MASON TALKS ON MARRIAGE
Men are not easily intimate. They confide in each other rather seldom.
Of love and marriage coarse men speak with sneers and obscene jests. Of
these deep themes serious men speak in hints, with apologetic smiles, as
if they were betraying a weakness, seldom going to any length of
statement. They express their meaning in broken sentences--in indirect
statements.
Sanborn had known Mason for some years. They were both from the country;
Mason from a small interior town in Illinois, Sanborn from Indiana.
Mason was an older man than Sanborn, and generally presumed upon it,
also upon Sanborn's reticence.
They rode up the elevator in the Berkeley flats in silence, and in
silence they removed their coats and filled their pipes, and took seats
before the fire. Mason was accustomed to say he supported two rooms and
an open grate fire, and he regretted it was not cold enough to have the
grate lighted for that evening.
They sat some minutes in smoke. Mason sitting low in his chair, with
face in repose, looked old and tired, and Sanborn was moved to say:
"Mason, I'm going to ask you a plump question: Why don't you get
married? You're getting old."
"I've tried to."
"What! tried to?"
"Exactly."
"That is incredible!"
"It is the fact," replied the older man, placidly.
Sanborn did not believe it. He knew Mason to be somewhat seclusive in
his life, but he also knew the high place he held in the eyes of several
women.
Mason went on finally, in his best manner, as Sanborn called it.
"For ten years I've been trying to marry, and I've been conscientious
and thorough in my heart, too."
Sanborn was violently interested. He drew a long breath of smoke.
"What seems to be the matter?"
"Don't hurry me. For one thing, I suppose I've gone too far in my
knowledge of women. I've gone beyond the capability of being bamboozled.
I see too much of the ropes and props that do sustain the pasteboard
rosetree."
"That is flat blasphemy," put in Sanborn. "I know more about women than
you do, and--"
"I don't mean to say that women deceive in a base way--often they are
not intentionally deceptive; but hereditarily-transmitted, necessarily
defensive wiles lead them to turn their best side toward men. Before I
was thirty I could still call upon a young woman without observing she
received me in a room shadowed to conceal her crows-feet. The
pre-arranged position of the chairs and color of the lamp-shade did not
trouble me."
He seemed to pause over some specific case. "And once I believed a girl
wore a patch on her chin to conceal a sore. Now I know she does it to
locate a dimple. I know perfectly well what any young woman would do if
I called upon her tomorrow. She would take a seat so that the softest
shadows would fall over her face. If she had good teeth she would smile
often. If her teeth were poor she would be grave. If her arms were fair
her sleeves would be loose, if they were thin she'd wear ruffles. If she
had a fine bosom her dress would be open a little at the neck--"
"O look here, Mason!" Sanborn interrupted, "I can't listen to such
calumny without protest."
"I don't mean to say that all this would be conscious. As a matter of
fact it is innocent and unintentional. A woman does not deliberately
say: 'I have a dimple, therefore I will smile.' She inherited the
dimples and the smile from a long line of coquettes. Women are painfully
alike from generation to generation. It's all moonshine and misty sky
about their infinite variety."
"Suppose I grant that--who's to blame? mind you I don't grant it--but
suppose I do, for argument."
"You are a lover and a fortunate man. You have in Isabel a woman of
character. Mark you! These wiles and seductions on the part of women
were forced upon them. I admit that they have been forced to use them in
defense for a million years. Had they been our physical superiors
unquestionably the lying graces would have been ours. At the same time
it doesn't help me. I can't trust such past-masters in deceit, albeit
they deceive me to my good."
"Are we not deceptive also? It seems to me the same indictment would
hold regarding men."
"Undoubtedly--but we are not now under indictment. You asked me a
question--I am answering it." This silenced Sanborn effectually. Mason
refilled his pipe and then resumed:
"Again, I can't seem to retain a vital interest in any given case--that
is to say, an exclusive interest."
"That is a relic of polygamy," Sanborn said. "I imagine we all have
moments when we feel that old instinct tumbling around in our blood."
"I meet a woman today who seems to possess that glamour which the
romantic poets and high-falutin novelists tell us the woman of our
choice must have. I go home exulting--at last I am to reach the mystic
happiness marriage is supposed to bring. But tomorrow I meet her and the
glamour is faded. I go again and again, every spark of electric aureole
vanishes; we get to be good friends, maybe--nothing more."
"Perhaps a friendship like that is the best plane for a marriage. Isabel
and I have never pretended to any school-boy or school-girl sentiment."
Mason replied in such wise Sanborn did not know whether to think him
bitterly in earnest or only lightly derisive.
"That would overturn all the sentiment and love-lore of a thousand
years. It would make every poet from Sappho down to Swinburne a
pretender or a madman. Such ideas are supreme treason to all the
inspired idiots of poetry. No! glamour we must have."
Sanborn smiled broadly, but Mason did not see him.
"So I say, marry young or marry on the impulse, or you'll come at last
to my condition, when no head wears an aureole."
"I wonder what started you off on this trail, Mason?"
Mason pushed on resolutely:
"I have become interested and analytical in the matter. I follow up each
case and catalogue it away. This failure due to a distressing giggle;
that to an empty skull; this to a bad complexion; that to a too ready
sentiment. If I could marry while the glamour lasts! I admit I have met
many women whose first appeal filled me with hope; if I might contrive
to marry then it might be done once for all. That, of course, is
impossible, because no woman, I am forced to admit, would discover any
seductive glamour in a taffy-colored blond like me. My glamour comes out
upon intimate acquaintance."
"Perhaps the glamour needed could be developed on closer acquaintance
with women who seem plain at first sight."
"Possibly! But I can't go about developing glamour in strange, plain
women. They might not understand my motives."
Sanborn laughed dismally.
"Then the case seems to me hopeless."
"Precisely. The case seems hopeless. After ten years careful study of
the matter I have come to the conclusion that I was born to something
besides matrimony. Cases of glamour get less and less common now, and I
foresee the time when the most beautiful creature in the world will
possess no glamour."
Sanborn imaginatively entered into this gloomy mood. "Nothing will then
remain but death."
"Exactly! Peaceful old age and decay. But there are deeper deeps to this
marriage question, as I warn you now on the eve of your venture. I find
in myself a growing inability to conceive of one woman in the light of
an exclusive ideal, an ideal of more interest than all the world of
women. I am troubled by the 'possible woman.'"
"I don't quite conceive----"
"I mean the woman who might, quite possibly, appeal to me in a more
powerful and beautiful way than the one I have. I am not prepared as I
approach the point to say I will love and cherish till death. In the
unknown deeps of life there are other women, more alluring, more
beautiful still. So I must refuse to make a promise which I am not sure
I can keep."
"Isabel and I have agreed to leave that out of our ceremony," said
Sanborn; "also the clause which demands obedience from her."
"I am watching you. If your experiment succeeds, and I can find a woman
as fine and sensible and self-reliant--but there again my confounded
altruism comes in. I think also of the woman. Ought I to break into the
orderly progress of her life? I can't afford to throw myself away, I
can't afford to place a barrier between me and the 'possible woman,'
and, per contra, neither can the woman afford to make a mistake; it
bears harder upon women than it does upon men. When the glorious
'possible woman' comes along I want to be free. So the woman might
reasonably want to be free when the ideal man comes along."
"If you really love, these considerations would not count."
Mason waved a silencing palm.
"That will do. I've heard those wise words before. I am ready to be
submerged in such excluding emotions."
"Mason," said Sanborn, "one of two things I must believe: Either that
you have fallen in love with that superb country girl tonight or you've
been giving me a chapter from your new novel."
Mason looked around with a mystic gleam in his eyes.
"Well, which is it?"