XV
Following his parting with Nan Brent on Saturday night, Donald McKayewent directly to the mill office, in front of which his car wasparked, entered the car, and drove home to The Dreamerie, quiteoblivious of the fact that he was not the only man in Port Agnew whohad spent an interesting and exciting evening. So thoroughly mixedwere his emotions that he was not quite certain whether he wasprofoundly happy or incurably wretched. When he gave way to rejoicingin his new-found love, straightway he was assailed by a realization ofthe barriers to his happiness--a truly masculine recognition of theterrible bar sinister to Nan's perfect wifehood induced a veritableshriveling of his soul, a mental agony all the more intense because itwas the first unhappiness he had ever experienced.
His distress was born of the knowledge that between the Sawdust Pileand The Dreamerie there stretched a gulf as wide and deep as the Bightof Tyee. He was bred of that puritanical stock which demands that themate for a male of its blood must be of original purity, regardless ofthe attitude of leniency on the part of that male for lapses fromvirtue in one of his own sex. This creed, Donald had accepted asnaturally, as inevitably as he had accepted belief in the communion ofsaints and the resurrection of the dead. His father's daughter-in-law,like Caesar's wife, would have to be above suspicion; while Donaldbelieved Nan Brent to be virtuous, or, at least, an unconscious,unwilling, and unpremeditating sinner, non-virtuous by circumstanceinstead of by her own deliberate act, he was too hard-headed not torealize that never, by the grace of God, would she be above suspicion.Too well he realized that his parents and his sisters, for whom heentertained all the affection of a good son and brother, would,unhampered by sex-appeal and controlled wholly by tradition, failutterly to take the same charitable view, even though he was honestenough with himself to realize that perhaps his own belief in thematter was largely the result of the wish being father to the thought.
Curiously enough, he dismissed, quite casually, consideration of theopinions his mother and sisters, their friends and his, the men andwomen of Port Agnew might entertain on the subject. His apprehensionscentered almost entirely upon his father. His affection for his fatherhe had always taken for granted. It was not an emotion to exclaimover. Now that he realized, for the first time, his potential power tohurt his father, to bow that gray head in grief and shame andhumiliation, he was vouchsafed a clearer, all-comprehending vision ofthat father's love, of his goodness, his manliness, his honor, hisgentleness, and his fierce, high pride; to Donald simultaneously camethe knowledge of his own exalted love for the old man. He knew him asno other human being knew him or ever would know him; whence he knewold Hector's code--that a clean man may not mate with an unclean womanwithout losing caste.
He and Nan had discussed the situation but briefly; for they wereyoung, and the glory of that first perfect hour could not be marred bya minute consideration of, misery in prospect. To-night, they had beencontent to forget the world and be happy with each other, apparentlywith the mutual understanding that they occupied an untenableposition, one that soon must be evacuated.
Yes; he was the young laird of Tyee, the heir to a principality, andit would be too great a strain on mere human beings to expect hislittle world to approve of its highest mating with its lowest. Prateas we may of democracy, we must admit, if we are to be honest withourselves, that this sad old world is a snobocracy. The very fact thatman is prone to regard himself as superior to his brother is theleaven in the load of civilization; without that quality, whether weelect to classify it as self-conceit or self-esteem, man would bewithout ambition and our civilization barren of achievement. Theinstinct for the upward climb--the desire to reach the heights--is tooinsistent to be disregarded. If all men are born equal, as the framersof our Constitution so solemnly declared, that is because the brainsof all infants, of whatsoever degree, are at birth incapable ofthought. The democracy of any people, therefore, must be predicatedupon their kindness and charity--human characteristics which blossomor wither according to the intensity of the battle for existence. Inour day and generation, therefore, democracy is too high-priced forpromiscuous dissemination; wherefore, as in an elder day, we turn fromthe teaching of the Man of Galilee and cling to tradition.
Tradition was the stone in the road to Donald McKaye's happiness, andhis strength was not equal to the task of rolling it away.
Despair enveloped him. Every fiber of his being, every tender, gallantinstinct drew him toward this wonder-girl that the world had thrustaside as unworthy. His warm, sympathetic heart ached for her; he knewshe needed him as women like her must ever need the kind of man hewanted to be, the kind he had always striven to be. Had he beenegotist enough to set a value upon himself, he would have told himselfshe was worthy of him; yet a damnable set of damnable man-madecircumstances over which he had no control hedged them about and keptthem apart. It was terrible, so he reflected, to know that, even ifNan should live the life of a saint from the hour of her child's birthuntil the hour of her death, a half-century hence, yet would she failto atone for her single lapse while there still lived one whoknew--and remembered. He, Donald McKaye, might live down a naturalson, but Nan Brent could not. The contemplation of this socialphenomenon struck him with peculiar force, for he had not hithertoconsidered the amazing inequalities of a double standard of morals.
For the first time in his life, he could understand the abjectdeference that must be shown to public opinion. He, who consideredhimself, and not without reason, a gentleman, must defer to theinchoate, unreasoning, unrelenting, and barbaric point of view of menand women who hadn't sense enough to pound sand in a rat-hole orbreeding enough to display a reasonable amount of skill in themanipulation of a knife and fork. Public opinion! Bah! Deference to afetish, a shibboleth, to the ancient, unwritten law that one must notdo that which hypocrites condemn and cowards fear to do, unless,indeed, one can "get away with it."
Ah, yes! The eleventh commandment: "Thou shalt not be discovered." Ithad smashed Nan Brent, who had violated it, desolated her, ruinedher--she who had but followed the instinct that God Almighty had givenher at birth--the instinct of sex, the natural yearning of a trustful,loving heart for love, motherhood, and masculine protection from abrutal world. More. Not satisfied with smashing her, public opinioninsisted that she should remain in a perennial state of smash. It wasabominable!
Nan had told him she had never been married, and a sense of delicacyhad indicated to him that this was a subject upon which he must notappear to be curious. To question her for the details would have beenrepugnant to his nicely balanced sense of the fitness of things.Nevertheless, he reflected, if her love had been illicit, was it moreillicit than that of the woman who enters into a loveless marriage,induced to such action by a sordid consideration of worldly goods andgear? Was her sin in bearing a child out of wedlock more terrible thanthat of the married woman who shudders at the responsibilities ofmotherhood, or evades the travail of love's fulfilment by snuffing outlittle lives in embryo? He thought not. He recalled an evening in NewYork when he had watched a policeman following a drab of the streetswho sought to evade him and ply her sorry trade in the vicinity ofHerald Square; he remembered how that same policeman had abandoned thechase to touch his cap respectfully and open her limousine door forthe heroine (God save the mark!) of a scandalous divorce.
"Damn it!" he murmured. "It's a rotten, cruel world, and I don'tunderstand it. I'm all mixed up." And he went to bed, where, hisbodily weariness overcoming his mental depression, he slept.
He was man enough to scorn public opinion, but human enough to fearit.