“It takes a big man to love a big woman,” he announced. “I am a big man.
He is not.”
Curiously enough, Peggy did not return to the confidential tone of her
letter, and during that brief visit we had only one talk. She was always
surrounded, even in the house; her accompanist, a secretary, a maid, one
or the other was always with her.
I began to see that, no matter what she intended, there was not much
time for a husband in her life. But, although she was never alone, I
thought her very lonely, a sort of loneliness of the heart. Queens must
have it sometimes.
But she did open up once.
“You mustn’t take Mazzari too hard,” she said. She was having her hair
brushed at the time, and I had a distinct feeling of shock over such a
subject before her maid. But I found that she did not think of the woman
at all; I daresay she was always about, and Peggy had grown to think of
her as a sort of toilet article.
“I certainly won’t, unless you do.”
She laughed a little.
“I’m used to him,” she said. “He’s like a comfortable fire; he burns,
but he doesn’t blaze too much.” She took her hand mirror, and examined
her face absently. “I have to have some affection,” she said. “Even a
dog has to be loved.”
“You have Jim.”
“Jim doesn’t care any more.”
“I don’t believe it. And you have Anne.”
“Anne hates me,” she said bitterly. “I can understand Jim. Or I try to.
But I can’t understand Anne.” And a moment later: “I’ve got everything,
and nothing.”
There was a sort of blessed hush after they had all gone. . . .
In looking about for an explanation of the desperate act by which Anne
finally solved her problem, I find myself wondering if her love for Jim
did not enter into it very largely. That he never knew of it I am
certain, but I am also certain that it existed.
In that case, I daresay the sort of pseudo-domesticity of their life
together while Peggy was away was finally too much for her. But even
eliminating that, Peggy’s absence was surely a contributory cause, and
Peggy must have known it. Always when she was there she was justifying
Anne to herself. “You did this for me, Anne,” or “Anne is my second
mother.” “Do come to-night, Anne; I want your opinion—” on anything,
from an aria to a costume.
But Peggy’s constantly upholding hand had been withdrawn, and Anne
slipped down and down. She killed herself.
I have sat back and looked at the words, and they seem horrible to me
even now. It was so unnecessary and so—so final. Do women really kill
themselves because they have nothing worth while to do? And if so, was
having something worth while to do the answer? Because Peggy had had
that, and she had not found happiness. Was the only safe way then a sort
of comfortable mediocrity? A little love, a little work, a little play?
Was it that men were satisfied with less, that they could so easily live
their lives of double interest, home and work, and that women demanded
more, all of love and all of success?
Are the great of the world among women always a little lonely? Is there
the element of tragedy in all genius? Or was Anne, and later Peggy
herself, a victim of a changing order of things, to which women have
reacted more quickly than men?
Just what crisis finally precipitated Anne’s suicide I do not know.
Probably, indeed, there was no crisis. She had, I think, simply reached
the end of the hopeful trail.
I had a heartbroken note from Peggy. The idea that she was somehow
wrecking everything she valued was noticeable through it, and she quoted
Wilde about men always killing the thing that they loved. She had
forgotten Anne’s later bitterness, and had gone back to the days when
Anne had been the only mother she knew.
She did not mention Jim. She said she had fixed up Harry’s affairs, and
he was back with them. . . .
From a psychological point of view, Anne’s suicide was a distinct
milestone in Peggy’s condition. She could not face what she felt as to
her own part in it. For months after she would not even speak Anne’s
name.
It rested for Harry, however, to deliver the final psychological blow,
and again her voice was the agent. It appears that he heard Peggy, in
the early dramatic days of the war, singing the Battle Hymn of the
Republic from the steps of the public library. He went home that night
and told her that she had profoundly moved him, and that he had gone off
at once and enlisted.
Later I heard from Jim that she had remained quite steady and said that
she was very proud. But she had gone to her bedroom and fainted.
Harry was killed at Château-Thierry.
I imagine that, along with that blow, there came the frightful
conviction that she had sent, not only Harry, but other boys; that she
saw her dead laid out in rows; that she began to see herself as a thing
of wrath, an agent of destruction. She began to have a steady insomnia.
I saw Jim in Washington not long after that, and the change in his
appearance was very marked. His hair was quite grey, and he was less
carefully dressed than usual. We lunched together at the Shoreham, and
it developed that since he was too old for the army he had been trying
to get some sort of war work. But he had failed.
“Where is Peggy?”
“She’s not very well. Of course Harry’s death— She’s singing at the
camps.”
And a moment later, with a ghastly sort of smile: “You see how it is.
She’s got a job to do for the war. _Morale_, you know. I can’t even do
that.”
A day or so later I saw him lunching with a young woman. She looked
eminently respectable, and I surmised that he was actuated by sheer
loneliness. Still, it worried me. I wondered if Mazzari was also singing
at the camps.
There was a long time when I heard nothing of Peggy or Jim after that.
My husband and two sons were in the army, and I myself had a government
mission abroad. While I was in Paris, shortly before the Armistice, I
learned that Peggy was singing along the front, and later on that she
had been giving a concert in a hospital when it was struck by a shell
and almost demolished, but that she had not been hurt.