"Well, I was going to tell you about this affair if you had not
forestalled me by mentioning it yourself. It isn't pleasant to be
vilified by rascals who make capital out of vilification, and a man has a
right to expect some sympathy from his wife."
"Did I ever deny you that, Hugh?" she asked. "Only you don't ever seem to
need it, to want it."
"And there are things," I pursued, "things in a man's province that a
woman ought to accept from her husband, things which in the very nature
of the case she can know nothing about."
"But a woman must think for herself," she declared. "She shouldn't become
a mere automaton,--and these questions involve so much! People are
discussing them, the magazines and periodicals are beginning to take them
up."
I stared at her, somewhat appalled by this point of view. There had,
indeed, been signs of its development before now, but I had not heeded
them. And for the first time I beheld Maude in a new light.
"Oh, it's not that I don't trust you," she continued, "I'm open to
conviction, but I must be convinced. Your explanation of this Galligan
case seems a sensible one, although it's depressing. But life is hard and
depressing sometimes I've come to realize that. I want to think over what
you've said, I want to talk over it some more. Why won't you tell me more
of what you are doing? If you only would confide in me--as you have now!
I can't help seeing that we are growing farther and farther apart, that
business, your career, is taking all of you and leaving me nothing." She
faltered, and went on again. "It's difficult to tell you this--you never
give me the chance. And it's not for my sake alone, but for yours, too.
You are growing more and more self-centred, surrounding yourself with a
hard shell. You don't realize it, but Tom notices it, Perry notices it,
it hurts them, it's that they complain of. Hugh!" she cried appealingly,
sensing my resentment, forestalling the words of defence ready on my
lips. "I know that you are busy, that many men depend on you, it isn't
that I'm not proud of you and your success, but you don't understand what
a woman craves,--she doesn't want only to be a good housekeeper, a good
mother, but she wants to share a little, at any rate, in the life of her
husband, in his troubles as well as in his successes. She wants to be of
some little use, of some little help to him."
My feelings were reduced to a medley.
"But you are a help to me--a great help," I protested.
She shook her head. "I wish I were," she said.
It suddenly occurred to me that she might be. I was softened, and alarmed
by the spectacle she had revealed of the widening breach between us. I
laid my hand on her shoulder.
"Well, I'll try to do better, Maude."
She looked up at me, questioningly yet gratefully, through a mist of
tears. But her reply--whatever it might have been--was forestalled by the
sound of shouts and laughter in the hallway. She sprang up and ran to the
door.
"It's the children," she exclaimed, "they've come home from Susan's
party!"
It begins indeed to look as if I were writing this narrative upside down,
for I have said nothing about children. Perhaps one reason for this
omission is that I did not really appreciate them, that I found it
impossible to take the same minute interest in them as Tom, for instance,
who was, apparently, not content alone with the six which he possessed,
but had adopted mine. One of them, little Sarah, said "Uncle Tom" before
"Father." I do not mean to say that I had not occasional moments of
tenderness toward them, but they were out of my thoughts much of the
time. I have often wondered, since, how they regarded me; how, in their
little minds, they defined the relationship. Generally, when I arrived
home in the evening I liked to sit down before my study fire and read the
afternoon newspapers or a magazine; but occasionally I went at once to
the nursery for a few moments, to survey with complacency the medley of
toys on the floor, and to kiss all three. They received my caresses with
a certain shyness--the two younger ones, at least, as though they were at
a loss to place me as a factor in the establishment. They tumbled over
each other to greet Maude, and even Tom. If I were an enigma to them,
what must they have thought of him? Sometimes I would discover him on the
nursery floor, with one or two of his own children, building towers and
castles and railroad stations, or forts to be attacked and demolished by
regiments of lead soldiers. He was growing comfortable-looking, if not
exactly stout; prematurely paternal, oddly willing to renounce the
fiercer joys of life, the joys of acquisition, of conquest, of youth.
"You'd better come home with me, Chickabiddy," he would say, "that father
of yours doesn't appreciate you. He's too busy getting rich."
"Chickabiddy," was his name for little Sarah. Half of the name stuck to
her, and when she was older we called her Biddy.
She would gaze at him questioningly, her eyes like blue flower cups, a
strange little mixture of solemnity and bubbling mirth, of shyness and
impulsiveness. She had fat legs that creased above the tops of the absurd
little boots that looked to be too tight; sometimes she rolled and
tumbled in an ecstasy of abandon, and again she would sit motionless, as
though absorbed in dreams. Her hair was like corn silk in the sun,
twisting up into soft curls after her bath, when she sat rosily presiding
over her supper table.
As I look back over her early infancy, I realize that I loved her,
although it is impossible for me to say how much of this love is
retrospective. Why I was not mad about her every hour of the day is a
puzzle to me now. Why, indeed, was I not mad about all three of them?
There were moments when I held and kissed them, when something within me
melted: moments when I was away from them, and thought of them. But these
moments did not last. The something within me hardened again, I became
indifferent, my family was wiped out of my consciousness as though it had
never existed.
There was Matthew, for instance, the oldest. When he arrived, he was to
Maude a never-ending miracle, she would have his crib brought into her
room, and I would find her leaning over the bedside, gazing at him with a
rapt expression beyond my comprehension. To me he was just a brick-red
morsel of humanity, all folds and wrinkles, and not at all remarkable in
any way. Maude used to annoy me by getting out of bed in the middle of
the night when he cried, and at such times I was apt to wonder at the odd
trick the life-force had played me, and ask myself why I got married at
all. It was a queer method of carrying on the race. Later on, I began to
take a cursory interest in him, to watch for signs in him of certain
characteristics of my own youth which, in the philosophy of my manhood, I
had come to regard as defects. And it disturbed me somewhat to see these
signs appear. I wished him to be what I had become by force of will--a
fighter. But he was a sensitive child, anxious for approval; not robust,
though spiritual rather than delicate; even in comparative infancy he
cared more for books than toys, and his greatest joy was in being read
to. In spite of these traits--perhaps because of them--there was a
sympathy between us. From the time that he could talk the child seemed to
understand me. Occasionally I surprised him gazing at me with a certain
wistful look that comes back to me as I write.
Moreton, Tom used to call Alexander the Great because he was a fighter
from the cradle, beating his elder brother, too considerate to strike
back, and likewise--when opportunity offered--his sister; and
appropriating their toys. A self-sufficient, doughty young man, with the
round head that withstands many blows, taking by nature to competition
and buccaneering in general. I did not love him half so much as I did
Matthew--if such intermittent emotions as mine may be called love. It was
a standing joke of mine--which Maude strongly resented--that Moreton
resembled Cousin George of Elkington.
Imbued with the highest ambition of my time, I had set my barque on a
great circle, and almost before I realized it the barque was burdened
with a wife and family and the steering had insensibly become more
difficult; for Maude cared nothing about the destination, and when I took
any hand off the wheel our ship showed a tendency to make for a quiet
harbour. Thus the social initiative, which I believed should have been
the woman's, was thrust back on me. It was almost incredible, yet
indisputable, in a day when most American women were credited with a
craving for social ambition that I, of all men, should have married a
wife in whom the craving was wholly absent! She might have had what other
women would have given their souls for. There were many reasons why I
wished her to take what I deemed her proper place in the community as my
wife--not that I cared for what is called society in the narrow sense;
with me, it was a logical part of a broader scheme of life; an auxiliary
rather than an essential, but a needful auxiliary; a means of dignifying
and adorning the position I was taking. Not only that, but I felt the
need of intercourse--of intercourse of a lighter and more convivial
nature with men and women who saw life as I saw it. In the evenings when
we did not go out into that world our city afforded ennui took possession
of me: I had never learned to care for books, I had no resources outside
of my profession, and when I was not working on some legal problem I
dawdled over the newspapers and went to bed. I don't mean to imply that
our existence, outside of our continued intimacy with the Peterses and
the Blackwoods, was socially isolated. We gave little dinners that Maude
carried out with skill and taste; but it was I who suggested them; we
went out to other dinners, sometimes to Nancy's--though we saw less and
less of her--sometimes to other houses. But Maude had given evidence of
domestic tastes and a disinclination for gaiety that those who
entertained more were not slow to sense. I should have liked to take a
larger house, but I felt the futility of suggesting it; the children were
still small, and she was occupied with them. Meanwhile I beheld, and at
times with considerable irritation, the social world changing, growing
larger and more significant, a more important function of that higher
phase of American existence the new century seemed definitely to have
initiated. A segregative process was away to which Maude was wholly
indifferent. Our city was throwing off its social conservatism; wealth
(which implied ability and superiority) was playing a greater part,
entertainments were more luxurious, lines more strictly drawn. We had an
elaborate country club for those who could afford expensive amusements.
Much of this transformation had been due to the initiative and leadership
of Nancy Durrett....
Great and sudden wealth, however, if combined with obscure antecedents
and questionable qualifications, was still looked upon askance. In spite
of the fact that Adolf Scherer had "put us on the map," the family of the
great iron-master still remained outside of the social pale. He himself
might have entered had it not been for his wife, who was supposed to be
"queer," who remained at home in her house opposite Gallatin Park and
made little German cakes,--a huge house which an unknown architect had
taken unusual pains to make pretentious and hideous, for it was Rhenish,
Moorish and Victorian by turns. Its geometric grounds matched those of
the park, itself a monument to bad taste in landscape. The neighbourhood
was highly respectable, and inhabited by families of German extraction.
There were two flaxen-haired daughters who had just graduated from an
expensive boarding-school in New York, where they had received the polish
needful for future careers. But the careers were not forthcoming.
I was thrown constantly with Adolf Scherer; I had earned his gratitude, I
had become necessary to him. But after the great coup whereby he had
fulfilled Mr. Watling's prophecy and become the chief factor in our
business world he began to show signs of discontent, of an irritability
that seemed foreign to his character, and that puzzled me. One day,
however, I stumbled upon the cause of this fermentation, to wonder that I
had not discovered it before. In many ways Adolf Scherer was a child. We
were sitting in the Boyne Club.
"Money--yes!" he exclaimed, apropos of some demand made upon him by a
charitable society. "They come to me for my money--there is always
Scherer, they say. He will make up the deficit in the hospitals. But what
is it they do for me? Nothing. Do they invite me to their houses, to
their parties?"
This was what he wanted, then,--social recognition. I said nothing, but I
saw my opportunity: I had the clew, now, to a certain attitude he had
adopted of late toward me, an attitude of reproach; as though, in return
for his many favours to me, there were something I had left undone. And
when I went home I asked Maude to call on Mrs. Scherer.
"On Mrs. Scherer!" she repeated.
"Yes, I want you to invite them to dinner." The proposal seemed to take
away her breath. "I owe her husband a great deal, and I think he feels
hurt that the wives of the men he knows down town haven't taken up his
family." I felt that it would not be wise, with Maude, to announce my
rather amazing discovery of the iron-master's social ambitions.
"But, Hugh, they must be very happy, they have their friends. And after
all this time wouldn't it seem like an intrusion?"
"I don't think so," I said, "I'm sure it would please him, and them. You
know how kind he's been to us, how he sent us East in his private car
last year."
"Of course I'll go if you wish it, if you're sure they feel that way."
She did make the call, that very week, and somewhat to my surprise
reported that she liked Mrs. Scherer and the daughters: Maude's likes and
dislikes, needless to say, were not governed by matters of policy.
"You were right, Hugh," she informed me, almost with enthusiasm, "they
did seem lonely. And they were so glad to see me, it was rather pathetic.
Mr. Scherer, it seems, had talked to them a great deal about you. They
wanted to know why I hadn't come before. That was rather embarrassing.
Fortunately they didn't give me time to talk, I never heard people talk
as they do. They all kissed me when I went away, and came down the steps
with me. And Mrs. Scherer went into the conservatory and picked a huge
bouquet. There it is," she said, laughingly, pointing to several vases.
"I separated the colours as well as I could when I got home. We had
coffee, and the most delicious German cakes in the Turkish room, or the
Moorish room, whichever it is. I'm sure I shan't be able to eat anything
more for days. When do you wish to have them for dinner?"
"Well," I said, "we ought to have time to get the right people to meet
them. We'll ask Nancy and Ham."
Maude opened her eyes.
"Nancy! Do you think Nancy would like them?"
"I'm going to give her a chance, anyway," I replied....
It was, in some ways, a memorable dinner. I don't know what I expected in
Mrs. Scherer--from Maude's description a benevolent and somewhat stupid,
blue-eyed German woman, of peasant extraction. There could be no doubt
about the peasant extraction, but when she hobbled into our little
parlour with the aid of a stout, gold-headed cane she dominated it. Her
very lameness added to a distinction that evinced itself in a dozen ways.
Her nose was hooked, her colour high,--despite the years in
Steelville,--her peculiar costume heightened the effect of her
personality; her fire-lit black eyes bespoke a spirit accustomed to rule,
and instead of being an aspirant for social honours, she seemed to confer
them. Conversation ceased at her entrance.
"I'm sorry we are late, my dear," she said, as she greeted Maude
affectionately, "but we have far to come. And this is your husband!" she
exclaimed, as I was introduced. She scrutinized me. "I have heard
something of you, Mr. Paret. You are smart. Shall I tell you the smartest
thing you ever did?" She patted Maude's shoulder. "When you married your
wife--that was it. I have fallen in love with her. If you do not know it,
I tell you."
Next, Nancy was introduced.
"So you are Mrs. Hambleton Durrett?"
Nancy acknowledged her identity with a smile, but the next remark was a
bombshell.
"The leader of society."
"Alas!" exclaimed Nancy, "I have been accused of many terrible things."
Their glances met. Nancy's was amused, baffling, like a spark in amber.
Each, in its way, was redoubtable. A greater contrast between two women
could scarcely have been imagined. It was well said (and not snobbishly)
that generations had been required to make Nancy's figure: she wore a
dress of blue sheen, the light playing on its ripples; and as she stood,
apparently wholly at ease, looking down at the wife of Adolf Scherer, she
reminded me of an expert swordsman who, with remarkable skill, was
keeping a too pressing and determined aspirant at arm's length. I was
keenly aware that Maude did not possess this gift, and I realized for the
first time something of the similarity between Nancy's career and my own.
She, too, in her feminine sphere, exercised, and subtly, a power in which
human passions were deeply involved.
If Nancy Durrett symbolized aristocracy, established order and prestige,
what did Mrs. Scherer represent? Not democracy, mob rule--certainly. The
stocky German peasant woman with her tightly drawn hair and heavy jewels
seemed grotesquely to embody something that ultimately would have its
way, a lusty and terrible force in the interests of which my own services
were enlisted; to which the old American element in business and
industry, the male counterpart of Nancy Willett, had already succumbed.
And now it was about to storm the feminine fastnesses! I beheld a woman
who had come to this country with a shawl aver her head transformed into
a new species of duchess, sure of herself, scorning the delicate
euphemisms in which Fancy's kind were wont to refer to asocial realm,
that was no less real because its boundaries had not definitely been
defined. She held her stick firmly, and gave Nancy an indomitable look.
"I want you to meet my daughters. Gretchen, Anna, come here and be
introduced to Mrs. Durrett."
It was not without curiosity I watched these of the second generation as
they made their bows, noted the differentiation in the type for which an
American environment and a "finishing school" had been responsible.
Gretchen and Anna had learned--in crises, such as the present--to
restrain the superabundant vitality they had inherited. If their
cheekbones were a little too high, their Delft blue eyes a little too
small, their colour was of the proverbial rose-leaves and cream. Gene
Hollister's difficulty was to know which to marry. They were nice
girls,--of that there could be no doubt; there was no false modesty in
their attitude toward "society"; nor did they pretend--as so many silly
people did, that they were not attempting to get anywhere in particular,
that it was less desirable to be in the centre than on the dubious outer
walks. They, too, were so glad to meet Mrs. Durrett.
Nancy's eyes twinkled as they passed on.
"You see what I have let you in for?" I said.
"My dear Hugh," she replied, "sooner or later we should have had to face
them anyhow. I have recognized that for some time. With their money, and
Mr. Scherer's prestige, and the will of that lady with the stick, in a
few years we should have had nothing to say. Why, she's a female
Napoleon. Hilda's the man of the family."
After that, Nancy invariably referred to Mrs. Scherer as Hilda.
If Mrs. Scherer was a surprise to us, her husband was a still greater
one; and I had difficulty in recognizing the Adolf Scherer who came to
our dinner party as the personage of the business world before whom
lesser men were wont to cringe. He seemed rather mysteriously to have
shed that personality; become an awkward, ingratiating, rather too
exuberant, ordinary man with a marked German accent. From time to time I
found myself speculating uneasily on this phenomenon as I glanced down
the table at his great torso, white waist-coated for the occasion. He was
plainly "making up" to Nancy, and to Mrs. Ogilvy, who sat opposite him.
On the whole, the atmosphere of our entertainment was rather electric.
"Hilda" was chiefly responsible for this; her frankness was of the
breath-taking kind. Far from attempting to hide or ignore the struggle by
which she and her husband had attained their present position, she
referred with the utmost naivete to incidents in her career, while the
whole table paused to listen.
"Before we had a carriage, yes, it was hard for me to get about. I had to
be helped by the conductors into the streetcars. I broke my hip when we
lived in Steelville, and the doctor was a numbskull. He should be put in
prison, is what I tell Adolf. I was standing on a clothes-horse, when it
fell. I had much washing to do in those days."
"And--can nothing be done, Mrs. Scherer?" asked Leonard Dickinson,
sympathetically.
"For an old woman? I am fifty-five. I have had many doctors. I would put
them all in prison. How much was it you paid Dr. Stickney, in New York,
Adolf? Five thousand dollars? And he did nothing--nothing. I'd rather be
poor again, and work. But it is well to make the best of it."...
"Your grandfather was a fine man, Mr. Durrett," she informed Hambleton.
"It is a pity for you, I think, that you do not have to work."
Ham, who sat on her other side, was amused.
"My grandfather did enough work for both of us," he said.
"If I had been your grandfather, I would have started you in puddling,"
she observed, as she eyed with disapproval the filling of his third glass
of champagne. "I think there is too much gay life, too much games for
rich young men nowadays. You will forgive me for saying what I think to
young men?"
"I'll forgive you for not being my grandfather, at any rate," replied
Ham, with unaccustomed wit.
She gazed at him with grim humour.
"It is bad for you I am not," she declared.
There was no gainsaying her. What can be done with a lady who will not
recognize that morality is not discussed, and that personalities are
tabooed save between intimates. Hilda was a personage as well as a
Tartar. Laws, conventions, usages--to all these she would conform when it
pleased her. She would have made an admirable inquisitorial judge, and
quite as admirable a sick nurse. A rare criminal lawyer, likewise, was
wasted in her. She was one of those individuals, I perceived, whose
loyalties dominate them; and who, in behalf of those loyalties, carry
chips on their shoulders.
"It is a long time that I have been wanting to meet you," she informed
me. "You are smart."
I smiled, yet I was inclined to resent her use of the word, though I was
by no means sure of the shade of meaning she meant to put into it. I had,
indeed, an uneasy sense of the scantiness of my fund of humour to meet
and turn such a situation; for I was experiencing, now, with her, the
same queer feeling I had known in my youth in the presence of Cousin
Robert Breck--the suspicion that this extraordinary person saw through
me. It was as though she held up a mirror and compelled me to look at my
soul features. I tried to assure myself that the mirror was distorted. I
lost, nevertheless, the sureness of touch that comes from the conviction
of being all of a piece. She contrived to resolve me again into
conflicting elements. I was, for the moment, no longer the self-confident
and triumphant young attorney accustomed to carry all before him, to
command respect and admiration, but a complicated being whose unity had
suddenly been split. I glanced around the table at Ogilvy, at Dickinson,
at Ralph Hambleton. These men were functioning truly. But was I? If I
were not, might not this be the reason for the lack of synthesis--of
which I was abruptly though vaguely aware between my professional life,
my domestic relationships, and my relationships with friends. The loyalty
of the woman beside me struck me forcibly as a supreme trait. Where she
had given, she did not withdraw. She had conferred it instantly on Maude.
Did I feel that loyalty towards a single human being? towards Maude
herself--my wife? or even towards Nancy? I pulled myself together, and
resolved to give her credit for using the word "smart" in its
unobjectionable sense. After all; Dickens had so used it.
"A lawyer must needs know something of what he is about, Mrs. Scherer, if
he is to be employed by such a man as your husband," I replied.
Her black eyes snapped with pleasure.
"Ah, I suppose that is so," she agreed. "I knew he was a great man when I
married him, and that was before Mr. Nathaniel Durrett found it out."
"But surely you did not think, in those days, that he would be as big as
he has become? That he would not only be president of the Boyne Iron
Works, but of a Boyne Iron Works that has exceeded Mr. Durrett's wildest
dreams."
She shook her head complacently.
"Do you know what I told him when he married me? I said, 'Adolf, it is a
pity you are born in Germany.' And when he asked me why, I told him that
some day he might have been President of the United States."
"Well, that won't be a great deprivation to him," I remarked. "Mr.
Scherer can do what he wants, and the President cannot."
"Adolf always does as he wants," she declared, gazing at him as he sat
beside the brilliant wife of the grandson of the man whose red-shirted
foreman he had been. "He does what he wants, and gets what he wants. He
is getting what he wants now," she added, with such obvious meaning that
I found no words to reply. "She is pretty, that Mrs. Durrett, and
clever,--is it not so?"
I agreed. A new and indescribable note had come into Mrs. Scherer's
voice, and I realized that she, too, was aware of that flaw in the
redoubtable Mr. Scherer which none of his associates had guessed. It
would have been strange if she had not discovered it. "She is beautiful,
yes," the lady continued critically, "but she is not to compare with your
wife. She has not the heart,--it is so with all your people of society.
For them it is not what you are, but what you have done, and what you
have."
The banality of this observation was mitigated by the feeling she threw
into it.
"I think you misjudge Mrs. Durrett," I said, incautiously. "She has never
before had the opportunity of meeting Mr. Scherer of appreciating him."
"Mrs. Durrett is an old friend of yours?" she asked.
"I was brought up with her."
"Ah!" she exclaimed, and turned her penetrating glance upon me. I was
startled. Could it be that she had discerned and interpreted those
renascent feelings even then stirring within me, and of which I myself
was as yet scarcely conscious? At this moment, fortunately for me, the
women rose; the men remained to smoke; and Scherer, as they discussed
matters of finance, became himself again. I joined in the conversation,
but I was thinking of those instants when in flashes of understanding my
eyes had met Nancy's; instants in which I was lifted out of my humdrum,
deadly serious self and was able to look down objectively upon the life I
led, the life we all led--and Nancy herself; to see with her the comic
irony of it all. Nancy had the power to give me this exquisite sense of
detachment that must sustain her. And was it not just this sustenance she
could give that I needed? For want of it I was hardening, crystallizing,
growing blind to the joy and variety of existence. Nancy could have saved
me; she brought it home to me that I needed salvation.... I was struck by
another thought; in spite of our separation, in spite of her marriage and
mine, she was still nearer to me--far nearer--than any other being.
Later, I sought her out. She looked up at me amusedly from the
window-seat in our living-room, where she had been talking to the Scherer
girls.
"Well, how did you get along with Hilda?" she asked. "I thought I saw you
struggling."
"She's somewhat disconcerting," I said. "I felt as if she were turning me
inside out."
Nancy laughed.
"Hilda's a discovery--a genius. I'm going to have them to dinner myself."
"And Adolf?" I inquired. "I believe she thought you were preparing to run
away with him. You seemed to have him hypnotized."
"I'm afraid your great man won't be able to stand--elevation," she
declared. "He'll have vertigo. He's even got it now, at this little
height, and when he builds his palace on Grant Avenue, and later moves to
New York, I'm afraid he'll wobble even more."
"Is he thinking of doing all that?" I asked.
"I merely predict New York--it's inevitable," she replied. "Grant Avenue,
yes; he wants me to help him choose a lot. He gave me ten thousand
dollars for our Orphans' Home, but on the whole I think I prefer Hilda
even if she doesn't approve of me."
Nancy rose. The Scherers were going. While Mr. Scherer pressed my hand in
a manner that convinced me of his gratitude, Hilda was bidding an
affectionate good night to Maude. A few moments later she bore her
husband and daughters away, and we heard the tap-tap of her cane on the
walk outside....