"Men are given to you women to protect--the best in them!" "You live off their strength,--what do you give them? Sensuality or spirit?" Her husband was a stranger; she had given him nothing but one child.
Isabelle opened her trunks and began to pack. There was a train south from White River at eight-thirty, which connected with the New York express.
Molly could follow later with the governess.... She flung the things loosely into the trunks, her mind filled with but one idea. She must get to St. Louis as soon as possible. "John--my husband--is being tried out there for dishonest conduct in his business, and we are so far apart that he doesn"t even mention it in his letters!"
At last, the packing over, she crouched by the embers and tried to warm her numb hands. This burst of decided will which had made her swiftly prepare for the journey gave out for the moment.... What should she do out there, after all? She would merely be in the way and annoy John. And with a strength that startled her came the answer, "After all, we are man and wife; he is my husband, and he is in trouble!"
It would not be possible to see Renault before she left. Well, he had spoken his message to her, having chosen his own time. And already his prophecy was coming about. The thing to do was plain. The Vision was there, and the voice had spoken out of the depths. She was extraordinarily calm, as if raised above doubt, the confusing calls of personal consideration.
There might be disgrace to come for her husband. There was the undoubted miserable failure of her marriage,--the strong possibility of her husband"s impa.s.sive coldness at her futile flight to his side, at this hour. But there was no Fear! ... And serenely she dropped into sleep.
CHAPTER LXVI
Margaret and the children drove down to White River with her the next morning. Just as Margaret had previously opposed her restless desire to leave Grosvenor, with gentle suggestions and quiet persuasion, so this time she accepted her going as inevitable.
"But you may come back; I wish it might be!" was all she said, not very hopefully.
Isabelle shook her head. She made no plans, but she felt that no matter what the outcome of the trial might be it was hardly probable that her path would lead back to this retreat. As she got into the sleigh she looked up the hillside to the hospital, its many windows glistening in the rising sun, its severe outlines sharp against the snowy field, and her eyes roved on to the dusky firs in the valley, up to the purple hilltop of the Altar, on to the distant peaks rising behind, with crests already bare. Her eyes were misty as she drove through the familiar village street, past the blacksmith"s shop, where Sol Short waved a second good-by with a glowing bar of steel caught from the forge, on towards the Pa.s.s and the descent,--it was a haven of peace, this hillside village! Within that circle of snowy hills, in the silent beauty of the Northern winter, she had lived more, lived deeper, than anywhere else in the world. But she should not come back,--there would be no place for that. Grosvenor had given its benediction,--the hills and the woods, the snowy expanses and frozen brooks, the sunsets and starlit firmament,--the blacksmith"s simple content and Renault"s beacon lights, Margaret"s peace,--all had done their work in her. As the lumbering sleigh dragged over the Pa.s.s, she gazed back to fix its image in her mind forever. The fresh March wind blew in her face, chill but full of distant promise, as if in its sweep from the north it had heard the tidings of spring, the stirrings deep below snow and frost. And the sky shimmered cloudless from horizon to horizon, a soft blue....
The agitations before and the struggle to come were inters.p.a.ced by this lofty place of Peace--wherein she had found herself!
The frost-covered train from the north drew up at the platform in a cloud of steam. The fireman, a lad of eighteen, with a curl waving from under his cap, was leaning far out of the cab, smoking a cigarette and looking up at the snowy mountains just visible from White River. He was careless,--alive, and content this fine morning,--his grimy arms bare on the sill of the cab window, the broad earth and its hills spread before him. As the engine shot past, he looked down at Isabelle, curiously, and then up to the mountains again, as if his life were complete enough. A careless figure of the human routine of the world, endlessly moving, changing, energizing, functioning in its destined orbit! And all lives were tied together in the fine mesh of circ.u.mstance,--one destiny running into another as the steel band of railroad ran on and on into distant places, just as the lad in the engine cab was somehow concerned with the whole human system that ended, perchance, in the courtroom at St. Louis....
Isabelle took Margaret in her arms and holding her close, as if she would seize her very spirit, kissed her.
"Tell the doctor," she said, "that I am beginning to understand--a little."
PART SEVEN
CHAPTER LXVII
What is marriage? At least in these United States where men once dreamed they would create a new society of ideal form based on that poetic illusion, "All men"--presumably women, too!--"are born free and equal!"
Yes, what has marriage been,--first among the pioneers pushing their way to new land through the forest, their women at their sides, or in the ox-cart behind them with the implements of conquest,--pushing out together into the wide wilderness, there to fight side by side, to tame Nature and win from her a small circle of economic order for their support? Together these two cut the trees, build the cabin, clear the land and sow it, thus making shelter and food. And then the Woman draws apart to bring _her_ increment, the children, to fight with them, to follow in their steps. In that warfare against stubborn Nature and Chaos, against the Brute, against the Enemy in whatever form, the Man and the Woman are free and equal,--they stand together and win or lose together, live or die in the life-long battle. And the end? If they triumph in this primitive struggle for existence, they have won a few acres of cleared land for the harvest, a habitation, and food, and children who will take up from their hands the warfare for life, to win further concessions from Nature, a wider circle of order from chaos.
This is the marriage type of the pioneer,--a primitive, body-wracking struggle of two against all, a perfect type, elemental but whole,--and this remains the large pattern of marriage to-day wherever sound. Two bodies, two souls are united for the life struggle to wring order out of chaos,--physical and spiritual.
Generations are born and die. The circles grow wider, more diversified, overlap, intersect. But the type remains of that primitive wilderness struggle of the family. Then comes to this breeding society the Crisis.
There came to us the great War,--the conflict of ideals. Now Man leaves behind in the home the Woman and her children, and goes forth alone to fight for the unseen,--the Idea that is in him, that is stronger than woman or child, greater than life itself. Giving over the selfish struggle with the Brute, he battles against articulate voices. And the Woman is left to keep warm the forsaken nest, to nurse the brood there, to wait and want, perchance to follow after her man to the battle-field and pick out her dead and bear it back to burial. She, too, has her part in the struggle; not merely the patient, economic part, but the cherishing and the shaping of man"s impulse,--the stuff of his soul that sends him into the battle-field.
Alone she cannot fight; her Man is her weapon. He makes to prevail those Ideals which she has given him with her embraces. This also is the perfect type of Marriage,--comradeship, togethership,--and yet larger than before because the two share sacrifice and sorrow and truth,--things of the spirit. Together they wage War for others.
And there follows a third condition of Marriage. The wilderness reduced, society organized, wars fought, there is the time of peace. Now Man, free to choose his task, goes down into the market-place to sell his force, and here he fights with new weapons a harder fight; while his Woman waits behind the firing line to care for him,--to equip him and to h.o.a.rd his pelf. On the strength and wisdom of her commissariatship the fate of this battle in good part depends. Of such a nature was Colonel Price"s marriage.
"He made the money, I saved it," Harmony Price proudly repeated in the after-time. "We lived our lives together, your mother and I," her husband said to their daughter. It was _his_ force that won the dollars, made the economic position, and _her_ thrift and willingness to forego present ease that created future plenty. Living thus together for an economic end, saving the surplus of their energies, they were prosperous--and they were happy. The generation of money-earners after the War, when the country already largely reclaimed began to bear fruit abundantly, were happy, if in no greatly idealistic manner, yet peacefully, contentedly happy, and usefully preparing the way for the upward step of humanity to a little nearer realization of that poetic illusion,--the brotherhood of man.
In all these three stages of the marriage state, the union of Man and Woman is based on effort in common, together; not on sentiment, not on emotion, not on pa.s.sion, not on individual gratification of sense or soul. The two are partners in living, and the fruit of their bodies is but another proof of partnership....
And now emerges another economic condition, the inexorable successor of the previous one, and another kind of Marriage. Society is complexly organized, minutely interrelated; great power here and great weakness there, vast acc.u.mulations of surplus energies, h.o.a.rded goods, many possessions,--oh, a long gamut up and down the human scale! And the CHANCE, the great gamble, always dangles before Man"s eyes; not the hope of a hard-won existence for woman and children, not a few acres of cleared wilderness, but a dream of the Aladdin lamp of human desires,--excitements, emotions, ecstasies,--all the world of the mind and the body. So Woman, no longer the Pioneer, no longer the defender of the house, no longer the economist, blossoms--as what? The Spender! She is the fine flower of the modern game, of the barbaric gamble. At last she is Queen and will rule. The Man has the money, and the Woman has--herself, her body and her charm. She traffics with man for what he will give, and she pays with her soul.... To her the man comes from the market-place soiled and worn, and lays at her feet his gain, and in return she gives him of her wit, of her handsome person, gowned and jewelled, of her beauty, of her body itself. She is Queen! She amuses her lord, she beguiles him, she whets his appet.i.te and pushes him forth to the morrow"s fight, to bring back to her more pelf, to make her greater yet.
She sits idle in her cabin-palace, attended by servants, or goes forth on her errands to show herself before the world as her man"s Queen. So long as she may but please this lord of hers, so long as she may hold him by her mind or her body, she will be Queen. She has found something softer than labor with her hands, easier than the pains of childbirth,--she has found the secret of rule,--mastery over her former master, the slave ruling the lord. Like the last wife of the barbarian king she is heaped with jewels and served with fine wines and foods and lives in the palace,--the favorite.
And Woman, now the mistress rather than the wife, has longings for Love.
She listens to her heart, and it whispers strange fancies. "I cannot love this man whom I have married, though he feeds me and gives me of his best.
My soul will have none of him,--I will not consent to live with him and bear children for him and thus be a slave. Lo, am I not a Queen, to give and take back, to swear and then swear again? I will divorce this man who can no longer thrill me, and I will take another dearer to my heart,--and thus I shall be n.o.bler than I was. I shall be a person with a soul of my own. To have me man must win me not once, but daily. For marriage without the love of my soul is beastly." So she cheats herself with fine phrases and shirks. Small comradeship here! Marriage to this woman is a state of personal gratification, the best bargain she can make with man....
To this state has come the honorable condition of marriage in a country where "men"--and surely women!--"are born free and equal." The flower of successful womanhood--those who have bargained shrewdly--are to be found overfed, overdressed, sensualized, in great hotels, on mammoth steamers and luxurious trains, rushing hither and thither on idle errands. They have lost their prime function: they will not or they cannot get children. They are free! As never women were before. And these wives are the custodians of men, not merely of their purses but of their souls. They whisper to them the Ideals of their hearts: "Come bring me money, and I will kiss you. Make me a name before the world, and I will noise it abroad. Build me a house more splendid than other houses, set me above my sisters, and I will reflect honor on you among men for the clothes I wear and the excellent shape of my figure."
And thus, unwittingly, Woman becomes again in the revolution of the ages what she was at first, the female creature, the possession, the thing for l.u.s.t and for amus.e.m.e.nt,--the cherished slave. For the death of woman"s soul follows when she pays with her body,--a simple, immutable law.... Woman in America, splendidly free and Queen! What have you done with the men who were given into your charge? Clever, beautiful, brilliant,--our most shining prize,--but what have you done for the souls of the men given into your keeping? ... The answer roars up from the city streets,--the most material age and the most material men and the least lovely civilization on G.o.d"s earth. No longer the fighting companion at man"s side, but reaching out for yourselves, after your own desires, you have become the slave of the Brute as you were before. And a neurotic slave. For when Woman is no longer comrade of man in the struggle, she is either Nothing or a--but blot the word!
Perfect justice, a complete picture of society in a civilization of eighty millions, requires many shades. The darker shades are true only of the rotting refuse, the sc.u.m of the whole. Among the married millions most are, fortunately, still struggling through the earlier types from the pioneer to the economist. But as the water runs there lies the sea beyond. From the prairie village to the city tenement, the American woman sees in marriage the fulfilment of her heart"s desire,--to be Queen, to rule and not work.
Thus for emanc.i.p.ated Woman.
And the poor creature Man, who fights for his Queen? A trained energy, a vessel of careless pa.s.sion, a blind doer, dreaming great truths and seeing little ends,--Man is still abroad ranging his forest, his hunting blood up, "playing the game." There are moments when his sleep is troubled with feverish dreams in which he hears murmurs,--"The body is more than raiment," and "The soul is more than the body"; "There are other hunting-grounds, another warfare." But roused from these idle fancies he sallies forth from his cabin-palace, or his hotel apartment, or his steam-heated and childless flat into the old fray, to kill his meat and bring it home.... We chatter of the curse of Castle Garden, unmindful that in the dumb animal hordes, who labor and breed children, lies the future.
For Theirs Will Be The Land, when the blond hunter of the market and his pampered female are swept into the dust heap.
CHAPTER LXVIII
In the vast eighteen-story, thousand-room New York hotel where Isabelle Lane stayed for the night on her way west, there was the usual constant bustle of arriving and departing people. The heat, the crowd, the luxury of this cliff-city with its throngs of much-dressed men and women overwhelmed Isabelle with a sense of startling unreality. It was not simply that she had been removed from the noise of city life for a number of months, secluded in the quiet of open s.p.a.ces, and that the latest novelty in New York hotels contrasted sharply with primitive Grosvenor. But she found herself examining the scene, from the moment she entered the crowded foyer with its stucco-marble columns and bronze railings, its heavy hangings and warm atmosphere, with eyes that seemed to observe what was there before her for the first time. She looked at the thick rugs, the uniformed servants, the line of pale, sleek young men in the office enclosure, the swarming "guests" (according to the euphemistic slang of American hotels!),--all these women in evening gowns, much jewelled, on their way to dinner, with their attendant males; and she asked herself if it were the same world that she had always known.
The little bronze doors in the bank of elevators opened and shut, taking in and disgorging men and women, to shoot upwards to the tiers of part.i.tioned privacy above or to hurry forth on their errands. Waiting for the hotel maid to fetch her key, Isabelle felt like a soul resurrected from a grave, come back to experience what had once been its theatre of activity and joy.
She felt the tense hum of life in the activity of the clerks behind the desk, the servants hurrying on their errands, the coming and going of the horde of people, among whom watchful house detectives moved about silently.
She knew that across the narrow street was another even larger cliff-city, where the same picture of life was repeating itself, and around the corner there were four or five more, and farther away dozens almost exactly like this one,--all crowded, humming with people, with the same heavy atmosphere of human beings hived together in hot air, men and women dressed like these, feeding like these in great halls, spending lavishly for comfort, pleasure, and repose! ...
This mammoth caravansary was a symbol of the broad, riotously rich country,--a spiritual and material symbol, representing its thoughts, its ideals, its art, its beauty, its joy. Into these metropolitan cliff-cities flowed the stream of dominant, successful lives of the nation, seeking to find satisfaction for their efforts, their rightful triumph. Once Isabelle had had the child"s pleasure in the hotel pageant. Later it had been an accepted convenience. Now she sat there looking on as from a great distance, and she said over and over wonderingly: "Can this be life? No, this is not life,--"tis not real!"
At the news-stand near by a group of men and women were loitering, the men buying theatre tickets, the women turning over the leaves of magazines, scanning lazily the t.i.tles of novels. The magazines were stacked in rows, each with a gaudy cover,--"artistic" or designed merely to capture the eye by a blaze of color. One of the women turned the leaves of several novels, idly, with a kind of fat ennui, as if loath to be tempted even by mental dissipation. Then noting a t.i.tle that had somehow lodged itself with favorable a.s.sociations in her brain, she said to the girl behind the counter, "You may send this up to my room."
So the work of imagination, the picture of life, the soul of the poet creator, was slipped from the pile to be sent upwards along with the other purchases of the day,--clothes and jewellery and candy,--what the woman had desired that day. This group moved on and another took its place. The books and the magazines disappeared like the theatre tickets and the cigars and cigarettes at the neighboring stand,--feeding the maw of the mult.i.tude, which sought to tickle different groups of brain cells. Gay little books, saucy little books, cheap little books, pleasant little books,--all making their bid to certain cells in the gray matter of these sated human beings!
A literature composed chiefly by women for women,--tons of wood pulp, miles of linen covers, rivers of ink,--all to feed the prevailing taste, like the ribbons, the jewels, the candy, the theatre tickets! A great age, as Mr.
Gossom, swelling with pride, would have said, and a great people, that has standardized its pleasures and has them marketed in convenient packages for all tastes! An age of women"s ideals, a literature by women for women! ...
Isabelle bought a copy of Mr. Gossom"s patriotic magazine for the People, and turned its fresh pages with a curiosity to see what it was like, and who was writing now. The sentimental novel by the popular English novelist that she had looked at when it first appeared came to its conclusion in this number. And it not having met with the expected popular approval, for all its sentiment, Mr. Gossom had abandoned the idyllic in favor of a startling series of articles on "Our National Crimes," plentifully and personally ill.u.s.trated. Mr. Gossom would have preferred to prolong the sentimental note,--"pleasant reading," as he called it; personally he did not approve of hanging up the nation"s wash in the front yard, for he himself was an investor in corporations. But what could he do? It was his business to give the People what the People wanted. And just now they wanted to be shocked and outraged by revelations of business perfidy.
Another six months, perhaps, when the public was tired of contemplating rascality, the editor would find something sweet, full of country charm and suburban peace, to feed them.... On the t.i.tle-page there were the old names and some new ones, but the same grist,--a "homely" story of "real life"
among the tenements, a "humorous" story of the new school, an article on a marvellous invention to set the public on the gape, etc.... Fosd.i.c.k had an article of a serious nature, on Trades Unions and Socialism. "So d.i.c.kie, having ceased to roll about the world," thought Isabelle, "has begun to write about it." She turned down the page at his article and looked into the advertising section. That was where the _People"s_ excelled,--in its thick advertising section. Between the automobiles and the pianolas were inserted some pages of personal puff, photographs of the coming contributors, and an account of their deeds,--the menus prepared for the coming months. Isabelle looked at the faces of the contributors, among whom was d.i.c.k"s face, very smooth and serious. As a whole the photographs might be those of any Modern Order of Redmen, consciously posed before the camera of Fame. But they gave that personal touch so necessary to please the democratic taste. Thus from Aeschylus to Mr. Gossom"s "literature." ... It seemed no more real, no more a part of what life is in its essence, than the hotel and the sleek people thronging it.