleness? We certainly are idle. I shouldn’t have
believed you could be so idle.”
“Perfect idleness--yes. But more than that. I aimed far higher. My ideal
was perfect irresponsibility. We have become like the wind that bloweth
where it listeth.”
And again, she said: “Let me see, what day is this?”
“I think it is Thursday or Friday,” he replied. “But it may be Sunday.
I can assure you that it is afternoon, late afternoon, and I think we
ought to dress for dinner soon. After dinner, if you still care to know,
and will remind me, I’ll try to find out the day. But I’m sure we shall
have forgotten before to-morrow.”
Howard got an extension of his leave of absence and they roamed about
England in August, reaching New York on the first day of September.
Marian went on to Mrs. Carnarvon at Newport and Howard took rooms at the
Waldorf. She stayed away a full week, then came to town, opened their
apartment, and surprised him with a formal invitation to dinner.
He came like a guest and they went through all the formalities of
meeting for the first time, of increasing intimacy--condensing a
complete courtship into one evening.
“I thought you had had enough of me for the time,” he said, as they sat
in the wide window-seat, he tracing with his forefinger the line of the
straps over her bare shoulders.
“And I thought that I would give you a chance to forget how nice I am
and so give you the pleasure of learning all over again. But it was so
lonely and miserable up there. ‘Who can come after the king?’”
“Sometimes I think I ought to stir about more--meet the men who lead
in the city. But it seems such a waste of time when I can come and call
upon you.”
“But might it not be better in the long run if you did meet these men?
Mightn’t it make your getting on quicker and easier?”
“Perhaps--if I were a gregarious animal, but I’m not. I’m shy and
solitary and hard to get acquainted with. And it takes time to make
friends. Besides, in making friends you also make enemies, and one enemy
can do you more harm than all your friends can do you good. Then too,
friends take up too much time. We have so little time and--we can spend
it to so much better advantage--can’t we?”
Marian pushed herself closer against him and presently said dreamily:
“So much happiness, such utter happiness which no one, nothing can take
away. I wonder when and how the first storm will come?”
“It needn’t come at all--not for a long, long time. And when it does--we
can weather it, don’t you think?”
* * * * *
During the next two months they were together more than they had been in
the spring. He imposed day office hours upon himself and did no work in
the evenings except the correcting of editorial proofs which he had sent
to him at the house, at the theatre, or at whatever restaurant they were
dining. And at midnight he called up the office on the telephone
and talked with Mr. King or Mr. Vroom about the news in hand and the
programme for presenting it in the next morning’s paper.
But as “people”--meaning Marian’s friends--returned to town, they fell
into the former routine. It was in part his doing, in part hers. He was
now thirty-seven years old and his mind, always of a serious cast, was
intolerant of trifles and triflers.
Marian’s range of interests was shallower but much wider than his. Her
beauty, her cleverness, her tact caused her to be sought. She invited
many to their house and accepted more and more invitations. At first she
never went without him. But he was sometimes compelled by his work to
send her alone. He rarely went except for her sake--because he thought
going about amused her. And he was glad and relieved when she began to
go without him, instead of spending the evenings in solitude.
“There is no reason why you should punish yourself and punish me because
you had the ill luck to marry a working-man,” he said. “It cannot be
agreeable to sit here all by yourself evening after evening. And it
depresses me when I am at the office at night to think of you as lonely.
It makes me happier in my work--my pleasure, you know--to think of you
enjoying yourself.”
“But aren’t you afraid that some one will steal me?” she asked,
laughingly.
“Not I.” He was smiling proudly at her. “If you could be stolen, if you
could be happier anywhere than with me, you have only to let me into the
plot.”
“There are some women who would not like that.”
“And there are men who wouldn’t feel as I do. But you and I, we belong
to a class all by ourselves, don’t we?”
Apparently they were as devoted each to the other as ever. But each now
sought a separate happiness--he perforce in his work, she perforce in
the only way left open to her. When they were together, which meant
several hours every day and usually one whole day in the week, they
were at once seemingly absorbed each in the other with all the rest as
background. But none the less, they were leading separate lives, with
separate interests, separate tastes, separate modes of thinking. The
“bourgeois” life which they had planned--both standing behind the
counter and both adding up the results of the day’s business after they
had put up the shutters, two as one in all the interests of life--became
a dead and forgotten dream.
XXII.
THE SHENSTONE EPISODE.
On the way to or from the opera or a party, she would peep in on him,
watching the back of his head as he bent over his desk or read away at
some dull-looking book, wishing that he would feel her presence and turn
with that smile which was always hers from him, yet fearing to make a
sound and compel his attention.
“At times I think,” she said one day when he caught her in his arms on a
sudden impulse and kissed her, “that the reason you don’t try to rule me
is because you don’t care enough.”
“That’s precisely it.” He was smoothing her eyebrows with his
forefinger. “I don’t care enough about ruling. I don’t care enough for
the sort of love that responds to ‘must.’”
“But a woman likes to have ‘must’ said to her sometimes.”
“Does she? Do you? Well--I’ll say ‘must’ to you. You must love me freely
and voluntarily, or not at all. You must do as you please.”
“But don’t you see that that drives me from you often, keeps us apart in
many ways. Now if you compelled me to think as you do, to like what you
like--”
“But I couldn’t. Then you would no longer be _you_. And I like you so
well just as you are that I would not change an idea in your head.”
Marian sighed and went away to her dinner party. She felt that she was
in danger. “Not of falling in love with some other man,” she thought,
“for that’s impossible. But if a man were to come along who invited me
to be interested in his work, to keep him at whatever he was doing, I’d
accept and that would lead on and on--where?”
She soon had an opportunity to answer that question. Howard went away
to Washington to assist the party leaders in putting through a difficult
tariff-reform bill which all the protected interests were fighting. He
expected to be gone a week; but week after week passed and he was still
at the capital, directing the paper by telegraph and sending Marian
hurried notes postponing his return. She was going about daily, early
and late, her life vacant, her mind restlessly seeking occupation,
interest.
After he had been gone three weeks she found herself at dinner at Mrs.
Provost’s next to a tall, fair-haired athletic young man of about her
own age. Something in his expression--perhaps the amused way in which he
studied the faces of the others--attracted her to him. She glanced over
at his card. It read “Mr. Shenstone.”
“It doesn’t add much to your information, does it?” he smiled, as he
caught her glance rising from the card.
“Nothing,” she confessed candidly. “I never heard of you before.”
“And yet I’ve been splashing about, trying to attract attention to
myself, for twelve years.”
“Perhaps not in this particular pond.”
“No, that is true.”
“I was wondering what you do--lawyer, doctor, journalist, business man
or what.
“And what did you conclude?”
“I concluded that you did nothing.”
“You are right. But I try--I paint.”
“Portraits?”
“Yes.”
“That explains your way of looking at people. Only, you’ll get no
customers if you paint them as you see them.”
“I only see what they see when they look in the mirror.”
“Yes, but you see it impartial--or rather, I should say, cynically.”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For calling me cynical. The two keenest pleasures a man can attain are
for a woman to call him a cynic and for a woman to call him a devil with
the women.”
“Are you a ‘devil with the women’?”
“Not I--not any more than I am a cynic. But let us talk about you--I
am about exhausted as a topic of conversation. Why do you look so
discontented?”
“Because I have nothing to occupy my mind.”
“No children?”
“None--and no dogs.”
“No husband?”
“Husbands are busy.”
“So you are the typical American woman--the American instinct for doing,
the universal woman’s instinct for sunshine and laziness; the husband
absorbed in his business or profession with his domestic life as an
incident; the wife--like you.”
“That is right, and wrong--nearer right than wrong, a little unjust to
the husband.”
“Oh, it’s probably your fault that you are not absorbed in his business
or profession. It ought to be as much yours as his. What does he do?”
“He edits a newspaper.”
“Oh, he’s _the_ Mr. Howard. A very interesting, a very remarkable man.”
Marian was delighted by this appreciation. She talked with Shenstone
again after dinner and was pleased that he was to be in the same box
with her at the opera the next night. He had spent much of his time on
the other side of the Atlantic. He was unusually well educated for an
artist’s, and his mind was not developed in one direction only. Like
Marian, his point of view was artistic and emotional. Like her he had a
reverence for tradition, a deference to caste--the latter not offensive
for the same reason that hers was not, because good birth and good
breeding made him of the “high caste” and not a cringer with his eyes
craned upward. It seemed in him, as in her, a sort of self-respect.
Marian showed a candid liking for his society and he was quick to take
advantage of it. For a month they saw more and more each of the other,
she discreet without deliberation and he discreet with deliberation.
He talked to her of his work, of his ambition. He showed her himself
without egotism. He made an impression upon her so distinct and so
favourable that she admitted to herself that he was the most fascinating
man--except one--whom she had ever met.
When Howard at last returned, defeated by corruption within his
own party and for the time disgusted with politics, she at once had
Shenstone at the house to dine. “What do you think of Mr. Shenstone?”
she asked when they were alone.
“No wonder you’re enthusiastic about him. As he talked to me, I could
hardly keep from laughing. It was your own views, almost your own words.
He has the look of a great man. I think he will ‘arrive,’ as they say in
the Bowery.”