I
It was half-past three o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon in April when
Associate Professor Charleroy (of the Midwest University at Powelton)
learned that he was to lose his wife and home.
For April, the day was excessively hot. The mercury stood at
eighty-nine degrees on the stuffy little east porch of the Charleroy
home. There was no ice in the refrigerator, the house-cleaning was not
finished, and the screens were not in. The discomfort of the untimely
heat was very great.
Clarissa Charleroy, tired, busy, and flushed of face, knew that she
was nervous to the point of hysteria. This {130} condition always gave
her a certain added clearness of vision and fluency of speech which
her husband, with justice, had learned to dread. Indeed, she dreaded
it herself. In such moods she often created for herself situations
which she afterwards found irksome. She quite sincerely wished herself
one of the women whom fatigue makes quiet and sodden, instead of
unduly eloquent.
Paul Charleroy, coming from a classroom, found his wife in the
dining-room, ironing a shirt-waist. The door was open into the little
kitchen beyond, where the range fire was burning industriously, and
the heat poured steadily in.
"I thought it would be cooler in here," Clarissa explained wearily,
"but it is n't. I have to get these waists ready to wear, and a
gingham dress {131} ironed for Marvel. The child is simply roasted in
that woolen thing. But the starch _will_ stick to the irons!"
Professor Charleroy shut the door into the kitchen. He frowned at the
ironing-board, balanced on two chairs in front of the window. Small
changes in the household arrangements were likely to discompose him.
In his own house he was vaguely conscious always of seeking a calm
which did not exist there.
"Can't the washerwoman do that ironing?" he inquired.
Clarissa dropped her iron and confronted him dramatically.
"Doubtless--if I could afford to pay her," she responded. "As you are
already aware, the salary of associate professors in the Midwest
University is fourteen hundred dollars a year. When steak was a
shilling a pound {132} and eggs fifteen cents a dozen and the
washerwoman asked a dollar a day, one could afford to have her help
longer. Now it is different."
Professor Charleroy moved quietly over to the ironing-board and put
the flatiron, which was still hot enough to scorch, upon its stand.
Then he arranged, in a glass, the handful of daffodils he was
carrying, and set them where the April sunshine fell across them.
"Yes, I know it is different," he said gloomily. "But it may be
different again if I can place my text-book. When we married,
Clarissa, I thought your own little income would be sufficient to
protect you from such economies as I knew would be most distasteful to
you--but, somehow, it--it does n't seem to do it."
"It goes," returned Clarissa. "I don't {133} know how it goes, but it
does. I dare say I'm not a good manager. It is n't as if I dressed
well, for I don't. But I would n't mind, if we could go to Chicago for
a week of music and theatres in the spring. But we can't do anything
but live--and _that_ is n't living! Something is wrong with the whole
system of woman's work in the world. I don't know what it is, but I
mean to find out. Somebody has got to do something about it."
She threw back her small blonde head as she spoke, and it was as if
she gave the universe and all its powers warning that she did not
purpose to live indefinitely under such an ill-arranged order of
things as they were maintaining. Let the universe look to itself!
"I met Baumgarten of the Midwest Ice Company on the campus. He says
{134} if this weather holds, he will start his ice-wagons to-morrow,"
suggested her husband anxiously. He had very definite reasons for
wishing to divert Clarissa from consideration of all the things that
are out of joint in the world.
"Ice is a detail. Sometimes details do help," admitted Clarissa,
fanning her blazing cheeks.
"We will have Jacob come and wash the windows and put on the screens
in the morning," he continued very gently. "And I will uncover the
roses and rake the beds this afternoon. I should have done it last
week, but no one could forsee this weather."
"I'm not ready for Jacob until I have been through the closets. They
must be cleaned first.--I hate to clean closets! I hate to cook, to
sew, to iron, to dust, to scrub! There are women who {135} like these
occupations. Let such people assume them!"
"I can hear you, Clarissa, if you speak less oratorically. We are not
in an audience-room," suggested her husband.
Clarissa was slender, fair, and dramatic. If she was in the room you
looked at her. Her Norman nose was delicately cut, her manner
fastidious, but her collars were carelessly put on, and her neckties
had a vaguely one-sided effect. She just escaped being pretty and
precise and reliable-looking by a narrow margin, but escape she did.
She was, instead, disturbing, distracting, decidedly lovable, not a
little pathetic. Her face was dreamy, yet acute--the face of an
enthusiast. The line of her jaw was firmly and beautifully drawn; her
intellectual activity was undeniable, but philistines {136} mistrusted
her conclusions at sight--and justly.
"This is not a good day on which to hold an argument," she went on
with dignity, ignoring her husband's sub-acid comment. "It is too easy
to be uncivil when one is so uncomfortable. But I have been thinking
about these matters for a long time. I have been forming my
resolutions. They are not lightly taken. I was almost ready, in any
event, to tell you that I had decided to renounce the domestic life."
"To--?"
"To renounce the domestic life," repeated Clarissa with emphasis.
"Homes are an anachronism at the end of the nineteenth century,
anyhow. It is time women had the courage of their convictions and
sloughed off an anti-social form of habitat that dates from the Stone
Age."
{137}
"Do you mean you would rather _board?_"
Clarissa stared. "What has boarding to do with it?" she inquired
rather haughtily. "I am talking about the universal problem of woman's
work. One's own individual makeshifts do not affect that. But if it is
ever to be solved, some woman must solve it. Men never will.
Sacrifices will have to be made for it, as for other causes. There are
women who are ready to make them--and I have discovered that I am one
of the women."
Professor Charleroy received this statement in absolute silence.
"As a temporary alleviation," Clarissa went on meditatively, "families
might be associated upon some group-system. The operating expenses of
the individual establishments would be greatly reduced, and the
surplus {138} could be applied to developing the higher life of the
members of the group. It would be quite practicable, even in our
present crude civilization, to arrange such groups. But of course that
would be a temporary expedient. In the redeemed form of social life,
it will not be necessary."
"What ails you, Clarissa? Did that lecture you delivered before the
Saturday Afternoon Club go to your head?"
Clarissa flushed. Her club paper on "After the Home--What?" was a
sensitive subject. She already had been chaffed a good deal about it.
"Of course I know," she said with dignity, "that I am not a genius. I
can't organize. I can't write. I'm not pretending to be in the class
with Ibsen or Olive Schreiner or Sonia Kovalevsky! No, nor with the
American women who are going to work {139} out their ideas. I don't
believe I'd make a good social worker, either. I have n't enough
patience and tenderness. But I _can_ talk. You know I can talk, Paul."
Yes, he knew it. To his cost, he knew it. She had the gift of fluent,
winning speech, speech with an atmosphere, a charm. Uncouth theories
acquired grace on her lips, and plausible theories seemed stronger
than they were. She ironed shirt-waists badly, and the starch stuck to
the irons, but she could make the worse appear the better reason with
deftness and dispatch. Somewhere, somehow, a coal from the sacred fire
had touched her lips. You might be indignant, outraged, at her
theories, but you never refused to listen while she set them forth.
"I figure it this way," she continued. {140} "In all great causes, the
people who can think and write need the help of the people who can
talk, to disseminate their ideas, to popularize them, to get them
brought home to the people who don't think and don't read, and yet
have influence. That shall be my _metier_. I can do it. I can do it
well. I will do it for a living wage and put my heart and soul into
doing it. Without going outside a very narrow field,--say, that of
parlor talks,--I can yet be a promoter of great causes. I will be a
walking-delegate from the Union of the Elect! I will fight the good
fight for Utopia! Why, Paul, I can make it glorious!"
Her face shone with a wonderful light. Her slender, delicately rounded
figure vibrated with enthusiasm. She did not see the expression on her
husband's face. When great thoughts were {141} astir in Clarissa s
brain, her high imperturbability, her bright serenity, were maddening.
To assail them, logic was as useless as passion. She was simply in
another world from this.
Her husband sat down heavily. He felt an unacademic desire to box her
ears. Perhaps, had he done so, there would have been no story, for
like most women with erratic nerves Clarissa Charleroy had the
elemental liking for a masterful man.
However, her husband's Huguenot blood and scholastic training did not
help him to carry out such primitive impulses toward domestic
discipline. He was a man of sturdy build, with a fine head and brown
eyes of the gentle, faithful kind. Conscientious, persistent, upright,
he perfectly fitted that old-fashioned description our fathers loved,
"a scholar and a gentleman." It {142} cannot be denied that this type
is out of place in our modern life; it is especially at a disadvantage
when confronted with such a modern wife as his.
"Do you mean to--to _leave_ Marvel and me?" he inquired in a voice
that was not as even as he could have wished.
His back was toward the window. His wife could not see that he had
turned white, but she did notice that he looked steadily down into the
palms of his hands.
She faced him with a fine composure.
"I don't see that I'm much good here and I, myself, am certainly very
miserable," she said. "There is so much antagonism between you and me,
Paul. We think alike about so few things!"
"Do you think the antagonism lies {143} between you and me--or between
you and our circumstances?" inquired the professor. His voice was
controlled now, but cutting. "Also, do you feel any special antagonism
to Marvel? She is rather like yourself, you know."
Clarissa nodded brightly. He was stunned to see that she approved
this.
"That's better! Do fight me, Paul! It clarifies my ideas, and I see
more definitely what I want. I wish you were a good fighter. I like
hard knocks!"
"Good Lord! little girl, you don't mean all this nonsense--you can't.
Why, it's impossible. You're my wife. I've done my best. Some day I
shall do better. We shall win to peace and comfort yet--if you stand
by. My text-book--"
Clarissa waved a disdainful hand. Her blue eyes were liquid,
wonderful.
{144}
"You don't seem to think of the cause, Paul! Don't you realize that _I
can do good work for humanity?_ Everybody can't do that. Everybody is
n't called to it. I am."
Paul Charleroy let this statement pass. It hung in the air between
them, unchallenged, undenounced. Possibly it was true. But, the man
was wondering dumbly, what became of other men to whom this thing
really happened? Did it crush them all like _this_? How did they keep
up hope, decency, honor? How did they preserve their interest in the
game and make life worth living afterward? Already he felt heavy upon
his heart a presentiment of airless days, of tortured nights. The
loneliness of it! No tenderness anywhere in life for him? No love?
Then, what use to live? Humanity? Wasn't he humanity?
{145}
Nevertheless, when he spoke, he only said, "And Marvel? Is Marvel
called to be motherless?"
Clarissa's serene face clouded faintly. The question of Marvel did,
indeed, puzzle even her facility. And yet she had light on that
problem also.
"If I really prove to be any good,--and I think I shall be a helper
in a movement that is going to revolutionize the earth,"--Clarissa
said gravely, "there are others to consider besides Marvel. It--why,
it _may_ be, Paul that my duty is to the race! I'm not an especially
good mother for Marvel at her present age--the young-animal stage of
her development. All a child under twelve years needs is to be
properly fed, and clothed, and taught the elementary things. It has
all been standardized, and is a matter for experts, anyhow. Your
sister Josephine {146} would be a better mother for her for the next
few years than I. Why should I do what others can do better? When
Marvel begins to _think_, it will be different. Then she will need my
influence. I should like to let you have her for the next few years,
and have her come to me when she is fifteen or sixteen. How would that
suit you, Paul?"
Her husband moved his shoulders imperceptibly, but said nothing. The
thing had passed the point where rational speech, as he conceived it,
was in place. If Clarissa did not see the shallowness, the sheer
indecency, of discarding one's human relations as if they were old
clothes, he could not make her see it. Was it only half an hour ago
that he had come down the street in the spring sunshine, under the
budding elms, bringing Clarissa a bunch of {147} daffodils and
thinking of making a garden, and of all the dear, homely April tasks?
Clarissa assumed that his silence was one of acquiescence. Sooner or
later people always acquiesced.
"It is really sweet of you to take it like this, Paul," she said
warmly. "I never have understood why people should n't be thoroughly
rational about these matters. There's no occasion for bitterness. I
should like to have people say we had remained ideal friends. I shall
always be as much interested in your welfare as in my own.--Yes, more.
I should never dream of marrying again, myself, but in time I think it
might be well for you to divorce me and do so." Her mobile face became
introspective, absorbed. "Ruth Lawrence is rather too sentimental, not
energetic enough for a professor's wife. And Nora Mills is heartless.
I think {148} she would marry you for a home, but you must n't let her
do it. There is Evelyn Ames. I think Evelyn would do. She is so gentle
and reliable!"
She was actually absorbed in this problem, her husband perceived to
his utter amazement. He shivered with distaste. This was too
grotesque. It could not be true.
His wife looked at him for approval. She noted that the look of fear
was gone from his dark eyes. Something unwonted, ironic, flashed there
in its stead. It was neither mirth nor malice, yet approached both. He
set his boyish-looking mouth firmly, and shook off his silence as one
throws off a nightmare. He would meet her on her own ground, and be as
indifferent as she.
"Really, Clarissa, _that_ is the first sensible thing you have said
this {149} afternoon," he forced himself to say.--"Why, what's this?"
It was the small daughter of the house who chose this moment to emerge
from under the table, clutching fast a jaded-looking doll and a
handful of its belongings. Her round eyes were fear-struck and her
quick glance curiously hostile, but she slipped silently from the
room. Her presence there was soon forgotten by her parents--but
children do not forget. Of all the incomprehensible words tossed to
and fro above her head, Marvel remembered every one.