Reginald Wright Kauffman

“ At the advice of their chauffeur, they commenced with the Bal Tabarin. From the motor-car that had hauled them up the long hills of dark and tortuous streets, they stepped into a blaze of yellow light, under which half a dozen men hurried to them. One held the door of the cab; another, as if it were his sole business in life, wielded a folded newspaper as a shield to protect Muriel's gown from contamination by the motor's muddy tires; two pointed to the scintillating doorway, and two more chattered enquiries that Jim could in no wise interpret. ”

“ It was useless to imagine that he might live and leave her, for he knew that if he left her she, unable to marry von Klausen, would marry no one and would come to what Stainton believed to be a worse estate. He knew that if he lived, he would have to live beside her and not with her, a despised protector. If passion should once or twice more flicker in its socket, it would be an animal passion that he detested and that would make Muriel and him detest each other. ”

“ Stainton was not unusual.
"I have won my fight—yes," he said. "I have got the means. Can I gain the end? It's you who must tell me that."
She saw now.
"How can I help?" she faltered.
"I wanted Life," he repeated, and wished that he could see her face. "Life means more than money. Money will protect it, secure it; but Life means Love. Long ago I knew your mother."
Very simply, but directly, he told her how he had loved that other Muriel. ”

“ But yes; I know them! I have been to their meetings and heard one of these savants talk while ten snored. 'Nature, nature!' they cry, and all the time, all the time they forget Nurture. What do I to them say? I, Paul Achille Boussingault?" The doctor struck his heart, and breathed: "I say one word: 'Environment!'—and they silence themselves."
Before this volley Stainton felt dismayed. ”

“ Besides, he is really a very good fellow; I really can't see why you don't like him. What reason can you have for your prejudice?"
"When a woman can give a reason for disliking a man," said Muriel, "she hasn't any. If her dislike comes just because she has no reason there's generally good ground for it."
"There's nothing wrong with von Klausen," said Jim. "Besides, he's a mere boy."
"Please don't talk about his youth. He is at least five years older than I am."
"Are you so very aged, my dear?"
"I am old enough, it appears, to be the wife of my young husband."
Stainton kissed her. ”

“ Stainton did not long remember all these things, was never even aware that at this wedding, as at all the other public demonstrations that go by the same name, the young girls wondered what it portended and the young men smirked because they knew. After a brief engagement in which the flames of his desire had grown in expectant intensity upon the fuel of those minor favours which conventional engagements make the right of the man, he was hurried into the church in no state of mind that a sane man would willingly describe as sane. ”

“ I know that a girl of eighteen is better off with a man steady enough to protect and guide her than she is with an irresponsible boy of her own years."
"How about the irresponsible girl? Why should the boy be more irresponsible than the girl?"
"The girl will have a mature man to protect and guide her."
"A man of twenty-five? Or a man of fifty? Protect and guide!" echoed Holt. "Is that marriage?"
"An important part of it."
"Pff!" George sniffed. "You must think that guiding and protecting is an easy business."
"I think," said Stainton, good-humouredly, "that you are a good deal of a fool." ”

“ You have more to do than that, my friend—we have more to do: we have to give every child born an equal chance, every man how much he earns; we must build a society where no superstition, no economic strain, no selfish 'usband keeps childless the woman that wants to be and ought to be a mother in marriage or outside; and we must recognise of all other women their inalienable right to refuse motherhood!"
Stainton rose quickly. ”

“ All women, it has been said, begin life by having in their inmost heart a self-created Prince Charming, who proves the strongest rival that their destined husbands have to endure. Such a prince was as much Muriel's as he is other girls'! She had created him unknowingly from the books she had read, from the pictures she had seen, out of blue sky and sunshine and the soft first breezes of Spring: the stuff [Pg 111] of dreams. But she was eighteen and no longer in school, and Stainton had given her a glimpse of the great happy thing that she accepted as life. ”

“ All the world goes there: Chinamen, Moors, Oriental priests and Malay sailors. You sit at a table before one of the cafés, of an evening in summer or of a Sunday afternoon in winter, anywhere along the Cannebière or the rue Noailles. I should much like to show you Marseilles sometime—you and your husband."
"Sometime, perhaps," said Muriel, "we shall go there, Mr. Stainton and I."
"But the best of Marseilles," pursued von Klausen, "is thirty miles and more away: a place that tourists miss and that only a few devout persons seem really to know. I mean the Sainte Baume." ”

“ At sea there had necessarily been a quieter period; but this had ended with the arrival of the Staintons in Paris. The tension of sightseeing had, alone, sufficed to wear them out, and now (though he persuaded himself that this was but the inevitable development of the novel into the commonplace) he began to fear that the high tide of his emotion might be sinking to the low level of habit and affection, that what was true of himself was also true of Muriel, and he drew the inference that another sort of sightseeing would be good for them both. ”

“ Their personality doesn't matter. Any Y, any Z, will serve. In fact, though this fact does not concern me personally, I believe that, even if she should free herself from her husband and marry an X with whom she has managed to compromise herself, it is only a matter of a few months or a few years before Y and Z will have their innings anyhow."
Muriel's fists were clenched at her sides. Her eyes shone and her cheeks were crimson. Tight as her stays were, her white breast above the low-cut black corsage rose and fell like white-capped waves seen in a lightning-flash on a darkened sea. ”

“ They were standing by the parapet when he staggered, panting, toward them: Muriel's black eyes shining with tears, and a light in von Klausen's boyish face that made the husband wince.
"Why, Jim," said Muriel, "how muddy your clothes are. You look perfectly ridiculous."
Stainton was thinking:
"I must get her away. I must get myself away from this awful place. I must take her with me. I am afraid to be alone. I must get her away." ”

“ Our modern method of courting is, of course, the most artificial phase of modern artificial life. The period of courtship is, for most lovers, what Sunday used to be for the small boy in the orthodox family of the early 'seventies. As he then put on his best clothes for the Sabbath, our men and women now put on their best manners for the courting. As he then put off his real self at church-time, they now lay aside, for this supposedly romantic interlude in an existence presently to return to the acknowledged prosaic, all their crudities. It was thus with Muriel and Stainton. ”

“ I am fond of Jim; he is good and kind and brave; but somehow—I don't know why: I don't know why, but, oh, I can't love him! I even understand now that I never did love him."
"Nevertheless, you are married to him."
"Yes; but is a divorce wrong when——" [Pg 301]
"A divorce is always wrong."
"Your church didn't perform the marriage, why should it consider the marriage a real one?"
"Because it has decreed that a true marriage according to the rite of any faith is binding."
"But marriage is a contract."
"Marriage is a sacrament." ”

“ He had not long to wait before the double-doors of the consulting room opened and Boussingault cheerily bade him enter.
"The good day, the good day!" Boussingault was as leathery of face and as voluble as he had been on the evening previous. He took both of Jim's hands and shook them. "It is the early bird that you are, hein? Did the dinner of last night not well digest? Sit. We shall see. It is not my specialty; I help for to eat: I do not help for to digest. But what is a specialty that one to it should confine one's self with a friend? Sit." ”

“ Holt grudgingly told him.
"Fresh?" asked Stainton.
"Five years old," said Holt.
"And that?—And that?"
Again Holt supplied the information thus requested.
"I think that New York is alive," said Stainton.
"Well, you never thought it was Philadelphia, did you?"
"I mean that the city itself is a living thing, a gigantic organism. You know they say a man changes, atom by atom, so that, every seven years, he is a fresh being, and yet remains the same being. I believe that is true of some cities and most of all of New York."
Holt slapped him on the back.
"Good old Jim!" said Holt. ”

“ I have been too good to deserve!' The old roué, he comes to me and says—the same thing. We all some day curse Nature; but Nature, she does not make exceptions for the reward of merit; she cares nothing for morals; she cares only for the excess on one side or other, and for the rest she lays down her law and follows it with regard to no man."
"At the worst," said Jim, his face averted, "I am only fifty."
"With a girl-wife," sighed Boussingault. "Name of God!"
"And I am in good shape," pleaded Jim.
The Frenchman's hand pressed Stainton's arm. ”

“ Another tunnel would succeed, and another red-tiled village and high-spired church would follow. Mile upon mile of pine-forest spread itself along the tracks, and then, at last, toward late afternoon, far beyond Pontarlier and the fortressed pass to the east of it, there was revealed, forward and to the right, what Muriel mistook for jagged, needle-like clouds about a strip of the sky: the lake of Neuchâtel with the white Sentis to the Mont Blanc Alpine range, the Jungfrau towering in its midst. ”

“ And as the steam rises from the red waste that runs from the furnace into the river, there now rose to Stainton's desert-starved ears the clanging of cable-cars, the rattle of carriages, the tooting of the purring motors—all the humming chorus of the night-wakeful thing that men call New York. ”

“ My friend, as a man of affairs, you must know that one cannot say 'Money' but that one is asked: ''Ow much?' Attend well: In your country and in England these savants—name of God!—want what they call the best; in my country they want what they call the many. Do they this reconcile? I should be well amused to know the way." Dr. Boussingault leaned across the table and tapped Jim's wrist with an impressive forefinger. "In all the world, all, the only people that desire the poor to produce families, they are the propriétaires and those lackeys of the propriétaires, the generals of the armies. ”

“ She was, she suddenly realised, but repeating his own phrase. Why should she not? The phrase was commonplace enough; besides, the phosphorus was beautiful.
Then she became conscious of his arm about her, became conscious that this arm about her had not been unpleasant; was indignant with him, silently, and indignant with herself; made certain, in her own mind, that he had put his arm around her waist only that he might protect her—and thus soon left him and went to bed without waking Jim. ”

“ He upbraided himself for making to her, no matter how long he might have been married to her, a frank proposition that her sensitive nature probably repelled only because of the matter-of-fact way in which he had suggested what, he thought, should have been more delicately put. He did not change his design; he merely ceased to speak of it. Throughout the world the only persons not consulted about the possible bearing of children are the only persons able to bear them. Stainton no longer made an exception of Muriel. ”

“ Muriel did not seem to like this.
"Not very," said she. "He is"—she searched for a phrase characteristic of Stainton—"he is just a bit under the weather."
"So," sighed the stranger, unduly comprehending. "Ah, perhaps Madame has made more voyages than has he?"
"No, this is the first trip across for both of us."
"Indeed? But you seem to be so excellent a sailor! Is it only youth that makes you so?"
"I don't know." She was clearly, her will to the contrary, a little flattered. "I seem to take naturally to the water."
"But not so your husband!" ”

“ For the generals, all they want is more men to feed to the monster, War."
"You must be a Socialist," smiled Stainton.
"Socialist?" thundered the physician. "Never in life! Me, I am I: Boussingault, médecin!"
"At any rate," said Stainton, "the world can't very well get along without children, you know."
He was amazed at the doctor's manner: Boussingault would wave his arms and shout his words and then, when he had leaped to silence, relapse into a calm that seemed never to have been dispelled. ”

“ Von Klausen waived religious immunity. "I govern myself one way, but I do not object to hear the reasons why other people should choose other ways. Your way—your American way of divorce—is one of the peculiarities of your great nation, and so I studied it much while I lived there. If you permit, sir, to say it: the figures do not well bear out the boast that the American husband is the best husband. So, Mrs. Stainton?"
"But he is, just the same," protested Muriel. ”

“ Muriel was cold; she said that she wanted to find warm weather. Stainton was tired; he said that he wanted to find a place where they could loaf. So they left for Verona, feeling certain that they would there secure these things—and "sunny Italy" welcomed them with a snowstorm.
Muriel was again in tears.
"It's no use," she sobbed; "we can't get what we want anywhere."
"Of course we can," sighed Stainton, "and the snowstorm will clear. Cheer up, dear; we've only to look hard enough or wait a bit." ”

“ But to-night——Even you've got to admit to-night, Jim. It isn't every day in the year that a man that's saved my life turns up in New York with a newly discovered, warranted pure, gold mine in his pocket."
This was so clearly true that Stainton capitulated, or at least compromised by going to the bar and drinking a thimbleful of white-mint while Holt, chattering like a cheerful magpie—if a magpie can be cheerful—consumed two long glasses of Irish whiskey with a little aerated water added. ”

“ There are fifty of 'em born outside of marriage right here in New York every day in the year. When Romeo makes eyes at Juliet, he isn't thinking babies."
"He only doesn't know that he is, that's all."
"Suppose you're right," said Holt; "that's all the more reason why a fellow should want to beget a baby instead of marrying one. Look here, Jim: I'm not butting in on your affairs because I like to; but I know what I'm talking about when I say you can't play this lead without spoiling the game."
"Do you mean," asked Stainton, "that Miss Stannard's guardians will object?" ”

“ So you see that when our divorces are not really the result of a quiet agreement between the husband and wife—and every judge that signs a decree knows in his heart that nine-tenths are that—they are the result of conduct which, for anybody who does not consider marriage a sacrament, abundantly justifies the action."
The talk shifted to Wall Street and continued for half an hour.
"Von Klausen has some antiquated ideas," remarked Stainton to Muriel as they were going to bed that night; "but he seems to be a pretty good sort of man. I like him." ”