“What does that headshake mean?” demanded she.
“_You_--taught _Margot_ to be a--a--like those other girls?” said I.
“Oh, you fool!” cried Edna. And in excuse for her, please remember I
had ever been a dotingly bored slave of hers--as uxorious a husband
as you ever saw--and therefore inevitably despised, for women have so
little intelligence that they despise a man who loves them and lets
them rule. “You fool!” she repeated. “Yes, I brought her up like a
lady--taught her to cultivate nice things and nice people. What should
I teach her? To associate with common people? To drop back toward
where we came from--where _you_ belong?”
“Yes, I guess I do,” said I.
Up to that time I had interested myself in only one aspect of human
nature--the aspect that concerned me as a business man. But from that
time I began to study the human animal in all his--and her--aspects.
And it was not long before I learned what that animal is forced to
become when exposed to the powerful thrusts and temptings of wealth
and social position. In our alternations of pride and humility we
habitually take undue credit or give undue blame to ourselves for what
is wholly the result of circumstance. The truth is, we are like flocks
of birds in a high wind. Some of us fly more steadily than others,
some are quite beaten down, others seem almost self-directing; but
all, great and small, weak and strong, are controlled by the wind, and
those who make the best showing are those who adapt themselves most
skillfully to the will of the wind.
At the time when Edna and I were talking I had not become a
philosopher. I was in the primitive stages of development in which most
men and nearly all women remain their whole lives through--the stage in
which you live, gentle reader, with your shallow mistaken notions of
what is and your shallower mistaken notions of what ought to be. So, as
Edna uncovered herself to me, I shrank in horror. It was fortunate--for
her, at least--that I had always trained myself never to make hasty
speeches. My expertness in that habit has probably been the principal
cause of my business success, of my ability to outwit even abler men
than myself. I did not yield to the impulse to burst out against her.
I compressed my lips and silently watched as she lifted the veil over
our family life and revealed to me the truth about it.
“What are you going to do?” she asked impatiently, yet with a certain
uneasiness born no doubt of a something in my manner that made her
vaguely afraid, for while she knew I was her slave and despised me, as
I was to learn, for being so weak before a mere woman, she also knew
that, outside of her domain, I was not her slave nor anybody’s, but
planned and executed at the pleasure of my own will.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” said I slowly. “I must think. All
this is new to me.”
“If you haven’t any pride in yourself, or in me,” said she, “still you
surely must have pride for Margot.”
“I think so,” said I.
“If you could know how they have made the poor child suffer!”
I made no reply, nor did I encourage her to talk further. In fact, when
she began again I stopped her with: “I’ve heard enough, my dear. And
I’ve some important business to attend to.”
She, preparing to leave me alone with my papers, came and put her
arms round my neck and pressed her cheek against mine. I think she
was uneasy about the posture of the affair in my mind--feared stupid
commercial I could not appreciate these vital things of life. I suspect
my tranquil reception of her caresses did not tend to allay her
uneasiness. Never before had she failed to interest me in her physical
self; and the only reason she then failed was that in the general
upsetting of all my ideas of what my family life was there had been
tossed up to the surface an undefined suspicion of her sincerity as a
wife. I was not altogether blind as to the relations of men and women,
as to the fact that women often coolly played upon the passions of men
for their own purposes of money getting in its various forms. My wife
was right in her sneer at the innocence of married men. But there are
exceptions, and a woman with a husband intelligent in every way except
in seeing through women would do well to take care how she tempts his
intelligence to shake off its indifference in that respect.
The next morning I was breakfasting alone as usual. No, gentle reader,
I am not girding at my poor wife as you hastily accuse. I am sure I do
not deceive myself when I say I never was of those men who fuss about
trifles. Thank heaven, as soon as we had a servant my wife kept away
from breakfast. It was one of the things I loved her for. If I had
been married to a woman who appeared at breakfast looking lovely and
smiling sweetly, I should have become a bad-tempered tyrant. I want no
sentimentalities in the early-morning hours. I wake up uncomfortable
and sour, and I quarrel with myself and look about for trouble until I
have had something to eat and coffee. Further in the same direction, I
took particular pleasure in my wife’s small personal slovenlinesses,
in her curl papers, in her occasional overlaying of her face with cold
cream and the like, in her careless negligee worn in her own rooms.
There is, I guess, no nature so prodigal that it has not some small
economies. Edna had, probably still has, a fondness for wearing out
thoroughly, in secluded privacy, house dresses, underclothes, and night
gowns.
It took nothing from my delight in her beauty that she was not
invariably beautiful. I’ve rarely seen her lovely early in the morning.
Who is? I should have taken habitual early-morning loveliness as a
personal insult. I’ve seen her homely all day long, and for several
days at a time. She was as attractive to me than as at her most
beautiful. I detest monotony. Thank heaven, she was never monotonous
to look at; one rather expects _mental_ monotony in women unless one
is a fool. I didn’t mind her times of homeliness, because she could be
so far, far the opposite of homely. I did not mind her way of getting
herself up in odds and ends, mussily, but, mind you, never after the
Passaic days unclean--never! I did not mind her dishevelments because,
when she set out to dress, she did it so bang up well. She was born
with a talent for dress; she rapidly developed it into an art. You know
what I mean. You’ve seen the girl with hardly five dollars’ worth of
clothing on her, including the hat, yet making the woman from the best
dressmaker in Paris look a frump.
I never had to join the innumerable and pitiful army of men who give
the woman their money to squander upon bad fits and bad taste, and are
bowed down with shame when they have to issue forth with her. I can
honestly say, and Edna will bear me out, that I gave her money freely.
No doubt the reason in part was I found it so easy to make money that
I was indifferent to extravagance. But the chief reason, I believe,
was Edna’s skill at dress. The woman who is physically alluring to her
husband, and who knows how to dress, rarely has difficulty in getting
money from him, though he be a miser. But, gentle lady reader, can you
in your heart blame a man for grudging his earnings to a woman who
isn’t fit to dress and who doesn’t know how, either?
As I had begun to tell when I interrupted myself, I was breakfasting
alone the morning after that memorable talk with Edna, and Margot came
down to glance in for a smile at me on her way to school.
In theory Margot was still classed as a child, and would be so classed
for two years longer. In fact she was, and had been for two years and
more, a full-fledged young lady. That is the way American children of
the rank for which my wife was training Margot are being brought up
nowadays. She had her own apartment, dressing room and bath, sitting
room, reception room--as many rooms as my wife and I had altogether
when we began married life, and about four times the room. As for
luxury, a comparison would be ridiculous. Also Margot had her own staff
of servants--companion, maid, maid’s assistant--and her own automobile
with chauffeur, used by no one else. It would be hard to find more
helpless creatures than these young aspirants to aristocracy. And they
prided themselves upon their ignorance of the realities, and their
mothers, often with hypocritical pretense of distress, boasted it. At
that time I thought it amusing. The serious side of it was entirely out
of my range. We American men of the comfortable and luxurious classes
are addicted to the habit of regarding our wives and children as
toys, as mere sources of amusement not to be taken seriously. It isn’t
strange that the children should not mind this, but what a commentary
upon the real mentality of the women that they tolerate and encourage
it! Our women are always, with a fine show of earnestness, demanding
that they be taken seriously. But woe unto the man who believes them
in earnest and tries to treat them as his equals instead of as dainty
toys, odalisques. How he will be denounced, hated, and, if proper
alimony can be got, divorced!
Margot’s parties differed in no respect from grown-up parties, except
that there were restrictions in the matter of hours and also as to the
serving of drinks. For, I believe my wife did not follow the extreme
of fashionable custom, but forbade wines and punch at these parties.
In this matter, as in the matter of using slang and in many others,
she held that only people of long-established social position, people
with what is called tradition, could safely make excursions beyond the
bounds of conventionality; that it was safest, wisest for people like
herself to stay well within the bounds, to be prim even, and so to
avoid any possible criticism as vulgar. A very shrewd woman was Edna.
If her intelligence had been equal to her shrewdness and energy, and if
she had possessed a gleam of the sense of humor! However----
In no essential respect did Margot’s routine of life differ from
that of her mother--and her mother’s routine of inane and worthless
time-killing was modeled exactly upon that of all the fashionable
women and apers of fashionable women. Edna did a vast amount of
studying, with and without teachers. It was all shallow and showy.
Margot’s studies were also beneath contempt. I amused myself from time
to time by inquiring--with pretense of gravity--into what they were
teaching her at the Ryper school for the turning out of fashionable
womanhood. Such a mess of trash! She was learning much about social
usages, from how to sit in a carriage--a rare art that, I assure you,
gentle reader--to how to receive guests at a large dinner. She was
studying some of the vulgarities--science, history, literature, and the
like--but in no vulgar way. She would get only the thinnest smatter
of talkable stuff about them--nothing “unsettling,” nothing that
might possibly rouse the mind to think or distract the attention from
the “high” things of life. She was dabbling in music, in drawing, in
several similar costly fripperies. And the sum total of expense!--well,
no wonder Miss Ryper was fast becoming as rich as some of the asteroids
in the plutocracy she adored.
I regarded Margot’s education as a species of joke. It never occurred
to me that our pretty baby had the right to be educated to become a
wife and a mother. And why should it have occurred to me? Where is that
being done? Who is thinking of it? In all the oceans of twaddle about
the elevation of woman where is there a drop of good sense about _real_
education? You say I was criminally negligent as to my daughter’s
education. But how about your own? The truth is, we all still look upon
education as a frill, an ornament. We never think of it, whether for
our sons or for our daughters, as nothing more or less than teaching a
human being how to live. It is high time to end this idiotic ignorant
exaltation of tomfoolery into culture!
Poor Margot! How the little girls in plain clothes--and machine-made
underwear--must have envied her as she swept along in her limousine,
dressed with that enormously costly simplicity which only the rich
can afford. No wonder many of the other girls at the Ryper school
hated her. For, her mother was in one respect unlike most of the
fashionable mothers who are too busy doing things not worth doing to
attend to their children. Her mother gave her loving care, spent many
hours--of anxious thought, no doubt--in planning to make her the most
luxurious, the most helpless, the most envied girl in the school. We
hear unendingly about the good that love does in the world. Not too
much--no, indeed! But at the same time might it not be well if we also
heard about the harm love can do--and does? How many sons and daughters
have been ruined by loving parents! How many husbands have been wrecked
by the flatteries and the assiduities of loving wives! How many wives
have been lured to decay and destruction by the over-indulgent love of
their husbands! What we need in this world is not more sentiment, but
more intelligence. Sentiment is a force that rushes far and crazily
in _both_ directions, gentle reader, unless it has well-balanced
intelligence to guide it.
Margot, smiling in the doorway of the breakfast room, put me at once
into a less somber humor. She was tall and slim--an inch taller than
her mother and with the same supple, well-proportioned figure. She
had her mother’s small, tip-tilted face and luminous eyes, but they
were of an intense dark gray that gave her an expression of poetic
thoughtfulness and mystery. Whiter or more perfectly formed teeth I
have never seen. In former days children’s teeth were neglected. But
my wife, with her peculiar reach for all matters having to do with
appearances, had learned the modern methods of caring for the body when
Margot was still in the period when the body is almost as formable as
sculptor’s clay. Thus Margot’s teeth had been looked after and made
perfect and kept so. Her hair hung loose upon her shoulders like a
wonderful changeable veil of golden brown. Often at first glance you
are dazzled by these carefully fed and carefully groomed children of
the rich, only to note at the second glance that the best showing has
been made of precious little in the way of natural charm. But this was
not true of Margot. The longer you looked, and the more attentively,
the finer she seemed to be--like a rare perfect specimen from a
connoisseur’s greenhouses. There’s no doubt about it, Edna did know
the physical side of life. She would have got notable results even had
we been poor. As it was, with all the money she cared to spend, she
performed what looked like miracles.
“Come and kiss me, Margot,” said I.
She obeyed, with a charming air of restrained eagerness that is
regarded as ladylike. “My car is waiting,” said she. “I’m late.”
“Is that Therese”--her maid--“out in the hall waiting to go with you?”
“Yes. Miss Parnell”--her companion--“has a headache, poor creature!”
Margot had caught to perfection the refined, elegant, fashionable tone
of speaking of the servile classes. Though I was in a critical mood
that morning, I was not critical of my beloved little Margot, and her
airs entertained me as much as ever. Said I:
“Sit down, little duchess”--the familiar name slipped out
unconsciously--“and talk to me a few minutes.”
“But I’m shockingly late, papa,” pleaded she.
“No matter. I’ll telephone Miss Ryper, if you wish.” To the butler, who
was serving me: “Sackville, go tell Therese that I’m detaining Miss
Margot. And close the door behind you.”
Sackville retired. Margot seated herself with alacrity. She did not
like her useless school any better than other children like more
or less useful schools. “Are you taking me to the theater Saturday
afternoon, as you promised?” said she. “And do get a box and let me ask
two of the girls.”
“Certainly,” said I. “If I can’t go, Miss Parnell will chaperon you.”
“No, I want you, papa. It’s so nice to have a man.”
“How are you getting on at school? Not with the studies”--I laughed
at the absurdity of calling her fiddle-faddle studies--“but with the
girls?”
Her face clouded. “Has mamma told you?”
“Told me what?”
She hesitated.
“Go on, dear,” said I. “What’s the trouble?”
“Oh, it’s always the same thing,” she sighed, with a grown-up air
that was both humorous and pathetic. “Some of the girls are down on
me--about--about social position. You see, we don’t go _socially_ with
their families.”
“Why should we?” said I. “We don’t know them nor they us. Naturally,
they don’t care anything about us, nor we about them.”
She hung her head. “But I want to go with them,” said she doggedly.
“Why?” said I.
“Because--because--it’s the proper thing to do. If you don’t go with
them everybody looks down on you.” She lifted her head, and her
flashing eyes reminded me of her mother. “It makes me just _wild_ to be
looked down on.”
“I should say so,” said I. “Those little girls at Miss Ryper’s must
be an ill-bred lot. We must take you away from there and put you in a
school with nice girls.”
“Oh, no, father!” she cried in a panic. “Those girls are the
_nicest_--the only nice girls in any school in New York. All the other
schools look up to ours. I’d cry my eyes out in any other school.”
“Why?” said I.
“I’d feel--_low_.” Her eyes had filled and her cheeks were flushed.
“I’d be out of place except among the richest and most aristocratic
girls.”
“But you don’t like them,” said I gently. I began to feel a sensation
of sickness at the heart.
“I _hate_ them!” cried she with passionate energy. “But I want to stay
on there and _make_ them be friendly with me. I’ve got too much pride,
papa, to run away.”
“Pride,” said I, and my tone must have been sad. “That isn’t pride,
dear. You ought to choose your friends by liking. You ought to feel
above girls with such cheap ideas.”
“But I’m not above them,” protested she. “And I couldn’t like any girl
I’d be ashamed to be seen with, unless she were a sort of servant. Oh,
papa, you don’t appreciate how proud I am.”
“Proud of what, dear? Of your parents? Of yourself?”
She hung her head.
“Of what, dear?” I urged.
“It hurts me not to be treated as--as the inside clique of girls in
our secret society treat each other.” She was almost crying. “They
don’t even call me by my first name any more. They speak to me as Miss
Loring--and _so_ politely--exactly as I speak to Miss Parnell or one of
the teachers or a servant. Oh, I’m so proud! I’d love to be like Gracie
Fortescue. She speaks even to Miss Ryper as I would to Miss Parnell.”
My digestion wasn’t any too good, even in those days. My whole
breakfast suddenly went wrong--turned to poison inside me, I suppose.
A hot wave of rage against I knew not whom or what rolled up into my
brain. I pushed away my plate abruptly. “Run along, child,” I said in a
hoarse voice I did not recognize as my own.
She threw her arms round my neck with a gesture and an expression that
made me realize how close a copy of her mother she was. “You wouldn’t
take me away from my school, would you, papa dear?” she pleaded.
“All I want is to make you happy,” said I, patting and stroking that
thick and lovely veil of flowing hair.
She assumed that I meant she was to stay on with the viperous Ryper
brood, and went away almost happy. She had awakened to the fact that
there were fates even worse than being snubbed and addressed like a
teacher or a companion or a servant or some other lower animal--yes,
far worse fates. For instance, not being able to feel that she was,
on whatever degrading terms, at least associated with the adored
fashionables.
That evening when my wife again accompanied me to my study, after
dinner, I said to her:
“I’ve been turning over our talk last night. I haven’t been able to
reach a conclusion as yet, except on one point. I can’t help you
socially in the way you suggested.”
I glanced at her as I said this. She was looking at me. Her pale,
intense expression fascinated me.
“I don’t think you have thought about it fully,” said she slowly.
“Yes,” said I, with my utmost deliberateness; “and my decision is
final.”
She rose, stood beside her chair, rubbing her hand softly along the top
of the back. “Very well,” said she quietly. And she left me alone.
V
In refusing Edna her heart’s desire thus promptly and tersely I had an
object. I assumed she would protest and argue; in the discussion that
would follow some light might come to me, utterly befogged as to what
course to take about my family affairs. I knew something should be
done--something quick and drastic. But what? It was no new experience
to me to be faced with complex and well-nigh impossible situations.
My business life had been a succession of such experiences. And
while I had learned much as to handling them, I had also learned how
dangerous it is to rush in recklessly and to begin action before one
has discovered what to do--and what _not_ to do. The world is full of
Hasty Hals and Hatties who pride themselves on their emergency minds,
on knowing just what to do in any situation the instant it arises; and
fine spectacles they are, lying buried and broken amid the ruins they
have aggravated if not created.
How recover my wife? How rescue my daughter? I could think of no
plan--of no beginning toward a plan. And when Edna, by receiving my
refusal in cold silence, defeated my hope of a possibly illuminating
discussion, I did not know which way to turn.
Why had I refused to help her in the way she suggested? Not on moral
grounds, gentle reader. There I should have been as free from scruple
as you yourself would have been, as you perhaps have been in your
social climbing or maneuvering in your native town, wherever it is.
Nor yet through fear of failure. I did not know the social game, but
I did know something of human nature. And I had found out that the
triumphant class, far from being the gentlest and most civilized, as
its dominant position in civilization would indicate, was in fact the
most barbarous, was saturated with the raw savage spirit of the right
of might. I am speaking of actualities, not of pretenses--of deeds,
not of words. To find a class approaching it in frank savagery of
will and action you would have to descend through the social strata
until you came to the class that wields the blackjack and picks
pockets and dynamites safes. The triumphant class became triumphant
not by refinement and courtesy and consideration, but by defiance of
those fundamentals of civilization--by successful defiance of them.
It remained the triumphant class by keeping that primal savagery
of nature. As soon as any member of it began to grow tame--gentle,
considerate, except where consideration for others would increase his
own wealth and power, became really a disciple of the sweet gospel he
professed and urged upon others--just so soon did he begin to lose his
wealth into the strong unscrupulous hands ever reaching for it--and
with waning wealth naturally power and prestige waned.
No, I did not refuse because I thought the triumphant class would
contemptuously repel any attempt to carry its social doors by assault.
I saw plainly enough that I could compel enough of these society
leaders to receive my wife and daughters to insure their position. You
have seen swine gathered about a trough, comfortably swilling; you have
seen a huge porker come running with angry squeal to join the banquet.
You have observed how rudely, how fiercely he is resented and fought
off by the others. This, until he by biting and thrusting has made a
place for himself; then the fact that he is an intruder and the method
of his getting a place are forgotten, and the swilling goes peacefully
forward. So it is, gentle reader, though it horrifies your hypocrisy to
be told it, so do human beings conduct themselves round a financial or
political or social swill trough. I should have had small difficulty
in biting and kicking a satisfactory place for Edna and Margot at the
social swill trough; I should have had no difficulty at all in keeping
it for them. But----
You will be incredulous, gentle reader, devoured of snobbishness and
dazzled by what you have heard and read of the glories of fashionable
society in the metropolis. You will be incredulous, because you, too,
like the overwhelming majority of the comfortable classes in this great
democracy--and many of the not so comfortable classes as well--because
you, too, are infected of the mania for looking about for some one who
refuses to associate with you on the ground that you are “common,”
and for straightway making it your heart’s dearest desire to compel
that person to associate with you. You will be incredulous when I tell
you my sole reason was my hatred and horror of what seemed to me the
degrading, vulgar, and rotten longings that filled my wife and that had
infected my daughter. That hatred and horror had thrown me into a state
of mind I did not dare confess to myself. You are incredulous; but
perhaps you will admit I may be truthful when I explain that the reason
for my moral and sentimental revolt was perhaps in large part my dense
ignorance of the whole society side of life.
No doubt in the Passaic public school of my boyhood there had been as
much snobbishness as there is in Fifth Avenue. But I had somehow never
happened to notice it. It must have been there; it must be elemental
in human nature; how else account for my wife? We hear more about the
snobbishness of Fifth Avenue than we do about the snobbishness of the
tenements. But that is solely because Fifth Avenue is more conspicuous.
Also, Fifth Avenue, supposedly educated, supposedly broadened by
knowledge and taste, has no excuse for petty vanities that belong only
to the ignorant. And if Fifth Avenue were really educated, really had
knowledge and taste, it could not be snobbish. However, my busy life
had never been touched by social snobbishness. I preferred to know
and to associate with men better educated and richer than I, but for
excellent practical reasons--because from such men I could get the
knowledge and the wealth I needed. But I would not have wasted a moment
of my precious time upon the men most exalted in fashionable life--the
ignorant incompetents who had inherited their wealth. They seemed
ridiculous and worthless to me, a man of thought and action.
So, the sudden exposure of my wife’s and my little girl’s disease gave
me a shock hardly to be measured by the man or woman used all his life
to the social craze. It was much as if I had suddenly seen upon their
bared bosoms the disgusting ravages of cancer.
* * * * *
As I could not devise any line of action that, however faintly,
promised results, I kept away from home. I absorbed myself in some new
enterprises that filled my evenings, which I spent at my club with the
men I drew into them. At the mention of club, gentle reader, I see your
ears pricking. You are wondering what sort of club _I_ belonged to. I
shall explain.
It was the Amsterdam Club. You may have seen and gawked at its vast and
imposing red sandstone front in middle Fifth Avenue. As you drove by in
the “rubber-neck” wagon, the man with the megaphone may have shouted:
“The Amsterdam Club, otherwise known as the Palace of Plutocracy. The
total wealth of its members is one tenth of the total wealth of the
United States. Every great millionaire in New York City belongs to it.
The reason you see no one in the magnificent windows is because the
plutocrats are afraid of cranks with pistol or bomb.” And you stared
and envied and craned your neck backward as the sight-seeing car rolled
on. A fairly accurate description of my club. But you will calm as I
go on to tell you the inside truth about it. It was built to provide
a club for those rich men of New York who had no social position, and
so could not be admitted to the fashionable clubs. It was not built by
those outcasts for whom it was intended, but by the rich men of the
fashionable world. They did not build it out of pity nor yet out of
generosity, but for freedom and convenience.
You must know that the rich, both the fashionables and the excludeds,
are intimately associated in business. Now, in the days before the
Amsterdam Club, if a rich fashionable wished to talk business out of
office hours with a rich unfashionable, he had to take him to his
home or to his club, one or the other. You will readily appreciate
that either course involved disagreeable complications. The rich
unfashionable would say: “Why am I not invited to this snob’s house
_socially_? Why does not this hound see that I am elected to his
elegant club? I’ll teach this wrinkle-snout how to spit at me.
I’ll slip a stiletto into his back, damn him.” As the number of
rich unfashionables increased, as the number of stealthy financial
stilettoings for social insult grew and swelled, the demand for a
“way out” became more clamorous and panicky. The final result was
the Amsterdam Club--perhaps by inspiration, perhaps by accident. And
so it has come to pass that now, when a rich fashionable wishes to
talk finance with a rich pariah, he does not have to run the risk of
defiling his home or his exclusive club. With the gracious cordiality
wherefor aristocracy is famed in song and story, he says: “Let us go
to _our_ club”--for, the rich fashionables see to it that every rich
pariah is elected to the Amsterdam immediately he becomes a person of
financial consequence. And I fancy that not one in ten of the rich
pariah members dreams how he is being insulted and tricked. All, or
nearly all, imagine they are elected by favor of the great fashionable
plutocrats to about the most exclusive club in New York. Also, not one
in a dozen of the fashionable members appreciates how he is degrading
himself--for, to my quaint mind, the snob degrades only himself.
Well! Not many months after we moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan I
was elected to the Amsterdam--I, in serene ignorance of the trick
that was being played upon me by my sponsors, associates in large
financial deals and members of several exclusive really fashionable
clubs. They pulled regretful faces as they talked of the “long waiting
lists at most of the clubs.” They brightened as they spoke of the
Amsterdam--“the finest and, take it all round, the most satisfactory
of the whole bunch, old man. And we believe we’ve got pull enough to
put you in there pretty soon. We’ll work it, somehow.” If I had known
the shrivel-hearted trick behind their genial friendliness, I should
not have minded, should probably have laughed. For, human littlenesses
do not irritate me; and I have a vanity--I prefer to call it a
pride--that lifts me out of their reach. I am of the one aristocracy
that is truly exclusive, the only one that needs no artificial
barriers to keep it so. But I shall not bore you, gentle reader, by
explaining about it. You are interested only in the aristocracies of
rank and title and wealth that are nothing but the tawdry realization
of the tawdry fancies of the yokel among his kine and the scullery
maid among her pots. For, who but a tossed-up yokel or scullery maid
would indulge in such vulgarities as sitting upon a gold throne or
living in a draughty, cheerless palace or seeking to make himself
more ridiculous by aggravating his littleness with a title, like the
ass in the lion’s skin? Did it ever occur to you, gentle reader, that
aristocracy is essentially common, essentially vulgar? To a large
vision the distinction between king and carpenter, between the man with
a million dollars and the million men with one dollar looks trivial and
unimportant. Only a squat and squinting soul in a cellar and blinking
through the twilight could discover agitating differences of rank
between Fifth Avenue and Grand Street, between first floor front and
attic rear, between flesh ripening to rot in silk and flesh ripening
to rot in cotton. To an infinitesimal insect an infinite gulf yawns
between the molecules of a razor’s edge.
I often found my club a convenience, for in those busiest days of my
financial career I had much private conferring--or conspiring, if you
choose. Never had I found it so convenient as when for the first time
there was pain and shrinking at the thought of going home, of seeing
my wife and Margot. My Margot! When she was a baby how proudly I had
wheeled her along the sidewalks of Passaic in the showy perambulator
we bought for her--and the twenty-five dollars it cost loomed mighty
big even to Edna. And in Brooklyn, what happy Sundays Edna and I had
had with her, when I would hire a buggy at the livery stable round the
corner and we would go out for the day to some Long Island woods; or
when we would take her down to the respectable end of Coney Island to
dig in the sand and to wade after the receding tide. My Margot! No
longer mine; never again to be mine.
One evening I had an appointment at the Amsterdam with a Western
millionaire, Charles Murdock, whom I had interested in a Canada railway
to tap a Hudson Bay spruce forest. He was having trouble with his
wife and something of it had come out in the afternoon newspapers. At
the last moment his secretary--who, by the way, afterwards married
the divorced Mrs. Murdock--telephoned that Murdock could not keep
his engagement to dine. I looked about for some one to help me eat
the dinner I had ordered. There are never many disengaged men in the
Amsterdam. The fashionable rich come only when they have business with
the pariahs. The pariahs prefer their own houses or the barrooms and
cafés of the big hotels. I therefore thought myself lucky when I found
Bob Armitage sulking in a huge leather chair and got him to share my
dinner. Armitage was one of my railway directors. He had helped me
carry through the big stroke that made me, had joined in half a dozen
of my enterprises in all of which I had been successful. There was no
man of my acquaintance I knew and liked so well as Armitage. Yet it had
so happened that we had never talked much with each other, except about
business.
It promised to be a silent dinner. He was as deep in his thoughts as
I was in mine--and our faces showed that neither of us was cogitating
anything cheerful. On impulse I suddenly said:
“Bob, do you know about fashionable New York society?”
I knew that he did; that is to say, I had often heard he was one of
the heavy swells, having all three titles to fashion--wealth, birth,
and marriage. But I now pretended ignorance of the fact; when you wish
to inform yourself thoroughly on a subject you should always select an
expert, tell him you know nothing and bid him enlighten you from the
alphabet up.
“Why do you ask?” said Armitage. “Do you want to get in? I had a notion
you didn’t care for society--you and your wife.”
Armitage didn’t go to Holy Cross, but to St. Bartholomew’s. So he had
never known of my wife’s activities, knew only the sort of man I was.
“Oh, I forgot,” he went on. “You’ve a daughter almost grown. I suppose
you want her looked after. All right. I’ll attend to it for you. Your
wife won’t mind my wife’s calling? I’d have sent her long ago--in fact,
I apologize for not having done it. But I hate the fashionable crowd.
They bore me. However, your wife may like them. Women usually do.”
It was at my lips to thank him and decline his offer. Then it flashed
into my mind that perhaps my one hope of getting back my wife and
daughter, of restoring them to sanity, lay in letting them have what
they wanted. Another sort of man might have deluded himself with the
notion that he could set his foot down, stamp out revolt, compel his
family to do as he willed. But I happen not to be of that instinctively
tyrannical and therefore inherently stupid temperament.
Armitage ate in silence for a few moments, then said:
“I’ll have you elected to the Federal Club.”
“This club is all I need,” said I.
He smiled sardonically. I didn’t understand that smile then, because I
didn’t know anything about caste in New York. “You let me look after
you,” said he. “You’re a child in the social game.”
“I’ve no objection to remaining so,” said I.
“Quite right. There’s nothing in it,” said he. “But you must remember
you’re living in a world of rather cheap fools, and they are impressed
by that nothing. On the other side of the Atlantic the social prizes
have a large substantial value. Over here the value’s small. Still it’s
something. You wouldn’t refuse even a trading stamp, would you?”
I laughed. “I refuse nothing,” said I. “I take whatever’s offered me.
If I find I don’t want it, why, what’s easier than to throw it away?”
“Then I’ll put you in the Federal Club. You could have made me do it,
if you had happened to want it. So, why shouldn’t I do it anyhow, in
appreciation of your forbearance? You don’t realize, but I’m doing for
you what about two thirds of the members of this club would lick my
boots to get me to do for them.”
“I had no idea the taste for shoe polish was so general here,” said I.
“It’s a human taste, my dear Loring,” replied he. “It’s as common as
the taste for bread. All the men have it. As for the women they like
nothing so well. Having one’s boots licked is the highest human joy.
Next comes licking boots.”
“You don’t believe that?” said I, for his tone was almost too bitter
for jest.
“You aren’t acquainted with your kind, old man,” retorted he.
“I don’t know the kind you know,” said I. And then I remembered my wife
and my daughter. There must be truth in what Armitage had said; for,
my beautiful wife and my sweet daughter, both looking so proud--surely
they could not be rare exceptions in their insensibility to what seemed
to me elemental self-respect.
“You don’t know your kind,” he went on, “because you don’t indulge in
cringing and don’t encourage it. You’re like the cold, pure-minded
woman who goes through the world imagining it a chaste and austere
place because her very face silences and awes sensuality. You are part
of the small advance guard of a race that is to come.” He grinned
satirically. “Perhaps you’ll drop out in the next few months. We’ll
see.”
When the silence was again broken, it was broken by me. “Do you know a
school kept by a woman named Ryper?” I inquired.
“Sure I do,” replied he. He gave me a shrewd laughing glance. “The
daughter isn’t learning anything?”
“Nothing but mischief,” said I.
“That’s what Ryper’s for. But what does it matter? Why should a woman
learn anything? They’re of no consequence. The less a man has to do
with them the better off he will be.”
“They’re of the highest consequence,” said I bitterly. “They have the
control of the coming generation.”
“And a hell of a generation it’s to be,” cried he, suddenly rousing
from the state of bored apathy in which he seemed to pass most of his
time. “You’ve got me started on the subject that’s a craze with me. I
have only one strong feeling--and that is my contempt for woman--the
American woman. I’m not speaking about the masses. They don’t count.
They never did. They never will. No one counts until he gets some
education and some property. I suppose the women of the masses do as
well as could be expected. But how about the women of the classes
with education and property? Do you know why the world advances so
slowly?--why the upper classes are always tumbling back and everything
has to be begun all over again?”
“I’ve a suspicion,” said I. “Because the men are fools about the women.”
“The sex question!” cried Armitage. “That’s the only question worth
agitating about. Until it’s settled--or begins to be settled--and
settled right, it’s useless to attempt anything else. The men climb
up. The women they take on their backs become a heavier and heavier
burden--and down they both drop--and the children with them. Selfish,
vain, extravagant mothers, crazy about snobbishness, bringing up their
children in extravagance, ignorance and snobbishness--that’s America
to-day!”
“The men are fools about the women, and they let the women make fools
of themselves.”
“The men are fools--but not about the women,” said Armitage. “How much
time and thought for your family have you averaged daily in the last
ten years?”
“I’ve been busy,” said I. “I’ve had to look out for the bread and
butter, you know.”
“Exactly!” exclaimed he, in triumph. “You think you’re fond of your
family. No doubt you are. But the bottom truth is you’re indifferent to
your family. I can prove it in a sentence: You attend to anything you
care about; and you haven’t attended to them.”
I stared at him like a man dazzled by a sudden light--which, in fact, I
was.
“Guilty or not guilty?” said he, laughing.
“Guilty,” said I.
“The American man, too busy to be bothered, turns the American woman
loose--gives her absolute freedom. And what is she? A child in
education, a child in experience, a child in taste. He turns her loose,
bids her do as she likes--and, up to the limit of his ability gives
her all the money she wants. He prefers her a child. Her childishness
rests his tired brain. And he doesn’t mind if she’s a little
mischievous--that makes her more amusing.”
“You are married--have children,” said I, too serious to bother about
tact. “How is it with you?”
He laughed cynically. “Don’t speak of my family,” said he. “I tried the
other way. But I’ve given up--several years ago. What can _one_ do in a
crazy crowd?”
“Not much,” confessed I, deeply depressed.
“The women stampede each other,” he went on. “Besides, no American
woman--none that I know--has been brought up with education enough
to enable her to make a life for herself, even when the man tries to
help her. To like an occupation, to do anything at it, you’ve got
to understand it. Being a husband and father is an occupation, the
most important one in the world for a man. Being a wife and mother is
an occupation--the most important one in the world for a woman. Are
American men and women brought up to those occupations--trained in
them--prepared for them? The most they know is a smatter at the pastime
of lover and mistress--and they’re none too adept at that.”
“I believe,” said I, “that in my whole life I’ve never learned so much
in so short a time.”
“It’ll do you no good to have learned,” rejoined Armitage. “It will
only make you sad or bitter, according to your mood. Or, perhaps some
day you may reach my plane of indifference--and be amused.”
“Nothing is hopeless,” said I.
“The American woman is hopeless,” said he. “Her vanity is
triple-plated, copper-riveted. She’s hopeless so long as the American
man will give her the money to buy flattery at home and abroad; for,
so long as you can buy flattery, you never find out the truth about
yourself. And the American man will give her the money as long as he
can, because it buys him peace and freedom. He doesn’t want to be
bothered with the American woman--except when he’s in a certain mood
that doesn’t last long.”
“There are exceptions,” said I--not clear as to what I meant.
“Yes--there are exceptions,” said he. “There are American men who spend
time with the American woman. And what does she do to them? Look at
the poor asses!--neglecting their business, letting their minds go to
seed. They don’t make her wise. She makes them foolish--as foolish as
herself--and her children.”
You may perhaps imagine into what a state this talk of Armitage’s threw
me. He was talking generalities. But every word he spoke went straight
home to me. He had torn the coverings from my inmost family life, had
exposed its soul, naked and ugly, to my fascinated gaze.
He finished dinner, lighted a cigarette--sat back watching me with a
mysterious smile, half amused, wholly sympathetic, upon his handsome
face, younger than his forty-five years--for he was considerably older
than I. I was hardly more than barely conscious of that look of his, or
of his presence. Suddenly I struck my fist with violence upon the arm
of my chair. And I said:
“I _will_ do something! It is _not_ hopeless!”
He shook his head slowly, at the same time exhaling a cloud of smoke.
“I tried, Godfrey,” said he, “and I had a better chance of success
than you could possibly have. For my wife had been brought up by a
sensible father and mother in a sensible way, and she had been used to
fashionable society all her life and, when I married her, seemed to
have proved herself immune. A few years and--” His cynical smile may
not have been genuine. “She leads the simpletons. But you’ll see for
yourself.”
“When you know what to do, and feel as you do,” said I, “why did you
suggest our going into your society?”
“It isn’t mine,” laughed he. “It’s my wife’s. It doesn’t belong to the
men. It belongs to the women.”
“Into your wife’s society?” persisted I.
“Why did I suggest it? Because I wished to please you, and I know you
like to please your wife. And she’s an American woman--therefore,
society mad. She has her daughter at the Ryper joint, hasn’t she?”