After six festival months of married life--in April or May, 1914--the
happy Mrs. Carl Ericson did not have many "modern theories of marriage
in general," though it was her theory that she had such theories. Like
a majority of intelligent men and women, Ruth was, in her rebellion
against the canonical marriage of slipper-warming and obedience,
emphatic but vague. She was of precise opinion regarding certain
details of marriage, but in general as inconsistent as her library. It
is a human characteristic to be belligerently sure as to whether one
prefers plush or rattan upholstery on car seats--but not to consider
whether government ownership of railroads will improve upholstering;
to know with certainty of perception that it is a bore to have one's
husband laugh at one's pet economy, of matches or string or ice--but
to be blandly willing to leave all theories of polygamy and polyandry,
monogamy and varietism, to the clever Russian Jews.
As regards details Ruth definitely did want a bedroom of her own; a
desire which her mother would have regarded as somehow immodest. She
definitely did want shaving and hair-brushing kept in the background.
She did not want Carl the lover to drift into Carl the husband. She
did not want them to lose touch with other people. And she wanted to
keep the spice of madness which from the first had seasoned their
comradeship.
These things she delightfully had, in May, 1914.
They were largely due to her own initiative. Carl's drifting theories
of social structure concerned for the most part the wages of workmen
and the ridiculousness of class distinctions. Reared in the farming
district, the amateur college, the garage, and the hangar, he had not,
despite imagination, devoted two seconds to such details as the
question of whether there was freedom and repose--not to speak of a
variety of taste as regards opening windows and sleeping diagonally
across a bed--in having separate bedrooms. Much though he had been
persuaded to read of modern fiction, his race still believed that
marriage bells and roses were the proper portions of marriage to think
about.
It was due to Ruth, too, that they had so amiable a flat. Carl had
been made careless of surroundings by years of hotels and furnished
rooms. There was less real significance for him in the beauty of his
first home than in the fact that they two had a bath-room of their
own; that he no longer had to go, clad in a drab bath-robe, laden with
shaving materials and a towel and talcum powder and a broken
hand-mirror and a tooth-brush, like a perambulating drug-store
toilet-counter, down a boarding-house hall to that modified hall
bedroom with a tin tub which his doctor-landlord had called a
bath-room. Pictures, it must be admitted, give a room an air; pleasant
it is to sit in large chairs by fireplaces and feel yourself a landed
gentleman. But nothing filled Carl with a more delicate--and truly
spiritual--satisfaction than having a porcelain tub, plenty of hot
water, and the privilege of leaving his shaving-brush in the Ericson
bath-room with a fair certainty of finding it there when he wanted to
shave in a hurry.
But, careless of surroundings or not, Carl was stirred when on their
return from honeymooning in the Adirondacks he carried Ruth over the
threshold and they stood together in the living-room of their home.
It was a room to live in and laugh in. The wood-work was
white-enameled; the walls covered with gray Japanese paper. There were
no portieres between living-room and dining-room and small hall, so
that the three rooms, with their light-reflecting walls, gave an
effect of spaciousness to rather a cramped and old-fashioned
apartment. There were not many pictures and no bric-a-brac, yet the
rooms were not bare, but clean and trim and distinguished, with the
large davenport and the wing-chair, chintz-cushioned brown willow
chairs, and Ruth's upright piano, excellent mahogany, and a few good
rugs. There were only two or three vases, and they genuinely intended
for holding flowers, and there was a bare mantelpiece that rested the
eyes, over the fuzzily clean gas-log. The pictures were chosen because
they led the imagination on--etchings and color prints, largely by
unknown artists, like windows looking on delightful country. The
chairs assembled naturally in groups. The whole unit of three rooms
suggested people talking.... It was home, first and last, though it
was one cell in one layer of a seven-story building, on a street
walled in with such buildings, in a city which lined up more than
three hundred of such streets from its southern tip to its northern
limit along the Hudson, and threw in a couple of million people in
Brooklyn and the Bronx.
They lived in the Nineties, between Broadway and Riverside Drive; a
few blocks from the Winslow house in distance, but one generation away
in the matter of decoration. The apartment-house itself was
comparatively old-fashioned, with an intermittent elevator run by an
intermittent negro youth who gave most of his time to the telephone
switchboard and mysterious duties in the basement; also with a
down-stairs hall that was narrow and carpeted and lined with
offensively dark wood. But they could see the Hudson from their
living-room on the sixth floor at the back of the house (the agent
assured them that probably not till the end of time would there be
anything but low, private houses between them and the river); they
were not haunted by Aunt Emma Truegate Winslow; and Ruth, who had long
been oppressed by late-Victorian bric-a-brac and American Louis XVth
furniture, so successfully adopted Elimination as the key-note that
there was not one piece of furniture bought for the purpose of
indicating that Mr. and Mrs. Carl Ericson were well-to-do.
She dared to tell friends who before the wedding inquired what she
wanted, that checks were welcome, and need not be monogrammed. Even
Aunt Emma had been willing to send a check, provided they were
properly married in St. George's Church. Consequently their six rooms
showed a remarkable absence of such usual wedding presents as prints
of the smugly smiling and eupeptic Mona Lisa, three muffin-stands in
three degrees of marquetry, three electroliers, four punch-bowls,
three sets of almond-dishes, a pair of bird-carvers that did not
carve, a bust of Dante in New Art marble, or a de luxe set of De
Maupassant translated by a worthy lady with a French lexicon. Instead,
they bought what they wanted--rather an impertinent thing to do, but,
like most impertinences, thoroughly worth while. Their living-room was
their own. Carl's bedroom was white and simple, though spotty with
aviation medals and silver cups and monoplanes sketchily rendered in
gold, and signed photographs of aviators. Ruth's bedroom was also
plain and white and dull Japanese gray, a simple room with that
simplicity of hand-embroidery, real lace, and fine linen appreciated
by exclamatory women friends.
She taught Carl to say "dahg" instead of "dawg" for "dog"; "wawta"
instead of "wotter" for "water." Whether she was more correct in her
pronunciation or not does not matter; New York said "dahg," and it
amused him just then to be very Eastern. She taught him the theory of
house-lighting. Carl had no fanatical objection to unshaded
incandescent bulbs glaring from the ceiling. But he came to like the
shaded electric lamps which Ruth installed in the living-room. When
she introduced four candles as sole lighting of the dining-room
table, however, he grumbled loudly at his inability to see what he was
eating. She retired to her bedroom, and he huffily went out to get a
cigar. At the cigar-counter he repented of all the unkind things he
had ever done or could possibly do, and returned to eat humble
pie--and eat it by candle-light. Inside of two weeks one of the things
which Carl Ericson had always known was that the harmonious
candle-light brought them close together at dinner.
The teaching, in this Period of Adjustments, was not all on Ruth's
part. It was due to Carl's insistence that she tried to discover what
her theological beliefs really were. She admitted that only at
twilight vespers, with a gale of violins in an arched roof, did she
really worship in church. She did not believe that priests and
ministers, who seemed to be ordinary men as regards earthly things,
had any extraordinary knowledge of the mysteries of heaven. Yet she
took it for granted that she was a good Christian. She rarely
disagreed with the Dunleavys, who were Catholics; or her Aunt Emma,
who regarded anything but High Church Episcopalianism as bad form; or
her brother Mason, who was an uneasy Unitarian; or Carl, who was an
unaggressive agnostic.
Of the four it was Carl who seemed to have the greatest interest in
religions. He blurted out such monologues as, "I wonder if it isn't pure
egotism that makes a person believe that the religion he is born to is the
best? _My_ country, _my_ religion, _my_ wife, _my_ business--we think that
whatever is ours is necessarily sacred, or, in other words, that we are
gods--and then we call it faith and patriotism! The Hindu or the Christian
is equally ready to prove to you--and mind you, he may be a wise old man
with a beard--that his national religion is obviously the only one. Find
out what you yourself really do think, and if you turn out a Sun-worshiper
or a Hard-shell Baptist, why, good luck. If you don't think for yourself,
then you're admitting that your theory of happiness is the old dog asleep
in the sun. And maybe he is happier than the student. But I think you like
to experiment with life."
His arguments were neither original nor especially logical; they were
largely given to him by Bone Stillman, Professor Frazer, and chance
paragraphs in stray radical magazines. But to Ruth, politely reared in
a house with three maids, where it was as tactless to discuss God as
to discuss sex, his defiances seemed terrifyingly new.... She was not
the first who had complacently gone to church after reading Bernard
Shaw.... But she did try to follow Carl's loose reasoning; to find out
what she thought and what the spiritual fashions of her neighborhood
made her think she thought.
The process gave her many anxious hours of alternating impatience with
fixed religious dogmas, and loneliness for the comfortable refuge of a
personal God, whose yearning had spoken to her in the Gregorian chant.
She could never get herself to read more than two chapters of any book
on the subject, nor did she get much light from conversation. One set
of people supposed that Christianity had so entirely disappeared from
intelligent circles that it was not worth discussion; another set
supposed that no one but cranks ever thought of doubting the
essentials of Christianity, and that, therefore, it was not worth
discussion; and to a few superb women whom she knew, their religion
was too sweet a reality to be subjected to the noisy chatter of
discussion. Gradually Ruth forgot to think often of the matter, but it
was always back in her mind.
* * * * *
They were happy, Carl and Ruth. To their flat came such of Ruth's friends
as she kept because she liked them for themselves, with a fantastic
assortment of personages and awkward rovers whom the ex-aviator knew. The
Ericsons made an institution of "bruncheon"--breakfast-luncheon--at which
coffee and eggs and deviled kidneys, a table of auction bridge and a
davenport of talk and a wing-chair of Sunday papers, were to be had on
Sunday morning from ten to one. At bruncheon Walter MacMonnies told to
Florence Crewden his experiences in exploring Southern Greenland by
aeroplane with the Schliess-Banning expedition. At bruncheon Bobby Winslow,
now an interne, talked baseball with Carl. At bruncheon Phil Dunleavy
regarded cynically all the people he did not know and played piquet in a
corner with Ruth's father.
Carl and Ruth joined the Peace Waters Country Club, and in the spring
of 1914 went there nearly every Saturday afternoon for tennis and a
dance. Carl refused golf, however; he always repeated a shabby joke
about the shame of taking advantage of such a tiny ball.
He seemed content to stick to office, home, and tennis-court. It was
Ruth who planned their week-end trips, proposed at 8 A.M. Saturday,
and begun at two that afternoon. They explored the tangled rocks and
woods of Lloyd's Neck, on Long Island, sleeping in an abandoned shack,
curled together like kittens. They swooped on a Dutch village in New
Jersey, spent the night with an old farmer, and attended the Dutch
Reformed church. They tramped from New Haven to Hartford, over Easter.
Carl was always ready for their gipsy journeys; he responded to Ruth's
visions of foaming South Sea isles; but he rarely sketched such
pictures himself. He had given all of himself to joy in Ruth. Like
many men called "adventurers," he was ready for anything but content
with anything.
It was Ruth who was finding new voyages. She kept up her settlement
work and progressed to an active interest in the Women's Trade Union
League and took part in picketing during a Panama Hat-Workers' strike.
She may have had more curiosity than principle, but she did badger
policemen pluckily. She was studying Italian, the Montessori method,
cooking. She taught new dishes to her maid. She adopted a careless
suggestion of Carl and voluntarily increased the maid's salary,
thereby shaking the rock-ribbed foundations of Upper West Side
society.
In nothing did she find greater satisfaction than in being neither
"the bride" nor "the little woman" nor any like degrading thing which
recently married girls are by their sentimental spinster friends
expected to be. She did not whisper the intimate details of her
honeymoon to other young married women; she did not run about quaintly
and tinily telling her difficulties with household work.
When a purring, baby-talking acquaintance gurgled: "How did the Ruthie
bride spend her morning? Did she cook some little dainty for her
husband? Nothing bourgeois, I'm _sure_!" in reply Ruth pleasantly
observed: "Not a chance. The Ruthie bride cussed out the janitor for
not shooting up a dainty cabbage on the dumb-waiter, and then counted
up her husband's cigarette coupons and skipped right down to the
premium parlors with 'em and got him a pair of pale-blue Boston
garters and a cunning granite-ware stew-pan, and then sponged lunch
off Olive Dunleavy. But nothing bourgeois!"
Such experiences, told to Carl, he found diverting. He seemed, in the
spring of 1914, to want no others.