DR. MADELENE PRESCRIBES
Madelene's anteroom was full of poor people. They flocked to her, though
she did not pauperize them by giving her services free. She had got the
reputation of miraculous cures, the theory in the tenements being that
her father had swindled his satanic "familiar" by teaching his daughter
without price what he had had to pay for with his immortal soul. Adelaide
refused the chair a sick-looking young artisan awkwardly pressed upon
her. Leaning against the window seat, she tried to interest herself in
her fellow-invalids. But she had not then the secret which unlocks the
mystery of faces; she was still in the darkness in which most of us
proudly strut away our lives, deriding as dreamers or cranks those who
are in the light and see. With almost all of us the innate sympathies of
race, which give even wolves and vultures the sense of fraternal
companionship in the storm and stress of the struggle for existence, are
deep overlaid with various kinds of that egotistic ignorance called class
feeling. Adelaide felt sorry for "the poor," but she had yet to learn
that she was of them, as poor in other and more important ways as they in
money and drawing-room manners. Surfaces and the things of the surface
obscured or distorted all the realities for her, as for most of us; and
the fact that her intelligence laughed at and scorned her perverted
instincts was of as little help to her as it is to most of us.
When Madelene was free she said to her sister-in-law, in mock
seriousness, "Well, and what can I do for _you_!" as if she were
another patient.
Adelaide's eyes shifted. Clearly Madelene's keen, pretense-scattering
gaze was not one to invite to inspect a matter which might not look at
all well stripped of its envelopes of phrase and haze. She wished she had
not come; indeed, she had been half-wishing it during the whole
three-quarters of an hour of watching and thinking on Madelene's
wonderful life, so crowded with interest, with achievement, with all that
Hiram Ranger's daughter called, and believed, "the real thing."
"Nothing, nothing at all," replied she to Madelene's question. "I just
dropped in to annoy you with my idle self--or, maybe, to please you. You
know we're taught at church that a large part of the joy of the saved
comes from watching the misery of the damned."
But Madelene had the instinct of the physician born. "She has something
on her mind and wants me to help her," she thought. Aloud she said: "I
feel idle, myself. We'll sit about for an hour, and you'll stay to dinner
with Arthur and me--we have it here to-day, as your mother is going out.
Afterwards I must do my round."
A silence, with Adelaide wondering where Ross was and just when he would
return. Then Madelene went on: "I've been trying to persuade your mother
to give up the house, change it into a hospital."
The impudence of it! _Their_ house, _their_ home; and this newcomer into
the family--a newcomer from nowhere--trying to get it away from them!
"Mother said something about it," said Adelaide frostily. "But she
didn't say _you_ had been at her. I think she ought to be left alone in
her old age."
"The main thing is to keep her interested in life, don't you think?"
suggested Madelene, noting how Adelaide was holding herself in check, but
disregarding it. "Your mother's a plain, natural person and never has
felt at home in that big house. Indeed, I don't think any human being
ever does feel at home in a big house. There was a time when they fitted
in with the order of things; but now they've become silly, it seems to
me, except for public purposes. When we all get sensible and go in for
being somebody instead of for showing off, we'll live in convenient,
comfortable, really tasteful and individual houses and have big buildings
only for general use."
"I'm afraid the world will never grow up into your ideals, Madelene,"
said Del with restrained irony. "At least not in our day."
"I'm in no hurry," replied Madelene good-naturedly. "The most
satisfactory thing about common sense is that one can act on it without
waiting for others to get round to it. But we weren't talking of those
who would rather be ignorantly envied than intelligently happy. We were
talking of your mother."
"Mother was content with her mode of life until you put these 'advanced'
ideas into her head."
"'Advanced' is hardly the word," said Madelene. "They used to be her
ideas--always have been, underneath. If it weren't that she is afraid of
hurting your feelings, she'd not hesitate an instant. She'd take the
small house across the way and give herself the happiness of helping with
the hospital she'd install in the big house. You know she always had a
passion for waiting on people. Here's her chance to gratify it to good
purpose. Why should she let the fact that she has money enough not to
have to work stand between her and happy usefulness?"
"What does Arthur think?" asked Del. Her resentment was subsiding in
spite of her determined efforts to keep it glowing; Madelene knew the
secret of manner that enables one to be habitually right without giving
others the sense of being put irritatingly in the wrong. "But," smiling,
"I needn't inquire. Of course he assents to whatever _you_ say."
"You know Arthur better than that," replied Madelene, with no trace of
resentment. She had realized from the beginning of the conversation that
Del's nerves were on edge; her color, alternately rising and fading, and
her eyes, now sparkling now dull, could only mean fever from a tempest of
secret emotion. "He and I usually agree simply because we see things in
about the same light."
"You furnish the light," teased Adelaide.
"That was in part so at first," admitted her sister-in-law. "Arthur had
got many foolish notions in his head through accepting thoughtlessly the
ideas of the people he traveled with. But, once he let his good sense get
the upper hand--He helps me now far more than I help him."
"Has he consented to let them give him a salary yet?" asked Adelaide,
not because she was interested, but because she desperately felt that
the conversation must be kept alive. Perhaps Ross was even now on his
way to Saint X.
"He still gets what he fixed on at first--ten dollars a week more than
the foreman."
"Honestly, Madelene," said Adelaide, in a flush and flash of
irritation, "don't you think that's absurd? With the responsibility of
the whole business on his shoulders, you know he ought to have more
than a common workman."
"In the first place you must not forget that everyone is paid very high
wages at the university works now."
"And he's the cause of that--of the mills doing so well," said Del. She
could see Ross entering the gates--at the house--inquiring--What was she
talking to Madelene about? Yes, about Arthur and the mills. "Even the men
that criticise him--Arthur, I mean--most severely for 'sowing discontent
in the working class,' as they call it," she went on, "concede that he
has wonderful business ability. So he ought to have a huge salary."
"No doubt he earns it," replied Madelene. "But the difficulty is that he
can't take it without it's coming from the other workmen. You see, money
is coined sweat. All its value comes from somebody's labor. He deserves
to be rewarded for happening to have a better brain than most men, and
for using it better. But there's no fund for rewarding the clever for
being cleverer than most of their fellow-beings, any more than there's a
fund to reward the handsome for being above the average in looks. So he
has to choose between robbing his fellow-workmen, who are in his power,
and going without riches. He prefers going without."
"That's very noble of you both, I'm sure," said Adelaide absently.
The Chicago express would be getting in at four o'clock--about five
hours. Absurd! The morning papers said Mr. Whitney had had a relapse.
"Very noble," she repeated absently. "But I doubt if anybody will
appreciate it."
Madelene smiled cheerfully. "That doesn't worry Arthur or me," said she,
with her unaffected simplicity. "We're not looking for appreciation.
We're looking for a good time." Del, startled, began to listen to
Madelene. A good time--"And it so happens," came in Madelene's sweet,
honest voice, "that we're unable to have it, unless we feel that we
aren't getting it by making some one else have a not-so-good time or a
very bad time indeed. You've heard of Arthur's latest scheme?"
"Some one told me he was playing smash at the mills, encouraging the
workmen to idleness and all that sort of thing," said Del. Somehow she
felt less feverish, seemed compelled to attention by Madelene's voice and
eyes. "But I didn't hear or understand just how."
"He's going to establish a seven-hours' working day; and, if possible,
cut it down to six." Madelene's eyes were sparkling. Del watched her
longingly, enviously. How interested she was in these useful things. How
fine it must be to be interested where one could give one's whole heart
without concealment--or shame! "And," Madelene was saying, "the
university is to change its schedules so that all its practical courses
will be at hours when men working in the factory can take them. It's
simply another development of his and Dory's idea that a factory
belonging to a university ought to set a decent example--ought not to
compel its men to work longer than is necessary for them to earn at
honest wages a good living for themselves and their families."
"So that they can sit round the saloons longer," suggested Adelaide, and
then she colored and dropped her eyes; she was repeating Ross's comment
on this sort of "concession to the working classes." She had thought it
particularly acute when he made it. Now--
"No doubt most of them will spend their time foolishly at first,"
Madelene conceded. "Working people have had to work so hard for
others--twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day, just to be allowed to
live--that they've had really no free time at all; so they've had no
chance to learn how to spend free time sensibly. But they'll learn, those
of them that have capacity for improvement. Those that haven't will soon
drop out."
"The factories can't make money on such a plan as that," said Adelaide,
again repeating a remark of Ross's, but deliberately, because she
believed it could be answered, wished to hear it answered.
"No, not dividends," replied Madelene. "But dividends are to be abolished
in that department of the university, just as they are in the other
departments. And the money the university needs is to come from tuition
fees. Everyone is to pay for what he gets. Some one has to pay for it;
why not the person who gets the benefit? Especially when the university's
farms and workshops and factories give every student, man and woman, a
chance to earn a good living. I tell you Adelaide, the time is coming
when every kind of school except kindergarten will be self-supporting.
And then you'll see a human race that is really fine, really capable, has
a real standard of self-respect."
As Madelene talked, her face lighted up and all her latent magnetism was
radiating. Adelaide, for no reason that was clear to her, yielded to a
surge of impulse and, half-laughing, half in tears, suddenly kissed
Madelene. "No wonder Arthur is mad about you, stark mad," she cried.
Madelene was for a moment surprised out of that perfect
self-unconsciousness which is probably the rarest of human qualities, and
which was her greatest charm to those who knew her well. She blushed
furiously and angrily. Her and Arthur's love was to her most sacred,
absolutely between themselves. When any outsider could observe them,
even her sister Walpurga, she seemed so much the comrade and
fellow-worker in her attitude toward him that people thought and spoke of
their married life as "charming, but cold." Alone with him, she showed
that which was for him alone--a passion whose strength had made him
strong, as the great waves give their might to the swimmer who does not
shrink from adventuring them. Adelaide's impulsive remark, had violated
her profoundest modesty; and in the shock she showed it.
"I beg your pardon!" exclaimed Adelaide, though she did not realize
wherein she had offended. Love was an unexplored, an unsuspected mystery
to her then--the more a mystery because she thought she knew from having
read about it and discussed it and reasoned about it.
"Oh, I understand," said Madelene, contrite for her betraying expression.
"Only--some day--when you really fall in love--you'll know why I was
startled."
Adelaide shrank within herself. "Even Madelene," thought she, "who
has not a glance for other people's affairs, knows how it is between
Dory and me."
It was Madelene's turn to be repentant and apologetic. "I didn't mean
quite that," she stammered. "Of course I know you care for Dory--"
The tears came to Del's eyes and the high color to her cheeks. "You
needn't make excuses," she cried. "It's the truth. I don't care--in
_that_ way."
A silence; then Madelene, gently: "Was this what you came to tell me?"
Adelaide nodded slowly. "Yes, though I didn't know it."
"Why tell _me_?"
"Because I think I care for another man." Adelaide was not looking away.
On the contrary, as she spoke, saying the words in an even, reflective
tone, she returned her sister-in-law's gaze fully, frankly. "And I don't
know what to do. It's very complicated--doubly complicated."
"The one you were first engaged to?"
"Yes," said Del. "Isn't it pitiful in me?" And there was real
self-contempt in her voice and in her expression. "I assumed that I
despised him because he was selfish and calculating, and _such_ a snob!
Now I find I don't mind his selfishness, and that I, too, am a snob." She
smiled drearily. "I suppose you feel the proper degree of contempt and
aversion."
"We are all snobs," answered Madelene tranquilly. "It's one of the
deepest dyes of the dirt we came from, the hardest to wash out."
"Besides," pursued Adelaide, "he and I have both learned by
experience--which has come too late; it always does."
"Not at all," said Madelene briskly. "Experience is never too late. It's
always invaluably useful in some way, no matter when it comes."
Adelaide was annoyed by Madelene's lack of emotion. She had thought her
sister-in-law would be stirred by a recital so romantic, so dark with the
menace of tragedy. Instead, the doctor was acting as if she were dealing
with mere measles. Adelaide, unconsciously, of course--we are never
conscious of the strong admixture of vanity in our "great" emotions--was
piqued into explaining. "We can never be anything to each other. There's
Dory; then there's Theresa. And I'd suffer anything rather than bring
shame and pain on others."
Madelene smiled--somehow not irritatingly--an appeal to Del's sense of
proportion. "Suffer," repeated she. "That's a good strong word for a
woman to use who has health and youth and beauty, and material
comfort--and a mind capable of an infinite variety of interests."
Adelaide's tragic look was slipping from her. "Don't take too gloomy a
view," continued the physician. "Disease and death and one other thing
are the only really serious ills. In this case of yours everything will
come round quite smooth, if you don't get hysterical and if Ross Whitney
is really in earnest and not"--Madelene's tone grew even more
deliberate--"not merely getting up a theatrical romance along the lines
of the 'high-life' novels you idle people set such store by." She saw, in
Del's wincing, that the shot had landed. "No," she went on, "your case is
one of the commonplaces of life among those people--and they're in all
classes--who look for emotions and not for opportunities to be useful."
Del smiled, and Madelene hailed the returning sense of humor as an
encouraging sign.
"The one difficult factor is Theresa," said Madelene, pushing on with the
prescription. "She--I judge from what I've heard--she's what's commonly
called a 'poor excuse for a woman.' We all know that type. You may be
sure her vanity would soon find ways of consoling her. Ninety-nine times
out of a hundred where one holds on after the other has let go the reason
is vanity, wounded vanity--where it isn't the material consideration that
explains why there are so many abandoned wives and so few abandoned
husbands. Theresa doesn't really care for her husband; love that isn't
mutual isn't love. So she'd come up smiling for a second husband."
"She's certainly vain," said Del. "Losing him would all but kill her."
"Not if it's done tactfully," replied Madelene. "Ross'll no doubt be glad
to sacrifice his own vanity and so arrange matters that she'll be able to
say and feel that she got rid of him, not he of her. Of course that means
a large sacrifice of his vanity--and of yours, too. But neither of you
will mind that."
Adelaide looked uncomfortable; Madelene took advantage of her abstraction
to smile at the confession hinted in that look.
"As for Dory--"
At that name Del colored and hung her head.
"As for Dory," repeated Madelene, not losing the chance to emphasize the
effect, "he's no doubt fond of you. But no matter what he--or you--may
imagine, his fondness cannot be deeper than that of a man for a woman
between whom and him there isn't the perfect love that makes one of two."
"I don't understand his caring for me," cried Del. "I can't believe he
does." This in the hope of being contradicted.
But Madelene simply said: "Perhaps he'd not feel toward you as he seems
to think he does if he hadn't known you before you went East and got fond
of the sort of thing that attracts you in Ross Whitney. Anyhow, Dory's
the kind of man to be less unhappy over losing you than over keeping you
when you didn't want to stay. You may be like his eyes to him, but you
know if that sort of man loses his sight he puts seeing out of the
calculation and goes on just the same. Dory Hargrave is a _man_; and a
real man is bigger than any love affair, however big."
Del was trying to hide the deep and smarting wound to her vanity. "You
are right, Madelene," said she. "Dory _is_ cold."
"But I didn't say that," replied Madelene. "Most of us prefer people like
those flabby sea creatures that are tossed aimlessly about by the waves
and have no permanent shape or real purposes and desires, but take
whatever their feeble tentacles can hold without effort." Del winced, and
it was the highest tribute to Dr. Madelene's skill that the patient did
not hate her and refuse further surgery. "We're used to that sort,"
continued she. "So when a really alive, vigorous, pushing, and resisting
personality comes in contact with us, we say, 'How hard! How unfeeling!'
The truth, of course, is that Ross is more like the flabby things--his
environment dominates him, while Dory dominates his environment. But you
like the Ross sort, and you're right to suit yourself. To suit yourself
is the only way to avoid making a complete failure of life. Wait till
Dory comes home. Then talk it out with him. Then--free yourself and marry
Ross, who will have freed himself. It's quite simple. People are
broad-minded about divorce nowadays. It never causes serious scandal,
except among those who'd like to do the same, but don't dare."
It certainly was easy, and ought to have been attractive. Yet Del was not
attracted. "One can't deal with love in such a cold, calculating
fashion," thought she, by way of bolstering up her weakening confidence
in the reality and depth of those sensations which had seemed so
thrillingly romantic an hour before. "I've given you the impression that
Ross and I have some--some understanding," said she. "But we haven't. For
all I know, he may not care for me as I care for him."
"He probably doesn't," was Madelene's douche-like reply. "You attract him
physically--which includes his feeling that you'd show off better than
Theresa before the world for which he cares so much. But, after all,
that's much the way you care for him, isn't it?"
Adelaide's bosom was swelling and falling agitatedly. Her eyes flashed;
her reserve vanished. "I'm sure he'd love me!" cried she. "He'd give me
what my whole soul, my whole body cry out for. Madelene, you don't
understand! I am so starved, so out in the cold! I want to go in where
it's warm--and--human!" The truth, the deep-down truth, was out at last;
Adelaide had wrenched it from herself.
"And Dory will not give you that?" said Madelene, all gentleness and
sympathy, and treading softly on this dangerous, delicate ground.
"He gives me nothing!" exclaimed Adelaide bitterly. "He is waiting for me
to learn to love him. He ought to know that a woman has to be taught to
love--at least the sort of woman I am. He treats me as if I were his
equal, when he ought to see that I'm not; that I'm like a child, and have
to be shown what's good for me, and _made_ to take it."
"Then, perhaps, after all," said Madelene slowly, "you do care for Dory."
"Of course I care for him; how could anyone help it? But he won't let
me--he won't let me!" She was on the verge of hysteria, and her loss of
self-control was aggravated by the feeling that she was making a weak,
silly exhibition of herself.
"If you do care for Dory, and Dory cares for you, and you don't care for
Ross--" began Madelene.
"But I do care for Ross, too! Oh, I must be bad--bad! Could a nice woman
care for two men at the same time?"
"I'd have said not," was Madelene's answer. "But now I see that she
could--and I see why."
"Dory means something to me that Ross does not. Ross means something that
Dory does not. I want it all--all that both of them represent. I can't
give up Dory; I can't give up Ross. You don't understand, Madelene,
because you've had the good luck to get it all from Arthur."
After a silence, Madelene said: "Well, Del, what are you going to do?"
"Nothing."
"That's sensible!" approved Madelene. "If Ross really loves you, then,
whether he can have you or not, he'll free himself from Theresa. He
simply couldn't go on with her. And if you really care for him, then,
when Dory comes home he'll free you."
"That ought to be so," said Adelaide, not seeing the full meaning of
Madelene's last words. "But it isn't. Neither Ross nor I is strong
enough. We're just ordinary people, the sort that most everybody is and
that most everybody despises when they see them or read about them as
they really are. No, he and I will each do the conventional thing. We'll
go our separate ways "--contemptuously--"the _easiest_ ways. And we'll
regard ourselves as martyrs to duty--that's how they put it in the
novels, isn't it?"
"At least," said Madelene, with a calmness she was far from feeling,
"both you and Ross have had your lesson in the consequence of doing
things in a hurry."
"That's the only way people brought up as we've been ever do anything. If
we don't act on impulse, we don't act at all; we drift on."
"Drifting is action, the most decisive kind of action." Madelene was
again thinking what would surely happen the instant Dory found how
matters stood; but she deemed it tactful to keep this thought to herself.
Just then she was called to the telephone. When she came back she found
Adelaide restored to her usual appearance--the fashionable,
light-hearted, beautiful woman, mistress of herself, and seeming as
secure against emotional violence from within as against discourtesy from
without. But she showed how deep was the impression of Madelene's
common-sense analysis of her romance by saying: "A while ago you said
there were only three serious ills, disease and death, but you didn't
name the third. What is it?"
"Dishonor," said Madelene, with a long, steady look at her.
Adelaide paled slightly, but met her sister-in-law's level gaze. "Yes,"
was all she said.
A silence; then Madelene: "Your problem, Del, is simple; is no problem
at all, so far as Dory or Ross's wife is concerned; or the whole outside
world, for that matter. It's purely personal; it's altogether the
problem of bringing pain and shame on yourself. The others'll get over
it; but can you?"
Del made no reply. A moment later Arthur came; after dinner she left
before he did, and so was not alone with Madelene again. Reviewing her
amazing confessions to her sister-in-law, she was both sorry and not
sorry. Her mind was undoubtedly relieved, but at the price of showing to
another her naked soul, and that other a woman--true, an unusual woman,
by profession a confessor, but still a woman. Thenceforth some one other
than herself would know her as she really was--not at all the nice,
delicate lady with instincts as fine as those of the heroines of novels,
who, even at their most realistic, are pictured as fully and grandly
dressed of soul in the solitude of bedroom as in crowded drawing-room. "I
don't care!" concluded Adelaide. "If she, or anyone, thinks the worse of
me for being a human being, it will show either hypocrisy or ignorance of
human nature."