“Never a word of love,” she went on monotonously. “Yet I don’t suppose
any woman ever wanted to hear it more. And no children. Yet I know
no woman ever wanted them more. No, not adopted children--but my own
flesh and blood. I’ve heard women complain of the burden of bearing a
child. It made me wild to listen to them--the fools--the selfish fools!
What wouldn’t I have given to have felt a child within me. Does it
scandalize you to hear me talk like this?”
“No,” said I. “No.”
“It’s a wonder,” said she, with a grim smile. She was quieting down,
was hiding the heart from which she had on impulse snatched the
veil, was ashamed of her outburst. “A woman can talk about having a
cancer, or a tumor, or any frightful disease inside her, and nobody’s
modesty is shocked. But if she speaks of having a child within her--a
wonderful, living human being--a lovely baby--why, it’s immodest!” She
gave a scornful laugh. “What a world! What a world!”
I looked at her and marveled. What a world, indeed!--where _this_
was one of the sort of relatives of whom pushing arrived people were
ashamed!
* * * * *
I think I forced myself to stay three days with them. I cannot recall;
perhaps I left the second day. However that may be, I have the sense of
a long, a very long visit. To one who has the city habit the country
is oppressively deliberate even when it is interesting. It makes you
realize how there is room, and to spare, for sixty minutes in an hour,
for sixty seconds in each minute. The city entertains; the country
compels you to seek entertainment, to make entertainment. People whose
mentality tapers away from mediocrity grow old and dull rapidly in
the country as soon as childhood’s torrential life begins to slacken.
For men of thought the country ought to be ideal, I should say, once
they formed its habit and lost the city habit of waiting in confident
expectation of being amused. But for men of action like myself, for men
whose whole life is dealing directly with their fellow men, to acquire
the country habit is a matter of years, of a complete revolution.
I brought a sore and a sick heart to the country. I took back to town
one that was on the way toward the normal. And I owed the improvement
not to the country directly, but to my sister. Polly Ann had reminded
me of the futility of graveyard mooning, of its egotism and hypocrisy.
She had reminded me that only the fool walks backward through life.
I believed I had been guilty of the folly of blowing a bubble of
delusion, pretending to myself that it was no bubble, but permanent,
substantial, real. The bubble had burst, as bubbles must--had burst
with a mocking and irritating dash of cold spray straight into my face.
Well!--the sensible thing to do, the only thing to do, was to laugh and
blow no more bubbles.
I went back to finance; I busied myself to the uttermost of my capacity
for work. But I could not uproot the idea Mary Kirkwood had set growing
in my mind. I saw ever more clearly that my sister was eternally right.
Some men might be successful bachelors. I could be fairly successful
at that selfish and solitary profession for a few years, perhaps
for ten or fifteen years longer. But I knew with the clearness of a
vision trained to search the horizon of the future that the feeling
of loneliness, of complete futility which already shadowed me, would
become a black pall. I _must_ have companionship; and to companionship
there is but the one way--the way of wife and children. A poor, an
uncertain way; nevertheless the only way.
You have, perhaps, observed the marriages of the rich. You have noted
that every rich man and every rich woman is surrounded by a smaller
or larger army of satellites--persons nominally their social equals,
often distinctly their mental superiors, salaried persons, wearers of
cast-off clothing, eaters of luncheons and dinners, permanent free
lodgers, constant or occasional pensioners more or less disguised.
Family life fails with the rich as it fails with the well off, or with
the poor. But while other classes revert to the herd life, the life of
clubs, saloons, teas, receptions, the rich take up the parasite-beset
life, each rich person aloof with his or her particular circle of
flatterers, attendants, coat-holders, joke-makers, and boot-lickers.
Now it so happened that for me there could be no enduring of this
standing apart in the meadow, switching my tail while parasites bit
and tickled, buzzed and burrowed. Riches, like any other heavy and
constantly growing responsibility, usually rob a man of his sense of
humor and turn his thoughts in upon himself and make him a ridiculous
ass of an egotist. They had not had that effect upon me. I can give no
reason; I simply state the fact. So, with my sense of humor active,
and my sense of proportion fairly well balanced, I could not give
myself up to the dreary life custom assigns to the rich. I retained the
normal human instincts.
I had hoped to satisfy them to the uttermost with the aid of Mary
Kirkwood. That hope had fallen dead. I must search on--not for the best
conceivable, but for the best possible.
You are not surprised at my lack of sentiment, gentle reader. By this
time, I am sure, I could not surprise you with any exhibition of
that or other depravity. But it confirms your conviction of my utter
sordidness. So? Then you imagine, do you, that there are many love
marriages in the world, leaving out of the count those in novels and
in the twaddling gossip men and women repeat as the true heart stories
of this and that person? Yes, I should say your intelligence was
about rudimentary enough to give you such a false notion of life as
it is lived. Marriages of passion there are a-plenty. Rarely, indeed,
does a man become bill-payer to a woman for life--not to speak of the
insurance--without having been more or less agitated by her physical
charms; and usually the woman, eager to be married, whips up for him
a return feeling that looks well, convinces the man and herself,
and makes you, gentle reader, sigh and wipe your sloppy eyes. But
love-marriage--that’s a wholly different matter. I should say it almost
never occurs. Where love, a sentiment of slow and reluctant growth,
does happen occasionally to come afterwards, because the two are really
congenial, really mated--where love does come afterwards, it did not
exist when the wedding bells rang. And I doubt not that love has grown
as often, if not oftener, where the motives that led to the marriage
were practical and even sordid than where they were the bright, swift
fading, and in death most foul-smelling, flowers of passion.
I was willing to buy a wife, if I could find a woman who promised
to wear well, to improve on acquaintance, or, at least, not to
deteriorate. And, beyond question, with my money I could have taken
my pick. Almost any girl anywhere, engaged or unengaged, would have
fallen in love with me as soon as she discovered my charms--of person
and of purse. Yes, would have fallen in love, gentle reader. Don’t you
know that a nice, pure girl always makes herself, or lets herself, fall
in love, before she gives herself? And don’t you know that, except
falling out of love--out of that kind of love--there’s nothing easier,
especially for an inexperienced girl, than falling in love--in that
kind of love?
But where was I to find a woman with enough solid quality to give me a
reasonable hope that she would aid me in my quest for family happiness?
Do not denounce me, gentle reader. Epithet and hiss are not reply.
Answer my question.
You say there are millions of such girls. Yes? But where?
You say there are millions of pure, sweet, charming girls, intelligent
and domestic. Yes. No doubt. But how long would they remain so if
tempted by wealth, by the example of all the money-mad, luxury-mad,
society-mad women about them?
Mind you, I did not want a stupid rotter, a cow, a sitter and lounger
and taker on of fat and slougher off of intelligence. I did not want
the lazy slattern who poses as domestic, who is fond of home in exactly
the same way that a pig is fond of an alley wallow.
You laugh at me. You say: “He is a conceited fool!--to think that _he_
could attract and absorb an intelligent woman with a complex woman’s
soul!” Not so, gentle reader. I did not wish to attract and to absorb
her. As for the “complex woman’s soul,” the less I saw or heard of it,
the better pleased I’d be. I simply wanted a woman who would join me in
being attracted by and absorbed in family life.
You are still smiling mockingly. But let me tell you a few secrets of
wisdom and happiness. First--Friendship is divine, but intimacy is the
devil himself--unless it is the intimacy of the family. Second--To love
your neighbor as yourself, he must be and must remain your neighbor,
that is to say, within hail, but not within touch. Third--Husband,
wife, and children are the only natural intimates--intimate because
they have the bond of common interest. The family that looks abroad
for intimates has ceased to be a family. Finally--A man who has his
wife and children for intimates has neither need nor time for other
intimates; and unless a man’s wife and children are his intimates, he
has, in fact, no wife and no children. Let me add, for the benefit
of--perhaps of you and your husband, gentle reader--that the only
career worth having is built upon and with efficient work; careers made
with friendships, gaddings, pulls, and the like would better be left
unmade.
You are smiling still, in your smug, supercilious fashion--smiling
at what you promptly call old-fashioned trite truisms. I am not
sure that, after they have been thought about a while, they would
seem old-fashioned or stale. Rather, I flatter myself, they are
the statement of a new philosophy of life. For the old theory
with which you are confusing these truths was that the family is
the _social unit_. In fact, it is not; the only _social_ units
are individuals--capable individuals. My theory, or rather my
philosophy--for it is more than a theory--my philosophy is that the
family is the _unit of happiness_. Society can--and does--get along
fairly well with little or no happiness. But happiness is an excellent
thing, nevertheless. And _I_ wanted it.
Now, perhaps, you see why I was not looking forward with any exuberance
of optimism to finding the woman whom I needed and wanted, and who
needed and wanted me. Prompted by my experiences and guided somewhat
by my shrewd and cynical friend Bob Armitage, I had been giving no
small amount of spare time to observing and thinking about the American
woman. And while I admired that charming lady and found her an amusing
companion for an occasional leisure hour, I saw that she was not to be
taken seriously by a serious person. She knew how to look well, how
to make a good “front,” how to get perhaps a hundred dollars worth of
pleasing surface results by squandering a thousand or two thousand
dollars. As an ornament, a decoration, as a basket of rare inedible
fruit to irradiate lovely costliness, she could not be beaten. As wife
to a showy plutocrat, ignorant of the art of comfortable living, as
head mistress to an European noble with servants trained to maintain
his state in splendid and orderly discomfort, she would do excellently
well. But not for the practical uses of sensible life. She had no
training for them, no taste for them, no intention of adapting herself
to them, whatever she might pretend in order to catch a bill-payer.
Still, I did not despair. I dared not despair. If I had,
loneliness--and heartache, yes, heartache--and my sense of present and
future futility would have become intolerable. On the other hand, while
there was every reason for haste--when happiness was my goal, and life
is short and uncertain--I was resolved to be deliberate. If I should be
deceived--perhaps by the girl’s honest self-deception--into choosing
wrong, how she would hate me! For not again would, or could I let a
woman use me as Edna had used me. A fool is a grown-up person who has
never grown up. I had grown up--had become a definite person, knowing
what I wanted and what I did not want. Such persons are hated by those
who try in vain to use them. My one chance lay in finding a woman with
the same definite tastes as mine. Only disaster could come through the
woman who might marry me, pretending to agree with me and secretly
resolved to “redeem” me once she got me firmly in her grasp.
Armitage was back in New York, was eager to resume our old relations.
But that could not be. I had outgrown him. And he, at the dangerous
age, was allowing himself to harden into all the habits of the rich
class and of middle life. Despite his efforts to conceal it, I saw
that he had even reached the pass where a man of property regards a
new idea as a menace to society. If it is a new invention, it may make
some stock he owns worthless. If it is a new social or political idea
it may make his laborers demand higher wages, or in some other way
affect his dividends. And, of course, whenever a man speaks of a menace
to society, he means a menace to himself whom he naturally regards as
the most precious and vital thread in the social fabric. Compelled by
my need for ideas to occupy me in supplement to the now thoroughly
familiar and rather monotonous routine of investing and reinvesting,
organizing and reorganizing, I was associating more and more with
artists and writers of the sort who feel suffocated in the society of
the merely rich.
Material conditions force upon men inexorable modes of life. And every
mode of life breeds a definite, distinct set of ideas. Men fancy
themselves original because they suddenly discover certain ideas in
their brains. As well might a hen who has just eaten hot bran fancy
herself original because she laid an egg. The idea was not from the
man, but from his material conditions--lawyer idea, politician idea,
banker idea, anarchist idea, big or little merchant idea, dog-fighter
idea, professor idea, preacher idea, and so on. I was fighting to
escape this to me repellent molding process--and I was making headway.
But poor Armitage was rapidly yielding; his struggle, I fear, had been
in its best days in large part a brassy make-believe--the valor of the
trumpet, not of the sword.
He was a sorry sight. His once handsome face was taking on that petty,
pinched, frost-bitten Fifth Avenue expression. And he had been driven
for companionship into forming the familiar parasite circle. The chief
figures in it were a decaying dandy of an old New York family who had
been fawner and crumb snapper all his days, and a broken-down plutocrat
who had squandered his fortune on fine women, fine wine, and fine food.
The dandy gave Bob the fashionable gossip; the broken-down plutocrat
gave him the gossip and scandal of the giddy part of town, also the
latest gamey stories; also he--perhaps both--arranged for him the
peculiar pleasures of the rich man with the palate that needs strong
sensations to make it respond.