I paused, uncertain if Sylvia would understand the story. "Do you know what syphilis is?" I asked.
"I suppose--I have heard of what we call a "bad disease"" she said.
"It"s a very bad disease. But if the words convey to you that it"s a disease that bad people get, I should tell you that most men take the chance of getting it; yet they are cruel enough to despise those upon whom the ill-luck falls. My poor nephew had been utterly ignorant--I found out that from his father, too late. An instinct had awakened in him of which he knew absolutely nothing; his companions had taught him what it meant, and he had followed their lead. And then had come the horror and the shame--and some vile, ignorant wretch to trade upon it, and cast the boy off when he was penniless. So he had come home again, with his gnawing secret; I pictured him wandering about, trying to make up his mind to confide in me, wavering between that and the horrible deed he did."
I stopped, because even to this day I cannot tell the story without tears. I cannot keep a picture of the boy in my room, because of the self-reproaches that haunt me. "You can understand," I said to Sylvia, "I never could forget such a lesson. I swore a vow over the poor lad"s body, that I would never let a boy or girl that I could reach go out in ignorance into the world. I read up on the subject, and for a while I was a sort of fanatic--I made people talk, young people and old people.
I broke down the taboos wherever I went, and while I shocked a good many, I knew that I helped a good many more."
All that was, of course, inconceivable to Sylvia. How curious was the contrast of her one experience in the matter of venereal disease. She told me how she had been instrumental in making a match between her friend, Harriet Atkinson and a young scion of an ancient and haughty family of Charleston, and how after the marriage her friend"s health had begun to give way, until now she was an utter wreck, living alone in a dilapidated antebellum mansion, seeing no one but negro servants, and praying for death to relieve her of her misery.
"Of course, I don"t really know," said Sylvia. "Perhaps it was this--this disease that you speak of. None of my people would tell me--I doubt if they really know themselves. It was just before my own wedding, so you can understand it had a painful effect upon me. It happened that I read something in a magazine, and I thought that--that possibly my fiancee--that someone ought to ask him, you understand--"
She stopped, and the blood was crimson in her cheeks, with the memory of her old excitement, and some fresh excitement added to it. There are diseases of the mind as well as of the body, and one of them is called prudery.
"I can understand," I said. "It was certainly your right to be rea.s.sured on such a point."
"Well, I tried to talk to my Aunt Varina about it; then I wrote to Uncle Basil, and asked him to write to Douglas. At first he refused--he only consented to do it when I threatened to go to my father."
"What came of it in the end?"
"Why, my uncle wrote, and Douglas answered very kindly that he understood, and that it was all right--I had nothing to fear. I never expected to mention the incident to anyone again."
"Lots of people have mentioned such things to me," I responded, to rea.s.sure her. Then after a pause: "Tell me, how was it, if you didn"t know the meaning of marriage, how could you connect the disease with it?"
She answered, gazing with the wide-open, innocent eyes: "I had no idea how people gave it to each other. I thought maybe they got it by kissing."
I thought to myself again: The horror of this superst.i.tion of prudery!
Can one think of anything more destructive to life than the placing of a taboo upon such matters? Here is the whole of the future at stake--the health, the sanity, the very existence of the race. And what fiend has been able to contrive it that we feel like criminals when we mention the subject?
23. Our intimacy progressed, and the time came when Sylvia told me about her marriage. She had accepted Douglas van Tuiver because she had lost Frank Shirley, and her heart was broken. She could never imagine herself loving any other man; and not knowing exactly what marriage meant, it had been easier for her to think of her family, and to follow their guidance. They had told her that love would come; Douglas had implored her to give him a chance to teach her to love him. She had considered what she could do with his money--both for her home-people and for those she spoke of vaguely as "the poor." But now she was making the discovery that she could not do very much for these "poor."
"It isn"t that my husband is mean," she said. "On the contrary, the slightest hint will bring me any worldly thing I want. I have homes in half a dozen parts of America--I have _carte blanche_ to open accounts in two hemispheres. If any of my people need money I can get it; but if I want it for myself, he asks me what I"m doing with it--and so I run into the stone-wall of his ideas."
At first the colliding with this wall had merely pained and bewildered her. But now the combination of Veblen and myself had helped her to realize what it meant. Douglas van Tuiver spent his money upon a definite system: whatever went to the maintaining of his social position, whatever added to the glory, prestige and power of the van Tuiver name--that money was well-spent; while money spent to any other end was money wasted--and this included all ideas and "causes." And when the master of the house knew that his money was being wasted, it troubled him.
"It wasn"t until after I married him that I realized how idle his life is," she remarked. "At home all the men have something to do, running their plantations, or getting elected to some office. But Douglas never does anything that I can possibly think is useful."
His fortune was invested in New York City real-estate, she went on to explain. There was an office, with a small army of clerks and agents to attend to it--a machine which had been built up and handed on to him by his ancestors. It sufficed if he dropped in for an hour or two once a week when he was in the city, and signed a batch of doc.u.ments now and then when he was away. His life was spent in the company of people whom the social system had similarly deprived of duties; and they had, by generations of experiment, built up for themselves a new set of duties, a life which was wholly without relationship to reality. Into this unreal existence Sylvia had married, and it was like a current sweeping her in its course. So long as she went with it, all was well; but let her try to catch hold of something and stop, and it would tear her loose and almost strangle her.
As time went on, she gave me strange glimpses into this world. Her husband did not seem really to enjoy its life. As Sylvia put it, "He takes it for granted that he has to do all the proper things that the proper people do. He hates to be conspicuous, he says. I point out to him that the proper things are nearly always conspicuous, but he replies that to fail to do them would be even more conspicuous."
It took me a long time to get really acquainted with Sylvia, because of the extent to which this world was clamouring for her. I used to drop in when she "phoned me she had half an hour. I would find her dressing for something, and she would send her maid away, and we would talk until she would be late for some function; and that might be a serious matter, because somebody would feel slighted. She was always "on pins and needles" over such questions of precedent; it seemed as if everybody in her world must be watching everybody else. There was a whole elaborate science of how to treat the people you met, so that they would not feel slighted--or so that they would feel slighted, according to circ.u.mstances.
To the enjoyment of such a life it was essential that the person should believe in it. Douglas van Tuiver did believe in it; it was his religion, the only one he had. (Churchman as he was, his church was a part of the social routine.) He was proud of Sylvia, and apparently satisfied when he could take her at his side; and Sylvia went, because she was his wife, and that was what wives were for. She had tried her best to be happy; she had told herself that she _was_ happy yet all the time realizing that a woman who is really happy does not have to tell herself.
Earlier in life she had quaffed and enjoyed the wine of applause. I recollect vividly her telling me of the lure her beauty had been to her--the most terrible temptation that could come to a woman. "I walk into a brilliant room, and I feel the thrill of admiration that goes through the crowd. I have a sudden sense of my own physical perfection--a glow all over me! I draw a deep breath--I feel a surge of exaltation. I say, "I am victorious--I can command! I have this supreme crown of womanly grace--I am all-powerful with it--the world is mine!""
As she spoke the rapture was in her voice, and I looked at her--and yes, she was beautiful! The supreme crown was hers!
"I see other beautiful women," she went on--and swift anger came into her voice. "I see what they are doing with this power! Gratifying their vanity--turning men into slaves of their whim! Squandering money upon empty pleasures--and with the dreadful plague of poverty spreading in the world! I used to go to my father, "Oh, papa, why must there be so many poor people? Why should we have servants--why should they have to wait on me, and I do nothing for them?" He would try to explain to me that it was the way of Nature. Mamma would tell me it was the will of the Lord--"The poor ye have always with you"--"Servants, obey your masters"--and so on. But in spite of the Bible texts, I felt guilty. And now I come to Douglas with the same plea--and it only makes him angry!
He has been to college and has a lot of scientific phrases--he tells me it"s "the struggle for existence," "the elimination of the unfit"--and so on. I say to him, "First we make people unfit, and then we have to eliminate them." He cannot see why I do not accept what learned people tell me--why I persist in questioning and suffering."
She paused, and then added, "It"s as if he were afraid I might find out something he doesn"t want me to! He"s made me give him a promise that I won"t see Mrs. Frothingham again!" And she laughed. "I haven"t told him about you!"
I answered, needless to say, that I hoped she would keep the secret!
24. All this time I was busy with my child-labour work. We had an important bill before the legislature that session, and I was doing what I could to work up sentiment for it. I talked at every gathering where I could get a hearing; I wrote letters to newspapers; I sent literature to lists of names. I racked my mind for new schemes, and naturally, at such times, I could not help thinking of Sylvia. How much she could do, if only she would!
I spared no one, least of all myself, and so it was not easy to spare her. The fact that I had met her was the gossip of the office, and everybody was waiting for something to happen. "How about Mrs. van Tuiver?" my "chief" would ask, at intervals. "If she would _only_ go on our press committee" my stenographer would sigh.
The time came when our bill was in committee, a place of peril for bills. I went to Albany to see what could be done. I met half a hundred legislators, of whom perhaps half-a-dozen had some human interest in my subject; the rest, well, it was discouraging. Where was the force that would stir them, make them forget their own particular little grafts, and serve the public welfare in defiance to hostile interests?
Where was it? I came back to New York to look for it, and after a blue luncheon with the members of our committee, I came away with my mind made up--I would sacrifice my Sylvia to this desperate emergency.
I knew just what I had to do. So far she had heard speeches about social wrongs, or read books about them; she had never been face to face with the reality of them. Now I persuaded her to take a morning off, and see some of the sights of the underworld of toil. We foreswore the royal car, and likewise the royal furs and velvets; she garbed herself in plain appearing dark blue and went down town in the Subway like common mortals, visiting paper-box factories and flower factories, tenement homes where whole families sat pasting toys and gimcracks for fourteen or sixteen hours a day, and still could not buy enough food to make full-sized men and women of them.
She was Dante, and I was Virgil, our inferno was an endless procession of tortured faces--faces of women, haggard and mournful, faces of little children, starved and stunted, dulled and dumb. Several times we stopped to talk with these people--one little Jewess girl I knew whose three tiny sisters had been roasted alive in a sweatshop fire. This child had jumped from a fourth-story window, and been miraculously caught by a fireman. She said that some man had started the fire, and been caught, but the police had let him get away. So I had to explain to Sylvia that curious bye-product (sic) of the profit system known as the "Arson Trust." Authorities estimated that incendiarism was responsible for the destruction of a quarter of a billion dollars worth of property in America every year. So, of course, the business of starting fires was a paying one, and the "fire-bug," like the "cadet" and the dive-keeper, was a part of the "system." So it was quite a possible thing that the man who had burned up this little girl"s three sisters might have been allowed to escape.
I happened to say this in the little girl"s hearing, and I saw her pitiful strained eyes fixed upon Sylvia. Perhaps this lovely, soft-voiced lady was a fairy G.o.d-mother, come to free her sisters from an evil spell and to punish the wicked criminal! I saw Sylvia turn her head away, and search for her handkerchief; as we groped our way down the dark stairs, she caught my hand, whispering: "Oh, my G.o.d! my G.o.d!"
It had even more effect than I had intended; not only did she say that she would do something--anything that would be of use--but she told me as we rode back home that her mind was made up to stop the squandering of her husband"s money. He had been planning a costume ball for a couple of months later, an event which would keep the van Tuiver name in condition, and would mean that he and other people would spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars. As we rode home in the roaring Subway, Sylvia sat beside me, erect and tense, saying that if the ball were given, it would be without the presence of the hostess.
I struck while the iron was hot, and got her permission to put her name upon our committee list. She said, moreover, that she would get some free time, and be more than a mere name to us. What were the duties of a member of our committee?
"First," I said, "to know the facts about child-labour, as you have seen them to-day, and second, to help other people to know."
"And how is that to be done?"
"Well, for instance, there is that hearing before the legislative committee. You remember I suggested that you appear."
"Yes," she said in a low voice. I could almost hear the words that were in her mind: "What would _he_ say?"
25. Sylvia"s name went upon our letter-heads and other literature, and almost at once things began to happen. In a day or two there came a reporter, saying he had noticed her name. Was it true that she had become interested in our work? Would I please give him some particulars, as the public would naturally want to know.
I admitted that Mrs. van Tuiver had joined the committee; she approved of our work and desired to further it. That was all. He asked: Would she give an interview? And I answered that I was sure she would not. Then would I tell something about how she had come to be interested in the work? It was a chance to a.s.sist our propaganda, added the reporter, diplomatically.
I retired to another room, and got Sylvia upon the "phone, "The time has come for you to take the plunge," I said.
"Oh, but I don"t want to be in the papers!" she cried "Surely, you wouldn"t advise it!"
"I don"t see how you can avoid having something appear. Your name is given out, and if the man can"t get anything else, he"ll take our literature, and write up your doings out of his imagination."
"And they"ll print my picture with it!" she exclaimed. I could not help laughing. "It"s quite possible."
"Oh, what will my husband do? He"ll say "I told you so!""
It is a hard thing to have one"s husband say that, as I knew by bitter experience. But I did not think that reason enough for giving up.