"We"re not so very far from Key West; and my husband means to have a physician with us in any case. The advantage of being in a small place is that we couldn"t entertain if we wanted to. I can have my Aunt Varina come to stay with me, a dear, sweet soul who loves me devotedly; and then if I find I have to have some new ideas, perhaps you can come---"
"I don"t think your husband would favour that," I said.
She put her hand out to me in a quick gesture. "I don"t mean to give up our friendship! I want you to understand, I intend to go on studying and growing. I am doing what he asked me--it"s right that I should think of his wishes, and of the health of my child. But the child will be growing up, and sooner or later my husband must grant me the right to think, to have a life of my own. You must stand by me and help me, whatever happens."
I gave her my hand on that, and so we parted--for some time, as it proved. I went up to Albany once more, in a last futile effort to save our precious bill; and while I was there I got a note from her, saying that she was leaving for the Florida Keys.
BOOK II. SYLVIA AS MOTHER
For three months after this I had nothing but letters from Sylvia. She proved to be an excellent letter-writer, full of verve and colour.
I would not say that she poured out her soul to me, but she gave me glimpses of her states of mind, and the progress of her domestic drama.
First, she described the place to which she had come; a ravishing spot, where any woman ought to be happy. It was a little island, fringed with a border of cocoanut-palms, which rustled and whispered day and night in the breeze. It was covered with tropical foliage, and there was a long, rambling bungalow, with screened "galleries," and a beach of hard white sand in front. The water was blue, dazzling with sunshine, and dotted with distant green islands; all of it, air, water, and islands, were warm. "I don"t realize till I get here," she said, "I am never really happy in the North. I wrap myself against the a.s.saults of a cruel enemy.
But here I am at home; I cast off my furs, I stretch out my arms, I bloom. I believe I shall quite cease to think for a while--I shall forget all storms and troubles, and bask on the sand like a lizard.
"And the water! Mary, you cannot imagine such water; why should it be blue on top, and green when you look down into it? I have a little skiff of my own in which I drift, and I have been happy for hours, studying the bottom; you see every colour of the rainbow, and all as clear as in an aquarium. I have been fishing, too, and have caught a tarpon. That is supposed to be a great adventure, and it really is quite thrilling to feel the monstrous creature struggling with you--though, of course, my arms soon gave out, and I had to turn him over to my husband. This is one of the famous fishing-grounds of the world, and I am glad of that, because it will keep the men happy while I enjoy the sunshine.
"I have discovered a fascinating diversion," she wrote, in a second letter. "I make them take me in the launch to one of the loneliest of the keys; they go off to fish, and I have the whole day to myself, and am as happy as a child on a picnic! I roam the beach, I take off my shoes and stockings--there are no newspaper reporters snapping pictures.
I dare not go far in, for there are huge black creatures with dangerous stinging tails; they rush away in a cloud of sand when I approach, but the thought of stepping upon one by accident is terrifying. However, I let the little wavelets wash round my toes, and I try to grab little fish, and I pick up lovely sh.e.l.ls; and then I go on, and I see a huge turtle waddling to the water, and I dash up, and would stop him if I dared, and then I find his eggs--such an adventure!
"I am the prey of strange appet.i.tes and cravings. I have a delicious luncheon with me, but suddenly the one thing in the world I want to eat is turtle-eggs. I have no matches with me, and I do not know how to build a fire like the Indians, so I have to hide the eggs back in the sand until to-morrow. I hope the turtle does not move them--and that I have not lost my craving in the meantime!
"Then I go exploring inland. These islands were once the haunts of pirates, so I may imagine all sorts of romantic things. What I find are lemon-trees. I do not know if they are wild, or if the key was once cultivated; the lemons are huge in size, and nearly all skin, but the flavour is delicious. Turtle-eggs with wild lemon-juice! And then I go on and come to a mangrove-swamp--dark and forbidding, a grisly place; you imagine the trees are in torment, with limbs and roots tangled like writhing serpents. I tiptoe in a little way, and then get frightened, and run back to the beach.
"I see on the sand a mysterious little yellow creature, running like the wind; I make a dash, and get between him and his hole; and so he stands, crouching on guard, staring at me, and I at him. He is some sort of crab, but he stands on two legs like a caricature of a man; he has two big weapons upraised for battle, and staring black eyes stuck out on long tubes. He is an uncanny thing to look at; but then suddenly the idea comes, How do I seem to him? I realize that he is alive; a tiny mite of hunger for life, of fear and resolution. I think, How lonely he must be! And I want to tell him that I love him, and would not hurt him for the world; but I have no way to make him understand me, and all I can do is to go away and leave him. I go, thinking what a strange place the world is, with so many living things, each shut away apart by himself, unable to understand the others or make the others understand him. This is what is called philosophy, is it not? Tell me some books where these things are explained....
"I am reading all you sent me. When I grew tired of exploring the key, I lay down in the shade of a palm-tree, and read--guess what? "Number Five John Street"! So all this loveliness vanished, and I was back in the world"s nightmare. An extraordinary book! I decided that it would be good for my husband, so I read him a few paragraphs; but I found that it only irritated him. He wants me to rest, he says--he can"t see why I"ve come away to the Florida Keys to read about the slums of London.
"My hope of gradually influencing his mind has led to a rather appalling discovery--that he has the same intention as regards me! He too has brought a selection of books, and reads to me a few pages every day, and explains what they mean. He calls _this_ resting! I am no match for him, of course--I never realized more keenly the worthlessness of my education. But I see in a general way where his arguments tend--that life is something that has grown, and is not in the power of men to change; but even if he could convince me of this, I should not find it a source of joy. I have a feeling always that if you were here, you would know something to answer.
"The truth is that I am so pained by the conflict between us that I cannot argue at all. I find myself wondering what our marriage would have been like if we had discovered that we had the same ideas and interests. There are days and nights at a time when I tell myself that I ought to believe what my husband believes, that I ought never have allowed myself to think of anything else. But that really won"t do as a life-programme; I tried it years ago with my dear mother and father. Did I ever tell you that my mother is firmly convinced in her heart that I am to suffer eternally in a real h.e.l.l of fire because I do not believe certain things about the Bible? She still has visions of it--though not so bad since she turned me over to a husband!
"Now it is my husband who is worried about my ideas. He is reading a book by Burke, a well-known old writer. The book deals with English history, which I don"t know much about, but I see that it resents modern changes, and the whole spirit of change. And Mary, why can"t I feel that way? I really ought to love those old and stately things, I ought to be reverent to the past; I was brought up that way. Sometimes I tremble when I realize how very flippant and cynical I am. I seem to see the wrong side of everything, so that I couldn"t believe in it if I wanted to!"
2. Her letters were full of the wonders of Nature about her. There was a snow-white egret who made his home upon her island; she watched his fishing operations, and meant to find his nest, so as to watch his young. The men made a trip into the Everglades, and brought back wonder-tales of flocks of flamingoes making scarlet clouds in the sky, huge colonies of birds" nests crowded like a city. They had brought home a young one, which screamed all day to be stuffed with fish.
A cousin of Sylvia"s, Harley Chilton, had come to visit her. He had taken van Tuiver on hunting-trips during the latter"s courtship days, and now was a good fishing-companion. He was not allowed to discover the state of affairs between Sylvia and her husband, but he saw his cousin reading serious books, and his contribution to the problem was to tell her that she would get wrinkles in her face, and that even her feet would grow big, like those of the ladies in New England.
Also, there was the young physician who kept watch over Sylvia"s health; a dapper little man with pink and white complexion, and a brown moustache from which he could not keep his fingers. He had a bungalow to himself, but sometimes he went along on the launch-trips, and Sylvia thought she observed wrinkles of amus.e.m.e.nt round his eyes whenever she differed from her husband on the subject of Burke. She suspected this young man of not telling all his ideas to his multi-millionaire patients, and she was entertained by the prospect of probing him.
Then came Mrs. Varina Tuis; who since the tragic cutting of her own domestic knot, had given her life to the service of the happier members of the Castleman line. She was now to be companion and counsellor to Sylvia; and on the very day of her arrival she discovered the chasm that was yawning in her niece"s life.
"It"s wonderful," wrote Sylvia, "the intuition of the Castleman women.
We were in the launch, pa.s.sing one of the viaducts of the new railroad, and Aunt Varina exclaimed, "What a wonderful piece of work!" "Yes," put in my husband, "but don"t let Sylvia hear you say it." "Why not?" she asked; and he replied, "She"ll tell you how many hours a day the poor Dagoes have to work." That was all; but I saw Aunt Varina give a quick glance at me, and I saw that she was not fooled by my efforts to make conversation. It was rather horrid of Douglas, for he knows that I love these old people, and do not want them to know about my trouble. But it is characteristic of him--when he is annoyed he seldom tries to spare others.
"As soon as we were alone, Aunt Varina began, "Sylvia, my dear, what does it mean? What have you done to worry your husband?"
"You would be entertained if I could remember the conversation. I tried to dodge the trouble by answering off-hand, "Douglas had eaten too many turtle-eggs for luncheon "--this being a man-like thing, that any dear old lady would understand. But she was too shrewd. I had to explain to her that I was learning to think, and this sent her into a perfect panic.
""You actually mean, my child, that you are thinking about subjects to which your husband objects, and you refuse to stop when he asks you to?
Surely you must know that he has some good reason for objecting."
""I suppose so," I said, "but he has not made that reason clear to me; and certainly I have a right--"
"She would not hear any more than that. "Right, Sylvia? Right? Are you claiming the right to drive your husband from you?"
""But surely I can"t regulate all my thinking by the fear of driving my husband from me!"
""Sylvia, you take my breath away. Where did you get such ideas?"
""But answer me, Aunt Varina--can I?"
""What thinking is as important to a woman as thinking how to please a good, kind husband? What would become of her family if she no longer tried to do this?"
"So you see, we opened up a large subject. I know you consider me a backward person, and you may be interested to learn that there are some to whom I seem a terrifying rebel. Picture poor Aunt Varina, her old face full of concern, repeating over and over, "My child, my child, I hope I have come in time! Don"t scorn the advice of a woman who has paid bitterly for her mistakes. You have a good husband, a man who loves you devotedly; you are one of the most fortunate of women--now do not throw your happiness away!"
""Aunt Varina," I said (I forget if I ever told you that her husband gambled and drank, and finally committed suicide) "Aunt Varina, do you really believe that every man is so anxious to get away from his wife that it must take her whole stock of energy, her skill in diplomacy, to keep him?"
""Sylvia," she answered, "you put things so strangely, you use such horribly crude language, I don"t know how to talk to you!" (That must be your fault, Mary. I never heard such a charge before.) "I can only tell you this--that the wife who permits herself to think about other things than her duty to her husband and her children is taking a frightful risk. She is playing with fire, Sylvia--she will realize too late what it means to set aside the wisdom of her s.e.x, the experience of other women for ages and ages!"
"So there you are, Mary! I am studying another unwritten book, the Maxims of Aunt Varina!
"She has found the remedy for my troubles, the cure for my disease of thought--I am to sew! I tell her that I have more clothes than I can wear in a dozen seasons, and she answers, in an awesome voice, "There is the little stranger!" When I point out that the little stranger will be expected to have a "layette" costing many thousands of dollars, she replies, "They will surely permit him to wear some of the things his mother"s hands have made." So, behold me, seated on the gallery, learning fancy st.i.tches--and with Kautsky on the Social Revolution hidden away in the bottom of my sewing-bag!"
3. The weeks pa.s.sed. The legislature at Albany adjourned, without regard to our wishes; and so, like the patient spider whose web is destroyed, we set to work upon a new one. So much money must be raised, so many articles must be written, so many speeches delivered, so many people seized upon and harried and wrought to a state of mind where they were dangerous to the future career of legislators. Such is the process of social reform under the private property regime; a process which the pure and simple reformers imagine we shall tolerate for ever--G.o.d save us!
Sylvia asked me for the news, and I told it to her--how we had failed, and what we had to do next. So pretty soon there came by registered mail a little box, in which I found a diamond ring. "I cannot ask him for money just now," she explained, "but here is something that has been mine from girlhood. It cost about four hundred dollars--this for your guidance in selling it. Not a day pa.s.ses that I do not see many times that much wasted; so take it for the cause." Queen Isabella and her jewels!
In this letter she told me of a talk she had had with her husband on the "woman-problem." She had thought at first that it was going to prove a helpful talk--he had been in a fairer mood than she was usually able to induce. "He evaded some of my questions," she explained, "but I don"t think it was deliberate; it is simply the evasive att.i.tude of mind which the whole world takes. He says he does not think that women are inferior to men, only that they are different; the mistake is for them to try to become _like_ men. It is the old proposition of "charm," you see. I put that to him, and he admitted that he did like to be "charmed."
"I said, "You wouldn"t, if you knew as much about the process as I do."
""Why not?" he asked.
""Because, it"s not an honest process. It"s not a straight way for one s.e.x to deal with the other."
"He asked what I meant by that; but then, remembering the cautions of my great-aunt, I laughed. "If you are going to compel me to use the process, you can hardly expect me to tell you the secret of it."
""Then there"s no use trying to talk," he said.
""Ah, but there is!" I exclaimed. "You admit that I have "charm"--dozens of other men admitted it. And so it ought to count for something if I declare that I know it"s not an honest thing--that it depends upon trickery, and appeals to the worst qualities in a man. For instance, his vanity. "Flatter him," Lady Dee used to say. "He"ll swallow it." And he will--I never knew a man to refuse a compliment in my life. His love of domination. "If you want anything, make him think that _he_ wants it!"
His egotism. She had a bitter saying--I can hear the very tones of her voice: "When in doubt, talk about HIM." That is what is called "charm"!"