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SYLVIA’S MARRIAGE
A NOVEL
By Upton Sinclair
Author Of “The Jungle,” Etc., Etc.
London
SOME PRESS NOTICES
“The importance of the theme cannot be doubted, and no one hitherto
ignorant of the ravages of the evil and therefore, by implication, in
need of being convinced can refuse general agreement with Mr. Sinclair
upon the question as he argues it. The character that matters most is
very much alive and most entertaining.”--_The Times._
“Very severe and courageous. It would, indeed, be difficult to deny
or extenuate the appalling truth of Mr. Sinclair’s indictment.”-- _The
Nation._
“There is not a man nor a grown woman who would not be better for
reading Sylvia’s Marriage.”--_The Globe_
“Those who found Sylvia charming on her first appearance will find her
as beautiful and fascinating as ever.”--_The Pall Mall_.
“A novel that frankly is devoted to the illustration of the dangers
that society runs through the marriage of unsound men with unsuspecting
women. The time has gone by when any objection was likely to be taken to
a perfectly clean discussion of a nasty subject.”--_T.P.’s Weekly._
CONTENTS
BOOK I SYLVIA AS WIFE
BOOK II SYLVIA AS MOTHER
BOOK III SYLVIA AS REBEL
SYLVIA’S MARRIAGE
BOOK I. SYLVIA AS WIFE
1. I am telling the story of Sylvia Castleman. I should prefer to tell
it without mention of myself; but it was written in the book of fate
that I should be a decisive factor in her life, and so her story
pre-supposes mine. I imagine the impatience of a reader, who is promised
a heroine out of a romantic and picturesque “society” world, and
finds himself beginning with the autobiography of a farmer’s wife on a
solitary homestead in Manitoba. But then I remember that Sylvia found
me interesting. Putting myself in her place, remembering her eager
questions and her exclamations, I am able to see myself as a heroine of
fiction.
I was to Sylvia a new and miraculous thing, a self-made woman. I must
have been the first “common” person she had ever known intimately. She
had seen us afar off, and wondered vaguely about us, consoling herself
with the reflection that we probably did not know enough to be unhappy
over our sad lot in life. But here I was, actually a soul like herself;
and it happened that I knew more than she did, and of things she
desperately needed to know. So all the luxury, power and prestige that
had been given to Sylvia Castleman seemed as nothing beside Mary Abbott,
with her modern attitude and her common-sense.
My girlhood was spent upon a farm in Iowa. My father had eight children,
and he drank. Sometimes he struck me; and so it came about that at
the age of seventeen I ran away with a boy of twenty who worked upon
a neighbour’s farm. I wanted a home of my own, and Tom had some money
saved up. We journeyed to Manitoba, and took out a homestead, where I
spent the next twenty years of my life in a hand-to-hand struggle with
Nature which seemed simply incredible to Sylvia when I told her of it.
The man I married turned out to be a petty tyrant. In the first five
years of our life he succeeded in killing the love I had for him; but
meantime I had borne him three children, and there was nothing to do but
make the best of my bargain. I became to outward view a beaten drudge;
yet it was the truth that never for an hour did I give up. When I lost
what would have been my fourth child, and the doctor told me that I
could never have another, I took this for my charter of freedom, and
made up my mind to my course; I would raise the children I had, and grow
up with them, and move out into life when they did.
This was when I was working eighteen hours a day, more than half of
it by lamp-light, in the darkness of our Northern winters. When the
accident came, I had been doing the cooking for half a dozen men, who
were getting in the wheat upon which our future depended. I fell in my
tracks, and lost my child; yet I sat still and white while the men ate
supper, and afterwards I washed up the dishes. Such was my life in
those days; and I can see before me the face of horror with which Sylvia
listened to the story. But these things are common in the experience
of women who live upon pioneer farms, and toil as the slave-woman has
toiled since civilization began.
We won out, and my husband made money. I centred my energies upon
getting school-time for my children; and because I had resolved that
they should not grow ahead of me, I sat up at night, and studied their
books. When the oldest boy was ready for high-school, we moved to a
town, where my husband had bought a granary business. By that time I
had become a physical wreck, with a list of ailments too painful to
describe. But I still had my craving for knowledge, and my illness was
my salvation, in a way--it got me a hired girl, and time to patronize
the free library.
I had never had any sort of superstition or prejudice, and when I got
into the world of books, I began quickly to find my way. I travelled
into by-paths, of course; I got Christian Science badly, and New Thought
in a mild attack. I still have in my mind what the sober reader would
doubtless consider queer kinks; for instance, I still practice “mental
healing,” in a form, and I don’t always tell my secret thoughts about
Theosophy and Spiritualism. But almost at once I worked myself out of
the religion I had been taught, and away from my husband’s politics,
and the drugs of my doctors. One of the first subjects I read about was
health; I came upon a book on fasting, and went away upon a visit and
tried it, and came back home a new woman, with a new life before me.
In all of these matters my husband fought me at every step. He wished
to rule, not merely my body, but my mind, and it seemed as if every new
thing that I learned was an additional affront to him. I don’t think
I was rendered disagreeable by my culture; my only obstinacy was in
maintaining the right of the children to do their own thinking. But
during this time my husband was making money, and filling his life with
that. He remained in his every idea the money-man, an active and bitter
leader of the forces of greed in our community; and when my studies took
me to the inevitable end, and I joined the local of the Socialist party
in our town, it was to him like a blow in the face. He never got over
it, and I think that if the children had not been on my side, he would
have claimed the Englishman’s privilege of beating me with a stick
not thicker than his thumb. As it was, he retired into a sullen
hypochondria, which was so pitiful that in the end I came to regard him
as not responsible.
I went to a college town with my three children, and when they were
graduated, having meantime made sure that I could never do anything but
torment my husband, I set about getting a divorce. I had helped to lay
the foundation of his fortune, cementing it with my blood, I might say,
and I could fairly have laid claim to half what he had brought from
the farm; but my horror of the parasitic woman had come to be such that
rather than even seem to be one, I gave up everything, and went out into
the world at the age of forty-five to earn my own living. My children
soon married, and I would not be a burden to them; so I came East for
a while, and settled down quite unexpectedly into a place as a
field-worker for a child-labour committee.
You may think that a woman so situated would not have been apt to meet
Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver, _née_ Castleman, and to be chosen for her bosom
friend; but that would only be because you do not know the modern world.
We have managed to get upon the consciences of the rich, and they invite
us to attend their tea-parties and disturb their peace of mind. And
then, too, I had a peculiar hold upon Sylvia; when I met her I possessed
the key to the great mystery of her life. How that had come about is a
story in itself, the thing I have next to tell.
2. It happened that my arrival in New York from the far West coincided
with Sylvia’s from the far South; and that both fell at a time when
there were no wars or earthquakes or football games to compete for
the front page of the newspapers. So everybody was talking about the
prospective wedding. The fact that the Southern belle had caught
the biggest prize among the city’s young millionaires was enough to
establish precedence with the city’s subservient newspapers, which had
proceeded to robe the grave and punctilious figure of the bridegroom in
the garments of King Cophetua. The fact that the bride’s father was
the richest man in his own section did not interfere with this--for how
could metropolitan editors be expected to have heard of the glories of
Castleman Hall, or to imagine that there existed a section of America so
self-absorbed that its local favourite would not feel herself exalted in
becoming Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver?
What the editors knew about Castleman Hall was that they wired for
pictures, and a man was sent from the nearest city to “snap”
this unknown beauty; whereupon her father chased the presumptuous
photographer and smashed his camera with a cane. So, of course, when
Sylvia stepped out of the train in New York, there was a whole battery
of cameras awaiting her, and all the city beheld her image the next day.
The beginning of my interest in this “belle” from far South was when I
picked up the paper at my breakfast table, and found her gazing at me,
with the wide-open, innocent eyes of a child; a child who had come from
some fairer, more gracious world, and brought the memory of it with her,
trailing her clouds of glory. She had stepped from the train into the
confusion of the roaring city, and she stood, startled and frightened,
yet, I thought, having no more real idea of its wickedness and horror
than a babe in arms. I read her soul in that heavenly countenance, and
sat looking at it, enraptured, dumb. There must have been thousands,
even in that metropolis of Mammon, who loved her from that picture, and
whispered a prayer for her happiness.
I can hear her laugh as I write this. For she would have it that I was
only one more of her infatuated lovers, and that her clouds of glory
were purely stage illusion. She knew exactly what she was doing with
those wide-open, innocent eyes! Had not old Lady Dee, most cynical
of worldlings, taught her how to use them when she was a child in
pig-tails? To be sure she had been scared when she stepped off the
train, and strange men had shoved cameras under her nose. It was almost
as bad as being assassinated! But as to her heavenly soul--alas, for the
blindness of men, and of sentimental old women, who could believe in a
modern “society” girl!
I had supposed that I was an emancipated woman when I came to New York.
But one who has renounced the world, the flesh and the devil, knowing
them only from pictures in magazines and Sunday supplements; such a
one may find that he has still some need of fasting and praying.
The particular temptation which overcame me was this picture of the
bride-to-be. I wanted to see her, and I went and stood for hours in a
crowd of curious women, and saw the wedding party enter the great Fifth
Avenue Church, and discovered that my Sylvia’s hair was golden, and her
eyes a strange and wonderful red-brown. And this was the moment that
fate had chosen to throw Claire Lepage into my arms, and give me the key
to the future of Sylvia’s life.
3. I am uncertain how much I should tell about Claire Lepage. It is a
story which is popular in a certain sort of novel, but I have no wish
for that easy success. Towards Claire herself I had no trace of the
conventional attitude, whether of contempt or of curiosity. She was to
me the product of a social system, of the great New Nineveh which I was
investigating. And later on, when I knew her, she was a weak sister whom
I tried to help.
It happened that I knew much more about such matters than the average
woman--owing to a tragedy in my life. When I was about twenty-five years
old, my brother-in-law had moved his family to our part of the world,
and one of his boys had become very dear to me. This boy later on
had got into trouble, and rather than tell anyone about it, had shot
himself. So my eyes had been opened to things that are usually hidden
from my sex; for the sake of my own sons, I had set out to study the
underground ways of the male creature. I developed the curious custom of
digging out every man I met, and making him lay bare his inmost life to
me; so you may understand that it was no ordinary pair of woman’s arms
into which Claire Lepage was thrown.
At first I attributed her vices to her environment, but soon I realized
that this was a mistake; the women of her world do not as a rule go to
pieces. Many of them I met were free and independent women, one or two
of them intellectual and worth knowing. For the most part such women
marry well, in the worldly sense, and live as contented lives as the
average lady who secures her life-contract at the outset. If you had met
Claire at an earlier period of her career, and if she had been concerned
to impress you, you might have thought her a charming hostess. She
had come of good family, and been educated in a convent--much better
educated than many society girls in America. She spoke English as well
as she did French, and she had read some poetry, and could use the
language of idealism whenever necessary. She had even a certain
religious streak, and could voice the most generous sentiments, and
really believe that she believed them. So it might have been some time
before you discovered the springs of her weakness.
In the beginning I blamed van Tuiver; but in the end I concluded that
for most of her troubles she had herself to thank--or perhaps the
ancestors who had begotten her. She could talk more nobly and act more
abjectly than any other woman I have ever known. She wanted pleasant
sensations, and she expected life to furnish them continuously.
Instinctively she studied the psychology of the person she was dealing
with, and chose a reason which would impress that person.
At this time, you understand, I knew nothing about Sylvia Castleman
or her fiancé, except what the public knew. But now I got an inside
view--and what a view! I had read some reference to Douglas van Tuiver’s
Harvard career: how he had met the peerless Southern beauty, and had
given up college and pursued her to her home. I had pictured the
wooing in the rosy lights of romance, with all the glamour of worldly
greatness. But now, suddenly, what a glimpse into the soul of the
princely lover! “He had a good scare, let me tell you,” said Claire. “He
never knew what I was going to do from one minute to the next.”
“Did he see you in the crowd before the church door?” I inquired.
“No,” she replied, “but he thought of me, I can promise you.”
“He knew you were coming?”
She answered, “I told him I had got an admission card, just to make sure
he’d keep me in mind!”
4. I did not have to hear much more of Claire’s story before making up
my mind that the wealthiest and most fashionable of New York’s young
bachelors was a rather self-centred person. He had fallen desperately in
love with the peerless Southern beauty, and when she had refused to
have anything to do with him, he had come back to the other woman for
consolation, and had compelled her to pretend to sympathize with his
agonies of soul. And this when he knew that she loved him with the
intensity of a jealous nature.
Claire had her own view of Sylvia Castleman, a view for which I
naturally made due reservations. Sylvia was a schemer, who had known
from the first what she wanted, and had played her part with masterly
skill. As for Claire, she had striven to match her moves, plotting
in the darkness against her, and fighting desperately with such weak
weapons as she possessed. It was characteristic that she did not
blame herself for her failure; it was the baseness of van Tuiver, his
inability to appreciate sincere devotion, his unworthiness of her love.
And this, just after she had been naively telling me of her efforts to
poison his mind against Sylvia while pretending to admire her! But I
made allowances for Claire at this moment--realizing that the situation
had been one to overstrain any woman’s altruism.
She had failed in her subtleties, and there had followed scenes of
bitter strife between the two. Sylvia, the cunning huntress, having
pretended to relent, van Tuiver had gone South to his wooing again,
while Claire had stayed at home and read a book about the poisoners
of the Italian renaissance. And then had come the announcement of the
engagement, after which the royal conqueror had come back in a panic,
and sent embassies of his male friends to plead with Claire, alternately
promising her wealth and threatening her with destitution, appealing
to her fear, her cupidity, and even to her love. To all of which I
listened, thinking of the wide-open, innocent eyes of the picture, and
shedding tears within my soul. So must the gods feel as they look down
upon the affairs of mortals, seeing how they destroy themselves by
ignorance and folly, seeing how they walk into the future as a blind man
into a yawning abyss.
I gave, of course, due weight to the sneers of Claire. Perhaps the
innocent one really had set a trap--had picked van Tuiver out and
married him for his money. But even so, I could hope that she had not
known what she was doing. Surely it had never occurred to her that
through all the days of her triumph she would have to eat and sleep with
the shade of another woman at her side!
Claire said to me, not once, but a dozen times, “He’ll come back to me.
She’ll never be able to make him happy.” And so I pictured Sylvia upon
her honeymoon, followed by an invisible ghost whose voice she would
never hear, whose name she would never know. All that van Tuiver had
learned from Claire, the sensuality, the _ennin_, the contempt for
woman--it would rise to torment and terrify his bride, and turn her
life to bitterness. And then beyond this, deeps upon deeps, to which
my imagination did not go--and of which the Frenchwoman, with all
her freedom of tongue, gave me no more than a hint which I could not
comprehend.
5. Claire Lepage at this time was desperately lonely and unhappy. Having
made the discovery that my arms were sturdy, used to doing a man’s
work, she clung to them. She begged me to go home with her, to visit
her--finally to come and live with her. Until recently an elderly
companion, had posed as her aunt, and kept her respectable while she
was upon van Tuiver’s yacht, and at his castle in Scotland. But this
companion had died, and now Claire had no one with whom to discuss her
soul-states.
She occupied a beautiful house on the West Side, not far from Riverside
Drive; and in addition to the use of this she had an income of eight
thousand a year--which was not enough to make possible a chauffeur, nor
even to dress decently, but only enough to keep in debt upon. Such as
the income was, however, she was willing to share it with me. So
there opened before me a new profession--and a new insight into the
complications of parasitism.
I went to see her frequently at first, partly because I was interested
in her and her associates, and partly because I really thought I could
help her. But I soon came to realize that influencing Claire was like
moulding water; it flowed back round your hands, even while you worked.
I would argue with her about the physiological effects of alcohol, and
when I had convinced her, she would promise caution; but soon I would
discover that my arguments had gone over her head. I was at this time
feeling my way towards my work in the East. I tried to interest her in
such things as social reform, but realized that they had no meaning for
her. She was living the life of the pleasure-seeking idlers of the great
metropolis, and every time I met her it seemed to me that her character
and her appearance had deteriorated.
Meantime I picked up scraps of information concerning the van Tuivers.
There were occasional items in the papers, their yacht, the “Triton,”
had reached the Azores; it had run into a tender in the harbour
of Gibraltar; Mr. and Mrs. van Tuiver had received the honour of
presentation at the Vatican; they were spending the season in London,
and had been presented at court; they had been royal guests at the
German army-manoeuvres. The million wage-slaves of the metropolis,
packed morning and night into the roaring subways and whirled to and
from their tasks, read items such as these and were thrilled by the
triumphs of their fellow-countrymen.
At Claire’s house I learned to be interested in “society” news. From
a weekly paper of gossip about the rich and great she would read
paragraphs, explaining subtle allusions and laying bare veiled scandals.
Some of the men she knew well, referring to them for my benefit as
Bertie and Reggie and Vivie and Algie. She also knew not a little about
the women of that super-world--information sometimes of an intimate
nature, which these ladies would have been startled to hear was going
the rounds.
This insight I got into Claire’s world I found useful, needless to say,
in my occasional forays as a soap-box orator of Socialism. I would go
from the super-heated luxury of her home to visit tenement-dens where
little children made paper-flowers twelve and fourteen hours a day for a
trifle over one cent an hour. I would spend the afternoon floating about
in the park in the automobile of one of her expensive friends, and then
take the subway and visit one of the settlements, to hear a discussion
of conditions which doomed a certain number of working-girls to be
burned alive every year in factory fires.
As time went on, I became savage concerning such contrasts, and the
speeches I was making for the party began to attract attention. During
the summer, I recollect, I had begun to feel hostile even towards the
lovely image of Sylvia, which I had framed in my room. While she was
being presented at St. James’s, I was studying the glass-factories
in South Jersey, where I found little boys of ten working in front of
glowing furnaces until they dropped of exhaustion and sometimes had
their eyes burned out. While she and her husband were guests of the
German Emperor, I was playing the part of a Polish working-woman,
penetrating the carefully guarded secrets of the sugar-trust’s domain in
Brooklyn, where human lives are snuffed out almost every day in noxious
fumes.
And then in the early fall Sylvia came home, her honeymoon over.
She came in one of the costly suites in the newest of the _de luxe_
steamers; and the next morning I saw a new picture of her, and read
a few words her husband had condescended to say to a fellow traveller
about the courtesy of Europe to visiting Americans. Then for a couple
of months I heard no more of them. I was busy with my child-labour
work, and I doubt if a thought of Sylvia crossed my mind, until that
never-to-be-forgotten afternoon at Mrs. Allison’s when she came up to me
and took my hand in hers.
6. Mrs. Roland Allison was one of the comfortable in body who had
begun to feel uncomfortable in mind. I had happened to meet her at
the settlement, and tell her what I had seen in the glass factories;
whereupon she made up her mind that everybody she knew must hear me
talk, and to that end gave a reception at her Madison Avenue home.
I don’t remember much of what I said, but if I may take the evidence of
Sylvia, who remembered everything, I spoke effectively. I told them, for
one thing, the story of little Angelo Patri. Little Angelo was of that
indeterminate Italian age where he helped to support a drunken father
without regard to the child-labour laws of the State of New Jersey.
His people were tenants upon a fruit-farm a couple of miles from the
glass-factory, and little Angelo walked to and from his work along the
railroad-track. It is a peculiarity of the glass-factory that it has to
eat its children both by day and by night; and after working six hours
before midnight and six more after midnight, little Angelo was tired. He
had no eye for the birds and flowers on a beautiful spring morning, but
as he was walking home, he dropped in his tracks and fell asleep. The
driver of the first morning train on that branch-line saw what he
took to be an old coat lying on the track ahead, and did not stop to
investigate.
All this had been narrated to me by the child’s mother, who had worked
as a packer of “beers,” and who had loved little Angelo. As I repeated
her broken words about the little mangled body, I saw some of my
auditors wipe away a surreptitious tear.
After I had stopped, several women came up to talk with me at the last,
when most of the company was departing, there came one more, who had
waited her turn. The first thing I saw was her loveliness, the thing
about her that dazzled and stunned people, and then came the strange
sense of familiarity. Where had I met this girl before?
She said what everybody always says; she had been so much interested,
she had never dreamed that such conditions existed in the world. I,
applying the acid test, responded, “So many people have said that to me
that I have begun to believe it.”
“It is so in my case,” she replied, quickly. “You see, I have lived all
my life in the South, and we have no such conditions there.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Our negroes at least can steal enough to eat,” she said.
I smiled. Then--since one has but a moment or two to get in one’s work
in these social affairs, and so has to learn to thrust quickly: “You
have timber-workers in Louisiana, steel-workers in Alabama. You have
tobacco-factories, canning-factories, cotton-mills--have you been to any
of them to see how the people live?”
All this I said automatically, it being the routine of the agitator.
But meantime in my mind was an excitement, spreading like a flame. The
loveliness of this young girl; the eagerness, the intensity of feeling
written upon her countenance; and above all, the strange sense of
familiarity! Surely, if I had met her before, I should never have
forgotten her; surely it could not be--not possibly--
My hostess came, and ended my bewilderment. “You ought to get Mrs. van
Tuiver on your child-labour committee,” she said.
A kind of panic seized me. I wanted to say, “Oh, it is Sylvia
Castleman!” But then, how could I explain? I couldn’t say, “I have your
picture in my room, cut out of a newspaper.” Still less could I say, “I
know a friend of your husband.”
Fortunately Sylvia did not heed my excitement. (She had learned by this
time to pretend not to notice.) “Please don’t misunderstand me,” she
was saying. “I really _don’t_ know about these things. And I would do
something to help if I could.” As she said this she looked with the
red-brown eyes straight into mine--a gaze so clear and frank and honest,
it was as if an angel had come suddenly to earth, and learned of the
horrible tangle into which we mortals have got our affairs.
“Be careful what you’re saying,” put in our hostess, with a laugh.
“You’re in dangerous hands.”
But Sylvia would not be warned. “I want to know more about it,” she
said. “You must tell me what I can do.”
“Take her at her word,” said Mrs. Allison, to me. “Strike while the iron
is hot!” I detected a note of triumph in her voice; if she could say
that she had got Mrs. van Tuiver to take up child-labour--that indeed
would be a feather to wear!
“I will tell you all I can,” I said. “That’s my work in the world.”
“Take Mrs. Abbott away with you,” said the energetic hostess, to Sylvia;
and before I quite understood what was happening, I had received and
accepted an invitation to drive in the park with Mrs. Douglas van
Tuiver. In her role of _dea ex machina_ the hostess extricated me from
the other guests, and soon I was established in a big new motor, gliding
up Madison Avenue as swiftly and silently as a cloud-shadow over the
fields. As I write the words there lies upon my table a Socialist paper
with one of Will Dyson’s vivid cartoons, representing two ladies of the
great world at a reception. Says the first, “These social movements are
becoming _quite_ worth while!” “Yes, indeed,” says the other. “One meets
such good society!”
7. Sylvia’s part in this adventure was a nobler one than mine, Seated as
I was in a regal motor-car, and in company with one favoured of all
the gods in the world, I must have had an intense conviction of my own
saintliness not to distrust my excitement. But Sylvia, for her part, had
nothing to get from me but pain. I talked of the factory-fires and
the horrors of the sugar-refineries, and I saw shadow after shadow of
suffering cross her face. You may say it was cruel of me to tear the
veil from those lovely eyes, but in such a matter I felt myself the
angel of the Lord and His vengeance.
“I didn’t know about these things!” she cried again. And I found it was
true. It would have been hard for me to imagine anyone so ignorant
of the realities of modern life. The men and women she had met she
understood quite miraculously, but they were only two kinds, the “best
people” and their negro servants. There had been a whole regiment of
relatives on guard to keep her from knowing anybody else, or anything
else, and if by chance a dangerous fact broke into the family stockade,
they had formulas ready with which to kill it.
“But now,” Sylvia went on, “I’ve got some money, and I can help, so
I dare not be ignorant any longer. You must show me the way, and my
husband too. I’m sure he doesn’t know what can be done.”
I said that I would do anything in my power. Her help would be
invaluable, not merely because of the money she might give, but because
of the influence of her name; the attention she could draw to any
cause she chose. I explained to her the aims and the methods of our
child-labour committee. We lobbied to get new legislation; we watched
officials to compel them to enforce the laws already existing; above
all, we worked for publicity, to make people realise what it meant that
the new generation was growing up without education, and stunted by
premature toil. And that was where she could help us most--if she would
go and see the conditions with her own eyes, and then appear before the
legislative committee this winter, in favour of our new bill!
She turned her startled eyes upon me at this. Her ideas of doing good
in the world were the old-fashioned ones of visiting and almsgiving;
she had no more conception of modern remedies than she had of modern
diseases. “Oh, I couldn’t possibly make a speech!” she exclaimed.
“Why not?” I asked.
“I never thought of such a thing. I don’t know enough.”
“But you can learn.”
“I know, but that kind of work ought to be done by men.”
“We’ve given men a chance, and they have made the evils. Whose business
is it to protect the children if not the women’s?”
She hesitated a moment, and then said: “I suppose you’ll laugh at me.”
“No, no,” I promised; then as I looked at her I guessed. “Are you going
to tell me that woman’s place is the home?”
“That is what we think in Castleman County,” she said, smiling in spite
of herself.
“The children have got out of the home,” I replied. “If they are ever to
get back, we women must go and fetch them.”
Suddenly she laughed--that merry laugh that was the April sunshine of
my life for many years. “Somebody made a Suffrage speech in our State
a couple of years ago, and I wish you could have seen the horror of my
people! My Aunt Nannie--she’s Bishop Chilton’s wife--thought it was the
most dreadful thing that had happened since Jefferson Davis was put in
irons. She talked about it for days, and at last she went upstairs and
shut herself in the attic. The younger children came home from school,
and wanted to know where mamma was. Nobody knew. Bye and bye, the cook
came. ‘Marse Basil, what we gwine have fo’ dinner? I done been up to
Mis’ Nannie, an’ she say g’way an’ not pester her--she busy.’ Company
came, and there was dreadful confusion--nobody knew what to do about
anything--and still Aunt Nannie was locked in! At last came dinner-time,
and everybody else came. At last up went the butler, and came down with
the message that they were to eat whatever they had, and take care of
the company somehow, and go to prayer-meeting, and let her alone--she
was writing a letter to the Castleman County _Register_ on the subject
of ‘The Duty of Woman as a Homemaker’!”
8. This was the beginning of my introduction to Castleman County. It was
a long time before I went there, but I learned to know its inhabitants
from Sylvia’s stories of them. Funny stories, tragic stories, wild and
incredible stories out of a half-barbaric age! She would tell them and
we would laugh together; but then a wistful look would come into her
eyes, and a silence would fall. So very soon I made the discovery that
my Sylvia was homesick. In all the years that I knew her she never
ceased to speak of Castleman Hall as “home”. All her standards came from
there, her new ideas were referred there.
We talked of Suffrage for a while, and I spoke about the lives of women
on lonely farms--how they give their youth and health to their husband’s
struggle, yet have no money partnership which they can enforce in
case of necessity. “But surely,” cried Sylvia, “you don’t want to make
divorce more easy!”
“I want to make the conditions of it fair to women,” I said.
“But then more women will get it! And there are so many divorced women
now! Papa says that divorce is a greater menace than Socialism!”
She spoke of Suffrage in England, where women were just beginning to
make public disturbances. Surely I did not approve of their leaving
their homes for such purposes as that! As tactfully as I could, I
suggested that conditions in England were peculiar. There was, for
example, the quaint old law which permitted a husband to beat his wife
subject to certain restrictions. Would an American woman submit to such
a law? There was the law which made it impossible for a woman to divorce
her husband for infidelity, unless accompanied by desertion or cruelty.
Surely not even her father would consider that a decent arrangement! I
mentioned a recent decision of the highest court in the land, that a man
who brought his mistress to live in his home, and compelled his wife
to wait upon her, was not committing cruelty within the meaning of the
English law. I heard Sylvia’s exclamation of horror, and met her stare
of incredulity; and then suddenly I thought of Claire, and a little
chill ran over me. It was a difficult hour, in more ways than one, that
of my first talk with Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver!
I soon made the discovery that, childish as her ignorance was, there was
no prejudice in it. If you brought her a fact, she did not say that it
was too terrible to be true, or that the Bible said otherwise, or that
it was indecent to know about it. Nor, when you met her next, did you
discover that she had forgotten it. On the contrary, you discovered that
she had followed it to its remote consequences, and was ready with a
score of questions as to these. I remember saying to myself, that first
automobile ride: “If this girl goes on thinking, she will get into
trouble! She will have to stop, for the sake of others!”
“You must meet my husband some time,” she said; and added, “I’ll have to
see my engagement-book. I have so much to do, I never know when I have a
moment free.”
“You must find it interesting,” I ventured.
“I did, for a while; but I’ve begun to get tired of so much going about.
For the most part I meet the same people, and I’ve found out what they
have to say.”
I laughed. “You have caught the society complaint already--_ennui_!”
“I had it years ago, at home. It’s true I never would have gone out at
all if it hadn’t been for the sake of my family. That’s why I envy a
woman like you--”
I could not help laughing. It was too funny, Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver
envying me!
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Just the irony of life. Do you know, I cut you out of the newspaper,
and put you in a little frame on my bureau. I thought, here is the
loveliest face I’ve ever seen, and here is the most-to-be-envied of
women.”
She smiled, but quickly became serious. “I learned very early in life
that I was beautiful; and I suppose if I were suddenly to cease being
beautiful, I’d miss it; yet I often think it’s a nuisance. It makes one
dependent on externals. Most of the beautiful women I’ve known make a
sort of profession of it--they live to shine and be looked at.
“And you don’t enjoy that?” I asked.
“It restricts one’s life. Men expect it of you, they resent your having
any other interest.”
“So,” I responded, gravely, “with all your beauty and wealth, you aren’t
perfectly happy?”
“Oh, yes!” she cried--not having meant to confess so much. “I told
myself I would be happy, because I would be able to do so much good in
the world. There must be some way to do good with money! But now I’m
not sure; there seem to be so many things in the way. Just when you have
your mind made up that you have a way to help, someone comes and points
out to you that you may be really doing harm.”
She hesitated again, and I said, “That means you have been looking into
the matter of charity.”
She gave me a bright glance. “How you understand things!” she exclaimed.
“It is possible,” I replied, “to know modern society so well that when
you meet certain causes you know what results to look for.”
“I wish you’d explain to me why charity doesn’t do any good!”
“It would mean a lecture on the competitive wage-system,” I laughed--
“too serious a matter for a drive!”
This may have seemed shirking on my part. But here I was, wrapped in
luxurious furs, rolling gloriously through the park at twilight on a
brilliant autumn evening; and the confiscation of property seems so much
more startling a proposition when you are in immediate contact with
it! This principle, which explains the “opportunism” of Socialist
cabinet-ministers and Labour M.P.s may be used to account for the sudden
resolve which I had taken, that for this afternoon at least Mrs. Douglas
van Tuiver should not discover that I was either a divorced woman, or a
soap-box orator of the revolution.
9. Sylvia, in that first conversation, told me much about herself that
she did not know she was telling. I became fairly certain, for instance,
that she had not married Mr. Douglas van Tuiver for love. The young girl
who has so married does not suffer from ennui in the first year, nor
does she find her happiness depending upon her ability to solve the
problem of charity in connection with her husband’s wealth.
She would have ridden and talked longer, she said, but for a dinner
engagement. She asked me to call on her, and I promised to come some
morning, as soon as she set a day. When the car drew up before the
door of her home, I thought of my first ride about the city in the
“rubber-neck wagon,” and how I had stared when the lecturer pointed out
this mansion. We, the passengers, had thrilled as one soul, imagining
the wonderful life which must go on behind those massive portals, the
treasures outshining the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, which required
those thick, bronze bars for their protection. And here was the mistress
of all the splendour, inviting me to come and see it from within!
She wanted to send me home in the car, but I would not have that, on
account of the push-cart men and the babies in my street; I got out
and walked--my heart beating fast, my blood leaping with exultation. I
reached home, and there on the bureau was the picture--but behold, how
changed! It was become a miracle of the art of colour-photography; its
hair was golden, its eyes a wonderful red-brown, its cheeks aglow with
the radiance of youth! And yet more amazing, the picture spoke! It spoke
with the most delicious of Southern drawls--referring to the “repo’t” of
my child-labour committee, shivering at the cold and bidding me pull the
“fu-uzz” up round me. And when I told funny stories about the Italians
and the Hebrews of my tenement-neighbourhood, it broke into silvery
laughter, and cried: “Oh, de-ah me! How que-ah!” Little had I dreamed,
when I left that picture in the morning, what a miracle was to be
wrought upon it.
I knew, of course, what was the matter with me; the symptoms were
unmistakable. After having made up my mind that I was an old woman, and
that there was nothing more in life for me save labour--here the little
archer had come, and with the sharpest of his golden arrows, had shot
me through. I had all the thrills, the raptures and delicious agonies of
first love; I lived no longer in myself, but in the thought of another
person. Twenty times a day I looked at my picture, and cried aloud: “Oh,
beautiful, beautiful!”
I do not know how much of her I have been able to give. I have told of
our first talk--but words are so cold and dead! I stop and ask: What
there is, in all nature, that has given me the same feeling? I remember
how I watched the dragon-fly emerging from its chrysalis. It is soft and
green and tender; it clings to a branch and dries its wings in the sun,
and when the miracle is completed, there for a brief space it poises,
shimmering with a thousand hues, quivering with its new-born ecstasy.
And just so was Sylvia; a creature from some other world than ours,
as yet unsoiled by the dust and heat of reality. It came to me with
a positive shock, as a terrifying thing, that there should be in this
world of strife and wickedness any young thing that took life with
such intensity, that was so palpitating with eagerness, with hope, with
sympathy. Such was the impression that one got of her, even when her
words most denied it. She might be saying world-weary and cynical
things, out of the maxims of Lady Dee; but there was still the
eagerness, the sympathy, surging beneath and lifting her words.
The crown of her loveliness was her unconsciousness of self. Even though
she might be talking of herself, frankly admitting her beauty, she was
really thinking of other people, how she could get to them to help them.
This I must emphasize, because, apart from jesting, I would not have it
thought that I had fallen under the spell of a beautiful countenance,
combined with a motor-car and a patrician name. There were things about
Sylvia that were aristocratic, that could be nothing else; but she could
be her same lovely self in a cottage--as I shall prove to you before I
finish with the story of her life.
I was in love. At that time I was teaching myself German, and I sat one
day puzzling out two lines of Goethe:
“Oden and Thor, these two thou knowest; Freya, the heavenly, knowest
thou not.”
And I remember how I cried aloud in sudden delight: _“I know her!”_ For
a long time that was one of my pet names--“Freya dis Himmlische!” I only
heard of one other that I preferred--when in course of time she told me
about Frank Shirley, and how she had loved him, and how their hopes had
been wrecked. He had called her “Lady Sunshine”; he had been wont to
call it over and over in his happiness, and as Sylvia repeated it to
me--“Lady Sunshine! Lady Sunshine!” I could imagine that I caught an
echo of the very tones of Frank Shirley’s voice.
10. For several days I waited upon the postman, and when the summons
came I dodged a committee-meeting, and ascended the marble stairs with
trepidation, and underwent the doubting scrutiny of an English lackey,
sufficiently grave in deportment and habiliments to have waited upon a
bishop in his own land. I have a vague memory of an entrance-hall with
panelled paintings and a double-staircase with a snow-white carpet,
about which I had read in the newspapers that it was woven in one piece,
and had cost an incredible sum. One did not have to profane it with his
feet, as there was an elevator provided.
I was shown to Sylvia’s morning-room, which had been “done” in pink and
white and gold by some decorator who had known her colours. It was large
enough to have held half-a-dozen of my own quarters, and the sun was
allowed to flood it. Through a door at one side came Sylvia, holding out
her hands to me.
She was really glad to see me! She began to apologize at once for the
time she had taken to write. It was because she had so much to do. She
had married into a world that took itself seriously: the “idle rich,”
who worked like slaves. “You know,” she said, while we sat on a pink
satin couch, and a footman brought us coffee: “you read that Mrs.
So-and-so is a ‘social queen,’ and you think it’s a newspaper phrase,
but it isn’t; she really feels that she’s a queen, and other people
feel it, and she goes through her ceremonies as solemnly as the Lord’s
anointed.”
She went on to tell me some of her adventures. She had a keen sense of
fun, and was evidently suffering for an outlet for it. She saw through
the follies and pretences of people in a flash, but they were all such
august and important people that, out of regard for her husband, she
dared not let them suspect her clairvoyant power.
She referred to her experiences abroad. She had not liked Europe--being
quite frankly a provincial person. To Castleman County a foreigner was
a strange, dark person who mixed up his consonants, and was under
suspicion of being a fiddler or an opera-singer. The people she had met
under her husband’s charge had been socially indubitable, but still,
they were foreigners, and Sylvia could never really be sure what they
meant.
There was, for instance, the young son of a German steel-king, a person
of amazing savoir faire, who had made bold to write books and exhibit
pictures, and had travelled so widely that he had even heard of
Castleman County. He had taken Sylvia to show her the sights of Berlin,
and had rolled her down the “Sieges Allée,” making outrageous fun of his
Kaiser’s taste in art, and coming at last to a great marble column, with
a female figure representing Victory upon the top. “You will observe,”
said the cultured young plutocrat, “that the Grecian lady stands a
hundred meters in the air, and has no stairway. There is a popular
saying about her which is delightful--that she is the only chaste woman
in Berlin!”
I had been through the culture-seeking stage, and knew my Henry James;
so I could read between the lines of Sylvia’s experiences. I figured
her as a person walking on volcanic ground, not knowing her peril, but
vaguely disquieted by a smell of sulphur in the air. And once in a while
a crack would open in the ground! There was the Duke of Something in
Rome, for example, a melancholy young man, with whom she had coquetted,
as she did, in her merry fashion, with every man she met. Being married,
she had taken it for granted that she might be as winsome as she chose;
but the young Italian had misunderstood the game, and had whispered
words of serious import, which had so horrified Sylvia that she flew
to her husband and told him the story--begging him incidentally not to
horse-whip the fellow. In reply it had to be explained to her she had
laid herself liable to the misadventure. The ladies of the Italian
aristocracy were severe and formal, and Sylvia had no right to expect an
ardent young duke to understand her native wildness.
11. Something of that sort was always happening--something in each
country to bewilder her afresh, and to make it necessary for her husband
to remind her of the proprieties. In France, a cousin of van Tuiver’s
had married a marquis, and they had visited the chateau. The family was
Catholic, of the very oldest and strictest, and the brother-in-law, a
prelate of high degree, had invited the guests to be shown through his
cathedral. “Imagine my bewilderment!” said Sylvia. “I thought I was
going to meet a church dignitary, grave and reverent; but here was a
wit, a man of the world. Such speeches you never heard! I was ravished
by the grandeur of the building, and I said: ‘If I had seen this, I
would have come to you to be married.’ ‘Madame is an American,’
he replied. ‘Come the next time!’ When I objected that I was not a
Catholic, he said: ‘Your beauty is its own religion!’ When I protested
that he would be doing me too great an honour, ‘Madame,’ said he, ‘the
_honneur_ would be all to the church!’ And because I was shocked at all
this, I was considered to be a provincial person!”
Then they had come to London, a dismal, damp city where you “never saw
the sun, and when you did see it it looked like a poached egg”; where
you had to learn to eat fish with the help of a knife, and where you
might speak of bitches, but must never on any account speak of your
stomach. They went for a week-end to “Hazelhurst,” the home of the
Dowager Duchess of Danbury, whose son van Tuiver, had entertained in
America, and who, in the son’s absence, claimed the right to repay the
debt. The old lady sat at table with two fat poodle dogs in infants’
chairs, one on each side of her, feeding out of golden trays. There
was a visiting curate, a frightened little man at the other side of one
poodle; in an effort to be at ease he offered the wheezing creature a
bit of bread. “Don’t feed my dogs!” snapped the old lady. “I don’t allow
anybody to feed my dogs!”
And then there was the Honourable Reginald Annersley, the youngest son
of the family, home from Eton on vacation. The Honourable Reginald was
twelve years of age, undersized and ill-nourished. (“They feed them
badly,” his mother had explained, “an’ the teachin’s no good either,
but it’s a school for gentlemen.”) “Honestly,” said Sylvia, “he was the
queerest little mannikin--like the tiny waiter’s assistants you see in
hotels on the Continent. He wore his Eton suit, you understand--grown-up
evening clothes minus the coat-tails, and a top hat. He sat at tea and
chatted with the mincing graces of a cotillion-leader; you expected to
find some of his hair gone when he took off his hat! He spoke of his
brother, the duke, who had gone off shooting seals somewhere. ‘The jolly
rotter has nothing to do but spend his money; but we younger sons have
to work like dogs when we grow up!’ I asked what he’d do, and he said ‘I
suppose there’s nothin’ but the church. It’s a beastly bore, but you do
get a livin’ out of it.’
“That was too much for me,” said Sylvia. “I proceeded to tell the poor,
blasé infant about my childhood; how my sister Celeste and I had caught
half-tamed horses and galloped about the pasture on them, when we were
so small that our little fat legs stuck out horizontally; how we had
given ourselves convulsions in the green apple orchard, and had to be
spanked every day before we had our hair combed. I told how we heard
a war-story about a ‘train of gunpowder,’ and proceeded to lay such a
train about the attic of Castleman Hall, and set fire to it. I might
have spent the afternoon teaching the future churchman how to be a boy,
if I hadn’t suddenly caught a glimpse of my husband’s face!”
12. I did not hear these stories all at once. I have put them together
here because they make a little picture of her honeymoon, and also
because they show how, without meaning it, she was giving me an account
of her husband.
There had been even fewer adventures in the life of young Douglas van
Tuiver than in the life of the Honourable Reginald Annersley. When one
heard the details of the up-bringing of this “millionaire baby,” one was
able to forgive him for being self-centred. He had grown into a man who
lived to fulfil his social duties, and he had taken to wife a girl who
was reckless, high-spirited, with a streak of almost savage pride in
her.
Sylvia’s was the true aristocratic attitude towards the rest of the
world. It could never have occurred to her to imagine that anywhere
upon the whole earth there were people superior to the Castlemans of
Castleman County. If you had been ignorant enough to suggest such an
idea, you would have seen her eyes flash and her nostrils quiver; you
would have been enveloped in a net of bewilderment and transfixed with
a trident of mockery and scorn. That was what she had done in her
husband-hunt. The trouble was that van Tuiver was not clever enough
to realise this, and to trust her prowess against other beasts in the
social jungle.
Strange to me were such inside glimpses into the life of these two
favourites of the gods! I never grew weary of speculating about them,
and the mystery of their alliance. How had Sylvia come to make this
marriage? She was not happy with him; keen psychologist that she was,
she must have foreseen that she would not be happy with him. Had she
deliberately sacrificed herself, because of the good she imagined she
could do to her family?
I was beginning to believe this. Irritated as she was by the solemn
snobberies of van Tuiver’s world, it was none the less true that she
believed in money; she believed in it with a faith which appalled me as
I came to realise it. Everybody had to have money; the social graces,
the aristocratic virtues were impossible without it. The rich needed
it--even the poor needed it! Could it be that the proud Castlemans of
Castleman County had needed it also?
If that guess at her inmost soul was correct, then what a drama was her
meeting with me! A person who despised money, who had proven it by grim
deeds--and this a person of her own money-worshipping sex! What was the
meaning of this phenomenon--this new religion that was challenging the
priesthood of Mammon? So some Roman consul’s daughter might have sat in
her father’s palace, and questioned in wonder a Christian slave woman,
destined ere long to face the lions in the arena.
The exactness of this simile was not altered by the fact that in this
case the slave woman was an agnostic, while the patrician girl had
been brought up in the creed of Christ. Sylvia had long since begun to
question the formulas of a church whose very pews were rented, and whose
existence, she declared, had to be justified by charity to the poor. As
we sat and talked, she knew this one thing quite definitely--that I had
a religion, and she had none. That was the reason for the excitement
which possessed her.
Nor was that fact ever out of my own mind for a moment. As she sat there
in her sun-flooded morning-room, clad in an exquisite embroidered robe
of pink Japanese silk, she was such a lovely thing that I was ready to
cry out for joy of her; and yet there was something within me, grim and
relentless, that sat on guard, warning me that she was of a different
faith from mine, and that between those two faiths there could be no
compromise. Some day she must find out what I thought of her husband’s
wealth, and the work it was doing in the world! Some day she must hear
my real opinion of the religion of motor-cars and hand-woven carpets!
13. Nor was the day so very far off. She sat opposite me, leaning
forward in her eagerness, declaring: “You must help to educate me. I
shall never rest until I’m of some real use in the world.”
“What have you thought of doing?” I inquired.
“I don’t know yet. My husband has an aunt who’s interested in a
day-nursery for the children of working-women. I thought I might help
this, but my husband says it does no good whatever--it only makes
paupers of the poor. Do you think so?”
“I think more than that,” I replied. “It sets women free to compete with
men, and beat down men’s wages.”
“Oh, what a puzzle!” she exclaimed, and then: “Is there any way of
helping the poor that wouldn’t be open to the same objection?”
That brought us once more to the subject I had put aside at our last
meeting. She had not forgotten it, and asked again for an explanation.
What did I mean by the competitive wage system?
My purpose in this writing is to tell the story of Sylvia Castleman’s
life, to show, not merely what she was, but what she became. I have to
make real to you a process of growth in her soul, and at this moment the
important event is her discovery of the class-struggle and her reaction
to it. You may say, perhaps, that you are not interested in the
class-struggle, but you cannot alter the fact that you live in an age
when millions of people are having the course of their lives changed by
the discovery of it. Here, for instance, is a girl who has been taught
to keep her promises, and has promised to love, honour and obey a man;
she is to find the task more difficult, because she comes to understand
the competitive wage-system while he does not understand it and does not
wish to. If that seems to you strange material out of which to make a
domestic drama, I can only tell you that you have missed some of the
vital facts of your own time.
I gave her a little lesson in elementary economics. I showed her how,
when a capitalist needed labour, he bought it in the open market, like
any other commodity. He did not think about the human side of it, he
paid the market-price, which came to be what the labourer had to have
in order to live. No labourer could get more, because others would take
less.
“If that be true,” I continued, “one of the things that follows is the
futility of charity. Whatever you do for the wage-worker on a general
scale comes sooner or later out of his wages. If you take care of his
children all day or part of the day, he can work for less; if he doesn’t
discover that someone else does, and underbids him and takes his place.
If you feed his children at school, if you bury him free, if you insure
his life, or even give him a dinner on Christmas Day, you simply enable
his landlord to charge him more, or his employer to pay him less.”
Sylvia sat for a while in thought, and then asked: “What can be done
about such a fact?”
“The first thing to be done is to make sure that you understand it.
Nine-tenths of the people who concern themselves with social questions
don’t, and so they waste their time in futilities. For instance, I read
the other day an article by a benevolent old gentleman who believed that
the social problem could be solved by teaching the poor to chew their
food better, so that they would eat less. You may laugh at that, but
it’s not a bit more absurd than the idea of our men of affairs, that the
thing to do is to increase the efficiency of the workers, and so produce
more goods.”
“You mean the working-man doesn’t get more, even when he produces more?”
“Take the case of the glass factories. Men used to get eight dollars a
day there, but someone invented a machine that did the work of a dozen
men, and that machine is run by a boy for fifty cents a day.”
A little pucker of thought came between her eyes. “Might there not be a
law forbidding the employer to reduce wages?”
“A minimum wage law. But that would raise the cost of the product, and
drive the trade to another state.”
She suggested a national law, and when I pointed out that the trade
would go to other countries, she fell back on the tariff. I felt like an
embryologist--watching the individual repeating the history of the race!
“Protection and prosperity!” I said, with a smile. “Don’t you see the
increase in the cost of living? The working-man gets more money in his
pay envelope, but he can’t buy more with it because prices go up. And
even supposing you could pass a minimum wage law, and stop competition
in wages, you’d only change it to competition in efficiency--you’d throw
the old and the feeble and the untrained into pauperism.”
“You make the world seem a hard place to live in,” protested Sylvia.
“I’m simply telling you the elementary facts of business. You can forbid
the employer to pay less than a standard wage, but you can’t compel him
to employ people who aren’t able to earn that wage. The business-man
doesn’t employ for fun, he does it for the profit there is in it.”
“If that is true,” said Sylvia, quickly, “then the way of employing
people is cruel.”
“But what other way could you have?”
She considered. “They could be employed so that no one would make a
profit. Then surely they could be paid enough to live decently!”
“But whose interest would it be to employ them without profit?”
“The State should do it, if no one else will.”
I had been playing a game with Sylvia, as no doubt you have perceived.
“Surely,” I said, “you wouldn’t approve anything like that!”
“But why not?”
“Because, it would be Socialism.”
She looked at me startled. “Is that Socialism?”
“Of course it is. It’s the essence of Socialism.”
“But then--what’s the harm in it?”
I laughed. “I thought you said that Socialism was a menace, like
divorce!”
I had my moment of triumph, but then I discovered how fond was the
person who imagined that he could play with Sylvia. “I suspect you are
something of a Socialist yourself,” she remarked.
She told me a long time afterwards what had been her emotions during
these early talks. It was the first time in her life that she had ever
listened to ideas that were hostile to her order, and she did so with
tremblings and hesitations, combating at every step an impulse to flee
to the shelter of conventionality. She was more shocked by my last
revelation than she let me suspect. It counted for little that I
had succeeded in trapping her in proposing for herself the economic
programme of Socialism, for what terrifies her class is not our economic
programme, it is our threat of slave-rebellion. I had been brought up
in a part of the world where democracy is a tradition, a word to conjure
with, and I supposed that this would be the case with any American--that
I would only have to prove that Socialism was democracy applied to
industry. How could I have imagined the kind of “democracy” which had
been taught to Sylvia by her Uncle Mandeville, the politician of the
family, who believed that America was soon to have a king, to keep the
“foreign riff-raff” in its place!
14. At this time I was living in a three-roomed apartment in one of the
new “model tenements” on the East Side. I had a saying about the place,
that it was “built for the proletariat and occupied by cranks.” What an
example for Sylvia of the futility of charity--the effort on the part
of benevolent capitalists to civilise the poor by putting bath-tubs in
their homes, and the discovery that the graceless creatures were using
them for the storage of coals!
Having heard these strange stories, Sylvia was anxious to visit me, and
I was, of course, glad to invite her. I purchased a fancy brand of tea,
and some implements for the serving of it, and she came, and went into
raptures over my three rooms and bath, no one of which would have made
more than a closet in her own apartments. I suspected that this was her
Southern _noblesse oblige_, but I knew also that in my living room
there were some rows of books, which would have meant more to Sylvia van
Tuiver just then than the contents of several clothes-closets.
I was pleased to discover that my efforts had not been wasted. She
had been thinking, and she had even found time, in the midst of her
distractions, to read part of a book. In the course of our talks I had
mentioned Veblen, and she had been reading snatches of his work on the
Leisure Class, and I was surprised, and not a little amused, to observe
her reaction to it.
When I talked about wages and hours of labour, I was dealing with things
that were remote from her, and difficult to make real; but Veblen’s
theme, the idle rich, and the arts and graces whereby they demonstrate
their power, was the stuff of which her life was made. The subtleties of
social ostentation, the minute distinctions between the newly-rich
and the anciently-rich, the solemn certainties of the latter and the
quivering anxieties of the former--all those were things which Sylvia
knew as a bird knows the way of the wind. To see the details of them
analysed in learned, scientific fashion, explained with great mouthfuls
of words which one had to look up in the dictionary--that was surely
a new discovery in the book-world! “Conspicuous leisure!” “Vicarious
consumption of goods!” “Oh, de-ah me, how que-ah!” exclaimed Sylvia.
And what a flood of anecdotes it let loose! A flood that bore us
straight back to Castleman Hall, and to all the scenes of her young
ladyhood! If only Lady Dee could have revised this book of Veblen’s, how
many points she could have given to him! No details had been too minute
for the technique of Sylvia’s great-aunt--the difference between the
swish of the right kind of silk petticoats and the wrong kind; and yet
her technique had been broad enough to take in a landscape. “Every girl
should have a background,” had been one of her maxims, and Sylvia had to
have a special phaeton to drive, a special horse to ride, special roses
which no one else was allowed to wear.
“Conspicuous expenditure of time,” wrote Veblen. It was curious, said
Sylvia, but nobody was free from this kind of vanity. There was dear old
Uncle Basil, a more godly bishop never lived, and yet he had a foible
for carving! In his opinion the one certain test of a gentleman was the
ease with which he found the joints of all kinds of meat, and he was in
arms against the modern tendency to turn such accomplishments over to
butlers. He would hold forth on the subject, illustrating his theories
with an elegant knife, and Sylvia remembered how her father and the
Chilton boys had wired up the joints of a duck for the bishop to work
on. In the struggle the bishop had preserved his dignity, but lost the
duck, and the bishop’s wife, being also high-born, and with a long line
of traditions behind her, had calmly continued the conversation, while
the butler removed the smoking duck from her lap!
Such was the way of things at Castleman Hall! The wild, care-free
people--like half-grown children, romping their way through life! There
was really nothing too crazy for them to do, if the whim struck them.
Once a visiting cousin had ventured the remark that she saw no reason
why people should not eat rats; a barn-rat was clean in its person,
and far choicer in its food than a pig. Thereupon “Miss Margaret” had
secretly ordered the yard-man to secure a barn-rat; she had had it
broiled, and served in a dish of squirrels, and had sat by and watched
the young lady enjoy it! And this, mind you, was Mrs. Castleman of
Castleman Hall, mother of five children, and as stately a dame as ever
led the grand march at the Governor’s inaugural ball! “Major Castleman,”
she would say to her husband, “you may take me into my bedroom, and when
you have locked the door securely, you may spit upon me, if you wish;
but don’t you dare even to _imagine_ anything undignified about me in
public!”
15. In course of time Sylvia and I became very good friends. Proud as
she was, she was lonely, and in need of some one to open her eager mind
to. Who was there safer to trust than this plain Western woman, who
lived so far, both in reality and in ideas, from the great world of
fashion?
Before we parted she considered it necessary to mention my relationship
to this world. She had a most acute social conscience. She knew exactly
what formalities she owed to everyone, just when she ought to call, and
how long she ought to stay, and what she ought to ask the other person
to do in return; she assumed that the other knew it all exactly as well,
and would suffer if she failed in the slightest degree.
So now she had to throw herself upon my mercy. “You see,” she explained,
“my husband wouldn’t understand. I may be able to change him gradually,
but if I shock him all at once--”
“My dear Mrs. van Tuiver--” I smiled.
“You can’t really imagine!” she persisted. “You see, he takes his social
position so seriously! And when you are conspicuous--when everybody’s
talking about what you do--when everything that’s the least bit unusual
is magnified--”
“My dear girl!” I broke in again. “Stop a moment and let me talk!”
“But I hate to have to think--”
“Don’t worry about my thoughts! They are most happy ones! You must
understand that a Socialist cannot feel about such things as you do; we
work out our economic interpretation of them, and after that they are
simply so much data to us. I might meet one of your great friends, and
she might snub me, but I would never think she had snubbed _me_--it
would be my Western accent, and my forty-cent hat, and things like
that which had put me in a class in her mind. My real self nobody can
snub--certainly not until they’ve got at it.”
“Ah!” said Sylvia, with shining eyes. “You have your own kind of
aristocracy, I see!”
“What I want,” I said, “is you. I’m an old hen whose chickens have grown
up and left her, and I want something to mother. Your wonderful social
world is just a bother to me, because it keeps me from gathering you
into my arms as I’d like to. So what you do is to think of some role for
me to play, so that I can come to see you; let me be advising you about
your proposed day-nursery, or let me be a tutor of something, or a nice,
respectable sewing-woman who darns the toes of your silk stockings!”
She laughed. “If you suppose that I’m allowed to wear my stockings until
they have holes in them, you don’t understand the perquisites of maids.”
She thought a moment, and then added: “You might come to trim hats for
me.”
By that I knew that we were really friends. If it does not seem to you
a bold thing for Sylvia to have made a joke about my hat, it is
only because you do not yet know her. I have referred to her
money-consciousness and her social-consciousness; I would be idealizing
her if I did not refer to another aspect of her which appalled me when I
came to realise it--her clothes-consciousness. She knew every variety of
fabric and every shade of colour and every style of design that ever
had been delivered of the frenzied sartorial imagination. She had been
trained in all the infinite minutiae which distinguished the right from
the almost right; she would sweep a human being at one glance, and stick
him in a pigeon hole of her mind for ever--because of his clothes. When
later on she had come to be conscious of this clothes-consciousness,
she told me that ninety-nine times out of a hundred she had found this
method of appraisal adequate for the purposes of society life. What a
curious comment upon our civilization--that all that people had to
ask of one another, all they had to give to one another, should be
expressible in terms of clothes!
16. I had set out to educate Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver in the things I
thought she needed to know. A part of my programme was to find some
people of modern sympathies whom she might meet without offence to
her old prejudices. The first person I thought of was Mrs. Jessie
Frothingham, who was the head of a fashionable girls’ school, just
around the corner from Miss Abercrombie’s where Sylvia herself had
received the finishing touch. Mrs. Frothingham’s was as exclusive and
expensive a school as the most proper person could demand, and great was
Sylvia’s consternation when I told her that its principal was a member
of the Socialist party, and made no bones about speaking in public for
us.
How in the world did she manage it? For one thing, I answered, she ran
a good school--nobody had ever been heard to deny that. For another, she
was an irresistibly serene and healthy person, who would look one of her
millionaire “papas” in the eye and tell him what was what with so much
decision; it would suddenly occur to the great man that if his daughter
could be made into so capable a woman, he would not care what ticket she
might vote.
Then too, it was testimony to the headway we are making that we are
ceasing to be dangerous, and getting to be picturesque. In these days of
strenuous social competition, when mammas are almost at their wits’ end
for some new device, when it costs incredible sums to make no impression
at all--here was offered a new and inexpensive way of being unique.
There could be no question that men were getting to like serious women;
the most amazing subjects were coming up at dinner-parties, and you
might hear the best people speak disrespectfully of their own money,
which means that the new Revolution will have not merely its “Egalité
Orleans,” but also some of the ladies of his family!
I telephoned from Sylvia’s house to Mrs. Frothingham, who answered:
“Wouldn’t you like Mrs. van Tuiver to hear a speech? I am to speak next
week at the noon-day Wall Street meeting.” I passed the question on, and
Sylvia answered with an exclamation of delight: “Would a small boy like
to attend a circus?”
It was arranged that Sylvia was to take us in her car. You may picture
me with my grand friends--an old speckled hen in the company of two
golden pheasants. I kept very quiet and let them get acquainted, knowing
that my cause was safe in the hands of one so perfectly tailored as Mrs.
Frothingham.
Sylvia expressed her delight at the idea of hearing a Socialist speech,
and her amazement that the head of Mrs. Frothingham’s should be so
courageous, and meantime we threaded our way through the tangle of
trucks and surface-cars on Broadway, and came to the corner of Wall
Street. Here Mrs. Frothingham said she would get out and walk; it was
quite likely that someone might recognise Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver, and
she ought not to be seen arriving with the speaker. Sylvia, who
would not willingly have committed a breach of etiquette towards a
bomb-throwing anarchist, protested at this, but Mrs. Frothingham laughed
good-naturedly, saying that it would be time enough for Mrs. van Tuiver
to commit herself when she knew what she believed.
The speaking was to be from the steps of the Sub-treasury. We made
a _détour,_ and came up Broad Street, stopping a little way from the
corner. These meetings had been held all through the summer and fall, so
that people had learned to expect them; although it lacked some minutes
of noon, there was already a crowd gathered. A group of men stood upon
the broad steps, one with a red banner and several others with armfuls
of pamphlets and books. With them was our friend, who looked at us and
smiled, but gave no other sign of recognition.
Sylvia pushed back the collar of her sable coat, and sat erect in her
shining blue velvet, her eyes and her golden hair shining beneath
the small brim of a soft velvet hat. As she gazed eagerly at the busy
throngs of men hurrying about this busy corner, she whispered to me: “I
haven’t been so excited since my _début_ party!”
The crowd increased until it was difficult to get through Wall Street.
The bell of Old Trinity was tolling the hour of noon, and the meeting
was about to begin, when suddenly I heard an exclamation from Sylvia,
and turning, saw a well-dressed man pushing his way from the office of
Morgan and Company towards us. Sylvia clutched my hand where it lay on
the seat of the car, and half gasped: “My husband!”
17. Of course I had been anxious to see Douglas van Tuiver. I had heard
Claire Lepage’s account of him, and Sylvia’s, also I had seen pictures
of him in the newspapers, and had studied them with some care, trying
to imagine what sort of personage he might be. I knew that he was
twenty-four, but the man who came towards us I would have taken to be
forty. His face was sombre, with large features and strongly marked
lines about the mouth; he was tall and thin, and moved with decision,
betraying no emotion even in this moment of surprise. “What are you
doing here?” were his first words.
For my part, I was badly “rattled”; I knew by the clutch of Sylvia’s
hand that she was too. But here I got a lesson in the nature of “social
training.” Some of the bright colour had faded from her face, but she
spoke with the utmost coolness, the words coming naturally and simply:
“We can’t get through the crowd.” And at the same time she looked about
her, as much as to say: “You can see for yourself.” (One of the maxims
of Lady Dee had set forth that a lady never told a lie if she could
avoid it.)