Snyder's attitude during this tumultuous time was exceedingly puzzling
to Dodo. She seemed fairly to haunt the rooms, arriving at the most
unexpected moments, remaining determinedly camped on her trunk by the
window, endlessly silent and immersed in reading. Betty came often now
in the late morning, or toward six o'clock, hours when Dodo was sure to
be at home. Dore had a passionate affection for children, and remained
for hours on the floor, romping boisterously, or with Betty in her lap,
brown curls against her golden ones, exploring endless enchanted realms.
Once or twice in the fairy twilight, when eyelids had gone nodding,
overburdened with wonder and long listening, and she felt the warm flesh
of tiny fingers clinging to her neck, she had waited, cramped and
motionless, subjugated in a soft tyranny, glowingly happy and at peace.
At other moments, with the little body pressed against her own,
encircling arms and childish kisses awoke in her a sudden famine,
poignant even as the emotion that flowed through her when Massingale had
held her in his arms.
But Snyder she could not understand. She paid no attention either to
Dodo or to the child, keeping always aloof, always with averted eyes.
This indifference revolted Dodo. How could any one care so little for a
child so young, so soft and so clinging! In her heart she resented it as
something inhuman and incomprehensible, until suddenly, one day, her
eyes were opened.
Their great enemy, the clock, had stolen around to the inexorable hour,
and Snyder had announced the moment of farewells by starting from the
trunk with a loud closing of her book.
"Time up!"
A cry from Betty, and a convulsive closing of arms about the protector.
"What! already?" said Dodo, with a sigh, coming back unwillingly from a
painless world of dreams.
"Past time!"
"Just five minutes more!"
"Dodo!"
"Oh, dear!" she said, with a last protesting hug. "What a dreadful
mother you have, Betty! How would you like to change mothers, young
lady?"
A giggle of delight and a furious nod of assent.
"I'll be your mother, and you can come and stay here all the day and all
the night, and then there'll be nothing but dolls and fairies and good
things to eat all the time! What do you say? Will you come and be my
little girl forever and ever and ever after?"
She had begun in a light tone, and had insensibly drifted into a tender
note, hushed and with a touch of real longing. All at once she looked
up, startled. Snyder had snatched the child from her--Snyder as she had
never seen her before, towering, with tortured eyes, stung to the quick.
"Why, Snyder!" she began. But the woman turned away quickly, with a
murmur, gone before she knew it.
She was startled at this incomprehensible revelation. "What? She's
jealous! Snyder jealous! But then, why does she act so indifferently to
Betty?" she thought, amazed.
Still other things puzzled her about her taciturn room-mate--one thing
in particular. Whenever Massingale came, Snyder was sure to appear,
hostility writ openly on her direct eyes. Dodo almost believed that she
had instituted an espionage.
For Massingale came in often now to her room after the close of the
court. She had found, with a new rebellion, that there were bars beyond
which she could not penetrate into his life, and much as she scorned the
conventionalities, she found that on certain points she could not move
him. In public places where they were apt to meet his world he refused
to take her unless a third was provided. When she declaimed he answered
abruptly:
"I am a public man; you don't understand."
And he flattered himself that on this side, his public life, he would
always be immovable, no matter what disorder she might exercise over the
rest of his existence. This brought her a strange feeling of being
outlawed, of standing beyond the pale. She resented it fiercely, not
realizing, perhaps, how much she cared, turning her anger against
society, vowing vengeance, more and more determined to flout and affront
it. Denied complete liberty to participate in his life, she had resolved
to bring him into hers. He agreed readily to meet her friends, seeing in
this a way to save appearances. Ida Summers amused him, but it was
Estelle Monks who interested him most.
Like most women of advanced ideas, she held her opinions, not so much as
convictions, but as a sort of revealed truth which it was her duty to
spread; and she was determined to inflict them on her listeners,
crushing out all disbelief, restless and unhappy before opposition. To
her, marriage was the arch-enemy. Woman suffrage she dismissed lightly.
"That's of so little account. Of course it will come, sooner or later.
That does not interest me. The great question between man and woman is
marriage!"
"Perhaps it were better to say the greatest problem that the human race
has had to consider," responded Massingale, smiling. "That's why we keep
putting off its readjustment. What would you do? Abolish it?"
"Some day, yes!" said Estelle, without evasion. "I say flatly that two
human beings weren't made to live together all the time. It may happen
once in a million times, and then--do we ever know? What I hate about
marriage is, it is so intellectually debasing: one has to lie all the
time to make the other happy, and then you end by lying to yourself!"
Massingale, awakened from a tolerant amusement to a quick curiosity by
her boldness, shifted to a more alert position, asking:
"Just in what way?"
"The thing I want to do," said Estelle Monks, her face lighting up with
enthusiasm, "is to think honestly, not to fool myself! Now what is
marriage? It is really an institution for the assembling and
transmission of property." ("Ah, she's been dipping into socialism,"
thought Massingale.) "Good! But, in order to make it convincing, we
Americans try to give it a romantic basis!"
"And you think that's worse?" said Dodo, opening her eyes.
"Much! That's where the lie begins! We swear not only to live together
in a business partnership, but to love and adore each other, and to love
no one else for the rest of our lives."
"Why, Estelle!" exclaimed Dodo, who was profoundly shocked in her
deepest romanticism.
"Yes; and in order to bolster up this absurdity we have to corrupt our
whole literature. Young girls and men are brought up with the idea that
God, in some mysterious providence, has arranged for us a special
affinity--that there can be only one person to love in the whole world.
Why, some are so fanatic that they are certain that they shall go on
together riding a star for a few million years through a few trillion
spaces! Now, that's what I call fooling your intelligence!"
"Yet I know those who have been married forty years and still love!"
said Massingale seriously.
"As comrades or as lovers?" asked Estelle quickly. "Comradeship--yes,
that I admit: comradeship between man and woman, each equal, each free,
not forced to account to the other, comradeship such as exists between
you men--absolute loyalty, absolute trust, each working for the same
object, working together, an object outside of yourselves. That is life
and liberty! And what is the other--your marriage? Each sacrificing what
he doesn't want to sacrifice, unless, which is worse, one does all the
sacrificing. What happens now? A woman exists as a free being for
twenty--twenty-five years; then a man comes along and says, in so many
words:
"'If you have lived a virtuous life--which I have not--I will allow you
to renounce all your male friends, or retain those whom I approve of as
acquaintances, to limit your horizon to my home, to bear my children, to
accept my opinions, never to be interested in any other man but me, to
keep my house, amuse me when I'm tired, convince me of my superiority
over all other men, go where I must go, and age before I must age; and
in return for these favors I will swear to convince you that I have
loved no other woman but you, will blind my eyes to all other women but
you, and, if I die first, you will find me waiting patiently by the
pearly gates!'"
Her listeners acclaimed this sally with shrieks of laughter.
"May I ask, out of curiosity," said Massingale,--for, these
conversations being serious, frankness was the rule,--"how you feel
toward my sex--your oppressors?"
"Being a healthy woman who enjoys life," said Estelle simply, "I like
men very much--better than women, who are to me usually nothing but
sounding-boards. More, it pleases me exceedingly to attract men, and to
be attracted!"
"And if you fall in love, temporarily? Or perhaps--"
"Not at all! I desire very much to find a man big enough, courageous
enough, so that I could love him. When I do, I shall live with him
openly!"
Massingale looked up, rather startled; but Estelle, without
embarrassment, in her simple fanatic way, continued:
"I should hope that it might be for life. If it were not, there should
be no tyranny. Only, whatever I do will be done honestly and openly:
when such a man comes I shall announce it frankly to my friends and to
those who have a right to know!"
Massingale was about to interject that she would be a long time finding
a man who, on his side, would have the courage to assume such
responsibility; but a certain analogy to his own predicament tripped up
his impulse and made him change his remark.
"Others have thought the same, theoretically," he said carefully. "Few
have dared to put it into practise."
"Which is immoral, that or nine-tenths of the marriages to-day? Am I
selling myself, as many a woman in your world does who marries for
ambition and retreats under the mockery of a legal phrase? And when love
has changed into indifference or hate, is there anything more horrible,
more brutalizing, than marriage, and is such a woman anything but a paid
mistress? I know women who tell me their stories, who look at marriage
as a sort of social umbrella. And they are right! Society demands only
appearances; it never cares what goes on under the umbrella! That's why
I want to live honestly and think honestly, and that's why I intend to
have the courage to live as a free and self-respecting, intelligent
human being!"
These extraordinary sentiments were pronounced with the fire of the
revolutionary; nor was all that she had earnestly proclaimed without its
effect on him. He did not seek to amuse himself, but, impressed as if
seeking to perceive the extent of what might be coming, he asked:
"One question. You are a good reporter. You go everywhere, and women
talk to you frankly. How many share your ideas?"
"As ideas--many!" said Estelle. "Unfortunately, women are still what
history has forced them to be; their courage is in deceiving!"
"I know it is so!" said Massingale, aroused in a way that Dodo had never
seen him--a perception which was allied with a little jealousy that
Estelle should thus appeal to him. "It is inevitable, too. Women who are
in revolt to-day see in marriage the instrument of all their
oppressions. It is natural that women are resisting the idea of
marriage. But they are doing so blindly. They do not distinguish between
marriage as an ideal, and the defective conception of marriage: just as
people who violently attack the shortcomings of the church confuse a
human instrument with a divine religion. I can answer you at once. Are
you perfect? Am I perfect? Why, then, should marriage, which is the
union of imperfect beings, be a perfect thing?"
"But such a union as I believe in would be a true marriage!" said
Estelle Monks, restless under the doubts his words had brought to her
philosophy. "You'll answer, 'Marry and divorce.' But that's all
quibbling; my way is more honest!"
He did not continue the conversation, wondering to what extent Dodo had
been listening to such an advanced apostle; but he said:
"Miss Monks, you're very honest, and I know you believe all you say;
but--don't be offended if I tell you this!--opinions change with
experience, and you have not yet had that experience with actual
conditions that is necessary!"
Estelle Monks, piqued at this answer which precluded argument, rose
stiffly and went out.
"Why did you say that?" asked Dodo reproachfully, yet not displeased to
be left alone in the tete-a-tete which he usually avoided.
He was in a serious mood, and because he wished to be honest in his own
mind, he answered warily:
"She is too fine a type. I'd hate to see her make a mistake!"
He was thinking how much of what Estelle Monks had said applied to his
own marriage. What a mockery it was, and what right had two human beings
who were driven apart by every personal antipathy--physical, mental and
spiritual--to go on, bound by a convention, preventing each other from
seeking happiness elsewhere? And, remembering her attack on marriage as
the slavery of woman, he thought bitterly that she had expressed only
half the truth. He was, indeed, neither married nor a free man, checked
in every impulse, denied at every turn.
"What are you frowning about?" said Dodo.
He answered hastily in that language which, as has been said, was given
us to conceal our thoughts:
"I was wondering how much she had affected you!"
"Not the least!" said Dodo, adding impulsively: "And yet, that is just
what I feel!"
"You, Dodo?" he said anxiously.
She went to him with a sudden enthusiasm, taking his hands, perhaps
subconsciously divining the bitter personal reflection that had been
going on in his mind, feeling the moment to be propitious.
"Ah, let me tell you now what I want for us!" she began ardently.
"The great dream, Dodo?" he said, smiling.
"Yes, a dream, but a dream that will come true!" She hesitated, and
standing before him, her eyes lighted up by the penetration of a woman,
a glance that left him confused, she said directly: "You think you
understand me? You don't; but I understand you! You are afraid of me!
You love me, but you try not to, because you are afraid of me!"
"How?" he asked lamely.
"Because you think that I want to interfere in your life. Oh, yes, you
do! I remember the look in your face when I was romancing about Sassoon,
making him divorce--you remember, when you asked if that was what I
intended to do with you?"
"I was joking!"
"Not entirely! There's been a good deal of such thoughts back of your
eyes. You are afraid I'll take it into my little head to be Mrs.
Massingale. Don't deny it, Your Honor; I know! That's where you are
totally wrong. I hate marriage; I could not stand it a month!" she said
curtly. And she continued dramatically, stretching out her hand: "I
swear to you now that, whatever happens, I will never be your wife! I've
told you I would take nothing from you; I mean it!"
He watched her, erect and impassioned, weakly conscious of the dominion
she had established over every craving and every impulse.
"Ah, no, no!" she exclaimed indignantly. "It's nothing so commonplace I
want! There's only one love possible to me--a great transcending
passion, which would be so far above all earthly things that a year--a
month--would compensate for a whole life of loneliness! Don't you see,
it's love, an immense love, such as only comes once in a million times,
that I'm seeking?"
"How?"
Suddenly her mood leaped into playfulness, her eyes sparkled with
delight, and her clasped hands pillowed themselves against her cheek, as
if imprisoning in a caress a beautiful and precious thought.
"First, let's run away--away from all this ugliness, from all these
eyes, from all this hateful, noisy, black-and-brown city! Run away! Oh,
that's such a wonderful idea in itself, to go flying through the night,
just you and I, leaving it all behind, to a place I dream of night and
day--to some wonderful island, far off in the Pacific, where we can be
alone, live for ourselves!"
He did not check her, though he was wondering from what book she had
found such ideas, curious to learn to what extent she had visualized her
romance.
"And how long would you keep the island, Dodo?"
"Not long!" she said quietly. "Perhaps a year, perhaps only a season.
That must be agreed; and when the dream is over we would come back!"
"And then?"
"And then we would separate and never see each other again!"
"Why?"
"So that it could never become commonplace or stale--so that it could
live in our lives as the one great memory, with no regrets."
She stopped, looked at him tensely, and went on:
"You would take up your life again, and I would bury myself in my
career, and you would watch me, little by little, become a great name!"
"And never see each other--"
"Perhaps when we are quite old," she said suddenly. "You won't believe
me! I would do it!" She clasped her hands tumultuously over her heart.
"Oh, how easily I would do it! Ah, to have such a romance--anything
might come!"
"What book have you been reading?" he asked quietly--yet feeling a
little sad that he could not follow where her lawless imagination ran.
She turned away hotly, clenching her fists, crying:
"Ah, you will never let go of yourself! You are afraid--afraid of
everything!"
He followed her, laying a hand on her shoulder as she stood by the
window.
"Keep your island in southern seas!" he said, with such emotion in his
voice that she wheeled about. "Believe in it all you want, extraordinary
child, even if it ends by my paying all the penalty. Go on with your
day-dreaming."
His glance lay in hers, his arms were longing to take her into them,
when Snyder entered, with a quick knock that gave them only time to
spring apart. At this moment Dodo could have driven her out, fiercely
rebelling against this constant espionage. What right had Snyder or any
one to interfere with her liberty, or to say whom she should see? She
resolved hotly to have an explanation when she returned. Now it was
necessary to master her emotion.
"A moment--a moment to change my dress; ready in ten minutes!"
She ran quickly to trunk and bureau, gathering up her articles of
dress; disappearing behind a screen in the corner. Massingale, after a
calculating glance at the figure of Snyder, rigid in the window, sat
down, drawing a magazine to him. He no longer felt the unease he had
experienced at the woman's first interruption. It seemed so natural to
be there, in the musty high room, littered with trunks, with its patches
of carpet and incongruous wall-paper.
In the closet, behind a discreetly closed door, Dodo was laughing at her
narrow quarters. Outside, through the windows, the marshaled city was
setting its lights for Christmas Eve--thousands on thousands of human
beings disciplined under the old order of what is called right and
wrong, the millions who never really entered _his_ life and for whose
approval his every word and action must be calculated.
"Snyder, come and button me!" called Dodo, emerging from the closet
behind the screen.
She felt nothing unusual in this hidden change of dress, but to him the
touch of intimacy aroused more than his curiosity.
When they descended to the closed car, gaily brushing the snowflakes
from each other, a little moved by all that had passed, feeling, too,
the obliterating unrealities of dark streets and lights glistening amid
the obscurity, he said:
"Dodo, I wish it could be!"
"It can, it can!" she answered impulsively, excited at his approach to
consent.
"The world's too big for us!"
"Some men would have the courage!"
"The trouble is, I am born under a curse," he said moodily. "I'm
limited--a gentleman: that's the best and the worst of me!"
"A gentleman!" she repeated scornfully. "Yes, that's the whole of it!
That's why you're afraid of everything--why you'll never, never dare!"
"That's true, Dodo!"
"And what is a gentleman?" she asked angrily.
He looked beyond her at the lighted windows of his club, arrogantly set
in judgment over the multitude on the avenue, and answered, in mockery:
"A gentleman, Dodo, is one who is a gentleman because he associates with
those who are gentlemen because they associate with him!"
She did not laugh at this; there was more below it than the sarcasm.
Presently she drew his hand into hers.
"How much you need me, Your Honor!" she said softly. "What is the rest
worth? Let me guide you!"
He did not reply. In fact, he knew too well that he had surrendered
already, and in that moment, he said to himself that he would take his
courage in his hands--that now, before the week had ended, he would go
to his wife and claim from her his liberty, whatever her terms.
Dore returned early, after a dinner at the Hickory Log, riotous with the
Christmas cheer. Massingale had an engagement; she wished to be in her
room, childlike, eager for the excitement of arriving presents. Besides,
she had planned a tree for Betty, and with Ida's aid, she set
delightedly to the task of arranging candles, twining tinsel, tying up
presents in neat tissue-paper with enticing bows of red ribbon. She had
depleted her slender treasury in presents for Betty, having bought
almost a dozen, inscribing each from some imaginary fairy prince or
goblin whom they had met in their enchanted wanderings.
By ten o'clock the tree was completed, the pile of her own presents had
stopped at respectable proportions, and the wanderlust having come,
Dodo--not without a little feeling of treachery to Massingale--allowed
herself to be persuaded, and departed for a "spree." When they returned
in Peavey's automobile, which Dodo had commandeered, there was already a
slight covering of snow, and at the windows the slipping wheels flung
flurries of white flakes.
"I can't bear an old masher--a fossil that's falling to pieces!" said
Ida gaily, returning over the events of the evening. "Did you see that
old Caxton, that was buzzing around me all evening?"
Dodo laughed.
"He started after me, but I shook him!"
"Heavens, Do, how do you manage? I never can!"
"I gave him an awful shock," explained Dodo, continuing to laugh. "He'd
been looking at me with big wolf eyes, licking his chops and telling me
he'd leave his happy home for me--you know the stuff. He had me cornered
at the upper table, and just as I started to slip away he caught my
arm.
[Illustration: She was riotous with Christmas cheer]
"'And what's your fairy name, you darling?' says he.
"And I answered:
"'Gussie!'
"You should have seen the face he made! He dropped me like a hot
potato!"
Then she was silent, deliciously cradled in her own thoughts, convincing
herself that what yesterday had seemed but a faint dream was now a
possibility, visualizing, in dormant balmy seas, an island all white and
green, a fairy island as enchanted as the kingdoms which each day she
constructed for Betty's wondering eyes. To be Mrs. Massingale, to enter
into all the irksome routine of formal society--no, that had no appeal!
A year or a season in a world of her own, a great romance, a love that
would sweep them up like the magnificently reckless storms of passion
which came to her over the inspired motives of _Tristan and
Isolde_--that, and then a life of work and accomplishment, a career.
All at once, as the skidding automobile slowed and sloughed about a
corner, a group under a lamp-post, black and silhouetted against the
snow, sprang across the fragile fabric of her dreams out of the horrid
world of reality--a figure that scattered all selfish thoughts and
overwhelmed her with the power of a great remorse. She leaned forward
precipitately, beating on the window for Brennon to stop, and even in
the moment of her disorder, true to the Salamander instinct, she
explained hastily:
"A cousin--oh, dear! he's been on a spree for months; the family's
distracted. Stop! Wait--I must get hold of him. No, no; let me out!"
And to Ida's amazement, opening the door, heedless of the slush on her
delicate feet, of the bitter night, of what any one would
think,--obeying only an irresistible cry from her soul,--Dodo had sprung
out and run to the sidewalk, where the ghost of Lindaberry, come up from
the abyss, was standing embattled, torn and disheveled, magnificently
crazed, and at his feet a policeman, knocked out.