Chapter 29

"IF I MARRIED YOU"

When Armstrong saw the announcement of Frederic Carlin's death, he assumed Neva would soon be in New York, to escape the loneliness of Battle Field. He let three weeks pass, after her brief but gentle and friendly answer to his telegram of condolence. Then, he wrote her he was going to Chicago and wished to stop at Battle Field; she replied that she would be glad to see him. He took the first Westbound express�the through limited which, at his request, dropped him at the little town it had always before rushed past at disdainful speed. The respect with which he was treated, the deference of those who recognized him at the station, the smallness and simplicity of the old town, all combined to put the now triumphant and autocratic president of the mighty O.A.D. in the mood to appreciate every inch of the dizzy depth down from where he now blazed in glory to where he had begun, a barefoot boy in jeans, delivering groceries at back doors and alley gates. It was not in Armstrong to condescend; but it is in the sanest of us poor mortals, with our dim sense of proportion and our feeble sense of humor where we ourselves are the joke, to build up a grandiose mood upon less foundation of vanity of achievement than had Armstrong. The mood gave him a feeling of confidence, of conquest impending, as he strode in at the gate beside the drive into the Carlin place a full hour before he was expected. Memory was busy�not by any means altogether unpleasantly�as he went more slowly up the narrow walk to the old square stone house, with its walls all but hidden under the ivy, with its verandas draped in honeysuckle, and its peaceful, dignified foreground of primeval elms. The past was not quite forgotten; but he felt that it was completely expiated. He had paid for his ingratitude, his selfishness, his blindness, his folly�had paid in full, with interest.

He ascended to the veranda before the big oak front doors. The only life in view was a hummingbird flitting and balancing like a sprite among the honeysuckle blooms. The doors, the windows on either side, were open wide; he looked in with the future-focused eyes of the practical man of affairs. His past did not advance from those familiar rooms to abash him. On the contrary his eager gaze entered, searching for his future.

"We must have, will have, a place like this near New York," thought he. "Why not in New York? I can afford it."

He rang several times at long intervals; it was Neva herself who finally came�Neva, all in black and, so it seemed to him, more beautiful than ever. That she was glad, more than glad, at sight of him was plain to be seen in the color which submerged her pallor, in the swift lighting up of her eyes, like the first flash of stars in the night sky. But there was in her manner, as well as in her garb, a denial of the impulse of his impetuous passion; the doubts that had tormented him began to bore into his mood of self-confidence. She took him to the west veranda, with its luminous green curtains of morning-glory. She made him seat himself in the largest and laziest chair there, all the while covering the constraint with the neutral conversation which women command the more freely, the more difficult the situation. When the pause came he felt that she had permitted it, that she was ready to hear�and to speak. The doubts had made such inroads upon his assurance that his tone was less conclusive than he would have liked, as he began:

"Neva, I've come to take you back to New York."

Her expression, her manner brought vividly back to him that crucial talk of theirs at the lake shore. Only, now the advantage was wholly with her, where then it had been so distinctly on his side that he had pitied her, had felt almost cowardly. He looked at her impassive face, impossible to read, and there rose in him a feeling of fear�the fear every man at times has of the woman into whose hands his love has given his destiny.

"Everything is waiting on you," he went on. "The way lies smooth before us. You have brought me good fortune, Neva. My future�our future�is secure. With you to help me I shall go to the top. So�come, Neva!" And his heart filled his eyes.

She waited a moment before answering. "If we should fail this time, it would be the end, wouldn't it?" she said.

"But we can't fail!" he protested. He was strong in his assurance once more; did not her question imply that she loved him?

"We failed before, and we were younger and more adaptable."

"But now we understand each other."

"Do we?" she said, her eyes gravely upon him.

"How can you ask that!"

"Because so much depends on our seeing the truth exactly. The rest of our lives is at stake."

"Yes. I can't go on without you. Can you go on without me?"

"Each of us," she replied, "can go on without the other. I can paint pictures; you can make money. The question is, what will we mean to each other if we go on together? We aren't children any more, Horace. We are a man and a woman full grown, experienced, unable to blind ourselves even in our follies. And we aren't simply rushing into an episode of passion that will rage and die out. If it were merely that, I shouldn't be asking you and myself questions. When the end came, we could resume our separate lives; and, even if our experience had cost us dear instead of helping us, still we could recover, would in time be stronger and better for having had it. But you offer me your whole self, your whole life, and you ask me to give you mine. You ask me to marry you."

He did not understand this; woman meant to him only sex, and the difference between love and passion was a marriage ceremony. He felt that in what she said there lurked traces of the immorality of the woman who tries to think for herself instead of properly selecting a proper man and letting him do the thinking for both. "I love you," said he, "and there's the whole story. Love doesn't reason; it feels."

"Then it ought never to get married," she said. "We tried marriage once on the basis of husband and wife being absolute strangers to each other, and at cross purposes." She paused; he did not suspect it was to steady her constantly endangered self-control. "And," she added, "I shall never try that kind of marriage again. Passion is a better kindler than worldliness, but it is just as poor fuel."

"Neva!" he exclaimed.

"I couldn't be merely your mistress, Horace. I'd want you, and I'd want you to take me, all of me. I'd want it to be our life, and not merely an episode in our life. Can't you see what would come afterwards�when you had grown calm about me�and I about you? Can't you see that you'd turn back to your business and prostitute yourself for money, while I'd turn perhaps to luxury and show and prostitute myself to you for the means to exhibit myself? Don't you see it on every side, there in New York�the traffic in the souls of men and women viler than any on the sidewalks at night�the brazen faces of the men, flaunting their shame, the brazen faces of the women, the so-called wives, flaunting their shame?"

"But you could never be like them," he protested. "Never!"

"As strong women as I, stronger, have been dragged down. No human being can resist the slow, steady, insidious seduction of his daily surroundings."

"I don't understand this at all, Neva," he said, though his ill-concealed anger showed that he did. Indeed, so angry was he that he was almost forgetting his own warnings to himself of the injustice of holding her responsible for anything she said in her obviously unstrung condition. He asked, "What have you to do with that sort of woman?" He hesitated, forced himself to go boldly on. "Why do you compare me to those men? I do not degrade myself."

She did not answer immediately, but looked away across the beds of blooming flowers. When she began again, she seemed calmer, under better control. "All the time I was in New York," she said, "the life there�the real life of money getting and money spending�never touched me personally until toward the last. Then�I saw what it really meant, saw it so plainly that I can't ever again hide the truth from myself. And since I came away�out here�where it's calm, and one thinks of things as they are�where father and the other way of living and acting toward one's fellow beings, took strong hold of me��"

"But, Neva�you��"

"Please, let me finish," she begged, all excitement once more. "It's so hard to say�so much harder than you think. But I must�must�must let you see what kind of woman I am, who it is you've asked to be your wife. As I remember my acquaintances in New York, our friends, do you know what I always feel? I remember their palaces, their swarms of servants, their jewels, their luxuries, the food they eat, the wine they drink, all of it; and I wonder just whose dollar was stolen to help pay for this or that luxury, just who is in want, how many are in want, that that carriage might roll or the other automobile go darting about. You know the men steal it; they don't know from whom, and so they can brazen it out to themselves."

"That is harsh�too harsh, Neva!"

She did not heed his interruption. "They can brazen it out," she went on, "because no one can or will come forward and say, 'Take off that new string of pearls. Your husband stole the money from me to-day to buy it.' He did steal it, but not that day, not directly from one person, but indirectly from many who hardly, if at all, knew they were being robbed. That is what New York has come to mean to me these last few weeks�my New York and yours�the people we know best."

"But we need not know them. Have what friends you please." He took an air of gentleness, of forbearance with her. He reminded himself that she was overwrought by her father's illness and death, that she was not in condition to see things normally and practically; such hysterical ideas as these of hers naturally bred and flourished in the miasmatic soil and atmosphere of the fresh grave.

"Don't you see it?" she cried desperately. "I mean you�Horace�you, that ask me to be your wife."

"Me!" His amazement was wholly genuine.

"Yes�you!" And she lost all control of herself, was seized and swept away by the emotions that had grown stronger and stronger during her father's illness, and since his death had dominated her day and night in her loneliness. The scarlet of fever was in her cheeks, its flame in her eyes.

"Yes, you, Horace," she repeated. "Can't you see I'd be worse than uneasy about everything we bought, about every dollar we spent? When you left me to go downtown in the morning, I'd be thinking, 'Who is the man I love going to rob to-day?' And when you came back at night, when your hands touched mine, I'd be shuddering�for there might be blood on them!" She covered her face. "There would be blood on them. Happiness! Why, I should be in hell! And soon you'd hate me for what I would be thinking of you, would despise me for living a life I thought degrading."

If he had been self-analytic, he would have suspected the origin of the furious anger that surged up in him. "I see!" said he, his voice hard. "If these notions," he sneered, "were to prevail among the women, about all the strongest men in the country would lose their wives."

"That is not the question," she answered, maddened by his manner. "I'm only trying to make you acquainted with me. I don't understand, as I look at it, now that my eyes have opened, how a woman can live with a man who kills hundreds, thousands with his railway, to make dividends, or who lets thousands live in hovels and toil all the daylight hours and half starve part of the year that he may have a bigger income. Oh, I don't know the morals of it or the practical business side of it. And I don't want to know. My instinct tells me it's wrong, wrong. And I dare not have anything to do with it, Horace, or I'd become like those women, those so-called respectable women, one sees driving every afternoon in Fifth Avenue, with their hard, selfish faces. Ah, I see blood on their carriage wheels, the blood of their brothers and sisters who paid for carriage and furs and liveries and jewels. It would be dreadful enough for the intelligent and strong�for men like you, Horace�to take from the ignorant and weak to buy the necessities of life. But to snatch bread and shelter and warmth and education from their fellow beings to buy vanities� It isn't American�it isn't decent�it isn't brave!"

He saw that it would be idle to argue with her. Indeed, he began to feel, rather than to see, that beneath her hysteria there was something he would have to explore, something she was terribly in earnest about. There was a long silence, she slowly calming, he hidden behind the mask of that handsome, rugged face in which strength yielded so little for grace. "Well, what are you going to do about it?" he said unemotionally.

"All I can," she replied. "I can refuse to live that sort of life, to live on human flesh and blood. I know good people do it, people who are better than I. And if it seems right to them, why, I don't judge them. Only, it doesn't seem right to me. I wish it did. I wish I could shut my eyes again. But�I can't. My father won't let me!"

He made a movement that suggested shrinking. But he said presently, "I still don't see where I come in. In our business we don't get money that way."

"How do you get it?" she asked.

He stared, stolid and silent, at the floor.

"You told me once that��"

"In some moods I say things I don't altogether mean.... I don't moon about the miseries I can't possibly cure," he went on. "I don't quibble; I act. I don't criticise life; I live. I don't create the world or make the law of the survival of the fittest; I simply accept conditions I could not change. As for this so-called stealing, even the worst of the big men take only what's everybody's property and therefore anybody's."

"It seems to me," said she, "the question always is, 'Does this property belong to me?' and if the answer is 'No,' then to take it is�" She paused before the word.

"To steal," he said bluntly.

She made no comment. Finally he went on: "Let us understand each other. You refuse to marry me unless I abandon my career, and sink down to a position of no influence�become a nobody. For, of course, I can't play the game unless I play it under the rules. At least, I can think of no way."

"I see I didn't express myself well," she replied. "I've not tried to make conditions. I've simply shown you what kind of woman you were asking to marry you�and that you don't want her�that you want only the part of me that for the moment appeals to your senses. If I had married you without telling you what was in my mind and heart would it have been fair to you?"

He did not answer.

"Would it have been fair, Horace?"

"No," he said�a simple negative.

"You see that you do not want me�that you would find me more, far more, of a drag on your career than I was before�a force pulling back instead of merely a dead weight."

He was looking at her�was looking from behind his impenetrable mask. He looked for a long time, she now meeting his gaze and now glancing away. At last he said, with slow deliberateness: "I see that I came seeking a mistress. Whether I want her as a wife, I don't know. Whether she wants me as a husband�I don't know." He relapsed into thought which she did not interrupt.

When he rose to go, he did not see how she flushed and trembled, and fought down the longing to say the things that would have meant retreat.

"I feel," said he with a faint smile, "like a man who goes down to the pier thinking he is about to take an outing for the day, and finds that if he goes aboard he will be embarked for a life journey into new lands and will never come back. I never before really grasped what marriage means."

She had always been fascinated by his eyes, which seemed to her to contain the essence of all that attracted and thrilled and compelled her in the idea, man. As she stood touching the hand he extended, she had never felt his eyes so deeply; never before had there been in them this manly gentleness of respect and consideration. And her faltering courage took heart.

"I am going back to New York," he said. "I want to look about me."

She looked straight and calm; but, through her hand, he felt that she was vibrating like a struck, tense violin string. "Some men want a mistress when they marry," she went on, smiling-serious, "and some want a housekeeper, and some a parlor ornament, and some a mother for their children. But very few want a wife. And I"�she sighed. "I couldn't do anything at any of the other parts, unless I were also the wife."

"I understand�at last," he said. "Or rather, I begin to understand. You have thought it out. I haven't�and I must."

She hoped he would kiss her; but he did not. He reluctantly released her hand, gave her a lingering look which she had not the vanity or the buoyance rightly to interpret, then gazed slowly round the gardens, brilliant, alluring, warm. She stood motionless and tense, watching his big form, his strong shoulders and forcefully set head as he crossed the gardens, went down the walk and through the gate, to be hidden by the hedge between the lawns and the street. When the last echo of his firm step had ceased in her ears, she collapsed into the chair in which he had sat, and was all passion and tenderness and tears and longings and fears.

"He thinks me cold! He thinks me cold!" she cried. "Oh, Father, why won't You let me be weak? Why can't I take less than all? Why can't I trust him, when I love him so!"