When a man has taken a step across those limits which society imposes on
his conduct, he immediately begins, with a certain anxiety, to seek for
the visible results in those events, ordinary or extraordinary, which
affect his prosperity. From the time of Massingale's meeting with Dodo,
everything had succeeded with him. He had had a period of unusual
success in the stock market. Property which he had accepted in lieu of a
debt had unexpectedly proved necessary to the approaches of a new bridge
and had returned him ten times its value. His kennel had swept
everything before it in the Dog Show, and in the daily sessions at the
card table his run of luck had continued with extraordinary persistence.
Finally, the newspapers, lately, had given him columns of publicity.
Certain criticisms which he had passed on the haphazard conduct of
justice had been taken up and had set in movement great machines of
investigation, which threatened an overturn at the coming municipal
elections. As a consequence, he had received proffers of advancement,
and a political career seemed within his reach.
Whatever vague rumblings of conscience may have stirred within him, they
were, in a measure, stilled by these evidences of the good favor in
which he stood with Providence since Dodo's introduction into his life.
He was resolved to see in her the explanation of all that was favorable,
and he repeated, in daily self-justification, that if she brought him
this good luck, there could be no great harm, else a moral Heaven
certainly would not continue to shower him with blessings. He did not
express the feeling in so many words, but it existed, half avowed, as
often, when tendered a match, he would say to himself:
"If it remains lighted until it reaches me, it is a favorable sign!"
The first disagreeable shock had come in the form of a message from
Harrigan Blood saying that he would oppose any attempt to raise
Massingale to the Court of General Sessions. The message was delivered
by a mutual friend with intimations that, on account of certain sides of
his personal life, it would be better not to lay himself open to the
attack of a vindictive antagonist. The truth was that Harrigan Blood,
since the day when Dodo had been so unfortunately inspired as to bring
them together, had conceived the idea that the luncheon had been
arranged with the express purpose of making him ridiculous, and that
Massingale had been a party to the plot. From the first he had felt the
humiliation of the role he had been forced to play with Dodo. The
quarrel with Sassoon had been costly; his sense of pride had been
cruelly tried; on top of which the thought that she had paraded him for
the delectation of a favored rival was unbearable to his sensitive vain
nature. He took his revenge thus, from a need of feeling that at the
end the ridicule would not rest on his side. Massingale knew the man too
well to have any doubts as to his yielding. If the political campaign
were to be entered, he saw now that it would mean a distressing facing
of every indignity. It was the threat, perhaps, more than the
deprivation, that annoyed him; for at the bottom he had now come to a
full realization of the utter disorganization which the pursuit of Dodo
must inevitably bring him.
The morality of a man of the world after forty is largely a question of
what is, and what is not, done. Massingale, without being aware of it,
possessed this code to an unusual degree. Petty political grafting was
something of which he would have been simply incapable, from a pride of
caste. There were certain vices that were associated with a lower order
of human beings. Courage, in such surroundings, was as requisite to a
gentleman as recklessness before the consequences of a five-foot leap in
the hunting-field. So, with Dore, his moral code of good manners (which
might be expressed as eligibility to club membership) could not permit
what, to the eyes of the world, must appear as a deliberate seduction.
Despite the depths of infatuation into which he had plunged, the genuine
outcry of his whole nature, the intense and ceaseless longing with which
he was consumed, he never for a moment contemplated anything but the
permissible: divorce and remarriage.
This decisive step he had contemplated now for more than two months,
approaching and retreating. At times he had been on the point of
breaking in tempestuously on his wife and delivering an ultimatum, and
the next day he had thanked heaven for the accident that had prevented a
crisis. He was afraid of Dodo. Never for a moment had he placed the
slightest faith in her romantic dramatization of a lawless elopement.
Beyond that, a future in which she should join him as his wife was
illegible to his eyes. He was too profoundly sensible of the utter
change she had effected in his life not to fear where he might follow.
He found that she consumed his day; that only the moments spent with her
were vital. His old associations bored him.
His club friends of his age seemed hopelessly and incomprehendingly old.
In their presence he felt unaccountably young, eager for youth. The
evenings when Dodo punished him by departing with mysterious others were
intolerably long and heavy. And then he suffered! He came to know all
the torments of jealousy, hatred and submission violently reacting.
A little thing had perhaps more influence on his decision at this moment
than anything else--the ring which Lindaberry had given Dodo, and of
which she would furnish no explanation. This ring haunted him, terrified
him. He was a keen enough observer to perceive instinctively its
threat--that back of it was a deep import, not a mere passing
entanglement of a week. Something else there was in her life, of major
importance, he felt, strong enough to threaten him. Finally, on the
night he had taken Dodo in his car after her meeting with Nebbins, this
feeling of jealousy and alarm had become so intensified that he had
suddenly flung the future to the winds, and determined to be rid of the
pain, the frenzy and the miserable longing which his resistance brought
him in daily torture.
When he returned to his home, he learned from the footman at the door
that Mrs. Massingale had entered half an hour before. He went directly
to her rooms, giving himself no time for hesitation or reflection.
"Who is it?" cried a startled voice at his knock.
"It's I; may I come in?"
"But I'm not dressed! Is it serious?"
"Yes! Put on a dressing-gown!"
A moment later he entered. His wife, a frail, neurasthenic, thinly
pretty woman of forty, was standing with a peignoir hastily clutched
about her, a towel in hand, hastily rubbing off the cream with which her
maid had been industriously massaging her face. On the dressing-table
was a heap of hair in disordered braids. The mellow shades on the
electric candles flung frightened shadows on the sharp oval face and the
penciled eyebrows, that took flight above the nervous eyes, now white
with an exaggerated alarm.
"Send"--he did not even know the name of his wife's maid--"send her
away!"
"Lucille, _laissez-moi; je vous sonnerai plus tard_!" Mrs. Massingale
said directly, her eyes on her husband's face. She went to the door,
closing it and came swiftly back.
"Harold, what is it?" she cried breathlessly. "Are we ruined?"
"No!" he said, with a touch of irony in his voice. "No; it is not money
matters!"
She had seen the specter of bankruptcy before her eyes at his
incomprehensible entrance. She shuddered and regained her self-control
with a sigh, closing her wrapper more tightly over the disarray at her
breast, as if suddenly aware of impropriety in the presence of this man
who had entered her rooms after years.
"Sit down!" he said, straddling a chair and resting his arms on the
back. "Clara, I am very--I am exceedingly unhappy!"
At the sound of his voice, more than from the authority in his manner,
her alarm flashed up anew. She seated herself hesitatingly, scenting
instinctively the approach of some formless danger. For a second she had
a grotesque thought, caused by the sudden irruption on her cherished
privacy, that he was going to ask her to surrender her own apartment and
return to his.
"Well, well! What is it?" she asked, finally prepared to resist such
brutality.
"Clara, I want my liberty!"
She relaxed a little. His liberty? She had never for a moment opposed
that!
"This life I am leading is a ghastly mockery! I want it to end! I want
to be able to lead my own life. I want a divorce!"
She rose in her seat, stretched out her hand and stammered:
"What?"
"I have come to tell you that I am resolved to divorce!"
"Divorce!"
All at once she fell back, limp and swooning, her head fallen forward on
her breast. He rose, searched among the bottles, found smelling-salts,
and methodically, not quite convinced, held them to her nostrils. Then,
when she started, he placed the bottle on her lap and resumed his seat.
Her first emotion, on returning from the dizziness which had not been
altogether assumed, was one of profound astonishment. After almost
twenty years of married life, when she felt the completest security,
when her life had run smoothest along the roads she herself had
directed, all at once everything was threatened, without her being able
to perceive at what point she had committed an error.
"You said--divorce?" she said weakly, staring at him.
"Yes! I have come to ask you to make no opposition, if I make whatever
provision you desire for yourself."
Before the detail of his manner she could no longer cherish any doubt.
She became suddenly the woman of astuteness and cunning that she really
was, gathering every energy to ward off the blow.
"You are not serious! It is impossible that you can be serious!" she
began. She rose quickly, and gliding to the door, assured herself that
Lucille was not eavesdropping.
"I never was more serious in my life!"
"Then let me say right here--and I will never change," she said,
returning defiantly,--"I am Mrs. Massingale. That is my name; that is my
position in the world. I will never surrender it. I will never, never
consent to a divorce, on any grounds whatsoever!"
"Let us discuss!" he said quietly, resolved to push the matter no
further than the statement of intention, and, above all, to preserve his
self-respect.
"Discuss? There is nothing to discuss!" she cried, with rising anger.
"What have you to reproach me with? I have been a faithful wife all my
married life. I have never made you ridiculous; I have never dishonored
your name! Of how many women can you say the same in our world? I have
run your house for you, and I have let you go your way, lead your life,
do as you pleased, without complaint! And now, I am the one to be
sacrificed? Never! You may have your idea of marriage. I have mine! I
regard it as a holy sacrament that nothing can divide but death!"
"Clara, I warn you," he said quietly, "that the matter is too serious
for scenes. I am fully resolved!"
"So am I!"
"May I ask you what our marriage has been?" he said, growing angry in
spite of himself. "Yes, I believe in all you say, when marriage is a
marriage! But when it is simply a convenient legal phrase to yoke
together two human beings who have not the slightest interest in common
in the world--"
"What?"
"My dear Clara," he said icily, "let me say a few plain words to you! We
have lived twenty years together as you have wished it and as I have
agreed. This house might be a hotel, and we passing guests, for all the
marriage there has been to it! Let's go back! You married me for money
and position!"
"Harold! I--"
"Don't lie!" he said, forced at last into the inevitable brutality of
matrimonial discussion. "You never loved me! You loved what I had to
give you! Come, you're not going to pretend, now, that there ever was a
question of love in it? But then I thought so! You were very clever!
More, you even made me believe--you, a young girl--that you loved me
passionately, that you were capable of passion! You succeeded, as you
intended, in carrying me off my feet!"
She looked at him, incapable of retort, overwhelmed with shame. She had
never believed, in all these years, that he had comprehended this.
"Afterward I discovered the truth!" he continued. "I found I had united
myself fatuously with a perfectly cold woman, to whom I was even
repulsive!"
"Harold!"
"Physically speaking!" he added. "Who was cunningly intent on pushing me
out of the way, and building up a hollow, conventionally brilliant,
social life of her own. I ended by shrugging my shoulders and taking
what I could out of the world in an amused, dilettante way. Every word I
say is true! And now, when at forty-five I have the chance to live the
life you denied me, you would stop me by any such mummery as the
sacredness of this marriage! What? You would prevent me now when I come
to you gently, quietly, and say to you: 'I love, I want to live, I want
to be free from a bond that is nothing to you, to know what is
real'--when I ask you to give me a chance to find in another what you
scorn to give!"
"But you speak only of the physical!" she cried, aghast.
"No; I speak of the difference between the living and the dead!" he
cried passionately. "I speak of a woman who, when she is in your arms,
clings to you and cries out words of love, whose eyes shine with your
coming, who listens for your step, who doesn't hide behind prudery, but
adores you as a living, throbbing human being, who is not ashamed of her
love, who is natural, whose lips have kisses and whose arms seize you to
her, who has youth, fire, life!"
"But you are mad, infatuated! You don't know what you are saying!" she
cried, recoiling in terror. "But then, you wish to marry again!"
"Again? No! I want a real marriage!" he cried.
There was a pause, during which he brought himself back to calm, and she
rapidly ran over in her mind the possible woman in her own set who might
have thus awakened him.
"Clara, do not let us lose our sense of dignity," he said solemnly. "I
do not expect you to answer to-night."
"I will never consent!" she cried, flaring up.
"I don't expect your answer to-night," he repeated slowly. "I shall
return here to-morrow afternoon at four. By that time you will have
reflected; you will perceive the monstrous iniquity of keeping me from a
happiness that is perfectly indifferent to you. Moreover, I will make
any settlement on you that you indicate. You will probably realize by
that time that nothing in your mode of living need be changed; this
house shall be yours; all that is sacrificed is a little vanity, the
public recognition of a loss that has never meant anything to you!"
"Wait!" she said, with a rapid calculation. "Do I know the woman? Is it
one of my friends?"
"It is not! It is some one, a young girl, from an entirely different
world," he replied, and went out.
She remained embattled, and yet with the hovering sense of defeat,
striving to explain the catastrophe.
"Ah, if I had had a child this never could have happened!" she cried all
at once, striking her forehead.
Despite his assurance, the next day, after a night of horror, she called
up a dozen friends, seeking fruitlessly to learn of the woman. She
consulted three of her most particular confidantes as to what course she
should adopt. All three agreed on absolute resistance. The first said to
her:
"My dear, treat him as a friend. Be sympathetic! Find out who she is.
Point out to him that she is intriguing for his money. Act, not as an
enemy, but as an adviser!"
The second added:
"Pretend to consider the proposition; then ask him for a year's delay,
for his sake and for yours, to be sure that it is not a passing
infatuation. In a year, especially if there is no opposition, great
changes can take place!"
The third agreed with the others, with this addition:
"In a year he will either grow tired of her, or she will have become his
mistress, and he may become thoroughly satisfied with the arrangement.
Whatever you do, delay!"
At four o'clock, as the last adviser was hurrying out, Massingale
entered. She was instantly struck with the intensity of the emotion that
consumed him, which laid the telltale shadows of its fatigue in the
hollows about his eyes and the stern drawn lines of his mouth.
"Before we go any further," she said carefully, "since I am to be
sacrificed, may I at least ask you a few questions?"
"That is fair!" he said, deceived by her tone into a bounding hope that
she would consent.
"Are you perfectly sure of this young girl, Harold?"
"Absolutely!"
"Who is she?"
He hesitated a moment.
"She is twenty-two; she is from the Middle West; she has been a little
on the stage."
"And you are sure that she is disinterested?"
"Absolutely!"
"You are at the age when men are victims of such infatuations!" she
said, looking down. "Perhaps I myself have been to blame! If you will
wait a year, be sure, positively sure"--she stopped, blushed red, and
said rapidly--"I will try to be to you, Harold, all that you want."
Even in the tensity of the moment, the incongruity of this unexpected
solution struck him as so sublimely ludicrous that he laughed aloud.
Also he perceived her maneuver, at once undeceived. She drew herself up,
stung to the soul, prey to an anger that swept aside all caution.
"Well, no! I will never consent! You shall never have a divorce so long
as I can stop it! Go, live with your mistress."
"She is not my mistress!" he said, white with anger.
"A girl on the stage! You are ridiculous! You will make yourself the
laughing-stock of New York, my dear fellow, with your little girl! And
you think she loves you? Fool! don't you know what her game is?"
"Don't judge all women by yourself, Clara Bayne!" he said between his
teeth, giving her her girlhood name. But instantly, digging his nails in
his hands, he said in a different tone: "I beg your pardon! I am very
irritated, in a very nervous state. I don't want to lose control of
myself! Clara, you are too generous, too honest a woman, deliberately to
force her to be my mistress!"
"I force her?" she cried furiously. "If she has taken the love of a
married man, she is that already! Let her go on!"
"Do you mean this?" he said sternly.
"I certainly do!"
"You will not give the woman I love and respect the right to be my
wife--to love me honestly before the world? Do you mean this?"
"I am your wife, and you shall never take that from me!"
"You have never been my wife!" he cried, beside himself. "You, a pure
girl, deliberately set about to win me, as a _cocote_ does! Wife? You
have taken my money to pay for your pleasures and your luxuries, and you
have not even been my mistress! You a moral woman!"
"How dare you?" she cried, unrecognizable in her rage.
"A last time. Will you permit me to get a divorce?"
"No!" She uttered it as a shriek, fallen back against the wall.
"Then, madam, I will force you to do it!" he exclaimed, slamming his
fist on a little table with such violence that it sent a shower of books
clattering to the floor.
He left her clinging to the wall, choking with rage, descended to his
car, and gave Dodo's address. The interview had left him in just that
state of frenzy he needed to do the thing he would have hesitated long
to do in his day of calm. The life that he had claimed from his wife
rose up doubly precious to him for the proclaiming. He would cut off his
wife without a cent; he would force her to sue him for abandonment, if
not from shame, from positive necessity. Anyhow, the die was cast! He
had cut away from all the old life! He would go with Dodo to-night,
racing into the new, as she had wished. After a few months, a year,
abroad, traveling in hidden countries, when his wife had come to her
senses and procured a divorce, he would marry Dodo. They would not come
back to New York, but the world was wide. Marriage exalted everything.
He would not be the first so to do. Abroad, in Paris, London, Rome, such
romances were understood. He jumped out and ran hastily up the stairs,
knocked, and came tempestuously into the room.
He saw her with hands clasped over her breast, standing tremulously
sweet, swaying with fear of his coming. He held out his arms, caught her
violently to him, buried his head in the cool regions of her neck,
caressed by the fragrant youth of her hair, uttering but one word:
"Come!"
She heard it, rather frightened, alarmed, too, at the personal disorder
that shook him like a leaf, alarmed at the man who had at last come to
where she had wished him. She said to herself, incredulously, that she
was happy--wildly, deliriously happy; and she remained quiet, passing
her hands soothingly over his bent head, alert, as if listening for some
sound in the air.
"You will come?" he said suddenly, holding her from him.
"Yes!" she said in a whisper.
"Now--to-night--far off--with me?"
"Yes! How has it happened?" she said breathlessly. "Why now? Why are you
willing, all at once?"
"Because I no longer care for anything else but you!" he
cried--"friends, career, reputation. Because I can't live without you,
Dodo! Because nothing else in life is life but you! Because I've come to
hate it all--the rest! Dodo, I love you! I can't be without you!"
"At last!" she said mechanically, staring at him.
She did not draw away, though his lips sought hers. She longed for that
oblivion which had first come to her in his arms, that quieting of the
senses that drew the day from before her eyes and closed her ears to all
but the faintest, far-off murmurings. She did not resist, but eagerly
awaited this masculine mastery that once had awakened all the slumbering
passionate fires within her. She wanted to forget again, to be
overwhelmed, balanced in his arms, a weak contented thing, leaping
hungrily to his contact, delirious and on fire. But no such oblivion
arrived. She felt herself poignantly awake, curiously, critically
conscious of a hundred questions against her brain, wondering at him, at
his frenzy--feeling none herself, nor knowing why.
All at once from the other room the voice of Snyder startled them,
singing raucously:
"Who are you with to-night, to-night?
Oh, who are you with to-night?
Will you tell your wife in the morning
Who you are with to-night?"
He straightened up suddenly, recollecting himself.
"Ah, no! Don't go!" she cried, as she had on that first night when they
had been swept together. He seemed so strange to her now! She wanted to
have time to know him, this new Massingale!
"No, no!" he said hoarsely. "I don't dare--I can't--it's beyond me!
Dodo, at seven o'clock can you be ready?"
"Two hours only!"
"Take only a valise. Let everything be new! Can you do it?"
"Yes!"
"I will go and arrange my affairs, make preparations and be back here at
seven precisely. We'll dine, and then--the night express for the West,
as you wished!"
"Yes!"
"I will telephone. You will come down. I will be at the corner, waiting,
at seven!"
"Yes!"
He caught her again in his arms, lifting her off her feet, half mad with
recklessness and impatience, and started toward the door. Suddenly he
turned, came back, and catching her shoulders in his two hands, looked
at her savagely.
"What is it?" she said faintly. Could this be what she had made of
Massingale?
"I am throwing everything to the winds, Dodo!--giving up my whole life
for you!" he said breathlessly. "You will come, Dodo?"
"I will--I must!" she said in wonder.