When Gertrude found herself beside Trefusis in the Pullman, she wondered
how she came to be travelling with him against her resolution, if not
against her will. In the presence of two women scrutinizing her as if
they suspected her of being there with no good purpose, a male
passenger admiring her a little further off, her maid reading Trefusis’s
newspapers just out of earshot, an uninterested country gentleman
looking glumly out of window, a city man preoccupied with the
“Economist,” and a polite lady who refrained from staring but not from
observing, she felt that she must not make a scene; yet she knew he had
not come there to hold an ordinary conversation. Her doubt did not last
long. He began promptly, and went to the point at once.
“What do you think of this engagement of mine?”
This was more than she could bear calmly. “What is it to me?” she said
indignantly. “I have nothing to do with it.”
“Nothing! You are a cold friend to me then. I thought you one of the
surest I possessed.”
She moved as if about to look at him, but checked herself, closed her
lips, and fixed her eyes on the vacant seat before her. The reproach he
deserved was beyond her power of expression.
“I cling to that conviction still, in spite of Miss Lindsay’s
indifference to my affairs. But I confess I hardly know how to bring you
into sympathy with me in this matter. In the first place, you have never
been married, I have. In the next, you are much younger than I, in more
respects than that of years. Very likely half your ideas on the subject
are derived from fictions in which happy results are tacked on to
conditions very ill-calculated to produce them--which in real life
hardly ever do produce them. If our friendship were a chapter in a
novel, what would be the upshot of it? Why, I should marry you, or you
break your heart at my treachery.”
Gertrude moved her eyes as if she had some intention of taking to
flight.
“But our relations being those of real life--far sweeter, after all--I
never dreamed of marrying you, having gained and enjoyed your friendship
without that eye to business which our nineteenth century keeps open
even whilst it sleeps. You, being equally disinterested in your regard
for me, do not think of breaking your heart, but you are, I suppose, a
little hurt at my apparently meditating and resolving on such a serious
step as marriage with Agatha without confiding my intention to you. And
you punish me by telling me that you have nothing to do with it--that it
is nothing to you. But I never meditated the step, and so had nothing to
conceal from you. It was conceived and executed in less than a minute.
Although my first marriage was a silly love match and a failure, I have
always admitted to myself that I should marry again. A bachelor is a man
who shirks responsibilities and duties; I seek them, and consider it
my duty, with my monstrous superfluity of means, not to let the
individualists outbreed me. Still, I was in no hurry, having other
things to occupy me, and being fond of my bachelor freedom, and doubtful
sometimes whether I had any right to bring more idlers into the world
for the workers to feed. Then came the usual difficulty about the lady.
I did not want a helpmeet; I can help myself. Nor did I expect to be
loved devotedly, for the race has not yet evolved a man lovable on
thorough acquaintance; even my self-love is neither thorough nor
constant. I wanted a genial partner for domestic business, and Agatha
struck me quite suddenly as being the nearest approach to what I desired
that I was likely to find in the marriage market, where it is extremely
hard to suit oneself, and where the likeliest bargains are apt to be
snapped up by others if one hesitates too long in the hope of finding
something better. I admire Agatha’s courage and capability, and believe
I shall be able to make her like me, and that the attachment so begun
may turn into as close a union as is either healthy or necessary between
two separate individuals. I may mistake her character, for I do not know
her as I know you, and have scarcely enough faith in her as yet to tell
her such things as I have told you. Still, there is a consoling dash of
romance in the transaction. Agatha has charm. Do you not think so?”
Gertrude’s emotion was gone. She replied with cool scorn, “Very romantic
indeed. She is very fortunate.”
Trefusis half laughed, half sighed with relief to find her so
self-possessed. “It sounds like--and indeed is--the selfish calculation
of a disilluded widower. You would not value such an offer, or envy the
recipient of it?”
“No,” said Gertrude with quiet contempt.
“Yet there is some calculation behind every such offer. We marry to
satisfy our needs, and the more reasonable our needs are, the more
likely are we to get them satisfied. I see you are disgusted with me;
I feared as much. You are the sort of woman to admit no excuse for my
marriage except love--pure emotional love, blindfolding reason.”
“I really do not concern myself--”
“Do not say so, Gertrude. I watch every step you take with anxiety; and
I do not believe you are indifferent to the worthiness of my conduct.
Believe me, love is an overrated passion; it would be irremediably
discredited but that young people, and the romancers who live upon their
follies, have a perpetual interest in rehabilitating it. No relation
involving divided duties and continual intercourse between two people
can subsist permanently on love alone. Yet love is not to be despised
when it comes from a fine nature. There is a man who loves you exactly
as you think I ought to love Agatha--and as I don’t love her.”
Gertrude’s emotion stirred again, and her color rose. “You have no right
to say these things now,” she said.
“Why may I not plead the cause of another? I speak of Erskine.” Her
color vanished, and he continued, “I want you to marry him. When you are
married you will understand me better, and our friendship, shaken just
now, will be deepened; for I dare assure you, now that you can no longer
misunderstand me, that no living woman is dearer to me than you. So much
for the inevitable selfish reason. Erskine is a poor man, and in
his comfortable poverty--save the mark--lies your salvation from the
baseness of marrying for wealth and position; a baseness of which women
of your class stand in constant peril. They court it; you must shun it.
The man is honorable and loves you; he is young, healthy, and suitable.
What more do you think the world has to offer you?”
“Much more, I hope. Very much more.”
“I fear that the names I give things are not romantic enough. He is a
poet. Perhaps he would be a hero if it were possible for a man to be a
hero in this nineteenth century, which will be infamous in history as
a time when the greatest advances in the power of man over nature only
served to sharpen his greed and make famine its avowed minister. Erskine
is at least neither a gambler nor a slave-driver at first hand; if he
lives upon plundered labor he can no more help himself than I. Do not
say that you hope for much more; but tell me, if you can, what more you
have any chance of getting? Mind, I do not ask what more you desire; we
all desire unutterable things. I ask you what more you can obtain!”
“I have not found Mr. Erskine such a wonderful person as you seem to
think him.”
“He is only a man. Do you know anybody more wonderful?”
“Besides, my family might not approve.”
“They most certainly will not. If you wish to please them, you must sell
yourself to some rich vampire of the factories or great landlord. If you
give yourself away to a poor poet who loves you, their disgust will be
unbounded. If a woman wishes to honor her father and mother to their own
satisfaction nowadays she must dishonor herself.”
“I do not understand why you should be so anxious for me to marry
someone else?”
“Someone else?” said Trefusis, puzzled.
“I do not mean someone else,” said Gertrude hastily, reddening. “Why
should I marry at all?”
“Why do any of us marry? Why do I marry? It is a function craving
fulfilment. If you do not marry betimes from choice, you will be driven
to do so later on by the importunity of your suitors and of your family,
and by weariness of the suspense that precedes a definite settlement of
oneself. Marry generously. Do not throw yourself away or sell yourself;
give yourself away. Erskine has as much at stake as you; and yet he
offers himself fearlessly.”
Gertrude raised her head proudly.
“It is true,” continued Trefusis, observing the gesture with some anger,
“that he thinks more highly of you than you deserve; but you, on the
other hand, think too lowly of him. When you marry him you must save him
from a cruel disenchantment by raising yourself to the level he fancies
you have attained. This will cost you an effort, and the effort will do
you good, whether it fail or succeed. As for him, he will find his
just level in your estimation if your thoughts reach high enough to
comprehend him at that level.”
Gertrude moved impatiently.
“What!” he said quickly. “Are my long-winded sacrifices to the god of
reason distasteful? I believe I am involuntarily making them so because
I am jealous of the fellow after all. Nevertheless I am serious; I want
you to get married; though I shall always have a secret grudge against
the man who marries you. Agatha will suspect me of treason if you don’t.
Erskine will be a disappointed man if you don’t. You will be moody,
wretched, and--and unmarried if you don’t.”
Gertrude’s cheeks flushed at the word jealous, and again at his mention
of Agatha. “And if I do,” she said bitterly, “what then?”
“If you do, Agatha’s mind will be at ease, Erskine will be happy, and
you! You will have sacrificed yourself, and will have the happiness
which follows that when it is worthily done.”
“It is you who have sacrificed me,” she said, casting away her
reticence, and looking at him for the first time during the
conversation.
“I know it,” he said, leaning towards her and half whispering the
words. “Is not renunciation the beginning and the end of wisdom? I have
sacrificed you rather than profane our friendship by asking you to share
my whole life with me. You are unfit for that, and I have committed
myself to another union, and am begging you to follow my example, lest
we should tempt one another to a step which would soon prove to you how
truly I tell you that you are unfit. I have never allowed you to roam
through all the chambers of my consciousness, but I keep a sanctuary
there for you alone, and will keep it inviolate for you always. Not even
Agatha shall have the key, she must be content with the other rooms--the
drawing-room, the working-room, the dining-room, and so forth. They
would not suit you; you would not like the furniture or the guests;
after a time you would not like the master. Will you be content with the
sanctuary?” Gertrude bit her lip; tears came into her eyes. She looked
imploringly at him. Had they been alone, she would have thrown herself
into his arms and entreated him to disregard everything except their
strong cleaving to one another.
“And will you keep a corner of your heart for me?”
She slowly gave him a painful look of acquiescence. “Will you be brave,
and sacrifice yourself to the poor man who loves you? He will save you
from useless solitude, or from a worldly marriage--I cannot bear to
think of either as your fate.”
“I do not care for Mr. Erskine,” she said, hardly able to control her
voice; “but I will marry him if you wish it.”
“I do wish it earnestly, Gertrude.”
“Then, you have my promise,” she said, again with some bitterness.
“But you will not forget me? Erskine will have all but that--a tender
recollection--nothing.”
“Can I do more than I have just promised?”
“Perhaps so; but I am too selfish to be able to conceive anything more
generous. Our renunciation will bind us to one another as our union
could never have done.”
They exchanged a long look. Then he took out his watch, and began to
speak of the length of their journey, now nearly at an end. When they
arrived in London the first person they recognized on the platform was
Mr. Jansenius.
“Ah! you got my telegram, I see,” said Trefusis. “Many thanks for
coming. Wait for me whilst I put this lady into a cab.”
When the cab was engaged, and Gertrude, with her maid, stowed within, he
whispered to her hurriedly:
“In spite of all, I have a leaden pain here” (indicating his heart).
“You have been brave, and I have been wise. Do not speak to me, but
remember that we are friends always and deeply.”
He touched her hand, and turned to the cabman, directing him whither to
drive. Gertrude shrank back into a corner of the vehicle as it departed.
Then Trefusis, expanding his chest like a man just released from some
cramping drudgery, rejoined Mr. Jansenius.
“There goes a true woman,” he said. “I have been persuading her to take
the very best step open to her. I began by talking sense, like a man of
honor, and kept at it for half an hour, but she would not listen to me.
Then I talked romantic nonsense of the cheapest sort for five minutes,
and she consented with tears in her eyes. Let us take this hansom. Hi!
Belsize Avenue. Yes; you sometimes have to answer a woman according to
her womanishness, just as you have to answer a fool according to his
folly. Have you ever made up your mind, Jansenius, whether I am an
unusually honest man, or one of the worst products of the social
organization I spend all my energies in assailing--an infernal
scoundrel, in short?”
“Now pray do not be absurd,” said Mr. Jansenius. “I wonder at a man of
your ability behaving and speaking as you sometimes do.”
“I hope a little insincerity, when meant to act as chloroform--to save
a woman from feeling a wound to her vanity--is excusable. By-the-bye,
I must send a couple of telegrams from the first post-office we pass.
Well, sir, I am going to marry Agatha, as I sent you word. There was
only one other single man and one other virgin down at Brandon Beeches,
and they are as good as engaged. And so--
“‘Jack shall have Jill, Nought shall go ill, The man shall have his mare
again; And all shall be well.’”
APPENDIX
LETTER TO THE AUTHOR FROM MR. SIDNEY TREFUSIS.
My Dear Sir: I find that my friends are not quite satisfied with the
account you have given of them in your clever novel entitled “An
Unsocial Socialist.” You already understand that I consider it my duty
to communicate my whole history, without reserve, to whoever may desire
to be guided or warned by my experience, and that I have no sympathy
whatever with the spirit in which one of the ladies concerned recently
told you that her affairs were no business of yours or of the people who
read your books. When you asked my permission some years ago to make
use of my story, I at once said that you would be perfectly justified
in giving it the fullest publicity whether I consented or not, provided
only that you were careful not to falsify it for the sake of artistic
effect. Now, whilst cheerfully admitting that you have done your best
to fulfil that condition, I cannot help feeling that, in presenting the
facts in the guise of fiction, you have, in spite of yourself, shown
them in a false light. Actions described in novels are judged by a
romantic system of morals as fictitious as the actions themselves. The
traditional parts of this system are, as Cervantes tried to show, for
the chief part, barbarous and obsolete; the modern additions are largely
due to the novel readers and writers of our own century--most of them
half-educated women, rebelliously slavish, superstitious, sentimental,
full of the intense egotism fostered by their struggle for personal
liberty, and, outside their families, with absolutely no social
sentiment except love. Meanwhile, man, having fought and won his fight
for this personal liberty, only to find himself a more abject slave
than before, is turning with loathing from his egotist’s dream of
independence to the collective interests of society, with the welfare
of which he now perceives his own happiness to be inextricably bound
up. But man in this phase (would that all had reached it!) has not yet
leisure to write or read novels. In noveldom woman still sets the moral
standard, and to her the males, who are in full revolt against the
acceptance of the infatuation of a pair of lovers as the highest
manifestation of the social instinct, and against the restriction of the
affections within the narrow circle of blood relationship, and of
the political sympathies within frontiers, are to her what she calls
heartless brutes. That is exactly what I have been called by readers
of your novel; and that, indeed, is exactly what I am, judged by the
fictitious and feminine standard of morality. Hence some critics
have been able plausibly to pretend to take the book as a satire on
Socialism. It may, for what I know, have been so intended by you.
Whether or no, I am sorry you made a novel of my story, for the effect
has been almost as if you had misrepresented me from beginning to end.
At the same time, I acknowledge that you have stated the facts, on the
whole, with scrupulous fairness. You have, indeed, flattered me very
strongly by representing me as constantly thinking of and for other
people, whereas the rest think of themselves alone, but on the other
hand you have contradictorily called me “unsocial,” which is certainly
the last adjective I should have expected to find in the neighborhood
of my name. I deny, it is true, that what is now called “society”
is society in any real sense, and my best wish for it is that it may
dissolve too rapidly to make it worth the while of those who are “not
in society” to facilitate its dissolution by violently pounding it into
small pieces. But no reader of “An Unsocial Socialist” needs to be
told how, by the exercise of a certain considerate tact (which on the
outside, perhaps, seems the opposite of tact), I have contrived to
maintain genial terms with men and women of all classes, even those
whose opinions and political conduct seemed to me most dangerous.
However, I do not here propose to go fully into my own position, lest
I should seem tedious, and be accused, not for the first time, of a
propensity to lecture--a reproach which comes naturally enough from
persons whose conceptions are never too wide to be expressed within the
limits of a sixpenny telegram. I shall confine myself to correcting a
few misapprehensions which have, I am told, arisen among readers who
from inveterate habit cannot bring the persons and events of a novel
into any relation with the actual conditions of life.
In the first place, then, I desire to say that Mrs. Erskine is not dead
of a broken heart. Erskine and I and our wives are very much in and out
at one another’s houses; and I am therefore in a position to declare
that Mrs. Erskine, having escaped by her marriage from the vile caste
in which she was relatively poor and artificially unhappy and
ill-conditioned, is now, as the pretty wife of an art-critic, relatively
rich, as well as pleasant, active, and in sound health. Her chief
trouble, as far as I can judge, is the impossibility of shaking off her
distinguished relatives, who furtively quit their abject splendor to
drop in upon her for dinner and a little genuine human society much
oftener than is convenient to poor Erskine. She has taken a patronizing
fancy to her father, the Admiral, who accepts her condescension
gratefully as age brings more and more home to him the futility of his
social position. She has also, as might have been expected, become an
extreme advocate of socialism; and indeed, being in a great hurry for
the new order of things, looks on me as a lukewarm disciple because I do
not propose to interfere with the slowly grinding mill of Evolution, and
effect the change by one tremendous stroke from the united and awakened
people (for such she--vainly, alas!--believes the proletariat already to
be). As to my own marriage, some have asked sarcastically whether I ran
away again or not; others, whether it has been a success. These are
foolish questions. My marriage has turned out much as I expected
it would. I find that my wife’s views on the subject vary with the
circumstances under which they are expressed.
I have now to make one or two comments on the impressions conveyed
by the style of your narrative. Sufficient prominence has not, in my
opinion, been given to the extraordinary destiny of my father, the
true hero of a nineteenth century romance. I, who have seen society
reluctantly accepting works of genius for nothing from men of
extraordinary gifts, and at the same time helplessly paying my
father millions, and submitting to monstrous mortgages of its future
production, for a few directions as to the most business-like way of
manufacturing and selling cotton, cannot but wonder, as I prepare my
income-tax returns, whether society was mad to sacrifice thus to him and
to me. He was the man with power to buy, to build, to choose, to endow,
to sit on committees and adjudicate upon designs, to make his own terms
for placing anything on a sound business footing. He was hated, envied,
sneered at for his low origin, reproached for his ignorance, yet nothing
would pay unless he liked or pretended to like it. I look round at
our buildings, our statues, our pictures, our newspapers, our domestic
interiors, our books, our vehicles, our morals, our manners, our
statutes, and our religion, and I see his hand everywhere, for they
were all made or modified to please him. Those which did not please him
failed commercially: he would not buy them, or sell them, or countenance
them; and except through him, as “master of the industrial situation,”
nothing could be bought, or sold, or countenanced. The landlord could
do nothing with his acres except let them to him; the capitalist’s hoard
rotted and dwindled until it was lent to him; the worker’s muscles
and brain were impotent until sold to him. What king’s son would not
exchange with me--the son of the Great Employer--the Merchant Prince?
No wonder they proposed to imprison me for treason when, by applying my
inherited business talent, I put forward a plan for securing his full
services to society for a few hundred a year. But pending the adoption
of my plan, do not describe him contemptuously as a vulgar tradesman.
Industrial kingship, the only real kingship of our century, was his by
divine right of his turn for business; and I, his son, bid you respect
the crown whose revenues I inherit. If you don’t, my friend, your book
won’t pay.
I hear, with some surprise, that the kindness of my conduct to Henrietta
(my first wife, you recollect) has been called in question; why, I do
not exactly know. Undoubtedly I should not have married her, but it is
waste of time to criticise the judgment of a young man in love. Since
I do not approve of the usual plan of neglecting and avoiding a spouse
without ceasing to keep up appearances, I cannot for the life of me see
what else I could have done than vanish when I found out my mistake. It
is but a short-sighted policy to wait for the mending of matters that
are bound to get worse. The notion that her death was my fault is sheer
unreason on the face of it; and I need no exculpation on that score; but
I must disclaim the credit of having borne her death like a philosopher.
I ought to have done so, but the truth is that I was greatly affected at
the moment, and the proof of it is that I and Jansenius (the only
other person who cared) behaved in a most unbecoming fashion, as men
invariably do when they are really upset. Perfect propriety at a death
is seldom achieved except by the undertaker, who has the advantage of
being free from emotion.
Your rigmarole (if you will excuse the word) about the tombstone gives
quite a wrong idea of my attitude on that occasion. I stayed away from
the funeral for reasons which are, I should think, sufficiently obvious
and natural, but which you somehow seem to have missed. Granted that my
fancy for Hetty was only a cloud of illusions, still I could not, within
a few days of her sudden death, go in cold blood to take part in a
grotesque and heathenish mummery over her coffin. I should have
broken out and strangled somebody. But on every other point I--weakly
enough--sacrificed my own feelings to those of Jansenius. I let him
have his funeral, though I object to funerals and to the practice of
sepulture. I consented to a monument, although there is, to me, no more
bitterly ridiculous outcome of human vanity than the blocks raised to
tell posterity that John Smith, or Jane Jackson, late of this parish,
was born, lived, and died worth enough money to pay a mason to
distinguish their bones from those of the unrecorded millions. To
gratify Jansenius I waived this objection, and only interfered to save
him from being fleeced and fooled by an unnecessary West End middleman,
who, as likely as not, would have eventually employed the very man to
whom I gave the job. Even the epitaph was not mine. If I had had my way
I should have written: “HENRIETTA JANSENIUS WAS BORN ON SUCH A DATE,
MARRIED A MAN NAMED TREFUSIS, AND DIED ON SUCH ANOTHER DATE; AND NOW
WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHETHER SHE DID OR NOT?” The whole notion conveyed
in the book that I rode rough-shod over everybody in the affair, and
only consulted my own feelings, is the very reverse of the truth.
As to the tomfoolery down at Brandon’s, which ended in Erskine and
myself marrying the young lady visitors there, I can only congratulate
you on the determination with which you have striven to make something
like a romance out of such very thin material. I cannot say that I
remember it all exactly as you have described it; my wife declares
flatly there is not a word of truth in it as far as she is concerned,
and Mrs. Erskine steadily refuses to read the book.
On one point I must acknowledge that you have proved yourself a master
of the art of fiction. What Hetty and I said to one another that day
when she came upon me in the shrubbery at Alton College was known only
to us two. She never told it to anyone, and I soon forgot it. All
due honor, therefore, to the ingenuity with which you have filled the
hiatus, and shown the state of affairs between us by a discourse on
“surplus value,” cribbed from an imperfect report of one of my public
lectures, and from the pages of Karl Marx! If you were an economist I
should condemn you for confusing economic with ethical considerations,
and for your uncertainty as to the function which my father got his
start by performing. But as you are only a novelist, I compliment you
heartily on your clever little pasticcio, adding, however, that as an
account of what actually passed between myself and Hetty, it is the
wildest romance ever penned. Wickens’s boy was far nearer the mark.
In conclusion, allow me to express my regret that you can find no
better employment for your talent than the writing of novels. The first
literary result of the foundation of our industrial system upon the
profits of piracy and slave-trading was Shakspere. It is our misfortune
that the sordid misery and hopeless horror of his view of man’s destiny
is still so appropriate to English society that we even to-day regard
him as not for an age, but for all time. But the poetry of despair will
not outlive despair itself. Your nineteenth century novelists are only
the tail of Shakspere. Don’t tie yourself to it: it is fast wriggling
into oblivion.
I am, dear sir, yours truly,
SIDNEY TREFUSIS.
End of Project Gutenberg’s An Unsocial Socialist, by George Bernard Shaw