I have never been able to come to a satisfactory verdict as to the
intelligence of the human race. Is it stupid, or is it, rather,
sluggish? Is it unable to think, or does it refuse to think? Does it
believe the follies it pretends to believe and usually acts upon, or is
it the victim of its own willful prejudices and hypocrisies? Never have
I decided that a certain man or woman was practically witless, but that
he or she has confounded me by saying or doing something indicating
shrewdness or even wisdom.
The women are especially difficult to judge. Take Edna, for example.
It was impossible to interest her in anything worth while. But as to
the things in which she was interested, none could have thought more
clearly or keenly, or could have acted with more vigor and effect. I
have often made serious blunders--inexcusable blunders--in managing
my own affairs. To go no further, my management of my family would
have convicted me of imbecility before any court not made up of
good-natured, indifferent, woman-worshiping, woman-despising American
husbands. Yes, I have made the stupidest blunders in all creation. But
I cannot recall a single notable blunder made by Edna in the matters
which alone she deemed worthy of her attention. She decided what she
wanted. She moved upon it by the best route, whether devious or direct
or a combination of the two. And she always got it.
You may say her success was due to the fact that her objects were
trivial. But if you will think a moment, you will appreciate that a
thing’s triviality does not necessarily make it easy to attain. As much
energy and skill may be shown in winning a sham battle as in winning a
real. Still, I suppose minds are cast in molds of various sizes, and
one cast in a small mold can deal only with the small. And I guess
that, from whatever cause, the minds of women are of diverse kinds of
smaller molds. Perhaps this is the result of bad education. Perhaps
better education will correct it. I do not know. I can speak only of
what is--of Edna as she is and always has been.
Having made up her mind to fell the genealogical tree, that an
artificial one might be stood up in its place, she lost no time in
getting into action.
It was on the Sunday following our talk--the earliest possible
day--that she took me for the first visit we had made our parents
in nearly three years. We had sent them presents. We had written
them letters. We had received painfully composed and ungrammatical
replies--these received both for Edna and myself at my office, because
she feared the servants would pry into periodically arriving exhibits
of illiteracy. We had written them of coming and bringing Margot with
us. We had received suggestions of their coming to see us, which Edna
had evaded by such excuses as that we were moving or that she or
Margot was not well or that the cook had abruptly deserted. The world
outside Passaic was a vague place to our old fathers and mothers. Their
own immediate affairs kept them busy. So with no sense of deliberate
alienation on their side and small and mildly intermittent sense of it
on our side, the months and the years passed without our seeing one
another.
Edna announced to me the intended visit only an hour before we started.
It was a habit of hers--a clever habit, too--never to take anyone into
her confidence about her plans until the right moment--that is, the
moment when execution was so near at hand that discussion would seem
futile. At a quarter before nine on that Sunday morning she said:
“Don’t dress for church. This is a good day to make that trip to
Passaic.”
“We’ll go by Miss Ryper’s for Margot,” said I. “How the old people will
stare when they see her!”
Edna looked at me as if I had suddenly uncovered unmistakable evidence
of my insanity. Then I who had clean forgot her foolish notions
remembered. “But why not?” I urged. “It will give them so much
pleasure.”
“Trash!” ejaculated she. “They don’t care a rap about her. They can’t,
as they’ve not seen her since she was a baby. And Margot would suffer
horribly. I think it would be wicked to give a sweet, happy young girl
a horrible shock.”
This grotesque view of the effect of the sight of grandparents upon a
grandchild struck me as amusing. But there was no echo of my laughter
in the disgusted face of my wife. I sobered and said: “Yes, it would
give her a shock. We’ve made a mistake, bringing her up in that way.”
“Too late to discuss it now,” said Edna.
“I suppose so,” I could not but agree. “I guess the mischief’s done
beyond repair.”
Said Edna: “Have you any sense of--of them being _your_ father and
mother?”
“Rather,” said I. “My childhood is very vivid to me, and not at all
disagreeable.”
“It seems to me like a bad dream--unreal, and to be forgotten as
quickly as I can.”
She said this with a fine, spiritual look in her eyes, and I must say
that Edna, refined, delicately beautiful, fashionably dressed, speaking
her English with an elegant accent, did not suggest fusty-dusty,
queer-looking Weeping Willie with his hearse and funeral coaches, his
embalming apparatus and general appearance of animated casket, nor yet
fat, sloppy Ma Wheatlands, always in faded wrappers and with holes cut
in her shoes for her bunions.
“Wear your oldest business suit,” said Edna, coming back to earth from
the contemplation of her own elevation and grandeur. “I shall dress as
quietly as I dare. We mustn’t arouse the suspicions of the servants.”
Edna’s fooleries amused me. I didn’t then appreciate the dangers of
tolerating and laughing at the bad habits of a fascinating child.
If I had, little good I’d have accomplished, I suspect. However, I
got myself up as Edna directed, and when I saw how it irritated her
I stopped making such remarks as: “Shall I wear a collar? Hadn’t I
better sneak out the back way and join you at the ferry?” I should
have liked to get some fun out of our doings; that would have taken
at least the saw edge off my feelings of self-contempt. I am not fond
of hypocrisy, yet for that one occasion I should have welcomed the
familiar human shamming and faking in such matters. But Edna would put
the thing through like one of her father’s funerals. As we, in what
was practically disguise, issued forth, she said loudly enough for the
cocking ear of a maid who chanced to be in the front hall:
“Anyhow, the country dust won’t spoil these clothes. I’m so glad it’s
clear. How charming the woods will look.”
Just enough to deceive. Edna expanded upon her cleverness in never
saying too much, because saying too much always started people,
especially servants, to thinking. But she abruptly checked her flow of
self-praise as we seated ourselves in the ferry and she looked about.
There, not a dozen seats away, loomed our cook! Yes, no mistake, it was
our Mary, “gotten up regardless” for a Sunday outing.
“Do you see Mary?” said my wife.
“She’s the most conspicuous female in sight,” said I. “She’s a credit
to us.”
“I must have been mad,” groaned Edna, “to give her a holiday! Always
the way. I never do a generous, kind-hearted thing that I don’t have to
pay for it.”
“I don’t follow you,” said I.
“She hates us,” explained Edna. “Cooks--Irish cooks--invariably hate
the families they draw wages from. She’s dogging us.”
“Nonsense,” said I. “She probably hasn’t even seen us.”
But Edna was not listening; she was contriving. “We must let her leave
the boat ahead of us. Pretend not to see her.”
I obeyed orders. In the Jersey City train shed we, lagging behind, saw
her take a train bound for a different destination from ours. Much
relieved, Edna led the way to the Passaic train. Hardly were we seated
when in at the door of the coach hurried our Mary, excited and blown.
She came beaming down the aisle. Edna saluted her graciously and calmly.
“I got in the wrong train,” said Mary. “It’d never have took me
nowheres near my cousin in Passaic.”
Edna’s composure was admirable. Said I, when Mary had passed on, “Now
what, my dear?”
“You see she _is_ dogging us,” replied Edna. “I’ve not a doubt she
knows all about us.”
“I don’t _think_ she’s got a camera,” said I. “Still, they make them
very small nowadays.”
“We shall have to go on in the train, and return home from the station
beyond,” said Edna.
“Do as you like,” said I. “But as for me, I get off at Passaic and go
to see the old folks.”
“Please stop your joking,” said Edna. “If you had any pride you
couldn’t joke.”
“I am serious,” said I. “I shall go to see mother and father.”
“No doubt her cousin lives in the same part of the slums,” said Edna.
“Oh, it is _hideous_!”
I don’t know what possessed me--whether a fit of indigestion and
obstinacy or a sudden access of sense of decency as I approached my old
home. Whatever it was, it moved me to say: “My dear, this nonsense has
gone far enough. We will do what we set out to do.”
“Not I,” said Edna.
“Then I’ll drop off at Passaic alone, and hire a trap, and give Mary
a seat in it as far as her cousin’s. I’m not proud of my parents, the
more shame to me. But there’s a limit to my ability to degrade myself.”
Edna and I had not lived together all those years without her learning
the tone I use when I will not be trifled with. She did not argue. She
sat silent and pale beside me. When the train stopped at Passaic she
followed me from the car. Mary descended ahead of us and moved off at
as brisk a pace as tight corsets and stiff new shoes would permit, in a
direction exactly opposite that we were to take.
“Aren’t you glad we didn’t go on?” said I, eager to make it up.
She made no reply. She maintained haughty and injured silence until we
were within sight of the houses. Then she said curtly:
“I’ll do the talking about our plans for them.”
“That’ll be best,” said I, most conciliatory.
I had not intended to say this. There had been a half-formed resolution
in my mind to oppose those plans. But her anger roused in me such a
desire to pacify her that I promptly yielded, where, I must in honesty
confess, I was little short of indifferent. American husbands have the
reputation of being the most docile and the worst henpecked men in
the world. All foreigners say so, and our women believe it. In fact,
nothing could be further from the truth. The docility of American
husbands is the good nature of indifference. A friend of mine has the
habit of saying that his most valued and most valuable possession is
his long list of things he cares not a rap about. It is a typically
American and luminous remark. The men of other nations agitate over
trifles, love to have the sense of being master at home--usually their
one and only chance for a free swing at the joyous feeling of being
boss. The American man, absorbed in his important work at office or
factory, and not caring especially about anything else, lets thieving
politicians rule in public affairs, lets foolish, incompetent women
rule in domestic affairs. He has a half-conscious philosophy that he
is shrewd enough, if he attends to his business, to make money faster
than they can take it away from him, and that, if he does not attend to
his business only, he will have nothing either for thieving politician
and spendthrift wife or for himself. If you wish to discover how little
there is in the notion of his docility, meddle with something he really
cares about. Many a political rascal, many a shiftless wife, has done
it and has gotten a highly disagreeable surprise.
Perhaps what I saw had as much to do with my tame acquiescence in my
wife’s projects as my desire to have peace between her and me, when
peace meant yielding what only a vague and feeble filial impulse moved
me to contest. I had what I thought was a clear and vivid memory of my
natal place and Edna’s--how the two houses looked, how small and shabby
they were, how mean their surroundings, how plain their interiors. But
as we drove up I discovered that memory had been pleasantly deceiving
me. Could these squalid hovels, these tiny, hideous boxes set in two
dismal weedy oblongs of unkempt yards--could these be our old homes?
And the bent old laboring man and his wife--we had drawn up in front of
my home--could they be _my_ father and _my_ mother?
A feeling of sickness, of nausea came over me. Not from repulsion for
my parents--thank God, I had not sunk that low. But from abhorrence
of myself, so degraded by the “higher world” into which prosperity
and Edna’s ambitions had dragged me that I could look down upon the
gentle old man and the patient, loving old woman to whom I owed life
and a fair start in the world. My blood burned and my eyes sank as they
greeted me, their homely old hands trembling, their mouths distorted
by emotion and age and missing teeth. I turned away while they were
kissing Edna, for I felt I should hate her and loathe myself if I saw
the expression that must be in her face.
“There are my father and mother!” she cried in a suffocating voice. And
we three Lorings were watching her hurry across the yard and through
the gap in the fence between the two places. My sister came forward.
We kissed each other as awkwardly as two strangers. I looked at her
dazedly. Mary, our cook, was an imposing looking lady beside this
thin-haired, coarse-featured old maid. In embarrassed silence we four
entered the house. I am not tall nor in the least fat, yet I had an
uncontrollable impulse to stoop and to squeeze as I entered the squat
and narrow doorway. That miserable little “parlor!”
As we sat silent my roving glance at last sought my mother’s face. Oh,
the faces, the masks, with which freakish and so often savagely ironic
fate covers and hides our souls, making fair seem foul and foul seem
fair, making beauty repellent and ugliness seem beautiful. Suddenly
through that plain, time- and toil-scarred mask, through those dim,
sunken eyes, I saw her soul--her mother’s heart--looking at me. And the
tears poured into my eyes. “Mother!” I sobbed in a choking voice, and
I put my arms round her and nestled against her heart, a boy again--a
bad boy with a streak of good in him. I felt how proud she--they
all--were of me, the son and brother, who had gone forth and fulfilled
the universal American dream of getting up in the world. I hoped, I
prayed that they would not realize what a poor creature I was, with my
snobbish shame.
There was an awkward, rambling attempt at talk. But we had nothing
to talk about--nothing in common. I happened to think of our not
having brought Margot; how shameful it was, yet how glad I felt, and
how self-contemptuous for being glad. To break that awful silence I
enlarged upon Margot--her beauty, her cleverness.
“She must be like Polly”--my sister’s name was Polly--“like Polly was
at her age,” observed my mother.
I looked at Polly Ann, in whose faded face and withered form--faded and
withered though she was not yet forty, was in fact but seven or eight
years older than I. Like Polly! I could speak no more of Margot, the
delicate loveliness of a rare, carefully reared hot-house exotic. Yes,
exotic; for the girls and the women brought up in the super-refinements
of prosperous class silliness seem foreign to this world--and are.
A few minutes that seemed hours, and Edna came in, her father and
mother limping and hobbling in her train. Edna was sickly pale and her
eyelids refused to rise. I shook hands with old Willie Wheatlands,
hesitated, then kissed the fat, sallow, swinging cheek of my
mother-in-law. Said Edna in a hard, forced voice:
“I’ve explained that Margot isn’t well and that we’ve got to get
back----”
“Mercy me!” cried my mother. “Ain’t you going to stay to supper?”
Supper! It was only half-past twelve. Supper could not be until five or
half-past. We had been there half an hour and already conversation was
exhausted and time had become motionless.
“We intended to,” said Edna. “But Margot wasn’t at all well when we
left. We simply can’t stay away long. We’d not have come, but we felt
we’d never get here if we kept on letting things interfere.”
“You didn’t leave Margy _alone_?” demanded Edna’s mother.
“Almost,” said Edna. “Only a--a servant.”
“Oh, you keep a nurse girl, too,” said Polly. “I thought Edna didn’t
look as if she did any of her own work.”
“Yes, I have a--a girl, in addition to the cook,” replied Edna,
flushing as she thus denied three of her five servants--flushing not
because of the denial, but because in her confession she had almost
forgotten about the numerous excuses based on the cook. “Godfrey has
been doing very well, and we felt we could afford it.”
“Better get rid of her,” advised old Willie sourly. “And of the cook,
too. Servant girls is mighty wasteful.”
“And she’ll teach Margy badness,” said my mother. “Them servants is
full of poison. Even if yer pa’d had money I’d never have allowed no
servant round my children, no more’n a snake in the cradle. I hope
she’s a good Christian, and not a Catholic?”
“She’s all right,” declared Edna nervously. “But we’ll have to be going
soon.”
“Yes; that there girl might git drunk,” said Mrs. Wheatlands.
“And set fire to the house maybe,” said my mother. “I heard of a case
just last week.”
“I wish you hadn’t said that,” cried Edna, her tones of protest more
like jubilation. “I’ll be wretched until I’m home again.”
Mother told in detail and with rising excitement the story of the
drunken nurse girl who had burned up herself and her charges, a pair
of lovely twins. From that moment our families were anxious for us to
go. The three women could see the girl drunk and the house burning.
The two grandfathers, while less imaginative, were almost as uneasy.
Besides, no doubt our families found us full as tiring as we found them.
“But before we go,” said Edna, in a business-like tone, “there’s one
thing we wanted to talk about. Godfrey has had--that is, he has done
very well in business. And of course our first thought--one of our
first thoughts--was what could we do for you all down here. We hate to
think of your living in this unhealthful part of the town. We want to
see you settled in some healthful place, up in the hills.”
We were watching the faces of our five kinsfolk. We could make nothing
of their expression. It was heavy, dull--mere listening, without a hint
of even comprehension behind.
“We thought you, father, and Mr.--father Loring--might look round and
find a nice farm with a big comfortable house--plenty big enough for
you all--and Godfrey will buy it, and will pay for a man and a woman to
look after you. He has done well, as I said, and he can afford it. In
fact, they’ve made him president of the railroad.”
My father, my mother, and my sister exchanged glances. A long, awed
silence. Old Willie spoke in his squeaky, stingy voice: “I can’t leave
my business. I ain’t footless like Loring there. _My_ business pays.”
“You can sell it,” said Edna. “You know you ought to retire. You were
telling me how bad your health had been.”
“Nobody else couldn’t make nothing like what I make out of it. The men
growing up nowadays ain’t no account. The no-account women with heads
full of foolishness leads ’em off.”
Edna agreed with him, pointed out that he’d have to give up soon
anyhow, appealed to his cupidity for real estate by expanding upon the
size and value of the farm I was willing to give him. She made a strong
impression. The women were converted by the prospect of having help
with the work. My father had long dreamed of a home in the country. He
had not the imagination to picture how he would be bored, away from the
loafers with whom he talked politics and religion. “And,” said Edna,
“you’ll have horses and things to ride in, so you can go where you
please whenever you please.”
We had roused them. We had dazzled them. It was plain that if a
purchaser could be found for the Wheatlands undertaking business, Edna
would carry her point. “Godfrey will look for somebody to take the
business,” said she to her father. “I want you and Father Loring to
start out to-morrow morning, and not stop till you’ve found a farm.”
I understood an uncertain gleam in old Willie’s eyes. “About the
price,” said I, speaking for the first time, “I’m willing to pay
twenty-five thousand down for the place alone, and as I’ll pay cash,
you ought to be able on mortgage to get a farm--or two or three
adjoining farms--that would cost twice that.”
The two families were dumbfounded.
“I know I can trust you, Mr. Wheatlands, to get the money’s worth.”
“Buy a big place,” said Edna, of the unexpected timely shrewdnesses.
“Go back from the main roads where land’s so dear.”
Wheatlands nodded. “That’s a good idea,” said he. “There’ll be plenty
of roads after a while.”
Edna was ready to depart. “Then it’s settled?” said she.
Her father nodded. “I’m willing to see what can be done. But I’d rather
not have Ben Loring along. He’d interfere with a good bargain.”
“Yes, you go alone, Willie,” said my father. “Anyhow, I’ve got to ’tend
store. I can’t afford a boy any more.”
The mention of the, to them, enormous sum of money had put them in a
state of awe as to Edna and me. It saddened me to observe how quickly
the weed of snobbishness, whose seeds are in all human nature, sprang
up and dominated the whole garden. They lost the sense of our blood
kinship with them. They felt that we, able to dispense such splendid
largess, were of a superior order of being. And I saw that my and
Edna’s feeling of strangeness toward them was intimacy beside the
feeling of strangeness toward us which they now had. In my dealings
with my fellow beings I have often noted this sort of thing--that the
snobbishness of those who look down is a weak and hesitating impulse
which would soon die out but for the encouragement it gets from the
snobbishness of those who look up. I read somewhere, “Caste is made by
those who look up, not by those who look down.” That is a great truth,
and like most great, simple, obvious truths is usually overlooked.
Looking back I see that my own first decisive impulse toward the caste
feeling came that day, came when my people and Edna’s, discovering that
we were rich, began to treat us as lower class treats upper class.
My mother had been scrutinizing me for signs of the majesty of wealth.
“Why don’t you wear a beard, or leastways a mustache, Godfrey?” she
finally inquired. “Then you wouldn’t seem so boyish like.”
“I used to wear a mustache,” said I, “but I cut it off because--I don’t
recall why.”
In fact I did recall. I noted one day that I had a good mouth and
better teeth than most men have. And it came to me how absurd it was
to hang a bunch of hair from my upper lip to trail in the soup and to
embalm the odors of past cigars for the discomfort of my nose. Edna
kept after me for a time to let it grow again. But reading in some
novel she regarded as authoritative that mustaches were “common,” she
desisted. And I found my boyish appearance highly useful. It led men to
underestimate me--a signal advantage in the contests of wit against wit
in which I daily engaged with a view to wrenching a fortune for myself
away from my fellow men.
My mother went on to urge me to make my face look older and more
formidable. Now that she had learned what a grand person I was she
feared others would not realize it. Edna, who, as I have said,
was shrewdness personified where her own interests were involved,
immediately saw the dangerous bearings of this newly aroused vanity
of our kin. “I forgot to caution you,” said she, “not to mention our
prosperity. If we were talked about now, it might be lost entirely.
The only reason Godfrey and I came to you so soon with the news of it
was because we wanted to do something for you right away. And we knew
we could trust you not to get us into trouble. Don’t talk about us. If
you hear people talking, if they ask you questions, pretend you don’t
understand and don’t know. You see, it may be spies from our enemies.”
One glance round that circle of eager faces was enough to convince that
Edna had made precisely the impression she desired. I could see that my
mother and old Weeping Willie, the shrewd of the five--the two to whom
Edna and I owed most by inheritance--were prepared to deny knowing us
if that would aid in safeguarding the precious prosperity. My father
and sister were obviously disappointed that they could not go about
boasting of our magnificence and getting from the neighbors the envy
and respect due the near relations of a plutocrat. But there was no
danger of their being indiscreet; Edna could breathe freely. And when
the two families were tucked away in the midst of a large and secluded
farm, she could tell what genealogical stories she pleased without fear
of being confounded by the truth.
By three o’clock we were back in Brooklyn. Edna felt and looked
triumphant. The crowning of the day’s work had been small but
significant. A heavy rain storm that came up while we were on the way
back must have made the servants think we had cut short our woodland
outing. As we were going to bed that might Edna roused herself from
deep study and broke a long silence with, “I hesitated whether to tell
them you had become president of the road.”