If there be a distinction in being misunderstood, it was one denied to
Julia Westall when she left her first husband. Every one was ready to
excuse and even to defend her. The world she adorned agreed that John
Arment was “impossible,” and hostesses gave a sigh of relief at the
thought that it would no longer be necessary to ask him to dine.
There had been no scandal connected with the divorce: neither side
had accused the other of the offence euphemistically described as
“statutory.” The Arments had indeed been obliged to transfer their
allegiance to a State which recognized desertion as a cause for divorce,
and construed the term so liberally that the seeds of desertion were
shown to exist in every union. Even Mrs. Arment’s second marriage did
not make traditional morality stir in its sleep. It was known that she
had not met her second husband till after she had parted from the first,
and she had, moreover, replaced a rich man by a poor one. Though Clement
Westall was acknowledged to be a rising lawyer, it was generally felt
that his fortunes would not rise as rapidly as his reputation. The
Westalls would probably always have to live quietly and go out to
dinner in cabs. Could there be better evidence of Mrs. Arment’s complete
disinterestedness?
If the reasoning by which her friends justified her course was somewhat
cruder and less complex than her own elucidation of the matter, both
explanations led to the same conclusion: John Arment was impossible. The
only difference was that, to his wife, his impossibility was something
deeper than a social disqualification. She had once said, in ironical
defence of her marriage, that it had at least preserved her from
the necessity of sitting next to him at dinner; but she had not then
realized at what cost the immunity was purchased. John Arment was
impossible; but the sting of his impossibility lay in the fact that he
made it impossible for those about him to be other than himself. By
an unconscious process of elimination he had excluded from the world
everything of which he did not feel a personal need: had become, as it
were, a climate in which only his own requirements survived. This might
seem to imply a deliberate selfishness; but there was nothing deliberate
about Arment. He was as instinctive as an animal or a child. It was this
childish element in his nature which sometimes for a moment unsettled
his wife’s estimate of him. Was it possible that he was simply
undeveloped, that he had delayed, somewhat longer than is usual, the
laborious process of growing up? He had the kind of sporadic shrewdness
which causes it to be said of a dull man that he is “no fool”; and it
was this quality that his wife found most trying. Even to the naturalist
it is annoying to have his deductions disturbed by some unforeseen
aberrancy of form or function; and how much more so to the wife whose
estimate of herself is inevitably bound up with her judgment of her
husband!
Arment’s shrewdness did not, indeed, imply any latent intellectual
power; it suggested, rather, potentialities of feeling, of suffering,
perhaps, in a blind rudimentary way, on which Julia’s sensibilities
naturally declined to linger. She so fully understood her own
reasons for leaving him that she disliked to think they were not as
comprehensible to her husband. She was haunted, in her analytic moments,
by the look of perplexity, too inarticulate for words, with which he had
acquiesced to her explanations.
These moments were rare with her, however. Her marriage had been too
concrete a misery to be surveyed philosophically. If she had been
unhappy for complex reasons, the unhappiness was as real as though it
had been uncomplicated. Soul is more bruisable than flesh, and Julia was
wounded in every fibre of her spirit. Her husband’s personality seemed
to be closing gradually in on her, obscuring the sky and cutting off
the air, till she felt herself shut up among the decaying bodies of
her starved hopes. A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old
conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair.
If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in
ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature. She, for one,
would have no share in maintaining the pretence of which she had been a
victim: the pretence that a man and a woman, forced into the narrowest
of personal relations, must remain there till the end, though they
may have outgrown the span of each other’s natures as the mature tree
outgrows the iron brace about the sapling.
It was in the first heat of her moral indignation that she had met
Clement Westall. She had seen at once that he was “interested,” and had
fought off the discovery, dreading any influence that should draw her
back into the bondage of conventional relations. To ward off the peril
she had, with an almost crude precipitancy, revealed her opinions to
him. To her surprise, she found that he shared them. She was attracted
by the frankness of a suitor who, while pressing his suit, admitted that
he did not believe in marriage. Her worst audacities did not seem to
surprise him: he had thought out all that she had felt, and they had
reached the same conclusion. People grew at varying rates, and the yoke
that was an easy fit for the one might soon become galling to the other.
That was what divorce was for: the readjustment of personal relations.
As soon as their necessarily transitive nature was recognized they would
gain in dignity as well as in harmony. There would be no farther need
of the ignoble concessions and connivances, the perpetual sacrifice of
personal delicacy and moral pride, by means of which imperfect marriages
were now held together. Each partner to the contract would be on his
mettle, forced to live up to the highest standard of self-development,
on pain of losing the other’s respect and affection. The low nature
could no longer drag the higher down, but must struggle to rise, or
remain alone on its inferior level. The only necessary condition to a
harmonious marriage was a frank recognition of this truth, and a solemn
agreement between the contracting parties to keep faith with themselves,
and not to live together for a moment after complete accord had ceased
to exist between them. The new adultery was unfaithfulness to self.
It was, as Westall had just reminded her, on this understanding that
they had married. The ceremony was an unimportant concession to social
prejudice: now that the door of divorce stood open, no marriage need
be an imprisonment, and the contract therefore no longer involved any
diminution of self-respect. The nature of their attachment placed
them so far beyond the reach of such contingencies that it was easy to
discuss them with an open mind; and Julia’s sense of security made her
dwell with a tender insistence on Westall’s promise to claim his release
when he should cease to love her. The exchange of these vows seemed
to make them, in a sense, champions of the new law, pioneers in the
forbidden realm of individual freedom: they felt that they had somehow
achieved beatitude without martyrdom.
This, as Julia now reviewed the past, she perceived to have been her
theoretical attitude toward marriage. It was unconsciously, insidiously,
that her ten years of happiness with Westall had developed another
conception of the tie; a reversion, rather, to the old instinct of
passionate dependency and possessorship that now made her blood revolt
at the mere hint of change. Change? Renewal? Was that what they
had called it, in their foolish jargon? Destruction, extermination
rather--this rending of a myriad fibres interwoven with another’s being!
Another? But he was not other! He and she were one, one in the mystic
sense which alone gave marriage its significance. The new law was not
for them, but for the disunited creatures forced into a mockery of
union. The gospel she had felt called on to proclaim had no bearing on
her own case.... She sent for the doctor and told him she was sure she
needed a nerve tonic.
She took the nerve tonic diligently, but it failed to act as a sedative
to her fears. She did not know what she feared; but that made her
anxiety the more pervasive. Her husband had not reverted to the subject
of his Saturday talks. He was unusually kind and considerate, with a
softening of his quick manner, a touch of shyness in his consideration,
that sickened her with new fears. She told herself that it was because
she looked badly--because he knew about the doctor and the nerve
tonic--that he showed this deference to her wishes, this eagerness to
screen her from moral draughts; but the explanation simply cleared the
way for fresh inferences.
The week passed slowly, vacantly, like a prolonged Sunday. On Saturday
the morning post brought a note from Mrs. Van Sideren. Would dear Julia
ask Mr. Westall to come half an hour earlier than usual, as there was to
be some music after his “talk”? Westall was just leaving for his office
when his wife read the note. She opened the drawing-room door and called
him back to deliver the message.
He glanced at the note and tossed it aside. “What a bore! I shall have
to cut my game of racquets. Well, I suppose it can’t be helped. Will you
write and say it’s all right?”
Julia hesitated a moment, her hand stiffening on the chair-back against
which she leaned.
“You mean to go on with these talks?” she asked.
“I--why not?” he returned; and this time it struck her that his surprise
was not quite unfeigned. The discovery helped her to find words.
“You said you had started them with the idea of pleasing me--”
“Well?”
“I told you last week that they didn’t please me.”
“Last week? Oh--” He seemed to make an effort of memory. “I thought you
were nervous then; you sent for the doctor the next day.”
“It was not the doctor I needed; it was your assurance--”
“My assurance?”
Suddenly she felt the floor fail under her. She sank into the chair with
a choking throat, her words, her reasons slipping away from her like
straws down a whirling flood.
“Clement,” she cried, “isn’t it enough for you to know that I hate it?”
He turned to close the door behind them; then he walked toward her and
sat down. “What is it that you hate?” he asked gently.
She had made a desperate effort to rally her routed argument.
“I can’t bear to have you speak as if--as if--our marriage--were like
the other kind--the wrong kind. When I heard you there, the other
afternoon, before all those inquisitive gossiping people, proclaiming
that husbands and wives had a right to leave each other whenever they
were tired--or had seen some one else--”
Westall sat motionless, his eyes fixed on a pattern of the carpet.
“You HAVE ceased to take this view, then?” he said as she broke
off. “You no longer believe that husbands and wives ARE justified in
separating--under such conditions?”
“Under such conditions?” she stammered. “Yes--I still believe that--but
how can we judge for others? What can we know of the circumstances--?”
He interrupted her. “I thought it was a fundamental article of our
creed that the special circumstances produced by marriage were not to
interfere with the full assertion of individual liberty.” He paused a
moment. “I thought that was your reason for leaving Arment.”
She flushed to the forehead. It was not like him to give a personal turn
to the argument.
“It was my reason,” she said simply.
“Well, then--why do you refuse to recognize its validity now?”
“I don’t--I don’t--I only say that one can’t judge for others.”
He made an impatient movement. “This is mere hair-splitting. What you
mean is that, the doctrine having served your purpose when you needed
it, you now repudiate it.”
“Well,” she exclaimed, flushing again, “what if I do? What does it
matter to us?”
Westall rose from his chair. He was excessively pale, and stood before
his wife with something of the formality of a stranger.
“It matters to me,” he said in a low voice, “because I do NOT repudiate
it.”
“Well--?”
“And because I had intended to invoke it as”--
He paused and drew his breath deeply. She sat silent, almost deafened by
her heart-beats.
--“as a complete justification of the course I am about to take.”
Julia remained motionless. “What course is that?” she asked.
He cleared his throat. “I mean to claim the fulfilment of your promise.”
For an instant the room wavered and darkened; then she recovered a
torturing acuteness of vision. Every detail of her surroundings pressed
upon her: the tick of the clock, the slant of sunlight on the wall, the
hardness of the chair-arms that she grasped, were a separate wound to
each sense.
“My promise--” she faltered.
“Your part of our mutual agreement to set each other free if one or the
other should wish to be released.”
She was silent again. He waited a moment, shifting his position
nervously; then he said, with a touch of irritability: “You acknowledge
the agreement?”
The question went through her like a shock. She lifted her head to it
proudly. “I acknowledge the agreement,” she said.
“And--you don’t mean to repudiate it?”
A log on the hearth fell forward, and mechanically he advanced and
pushed it back.
“No,” she answered slowly, “I don’t mean to repudiate it.”
There was a pause. He remained near the hearth, his elbow resting on the
mantel-shelf. Close to his hand stood a little cup of jade that he had
given her on one of their wedding anniversaries. She wondered vaguely if
he noticed it.
“You intend to leave me, then?” she said at length.
His gesture seemed to deprecate the crudeness of the allusion.
“To marry some one else?”
Again his eye and hand protested. She rose and stood before him.
“Why should you be afraid to tell me? Is it Una Van Sideren?”
He was silent.
“I wish you good luck,” she said.