Until very recently indeed psychology was not an ology at all but an
indefinite something or other "up in the air," the sport of the winds
and fogs of transcendental tommy rot. Now, however, science has drawn it
down, has fitted it in its proper place as a branch of physiology. And
we are beginning to have a clearer understanding of the thoughts and the
thought-producing actions of ourselves and our fellow beings. Soon it
will be no longer possible for the historian and the novelist, the
dramatist, the poet, the painter or sculptor to present in all
seriousness as instances of sane human conduct, the aberrations
resulting from various forms of disease ranging from indigestion in its
mild, temper-breeding forms to acute homicidal or suicidal mania. In
that day of greater enlightenment a large body of now much esteemed art
will become ridiculous. Practically all the literature of strenuous
passion will go by the board or will be relegated to the medical library
where it belongs; and it, and the annals of violence found in the daily
newspapers of our remote time will be cited as documentary proof of the
low economic and hygienic conditions prevailing in that almost barbarous
period. For certain it is that the human animal when healthy and well
fed is invariably peaceable and kindly and tolerant--up to the limits of
selfishness, and even encroaching upon those limits.
Of writing rubbish about love and passion there is no end--and will be
no end until the venerable traditional nonsense about those interesting
emotions shares the fate that should overtake all the cobwebs of
ignorance thickly clogging the windows and walls of the human mind. Of
all the fiddle-faddle concerning passion probably none is more
shudderingly admired than the notion that one possessed of an
overwhelming desire for another longs to destroy that other. It is true
there is a form of murderous mania that involves practically all the
emotions, including of course the passions--which are as readily subject
to derangement as any other part of the human organism. But passion in
itself--even when it is so powerful that it dominates the whole life, as
in the case of Frederick Norman--passion in itself is not a form of
mental derangement in the medical sense. And it does not produce acute
selfishness, paranoiac egotism, but a generous and beautiful kind of
unselfishness. Not from the first moment of Fred Norman's possession did
he wish to injure or in any way to make unhappy the girl he loved. He
longed to be happy with her, to have her happy with and through him. He
represented his plotting to himself as a plan to make her happier than
she ever had been; as for ultimate consequences, he refused to consider
them. The most hardened rake, when passion possesses him, wishes all
happiness to the woman of his pursuit. Indifference, coldness--the
natural hard-heartedness of the normal man--returns only when the
inspiration and elevation of passion disappear in satiety. The man or
the woman who continues to inspire passion continues to inspire
tenderness and considerateness.
So when Norman left Dorothy that Sunday afternoon, he, being a normal if
sore beset human being, was soon in the throes of an agonized remorse.
There may have been some hypocrisy in it, some struggling to cover up
the baser elements in his infatuation for her. What human emotion of
upward tendency has not at least a little of the varnish of hypocrisy on
certain less presentable spots in it? But in the main it was a
creditable, a manly remorse, and not altogether the writhings of
jealousy and jealous fear of losing her.
He saw clearly that she was telling the truth, and telling it too
gently, when she said he was responsible for her having standards of
living which she could not unaided hope to attain. It is a dreadful
thing to interfere in the destiny of a fellow being. We do it all the
time; we do it lightly. Nevertheless, it is a dreadful thing--not one
that ought not to be done, but one that ought to be done only under
imperative compulsion, and then with every precaution. He had interfered
in Dorothy Hallowell's destiny. He had lifted her out of the dim obscure
niche where she was ensconced in comparative contentment. He had lifted
her up where she had seen and felt the pleasures of a life of luxury.
"But for me," he said to himself, "she would now be marrying this poor
young lawyer, or some chap of the same sort, and would be looking
forward to a life of happiness in a little flat or suburban cottage."
If she should refuse his offer--what then? Clearly he ought to do his
best to help her to happiness with the other man. He smiled cynically at
the moral height to which his logic thus pointed the way. Nevertheless,
he did not turn away but surveyed it--and there formed in his mind an
impulse to make an effort to attempt that height, if Fate should rule
against him with her. "If I were a really decent man," thought he, "I'd
sit down now and write her that I would not marry her but would give her
young man a friendly hand in the law if she wished to marry him." But he
knew that such utter generosity was far beyond him. "Only a hero could
do it," said he; he added with what a sentimentalist might have called a
return of his normal cynicism, "only a hero who really in the bottom of
his heart didn't especially want the girl." And a candid person of
experience might possibly admit that there was more truth than cynicism
in his look askance at the grand army of martyrs of renunciation, most
of whom have simply given up something they didn't really want.
"If she accepts me, I'll make it impossible for her not to be happy," he
said to himself, in all the fine unselfishness of passion--not divine
unselfishness but human--not the kind we read about and pretend to
have--and get a savage attack of bruised vanity if we are accused of not
having it--no, but just the kind we have and show in our daily
lives--the unselfishness of longing to make happy those whom it would
make us happier to see happy. "She may think she cares for this young
clerk--" so ran his thoughts--"but she doesn't know her own mind. When
she is mine, I'll take her in hand as a gardener does a delicate rare
flower--and, by Heaven, how I shall make her blossom and bloom!"
It would hardly be possible for a human being to pass a stormier night
than was that night of his. Alternations between hope and
despair--fantastic pictures of future with and without her, wild
pleadings with her--those delirious transports to which our imaginations
give way if we happen to be blessed and cursed with imaginations--in the
security of the darkness and aloneness of night and bed. And through it
all he was tormented body and soul by her loveliness--her hair, her
skin, her eyes, the shy, slender graces of her form--He tossed about
until his bed was so wildly disheveled that he had to rise and remake
it.
When day came and the first mail, there was her letter on the salver of
the boy entering the room. He reached for it with eager, trembling arm,
drew back. "Put it on the table," he said.
The boy left. He was alone. Leaning upon his elbow in the bed he stared
at the letter with hollow, terrified eyes. It contained his destiny. If
she accepted, he would go up, for his soul sickness would be cured. If
she refused, he would cease to struggle. He rose, took from a locked
drawer a bottle of rye whisky. He poured a tall glass--the kind called a
bar glass--half full, drank it straight down without a pause or a
quiver. The shock brought him up standing. He looked and acted like his
former self as he went to the table, took the letter, opened it, and
read:
"I am willing to marry you, if you really want me. I am so tired of
struggling, and I don't see anything but dark ahead.--D. H."
Norman struggled over to the bed, threw himself down, flat upon his
back, arms and legs extended wide and whole body relaxed. He felt the
blood whirl up into his brain like the great red and black tongues of
flame and smoke in a conflagration, and then he slept soundly until
nearly one o'clock.
To an outsider there would have been a world of homely commonplace
pathos in that little letter of the girl's if read aright, that is to
say, if read with what was between the lines supplied. It is impossible
to live in cities any length of time and with any sort of eyes without
learning the bitter unromantic truths about poverty--city poverty. In
quiet, desolate places one may be poor, very poor, without much
conscious suffering. There are no teasing contrasts, no torturing
temptations. But in a city, if one knows anything at all of the
possibilities of civilized life, of the joys and comforts of good food,
clothing, and shelter, of theater and concert and excursion, of
entertaining and being entertained, poverty becomes a hell. In the
country, in the quiet towns, the innocent people wonder at the
greediness of the more comfortable kinds of city people, at their love
of money, their incessant dwelling upon it, their reverence for those
who have it, their panic-like flight from those who have it not. They
wonder how folk, apparently human, can be so inhuman. Let them be
careful how they judge. If you discover any human being anywhere acting
as you think a human being should not, investigate all the
circumstances, look thoroughly into all the causes of his or her
conduct, before you condemn him or her as inhuman, unworthy of your
kinship and your sympathy.
In her brief letter the girl showed that, young though she was and not
widely experienced in life, she yet had seen the horrors of city
poverty, how it poisons and kills all the fine emotions. She had seen
many a loving young couple start out confidently, with a few hundred
dollars of debt for furniture--had seen the love fade and wither,
shrivel, die--had seen appear peevishness and hatred and unfaithfulness
and all the huge, foul weeds that choke the flowers of married life. She
knew what her lover's salary would buy--and what it would not buy--for
two. She could imagine their fate if there should be three or more. She
showed frankly her selfishness of renunciation. But there could be read
between the lines--concealed instead of vaunted--perhaps
unsuspected--her unselfishness of renunciation for the sake of her lover
and for the sake of the child or the children that might be. In our love
of moral sham and glitter, we overlook the real beauties of human
morality; we even are so dim or vulgar sighted that we do not see them
when they are shown to us.
As Norman awakened, he reached for the telephone, said to the boy in
charge of the club exchange: "Look in the book, find the number of a
lawyer named Branscombe, and connect me with his office." After some
confusion and delay he got the right office, but Dorothy was out at
lunch. He left a message that she was to call him up at the club as soon
as she came in. He was shaving when the bell rang.
He was at the receiver in a bound. "Is it you?" he said.
"Yes," came in her quiet, small voice.
"Will you resign down there to-day? Will you marry me this afternoon?"