WHY

Several years ago circumstances thrust me into a position in which it

became possible for the friend who figures in these pages as Godfrey

Loring to do me a favor. He, being both wise and kindly, never misses

a good chance to put another under obligations. He did me the favor.

I gratefully, if reluctantly, acquiesced. Now, after many days, he

collects. When you shall have read what follows, you may utterly reject

my extenuating plea that any and every point of view upon life is

worthy of attention, even though it serve only to confirm us in our

previous ideas and beliefs. You may say that I should have repudiated

my debt, should have refused to edit and publish the manuscript he

confided to me. You may say that the general racial obligation to

mankind--and to womankind--takes precedence over a private and personal

obligation. Unfortunately I happen to be not of the philanthropic

temperament. My sense of the personal is strong; my sense of the

general weak--that is to say, weak in comparison. If “Loring” had

been within reach, I think I should have gone to him and pleaded for

release. But as luck will have it, he is off yachting, to peep about

in the remote inlets and islets of Australasia and the South Seas for

several years.

To aggravate my situation, in the letter accompanying the manuscript,

after several pages of the discriminating praise most dear to a

writer’s heart, he did me the supreme honor of saying that in his

work he had “striven to copy as closely as might be your style and

your methods--to help me to the hearing I want and to lighten your

labors as editor.” I assure him and the public that in any event I

should have done little editing of his curious production beyond such

as a proofreader might have found necessary. As it is, I have done

practically no editing at all. In form and in substance, from title to

finis, the work is his. I am merely its sponsor--and in circumstances

that would forbid me were I disposed to qualify my sponsorship with

even so mild a disclaimer as reluctance.

Have I said more than a loyal friend should? If so, on the other hand,

have I not done all that a loyal friend could?

I

I am tempted to begin with our arrival in Fifth Avenue, New York City,

in the pomp and circumstance befitting that region of regal splendor.

I should at once catch the attention of the women; and my literary

friends tell me that to make any headway with a story in America it is

necessary to catch the women, because the men either do not read books

at all or read only what they hear the women talking about. And I know

well--none knows better--that our women of the book-buying class, and

probably of all classes, love to amuse their useless idleness with

books that help them to dream of wasting large sums of money upon

luxuries and extravagances, upon entertaining grand people in grand

houses and being entertained by them. They tell me, and I believe it,

that our women abhor stories of middle-class life, abhor truth-telling

stories of any kind, like only what assures them that the promptings of

their own vanities and sentimental shams are true.

But patience, gentle reader, you with the foolish, chimera-haunted

brain, with the silly ideas of life, with the ignorance of human

nature including your own self, with the love of sloppy and tawdry

clap trap. Patience, gentle reader. While I shall begin humbly in

the social scale, I shall not linger there long. I shall pass on to

the surroundings of grandeur that entrance your snobbish soul. You

will soon smell only fine perfumes, only the aromas of food cooked by

expensive chefs. You will sit in drawing-rooms, lie in bedrooms as

magnificent as the architects and decorators and other purveyors to

the very rich have been able to concoct. You will be tasting the fine

savors of fashionable names and titles recorded in Burke’s and the

“Almanach de Gotha.” Patience, gentle reader, with your box of caramels

and your hair in curl papers and your household work undone--patience!

A feast awaits you.

There has been much in the papers these last few years about the

splendid families we--my wife and I--came of. Some time ago one of the

English dukes--a nice chap with nothing to do and a quaint sense of

humor--assembled on his estate for a sort of holiday and picnic all the

members of his ancient and proud family who could be got together by

several months of diligent search. It was a strange and awful throng

that covered the lawns before the ducal castle on the appointed day.

There was a handful of fairly presentable, more or less prosperous

persons. But the most of the duke’s cousins, near and remote, were

tramps, bartenders, jail birds, women of the town, field hands male

and female, sewer cleaners, chimney sweeps, needlewomen, curates,

small shopkeepers, and others of the species that are as a stench

unto delicate, aristocratic nostrils. The duke was delighted with his

picnic, pronounced it a huge success. But then His Grace had a sense of

humor and was not an American aristocrat.

All this by way of preparation for the admission that the branch of

the Loring family from which I come and the branch of the Wheatlands

family to which the girl I married belongs were far from magnificent,

were no more imposing then, well, than the families of any of our

American aristocrats. Like theirs, our genealogical tree, most

imposingly printed and bound and proudly exhibited on a special stand

in the library of our New York palace--that genealogical tree, for all

its air of honesty, for all its documentary proofs, worm-eaten and

age-stained, was like an artificial palm bedded in artificial moss.

The truth is, aristocracy does not thrive in America, but only the

pretense of it, and that must be kept alive by constant renewals. Both

here and abroad I am constantly running across traces of illegitimacy,

substitution, and other forms of genealogical flim-flam. But let that

pass. Whoever is or is not aristocratic, certainly Godfrey Loring and

Edna Wheatlands are not--or, rather, _were_ not.

My father kept a dejected little grocery in Passaic, N. J. He did

not become a “retired merchant and capitalist” until I was able to

retire and capitalize him. Edna’s father was-- No, you guess wrong.

Not a butcher, but--an undertaker!... Whew! I am glad to have these

shameful secrets “off the chest,” as they say in the Bowery. He--this

Wheatlands, undertaker to the poor and near-poor of the then village

of Passaic--was a tall, thin man, with snow-white hair and a smooth,

gaunt, gloomy face and the best funeral air I have ever seen. Edna has

long since forgotten him; she has an admirable ability absolutely to

forget anything she may for whatever reason deem it inconvenient to

remember. What an aid to conscience is such a quality! But I have not

forgotten old Weeping Willy Wheatlands, and I shall not forget him. It

was he who loaned me my first capital, the one that-- But I must not

anticipate.

In those days Passaic was a lowly and a dreary village. Its best was

cheap enough; its poorest was wretchedly squalid. The “seat” of the

Lorings and the “seat” of the Wheatlands stood side by side on the

mosquito beset banks of the river--two dingy frame cottages, a story

and a half in height, two rooms deep. We Lorings had no money, for my

father was an honest, innocent soul with a taste for talking what he

thought was politics, though in fact he knew no more of the realities

of politics, the game of pull Dick pull Devil for licenses to fleece

a “free, proud and intelligent people”--he knew no more of that

reality than--than the next honest soul you may hear driveling on that

same subject. We had no money, but “Weeping Willie” had plenty--and

saved it, blessings on him! I hate to think where I should be now,

if he hadn’t hoarded! So, while our straightened way of living was

compulsory, that of the Wheatlands was not. But this is unimportant;

the main point is both families lived in the same humble way.

If I thought “gentle reader” had patience and real imagination--and,

yes, the real poetic instinct--I should give her an inventory of

the furniture of those two cottages, and of the meager and patched

draperies of the two Monday wash lines, as my mother and Edna’s

mother--and Edna, too, when she grew big enough--decorated them, the

while shrieking gossip back and forth across the low and battered board

fence. But I shall not linger. It is as well. Those memories make me

sad--put a choke in my throat and a mist before my eyes. Why? If you

can’t guess, I could not in spoiling ten reams of paper explain it

to you. One detail only, and I shall hasten on. Both families lived

humbly, but we not quite so humbly as the Wheatlands family, because my

mother was a woman of some neatness and energy while Ma Wheatlands was

at or below the do-easy, slattern human average. _We_ had our regular

Saturday bath--in the wash tub. _We_ did not ever eat off the stove.

And while we were patched we were rarely ragged.

In those days--even in those days--Edna was a “scrapper.” They call it

an “energetic and resolute personality” now; it was called “scrappy”

then, and scrappy it was. When I would be chopping wood or lugging

in coal, so occupied that I did not dare pause, she would sit on the

fence in her faded blue-dotted calico, and how she would give it to me!

She knew how to say the thing that made me wild with the rage a child

is ashamed to show. Yes, she loved to tease me, perhaps--really, I

hope--because she knew I, in the bottom of my heart, loved to be teased

by her, to be noticed in any way. And mighty pretty she looked then,

with her mop of yellowish brown hair and her big golden brown eyes

and her little face, whose every feature was tilted to the angle that

gives precisely the most fascinating expression of pretty pertness, of

precocious intelligence, or of devil-may-care audacity. She has always

been a pretty woman, has Edna, and always will be, even in old age, I

fancy. Her beauty, like her health, like that strong, supple body of

hers, was built to last. What is the matter with the generations coming

forward now? Why do they bloom only to wither? What has sapped their

endurance? Are they brought up too soft? Is it the food? Is it the

worn-out parents? Why am I, at forty, younger in looks and in strength

and in taste for life than the youths of thirty? Why is Edna, not five

years my junior, more attractive physically than girls of twenty-five

or younger?

But she was only eight or nine at the time of which I am writing.

And she was fond of me then--really fond of me, though she denied it

furiously when the other children taunted, and though she was always

jeering at me, calling me awkward and homely. I don’t think I was

notably either the one or the other, but for her to say so tended to

throw the teasers off the track and also kept me in humble subjection.

I knew she cared, because when we played kissing games she would never

call me out, would call out every other boy, but if I called any other

girl she would sulk and treat me as badly as she knew how. Also, while

she had nothing but taunts and sarcasms for me she was always to be

found in the Wheatlands’ back yard near the fence or on it whenever I

was doing chores in our back yard.

After two years in the High School I went to work in the railway office

as a sort of assistant freight clerk. She kept on at school, went

through the High School, graduated in a white dress with blue ribbons,

and then sat down to wait for a husband. Her father and mother were

sensible people. Heaven knows they had led a hard enough life to have

good sense driven into them. But the tradition--the lady-tradition--was

too strong for them. They were not ashamed to work, themselves. They

would have been both ashamed and angry had it been suggested to them

that their two boys should become idlers. But they never thought of

putting their daughter to work at anything. After she graduated and

became a young lady, she was not compelled--would hardly have been

permitted--to do housework or sewing. You have seen the potted flower

in the miserable tenement window--the representative of the life that

neither toils nor spins, but simply exists in idle beauty. That potted

bloom concentrates all the dreams, all the romantic and poetic fancies

of the tenement family. I suppose Edna was some such treasured exotic

possession to those toil-twisted old parents of hers. They wanted a

flower in the house.

Well, they had it. She certainly was a lovely girl, far too lovely

to be spoiled by work. And if ever there was a scratch or a stain on

those beautiful white hands of hers, it assuredly was not made by toil.

She took music lessons-- Music lessons! How much of the ridiculous,

pathetic gropings after culture is packed into those two words. Beyond

question, everyone ought to know something about music; we should all

know something about everything, especially about the things that

peculiarly stand for civilization--science and art, literature and

the drama. But how foolishly we are set at it! Instead of learning to

understand and to appreciate music, we are taught to “beat the box” in

a feeble, clumsy fashion, or to screech or whine when we have no voice

worth the price of a single lesson. Edna took I don’t know how many

lessons a week for I don’t know how many years. She learned nothing

about music. She merely learned to strum on the piano. But, after all,

the lessons attained their real object. They made Edna’s parents and

Edna herself and all the neighbors feel that she was indeed a lady.

She could not sew. She could not cook. She hadn’t any knowledge worth

mention of any practical thing--therefore, had no knowledge at all;

for, unless knowledge is firmly based upon and in the practical, it is

not knowledge but that worst form of ignorance, misinformation. She

didn’t know a thing that would help her as woman, wife, or mother. But

she could play the piano!

Some day some one will write something true on the subject of

education. You remember the story of the girl from Lapland who applied

for a place as servant in New York, and when they asked her what she

could do, she said, “I can milk the reindeer.”

I never hear the word education that I don’t think of that girl.

One half of the time spent at school, to estimate moderately, and

nine tenths of the time spent in college class rooms is given to

things about as valuable to a citizen of this world as the Lap girl’s

“education” to a New York domestic. If anyone tells you that those

valueless things are culture, tell him that only an ignorance still

becalmed in the dense mediæval fog would talk such twaddle; tell him

that science has taught us what common sense has always shown, that

there is no beauty divorced from use, that beauty is simply the

perfect adaptation of the thing to be used to the purpose for which it

is to be used. I am a business man, not a smug, shallow-pated failure

teaching in an antiquated college. I abhor the word culture, as I abhor

the word gentleman or the word lady, because of the company into which

it has fallen. So, while I eagerly disclaim any taint of “culture,” I

insist that I know what I’m talking about when I talk of education. And

if I had not been too good-natured, my girl-- But I must keep to the

story. “Gentle reader” wants a story; he--or she--does not want to try

to think.

It was pleasant to my ignorant ears to hear Edna playing sonatas and

classical barcaroles and dead marches and all manner of loud and

difficult pieces. Such sounds, issuing from the humble--and not too

clean--Wheatlands house gave it an atmosphere of aristocracy, put

tone into the whole neighborhood, elevated the Wheatlands family like

a paper collar on the calico shirt of a farm hand. If we look at

ourselves rightly, we poor smattering seekers after a little showy

knowledge of one kind or another--a dibble of French, a dabble of

Latin or Greek, a sputter of woozy so-called philosophy--how like the

paper-collared farm hand we are, how like the Hottentot chief with a

plug hat atop his naked brown body.

But Edna pleased me, fully as much as she pleased herself, and

that is saying a great deal. I wouldn’t have had her changed in

the smallest particular. I was even glad she could get rid of her

freckles--fascinating little beauty spots sprinkled upon her tip-tilted

little nose!

She was not so fond of me in those days. I had a rival. I am leaning

back and laughing as I think of him. Charley Putney! He was clerk in

a largish dry goods store. He is still a clerk there, I believe, and

no doubt is still the same cheaply scented, heavily pomatumed clerkly

swell he was in the days when I feared and hated him. The store used

to close at six o’clock. About seven of summer evenings Charley would

issue forth from his home to set the hearts of the girls to fluttering.

They were all out, waiting. Down the street he would come with his hat

set a little back to show the beautiful shine and part and roach of his

hair. The air would become delicious (!) with bergamot, occasionally

varied by German cologne or lemon verbena. What a jaunty, gay tie!

What an elegant suit! And he wore a big seal ring, reputed to be real

gold--and such lively socks! Down the street came Charley, all the

girls palpitant. At which stoop or front gate would he stop?

Often--only too often--it was at the front gate next ours. How I hated

him!

And the cap of the joke is that Edna nearly married him. In this land

where the social stairs are crowded like Jacob’s Ladder with throngs

ascending and descending, what a history it would make if the grown men

and women of any generation should tell whom they _almost_ married!

Yes, Edna came very near to marrying him. She was a lady. She did not

know exactly what that meant. The high-life novels she read left her

hazy on the subject, because to understand any given thing we must

have knowledge that enables us to connect it with the things we already

know. A snowball would be an unfathomable mystery to a savage living in

an equatorial plain. A matter of politics or finance or sociology or

real art, real literature, real philosophy, seems dull and meaningless

to a woman or to the average mutton-brained man. But if you span the

gap between knowledge of any subject and a woman’s or a man’s ignorance

of that subject with however slender threads of connecting knowledge,

she or he can at once bridge it and begin to reap the new fields. Edna

could not find any thread whatever for the gap between herself and that

fairy land of high life the novels told her about. In those days there

was no high life in Passaic. I suppose there is now--or, at least,

Passaic thinks there is--and in purely imaginary matters the delusion

of possession is equal to, even better than, possession itself. So,

with no high life to use as a measure, with only the instinct that her

white smooth hands and her dresses modeled on the latest Paris fashions

as illustrated in the monthly “Lady Book,” and her music lessons, her

taste for what she then regarded as literature--with only her instinct

that all these hallmarks must stamp her twenty-four carat lady, she

had to look about her for a matching gentleman. And there was Charley,

the one person within vision who suggested the superb heroes of the

high-life novels. I will say to the credit of her good taste that

she had her doubts about Charley. Indeed, if his sweet smell and his

smooth love-making--Charley excelled as a love-maker, being the born

ladies’ man--if the man, or, rather, the boy, himself had not won her

heart, she would soon have tired of him and would have suspected his

genuineness as a truly gentleman. But she fell in love with him.

There was a long time during which I thought the reason she returned

to me--or, rather, let me return to her--was because she fell out of

love with him. Then there was a still longer time when I thought the

reason was the fact that the very Saturday I got a raise to fourteen

a week, he fell from twelve to eight. But latterly I have known the

truth. How many of us know the truth, the down-at-the-bottom, absolute

truth, about why she married us instead of the other fellow? Very few,

I guess--or we’d be puffing our crops and flirting our feathers less

cantily. She took up with me again because he dropped her. It was he

that saved her, not she or I. Only a few months ago, her old mother,

doddering on in senility, with memory dead except for early happenings,

and these fresh and vivid, said: “And when I think how nigh Edny come

to marryin’ up with that there loud-smelling dude of a Charley Putney!

If he hadn’t ’a give her the go by, she’d sure ’a made a fool of

herself--a wantin’ me and her paw to offer him money and a job in the

undertakin’ store, to git him back. Lawsy me! What a narrer squeak fur

Princess Edny!”

Be patient, gentle reader! You shall soon be reading things that will

efface the coarse impression my old mother-in-law’s language and all

these franknesses about our beginnings must have made upon your refined

and cultured nature. Swallow a caramel and be patient. But don’t skip

these pages. If you should, you would miss the stimulating effect of

contrast, not to speak of other benefits which I, probably vainly, hope

to confer upon you.

She didn’t love me. Looking back, I see that for many months she

found it difficult to endure me. But it was necessary that she carry

off--with the neighborhood rather than with me--her pretense of having

cast off Charley because she preferred me. We can do wonders in the

way of concealing wounded pride; we can do equal wonders in the way

of preserving a reputation for unbroken victory. And I believe she

honestly liked me. Perhaps she liked me even more than she liked her

aromatic Charley; for, it by no means follows that we like best where

we love most. I am loth to believe--I do not believe--that at so early

an age, not quite seventeen, she could have received my caresses and

returned them with plausibility enough to deceive me, unless she had

genuinely liked me.

And what a lucky fellow I thought myself! And how I patronized the

perfumed man. And what a thrashing I gave him--poor, harmless, witless

creature!--when I heard of his boastings that he had dropped Edna

Wheatlands because he found Sally Simpson prettier and more _cultured_!

I must have been a railway man born. At twenty-two--no, six months

after my majority--I was jumped into a head clerkship at twelve

hundred a year. Big pay for a youngster in those days; not so bad for

a youngster even in these inflated years. When I brought Edna the news

I think she began to love me. To her that salary was a halo, a golden

halo round me--made me seem a superior person. She had long thought

highly of my business abilities, for she was shrewd and had listened

when the older people talked, and they were all for me as the likeliest

young man of the neighborhood.

“I’ve had another raise,” said I carelessly. We were sitting on her

front porch, she upon the top step, I two steps down.

“Another!” she said. “Why, the last was only two months ago.”

“Yes, they’ve pushed me up to twelve hundred a year--a little more, for

it’s twenty-five per.”

“Gee!” she exclaimed, and I can see her pretty face now--all aglow,

beaming a reverent admiration upon me.

I rather thought I deserved it. But it has ever been one of my vanities

to pretend to take my successes as matters of course, and even to

depreciate them. They say the English invariably win in diplomacy

because they act dissatisfied with what they get, never grumbling so

sourly as when they capture the whole hog. I can believe it. That

has been my policy, and it has worked rather well. Still, any policy

works well if the man has the gift for success. “Twenty-five per,” I

repeated, to impress it still more deeply upon her and to revel in the

thrilling words. “Before I get through I’ll make them pay me what I’m

worth.”

“Do you think you’ll ever be making more than that?” exclaimed she,

wonderingly.

“I’ll be getting two thousand some day,” said I, far more confidently

than I felt.

“Oh--Godfrey!” she said softly.

And as I looked at her I for the first time felt a certain peculiar

thrill that comes only when the soul of the woman a man loves rushes

forth to cling to his soul. In my life I have never had--and never

shall have--a happier moment.

Once more patience, gentle reader! I know this bit of sordidness--this

glow of sentiment upon a vulgar material incident--disgusts your

delicate soul. I am aware that you have a proper contempt for all the

coarse details of life. You would not be _gentle_ reader if you hadn’t.

You would be a plain man or woman, living busily and usefully, and

making people happy in the plain ways in which the human animal finds

happiness. You would not be devoting your days to making soul-food out

of idealistic moonshine and dreaming of ways to dazzle yourself and

your acquaintances into thinking you a superior person.

“Do you know,” said my pretty Edna, advancing her bond at least halfway

toward meeting mine, “do you know, I’ve had an instinct, a presentiment

of this? I was dreaming it when I woke up this morning.”

I’ve observed that every woman in her effort to prove herself “not like

other girls” pretends to some occult or other equally supranatural

quality. One dreams dreams. Another gets spirit messages. A third has

seen ghosts. Another has a foot which sculptors have longed to model.

A fifth has a note in her voice which the throat specialists pronounce

unique in the human animal and occurring only in certain rare birds

and Sarah Bernhardt. I met one not long ago who had several too many

or too few skins, I forget which, and as a result was endowed with

I cannot recall what nervous qualities quite peculiar to herself,

and somehow most valuable and fascinating. In that early stage of

her career my Edna was “hipped” upon a rather commonplace personal

characteristic--the notion that she had premonitions, was a sort of

seeress or prophetess. Later she dropped it for one less tiresome

and overworked. But I recall that even in that time of my deepest

infatuation I wished to hear as little as possible about the occult.

Of all the shallow, foggy fakes that attract ignorant and miseducated

people the occult is the most inexcusable and boring. A great many

people, otherwise apparently rather sensible, seem honestly to believe

in it. But, being sensible, they don’t have anything to do with it.

They treat it as practical men treat the idiotic in the creeds and

the impossible in the moral codes of the churches to which they

belong--that is, they assent and proceed to dismiss and to forget.

However, I was not much impressed by Edna’s attempt to dazzle me with

her skill as a Sibyl. But I was deeply impressed by the awe-inspiring

softness and shapeliness of her hand lying prisoner in mine. And I was

moved to the uttermost by the kisses and embraces we exchanged in the

gathering dusk. “I love you,” she murmured into my ecstatic ear. “You

are so different from the other men round here.”