I
“The marriage law of the new dispensation will be: THOU SHALT NOT BE
UNFAITHFUL--TO THYSELF.”
A discreet murmur of approval filled the studio, and through the haze of
cigarette smoke Mrs. Clement Westall, as her husband descended from his
improvised platform, saw him merged in a congratulatory group of ladies.
Westall’s informal talks on “The New Ethics” had drawn about him an
eager following of the mentally unemployed--those who, as he had once
phrased it, liked to have their brain-food cut up for them. The talks
had begun by accident. Westall’s ideas were known to be “advanced,” but
hitherto their advance had not been in the direction of publicity. He
had been, in his wife’s opinion, almost pusillanimously careful not
to let his personal views endanger his professional standing. Of late,
however, he had shown a puzzling tendency to dogmatize, to throw down
the gauntlet, to flaunt his private code in the face of society; and the
relation of the sexes being a topic always sure of an audience, a few
admiring friends had persuaded him to give his after-dinner opinions a
larger circulation by summing them up in a series of talks at the Van
Sideren studio.
The Herbert Van Siderens were a couple who subsisted, socially, on
the fact that they had a studio. Van Sideren’s pictures were chiefly
valuable as accessories to the MISE EN SCÈNE which differentiated his
wife’s “afternoons” from the blighting functions held in long New York
drawing-rooms, and permitted her to offer their friends whiskey-and-soda
instead of tea. Mrs. Van Sideren, for her part, was skilled in making
the most of the kind of atmosphere which a lay-figure and an easel
create; and if at times she found the illusion hard to maintain, and
lost courage to the extent of almost wishing that Herbert could paint,
she promptly overcame such moments of weakness by calling in some fresh
talent, some extraneous re-enforcement of the “artistic” impression. It
was in quest of such aid that she had seized on Westall, coaxing him,
somewhat to his wife’s surprise, into a flattered participation in her
fraud. It was vaguely felt, in the Van Sideren circle, that all the
audacities were artistic, and that a teacher who pronounced marriage
immoral was somehow as distinguished as a painter who depicted
purple grass and a green sky. The Van Sideren set were tired of the
conventional color-scheme in art and conduct.
Julia Westall had long had her own views on the immorality of marriage;
she might indeed have claimed her husband as a disciple. In the early
days of their union she had secretly resented his disinclination to
proclaim himself a follower of the new creed; had been inclined to tax
him with moral cowardice, with a failure to live up to the convictions
for which their marriage was supposed to stand. That was in the
first burst of propagandism, when, womanlike, she wanted to turn her
disobedience into a law. Now she felt differently. She could hardly
account for the change, yet being a woman who never allowed her impulses
to remain unaccounted for, she tried to do so by saying that she did not
care to have the articles of her faith misinterpreted by the vulgar. In
this connection, she was beginning to think that almost every one was
vulgar; certainly there were few to whom she would have cared to intrust
the defence of so esoteric a doctrine. And it was precisely at this
point that Westall, discarding his unspoken principles, had chosen to
descend from the heights of privacy, and stand hawking his convictions
at the street-corner!
It was Una Van Sideren who, on this occasion, unconsciously focussed
upon herself Mrs. Westall’s wandering resentment. In the first place,
the girl had no business to be there. It was “horrid”--Mrs. Westall
found herself slipping back into the old feminine vocabulary--simply
“horrid” to think of a young girl’s being allowed to listen to such
talk. The fact that Una smoked cigarettes and sipped an occasional
cocktail did not in the least tarnish a certain radiant innocency which
made her appear the victim, rather than the accomplice, of her parents’
vulgarities. Julia Westall felt in a hot helpless way that something
ought to be done--that some one ought to speak to the girl’s mother. And
just then Una glided up.
“Oh, Mrs. Westall, how beautiful it was!” Una fixed her with large
limpid eyes. “You believe it all, I suppose?” she asked with seraphic
gravity.
“All--what, my dear child?”
The girl shone on her. “About the higher life--the freer expansion of
the individual--the law of fidelity to one’s self,” she glibly recited.
Mrs. Westall, to her own wonder, blushed a deep and burning blush.
“My dear Una,” she said, “you don’t in the least understand what it’s
all about!”
Miss Van Sideren stared, with a slowly answering blush. “Don’t YOU,
then?” she murmured.
Mrs. Westall laughed. “Not always--or altogether! But I should like some
tea, please.”
Una led her to the corner where innocent beverages were dispensed. As
Julia received her cup she scrutinized the girl more carefully. It was
not such a girlish face, after all--definite lines were forming under
the rosy haze of youth. She reflected that Una must be six-and-twenty,
and wondered why she had not married. A nice stock of ideas she would
have as her dower! If THEY were to be a part of the modern girl’s
trousseau--
Mrs. Westall caught herself up with a start. It was as though some one
else had been speaking--a stranger who had borrowed her own voice: she
felt herself the dupe of some fantastic mental ventriloquism. Concluding
suddenly that the room was stifling and Una’s tea too sweet, she set
down her cup, and looked about for Westall: to meet his eyes had long
been her refuge from every uncertainty. She met them now, but only,
as she felt, in transit; they included her parenthetically in a larger
flight. She followed the flight, and it carried her to a corner to which
Una had withdrawn--one of the palmy nooks to which Mrs. Van Sideren
attributed the success of her Saturdays. Westall, a moment later, had
overtaken his look, and found a place at the girl’s side. She bent
forward, speaking eagerly; he leaned back, listening, with the
depreciatory smile which acted as a filter to flattery, enabling him
to swallow the strongest doses without apparent grossness of appetite.
Julia winced at her own definition of the smile.
On the way home, in the deserted winter dusk, Westall surprised his wife
by a sudden boyish pressure of her arm. “Did I open their eyes a bit?
Did I tell them what you wanted me to?” he asked gaily.
Almost unconsciously, she let her arm slip from his. “What I wanted--?”
“Why, haven’t you--all this time?” She caught the honest wonder of his
tone. “I somehow fancied you’d rather blamed me for not talking more
openly--before-- You’ve made me feel, at times, that I was sacrificing
principles to expediency.”
She paused a moment over her reply; then she asked quietly: “What made
you decide not to--any longer?”
She felt again the vibration of a faint surprise. “Why--the wish to
please you!” he answered, almost too simply.
“I wish you would not go on, then,” she said abruptly.
He stopped in his quick walk, and she felt his stare through the
darkness.
“Not go on--?”
“Call a hansom, please. I’m tired,” broke from her with a sudden rush of
physical weariness.
Instantly his solicitude enveloped her. The room had been infernally
hot--and then that confounded cigarette smoke--he had noticed once or
twice that she looked pale--she mustn’t come to another Saturday. She
felt herself yielding, as she always did, to the warm influence of his
concern for her, the feminine in her leaning on the man in him with a
conscious intensity of abandonment. He put her in the hansom, and her
hand stole into his in the darkness. A tear or two rose, and she let
them fall. It was so delicious to cry over imaginary troubles!
That evening, after dinner, he surprised her by reverting to the subject
of his talk. He combined a man’s dislike of uncomfortable questions
with an almost feminine skill in eluding them; and she knew that if he
returned to the subject he must have some special reason for doing so.
“You seem not to have cared for what I said this afternoon. Did I put
the case badly?”
“No--you put it very well.”
“Then what did you mean by saying that you would rather not have me go
on with it?”
She glanced at him nervously, her ignorance of his intention deepening
her sense of helplessness.
“I don’t think I care to hear such things discussed in public.”
“I don’t understand you,” he exclaimed. Again the feeling that his
surprise was genuine gave an air of obliquity to her own attitude. She
was not sure that she understood herself.
“Won’t you explain?” he said with a tinge of impatience. Her eyes
wandered about the familiar drawing-room which had been the scene of so
many of their evening confidences. The shaded lamps, the quiet-colored
walls hung with mezzotints, the pale spring flowers scattered here and
there in Venice glasses and bowls of old Sèvres, recalled, she hardly
knew why, the apartment in which the evenings of her first marriage had
been passed--a wilderness of rosewood and upholstery, with a picture of
a Roman peasant above the mantel-piece, and a Greek slave in “statuary
marble” between the folding-doors of the back drawing-room. It was a
room with which she had never been able to establish any closer relation
than that between a traveller and a railway station; and now, as
she looked about at the surroundings which stood for her deepest
affinities--the room for which she had left that other room--she was
startled by the same sense of strangeness and unfamiliarity. The prints,
the flowers, the subdued tones of the old porcelains, seemed to typify a
superficial refinement that had no relation to the deeper significances
of life.
Suddenly she heard her husband repeating his question.
“I don’t know that I can explain,” she faltered.
He drew his arm-chair forward so that he faced her across the hearth.
The light of a reading-lamp fell on his finely drawn face, which had
a kind of surface-sensitiveness akin to the surface-refinement of its
setting.
“Is it that you no longer believe in our ideas?” he asked.
“In our ideas--?”
“The ideas I am trying to teach. The ideas you and I are supposed to
stand for.” He paused a moment. “The ideas on which our marriage was
founded.”
The blood rushed to her face. He had his reasons, then--she was sure now
that he had his reasons! In the ten years of their marriage, how
often had either of them stopped to consider the ideas on which it was
founded? How often does a man dig about the basement of his house to
examine its foundation? The foundation is there, of course--the house
rests on it--but one lives abovestairs and not in the cellar. It
was she, indeed, who in the beginning had insisted on reviewing the
situation now and then, on recapitulating the reasons which justified
her course, on proclaiming, from time to time, her adherence to the
religion of personal independence; but she had long ceased to feel
the need of any such ideal standards, and had accepted her marriage as
frankly and naturally as though it had been based on the primitive needs
of the heart, and needed no special sanction to explain or justify it.
“Of course I still believe in our ideas!” she exclaimed.
“Then I repeat that I don’t understand. It was a part of your theory
that the greatest possible publicity should be given to our view of
marriage. Have you changed your mind in that respect?”
She hesitated. “It depends on circumstances--on the public one is
addressing. The set of people that the Van Siderens get about them don’t
care for the truth or falseness of a doctrine. They are attracted simply
by its novelty.”
“And yet it was in just such a set of people that you and I met, and
learned the truth from each other.”
“That was different.”
“In what way?”
“I was not a young girl, to begin with. It is perfectly unfitting that
young girls should be present at--at such times--should hear such things
discussed--”
“I thought you considered it one of the deepest social wrongs that such
things never ARE discussed before young girls; but that is beside
the point, for I don’t remember seeing any young girl in my audience
to-day--”
“Except Una Van Sideren!”
He turned slightly and pushed back the lamp at his elbow.
“Oh, Miss Van Sideren--naturally--”
“Why naturally?”
“The daughter of the house--would you have had her sent out with her
governess?”
“If I had a daughter I should not allow such things to go on in my
house!”
Westall, stroking his mustache, leaned back with a faint smile. “I fancy
Miss Van Sideren is quite capable of taking care of herself.”
“No girl knows how to take care of herself--till it’s too late.”
“And yet you would deliberately deny her the surest means of
self-defence?”
“What do you call the surest means of self-defence?”
“Some preliminary knowledge of human nature in its relation to the
marriage tie.”
She made an impatient gesture. “How should you like to marry that kind
of a girl?”
“Immensely--if she were my kind of girl in other respects.”
She took up the argument at another point.
“You are quite mistaken if you think such talk does not affect young
girls. Una was in a state of the most absurd exaltation--” She broke
off, wondering why she had spoken.
Westall reopened a magazine which he had laid aside at the beginning
of their discussion. “What you tell me is immensely flattering to my
oratorical talent--but I fear you overrate its effect. I can assure you
that Miss Van Sideren doesn’t have to have her thinking done for her.
She’s quite capable of doing it herself.”
“You seem very familiar with her mental processes!” flashed unguardedly
from his wife.
He looked up quietly from the pages he was cutting.
“I should like to be,” he answered. “She interests me.”