Margaret Culkin Banning

“ Life in the country was easy enough but none the less full of events. There was a great deal of lazy intercourse with people, a great deal of exercise, motoring—and Horatia found that she was able to give herself up quite happily to the enjoyment of natural beauty—fresh morning air, sunsets on the little lake and green afternoons in the woods. She was not ashamed of that. The sensations of beauty and the elevation of spirit that came with it were so far from trivial that they justified her for feeling happy so soon after her break with Jim. ”

“ She had a memory of Jim’s great strength and of all the things he did—and how the doctor turned to him and asked things and of Jim’s calmness and readiness, and of one moment when he took a wailing Anna by the shoulders and sent her out of the room. Horatia did not wail. But her face was so white and so full of suffering that Jim kept close beside her ready for a collapse if it should come.
A fight for life is always terrible, but with a child, when the odds are so unequal, it is especially terrible. ”

“ Love—men——” Horatia, watching her now, saw her standing still, looking back at her own life with angry, thwarted eyes.
“I didn’t want marriage. I had no illusions about that. Marriage was quite the ugliest thing I had seen. But I did want a lover. And I found I could love—I can love! I’ve had three lovers in five years, and I believe in marriage less than ever. The men have all wanted me to marry them. But I won’t. People use marriage and then it uses them. It is meaningless. More and more people cheat it and pretend to hang on when they are sick of each other. ”

“ Life could not frighten them.
Then, as if everything had become as hard as possible to test her, and finding her brave under the test, was becoming kinder, the household burdens lightened. Jackie was well—so amazingly well that it was hard to believe that he ever had been sick—Ellen was better and came back to her work and the house slid into order and ease again. And more and more accustomed did Horatia become to the ways of a household and more and more normal did it seem to imagine herself in a household. ”

“ Tricked once into belief in a person and deceived, she herself had learned to feel suspicion and fear. She had learned that the men about her were not necessarily faithful to their wives and try as she would to put the thought out of her mind it crept back sometimes while she was talking to this man or that. Langley had reassured her—had made her smile again—events had driven the memory of Grace out of her mind—but the stain remained, corroding the faith and beauty of her feeling for Jim more than she guessed. ”

“ There had been the fear of the pain of marriage as she hovered at the door of the little sick child in her sister’s house. These things once accepted as the lot of woman became a problem now that they were a choice and not a lot. Subtly too, the temptations of the luxury of the life of the married women whom she met around Mrs. Clapp had dulled the edge of her own desire to work after she married. And Horatia had found no anchor philosophical or sociological. She was one of those who drifted with people rather than with causes and it was a hard age into which she had come to maturity. ”

“ Hubbell so justified her deviations from the paths orderly people travel, Grace for the same reason as well as to excuse her fashion of intellectualizing all enthusiasms and apparently all emotions out of her life, and Horatia to define the spirit of adventure and desire to explore the depths of life which animated her. Each of them had a different mold which she called modernism and each of them poured her actions into her own mold, delighted to see that they hardened into the shape of the vessel. ”

“ Everyone, as her aunt said, had been surprised at her refusal to be a bridesmaid at the wedding of her friend. But with a quick reminiscent glance back at the ceremony, Horatia congratulated herself again on the decision that had held out against the requests of Edna and the expostulations of her aunt. She recalled the hurried fussy little ceremony, and the curious people, the space reserved in the front parlor with its tall cathedral candles, its lavish ten yards of white satin ribbon and the rose pink prayer rug. A faint odor of candles and coffee and perfume clung to the memory. ”

“ Horatia whispered to a nurse at the desk.
The nurse laughed.
“Oh, no indeed. Her baby just came and they’re taking her back to her room. They don’t die that easy.”
But to Horatia it was serious. How close to death people went for their babies, she thought tremulously! To do a thing like that one must be sure of great love. Would she some day be like that silent figure? She shivered in sudden horror. A man came out of a room and paced up and down silently, his face gray with pain. ”

“ She saw that she and Anthony together and others like them, mental aristocrats, secure in material things, could take their places in a society of flux and uncertainty, and be beacon lights of strength and security, she as a woman, raising woman’s functions to fine dignity, strong in love and content and purpose. She saw herself taking up the burdens which other cheaper women laid down, dignifying a home and wifehood and maternity. ”

“ Unexpectedly Horatia kissed her.
“Poor Maud,” she said, “you do want me to be comfortable, don’t you? But if Jim had Anthony’s money I wonder what you’d feel about the right man?”
“Don’t be silly,” Maud returned, with her pragmatism rising to the surface at once. “He hasn’t the money, has he? My dear, if you knew more about things! If you could see the scraping to get along! I don’t see as much of it as I used to, but Heaven knows there are plenty of people who have to do it. There are such a lot of women trying to get along on too little and keep things up.” ”

“ She was too inexperienced to know that men have always yielded to women in form when they won a victory in fact. There was a new vigor in Anthony’s walk as he left her after that.
That talk straightened “everything out,” according to Horatia, and she went to her window and drew a long breath of relief. She was clean again and fit for Jim. How tremendously she loved Jim that day! She wanted to bring him something finer, something cleaner, something purer than anyone in the world had ever brought to any man. She wanted to bring him all that the world could give a man. ”

“ And she had come out of college as thorough a young romanticist as ever lived in the Middle Ages, but a puzzled young romanticist with neither Church nor king to give her guidance. She brought her strong faith in young men, her growing desire for all the romance life could give, home. Home to West Park and after a taste of the dull routine of Aunt Caroline’s days and the gossiping wedding of Edna, had decided that she could not bear the let-down, the drop from romantic idealism and noble ideas into the actuality of a corner of life. ”

“ From that vacation on, Horatia began to be the “intellectual one” in her circle of friends. At first she resented it, then liked it and grew ultimately into complete indifference to what West Park did or didn’t think. But that was later. At first she found herself set apart and left out of the jokes. Before she went back to the University Maud was “settled,” not in West Park, but in an apartment in the city itself, more accessible for Harvey and better suited to his wife’s budding passion for storming the society of the city. ”

“ Men, shocked into the realization that death comes devastatingly to whole generations of the young, faced life more sturdily too, though temporarily with less responsibility, with more desire for immediate pleasures, for immediate achievements, and with an undertone of mental insecurity. The whole world seemed to feel unstable and ready for experiments, any experiments. That was the world which Horatia had found and it mated badly with Maud’s. Maud’s world, Maud’s friends, lived by the rules laid down by old-fashioned success and decency. ”

“ Mrs. Hubbell loomed large in her mind while she was in the midst of her argument with Jim. But she was not in the country for a week before she thought of her problem in terms which almost eliminated Rose.
In the first flush of her love for Jim she had yielded to her temperamental love for romance and to emotional wonder at finding herself beloved and suddenly more important than ever before. But with the approach of the great question of marriage she had found that her mind began to question many things. ”

“ CHAPTER X HORATIA made another effort to stop Anthony. She found herself disturbed beyond all control by this love of his. It seemed to her that such a thing had no right to exist in the same world with her feeling for Jim. She did not want to hurt Anthony—she did not want to argue about his love. She merely wanted his love not to exist—not to be there to affront her. If ever a woman’s psychology was pure in trying to arrest the affections of a man, Horatia’s was. ”

“ The same doubts stirring in their minds have always stirred in the minds of courted women—doubts as to whether such happiness, such devoted love as comes in the first fragrant period of love-making can endure and what will happen if it does not endure? Formerly women teased their lovers for assurances of perpetual love. The woman now, more wise, more honest, more skeptical too, about perpetual love, puts a different face on her questions. ”

“ Do you think those silly little doll-faced prattlers can hold a man? As for you—you go as far as you dare with Langley. How do I know how far you go? I don’t spy on you when you go to his rooms on Sunday! Not fit to live with! God, this prating of righteousness—sex righteousness, the most silly lying farce in the world. There is no such thing as righteousness. But there is love and passion, little white-face.”
Still Horatia did not speak. Before this ugly situation she had become powerless to attack or to defend. She had neither weapons nor skill for such a fight. ”

“ I’ll give you everything in the world—all the beauty and power of it. Horatia—we’re young—we belong together.”
But her revelation had been indeed revelation. Cruel, mistaken, even wrong love might be but love was love and to her marrying must include love. It was a stormy drive home. Anthony sullen, angry, pitiful, pleading, almost broke her down. He did break down her confidence and destroy her joy in her revelation, but against the one final fact he battered in vain. At last at the door of Maud’s cottage he kissed her again, almost angrily. ”

“ But thoughts were spinning madly around in Horatia’s head. This outrageously silly plan of Jim’s seemed to clinch the whole matter of Rose Hubbell. If Rose could make him believe that such an arrangement was all right—that it was all right to take the girl he was going to marry away under the chaperonage of a woman about whom he had been the co-respondent in a divorce suit, she could make him believe black was white. She felt older than Jim for once—responsible for him. With an instinctive feminine reaction she refused to blame the man. ”

“ It was wonderful to see how the excitement of the new life brought a richer color into Horatia’s cheeks and a glow into her eyes which made every gown the most becoming one. It was amazing to see how her power over men grew. ”

“ I love you because you are beautiful of body—that least and first—and I love your fine, clean soul which is like a candlelight before the altar of life, and I love—most of all, your warm, warm heart that warms everything which is near it at all. ”

“ She knew instinctively that Grace did not mean them but she had said them and in the saying had irretrievably marred and stained some things in Horatia.
Stray phrases hit her ear cruelly. Grace was now condemning her—now men—now women.
“Modern women! Modern with your tongues!{156} Love should be free. Love should be above conventions. How often you’ve said it! And I with my real beliefs did not dare to tell you how I chose to carry out your phrases because I knew that you were only talking. Doing lip service to modernism! ”

“ I never in my life wanted to marry until I saw you. It always looked like a trap. But with you marriage would be a wonderful game—a limitless voyage, an endless happiness. I don’t want you to work or wear yourself out as the women on newspapers do wear out. ”

“ Not all men were afraid of brains. Charley Jones came and brought young men with him, several friends of Harvey’s came and there were others justifying themselves by this claim or that to a seat near that tea-table where Grace Walsh, looking like a Dutch picture, poured out tea and calm cynical judgments and Horatia, in a yellow silk dress on Sundays and blue serge on weekdays, pressed lemon, cream, tea cakes and joy of living on them. ”

“ Horatia had an impulse to make herself understood on that point.
“As for babies,” she said, “I want babies. Marriage without them isn’t worth bothering about. They weight marriage—make it of consequence.”
“They hold a man,” said Maud. “Now there never was a better man than Harvey. But there have been times when I’ve seen women look at him, wondering just how much married he was and I’ve been glad I had Jackie and the baby. Men are funny in their feelings towards women but they are pretty certain about their children. ”

“ But before modernism—naked—you’d be horrified and pursing your shocked lips and running for veils.”
Horatia sank down in a chair and covered her face with her hands.
“My God,” cried Grace, “why shouldn’t I do as I please? Why should I say one thing and act another? If I know marriage is rotten why should I hold to its forms? Haven’t we all said marriage was archaic—love should be free?” ”

“ Some man—some damned man—no, don’t tell me—poor little Horatia—won’t you believe me when I tell you none of them is worth it? I wish to heaven that women would stop letting themselves suffer. They’ve borne the emotional burdens long enough. Why shouldn’t we take men as they take us—as part of the day’s work? Look here, Horatia, you’re worth any ten men I ever saw. ”

“ And Grace tore on, through a tirade of defense and condemnation, revealing her shattered pride and her spirit torn by the sense of guilt, of satisfactions and strangled discontents, trying to believe in its own rectitude. But poor Horatia could not analyze it then. She was only able to see facts and to hear the anger and accusations against herself. ”

“ The saddest point in the little tragedy was that Horatia could not know that she was learning one of the deepest truths which she would ever learn—that through all intensive modernism and intensive conservatism runs a thread of instinct that is stronger than either—a fundamental morality which drives the most hidebound conservatives into most radical actions and the most dangerous radicals into the most conservative actions. ”