Chapter XV: Part 15

This reproach led, on both sides, to a rapid fire of questions and answers in the course of which one of their chief misunderstandings was cleared up. Janet learned that Cornelia had never shown her letters to Robert. What she had done was to give him subtly to understand that Janet, in the hope of inducing Claude to legitimate their love affair, was prudently burning her Kips Bay connections behind her.

"It was only one of a score of things that Cornelia did to queer the pitch between us," was Robert's comment.

They were silent for a space, whilst they adjusted their thoughts to a much clearer interpretation of the curious way that Cornelia had acted out her part in the triangle of their relations.

Robert's mind reverted to a bit of news which Pryor had passed on to him the night before, after the arrival of the San Francisco Limited at the Pennsylvania Station. Pryor had picked up the information in the course of an interview with Hutchins Burley in the Tombs, where the fallen editor, garbed as a Federal convict (he had begun to serve his sentence for smuggling), was being detained to testify against a former confederate in the Japanese espionage case. Burley, raging like the bull of Bashan, had lashed out against all the people who had ever given him offence, and against some who hadn't. As a by-product of sheer, overflowing hatred, he had let slip the item that it was to Cornelia that he was really indebted for having been able to get on Janet's track in Brussels. Cornelia had not known Janet's precise whereabouts, yet she had shown Burley the letters, the very letters she had withheld from Robert! This was a piquant bit of gossip, but Robert decided to suppress it for the time being. Until he had finished with the delicate job he had in hand!

Crossing Astor Place, they proceeded along Bookworm Lane to Union Square. Janet stopped halfway and pointed out a quaint old shop where she had bought at secondhand many of the text-books used in her Evening Law School. "You are on the primrose path of dalliance!" exclaimed Robert, who heard of these studies for the first time. "Do you keep your mother posted regarding your wicked ways or has she closed the front door to you forever, as she threatened?"

"No, the front door has been left on a crack," said Janet. And she recounted a visit she had lately paid her home. The family atmosphere was exactly as she had left it, the only change being that her father, having retired from business as the result of a serious accident, had ceased to be even the titular head of the house.

"The poor old man, a mere ghost of his former handsome self, was in a state of coma, Robert. And I fear that, as his salary days are over, his approaching dissolution is being firmly and not too gently accelerated. He sat huddled up in an invalid's chair, from time to time mumbling that he hoped I'd be a sensible girl, and stay with them in Brooklyn now, and learn to appreciate my mother for the brave and unselfish woman she has always been! He'll lick the whip to the very last breath. The sight of him was heartrending!"

Otherwise, the atmosphere of the Barr household had not changed one whit. The same musty, fusty ideas prevailed, and the same hollow, stagnant, make-believe existence went on. Here, at least, was one spot in America where pre-war conditions prevailed unchallenged!

"How could I ever have stood it as long as I did! Mother pecked at my cheek and, without turning a hair, asked me was I coming home at last (to be a young lady of the house I suppose!) or did I mean to go on wasting the Lord's time? Wasting the Lord's time! I replied that if she was alluding to my work and to my legal studies--which together occupied me from ten to sixteen hours a day--wasting the Lord's time wasn't the picnic it sounded like. She muttered something about the wages of sin being death! 'Oh, no,' I said, 'I get a very fat salary from Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome.' I mentioned the exact figure--the amount quite made Emily sit up!--and I added that Mrs. Jerome, my friend as well as my employer, had undertaken to advance my career.

"Well, it seemed to me that this piece of news stumped mother a bit, although she closed her eyes in that trance-like, oblivious way of hers and affected never to have heard of a Mrs. Jerome. Perhaps she really hadn't. Nobody has ever fathomed the bottomless ignorance of the Barr mind."

"Nobody _could_--not even God!" said Robert.

Janet nodded and went on:

"Don't forget that the Barrs are inordinately vain and aggressively jealous of the things they don't know. This is the fact that makes their ignorance sublime! Take Emily. I got her to talk about herself for a while. She is now one of the head teachers in a public high school. Her devotion to her business is pathetic. She teaches, eats, sleeps--and teaches! Once in a while she shops or sews. These acts complete the cycle of her life from day to day, from year to year. No books, no concerts, no theatres, no travel, no meditation, no self-training, no real companionship with equals or superiors--never one piercing or shattering experience of novelty--nothing that might make the pulse go fast or the heart beat high. 'But how can you teach them anything real, anything about life?' I maliciously asked her."

"'Anything real!' she sneered. 'I suppose you mean romantic adventures! Well, teaching is real enough for me. I study the science of pedagogy every night of the week. And when I want to learn anything more about life, I read the _Saturday Evening Post_!'

"Yes, Robert; it sounds like a line from _The Old Homestead_. But that's exactly what she said."

"I don't doubt it," said Robert. "I know the Barrs of Brooklyn. I've met them in every part of the United States, and one runs across them even in Europe. Age cannot wither nor custom stale their infinite monotony. As on creation's day, so they'll remain till the trump of doom."

"Of course, Mother isn't as stupid as Emily, not by half," said Janet. "Her behavior at parting convinces me that she really does have an inkling of who Mrs. Jerome is and of how my position near this influential lady sends my stock up in the world of cash realities. When I left, she didn't peck at my cheek as at first. No, she kissed me almost affectionately and said, in a tone so relenting that I'm sure Emily was greatly shocked: 'Now that you've found the way back, my child, come and see us again soon.' And I had always believed that Mother's moral and religious prejudices were incorruptible--absolutely money-proof, if nothing else in this age was! It was quite a blow to me."

"Never mind," rejoined Robert. "We're all easily taken in by other people's moral counterfeit. Haven't you observed that it's usually a Barr who circulates the Biblical saying that a man cannot serve both God and Mammon? Yet, though too modest to acknowledge it, the Barrs themselves accomplish this miracle daily. It's precisely the Barrs who, in their heart of hearts, worship these two deities as one."

They had now reached the Lorillard tenements. In the dimly lit foyer of the middle house they rested on the settee, quite as in the chummiest days of Barr and Lloyd.

"Speaking of Mammon," he resumed, in the most offhand way imaginable, "don't you think you ought to marry a rich man? Of course I mean your own sort of rich man, not the St. Hilaire sort."

Janet gave him a puzzled look.

"I should hate a welter of trivial responsibilities," she said decisively. "A great big house and a lot of servants to manage--to say nothing of a husband!--the mere prospect terrifies me."

"Now I'm doubly sure that we're birds of a feather, Janet! Still, aren't you rather difficult to please? In Paris you said you wouldn't marry a man if he was poor? Here you say you won't marry a man if he's rich."

"Does it matter, Robert? What rich man is likely to ask me?"

"You're quite wrong. One is asking you now."

"You!" Had he suddenly lost his senses?

"I've inherited a couple of millions, Janet!"

He briefly put her in possession of the facts. Then he made her a formal offer of marriage, in tones so restrained that she could hardly guess the immortal longing beneath them.

"I need a partner to share the rich man's burden!" he said, with a quizzical smile. "And I know from experience that you are the one partner in the world for me."

"No!" she said, her eyes half closed, her cheeks rather pale. "I--I'm not sure that I'm ready for marriage."

"Oh, don't let that stop you! Nobody is ever ready for birth, marriage, or death. We're just plunged in--doubts, hesitations, and all. You don't suppose any sane man or woman _wants_ to take the plunge, do you? I know _I_ don't. But since I've got to marry somebody, I've made up my mind to marry no one but you."

"At least you're quite frank," she said, with a rather trembling lip.

"Are you angry? Heaven knows it would be easier for me to use the stock phrases on which we were brought up and fed up. But you're a woman of the new age! And I'm proposing partnership to an equal, to a fellow worker--not to a goddess-drudge!"

They both rose from the settee.

"Surely," he said, wondering at her silence, "it isn't the Free Love philosophy that's in the way?"

"No, no!" she said, emphatically. "I thought I'd told you that in Paris."

She repeated that she was done with all that! She admitted that, for a time, Cornelia had won her over to what Bernard Shaw called the _Love-Is-All_ school of fanatics. And, so she feared, she had actually believed in her own readiness to give up _All for Love_! But the hard knocks of the last two years had opened her eyes to the inadequacy as well as to the inexpediency of this philosophy. When the Hutchins Burleys, the Cornelia Coverts, the women with horn-rimmed spectacles, and their like--when these successively popped up to interfere with her purposes, she had realized that love, far from being _all_ to her, was simply one of her heart's desires. She still held to the view that the love relation between two people should be subject to no other law than that of their own consciences. And she still hoped that society would be converted to this view, although she no longer had a mind to risk her soul's welfare in its behalf.

"You see, Robert, how fully I've come round to your opinion! If I'm to risk my salvation for anything, it must be for something bigger than the love chase."

After a pause, she added, with a faintly ironical smile:

"For something bigger, too, than a mere husband, don't you think?"

"But you won't risk your salvation with me, Janet," said Robert, coming close to her side. "You're in a position to make your own terms, absolutely--for have you I must! Stick to your practical terms but not to your abstract ideas. And be generous! Remember, a man who's obliged to take care of a fortune, needs a wife to take care of him."

"Indeed! But why expect one able-bodied human being to 'take care of' another human being, equally able-bodied? Or why ask a woman to become what men gallantly call a ministering angel, but what ought bluntly to be called a domestic drudge?"

"I admit it's a very stupid arrangement. Yet at present it's the only tolerable arrangement I know of. Unquestionably, it's haphazard, wasteful, anarchic! And no doubt a later generation of men and women, fired with a collective purpose, will regulate domestic affairs much better. But what am I to do? Wasn't I born and bred on the understanding that some ministering angel would drudge my home to rights? Well, I'm extremely uncomfortable without one!"

"Selfish wretch. Do you know what Mrs. Jerome says?"

"No."

"She says that women have been men's cat's-paws long enough. It's time for them to abdicate the job. If we are to make any headway, the unmarried girls will have to be strong enough and self-respecting enough to refuse the empty honors offered as bribes for their servitude. They must put a high price on their freedom!"

"Good! I offer you a million dollars, cash down, for yours. It's half my fortune."

Janet turned away, chilled to the soul.

"You're mocking me," she said.

"Not a bit of it," he retorted, following her. "I don't propose to live with an economic inferior. Such a course would wreck us at the start. That there can be no genuine comradeship between people of unequal means is a truth which every philosopher from Plato to William James has pointed out."

"Did they point it out, in the midst of a proposal?"

He held both her hands in a firm grip.

"Darling, don't pretend to misunderstand me. Do you want me to sink to my knees in this public place and overwhelm you with ardors and protestations? It's easy enough, and I'm quite mad enough now. Mad with the enchantment of your touch, that turns my heart to fire; with the music of your voice, in which I hear all Elfland calling; with your haunting mystery and lilac fragrance, at which my senses reel and swim! I'm ninety-nine parts drenched with ecstasy! If you reproach me because one thin gleam of sanity still remains at the helm I shall be--"

"Arithmetical!"

At the word, he seized her and kissed her and--Time being Love's fool--they were imparadised in each other's arms.

*VII*

After a while, between endearments, she managed to say:

"So you _do_ want me to make a marriage of convenience?"

"No, I want you to make a convenience of marriage. That's what all sensible people do."

"Splendid! Then you won't expect me to give up the Susan B. Anthony House? I couldn't leave Mrs. Jerome in the lurch now, you know."

"Of course not!" he said.

She was to go on with her work, he with his. They should have living places to be alone in, and living places to be together in, like the Havelock Ellises. They'd have a house together in the mountains or the seashore, remote from other people--a biggish house, this would perhaps have to be. But she need manage it no better (or no worse, he trusted) than she now managed the Susan B. Anthony House.

Janet laughed at his incorrigible, man-made outlook on the future. Indulgent and happy, she rested her head on his shoulder.

"Why didn't you take your own advice," she asked, "and marry some independently rich woman--Charlotte, for instance?"

"Because there are a good many women that I could work with, yet never love. And some few that I could love, yet never work with. But there's only one that I could work with _and_ love as well. At least, I've never met another."

"That's a very pretty speech, Robert, for you. We _were_ good comrades, weren't we? In the days of Barr and Lloyd!"

"From now on, Barr and Lloyd, Inc."

"But it isn't the same Barr nor the same Lloyd that are to be incorporated again. Suppose we prove not to be good comrades, this time?"

"In that case, we shall hie us to some genuinely civilized country--Sweden or Cape Comorin--where breach of comradeship is the sole ground for divorce--"

Indignant voices from the staircase penetrated their mutual absorption.

"Where in the world can they be!"

"So this is your _radical_ hospitality!"

"Robert--latest method?--proposing by telepathy--imperfect communications--vast silences--heavenly harmony--"

"Pooh! Janet's no fool--nothing like a bee line--marriage license bureau--bird in the bush, you know--"

Blushing and looking like culprits, they climbed the stairs and braved the mock indignation meeting which their three friends were holding in the hall between flats 13 and 15. (Robert had rented both flats, as a surprise for Janet.)

Lydia went straight to Janet and enfolded her in a copious embrace, whilst Charlotte stood by, ready for a cordial handshake. Mark Pryor, stupefied at this exhibition of feminine perspicacity, could only stare at Robert and mutter:

"What! Already?"

"Was ever woman in this humor won!" drawled Lydia, as she led the way into Number Thirteen, Kelly's old flat. "I must say, Janet, I'm not much impressed with Robert's 1921 revision of the Lord of Burleigh stunt. Like all modern versions of fine old idylls, it's gingerbread without the ginger. Give me the village painter who leads his sweetheart to a palace! There's the thrill that comes but once in a lifetime. But fancy a millionaire taking his bride to a Kips Bay model tenement--and Number Thirteen at that!"

"You forget," said Robert, who, with Pryor, had followed the ladies in. "You forget that '_leiser Nachhall laengst verklungner Lieder, zieht mit Erinnenings-Schauer durch die Brust_."

"Which means, I take it," Pryor said:

"'I saw her then, as I see her yet,
With the rose she wore, when first we met.'"

"Pooh! Male parsimony disguised as Teuton sentiment," said Lydia. "Don't be put upon, Janet, by this _love-in-a-tenement_ stuff. Let me give you a tip. Laurence Twickenham, my publisher, has just put his Long Island home on the market. He says that the ruinous royalties he's compelled to pay me do not permit him to keep up an expensive establishment. It's a perfectly gorgeous estate, right next to mine, and not too far from New York. Do make Robert buy it and settle down to a useful life as a country gentleman."

"What! Foster his mania for hearth and home?" cried Janet, laughing. "Catch me! Nowadays men are almost incurably domestic, as it is."

"Well, what _are_ you children going to do?"

"Children!" said Robert, coming forward, and lecturing Lydia with gusto. "None of your wiseacre airs, Lydia. Our program will show you that we know our own minds. Hear ye! We shall be married as soon as Janet can get a day off. After the ceremony Janet will return to her job of running the Susan B. Anthony House; I shall return to my job of trying to make America safe for those who don't happen to be grafters, parasites, or profiteers. During the better part of the year, our offices will be in the Kips Bay tenements here, Numbers Thirteen and Fifteen, respectively--we shall toss up to see who gets which. No attempt on the part of either to impose his or her friends, diet, hygiene, or recreations upon the other without consent, will be tolerated for a moment. Each is to be absolute master in what may jointly be agreed upon to be his own domain, provided only that Janet is to darn all my socks or buy new pairs as fast as the big toe protrudes. At the end of nine months, we shall both be ready for a trip to--"

"To Sweden," Janet put in softly, going to his side and caressing his arm.

"To Sweden!" exclaimed Lydia, while Charlotte and Pryor laughed at her bewilderment. "To the psychopathic ward, if you ask _me_!"

* * * * * * * *

*BY FELIX GRENDON*

WILL HE COME BACK?
A Play

NIXOLA OF WALL STREET
A Novel

FREEDOM IN THE WORKSHOP
A Study

* * * * * * * *

[Transcriber's note: Inconsistent spelling and punctuation has been preserved as printed.]