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.