Read Ebook: Sylvia's Marriage: A Novel by Sinclair Upton

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Ebook has 1345 lines and 75520 words, and 27 pages

"Why not?" I asked.

"I never thought of such a thing. I don't know enough."

"But you can learn."

"I know, but that kind of work ought to be done by men."

"We've given men a chance, and they have made the evils. Whose business is it to protect the children if not the women's?"

She hesitated a moment, and then said: "I suppose you'll laugh at me."

"No, no," I promised; then as I looked at her I guessed. "Are you going to tell me that woman's place is the home?"

"That is what we think in Castleman County," she said, smiling in spite of herself.

"The children have got out of the home," I replied. "If they are ever to get back, we women must go and fetch them."

We talked of Suffrage for a while, and I spoke about the lives of women on lonely farms--how they give their youth and health to their husband's struggle, yet have no money partnership which they can 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 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.

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."

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.

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. "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 caught a glimpse of my husband's face!"

There had been even fewer adventures in the life of young Douglas van Tuiver than in the life of the Honourable Reginald Annersley. When one heard the details of the up-bringing of this "millionaire baby," one was able to forgive him for being self-centred. He had grown into a man who lived to fulfil his social duties, and he had taken to wife a girl who was reckless, high-spirited, with a streak of almost savage pride in her.

Sylvia's was the true aristocratic attitude towards the rest of the world. It could never have occurred to her to imagine that anywhere upon the whole earth there were people superior to the Castlemans of Castleman County. If you had been ignorant enough to suggest such an idea, you would have seen her eyes flash and her nostrils quiver; you would have been enveloped in a net of bewilderment and transfixed with a trident of mockery and scorn. That was what she had done in her husband-hunt. The trouble was that van Tuiver was not clever enough to realise this, and to trust her prowess against other beasts in the social jungle.

Strange to me were such inside glimpses into the life of these two favourites of the gods! I never grew weary of speculating about them, and the mystery of their alliance. How had Sylvia come to make this marriage? She was not happy with him; keen psychologist that she was, she must have foreseen that she would not be happy with him. Had she deliberately sacrificed herself, because of the good she imagined she could do to her family?

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