"I really do not know. I thought you were going to congratulate me upon living the life I want to live."
"I do. Until you get this thing out of your system--"
"What thing?" I, too, leaned forward. The tone of his voice made something in me flare. "What thing?" I repeated.
Selwyn"s shoulders shrugged slightly. He sat up, then leaned back, his hands in his pockets. "Why discuss it? You"ve long wanted to do something of this sort. Until it was done you would never be content. What you want to do, I doubt if you know yourself. Are you slumming? Uplifting?"
"I am not. I"m neither a slummer nor an uplifter. A slummer helps.
I"m just looking on." I threw the cushion behind me to the other end of the sofa. "I thought it might be interesting to see for myself some of the causes which produce conditions. I"ve read a good deal, but one doesn"t exactly sense things by reading. I want to see."
"And after you see?" Selwyn made an impatient movement with his hand. "A thousand years from now humanity may get results from scientific management in social organization, but most of your present-day methods are about as practical as trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon or to pick a posy out of swamp gra.s.s."
"What do you know of present-day methods?"
"Very little. Beating the air doesn"t interest me. Most people seem to forget the processes of nature; seem to imagine that certain things can be brought to pa.s.s quickly which can only be accomplished slowly. From the first struggle of the human race to stand upright, to articulate, to find food, to strike fire, to paddle in water, to wear covering, to forage, explore-- What is the matter?"
"Nothing." I leaned back in the corner of the sofa, my hands, palms upward, in my lap, my eyes on them that he might not see their smiling. "I was just wondering what that had to do with certain present-day conditions, certain injustices and inequalities, certain--"
"It explains them to some extent. From the earliest days of dawning thought, from the first efforts at self-expression, humanity has grouped itself not only into families, tribes, communities, nations, or what you will, but in each of these divisions there have ever been subdivisions. Ignorance and knowledge, strength and weakness, power and incapacity, find their level, rise or fall according to their proper place. If you have any little dreams of making all human beings after one pattern--"
"I haven"t. It would be as uninteresting as impossible. But it is queer--"
"What is queer?" Selwyn stooped forward and broke a lump of coal from which sprang blazing reds and curling blues of flame. "Why did you stop?"
"I was thinking it was queer you should know so much of the history of the human race and so little of its life to-day. As a shrugger you stand off."
"For the love of Heaven don"t let"s get on that!"
With swift movement he took a cigar from one pocket, a match-case from another. "May I smoke?" he asked, irritably, and as I nodded he struck a match and held it to the cigar in his mouth, then threw it in the fire. Presently he looked at me.
"Why didn"t you tell me you were coming here--for a while?"
"It would have meant more argument. You would not have approved."
"I most a.s.suredly would not. But that would have made no difference.
My disapproval would not have prevented."
"No. I should have come, of course. But I was tired, and useless discussion does no good. We would have said again the same old things we"ve said so often, and I didn"t want to say them or hear them. One of the reasons why I came down here was to talk with people who weren"t born with made-up minds, and who don"t have high walls around their homes."
"There are times when I would like to put them around you! If you were mine I"d do it."
"No, you wouldn"t. You know perfectly well what I would do with walls. That is the kind you think should be around a woman. But we won"t get on that, either. Were you ever in Scarborough Square before?"
Selwyn nodded and looked, not at me, but at the spirals of smoke from his cigar. "My grandfather used to live on the opposite side of the Square, and as a kid I was brought occasionally to see him. I barely remember him. He died thirty years ago."
"It"s difficult to imagine this was once the fashionable part of the city, and that gorgeous parties and b.a.l.l.s--" I sat upright and laughed. "I went to a party last night. It was a wonderful party."
"You did what?"
Selwyn"s cigar was held suspended on its way to his lips. "Whose party? Where was it?"
"Two doors from here. The girl who gave it, or rather, to whom it was given, is named Bryce--Evelyn Bryce. She is a friend of Mrs.
Mundy"s and is a printer. I never knew a girl printer until I came down here."
Selwyn"s look of amazed disapprobation had its usual effect. I hadn"t intended to mention the party, and instantly I went into its details.
"All kinds of people were at it and every woman had on a dress which entirely covered her. When I was a child I adored a person named Wyman, who used to give performances in which all sorts of unexpected things happened. Last night was a sort of Wyman night."
"I did not know you were going to parties." Selwyn"s tone was curt.
"I am not--to your sort." My face flushed. "I said this girl was a printer. I should have said she used to be. Two years ago she was caught in some machinery at the place where she worked and has never been able to stand up since. On her birthday her friends give her a party that she may have a bit of brightness. I went over to play that they might dance. She is fond of music and an old piano has recently been given her by--by some one interested in her."
For a moment there was silence, then throwing his cigar in the fire, Selwyn got up and stood looking down at me. In his eyes was strange worry and unrest.
"I beg your pardon." He bit his lips. "I"ve been pretty ragged of late and I"m always thoughtless. For two weeks I"ve seen no one--that is, no friend of yours or mine who hasn"t asked me why you have done so inexplicable a thing as to leave everybody you know and go into a part of the town where you know n.o.body and where--"
"It"s because I want to know all sorts of people." Something in Selwyn"s face stopped me, and, getting up from the sofa, I went over to the window and raised it slightly. My heart was pounding. I could laugh away the questions of others and ignore their comments, but with Selwyn this would be impossible. An overwhelming sense of distance and separation came over me demoralizingly as I pretended to rearrange the curtain, and for a moment words would not come.
I knew, of course, that Selwyn had neither patience nor sympathy with my desire to know more of life than I could learn in the particular world into which I had been born, but the keener realization to-night made between us a wide and separating gulf, and I felt suddenly alone and uncertain, and dispirited and afraid.
In our love of books, of digging deep into certain subjects, of historic questing and speculative discussions we are closely sympathetic, but in many viewpoints we are as apart as the poles.
Perhaps we will always be.
Selwyn by heritage and training and natural inclination is conventional and conservative. I am not. To walk in beaten tracks is not easy for me. I want to explore for myself. He thinks a woman has no business in by-paths. Our opposing beliefs do not make for placid friendship.
It is Selwyn"s indifference to life, to its problems and struggles and many-sidedness, that makes me at times impatient with him beyond restraint. In his profession he is successful. His ambition makes him work, but a weariness of things, of the unworthwhileness of human effort, the futility of striving, the emptiness of achievement, possesses him frequently, and in his dark days he pays the penalty of his points of view. If only he could see, could understand--.
I turned from the window and again sat down in my corner of the sofa and motioned him to take his seat.
"Don"t let"s argue to-night. I"m pretty tired and argument would do no good. We"d just say things we shouldn"t. You said just now you doubted if you knew why I was here. I may not be sure of all my reasons, but one of them is, I wanted to get away from--there." My hand made motion in a vague direction intended for my former neighborhood.
"Do you find this section of the city a satisfactory change?"
Selwyn"s tone was ironic. He looked for a moment into the eyes I raised to his, then turned away and, hands in his pockets, began to walk up and down the room. When he spoke again his voice had changed.
"Don"t mind anything I say to-night. I shouldn"t have come. I"m a bit raw yet that you should have done this without telling me. You have a right to do as you choose, of course, only--. Besides getting away from your old life--were there other reasons?"
"Not very definite ones." Into my face came surge of color, and, turning, I cut off the light in the lamp behind me. "When one is in a parade one can"t see what it looks like, very often doesn"t understand where it is going. I want to see the one I was in, see from the sidewalk the kind of human beings who are in it, and what they are doing with their time and energies and opportunities and knowledge and preparedness and--oh, with all the things that make their position in life a more responsible one than--than the people"s down here."
"Was it necessary to come to Scarborough Square to watch--your parade? One can stand off anywhere."
"But I don"t want just to stand off. I want to see with the eyes of the people who look at us, the people who don"t approve of us, though they envy us. We"re so certain they"re a hard lot to deal with, to do for, to make anything of--these people we don"t know save from charity contact, perhaps,--that I"ve sometimes wondered if they ever despair of us, think we, too, are pretty hopeless and hard to--to wake up."
"And you imagine the opinions and conclusions of uneducated, untrained, unthinking people will give you light concerning the valuation of your cla.s.s? It matters little what they think. They don"t think!"
"Do you know many of these people of whose mental machinery you are so sure?" I smiled in the eyes which would not smile into mine.
"Know them personally, I mean?"
"I do not." Selwyn"s tone was irritable. "My business dealings with them have not inspired desire for a closer acquaintance. To get as much money as possible from the men who employ them and give in return as little work as they can, is the creed of most of them. You can do nothing with people like that. I know them better than you will ever know them."