David Graham Phillips

“ The more elegant the human animal flatters itself it is, the poorer are its ideals—that is, the further removed from the practical and the useful. So, you rarely find a woman with so much true poetry, true romance, true imagination as to keep house well. But Mary Kirkwood kept house as a truly great artist paints a picture, as a truly great composer creates an opera. In all her house there was not a trace of the crude, costly luxury that rivals the squalor and bareness of poverty in repulsiveness to people of sense and taste. ”

“ You, gentle reader, who know about as much of the science of managing men in practical life as you know of any other phase of the world-that-is—you, gentle reader, are shocked by my rudeness to a polite, well-educated, well-dressed Englishman. And you hope—and feel—that I overreached myself. But let me inform you—not for your instruction but for my own satisfaction—courtesy has to be used most sparingly. Human vanity is so monstrous that men eagerly read into politeness to them—the most ordinary politeness—evidence that their superiority is inspiring fear, awe and desire to conciliate them. ”

“ But that evening I was not thinking so much of her youth and her beauty as of a certain expression of hardness, of evil passions rampant—envy and hatred and jealousy, savage disappointment over defeats in sordid battles.
“Edna,” said I, hesitatingly, “why don’t you drop all that? Can’t you see there’s nothing in it? You’re tempting the worst things in your nature to grow and destroy all that’s good and sweet—all that makes you—and me—happy. People aren’t necessary to us. And if you must have friends, surely all the attractive people in New York aren’t in that little fashionable set. ”

“ Why should they stay at home when they have no sympathy with the things that necessarily engross the husband? Why stay at home when it bores them even to see that the servants carry on the house decently? Why stay at home when they simply show there from day to day how little they know about housekeeping? Why stay at home when there is an amiable fool willing to mail them his money, while they amuse themselves gadding about Europe or some big city of America? ”

“ Such sounds, issuing from the humble—and not too clean—Wheatlands house gave it an atmosphere of aristocracy, put tone into the whole neighborhood, elevated the Wheatlands family like a paper collar on the calico shirt of a farm hand. If we look at ourselves rightly, we poor smattering seekers after a little showy knowledge of one kind or another—a dibble of French, a dabble of Latin or Greek, a sputter of woozy so-called philosophy—how like the paper-collared farm hand we are, how like the Hottentot chief with a plug hat atop his naked brown body. ”

“ You will be incredulous, gentle reader, devoured of snobbishness and dazzled by what you have heard and read of the glories of fashionable society in the metropolis. You will be incredulous, because you, too, like the overwhelming majority of the comfortable classes in this great democracy—and many of the not so comfortable classes as well—because you, too, are infected of the mania for looking about for some one who refuses to associate with you on the ground that you are “common,” and for straightway making it your heart’s dearest desire to compel that person to associate with you. ”

“ Was it not the women, with their insatiable appetite for luxury and splurge; was it not the women, with their incessant demands for money and ever more money; was it not the women, with their profound immorality of any and every class that earns nothing and simply spends; was it not the women, the ladies, who were edging on the men to get money, no matter how? For whom were the grand houses, the expensive hotels, the exorbitant flimsy clothing, the costly jewelry, the equipages, the opera boxes, the senseless, spendthrift squandering upon the degrading vanities of social position? ”

“ When I consider how the leaders of the human race have been tempted to tyranny, I cannot understand why history is able to record comparatively few real tyrants, most of them being homicidal lunatics like Nero, or success-crazed megalomaniacs like Napoleon, and almost none men of sanity. If the great of earth were as vain, as selfishly, as egotistically inconsiderate of the small as the small are of the great and of each other, would not the story of history have come to an end long ago for lack of surviving characters? ”

“ Well, your smile convicts you of never having loved. The essence of love is congeniality. Appetite is the essence of passion—which, therefore, has no sense of or especial desire for mutuality. Passion is as common as any other physical appetite. Love is as rare as are souls generous enough to experience or to inspire it. The essence of love is congeniality—and I knew there was a sympathy and understanding between me and Mary Kirkwood that made us lovers for all time.
There came a day—how it burned into my memory!—when Edna was well enough to talk with me. ”

“ He probably imagined I was in the dark as to his maneuverings and designs and smiled to himself as he thought, “How differently this American would be treating me if he knew!” Do not fancy, because Edna had no charm for me, I thought it strange she should have charm for other men. Nothing could be further from the truth. I appreciated her attractive points perhaps more than any other man possibly could. Also, I appreciated—and still appreciate—that another man would not be so peculiarly annoyed by her lack of any sense of humor as I was. ”

“ I have never been able to come to a satisfactory verdict as to the intelligence of the human race. Is it stupid, or is it, rather, sluggish? Is it unable to think, or does it refuse to think? Does it believe the follies it pretends to believe and usually acts upon, or is it the victim of its own willful prejudices and hypocrisies? Never have I decided that a certain man or woman was practically witless, but that he or she has confounded me by saying or doing something indicating shrewdness or even wisdom.
The women are especially difficult to judge. Take Edna, for example. ”

“ Of course, if you are a man, you know about your own carefully hid physical vanity. But you think it in yourself a virtue, quite natural, not a vanity at all. Bob Armitage was not vain enough to fail to see the beginning of the ravages of time and dissipation. Another man would have looked in the glass and would have seen a reflection ever handsomer as the years went by, would have discovered in the creases and crow’s-feet and lengthening wattles a superb beauty of manly strength of character showing at last in the face. Bob was not that sort of fool. ”

“ Having had experience at that time of the American brand of aristocracy only, I was ignorant of the European kinds that have the aristocratic instinct in the most acute form—the ingrowing form. I know now that our own sort, unpleasant and unsightly though it is, cannot compare in malignance, in littleness and meanness of soul with [212] the European sort. Just as the noisy blowhard is a modest fellow and harmless, and on acquaintance lovable in comparison with the silent, brooding egotist, just so is the American aristocrat in comparison with the European. ”

“ To any man no decisive event of life is so absolutely unimportant as his own death. I never have wasted, and never shall waste, a moment in thinking of my death. It may concern others, but how does it concern me? When it comes I shall not be there. The death of another, however—that is cause for reflection, for sadness. I knew, as did no one else, how intensely Edna loved life, how in her own way of strain and struggle she enjoyed it. And to me it was pitiful, this spectacle of her sudden arrest, her sudden mortal peril, as she was about to achieve the summit of her ambition. ”

“ For, human littlenesses do not irritate me; and I have a vanity—I prefer to call it a pride—that lifts me out of their reach. I am of the one aristocracy that is truly exclusive, the only one that needs no artificial barriers to keep it so. But I shall not bore you, gentle reader, by explaining about it. You are interested only in the aristocracies of rank and title and wealth that are nothing but the tawdry realization of the tawdry fancies of the yokel among his kine and the scullery maid among her pots. ”

“ It was evident she, in her secret heart, was taking it for granted that her news would be welcome to me; that all she had to do in order to win me back as her devoted, enslaved husband was to announce her willingness to come. I have often marveled at this peculiar vanity of women—their deep, abiding belief in the power of their own charms—the all but impossibility of a man’s ever convincing a woman that he does not love her. They say hope is the hardiest of human emotions. I doubt it. I think vanity, especially the sex vanity both of men and of women, is far and away hardier than even hope. ”

“ Yes, I should say your intelligence was about rudimentary enough to give you such a false notion of life as it is lived. Marriages of passion there are a-plenty. Rarely, indeed, does a man become bill-payer to a woman for life—not to speak of the insurance—without having been more or less agitated by her physical charms; and usually the woman, eager to be married, whips up for him a return feeling that looks well, convinces the man and herself, and makes you, gentle reader, sigh and wipe your sloppy eyes. But love-marriage—that’s a wholly different matter. ”

“ There is no limit to which the passion for living up to a pose will not carry a man. Men have flung away their fortunes, their lives, for the sake of a pose; martyrs have burned at the stake for pose. So a man of experience even more than your ordinary brick-brained citizen is distrustful of his fellow men where women are concerned. And it is nothing against Armitage’s intelligence, nor any sign of his having a low estimate of my strength of mind, that he tried to make absolutely sure of me before proceeding. ”

“ But looking only at my career since the change, when I think of the boredom I have endured, the folly I have permitted to waste my valuable time—when I recall the forbearance I have shown in sparing impudent and lazy incompetence where I might, yes, ought to have used the ax—when I think of my good-natured tolerance in face of extremest daily provocation, year after year, I marvel at myself and feel how unjust, how characteristically the verdict of little shallow men, is the attack on me as cold and unsympathetic. ”

“ How little pleasure we would get, to be sure, if, when we are praised or loved by anybody because we do that person a kindness, we paused to analyze and saw the shallow selfishness of such praise or such love. After all, it’s only human nature to like those who do as we ask them and to dislike those who don’t; and I am not quarreling with human nature—or with any other of the unchangeable conditions of the universe. My own love for Edna—what was it but the natural result of my getting what I wanted from her, all I wanted? ”

“ She had no training for them, no taste for them, no intention of adapting herself to them, whatever she might pretend in order to catch a bill-payer.
Still, I did not despair. I dared not despair. If I had, loneliness—and heartache, yes, heartache—and my sense of present and future futility would have become intolerable. On the other hand, while there was every reason for haste—when happiness was my goal, and life is short and uncertain—I was resolved to be deliberate. If I should be deceived—perhaps by the girl’s honest self-deception—into choosing wrong, how she would hate me! ”

“ How industrious we become in appeal to conscience—that most perfect of courtiers—to show us how just and right it is that we should have this thing we want! Having set myself drastically to cure self-fooling years before—when first I realized how dangerous it is and how common a cause of failure and ruin—I was unable to conceal from myself the cruelty of forcing Edna to divorce me. My conscience—as sly a sophist and flatterer as yours, gentle reader—my conscience could not convince me. ”