They were talking after dinner in that cozy moment when the
conversation has ripened, just before the coffee, into mocking guesses
and laughing suggestions. The thing they were talking of was something
that would have held them apart if less happily timed and placed, but
then and there it drew these together in what most of them felt a
charming and flattering intimacy. Not all of them took part in the
talk, and of those who did, none perhaps assumed to talk with
authority or finality. At first they spoke of the subject as _it_,
forbearing to name it, as if the name of it would convey an unpleasant
shock, out of temper with the general feeling.
"I don't suppose," the host said, "that it's really so much commoner
than it used to be. But the publicity is more invasive and explosive.
That's perhaps because it has got higher up in the world and has
spread more among the first circles. The time was when you seldom
heard of it there, and now it is scarcely a scandal. I remember that
when I went abroad, twenty or thirty years ago, and the English
brought me to book about it, I could put them down by saying that I
didn't know a single divorced person."
"And of course," a bachelor guest ventured, "a person of that sort
_must_ be single."
At first the others did not take the joke; then they laughed, but the
women not so much as the men.
"And you couldn't say that now?" the lady on the right of the host
inquired.
"Why, I don't know," he returned, thoughtfully, after a little
interval. "I don't just call one to mind."
"Then," the bachelor said, "that classes you. If you moved in our best
society you would certainly know some of the many smart people whose
disunions alternate with the morning murders in the daily papers."
"Yes, the fact seems to rank me rather low; but I'm rather proud of
the fact."
The hostess seemed not quite to like this arrogant humility. She said,
over the length of the table (it was not very long), "I'm sure you
know some very nice people who have not been."
"Well, yes, I do. But are they really smart people? They're of very
good family, certainly."
"You mustn't brag," the bachelor said.
A husband on the right of the hostess wondered if there were really
more of the thing than there used to be.
"Qualitatively, yes, I should say. Quantitatively, I'm not convinced,"
the host answered. "In a good many of the States it's been made
difficult."
The husband on the right of the hostess was not convinced, he said, as
to the qualitative increase. The parties to the suits were rich
enough, and sometimes they were high enough placed and far enough
derived. But there was nearly always a leak in them, a social leak
somewhere, on one side or the other. They could not be said to be
persons of quality in the highest sense.
"Why, persons of quality seldom can be," the bachelor contended.
The girl opposite, who had been invited to balance him in the scale of
celibacy by the hostess in her study of her dinner-party, first
smiled, and then alleged a very distinguished instance of divorce in
which the parties were both of immaculate origin and unimpeachable
fashion. "Nobody," she said, "can accuse _them_ of a want of quality."
She was good-looking, though no longer so young as she could have
wished; she flung out her answer to the bachelor defiantly, but she
addressed it to the host, and he said that was true; certainly it was
a signal case; but wasn't it exceptional? The others mentioned like
cases, though none quite so perfect, and then there was a lull till
the husband on the left of the hostess noted a fact which renewed the
life of the discussion.
"There was a good deal of agitation, six or eight years ago, about it.
I don't know whether the agitation accomplished anything."
The host believed it had influenced legislation.
"For or against?" the bachelor inquired.
"Oh, against."
"But in other countries it's been coming in more and more. It seems to
be as easy in England now as it used to be in Indiana. In France it's
nothing scandalous, and in Norwegian society you meet so many
disunited couples in a state of quadruplicate reunion that it is very
embarrassing. It doesn't seem to bother the parties to the new
relation themselves."
"It's very common in Germany, too," the husband on the right of the
hostess said.
The husband on her left side said he did not know just how it was in
Italy and Spain, and no one offered to disperse his ignorance.
In the silence which ensued the lady on the left of the host created a
diversion in her favor by saying that she had heard they had a very
good law in Switzerland.
Being asked to tell what it was, she could not remember, but her
husband, on the right of the hostess, saved the credit of his family
by supplying her defect. "Oh, yes. It's very curious. We heard of it
when we were there. When people want to be put asunder, for any reason
or other, they go before a magistrate and declare their wish. Then
they go home, and at the end of a certain time--weeks or months--the
magistrate summons them before him with a view to reconciliation. If
they come, it is a good sign; if they don't come, or come and persist
in their desire, then they are summoned after another interval, and
are either reconciled or put asunder, as the case may be, or as they
choose. It is not expensive, and I believe it isn't scandalous."
"It seems very sensible," the husband on the left of the hostess said,
as if to keep the other husband in countenance. But for an interval no
one else joined him, and the mature girl said to the man next her that
it seemed rather cold-blooded. He was a man who had been entreated to
come in, on the frank confession that he was asked as a stop-gap, the
original guest having fallen by the way. Such men are apt to abuse
their magnanimity, their condescension. They think that being there
out of compassion, and in compliance with a hospitality that had not
at first contemplated their presence, they can say anything; they are
usually asked without but through their wives, who are asked to "lend"
them, and who lend them with a grudge veiled in eager acquiescence;
and the men think it will afterward advantage them with their wives,
when they find they are enjoying themselves, if they will go home and
report that they said something vexing or verging on the offensive to
their hostess. This man now addressed himself to the lady at the head
of the table.
"Why do we all talk as if we thought divorce was an unquestionable
evil?"
The hostess looked with a frightened air to the right and left, and
then down the table to her husband. But no one came to her rescue, and
she asked feebly, as if foreboding trouble (for she knew she had taken
a liberty with this man's wife), "Why, don't we?"
"About one in seven of us doesn't," the stop-gap said.
"Oh!" the girl beside him cried out, in a horror-stricken voice which
seemed not to interpret her emotion truly. "Is it so bad as that?"
"Perhaps not quite, even if it is bad at all," he returned, and the
hostess smiled gratefully at the girl for drawing his fire. But it
appeared she had not, for he directed his further speech at the
hostess again: really the most inoffensive person there, and the least
able to contend with adverse opinions.
"No, I don't believe we do think it an unquestionable evil, unless we
think marriage is so." Everybody sat up, as the stop-gap had intended,
no doubt, and he "held them with his glittering eye," or as many as he
could sweep with his glance. "I suppose that the greatest hypocrite at
this table, where we are all so frankly hypocrites together, will not
deny that marriage is the prime cause of divorce. In fact, divorce
couldn't exist without it."
The women all looked bewilderedly at one another, and then appealingly
at the men. None of these answered directly, but the bachelor softly
intoned out of Gilbert and Sullivan--he was of that date:
"'A paradox, a paradox;
A most ingenious paradox!'"
"Yes," the stop-gap defiantly assented. "A paradox; and all aboriginal
verities, all giant truths, are paradoxes."
"Giant truths is good," the bachelor noted, but the stop-gap did not
mind him.
He turned to the host: "I suppose that if divorce is an evil, and we
wish to extirpate it, we must strike at its root, at marriage?"
The host laughed. "I prefer not to take the floor. I'm sure we all
want to hear what you have to say in support of your mammoth idea."
"Oh yes, indeed," the women chorused, but rather tremulously, as not
knowing what might be coming.
"Which do you mean? That all truth is paradoxical, or that marriage is
the mother of divorce?"
"Whichever you like."
"The last proposition is self-evident," the stop-gap said, supplying
himself with a small bunch of the grapes which nobody ever takes at
dinner; the hostess was going to have coffee for the women in the
drawing-room, and to leave the men to theirs with their tobacco at the
table. "And you must allow that if divorce is a good thing or a bad
thing, it equally partakes of the nature of its parent. Or else
there's nothing in heredity."
"Oh, come!" one of the husbands said.
"Very well!" the stop-gap submitted. "I yield the word to you." But as
the other went no further, he continued. "The case is so clear that it
needs no argument. Up to this time, in dealing with the evil of
divorce, if it is an evil, we have simply been suppressing the
symptoms; and your Swiss method--"
"Oh, it isn't _mine_," the man said who had stated it.
"--Is only a part of the general practice. It is another attempt to
make divorce difficult, when it is marriage that ought to be made
difficult."
"Some," the daring bachelor said, "think it ought to be made
impossible." The girl across the table began to laugh hysterically,
but caught herself up and tried to look as if she had not laughed at
all.
"I don't go as far as that," the stop-gap resumed, "but as an
inveterate enemy of divorce--"
An "Oh!" varying from surprise to derision chorused up; but he did not
mind it; he went on as if uninterrupted.
"I should put every possible obstacle, and at every step, in the way
of marriage. The attitude of society toward marriage is now simply
preposterous, absolutely grotesque. Society? The whole human framework
in all its manifestations, social, literary, religious, artistic, and
civic, is perpetually guilty of the greatest mischief in the matter.
Nothing is done to retard or prevent marriage; everything to
accelerate and promote it. Marriage is universally treated as a virtue
which of itself consecrates the lives of the mostly vulgar and
entirely selfish young creatures who enter into it. The blind and
witless passion in which it oftenest originates, at least with us, is
flattered out of all semblance to its sister emotions, and revered as
if it were a celestial inspiration, a spiritual impulse. But is it? I
defy any one here to say that it is."
As if they were afraid of worse things if they spoke, the company
remained silent. But this did not save them.
"You all know it isn't. You all know that it is the caprice of chance
encounter, the result of propinquity, the invention of poets and
novelists, the superstition of the victims, the unscrupulous
make-believe of the witnesses. As an impulse it quickly wears itself
out in marriage, and makes way for divorce. In this country
nine-tenths of the marriages are love-matches. The old motives which
delay and prevent marriage in other countries, aristocratic countries,
like questions of rank and descent, even of money, do not exist. Yet
this is the land of unhappy unions beyond all other lands, the very
home of divorce. The conditions of marriage are ideally favorable
according to the opinions of its friends, who are all more or less
active in bottling husbands and wives up in its felicity and
preventing their escape through divorce."
Still the others were silent, and again the stop-gap triumphed on.
"Now, I am an enemy of divorce, too; but I would have it begin before
marriage."
"Rather paradoxical again?" the bachelor alone had the hardihood to
suggest.
"Not at all. I am quite literal. I would have it begin with the
engagement. I would have the betrothed--the mistress and the
lover--come before the magistrate or the minister, and declare their
motives in wishing to marry, and then I would have him reason with
them, and represent that they were acting emotionally in obedience to
a passion which must soon spend itself, or a fancy which they would
quickly find illusory. If they agreed with him, well and good; if not,
he should dismiss them to their homes, for say three months, to think
it over. Then he should summon them again, and again reason with them,
and dismiss them as before, if they continued obstinate. After three
months more, he should call them before him and reason with them for
the last time. If they persisted in spite of everything, he should
marry them, and let them take the consequences."
The stop-gap leaned back in his chair defiantly, and fixed the host
with an eye of challenge. Upon the whole the host seemed not so much
frightened. He said: "I don't see anything so original in all that.
It's merely a travesty of the Swiss law of divorce."
"And you see nothing novel, nothing that makes for the higher
civilization in the application of that law to marriage? You all
approve of that law because you believe it prevents nine-tenths of the
divorces; but if you had a law that would similarly prevent
nine-tenths of the marriages, you would need no divorce law at all."
"Oh, I don't know that," the hardy bachelor said. "What about the
one-tenth of the marriages which it didn't prevent? Would you have the
parties hopelessly shut up to them? Would you forbid _them_ all hope
of escape? Would you have no divorce for any cause whatever?"
"Yes," the husband on the right of the hostess asked (but his wife on
the right of the host looked as if she wished he had not mixed in),
"wouldn't more unhappiness result from that one marriage than from all
the marriages as we have them now?"
"Aren't you both rather precipitate?" the stop-gap demanded. "I said,
let the parties to the final marriage take the consequences. But if
these consequences were too dire, I would not forbid them the hope of
relief. I haven't thought the matter out very clearly yet, but there
are one or two causes for divorce which I would admit."
"Ah?" the host inquired, with a provisional smile.
"Yes, causes going down into the very nature of things--the nature of
men and of women. Incompatibility of temperament ought always to be
very seriously considered as a cause."
"Yes?"
"And, above all," and here the stop-gap swept the board with his eye,
"difference of sex."
The sort of laugh which expresses uncertainty of perception and
conditional approval went up.
The hostess rose with rather a frightened air. "Shall we leave them to
their tobacco?" she said to the other women.
When he went home the stop-gap celebrated his triumph to his wife. "I
don't think she'll ask you for the loan of me again to fill a place
without you."
"Yes," she answered, remotely. "You don't suppose she'll think we live
unhappily together?"