him to the house and giving him a commission to paint Marian. For the
rest of the winter Shenstone was constantly in Marian’s company; so
constantly that they were gossiped about, and all the women who were
unpleasantly discussed “for cause” conspired to throw them together as
much as possible.
One evening in the very end of the winter, Howard called to Marian from
his dressing room: “Why, lady, Shenstone’s gone, hasn’t he? I’ve just
read a note from him.”
There was a pause before Marian answered in a constrained voice: “Yes,
he sailed to-day.”
Howard was tying his bow. He paused at the curious tone, then smiled
mysteriously to himself. He put on his waistcoat and coat and knocked on
the half-open door. “May I come in?” he asked.
“Yes--I’m waiting for dinner to be announced.”
She was sitting before the fire, very beautiful in her evening gown. She
seemed not to observe that he had entered but stared on into the flames.
He stood beside her, looking down at her with the half mocking, half
tender smile. Presently he sat upon the arm of her chair and took one of
her hands. “Poor, friendless, beautiful lady,” he said softly.
She glanced up quickly, her cheeks flaming but her eyes clear and frank.
“Why do you say that?” she asked in the tone of one who knows why.
“Other women will not be her friends because they are jealous of her,
and as for the men--how can a man be really a friend to a woman, a
fascinating, sympathetic woman?”
Marian hid her face against the lapel of his coat. “He told me,” she
whispered, “and then he went away.”
“He always does tell her. But----”
“But--what?”
“She doesn’t always send him away. Poor fellow! Still, he went into it
with his eyes open.”
“He was very nice. He told it in a roundabout way. And I wasn’t a bit
afraid that he’d--he’d--you know. But I got to thinking about how I’d
feel if he did--did touch me. And it made me--nervous.”
There was a long pause, then she went on: “I wonder how you’d feel about
touching another woman?”
“I? Dear me, I wonder! I never thought. You see I’m such a domestic,
unattractive creature----”
“Don’t laugh at me, please,” she pleaded.
“I’m not laughing. Underneath, I’m thinking--thinking what I would do if
I met you and lost you. It’s very black on the Atlantic for one pair of
eyes to-night.”
“And the worst of it is,” she said, “that my vanity is flattered and I’m
not really sorry for him.”
“Rather proud of her conquest, is she?”
“Yes, it pleased me to have him care.”
“She likes to think that he’ll carry his broken heart to the grave, does
she?”
“Yes. Isn’t it shameful?”
“Shameful? Shameless. I have always held that even the best woman dearly
loves to ruin a man. It’s such a triumph. And the more she loves him,
the more she’d like to ruin him--that is, if ruin came solely through
love for her and didn’t involve her.”
“But I would not want to ruin you.”
“If that seemed to be the supreme test of my love for you--are you sure?
I’m not. There’s Thomas, knocking to announce dinner.”
The Shenstone incident was apparently closed. Marian, a most attractive
woman of thirty, absorbed in a social life that demanded all her
physical and mental energy as well as all of her time, did not long
vividly remember him. But he had given her a standard by which she
unconsciously measured her husband. She contrasted the life he had
promised her, the life Shenstone reminded her of, with the life that
was--so material, so suspiciously physical when it professed to be
loving, so suspiciously chill when it professed to be friendly. She
thrust aside these thoughts as disloyal and false. But they persisted in
returning.
If she had been less appreciative of Howard’s intellect, less fascinated
by the charm of his personality, she would soon have become one of the
“misunderstood” women in search of “consolation.” Instead, she turned
her mind in the direction natural to her character--social ambition.
XXIII.
EXPANDING AND CONTRACTING.
In such a city as New York, to be deliberately careful about money is
the only way to keep within one’s income, whether it be vast or small.
There are temptations to buy at the end of every glance of the eye.
The merchants are crafty in producing new and insidious allurements, in
creating new and expensive tastes. But these might be resisted were it
not that the habits of all one’s associates are constantly and all but
irresistibly stimulating the faculty of imitation.
Neither Howard nor Marian had been brought up to be watchful about
money. Both had been accustomed to having their wants supplied. And
now that they had a household and a growing income, it was a matter
of course that their expenditures should steadily expand. Before three
years had passed they were spending more than double the sum which
at the outset they had fixed upon as their limit. A merely decent and
self-respecting return of the hospitalities they accepted, a carriage
and pair and two saddle horses and the servants to look after
them--these items accounted for the increase. They looked upon this as
really necessary expenditure and soon would have found that curtailment
involved genuine deprivation. From the very beginning each step in
expansion made the next logical and inevitable, made the plea of
necessity seem valid.
An aunt of Marian’s died, leaving her a “small” house--worth perhaps a
quarter of a million--near the Avenue in Sixty-fifth Street, and eighty
thousand in cash. About the same time Stokely told Howard of a fine
speculative opportunity in certain copper properties. Howard hesitated.
He knew that the way of speculation was the way of bondage for his
newspaper and for him. But this particular adventure seemed harmless and
he yielded. The money was invested and within a few months was producing
an income of fifteen thousand a year which promised to be steady.
Howard’s ownership of stock in the paper increased; and as the profits
advanced swiftly with its swift growth in its illustrated form, his own
income was nearly fifty thousand a year. They were growing very rich.
There was no longer the slightest anxiety as to money in his mind.
“You know the great dread I had in marrying,” he said to her one day,
“was lest I should make myself and you dependents, should some day
sacrifice my freedom to my fear of losing--happiness.”
“Yes, and very foolish you were, not to have more confidence in yourself
and in me.”
“Perhaps. But what I am thinking is that you have brought me luck. I am
free, beyond anybody’s reach. I could quit the paper to-morrow and we
should hardly have to change our style of living even if I did not get
something else to do.”
“Style of living--” in that phrase lay the key to the change that was
swiftly going on in Howard’s mind and mental attitude. It is not easy
for a man with environment wholly in his favour to keep his point
of view correct, to keep his horizon wide and clear, his sense of
proportion just. It is next to impossible for him to do so when his
environment opposes.
The man who looks out from misery and squalor upon misery and squalor
is, if he thinks at all, naturally an anarchist. To him the established
order shows only injustice and persistence of injustice. The man who
looks out from luxury and ease and well-being upon luxury and ease and
well-being is forced by the very limitations of the human mind to an
over-reverence for the established order. He is unreasonably suspicious
of anything that threatens change. “When I’m comfortable all’s well in
the world; change might bring discomfort to me.” And he flatters himself
that he is a “conservative.”
Howard had had a long training at the correct standpoint and in right
thinking. But the influences were there, were at work, were destroying
his devotion to a social and political ideal wholly alien to the life
he was now living under the leading of his wife. He did not blame her,
indeed he could not justly have blamed her, for his falling away from
what he knew were correct principles for him. While she had brought him
into this environment, while at first it was in large part for her that
he gave so much time and thought to the accumulation of wealth, soon
love of luxury, dependence upon a train of servants, fondness for the
great extravagances to which New York tempts the rich and those living
near the rich, became stronger in him than it was in her. And through
the inevitable reaction of environment upon the man, the central point
in his valuation of men and women tended to shift from the fundamentals,
mind and character, to the surface qualities--dress and style and
manners and refinement, and even dress.
This process of demoralisation was well advanced when they moved from
the apartment. After four years of “expansion” there, they had begun
to feel cramped; and a year after Marian inherited the house Howard had
progressed to the mental, the moral, the financial state where it seemed
natural, logical, practically necessary that they should set up a real
New York “establishment.”
“Isn’t this just the house for us?” she said. “I hate huge, big houses.
Like you, I think the taste of the occupants should be everywhere. Now
this house is just big enough. You don’t know how wonderful it would
be.”
“Oh, yes, I do,” he laughed, “and you must try it.” He was as
enthusiastic as she.
In the late autumn the house was ready; and there was not a more
artistic interior in New York. It was not so much the result of great
expense as of intelligence and taste. It was an expression of an
individuality--a revelation of a woman’s beautiful mind, inspired by
love.
“At last I have something to interest, to occupy me,” she said. “This is
our very own, through and through our own. It will be such a pleasure to
me to keep it always like this.”
“You--degenerated into a household drudge,” he mocked. “Why, you used to
laugh at me when I held up a wife who was a good housekeeper as one of
my ideals.”
“Did I?” she answered. “Well, as you would say, see what I’ve come to
through living with--a member of the working-classes.”
Howard’s own particular part of this house included a library with a
small study next to it. In the study was a most attractive table with
plenty of room to spread about books and papers, a huge divan in the
corner and a fire-place near by. He found himself doing more and more of
his work at home. There were not so many interruptions as at the office,
the beauty of the surroundings, the consciousness that “she” was not far
away--all combined to keep him at home and to enable him to do more and
better work there.
He was justly and greatly proud of her achievement; and where he used to
be more regretful than he admitted even to himself when they had guests,
he was now glad to see others about, admiring her taste, appreciating
her skill as a hostess and giving him opportunities to look at her from
an ever new point of view.
Of course these guests were almost all “_their_ kind of
people”--amiable, well mannered persons who thought and acted in that
most conventional of moulds, the mould of “good society.” They
fitted into the surroundings, they did their part toward making those
surroundings luxurious--a “wallow of self-complacent content.” And this
environment soon suited and fitted him exactly.
But to her he was still The Democrat. She loved him in the way and to
the degree which her character, as the years had developed it, permitted
her to love. And this love, or rather admiring respect, was wholly based
upon her ideal of him, her belief in the honesty and intensity of his
convictions. While she did not share them, she had breadth enough to
admire them and to regard them as high removed above her own ideas to
which for herself she held tenaciously, instinct and association and
“tradition” triumphing over reason.
Howard retained his ideal of her, never examining her closely, never
seeing or suspecting what a pale love she gave him and how shrivelled
had become the part of her nature which she and he both assumed was most
strongly developed. He knew how she idealised him and did not dare to
undeceive her. Therefore he practised toward her a hypocrisy that grew
steadily more disgraceful, yet grew so gradually that there was no
single moment at which he could conveniently halt and “straighten the
record.” At first he was often and heartily ashamed of himself; but by
degrees this feeling deadened into cynical insensibility and he was
only ashamed to let her see him as he really was. She had kept her
self-respect. She esteemed self-respect at the exalted valuation he had
formerly put upon it. What if she should find him out?
* * * * *
When the famous “coal conspiracy” was formed, three of the men
conspicuous in it were among their intimates--that is, their families
were often at his house and he and Marian were often at theirs. Yet he
had never made a more relentless attack. Nor did he, either in the news
columns or on the editorial page, conceal the connection of his three
friends with the conspiracy.
“Mrs. Mercer was here this morning,” Marian said as they were waiting
for the butler to announce dinner. She was flushed and embarrassed.
Howard laughed. “And did she tell you what a dreadful husband you had?”
“Oh, she didn’t blame you at all. She said they all knew how perfectly
upright you were. Only, she said you did not understand and were doing
Mr. Mercer a great injustice.”
“Well, what do you think?”
“Why--I can’t believe--is it possible, dear--I was just reading one of
your editorials. Can Mr. Mercer be in such a scheme? The way she told
it to me, he and the others were really doing a lot of people a
valuable service, putting their property on a paying basis, enabling the
railroads to meet their expenses and to keep thousands and thousands of
men employed.”
“Poor Mercer!” Howard said ironically. “Poor misunderstood
philanthropist! What a pity that that sort of benevolence has to be
carried on by bribing judges and prosecutors and legislatures, by making
the poor shiver and freeze, by subtracting from the pleasures and
adding to the anxieties of millions. One would almost say that such
a philanthropy had better not be undertaken. It is so likely to be
misunderstood by the ‘unruly classes.’”
“Oh, I knew you were right. I told her you must be right, that you never
wrote until you knew.”
“And what was the result?”
“Well, we are making some very bitter enemies.”
“I doubt it. I suspect that before long they’ll come wheedling about in
the hope that I’ll let up on them or be a little easier next time.”
“I’m sure I do not care what they do,” said Marian, drawing herself up.
“All I care for is--you, and to see you do your duty at whatever cost
or regardless of cost--” she was leaning over the back of his chair with
her arms about his neck and her lips very near to his ear--“you are my
love without fear and without reproach.”
“Listen, dear.” He took her hand and drew her arms more closely about
his neck. “Suppose that the lines were drawn--as they may be any day.
Suppose that we had to choose, with all these friends of yours, with our
position, yes, even the place I have won in my profession, my place as
editor--all that we now have on the one side; and on the other side a
thankless, unprofitable, apparently useless standing up for the right.
Wouldn’t you miss your friends?”
“_All_ our friends? And who will be on the other side?”
“Almost no one that we know--that you would care to call upon or go
about with or have here at the house. Nobody with any great amount of
wealth or social position. Those other people who are in town when it is
said ‘Nobody is in town now!’”
She did not answer.
“Where would you be?” he repeated.
“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of that.” She came around and sat on his
knee. “Where? Why, there’s only one ‘where’ in all this world for
me--‘wheresoever thou goest.’”
And so the half-formed impulse to begin to straighten himself out with
her was smothered by her.
Both were silent through dinner. She was thinking how honest, how
fearless he was, how he loved her, how eagerly she would follow him,
how blessed she was in the love of such a man. And he--he was regretting
that his “pose” had carried him so far; he was wishing that he had not
been so bitter in his attacks upon his and his wife’s friends, the coal
conspirators. When he had definitely cast in his lot with “the shearers”
why persist in making his hypocrisy more abominable by protesting more
loudly than ever in behalf of “the sheep?” Above all, why had he let
his habit of voluble denunciation lead him into this hypocrisy with the
woman he loved?
He admitted to himself that “causes” had ceased to interest him except
as they might contribute to the advancement of his power. Power!--that
was his ambition now. First he had wished to have an independent income
in order to be free. When he had achieved that, it was at the sacrifice
of his mental freedom. And now, with the clearness of self-knowledge
which only men of great ability have, he knew that the one cause for
which he would make sacrifices was--himself.
“Of what are you thinking so gloomily?” she interrupted.
“Oh--I--let me see--well, I was thinking what a fraud I am; and that I
wished I could dupe myself as completely as I can dupe--”
“Me?” she laughed. “Oh, we’re all frauds--shocking frauds. I wouldn’t
have you see me as I really am for anything.”
Although her remark was a commonplace, of small meaning, as he knew,
he got comfort out of it, so desperately was he casting about for some
consolation.
“That’s true, my dear,” he said. “And I wish that you liked the kind of
a fraud I am as well as I like the kind of a fraud you are.”
XXIV.
“MR. VALIANT-FOR-TRUTH.”
Stokely came rushing into his office the next morning. “Good God, old
man,” he exclaimed, “What’s the meaning of this attack on the coal
roads?”
Howard flushed with resentment, not at what Stokely said, but at his
tone.
“Now, don’t get on your high horse. I don’t think you understand.”
Stokely’s tone had moderated. “Don’t you know that the Delaware Valley
road is in this?”
Howard started. He had just invested two hundred thousand dollars in
that stock on Stokely’s advice “No, I didn’t know it.” He recovered
himself. “And furthermore I don’t give a damn.” He struck his desk
angrily. His simulation of incorruptible indignation for the moment half
deceived himself.
“Why, man, if this infernal roast is kept up, you’ll lose a hundred
thousand. Then there are my interests. I’m up to my neck in this deal.”
“My advice to you is to get out of it. I’m sorry, but you know as well
as I do that the thing is infamous.”
“Infamous--nonsense! It will double our dividends and the consumers
won’t feel it.”
“Let us not discuss it, Stokely. There--don’t say anything you’ll
regret.”
“But--”
“Now, Stokely--don’t argue it with me.”
Stokely put on his hat, stood up and looked at Howard with sullen
admiration. “You will drive away the last friend you’ve got on earth, if
you keep this up. Good morning.”
Howard sent a smile of cynical amusement after him, then stared
thoughtfully into the mass of papers on his desk for five, ten, fifteen
minutes. When his plan was formed he touched the electric button.
“Please tell Mr. King I’d like to see him,” he said to the answering
boy.
Mr. King entered with a bundle of legal documents. “I suppose it’s the
injunction you want to discuss,” he said. “We’ve got the papers all
ready. It’s simply great. Those fellows will be in a corner and will
have to give up. They can’t get away from us. The price of coal will
drop half a dollar within a week, I’ll bet.”
“I’m afraid you are over sanguine,” Howard said. “I’ve just been going
over the matter with my lawyer. But leave the papers with me. And--about
the news--be careful what you say. We’ve been going a little strong. I
think a little less personal matter would be advisable.”
Mr. King was amazed and looked it. He slowly pulled himself together to
say, “All right, Mr. Howard. I think I understand.” He laid the papers
down and departed. Outside the door he laughed softly to himself.
“Somebody’s been cutting his comb, I guess,” he murmured. “Well, I
didn’t think he’d last. New York always gets ‘em when they’re worth
while.”
As the door closed behind King, Howard drew out the lowest and deepest
drawer of his desk. It was half-filled with long-undisturbed pamphlets
and newspaper cuttings. He tossed in the injunction papers. A cloud of
dust flew up and settled thickly upon them. He shut the drawer.
He went to the window and looked out over the city--that seductive,
that overwhelming expression of wealth and power. “What was it my father
wrote me when I told him I was going to New York?” and he recalled
almost the exact words--“New York that lures young men from the towns
and the farms, and prostitutes them, teaches them to sell themselves
with unblushing cheeks for a fee, for an office, for riches, for power.”
He shrugged his shoulders, smiled, drew himself up, returned to his desk
and was soon absorbed in his work.
The next morning the _News-Record’s_ double-leaded “leader” on the
Coal Trust was a discharge of heavy artillery. But it was artillery
in retreat. And in the succeeding days, the retreat continued--not
precipitate but orderly, masterly.
* * * * *
Ten days after their talk on the “coal conspiracy” Marian greeted him
late in the afternoon with “Oh, such a row with Mrs. Mercer!”
“Mrs. Mercer! Why, what was she angry about?”
“She wasn’t--at least, not at first. It was I. I went to see her and she
asked me to thank you for stopping that fight on the coal conspiracy.”
“That was tactful of her,” Howard said, turning away to hide his
nervousness.
“And I told her that you had not stopped, that you wouldn’t stop until
you had broken it up. And she smiled in a superior way and said I was
quite mistaken, that I didn’t read the paper, I haven’t read it for
several days, but I knew _you_, dear, and I remembered what you had
said. And so we just had it. We were polite but furious when I went. I
shall never go near her again.”
“But, unfortunately, we have stopped. We had to do it. We could
accomplish nothing.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. What angered me was her insinuation.”
“That was irritating. But, tell me, what if it had been true?” Howard’s
voice was strained and he was looking at her eagerly, with fever in his
eyes.
“But it couldn’t be. It isn’t worth while imagining. You could not be
a coward and a traitor.” So complete was her confidence in him that
suspicion of him was impossible.
“Would you sit in judgment on me?”
“Not if I could help it.”
“But you can--you could help it.” His manner was agitated, and he spoke
almost fiercely. “I am free,” he went on, and as she watched his
eyes she understood why men feared him. “I do what I will. I am not
accountable to you, not even to you. I have never asked you to approve
of me, to approve what I do, to love me. You are free also, free to
love, free to withdraw your love. I follow the law of my own being. You
must take me as you find me or not at all.”
She tried to stop him but could not. His words poured on. He leaned
forward and took her hand and his eyes were brilliant and piercing. “I
love you,” he said. “Ah, how I love you--not because you love me, not
because you are an angel, not because you are a superior being. No, not
for any reason in all this wide world but because you are you. Do what
you will and I shall love you. Whether I had to look up among the stars
or down in the mire to find you, I would look just as steadily, just as
proudly.”
He drew along breath and his hand trembled. “If I were a traitor, then,
if you loved me, you would say, ‘What! Is he to be found among traitors?
How I love treason!’ If I were a coward, liar, thief, a sum of all the
vices, then, if you ever had loved me you would love me still. I want
no love with mental reservations, no love with ifs and buts and
provided-thats. I want love, free and fearless, that adapts itself to
changing human nature as the colour of the sea adapts itself to the
colour of the sky; love that does not have to be cajoled and persuaded
lest it be not there when I most need it. I want the love that loves.”