The next day George Cutter’s spirits had revived and with them a
certain hope. He resolved to have it out with Helen. She was not
reasonable. Few women were, but he knew that she loved him. He might
count on that.
In the evening after dinner they sat before the fire in the parlor.
Helen wore a dark dress, plain, durable, unbecoming. He considered this
dress, the woman in it, with a coolly impartial eye. His heart failed
him. He doubted if she could pull it off if she would. If, for example,
she could be made to realize the importance of dressing handsomely and
extravagantly every day. If she could be induced to live the life she
would have to live. He admitted it was a sort of puppet existence. But
as necessary to his success as the dummies in a shop window are to
advertise the owner’s trade. Ten thousand women did it all the time,
liked it. Still Helen was not one of them. She was removed by nature,
every instinct, from that class. He was half a mind to give up the
whole thing. At this moment, Helen looked across at him. There was
a hint of tears in her eyes, a fugitive smile on her lips as if this
smile pleaded with him for a certain forgiveness.
He laughed. He stood up and took her in his arms.
“Am I all right now, George?” she asked, as if she had been shriven by
this embrace.
“Absolutely,” he assured her.
They sat down. Helen sighed, being now full of that sad peace which
makes sighs.
“The trouble with you is, dear, that you are never wrong. That cuts you
out of life. We who are in the thick of it must be a little wrong,” he
explained.
“I suppose so,” she agreed.
“Not so rigid. We can’t be,” he said.
She agreed to that also.
“If you could be a little less perfect, it would help me a lot.”
She smiled, implying that in that case she was in a position to help
him. But what could she do? She had often felt how little service she
was.
Her meekness intrigued him. “How would you like to live in New York?”
he asked.
“I would not like it,” she answered after a pause.
He might have known what her answer would be, Cutter reflected
bitterly. His face reddened. His anger was rising.
“Why? Do you want to live there?” she asked, feeling this silence
directed against her.
“Oh, it makes no difference what I want, because if we lived on
separate planets you could not differ more widely than you do from my
way of life and my desires, my very needs,” he exclaimed.
This was unjust, she knew. Still she felt guilty.
“George, I can’t pretend that I should like to live in New York, but if
you want to go there, I will go. I must not stand ever in the way of
your success.”
He sat in brooding, bitter silence, staring into the fire.
“We might live very quietly; at least I could, couldn’t I?” she asked
timidly, ready to make every other concession.
“No; you could not. You’d have to play the game as other women do. You
would not do that. You--your whole mind is against the idea--you would
not adjust yourself. You would not even try to adjust yourself to the
world as it is. You want to make one yourself, six hundred feet long
and seven hundred feet wide with this house in the middle of it. You
have done it. Look at it,” he exclaimed, with a glance that swept this
room like a conflagration.
This was the first time she had suspected that the parlor was not
furnished according to his liking. She was that simple, and he had been
that patient.
“You have created a place to live in where nobody can live except as
you do,” he went on.
He took no notice of the fact that she sat with one hand on her breast,
staring at him with a look of mortal pain.
“Well, I will be more considerate of you than you can be of me, Helen,”
he began again. “We will drop the idea of going to New York. You like
this place. I might be contented here myself, if I had nothing to do
except keep it. But I have my business, a man’s name and reputation to
make. I will stay here when my affairs don’t require me to be somewhere
else. You understand,” giving her an eye thrust.
“Yes,” she answered, meeting this thrust steadily. She was dying to her
happiness, not without reproach, but without fear.
He crossed his legs and swung his foot after this deed. He did not tell
her that Shippen had offered him a partnership in a big business the
night before. In view of her unreasonable prejudice against Shippen,
this information would only have furnished her with stronger objections
to his plans.
The point was that she had failed him as a helpmate in the career he
had chosen. He purposed to alter his course accordingly. He would
do the square thing by her. She was his wife. He had that affection
for her; but she should not block his way. He meant to get on with
her or--without her. Other men did. He knew successful men in New
York, whose wives spent half their time in Europe or somewhere else.
He supposed he might do better than that. The bank in Shannon would
require a good deal of his time. He would come home occasionally. He
must spend a few days out of every month there.
This was the end. Helen sensed it. She saw his side of the situation.
She had failed her husband. She had been obliged to do so. He had never
expressed the least regret because she had not borne children, but
she knew that if they had had children, this would have made all the
difference. She supposed she herself might have been a different sort
of woman if she could have been a mother. Her influence as a wife had
never reached beyond the door of their home. Now she had failed him at
this upward turn in his career.
She had been a good wife to him according to the Scriptures, but he
needed another kind of wife, one who could fill a public position, a
wife according to the world. She grasped this fact clearly, held it
before her, regarded it with remarkable intelligence during a strictly
private interview she had with herself on this subject some time the
next day. She wondered how many wives combined the two offices which
George required of her. If you were the social official of his home,
if you “played the game,” as he called it, how could you be--well, the
kind of wife she had been to George?
She thought of Shippen in connection with this reflection. She could
not have told why, but she did. She was not so stupid as not to suspect
that Shippen had something to do with this sudden desire that George
had to live in New York. “Playing the game” meant coming in constant
contact with men like Shippen, women like the women they had discussed
that night at dinner--Shippen and soubrettes; somebody’s wife they had
seen in a café with a man who was not her husband and whom they had
discussed with a curious sort of grinning admiration, as if this lady
was a lady to be reckoned with.
Helen was wrong, of course, in the picture she drew of the game the
worldly wife must play. But there was this much sanity in her point of
view: Such a wife cannot always choose her partner nor the card she
must play. It is a skin game, matrimonially speaking, and sometimes the
one skinned is the husband, more frequently it is the wife, even if it
is only the gossips who do the skinning.
Helen made her way through such reflections as these, not as I have
written them down in words, but as one walking through the dark in a
dangerous place, with cautious steps and outstretched hands, feeling
the edges of strange abysses with her feet, touching unknown things
that might be alive with reptilian life.
The private mental life of all women, good or bad, is usually morbid,
consisting of thoughts or speculations which bring an emotional crisis
and leave them in fears and tears more frequently than we can believe,
judging by the faces they show.
Helen passed at this time through some such crisis. She was not changed
by it, because women of that sort are the “amens” of their sex. But
she was confirmed. She remembered what George had said long ago about
this belief in the freedom of love. She had often recalled it, always
with a pang of terror. If she had ever been jealous of him, it was in
this indefinite way. Now the way that led to such love seemed to widen
before her eyes.
She was alone in her room, sitting on the side of her bed during this
scene with herself. You know by your own experience, if you are a
married woman, that you always sit on the side of your bed when you
are dramatizing the sadder prospects of going on doing your duty by
this husband--or of not doing it. You chose the bed instead of a chair
because of a potential sense of prostration. You prepare yourself to
fall back in a storm of tears or to sink upon your knees in prayer for
strength to bear this “cross.” The more modern woman is said frequently
to rise unshriven, stride majestically across the room and stare at her
own proudly rebellious reflection in the mirror.
Helen did none of these things. She simply sat there, dry-eyed,
unprayerful, not rebellious, reviewing the future. This can be done
with amazing vividness, because the future is always a repetition and
development of the past. Then she made a resolution. It was that later
secret marriage vow a wife sometimes takes after she is acquainted with
the deflation and vicissitudes of this relation. Whatever happened,
she would be a good and dutiful wife to George. She would be patient.
Nothing should move her to reproach him. Thus she abandoned her rights
and self-respect. I do not say that she ought to have done this; I
doubt it; but the fact remains that many women do it. And in the end
they frequently become sanctuaries for disgracefully defeated husbands.
But to say so is not to recommend the practice. My task is to show how
it worked out in this instance. And you are warned therefore that a
sanctuary may become a very fine edifice, even smacking a little of
worldly grandeur.