Following his parting with Nan Brent on Saturday night, Donald McKaye
went directly to the mill office, in front of which his car was
parked, entered the car, and drove home to The Dreamerie, quite
oblivious of the fact that he was not the only man in Port Agnew who
had spent an interesting and exciting evening. So thoroughly mixed
were his emotions that he was not quite certain whether he was
profoundly happy or incurably wretched. When he gave way to rejoicing
in his new-found love, straightway he was assailed by a realization of
the barriers to his happiness--a truly masculine recognition of the
terrible bar sinister to Nan's perfect wifehood induced a veritable
shriveling of his soul, a mental agony all the more intense because it
was the first unhappiness he had ever experienced.
His distress was born of the knowledge that between the Sawdust Pile
and The Dreamerie there stretched a gulf as wide and deep as the Bight
of Tyee. He was bred of that puritanical stock which demands that the
mate for a male of its blood must be of original purity, regardless of
the attitude of leniency on the part of that male for lapses from
virtue in one of his own sex. This creed, Donald had accepted as
naturally, as inevitably as he had accepted belief in the communion of
saints and the resurrection of the dead. His father's daughter-in-law,
like Cæsar's wife, would have to be above suspicion; while Donald
believed Nan Brent to be virtuous, or, at least, an unconscious,
unwilling, and unpremeditating sinner, non-virtuous by circumstance
instead of by her own deliberate act, he was too hard-headed not to
realize that never, by the grace of God, would she be above suspicion.
Too well he realized that his parents and his sisters, for whom he
entertained all the affection of a good son and brother, would,
unhampered by sex-appeal and controlled wholly by tradition, fail
utterly to take the same charitable view, even though he was honest
enough with himself to realize that perhaps his own belief in the
matter was largely the result of the wish being father to the thought.
Curiously enough, he dismissed, quite casually, consideration of the
opinions his mother and sisters, their friends and his, the men and
women of Port Agnew might entertain on the subject. His apprehensions
centered almost entirely upon his father. His affection for his father
he had always taken for granted. It was not an emotion to exclaim
over. Now that he realized, for the first time, his potential power to
hurt his father, to bow that gray head in grief and shame and
humiliation, he was vouchsafed a clearer, all-comprehending vision of
that father's love, of his goodness, his manliness, his honor, his
gentleness, and his fierce, high pride; to Donald simultaneously came
the knowledge of his own exalted love for the old man. He knew him as
no other human being knew him or ever would know him; whence he knew
old Hector's code--that a clean man may not mate with an unclean woman
without losing caste.
He and Nan had discussed the situation but briefly; for they were
young, and the glory of that first perfect hour could not be marred by
a minute consideration of, misery in prospect. To-night, they had been
content to forget the world and be happy with each other, apparently
with the mutual understanding that they occupied an untenable
position, one that soon must be evacuated.
Yes; he was the young laird of Tyee, the heir to a principality, and
it would be too great a strain on mere human beings to expect his
little world to approve of its highest mating with its lowest. Prate
as we may of democracy, we must admit, if we are to be honest with
ourselves, that this sad old world is a snobocracy. The very fact that
man is prone to regard himself as superior to his brother is the
leaven in the load of civilization; without that quality, whether we
elect to classify it as self-conceit or self-esteem, man would be
without ambition and our civilization barren of achievement. The
instinct for the upward climb--the desire to reach the heights--is too
insistent to be disregarded. If all men are born equal, as the framers
of our Constitution so solemnly declared, that is because the brains
of all infants, of whatsoever degree, are at birth incapable of
thought. The democracy of any people, therefore, must be predicated
upon their kindness and charity--human characteristics which blossom
or wither according to the intensity of the battle for existence. In
our day and generation, therefore, democracy is too high-priced for
promiscuous dissemination; wherefore, as in an elder day, we turn from
the teaching of the Man of Galilee and cling to tradition.
Tradition was the stone in the road to Donald McKaye's happiness, and
his strength was not equal to the task of rolling it away.
Despair enveloped him. Every fiber of his being, every tender, gallant
instinct drew him toward this wonder-girl that the world had thrust
aside as unworthy. His warm, sympathetic heart ached for her; he knew
she needed him as women like her must ever need the kind of man he
wanted to be, the kind he had always striven to be. Had he been
egotist enough to set a value upon himself, he would have told himself
she was worthy of him; yet a damnable set of damnable man-made
circumstances over which he had no control hedged them about and kept
them apart. It was terrible, so he reflected, to know that, even if
Nan should live the life of a saint from the hour of her child's birth
until the hour of her death, a half-century hence, yet would she fail
to atone for her single lapse while there still lived one who
knew--and remembered. He, Donald McKaye, might live down a natural
son, but Nan Brent could not. The contemplation of this social
phenomenon struck him with peculiar force, for he had not hitherto
considered the amazing inequalities of a double standard of morals.
For the first time in his life, he could understand the abject
deference that must be shown to public opinion. He, who considered
himself, and not without reason, a gentleman, must defer to the
inchoate, unreasoning, unrelenting, and barbaric point of view of men
and women who hadn't sense enough to pound sand in a rat-hole or
breeding enough to display a reasonable amount of skill in the
manipulation of a knife and fork. Public opinion! Bah! Deference to a
fetish, a shibboleth, to the ancient, unwritten law that one must not
do that which hypocrites condemn and cowards fear to do, unless,
indeed, one can "get away with it."
Ah, yes! The eleventh commandment: "Thou shalt not be discovered." It
had smashed Nan Brent, who had violated it, desolated her, ruined
her--she who had but followed the instinct that God Almighty had given
her at birth--the instinct of sex, the natural yearning of a trustful,
loving heart for love, motherhood, and masculine protection from a
brutal world. More. Not satisfied with smashing her, public opinion
insisted that she should remain in a perennial state of smash. It was
abominable!
Nan had told him she had never been married, and a sense of delicacy
had indicated to him that this was a subject upon which he must not
appear to be curious. To question her for the details would have been
repugnant to his nicely balanced sense of the fitness of things.
Nevertheless, he reflected, if her love had been illicit, was it more
illicit than that of the woman who enters into a loveless marriage,
induced to such action by a sordid consideration of worldly goods and
gear? Was her sin in bearing a child out of wedlock more terrible than
that of the married woman who shudders at the responsibilities of
motherhood, or evades the travail of love's fulfilment by snuffing out
little lives in embryo? He thought not. He recalled an evening in New
York when he had watched a policeman following a drab of the streets
who sought to evade him and ply her sorry trade in the vicinity of
Herald Square; he remembered how that same policeman had abandoned the
chase to touch his cap respectfully and open her limousine door for
the heroine (God save the mark!) of a scandalous divorce.
"Damn it!" he murmured. "It's a rotten, cruel world, and I don't
understand it. I'm all mixed up." And he went to bed, where, his
bodily weariness overcoming his mental depression, he slept.
He was man enough to scorn public opinion, but human enough to fear
it.