enforce in case of necessity. "But surely," cried Sylvia, "you don't
want to make divorce more easy!"
"I want to make the conditions of it fair to women," I said.
"But then more women will get it! And there are so many divorced
women now! Papa says that divorce is a greater menace than
Socialism!"
She spoke of Suffrage in England, where women were just beginning to
make public disturbances. Surely I did not approve of their leaving
their homes for such purposes as that! As tactfully as I could, I
suggested that conditions in England were peculiar. There was, for
example, the quaint old law which permitted a husband to beat his
wife subject to certain restrictions. Would an American woman submit
to such a law? There was the law which made it impossible for a
woman to divorce her husband for infidelity, unless accompanied by
desertion or cruelty. Surely not even her father would consider that
a decent arrangement! I mentioned a recent decision of the highest
court in the land, that a man who brought his mistress to live in
his home, and compelled his wife to wait upon her, was not
committing cruelty within the meaning of the English law. I heard
Sylvia's exclamation of horror, and met her stare of incredulity;
and then suddenly I thought of Claire, and a little chill ran over
me. It was a difficult hour, in more ways than one, that of my first
talk with Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver!
I soon made the discovery that, childish as her ignorance was, there
was no prejudice in it. If you brought her a fact, she did not say
that it was too terrible to be true, or that the Bible said
otherwise, or that it was indecent to know about it. Nor, when you
met her next, did you discover that she had forgotten it. On the
contrary, you discovered that she had followed it to its remote
consequences, and was ready with a score of questions as to these. I
remember saying to myself, that first automobile ride: "If this girl
goes on thinking, she will get into trouble! She will have to stop,
for the sake of others!"
"You must meet my husband some time," she said; and added, "I'll
have to see my engagement-book. I have so much to do, I never know
when I have a moment free."
"You must find it interesting," I ventured.
"I did, for a while; but I've begun to get tired of so much going
about. For the most part I meet the same people, and I've found out
what they have to say."
I laughed. "You have caught the society complaint already--_ennui_!"
"I had it years ago, at home. It's true I never would have gone out
at all if it hadn't been for the sake of my family. That's why I
envy a woman like you--"
I could not help laughing. It was too funny, Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver
envying me!
"What's the matter?" she asked.
"Just the irony of life. Do you know, I cut you out of the
newspaper, and put you in a little frame on my bureau. I thought,
here is the loveliest face I've ever seen, and here is the
most-to-be-envied of women."
She smiled, but quickly became serious. "I learned very early in
life that I was beautiful; and I suppose if I were suddenly to cease
being beautiful, I'd miss it; yet I often think it's a nuisance. It
makes one dependent on externals. Most of the beautiful women I've
known make a sort of profession of it--they live to shine and be
looked at.
"And you don't enjoy that?" I asked.
"It restricts one's life. Men expect it of you, they resent your
having any other interest."
"So," I responded, gravely, "with all your beauty and wealth, you
aren't perfectly happy?"
"Oh, yes!" she cried--not having meant to confess so much. "I told
myself I would be happy, because I would be able to do so much good
in the world. There must be some way to do good with money! But now
I'm not sure; there seem to be so many things in the way. Just when
you have your mind made up that you have a way to help, someone
comes and points out to you that you may be really doing harm."
She hesitated again, and I said, "That means you have been looking
into the matter of charity."
She gave me a bright glance. "How you understand things!" she
exclaimed.
"It is possible," I replied, "to know modern society so well that
when you meet certain causes you know what results to look for."
"I wish you'd explain to me why charity doesn't do any good!"
"It would mean a lecture on the competitive wage-system," I
laughed--" too serious a matter for a drive!"
This may have seemed shirking on my part. But here I was, wrapped in
luxurious furs, rolling gloriously through the park at twilight on a
brilliant autumn evening; and the confiscation of property seems so
much more startling a proposition when you are in immediate contact
with it! This principle, which explains the "opportunism" of
Socialist cabinet-ministers and Labour M.P.s may be used to account
for the sudden resolve which I had taken, that for this afternoon at
least Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver should not discover that I was either
a divorced woman, or a soap-box orator of the revolution.
9. Sylvia, in that first conversation, told me much about herself
that she did not know she was telling. I became fairly certain, for
instance, that she had not married Mr. Douglas van Tuiver for love.
The young girl who has so married does not suffer from ennui in the
first year, nor does she find her happiness depending upon her
ability to solve the problem of charity in connection with her
husband's wealth.
She would have ridden and talked longer, she said, but for a dinner
engagement. She asked me to call on her, and I promised to come some
morning, as soon as she set a day. When the car drew up before the
door of her home, I thought of my first ride about the city in the
"rubber-neck wagon," and how I had stared when the lecturer pointed
out this mansion. We, the passengers, had thrilled as one soul,
imagining the wonderful life which must go on behind those massive
portals, the treasures outshining the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
which required those thick, bronze bars for their protection. And
here was the mistress of all the splendour, inviting me to come and
see it from within!
She wanted to send me home in the car, but I would not have that, on
account of the push-cart men and the babies in my street; I got out
and walked--my heart beating fast, my blood leaping with exultation.
I reached home, and there on the bureau was the picture--but behold,
how changed! It was become a miracle of the art of
colour-photography; its hair was golden, its eyes a wonderful
red-brown, its cheeks aglow with the radiance of youth! And yet more
amazing, the picture spoke! It spoke with the most delicious of
Southern drawls--referring to the "repo't" of my child-labour
committee, shivering at the cold and bidding me pull the "fu-uzz" up
round me. And when I told funny stories about the Italians and the
Hebrews of my tenement-neighbourhood, it broke into silvery
laughter, and cried: "Oh, de-ah me! How que-ah!" Little had I
dreamed, when I left that picture in the morning, what a miracle was
to be wrought upon it.
I knew, of course, what was the matter with me; the symptoms were
unmistakable. After having made up my mind that I was an old woman,
and that there was nothing more in life for me save labour--here the
little archer had come, and with the sharpest of his golden arrows,
had shot me through. I had all the thrills, the raptures and
delicious agonies of first love; I lived no longer in myself, but in
the thought of another person. Twenty times a day I looked at my
picture, and cried aloud: "Oh, beautiful, beautiful!"
I do not know how much of her I have been able to give. I have told
of our first talk--but words are so cold and dead! I stop and ask:
What there is, in all nature, that has given me the same feeling? I
remember how I watched the dragon-fly emerging from its chrysalis.
It is soft and green and tender; it clings to a branch and dries its
wings in the sun, and when the miracle is completed, there for a
brief space it poises, shimmering with a thousand hues, quivering
with its new-born ecstasy. And just so was Sylvia; a creature from
some other world than ours, as yet unsoiled by the dust and heat of
reality. It came to me with a positive shock, as a terrifying thing,
that there should be in this world of strife and wickedness any
young thing that took life with such intensity, that was so
palpitating with eagerness, with hope, with sympathy. Such was the
impression that one got of her, even when her words most denied it.
She might be saying world-weary and cynical things, out of the
maxims of Lady Dee; but there was still the eagerness, the sympathy,
surging beneath and lifting her words.
The crown of her loveliness was her unconsciousness of self. Even
though she might be talking of herself, frankly admitting her
beauty, she was really thinking of other people, how she could get
to them to help them. This I must emphasize, because, apart from
jesting, I would not have it thought that I had fallen under the
spell of a beautiful countenance, combined with a motor-car and a
patrician name. There were things about Sylvia that were
aristocratic, that could be nothing else; but she could be her same
lovely self in a cottage--as I shall prove to you before I finish
with the story of her life.
I was in love. At that time I was teaching myself German, and I sat
one day puzzling out two lines of Goethe:
"Oden and Thor, these two thou knowest; Freya, the heavenly, knowest
thou not."
And I remember how I cried aloud in sudden delight: _"I know her!"_
For a long time that was one of my pet names--"Freya dis
Himmlische!" I only heard of one other that I preferred--when in
course of time she told me about Frank Shirley, and how she had
loved him, and how their hopes had been wrecked. He had called her
"Lady Sunshine"; he had been wont to call it over and over in his
happiness, and as Sylvia repeated it to me--"Lady Sunshine! Lady
Sunshine!" I could imagine that I caught an echo of the very tones
of Frank Shirley's voice.
10. For several days I waited upon the postman, and when the summons
came I dodged a committee-meeting, and ascended the marble stairs
with trepidation, and underwent the doubting scrutiny of an English
lackey, sufficiently grave in deportment and habiliments to have
waited upon a bishop in his own land. I have a vague memory of an
entrance-hall with panelled paintings and a double-staircase with a
snow-white carpet, about which I had read in the newspapers that it
was woven in one piece, and had cost an incredible sum. One did not
have to profane it with his feet, as there was an elevator provided.
I was shown to Sylvia's morning-room, which had been "done" in pink
and white and gold by some decorator who had known her colours. It
was large enough to have held half-a-dozen of my own quarters, and
the sun was allowed to flood it. Through a door at one side came
Sylvia, holding out her hands to me.
She was really glad to see me! She began to apologize at once for
the time she had taken to write. It was because she had so much to
do. She had married into a world that took itself seriously: the
"idle rich," who worked like slaves. "You know," she said, while we
sat on a pink satin couch, and a footman brought us coffee: "you
read that Mrs. So-and-so is a 'social queen,' and you think it's a
newspaper phrase, but it isn't; she really feels that she's a queen,
and other people feel it, and she goes through her ceremonies as
solemnly as the Lord's anointed."
She went on to tell me some of her adventures. She had a keen sense
of fun, and was evidently suffering for an outlet for it. She saw
through the follies and pretences of people in a flash, but they
were all such august and important people that, out of regard for
her husband, she dared not let them suspect her clairvoyant power.
She referred to her experiences abroad. She had not liked
Europe--being quite frankly a provincial person. To Castleman County
a foreigner was a strange, dark person who mixed up his consonants,
and was under suspicion of being a fiddler or an opera-singer. The
people she had met under her husband's charge had been socially
indubitable, but still, they were foreigners, and Sylvia could never
really be sure what they meant.
There was, for instance, the young son of a German steel-king, a
person of amazing savoir faire, who had made bold to write books and
exhibit pictures, and had travelled so widely that he had even heard
of Castleman County. He had taken Sylvia to show her the sights of
Berlin, and had rolled her down the "Sieges All?e," making
outrageous fun of his Kaiser's taste in art, and coming at last to a
great marble column, with a female figure representing Victory upon
the top. "You will observe," said the cultured young plutocrat,
"that the Grecian lady stands a hundred meters in the air, and has
no stairway. There is a popular saying about her which is
delightful--that she is the only chaste woman in Berlin!"
I had been through the culture-seeking stage, and knew my Henry
James; so I could read between the lines of Sylvia's experiences. I
figured her as a person walking on volcanic ground, not knowing her
peril, but vaguely disquieted by a smell of sulphur in the air. And
once in a while a crack would open in the ground! There was the Duke
of Something in Rome, for example, a melancholy young man, with whom
she had coquetted, as she did, in her merry fashion, with every man
she met. Being married, she had taken it for granted that she might
be as winsome as she chose; but the young Italian had misunderstood
the game, and had whispered words of serious import, which had so
horrified Sylvia that she flew to her husband and told him the
story--begging him incidentally not to horse-
whip the fellow. In
reply it had to be explained to her she had laid herself liable to
the misadventure. The ladies of the Italian aristocracy were severe
and formal, and Sylvia had no right to expect an ardent young duke
to understand her native wildness.
11. Something of that sort was always happening--something in each
country to bewilder her afresh, and to make it necessary for her
husband to remind her of the proprieties. In France, a cousin of van
Tuiver's had married a marquis, and they had visited the chateau.
The family was Catholic, of the very oldest and strictest, and the
brother-in-law, a prelate of high degree, had invited the guests to
be shown through his cathedral. "Imagine my bewilderment!" said
Sylvia. "I thought I was going to meet a church dignitary, grave and
reverent; but here was a wit, a man of the world. Such speeches you
never heard! I was ravished by the grandeur of the building, and I
said: 'If I had seen this, I would have come to you to be married.'
'Madame is an American,' he replied. 'Come the next time!' When I
objected that I was not a Catholic, he said: 'Your beauty is its own
religion!' When I protested that he would be doing me too great an
honour, 'Madame,' said he, 'the _honneur_ would be all to the church!'
And because I was shocked at all this, I was considered to be a
provincial person!"
Then they had come to London, a dismal, damp city where you "never
saw the sun, and when you did see it it looked like a poached egg";
where you had to learn to eat fish with the help of a knife, and
where you might speak of bitches, but must never on any account
speak of your stomach. They went for a week-end to "Hazelhurst," the
home of the Dowager Duchess of Danbury, whose son van Tuiver, had
entertained in America, and who, in the son's absence, claimed the
right to repay the debt. The old lady sat at table with two fat
poodle dogs in infants' chairs, one on each side of her, feeding out
of golden trays. There was a visiting curate, a frightened little
man at the other side of one poodle; in an effort to be at ease he
offered the wheezing creature a bit of bread. "Don't feed my dogs!"
snapped the old lady. "I don't allow anybody to feed my dogs!"
And then there was the Honourable Reginald Annersley, the youngest
son of the family, home from Eton on vacation. The Honourable
Reginald was twelve years of age, undersized and ill-nourished.
("They feed them badly," his mother had explained, "an' the
teachin's no good either, but it's a school for gentlemen.")
"Honestly," said Sylvia, "he was the queerest little mannikin--like
the tiny waiter's assistants you see in hotels on the Continent. He
wore his Eton suit, you understand--grown-up evening clothes minus
the coat-tails, and a top hat. He sat at tea and chatted with the
mincing graces of a cotillion-leader; you expected to find some of
his hair gone when he took off his hat! He spoke of his brother, the
duke, who had gone off shooting seals somewhere. 'The jolly rotter
has nothing to do but spend his money; but we younger sons have to
work like dogs when we grow up!' I asked what he'd do, and he said
'I suppose there's nothin' but the church. It's a beastly bore, but
you do get a livin' out of it.'
"That was too much for me," said Sylvia. "I proceeded to tell the
poor, blas? infant about my childhood; how my sister Celeste and I
had caught half-tamed horses and galloped about the pasture on them,
when we were so small that our little fat legs stuck out
horizontally; how we had given ourselves convulsions in the green
apple orchard, and had to be spanked every day before we had our
hair combed. I told how we heard a war-story about a "train of
gunpowder," and proceeded to lay such a train about the attic of
Castleman Hall, and set fire to it. I might have spent the afternoon
teaching the future churchman how to be a boy, if I hadn't suddenly