_Grand Hôtel des Wagon-lits. April 17th. Later._
|I HELPED Heloise get her things back to our little hotel last night.
Then I packed a bag and came over here and took a room.
She did n't say anything when I told her I was going to do this. But I
am sure she realizes that it is the only thing to do. It disturbs me
to think of her alone over there. But now that she is known to half the
white people in Peking, I will not permit myself to stay there with her.
I will not have her talked about on any new grounds. And now that I am
beginning to understand her, I see clearly enough that I must protect
her. Lately it has seemed to me that none of the more artificial
restraints that society accepts as necessary details of a working code
mean much to her.
I begin to think that in certain fine ways women are more primitive
than men. In the sense, I mean, that their deeper emotional nature lies
closer to the roots of life than ours does. They are more elementally
natural, harder to sophisticate. They feel more swiftly and surely,
without the elaborate intellectual machinery that men find it necessary
to call into use in order to arrive at conclusions. In certain respects
they are deeper and bigger than we are.
I have read all this in the books, of course--years ago--but never
before believed it in the sense that belief implies personal experience
and understanding.
_April 18th. Morning. (At the Wagon-lits)._
|YES, I was right in moving over here. Heloise admitted it to-day. I
asked her if she did n't agree with me, and she said she had come to
think that my judgment is better than hers in these matters. God knows,
I am unworldly enough--sometimes I feel that she and I are nothing but
a couple of babes in the woods of life--but at least I am a bit more
worldly than she.
And I was right in insisting that we go right on with our plan, as
if nothing had happened. I have forced myself to go over the whole
difficult business, thinking it out step by step; and I was right.
It _is_ a difficult business. Sometimes, at night, when my imagination
slips out of control and dream-pictures come of a home of my own, it is
almost more than I can bear. Last night I had to switch on the lights
and work until daylight over the notes for Volume Six. (That is to be
the section devoted to “True Intervals and Natural Song.”)
I am driving myself to think constantly of the other side of the
picture--to realize how beautiful Heloise is, what a person she is and
what a voice she has. No home that I could conceivably offer her would
be large enough to contain her life. And when I construct in my mind
the years during which she would have to fight her own inclinations,
deliberately confine her activities and build barriers against the
growth of her own soul, my resolution strengthens. If it is hard to give
her up now, it would be impossible then. I know myself well enough
to know what I should be and do, then. I would be jealous of her very
bigness. I would, likely as not, come to hate her beauty, her voice,
her capacity for work. I would fight to make a _Hausfrau_ of her, with
babies, and meals to get--meals for me!--and sweeping and dusting to
look after. And then, should I succeed in that miserable purpose; should
I have to realize, every day and every night, with her beauty fading
and with that wonderful edge on her voice becoming blunted and the tones
growing uneven and foggy, that I had shut her out of the chance
for growth that God gave her--this, after she had already taken one
desperate, tragic step toward freedom--should I find myself forced to
live, day after day, year after year, with any such realization as that,
I think the time would come when I would want to kill myself.
The man who deliberately stops a woman's growth--no matter what his
traditions and beliefs; no matter what his fears for her--is doing a
monstrous thing, a thing for which he must some day answer to the God of
all life.
As civilization stands now, the woman who marries shuts herself out
from the possibility of a career. Not in every instance, of course; but
certainly in such an average, modest marriage as mine would have to
be. I have some means, of course; but not nearly enough. And it is not
likely that I shall ever “make” money in any large way.
No, I really don't believe the thing can be done. Not yet. I like
to hope that some day the world will become more nearly civilized as
regards marriage. But first we must make it less a matter of land and
houses and goods, and of woman as property along with these. And I think
we shall probably come to some system of paying woman directly for the
great service of child-bearing and rearing. Yes, we men must give up
the last shreds of our thought of woman as a personal possession. We are
farther from that, still, than we realize, I think. I myself am far, far
from it. Where Hel-oise is concerned, I know perfectly well that I am
not to be trusted. God only knows what I would do, what I would come
to think and believe. For the magic that is always between us would
be confused in a thousand subtle ways with the heritage, of deep-lying
racial habits that are in me as in every other man.
But at least, I have come to see it. For this I am thankful.
_Late Afternoon. (still the 18th.)_
|HELOISE understands now. And she agrees that I am right. She will
accept the loan I suggested. And she will go to Paris.
She called up this afternoon--while I was writing.
“Anthony,” she said, “take me for a walk. It is stuffy here. I want some
air.”
So she started out, and I met her near the eastern end of Legation
Street.
“Just a little walk, Anthony,” she said. “I'm not getting any exercise
these days. I don't seem to want to go out alone any more.... Up on the
wall, Anthony, where we can feel the wind. And there won't be so much
dust.”
So we climbed the ramp, and walked from the Hatamen to the Chienmen
and back--two miles. South of us extended the Chinese city, that lies
outside the historic stronghold of the Manchus. Northward, as far as
we could see, stretched the Tartar capital, now all fresh green foliage
with bits of curving tile roofs peeping out in gray-brown patches. For
Peking is a city of trees.
We could see the brick walls of the Imperial City, and, within that, of
the Forbidden City itself; with its acres of glazed yellow roofs.
The Tartar wall is all of fifty feet high, and nearly as broad on the
top. Grass grows there; and there are parapets, and the casual ruins of
stone barricades where men have fought.
I told Heloise, while we walked, that I had worked it all out. I told
her, too, of a curious coincidence of this very morning. I picked up a
magazine in the hotel lounge, and, turning the pages, found my attention
arrested by an interview with some great singers. In that paper the
three finest living operatic sopranos agreed that marriage, home,
domesticity, could play no part in their lives.
I felt it my duty to tell her about this. We simply have got to face
these facts. And I must help keep up her courage with my own. Once she
finds herself established at Paris, her work going on, the stimulus
of new acquaintances and of fine music and of the stir and rush of
the Western World all about her, it will not be so hard, I think. At
present, the loneliness, the sense of distance from her own kind, and
the perplexing reactions of the tragedy that we have both had to pass
through, combine to bring her deep emotional self closer to the surface
than normal.
Then, of course, she is quite dependent on me. We do not speak of this;
but I know well enough that it is every moment in her thoughts.
We did not stay out long. It is most difficult when we are together.
I am going to start my own work at once. It is the only way to keep
steady--I can see that. I have letters to the American Minister. I shall
present them tomorrow.
We lingered at the door of her hotel. Neither of us wanted to say
good-by. We stood there for several moments without speaking. Then she
said:
“Will you come in?”