And then suddenly came one of those swift unexpected tragedies which
knock the heart out of life for those who see and must witness them.
This came on Horatia like a thunderbolt. Life was magnificently clean
about Horatia--clean and beautiful--and then it was sullied by a
contact.
She had told Grace Walsh that she was to spend the night with Maud and
then she changed her mind. Going home from the office late and entering
quietly so as not to wake Grace, she heard voices. It was midnight and
she wondered. The voices were from Grace’s room, not from the
sitting-room, and Horatia stood weakly still in the dark and heard them.
One was a man’s and the other was Grace’s and they were saying things,
half-laughing things which turned Horatia weak and sick. Somehow she
stumbled out of the room--somehow got quietly down the stairs and out of
the building. She walked to Maud’s blindly and when Harvey let her in
said that she was very dizzy and must go straight to her room. Not to
sleep. To listen to what Grace had said and the man had said and to see
things of horror. Life was like that, was it? Foul--ugly? Was that love
too? They had used the word--that word--her word! No, no, no, she cried
to her tortured brain--not love. But Grace. Why should Grace be like
that? Had she always been? Grace who was fond of her. She was agonized
not by the facts as much as by her vision, her hearing of them.
Abstractly her brain tried to argue. Argue modern things she had heard.
Suddenly she understood many things that had puzzled her about
Grace--understood conversations which they had had together. She tried
to get Grace’s view of this, tried desperately. Grace had a right to
live--to be herself, to act as she pleased. But her senses, her heart
kept denying that--kept suffering its denial.
Harvey told her flatly at breakfast that she must cut out the night work
if she didn’t want to ruin her health--and her looks. He took her
downtown in his car and left her at the office for Jim to worry over.
Her white face and her shocked eyes told Jim that something had
happened. But she could not tell him. She worked mechanically, facing
the time when she would have to see Grace.
At six o’clock she took advantage of Jim’s absence to slip out and go
over to the apartment. Grace was there. She was paring potatoes in the
kitchenette. Sometimes they got their own supper.
Horatia did not take her hat off. She stood and watched the knife scrape
the skin from the potatoes. Grace looked at her.
“Why, what’s wrong, my dear?”
Horatia’s knees were weak and queer. She felt herself apt to faint if
she were not very, very slow and precise in what she said.
“I came back last night and heard--you.”
Grace’s face turned scarlet and then a different color--a color mixed of
anger, shame and defiance. She seemed about to speak several
times--several ways--and at last she succeeded.
“I really don’t see how it concerns you,” she said, viciously.
“No,” said poor Horatia, “I suppose it doesn’t. Only I can’t stay here.”
Grace’s expression hardened to an ugly sneer.
“So virtuous as all that,” she said. “Do I say a word when you go to Jim
Langley’s rooms? Don’t play the high and mighty lady with me.”
Grace had lost her intellectuality like a dropped cloak. She was pure,
raging passion, discovered in sin and accused. But Horatia did not stop
to analyze. She was stricken with horror. She couldn’t speak and Grace
raged on.
“You’re like all the rest. I knew you’d be or I’d have told you. Pretend
to be broadminded and yet scurry to get behind a fence of conventions if
your own skirts are involved. What business is it of yours if I have a
lover? If he isn’t married to me? He would marry me if he could and if
I’d let him. He’s married now to one of the silly fools who runs around
with your sister. He can’t stand her. He hates her presence--and he
loves me and I love him. We get what we can and then you come with your
face of horror to preach to me--to tell me I’m not fit to live with!
Fit to live with! I’m fit as the rest of the hypocrites that you live
with. Women or men--they’re all alike--covering their traces better. I
wonder where your brother-in-law spends some of his nights when he has
to go out of town. Do you think those silly little doll-faced prattlers
can hold a man? As for you--you go as far as you dare with Langley. How
do I know how far you go? I don’t spy on you when you go to his rooms on
Sunday! Not fit to live with! God, this prating of righteousness--sex
righteousness, the most silly lying farce in the world. There is no such
thing as righteousness. But there is love and passion, little
white-face.”
Still Horatia did not speak. Before this ugly situation she had become
powerless to attack or to defend. She had neither weapons nor skill for
such a fight. And Grace tore on, through a tirade of defense and
condemnation, revealing her shattered pride and her spirit torn by the
sense of guilt, of satisfactions and strangled discontents, trying to
believe in its own rectitude. But poor Horatia could not analyze it
then. She was only able to see facts and to hear the anger and
accusations against herself. She knew instinctively that Grace did not
mean them but she had said them and in the saying had irretrievably
marred and stained some things in Horatia.
Stray phrases hit her ear cruelly. Grace was now condemning her--now
men--now women.
“Modern women! Modern with your tongues! Love should be free. Love
should be above conventions. How often you’ve said it! And I with my
real beliefs did not dare to tell you how I chose to carry out your
phrases because I knew that you were only talking. Doing lip service to
modernism! Easy, isn’t it? But before modernism--naked--you’d be
horrified and pursing your shocked lips and running for veils.”
Horatia sank down in a chair and covered her face with her hands.
“My God,” cried Grace, “why shouldn’t I do as I please? Why should I say
one thing and act another? If I know marriage is rotten why should I
hold to its forms? Haven’t we all said marriage was archaic--love should
be free?”
There was no answer.
“Come now, isn’t that one of the great Sunday afternoon subjects for
discussion?”
Horatia nodded. “But this is different.”
“Why different?”
“Because it is furtive and hidden--don’t you see it’s--ugly?”
“It’s hidden because of just such cowards as you. You for whom I am not
fit!”
“It’s not a question of fitness. I don’t condemn you, Grace. Perhaps you
are right. Maybe I am cheap and cowardly. But I can’t--live with it.”
Generations of Grants and Ferrises living in holy wedlock speaking
through her--rash current phrases, fine modern leniencies dropping from
her before the facts of furtive illicit love and adultery. The
education of modern thought and modern living dashed to the ground by
the healthy instinct of race, healthy still in spite of its soaking in
strong, acidulous, dangerous ideas. Poor Horatia--so feeble in her
humiliation and yet stronger than ever before because there was only one
thing that she could do. Living with Grace was not a debatable issue. It
was an impossibility.
“Heaven knows that I don’t want to live with you,” said Grace hotly.
“But I would like to have you see that wherever you turn you can’t do
more than keep your own skirts clean. You can’t guarantee the skirts of
others.”
She walked up and down furiously and Horatia, not looking at her, knew
nevertheless how she looked. Her strong figure, her neat hair bound
about her head, her smart tailored gown did not make a proper figure of
passion but of restraint. But the passion was breaking through the
physical restraints.
“You were born in West Park,” Grace went on, “and brought up in a quiet
orderly way, told nothing ugly, seeing nothing ugly. I wasn’t. I was
born in a cheap hotel in a small town. Two years afterward my mother
either skipped or died. I suppose she skipped. And my father sent the
woman who kept the hotel a little money to keep me. He was a travelling
salesman--used to drop in now and then because I and the town were on
his route. I lived in that place where people came and went--some of
them decent enough--pale, dragged, gossipy women with fat, bloated men
or fat, big-breasted, lazy, powdery women, and their men. They were not
too attractive nor too delicate in their talk--these respectable ones.
And there were others too--not decent and not caring to be. I heard
things--saw things. I was well instructed in dirtiness young. And I
couldn’t stand it. I broke away and went to work in a woman’s kitchen
when I was fourteen. I washed dishes and cooked and made beds for
domestic decency. So it was called and rated. I learned how cheap and
dishonest a thing decency is. I was with that woman for two years. I
helped her when her fourth child was born. And the sordidness--the
hideousness of that unwelcomed birth ground some facts about modern
decency into me. They rowed over that baby--talked about ‘blame’. The
fears--the backbiting--the lack of love or even respect! I used to
wonder what those people started on--and then and there I vowed never to
marry.
“Well, I saved enough to go to High School. I had been through grammar
school. I started High School when I was sixteen years old and I got
through in three years. Meantime I was a ‘mother’s helper’. The irony of
that phrase! I helped that mother by washing clothes and dishes and
slaving way into the night sometimes. It was a hard little town. I
wanted to go to college so I moved--with my package--it was a small
package--of clothes to the University town--got some work, earned enough
to start on and to buy some clothes and then went to the Dean to ask
about working my way through. The Dean was the first woman I had ever
met who seemed to care what happened to me. It was a queer experience.
Funny, wasn’t it, the reputation I made in college. By the time you came
on the scene I was quite a celebrity, going home for vacations with
girls who were met at the stations by limousines and weaving a hazy
fiction about my dead parents and good connections. Then--after
college--jobs were easy.
“But I wanted other things by this time. I found myself wanting things I
never had. Love--men----” Horatia, watching her now, saw her standing
still, looking back at her own life with angry, thwarted eyes.
“I didn’t want marriage. I had no illusions about that. Marriage was
quite the ugliest thing I had seen. But I did want a lover. And I found
I could love--I can love! I’ve had three lovers in five years, and I
believe in marriage less than ever. The men have all wanted me to marry
them. But I won’t. People use marriage and then it uses them. It is
meaningless. More and more people cheat it and pretend to hang on when
they are sick of each other. When my lovers and I are through--we’re
through. I tell you that that man who was here last night hates the
sight of his wife. She must know it. Yet she rides in his car and takes
his money and eats at his table. Isn’t that degradation?”
Horatia did not answer and Grace stopped talking too, for a while. They
were aware of the awkwardness of the pared potatoes and the interrupted
preparations for supper, which seemed to insist on a continued intimacy.
“Will you have supper?” asked Grace, with bitter casualness.
“I’ll help get it,” answered Horatia gently and turned her attention to
details, striving, striving all the time to understand and help. They
set the informal table and faced each other over it.
“Don’t you want to stay here? I’ll go,” offered Grace brusquely later.
“No--no----” Horatia protested. “I’m the one to go. I really ought to go
to stay with Maud’s children for a while anyhow. She and her husband
want to go to New York for six weeks and they have been asking me to
stay at their house while they are away. I didn’t promise but I will
go.”
“Tonight?”
Horatia hesitated.
“No,” she answered bravely, “tomorrow.”
Suddenly Grace burst into tears.
It was the first time that reality had closely touched Horatia and for
the first time she realized that in dealing with personal realities,
theories have little value unless they have been tested by experience.
She had never been one of those who sought after modern ideas for their
own sake but she had accepted easily and as a matter of course all the
talk which went with her time--talk which was lavish in its use of
phrases about the rights of the individual, freedom of thought, antique
conventionality and the new everything. She believed in no church and
she laughed at Maud’s rigors as to what was and what wasn’t proper. In
college she had often expressed an opinion strongly indignant that women
should be required or expected to be more chaste than men and held the
double standard in abhorrence. And yet she was horrified to discover
that the man in this case did not excite her really. He was condemned
but it was a passionless condemnation that she gave him. But with Grace
her horror at finding that Grace had made use of this little apartment
for a furtive love affair turned her sick and yet miserable lest her
fastidiousness might be only cheapness. The saddest point in the little
tragedy was that Horatia could not know that she was learning one of the
deepest truths which she would ever learn--that through all intensive
modernism and intensive conservatism runs a thread of instinct that is
stronger than either--a fundamental morality which drives the most
hidebound conservatives into most radical actions and the most dangerous
radicals into the most conservative actions. The thread may be tangled,
and never untangled by some people in either group but, unbroken, it
runs through life and always will, through Bolshevism and monarchism.
Always irrefutable the fact confronts us that life is bigger than
politics or economic conditions or theories about either.
When Grace and Horatia said a restrained good night and went to their
bedrooms Horatia threw off her clothes and jumped into bed.
“If this affair was a block away it wouldn’t bother me at all,” she said
to herself determinedly. “I’ve decided to leave. Now I must go to
sleep.”
It was easy to say and impossible to do--easy to whip her actions into
conformity but not so easy to control her thought. She was shivering
with unpleasant contacts and she found herself standing on the floor in
the darkness, longing to dress and run away again. She tried to laugh,
to be “sensible,” assuring herself that all she needed was sleep and
rest. But there was no such thing as sleep. The darkness was not soft
and quiet. It was full of thoughts and pictures which did not soothe but
tortured her. She had always let her last thought be of her lover. Now
she wanted to forget about all men--even Jim. Grace had said--and so her
mind raced on through the darkness and morning came again.
To be sure that there could be no more discussion she telephoned her
sister at once and Maud’s flat definite tones coming over the wire,
expressing pleasure at the news and plunging at once into a world of
detail, reassured her. It was reassurance just to realize that Maud was
getting up from her breakfast table and that her mind was anxiously
turning on the problem of buying a new wardrobe trunk or making her old
one “do.” There was something cheering in the impression that much of
life was made up of just such innocent trivialities.
But at the office Jim saw the ravages of the day before increased and
she seemed unnatural to him, as if she was trying overhard to be
natural. He asked her to come into his office and shut the door on her
entrance.
But at the touch of his arms she looked so pathetic that his worry
deepened.
“You’re not yourself, darling.”
She shook her head weakly.
“I’m quite all right.”
“No--circles and shadows under your eyes--troubles in them--pale
cheeks--what is it about?”
Horatia tried to smile and failed miserably.
“Tell me, dear.”
He was so easy, so unpassionate because of some wise instinct that she
turned to him and the story came out. Grace had played her game silently
and well, for Jim had not suspected the situation.
“You must leave her, of course,” he said with quick masculine
intolerance for this business which affronted a woman dear and pure to
him.
“Pull my skirts aside--I suppose so,” she said drearily, “that’s what
hurts. My own reactions.”
“But you can’t help her by living there--and she had no right to expose
you to such a situation. It’s damnable.”
She had never seen him so excited or so very angry. He strode up and
down, his mouth set, eyes smouldering. She found that she was feebly
arguing for Grace but there was reassurance in the way he swept her
arguments aside. He wasn’t interested in Grace. He didn’t want to
discuss Grace. What she did was her own business. Let it go at that. But
to involve Horatia in a living arrangement and not explain her own
method of life--that was outrageous.
Suddenly he stopped and held up her face in his hands.
“And you have been thinking that all men----”
Her eyes wavered and his filled with tenderest pity.
“No, darling,” he said, quietly, “it’s not true.”
Confidence swept Horatia’s soul like a clean wind. She lifted her eyes
to her lover again.