The next morning proved to be a Sunday and she felt a need of spiritual
help in her hour of affliction. Man had betrayed her; religion would
sustain her grim determination to end the unwholesome condition of her
household. The Bible said (didn't it?), “If thy right hand offend thee,
cut it off.” That surely meant, “If thy husband offend thee, divorce
him.”
She went to church, her ancestral Episcopalian church, where her revered
Doctor Mosely, the kindliest old gentleman in the world, had poured
sermons down at her like ointment and sent prayers up like smoke since
she was a little girl. But on this day he chose to preach a ferocious
harangue against divorce as the chief peril, the ruination of modern
society.
The cowering Charity got from him the impression that home life had
always been flawless in this country until the last few years, when
divorce began to prosper, and that domestic life in countries where
there is little or no divorce had always been an unmitigated success.
If only divorce and remarriage were ended, the millennium of our fathers
would return.
This had not been her previous opinion; it was her vivid impression
from Doctor Mosely, as honest an old darling as ever ran facts through
a sieve and threw away all the big chunks that would not go through the
fine mesh of his prejudices. He abhorred falsehood, cruelty, skepticism,
sectarianism, and narrowness, and his sermons were unconscious mixtures
of hand-picked truth and eloquent legends, ruthless denunciations of
misunderstood people and views, atheism toward the revelations of all
the sciences (particularly the science of biblical criticism, which he
hated worse than he hated Haeckel), and a narrowness that kept trying to
sharpen itself into a razor edge.
Fortunately he belied in his life almost all of his pulpit crimes and
moved about, a tender, chivalrous, lovable old gentleman. It was this
phase that Charity knew, for she had not heard one of his sermons for a
year or more, though she saw him often in his parish work. She was the
more amenable to his pulpit logic to-day.
Charity had always assumed that the United States was the most virtuous,
enlightened, and humane of nations. According to Doctor Mosely, it was
shockingly corrupt, disgusting. The family as an institution was almost
completely gone; its only salvation would be an immediate return to a
divorceless condition. (Like that of Italy and Spain and France during
the Middle Ages?)
Hitherto Charity had not thought much about divorce, except to regret
that certain friends of hers had not hit it off better and had had to
undergo cruel notoriety after their private distresses. But divorce was
no longer an academic question to her. It had come home.
When she realized that her husband had been not only neglectful of her,
but devoted to a definite other woman, she felt at first that it would
be heinous to receive him back in her arms fresh from the arms of a vile
creature like Zada L'Etoile. Now she got from the pulpit the distinct
message that just this was her one important duty, and that any attempt
to break from such a triple yoke would be a monstrous iniquity which the
Church could not condone.
Doctor Mosely implied that when one partner to a marriage wandered aside
into forbidden paths (as he very prettily phrased the very ugly matter)
it was always the fault of the other partner. He thundered that the
wives of to-day were not like their simple-minded mothers, because they
played bridge and smoked cigarettes and did not attend prayer-meetings
and would not have children. It was small wonder, he said, that their
husbands could not be held. Doctor Mosely had preached the same sermon
at Charity's mother and her generation, and his father had preached it
at his generation, with the necessary terms changed and the spirit
the same. He and his kind had been trying since time began to cure
the inherent ills of human relationships by railing at old errors and
calling them new.
So in the dark ages the good priests had tried to cure insane people by
shouting denunciations at the devils that inhabited them. The less they
cured the louder they shouted, and when the remedy failed they blamed
the patients.
So fathers try to keep their little sons from being naughty and
untruthful by telling them how good and obedient little boys were when
they were little boys. They tell a silly lie to rebuke a lie and wonder
at their non-success.
Marital unrest is no more a sign of wickedness than stomach-ache is; it
is a result of indigestion or ptomaine poisoning, and divorce is only
a strong purge or an emetic, equally distressing and often the only
remedy.
But Doctor Mosely honestly abominated divorce; he regretted it almost
as much as he regretted the Methodist Episcopal heresies or the
perverseness of the low-Church doctrines.
Charity had always been religious; she had wrecked her health visiting
the sick and cherishing the orphan and she had believed everything she
was told to believe. But now when she went to church for strength and
comfort she came away feeling herself a condemned and branded failure,
blameworthy for all her husband's sins and sins of her own that she had
not suspected.
She prayed to be forgiven for causing her husband to sin and asked
strength to win him back to his duty. She reached home in such a mood
of holy devotion that when she found her husband there she bespoke him
tenderly and put out her arms to him and moaned:
“Forgive me!”
“For what?” he said as he went to her from habit before he could check
himself. But even as he clasped her she felt that his very sleeves were
warm from Zada L'Etoile's embrace and she slipped through his arms to
the floor.
When she came to, she was lying on a couch with a cushion under her
heels, and Cheever was chafing her wrists and kissing her hand. She drew
it away feebly and said:
“Thank you. I'll be all right. Just leave me alone.”
He remembered that Zada had said much the same thing. He was glad to
leave the room. When he had gone Charity got up and washed her hands,
particularly the hand, particularly the spot, he had kissed.
She seemed to feel that some of the rouge from Zada's lips had been left
there by Cheever's lips. There was a red stain there and she could not
wash it away. Perhaps it was there because she tried so hard to rub it
off. But it tormented her as she went sleep-walking, rubbing her hand
like another Lady Macbeth.