The story is told by Mary Abbott, about Sylvia and about herself. Sylvia is from Society, while Mary has lived hard working farmer's life.
"I was to Sylvia a new and miraculous thing, a self-made woman. I must have been the first "common" person she had ever known intimately. She had seen us afar off, and wondered vaguely about us, consoling herself with the reflection that we probably did not know enough to be unhappy over our sad lot in life. But here I was, actually a soul like herself; and it happened that I knew more than she did, and of things she desperately needed to know. So all the luxury, power and prestige that had been given to Sylvia Castleman seemed as nothing beside Mary Abbott, with her modern attitude and her common-sense."
"I was working eighteen hours a day, more than half of it by lamp-light, in the darkness of our Northern winters. When the accident came, I had been doing the cooking for half a dozen men, who were getting in the wheat upon which our future depended. I fell in my tracks, and lost my child; yet I sat still and white while the men ate supper, and afterwards I washed up the dishes. Such was my life in those days; and I can see before me the face of horror with which Sylvia listened to the story. But these things are common in the experience of women who live upon pioneer farms, and toil as the slave-woman has toiled since civilization began.
"We won out, and my husband made money. I centred my energies upon getting school-time for my children; and because I had resolved that they should not grow ahead of me, I sat up at night, and studied their books. When the oldest boy was ready for high-school, we moved to a town, where my husband had bought a granary business. By that time I had become a physical wreck, with a list of ailments too painful to describe. But I still had my craving for knowledge, and my illness was my salvation, in a way—it got me a hired girl, and time to patronize the free library."
"I went to a college town with my three children, and when they were graduated, having meantime made sure that I could never do anything but torment my husband, I set about getting a divorce."
"I gave up everything, and went out into the world at the age of forty-five to earn my own living. My children soon married, and I would not be a burden to them; so I came East for a while, and settled down quite unexpectedly into a place as a field-worker for a child-labour committee.
"You may think that a woman so situated would not have been apt to meet Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver, née Castleman, and to be chosen for her bosom friend; but that would only be because you do not know the modern world."
The publications of the Metropolis knew little of the South, and had no clue that the bride had no reason to feel as exalted due to her bridegroom's wealthy status as they expected her to do.
"What the editors knew about Castleman Hall was that they wired for pictures, and a man was sent from the nearest city to "snap" this unknown beauty; whereupon her father chased the presumptuous photographer and smashed his camera with a cane. So, of course, when Sylvia stepped out of the train in New York, there was a whole battery of cameras awaiting her, and all the city beheld her image the next day."
................................................................................................
Mary Abbott was curious to see her, and joined the crowd outside the church, thus meeting Claire Lapage.
"Claire said to me, not once, but a dozen times, "He'll come back to me. She'll never be able to make him happy." And so I pictured Sylvia upon her honeymoon, followed by an invisible ghost whose voice she would never hear, whose name she would never know. All that van Tuiver had learned from Claire, the sensuality, the ennin, the contempt for woman—it would rise to torment and terrify his bride, and turn her life to bitterness. And then beyond this, deeps upon deeps, to which my imagination did not go—and of which the Frenchwoman, with all her freedom of tongue, gave me no more than a hint which I could not comprehend."
Claire beseeched Mary to replace as a chaperone the elderly companion she had lost, and Mary was so persuaded, trying to help her; in her free time she visited poor at home and in factories, and began to be known for her speeches.
"Mrs. Roland Allison was one of the comfortable in body who had begun to feel uncomfortable in mind. I had happened to meet her at the settlement, and tell her what I had seen in the glass factories; whereupon she made up her mind that everybody she knew must hear me talk, and to that end gave a reception at her Madison Avenue home."
Sylvia talked to Mary afterwards.
""Our negroes at least can steal enough to eat," she said.
"I smiled. Then—since one has but a moment or two to get in one's work in these social affairs, and so has to learn to thrust quickly: "You have timber-workers in Louisiana, steel-workers in Alabama. You have tobacco-factories, canning-factories, cotton-mills—have you been to any of them to see how the people live?""
""Take Mrs. Abbott away with you," said the energetic hostess, to Sylvia; and before I quite understood what was happening, I had received and accepted an invitation to drive in the park with Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver. In her role of dea ex machina the hostess extricated me from the other guests, and soon I was established in a big new motor, gliding up Madison Avenue as swiftly and silently as a cloud-shadow over the fields. As I write the words there lies upon my table a Socialist paper with one of Will Dyson's vivid cartoons, representing two ladies of the great world at a reception. Says the first, "These social movements are becoming quite worth while!" "Yes, indeed," says the other. "One meets such good society!""
................................................................................................
Mary wanted Sylvia to speak to the legislature, and Sylvia thought speaking was men's role.
"We talked of Suffrage for a while, and I spoke about the lives of women on lonely farms—how they give their youth and health to their husband's struggle, yet have no money partnership which they can enforce in case of necessity. "But surely," cried Sylvia, "you don't want to make divorce more easy!"
""I want to make the conditions of it fair to women," I said.
""But then more women will get it! And there are so many divorced women now! Papa says that divorce is a greater menace than Socialism!""
"She spoke of Suffrage in England, where women were just beginning to make public disturbances. Surely I did not approve of their leaving their homes for such purposes as that! As tactfully as I could, I suggested that conditions in England were peculiar. There was, for example, the quaint old law which permitted a husband to beat his wife subject to certain restrictions. Would an American woman submit to such a law? There was the law which made it impossible for a woman to divorce her husband for infidelity, unless accompanied by desertion or cruelty. Surely not even her father would consider that a decent arrangement! I mentioned a recent decision of the highest court in the land, that a man who brought his mistress to live in his home, and compelled his wife to wait upon her, was not committing cruelty within the meaning of the English law. I heard Sylvia's exclamation of horror, and met her stare of incredulity; and then suddenly I thought of Claire, and a little chill ran over me. It was a difficult hour, in more ways than one, that of my first talk with Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver!
"I soon made the discovery that, childish as her ignorance was, there was no prejudice in it. If you brought her a fact, she did not say that it was too terrible to be true, or that the Bible said otherwise, or that it was indecent to know about it. Nor, when you met her next, did you discover that she had forgotten it. On the contrary, you discovered that she had followed it to its remote consequences, and was ready with a score of questions as to these. I remember saying to myself, that first automobile ride: "If this girl goes on thinking, she will get into trouble! She will have to stop, for the sake of others!"
""You must meet my husband some time," she said; and added, "I'll have to see my engagement-book. I have so much to do, I never know when I have a moment free."
""You must find it interesting," I ventured.
""I did, for a while; but I've begun to get tired of so much going about. For the most part I meet the same people, and I've found out what they have to say.""
They talked of society, and of beauty.
"Most of the beautiful women I've known make a sort of profession of it—they live to shine and be looked at. "And you don't enjoy that?" I asked.
""It restricts one's life. Men expect it of you, they resent your having any other interest.""
................................................................................................
"I do not know how much of her I have been able to give. I have told of our first talk—but words are so cold and dead! I stop and ask: What there is, in all nature, that has given me the same feeling? I remember how I watched the dragon-fly emerging from its chrysalis. It is soft and green and tender; it clings to a branch and dries its wings in the sun, and when the miracle is completed, there for a brief space it poises, shimmering with a thousand hues, quivering with its new-born ecstasy. And just so was Sylvia; a creature from some other world than ours, as yet unsoiled by the dust and heat of reality."
""Oden and Thor, these two thou knowest; Freya, the heavenly, knowest thou not.""
................................................................................................
That last quote goes deep in psyche of Upton Sinclair, who is aware enough to state it and recognise it, and simultaneously confident enough and humble enough to admit it. The World's End series has Lanny's world permeate with it, right up to when WWII intrudes, which is when the transformation, from the world of beauty and leisure and art and fashion, to one of necessity of fighting horrors, inflicted by injustice of fascism and nazism, overtakes life, and never recovers, however much Lanny attempt to keep up with love and art; was the giving up French Riviera and Beauty and Bienvenu a conscious choice Upton Sinclair made for Lanny, without saying so?
For his work could have been done for ever from Sept Chenes for much less cost and upheaval, instead of scouting a house in New Jersey and transferring allegiance to the Robbie and Esther Budds to the extent of making Newcastle the family vacation home, giving up not only living at Bienvenu but visiting as well. What's more, he repeatedly mentions Beauty asking about her grandson, but has neither brought her to visit his home nor brought his family to Bienvenu, and for that matter not even attended the second wedding of his sister Marceline, despite the fact that she endangered her own life to save his, and quite consciously so too!
In comparison, his transfer of heart from the Robin family to the Pomeroy-Nielson as a choice of Frances to marry, despite his accusing Irma of a thinly veiled antisemitism for being displeased that Frances and little Johannes were growing up together at Bienvenu and were attached, seems smaller.
Was this author ever aware of his own deep, concrete prejudices - against Jews and for West Europe, against women and pro biblically against other cultures?
................................................................................................
"She referred to her experiences abroad. She had not liked Europe—being quite frankly a provincial person. To Castleman County a foreigner was a strange, dark person who mixed up his consonants, and was under suspicion of being a fiddler or an opera-singer. The people she had met under her husband's charge had been socially indubitable, but still, they were foreigners, and Sylvia could never really be sure what they meant."
"There was the Duke of Something in Rome, for example, a melancholy young man, with whom she had coquetted, as she did, in her merry fashion, with every man she met. Being married, she had taken it for granted that she might be as winsome as she chose; but the young Italian had misunderstood the game, and had whispered words of serious import, which had so horrified Sylvia that she flew to her husband and told him the story—begging him incidentally not to horse-whip the fellow. In reply it had to be explained to her she had laid herself liable to the misadventure. The ladies of the Italian aristocracy were severe and formal, and Sylvia had no right to expect an ardent young duke to understand her native wildness."
"Then they had come to London, a dismal, damp city where you "never saw the sun, and when you did see it it looked like a poached egg"; where you had to learn to eat fish with the help of a knife, and where you might speak of bitches, but must never on any account speak of your stomach. They went for a week-end to "Hazelhurst," the home of the Dowager Duchess of Danbury, whose son van Tuiver, had entertained in America, and who, in the son's absence, claimed the right to repay the debt.
"And then there was the Honourable Reginald Annersley, the youngest son of the family, home from Eton on vacation. The Honourable Reginald was twelve years of age, undersized and ill-nourished. ("They feed them badly," his mother had explained, "an' the teachin's no good either, but it's a school for gentlemen.") ... He spoke of his brother, the duke, who had gone off shooting seals somewhere. 'The jolly rotter has nothing to do but spend his money; but we younger sons have to work like dogs when we grow up!' I asked what he'd do, and he said 'I suppose there's nothin' but the church. It's a beastly bore, but you do get a livin' out of it.'
""That was too much for me," said Sylvia. "I proceeded to tell the poor, blasé infant about my childhood; how my sister Celeste and I had caught half-tamed horses and galloped about the pasture on them, when we were so small that our little fat legs stuck out horizontally; how we had given ourselves convulsions in the green apple orchard, and had to be spanked every day before we had our hair combed. I told how we heard a war-story about a "train of gunpowder," and proceeded to lay such a train about the attic of Castleman Hall, and set fire to it. I might have spent the afternoon teaching the future churchman how to be a boy, if I hadn't suddenly caught a glimpse of my husband's face!"
"Sylvia's was the true aristocratic attitude towards the rest of the world. It could never have occurred to her to imagine that anywhere upon the whole earth there were people superior to the Castlemans of Castleman County. ... The trouble was that van Tuiver was not clever enough to realise this,"
"How had Sylvia come to make this marriage? She was not happy with him; keen psychologist that she was, she must have foreseen that she would not be happy with him. Had she deliberately sacrificed herself, because of the good she imagined she could do to her family?
"I was beginning to believe this. Irritated as she was by the solemn snobberies of van Tuiver's world, it was none the less true that she believed in money; she believed in it with a faith which appalled me as I came to realise it. Everybody had to have money; the social graces, the aristocratic virtues were impossible without it. The rich needed it—even the poor needed it! Could it be that the proud Castlemans of Castleman County had needed it also?"
................................................................................................
Mary answered Sylvia's questions about how she could help poor, making an education in economics out of it, which eventually had Sylvia proposing state production, and Mary informing her this was socialism; Sylvia remarked that Mary was a socialist.
" ... what terrifies her class is not our economic programme, it is our threat of slave-rebellion."
Her bringing up in Mississippi as a lady -
"Sylvia had to have a special phaeton to drive, a special horse to ride, special roses which no one else was allowed to wear."
The two became close friends.
"Proud as she was, she was lonely, and in need of some one to open her eager mind to. Who was there safer to trust than this plain Western woman, who lived so far, both in reality and in ideas, from the great world of fashion?"
................................................................................................
There is a delightful drama when Mary introduced Sylvia to Mrs Frothingham, head of 'Frothingham's', a finishing school for daughters of rich, and Sylvia brought the two in her chauffeured car to Wall Street where Mrs Frothingham was giving one of her socialist speeches - and suddely Sylvia's husband, Douglas Van Tuiver, appeared, asking why she was there, and so on. Sylvia was equal to the occasion, coolly stating she'd like to hear Mrs Frothingham, who proceeded to address "Mr Millionaire". Shortly after, the husband simply ordered the chauffeur to back out, and got in; next day Mary visited Sylvia, since she'd sent a note by a messenger.
"I waited for her to add what news she chose.
""It seems," she said, "that my husband has a cousin, a pupil of Mrs. Frothingham's. You can imagine!"
""I can imagine Mrs. Frothingham may lose a pupil."
""No; my husband says his Uncle Archibald always was a fool. But how can anyone be so narrow! He seemed to take Mrs. Frothingham as a personal affront."
"This was the most definite bit of vexation against her husband that she had ever let me see. I decided to turn it into a jest.
""Mrs. Frothingham will be glad to know she was understood," I said."
................................................................................................
Sylvia and Mary began to open up, speak more of their lives and husband's, and Mary realised Sylvia knew very little of life, especially about physical relations and darker side of life. She didn't know about women having to sell themselves due to poverty and couldn't believe it. Mary on the other hand saw the life of rich who had no work, which was new to Sylvia - men ran plantations where she came from. Mary began to know Douglas Van Tuiver through Sylvia.
"Douglas van Tuiver spent his money upon a definite system: whatever went to the maintaining of his social position, whatever added to the glory, prestige and power of the van Tuiver name—that money was well-spent; while money spent to any other end was money wasted—and this included all ideas and "causes." And when the master of the house knew that his money was being wasted, it troubled him.
""It wasn't until after I married him that I realized how idle his life is," she remarked. "At home all the men have something to do, running their plantations, or getting elected to some office. But Douglas never does anything that I can possibly think is useful.""
Here this couple seems like an early prototype for Irma and her set later in the World's End series. Even more, Sylvia is like a younger Lanny, while her husband Douglas is like Irma after rescuing the Robin family, grimly set in her ways.
................................................................................................
Mary took Sylvia on a tour of child labour horrors - tenements and factories - since the work mary did needed Sylvia's help when it came to legislature.
"She was Dante, and I was Virgil, our inferno was an endless procession of tortured faces—faces of women, haggard and mournful, faces of little children, starved and stunted, dulled and dumb. Several times we stopped to talk with these people—one little Jewess girl I knew whose three tiny sisters had been roasted alive in a sweatshop fire. This child had jumped from a fourth-story window, and been miraculously caught by a fireman. She said that some man had started the fire, and been caught, but the police had let him get away. So I had to explain to Sylvia that curious bye-product (sic) of the profit system known as the "Arson Trust." ities estimated that incendiarism was responsible for the destruction of a quarter of a billion dollars worth of property in America every year. So, of course, the business of starting fires was a paying one, and the "fire-bug," like the "cadet" and the dive-keeper, was a part of the "system." So it was quite a possible thing that the man who had burned up this little girl's three sisters might have been allowed to escape."
To the horror of the two, it turned out that several of those tenements and factories were part of the real estate that was primarily foundation of the van Tuiver wealth. Mary explained the connections between legislature and political contribution.
................................................................................................
Sylvia asked Mary to meet her at a hotel where she had an appointment for tea, and Mary met Claire Lapage while waiting for Sylvia in her sight; to avoid Sylvia approach her in public while she was with Claire, Mary took Claire to another hotel for tea. Claire spoke of having met Douglas at a party.
""Claire, let him alone. Give them a chance to be happy."
""Why should I?" she demanded, in a voice of hostility.
""She never harmed you," I said. I knew I was being foolish, but I would do what I could.
""She took him away from me, didn't she?" And Claire's eyes were suddenly alight with the hatred of her outcast class. "Why did she get him? Why is she Mrs. van Tuiver, and I nobody? Because her father was rich, because she had power and position, while I had to scratch for myself in the world. Is that true, or isn't it?"
"I could not deny that it might be part of the truth.
""But they're married now," I said, "and he loves her."
""He loves me, too. And I love him still, in spite of the way he's treated me. He's the only man I ever really loved. Do you think I'm going off and hide in a hole, while she spends his money and plays the princess up and down the Avenue? Not much!""
Mary met Sylvia, who was planning to relocate to Florida Keys, where Douglas had a house, amongst many others in various places; she was expecting, so the real reason for her going wouldn't be a public scandal, which was her aversion now to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on parties while poor children suffered as she'd seen.
................................................................................................
Sylvia wrote to Mary, beautiful letters about Florida. She tried to change her husband's thinking by reading, but he had exactly the same idea in the opposite direction, and her aunt who was visiting noticed their differences and chided her for thinking; she set Sylvia sewing as a cure. Sylvia discussed women's question with Douglas.
"He says he does not think that women are inferior to men, only that they are different; the mistake is for them to try to become like men. It is the old proposition of 'charm,' you see. I put that to him, and he admitted that he did like to be 'charmed.'
""I said, 'You wouldn't, if you knew as much about the process as I do.'
""'Why not?' he asked.
""'Because, it's not an honest process. It's not a straight way for one sex to deal with the other.'
""He asked what I meant by that; but then, remembering the cautions of my great-aunt, I laughed. 'If you are going to compel me to use the process, you can hardly expect me to tell you the secret of it.'
""'Then there's no use trying to talk,' he said.
""'Ah, but there is!' I exclaimed. 'You admit that I have 'charm'—dozens of other men admitted it. And so it ought to count for something if I declare that I know it's not an honest thing—that it depends upon trickery, and appeals to the worst qualities in a man. For instance, his vanity. "Flatter him," Lady Dee used to say. "He'll swallow it." And he will—I never knew a man to refuse a compliment in my life. His love of domination. "If you want anything, make him think that he wants it!" His egotism. She had a bitter saying—I can hear the very tones of her voice: "When in doubt, talk about HIM." That is what is called "charm"!'
""'I don't seem to feel it,' he said.
""' No, because now you are behind the scenes. But when you were in front, you felt it, you can't deny. And you would feel it again, any time I chose to use it. But I want to know if there is not some honest way a woman can interest a man. The question really comes to this—Can a man love a woman for what she really is?'
""'I should say,' he said, 'that it depends upon the woman.'
""I admitted this was a plausible answer. 'But you loved me, when I made myself a mystery to you. But now that I am honest with you, you have made it clear that you don't like it, that you won't have it. And that is the problem that women have to face. It is a fact that the women of our family have always ruled the men; but they've done it by indirection—nobody ever thought seriously of "women's rights" in Castleman County. But you see, women have rights; and somehow or other they will fool the men, or else the men must give up the idea that they are the superior sex, and have the right, or the ability, to rule women.'
""Then I saw how little he had followed me. 'There has to be a head to the family,' he said.
""I answered, 'There have been cases in history of a king and queen ruling together, and getting along very well. Why not the same thing in a family?'
""'That's all right, so far as the things of the family are concerned. But such affairs as business and politics are in the sphere of men; and women cannot meddle in them without losing their best qualities as women.'
""And so there we were. I won't repeat his arguments, for doubtless you have read enough anti-suffrage literature. The thing I noticed was that if I was very tactful and patient, I could apparently carry him along with me; but when the matter came up again, I would discover that he was back where he had been before. A woman must accept the guidance of a man; she must take the man's word for the things that he understands."
"'But suppose the man is wrong?' I said; and there we stopped—there we shall stop always, I begin to fear. I agree with him that woman should obey man—so long as man is right!""
She wrote about the doctor.
""Here is this young man; he thinks he is a scientist, he rather prides himself upon being cold-blooded; yet a cunning woman could twist him round her finger. He had an unhappy love-affair when he was young, so he confided to me; and now, in his need and loneliness, a beautiful woman is transformed into something supernatural in his imagination—she is like a shimmering soap-bubble, that he blows with his own breath. I know that I could never get him to see the real truth about me; I might tell him that I have let myself be tied up in a golden net—but he would only marvel at my spirituality. Oh, the women I have seen trading upon the credulity of men! And when I think how I did this myself! If men were wise, they would give us the vote, and a share in the world's work—anything that would bring us out into the light of day, and break the spell of mystery that hangs round us!"
................................................................................................
Towards final months of Sylvia's pregnancy, Douglas was restless, and Sylvia persuaded him to go alone while she was safe in Florida in care of her aunt and the doctor and the warmth. She asked Mary to visit, and Mary dropped in on Claire before doing so, discovering that Claire had reconnected with Douglas, although there was Larry, a blond married stockbroker worried about venereal disease from infidelity.
Mary discovered, by Claire declaring it casually, that Claire had had several diseases and some surgical operations as well; when confronted with the possibility of Sylvia's child being affected, she flew into a passion and said, why shouldn't she pay for taking Douglas away? That she should have had a chance to refuse to marry Douglas, she didnt admit.
Mary went to see the doctor in N.Y. who was to go to Florida to attend to Sylvia, and inform him, without naming Claire, before she went to see Sylvia. The baby was born already when she arrived, and Mary stopped them in the process of cancelling the visit from Dr Overton from N.Y., and got them to get nitrate of silver from Key West, as well as get an eye specialist from Atlanta for the baby.
................................................................................................
Douglas Van Tuiver telegraphed Dr Perrin to use tact, and the aunt went after Mary about not telling Sylvia, even as the baby was being treated by the specialist and Dr Overton.
""My dear Mrs. Tuis, what do you imagine you know about the prevalence of gonorrhea? Consider just one fact—that I heard a college professor state publicly that in his opinion eighty-five per cent. of the men students at his university were infected with some venereal disease. And that is the pick of our young manhood—the sons of our aristocracy!"
""Oh, that can't be!" she exclaimed. "People would know of it!
""Who are 'people'? The boys in your family know of it—if you could get them to tell you. My two sons studied at a State university, and they would bring me home what they heard—the gossip, the slang, the horrible obscenity. Fourteen fellows in one dormitory using the same bathroom—and on the wall you saw a row of fourteen syringes! And they told that on themselves, it was the joke of the campus. They call the disease a 'dose'; and a man's not supposed to be worthy the respect of his fellows until he's had his 'dose'—the sensible thing is to get several, till he can't get any more. They think it's 'no worse than a bad cold'; that's the idea they get from the 'clap-doctors,' and the women of the street who educate our sons in sex matters."
""That is what is going on among our boys," I said. "The Castleman boys, the Chilton boys! It's going on in every fraternity house, every 'prep school' dormitory in America. And the parents refuse to know, just as you do!"
""But what could I possibly do, Mrs. Abbott?"
""I don't know, Mrs. Tuis. What I am going to do is to teach the young girls."
"She whispered, aghast, "You would rob the young girls of their innocence. Why, with their souls full of these ideas their faces would soon be as hard—oh, you horrify me!"
""My daughter's face is not hard," I said. "And I taught her. Stop and think, Mrs. Tuis—ten thousand blind children every year! A hundred thousand women under the surgeon's knife! Millions of women going to pieces with slowly creeping diseases of which they never hear the names! I say, let us cry this from the housetops, until every woman knows—and until every man knows that she knows, and that unless he can prove that he is clean he will lose her! That is the remedy, Mrs. Tuis!""
................................................................................................
Mary met Douglas and presented an ultimatumabout telling Sylvia himself, but meanwhile events raced, and Sylvia overheard the nurses; she locked herself and asked for Mary. The two Southern doctors met Mary and Douglas ahead of their arrival.
"Dr. Perrin took command once more. "Our patient has asked for you, and she looks to you for guidance. You must put aside your own convictions and think of her health. You are the only person who can calm her, and surely it is your duty to do so!""
Notice the typical sleight of argument, presenting a fact and a conclusion with concealing the chain connecting them. Here, as often in most cases, the chain is "you must obey us", remaining unsaid, and presenting a fait accompli of "You must put aside your own convictions", universally employed.
Mary was forced to return to N.Y. by orders of Douglas and watched by his servants to make sure she wouldn't remain on pier at Key West, without an opportunity to see Sylvia.
Douglas attempted to browbeat and dominate Sylvia with a combination of lies and halftruths, not admitting his own guilt but saying Dr Perrin had treated a negro woman and not sterilized his instruments, and said he wouldn'ttolerate any contact between Sylvia and Mary. Mrs Tuis, Sylvia's aunt, was next.
""My child! Come, do your duty! ... Women have to suffer, dear; we must not shirk our share of life's burdens.""
"The next day they were again in a dispute, for he had come to ask her word of honour that she would never see me again, and would give him my letters to be returned unopened. This last was what she had let her father do in the case of Frank Shirley; and she had become certain in her own mind that she had done wrong.
""I am quite aware," he said, quietly, "that these things are not calculated to preserve the peace of mind of a young mother. You are horrified when I tell you of them—yet you clamour for the right to have Mrs. Abbott tell you of them! I warn you, Sylvia—you have married a rich man, who is exposed to the attacks of cunning and unscrupulous enemies. You, as his wife, are exactly as much exposed—possibly even more so. Therefore when I see you entering into what I know to be a dangerous intimacy, I must have the right to say to you, This shall stop, and I tell you, there can never be any safety or peace of mind for either of us, so long as you attempt to deny me that right.""
Dr Gibson met Sylvia before leaving, to exculpate Douglas.
""The idea has been planted in your mind that your husband brought the trouble; and that idea is sure to stay there and fester. So it becomes necessary for someone to talk to you straight. Let me tell you that eight men out of ten have had this disease at some time in their lives; also that very few of them were cured of it when they thought they were. You have a cold: and then next month, you say the cold is gone. So it is, for practical purposes. But if I take a microscope, I find the germs of the cold still in your membranes, and I know that you can give a cold, and a bad cold, to some one else who is sensitive. It is true that you may go through all the rest of your life without ever being entirely rid of that cold. You understand me?"
""Yes," said Sylvia, in a low voice.
""I say eight out of ten. Estimates would differ. Some doctors would say seven out of ten—and some actual investigations have shown nine out of ten. And understand me, I don't mean bar-room loafers and roustabouts. I mean your brothers, if you have any, your cousins, your best friends, the men who came to make love to you, and whom you thought of marrying. ... Well, I've had this disease; I've had it, and nevertheless I've raised six fine, sturdy children. ... And now you think that over, and stop tormenting your poor husband!"
................................................................................................
Sylvia wrote to Mary to say she was going on the yacht to Scotland for a year, and would only be a mother; Douglas instructed his family lawyer in N.Y., Rossiter Torrance, to blackmail Claire to get Mary to obey their demands.
"Poor Claire! She passes here from this story. For years thereafter I used to catch a glimpse of her now and then, in the haunts of the birds of gorgeous plumage; but I never got a chance to speak to her, nor did she ever call on me again. So I do not know if Douglas van Tuiver still continues her eight thousand a year. All I can say is that when I saw her, her plumage was as gorgeous as ever, and its style duly certified to the world that it had not been held over from a previous season of prosperity. Twice I thought she had been drinking too much; but then—so had many of the other ladies with the little glasses of bright-coloured liquids before them."
After a year around the world on yacht, in Scotland and Mediterranean and Japan, Sylvia wired Mary asking her to meet at the pier.
""I am leaving my husband."
"Leaving your husband!" I stood, dumbfounded.
""Leaving him for ever, Mary."
""But—but——" I could not finish the sentence. My eyes moved to where he stood, calmly chatting with his friends.
""He insisted on coming back with me, to preserve appearances. He is terrified of the gossip. He is going all the way home, and then leave me."
""It's a long story," she added. "I must apologise for asking you to come here, where we can't talk. But I did it for an important reason. I can't make my husband really believe that I mean what I say; and you are my Declaration of Independence!" And she laughed, but a trifle wildly, and looking at her suddenly, I realized that she was keyed almost to the breaking point."
Sylvia visited Mary.
""Tell me why you are leaving him."
""Mary, because I don't love him. That's the one reason. I have thought it out—I have thought of little else for the last year. I have come to see that it is wrong for a woman to live with a man she does not love. It is the supreme crime a woman can commit."
""Ah, yes!" I said. "If you have got that far!"
""I have got that far. Other things have contributed, but they are not the real things—they might have been forgiven. The fact that he had this disease, and made my child blind——"
""Well, he said now the doctors were agreed there was no danger to either of us. We could take precautions and not have children. I could only plead that the whole subject was distressing to me. He had asked me to put off my problems till my baby was weaned; now I asked him to put off his. But that would not do, it seemed. He took to arguing with me. It was an unnatural way to live, and he could not endure it. I was a woman, and I couldn't understand this. It seemed utterly impossible to make him realize what I felt. I suppose he has always had what he wanted, and he simply does not know what it is to be denied. It wasn't only a physical thing, I think; it was an affront to his pride, a denial of his authority."
""He wanted to know how long I expected to withhold myself. I said, 'Until I have got this disease out of my mind, as well as out of my body; until I know that there is no possibility of either of us having it, to give to the other.' But then, after I had taken a little more time to think it over, I said, 'Douglas, I must be honest with you. I shall never be able to live with you again. It is no longer a question of your wishes or mine—it is a question of right or wrong. I do not love you. I know now that it can never under any circumstances be right for a woman to give herself in the intimacy of the sex-relation without love. When she does it, she is violating the deepest instinct of her nature, the very voice of God in her soul.'
""His reply was, 'Why didn't you know that before you married?'
""I answered, 'I did not know what marriage meant; and I let myself be persuaded by others.'
""'By your own mother!' he declared.
""I said, 'A mother who permits her daughter to commit such an offence is either a slave-dealer, or else a slave.' Of course, he thought I was out of my mind at that. He argued about the duties of marriage, the preserving of the home, wives submitting themselves to their husbands, and so on. He would not give me any peace——"
""I won't repeat all his protests. When he found that I was really going, he offered to take me in the yacht, but I wouldn't go in the yacht. I had got to be really afraid of him—sometimes, you know, his obstinacy seems to be abnormal, almost insane. So then he decided he would have to go in the steamer with me to preserve appearances. I had a letter saying that papa was not well, and he said that would serve for an excuse. He is going to Castleman County, and after he has stayed a week or so, he is going off on a hunting-trip, and not return."
""And will he do it?"
"I don't think he expects to do it at present. I feel sure he has the idea of starting mamma to quoting the Bible to me, and dragging me down with her tears. But I have done all I can to make clear to him that it will make no difference. I told him I would not say a word about my intentions at home until he had gone away, and that I expected the same silence from him. But, of course—"
""Dear Friend," she said, suddenly, "don't think I haven't seen his side of the case. I try to tell myself that I dealt with him frankly from the beginning. But then I ask was there ever a man I dealt with frankly? There was coquetry in the very clothes I wore! And now that we are so entangled, now that he loves me, what is my duty? I find I can't respect his love for me. A part of it is because my beauty fascinates him, but more of it seems to me just wounded vanity. I was the only woman who ever flouted him, and he has a kind of snobbery that made him think I must be something remarkable because of it. I talked that all out with him—yes, I've dragged him through all that humiliation. I wanted to make him see that he didn't really love me, that he only wanted to conquer me, to force me to admire him and submit to him. I want to be myself, and he wants to be himself—that has always been the issue between us."
""That is the issue in many unhappy marriages," I said.
""I've done a lot of thinking in the last year," she resumed—"about things generally, I mean. We American women think we are so free. That is because our husbands indulge us, give us money, and let us run about. But when it comes to real freedom—freedom of intellect and of character, English women are simply another kind of being from us. I met a cabinet minister's wife—he's a Conservative in everything, and she's an ardent suffragist; she not merely gives money, she makes speeches and has a public name. Yet they are friends, and have a happy home-life. Do you suppose my husband would consider such an arrangement?"
""There was the Honorable Betty Annersley—the sister of a chum of his. She was friendly with the militants, and I wanted to talk to her to understand what such women thought. Yet my husband tried to stop me from going to see her. And it's the same way with everything I try to do, that threatens to take me out of his power. He wanted me to accept the authority of the doctors as to any possible danger from venereal disease. When I got the books, and showed him what the doctors admitted about the question—the narrow margin of safety they allowed, the terrible chances they took—he was angry again."
"She stopped, seeing a question in my eyes. "I've been reading up on the subject," she explained. "I know it all now—the things I should have known before I married."
""How did you manage that?"
""I tried to get two of the doctors to give me something to read, but they wouldn't hear of it. I'd set myself crazy imagining things, it was no sort of stuff for a woman's mind. So in the end I took the bit in my teeth. I found a medical book store, and I went in and said: 'I am an American physician, and I want to see the latest works on venereal disease.' So the clerk took me to the shelves, and I picked out a couple of volumes."
""When Douglas found that I was reading these books he threatened to burn them. I told him 'There are more copies in the store, and I am determined to be educated on this subject.'"
""There were chapters on the subject of wives, how much they were not told, and why this was. So very quickly I began to see around my own experience. Douglas must have figured out that this would be so, for the end of the matter was an admission."
""You don't mean he confessed to you!"
"She smiled bitterly. "No," she said. "He brought Dr. Perrin to London to do it for him. Dr. Perrin said he had concluded I had best know that my husband had had some symptoms of the disease. He, the doctor, wished to tell me who was to blame for the attempt to deceive me. Douglas had been willing to admit the truth, but all the doctors had forbidden it. I must realise the fearful problem they had, and not blame them, and, above all I must not blame my husband, who had been in their hands in the matter."
""How stupid men are! As if that would excuse him!"
""I'm afraid I showed the little man how poor an impression he had made—both for himself and for his patron. But I had suffered all there was to suffer, and I was tired of pretending. I told him it would have been far better for them if they had told me the truth at the beginning."
""Ah, yes!" I said. "That is what I tried to make them see; but all I got for it was a sentence of deportation!""
................................................................................................
Sylvia went South to be with her family, to begin the process of separation.
"Sylvia realized at once that her husband was setting out upon a campaign to win her family to his side. He rode about the major's plantations, absorbing information about the bollweevil. He rode back to the house, and exchanged cigars, and listened to stories of the major's boyhood during the war. He went to call upon Bishop Chilton, and sat in his study, with its walls of faded black volumes on theology. Van Tuiver himself had had a Church of England tutor, and was a punctilious high churchman; but he listened respectfully to arguments for a simpler form of church organization, and took away a voluminous exposé of the fallacies of "Apostolic Succession." And then came Aunt Nannie, ambitious and alert as when she had helped the young millionaire to find a wife; and the young millionaire made the suggestion that Aunt Nannie's third daughter should not fail to visit Sylvia at Newport.
"There was no limit, apparently, to what he would do. He took Master Castleman Lysle upon his knee, and let him drop a valuable watch upon the floor. He got up early in the morning and went horse-back riding with Peggy and Maria. He took Celeste automobiling, and helped by his attentions to impress the cocksure young man with whom Celeste was in love. He won "Miss Margaret" by these attentions to all her children, and the patience with which he listened to accounts of the ailments which had afflicted the precious ones at various periods of their lives. To Sylvia, watching all these proceedings, it was as if he were binding himself to her with so many knots.
"She had come home with a longing to be quiet, to avoid seeing anyone. But this could not be, she discovered. There was gossip about the child's blindness, and the significance thereof; and to have gone into hiding would have meant an admission of the worst. The ladies of the family had prepared a grand "reception," at which all Castleman County was to come and gaze upon the happy mother. And then there was the monthly dance at the Country Club, where everybody would come, in the hope of seeing the royal pair. To Sylvia it was as if her mother and aunts were behind her every minute of the day, pushing her out into the world. "Go on, go on! Show yourself! Do not let people begin to talk!"
"She bore it for a couple of weeks; then she went to her cousin, Harley Chilton.
""Harley," she said, "my husband is anxious to go on a hunting-trip. Will you go with him?"
""When?" asked the boy.
""Right away; to-morrow or the next day."
""I'm game," said Harley.
"After which she went to her husband. "Douglas, it is time for you to go.""
Douglas argued.
""Douglas," she replied, "I know exactly what you have been doing. I have watched your change of character since you came here. You may be able to make my people so unhappy that I must be unhappy also. You see how deeply I love them, how I yield everything for love of them. But let me make it clear, I will not yield this. It was for their sake I went into this marriage, but I have come to see that it was wrong, and no power on earth can induce me to stay in it. My mind is made up—I will not live with a man I do not love. I will not even pretend to do it. Now do you understand me, Douglas?"
"He answered calmly, "I see no reason why I, your husband, should permit you to pursue this insane course. You propose to leave me; and the reason you give is one that would, if it were valid, break up two-thirds of the homes in the country. Your own family will stand by me in my effort to prevent your ruin."
""What do you expect to do?" she asked in a suppressed voice.
""I have to assume that my wife is insane; and I shall look after her till she comes to her senses."
"She sat watching him for a few moments, wondering at him. Then she said, "You are willing to stay on here, day after day, pursuing me in the only refuge I have. Well then, I shall not consider your feelings. I have a work to do here—and I think that when I begin it, you will want to be far away.""
He asked what she meant.
""Just this, Douglas—I do not intend to leave my sister unprotected as I was. I am going to tell her about Elaine. I am going to tell her all that she needs to know. It is bound to mean arguments with the old people, and in the end the whole family will be discussing the subject. I feel sure you will not care to be here under such circumstances.""
................................................................................................
At the end there is a scene with pain, delight and more, where a neighbour arranged Sylvia be confronted at a card party she couldn't decline, with the young man she'd been in love with and forced to break up with before her marriage, due to a false story circulated about him in innuendos. Upton Sinclair writes it with a combination of precise details of malicious neighbours and exemplary conduct of the targeted Sylvia.
................................................................................................
................................................................................................
