Do other people feel like this? If they do why do they live? A dead leaf blown in the wind. It isn’t so much the helplessness; you could stand it to feel yourself pushed and pulled, here and there, against all protests, if only you knew what was doing it and why. You called yourself a weakling and a coward because you let Lucy go, but that was silly. Those are just words made up by somebody who wanted to pretend that he knew what was pushing him. All words are like that except the ones you can touch and eat and drink. How can you disapprove of anything you don’t understand? That’s the last refuge of ignorance, that pitiful attempt to give yourself a moral value by making up words to compare yourself with omniscience. If the dead leaf, or a live one either, put on such airs, wouldn’t you give it the horse laugh though!
Don’t flatter yourself; you’re neither a weakling nor a coward; there’s not that much significance in all your vain and petty flutterings. Maybe Dick’s not so dumb after all; maybe the reason he’s not interested in the meaning of anything is because he knows somehow, though he couldn’t say it and wouldn’t bother to if he could, that there isn’t any; at least none that he or you or anybody knows anything about. Erma too. No, not the same way. She’ll talk about meanings, she likes to play with them, but at bottom she’s no more interested in them than Dick is. Let one of them get in her way once.…
Like the time in Cleveland that old camel fell in love with her. You never could understand anyone falling in love with her, but there have been plenty who have done it. Hoskinson, his name was, lived there all his life and owned two or three country banks and had a wife who thought he was a mixture of Leander and J. P. Morgan. He wasn’t really old, but he looked ancient and dried up as if he were trying to see how long he could go without taking on water. When he moved you expected to hear him squeak.
Summoned on the telephone, you went one afternoon straight from the office to Wooton Avenue, and when you got there Erma handed you a letter to read, It was from Mrs. Hoskinson, and it said in effect that if Erma didn’t let her beloved husband alone the consequences would be extremely unpleasant. She announced that she would call on Erma the following afternoon.
“She’s apt to be here any minute,” Erma said, “and I don’t want to see her. Will you talk to her? I could have sent for Tom Hall, but lawyers always ask so many questions.”
“Why not refuse to see her?”
“It wouldn’t do any good, she’d camp on the doorstep.” You got your instructions. Miss Carr was not interested in the domestic or emotional life of Mrs. Hoskinson. If Mr. Hoskinson should again offer to amuse her by spending an evening playing Debussy on her Louis Seize Steinway, Miss Carr would gratefully accept, and her unconcern as to Mrs. Hoskinson’s reactions would be effortless and complete.
The bell rang; the lady was announced and shown into the library; you joined her there and, representing yourself as Miss Carr’s legal adviser, in pursuance of your instructions, informed her that after full and careful consideration the decision had been reached that she could go to hell. It was very unpleasant. Mrs. Hoskinson first was furious and threatening; then she wept and implored, pleaded with you to save her husband for her. You were touched, genuinely sorry for her, and when she was finally got out of the house you sought Erma, angry and indignant that you had been let in for such a thing. You made a heated speech, throughout which Erma smiled.
“Why should I make a sacrifice for her, just because she happens to be uncivilized?” she demanded. “I don’t want her precious husband, but sometimes he’s amusing. If I wanted him, of course, I’d take him. Bill darling, don’t tell me I’ve got to preserve the home.”
“I’m not telling you you’ve got to do anything. It’s just a matter of decent human feeling. The woman is really suffering, she’s unhappy.”
“You’re being stupid, you don’t realize what you’re saying,” Erma declared. “Do you mean we shouldn’t take something we want if it makes someone else suffer?”
“Yes. Unless we need it very badly, unless the want is vital.”
She smiled. “Then you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Your salary has been raised to fifteen thousand, hasn’t it? And you say yourself that the men in the mills are underpaid. Whereas I’m making only one woman suffer—by letting Hosky play to me, which he does extremely well. Besides, I’m taking nothing from his wife—do you happen to know that her favorite phonograph record is Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes?”
“Come on, he sends you flowers every day and writes you ten-page letters with poetry in them and follows you around like a love-sick camel. And don’t you tell Dick that I think the men are underpaid, or I won’t have any salary at all.”
Something disagreeable might have happened, for Hoskinson’s attentions became more pronounced and continuous than ever, and his wife was finally driven to threaten, formally and legally, a suit for alienation of affection—if Erma had not suddenly decided to go to Europe.
That was in November, two years after Lucy had left. You had never heard from her or written to her. In your room was her photograph; for a long time it stood open on your chiffonier, where you saw it every time you brushed your hair or put on your necktie; then, one day, just after you got back from your visit home when you told Jane all about it, you took the photograph down and put it away in a drawer. It’s probably still around somewhere.
Throughout those two years it was obvious that everyone, including Dick, expected momentarily to hear that you and Erma were engaged. You yourself wouldn’t have been surprised if some morning at breakfast you had found an item on the society page of the Plain Dealer: “Miss Erma Carr announces her engagement to Mr. William Barton Sidney.” It was of course possible that she would notify you first, depending on whether, at the moment of decision, you happened to be handy. Would you have submitted to that insolent connubial rape? Indeed, indeed you would, though at the time, put as a hypothesis, you would have rejected it indignantly. Much easier to appraise an attitude after time has taken the peeling off.
You did in fact find information in the society column one morning, but it was to the effect that Miss Carr would leave shortly for an extended stay abroad. All day at the office you expected to hear from her, and when at five o’clock no word had come and you telephoned to Wooton Avenue you were told that she was not at home. The following morning she phoned to ask you to lunch.
“Is Hoskinson going on the same boat?” you asked politely, after she had joined you at the corner table at Winkler’s.
She made a grimace. “Don’t be nasty. As a matter of fact, I was mostly joking when I told Carrie Lawson I was going to Europe, but when I saw it in print it looked so sensible that I began to pack at once. I wonder if I’m more or less running away from Hosky—no, he’s not important enough. I’d be much more apt to run away from you. Do you know, you’re getting more attractive and dangerous-looking every day. A Lord Byron who has exchanged his limp for a modern American business training. If I met you on the rue Royale…”
“How long are you going to stay?”
“A winter, a month, ten years! Why don’t you come over next summer? Meet me in Brittany or Norway or somewhere. You ought to have a real vacation anyway. We could stay over there forever, and you could run back once a year to attend the stockholders’ meeting.”
You were puzzled and irritated. Was this a proposal of marriage, or was it a polite hint that she would like to change her business arrangements, or was it merely a cat amusing itself by entangling a ball of yarn?
“By the way,” you said, “now that you’re going away maybe you’d prefer to turn your proxy over to Dick.”
“I think,” she said solemnly, “I’ll transfer it to Mr. Hoskinson,” and then laughed gaily as you felt the color mounting to your face.
You said with dignity:
“Seriously, I think it would be a good idea. You don’t know how long you’ll be gone, and after all who am I? I’m in an anomalous position. You can be sure that Dick doesn’t relish having a mere employee dressed up like an equal.”
“Has he been nasty?” she asked quickly.
“Lord no. I’m not complaining. It’s just that there doesn’t seem to be much sense in it, and naturally I feel a little ridiculous.”
“You don’t need to. You shouldn’t.” She pushed her plate a little aside and leaned forward, and her grey-mottled blue eyes almost lost their constant mockery as they looked directly into yours. “Bill dear,” she said, “if you make me get serious I’ll never forgive you. No one but you could do it. One reason I like you is that you understand things without talking about them, so it shouldn’t be necessary for me to tell you that I trust you in certain essential ways more than any other person. As for the proxy, keep it if you please.” She hesitated, then went on, “I didn’t intend to mention it, but the other day Tom Hall insisted that I make a will, and if I fall off an Alp or drink myself to death you’ll be able to celebrate by buying a yacht.”
You’ve always been curious about that will. What exactly did it say? Surely not the whole to you; yet with Erma you can’t tell. There was no one else but Dick, and she wasn’t apt to swell him up. The whole thing! Under certain circumstances, then, you could have given Dick something to think about. Was it changed later when she married Pierre? Perhaps, no telling; if so, has it again been changed to you? What the deuce, once that would have been worth thinking about.…
A week later she left, on an evening train, with the whole bunch at the station to see her off. She had been taken by the whim that you should accompany her as far as Erie; either a whim, or she considered that the gesture would somewhat ease the embarrassment of your position as an abandoned swain. Tacit, oh carefully tacit, that was. When the train paused at Erie, long after midnight, you kissed her hand, then on command her lips, briefly and lightly, and swung down onto the platform to make your way to a hotel bed and there horizontally pass the hours until time for the morning train back to Cleveland.
It was more than a year before you got a letter from her, a note rather, and then another year to the next. When she got married she didn’t write you about it at all; you learned of it from a letter to Dick. Not much of a swain, but sufficiently abandoned.
If there really is no such thing as time, if it is merely a system of punctuation marks men have devised to make life seem real, your last three years in Cleveland, with Erma gone, Lucy a memory, and your business career a stale joke, a monotonous sequence of pale and feeble gestures—those years were not there at all. The calendars were fiction and their days a mirage. You went to New York twice to visit Jane—and, vaguely, Margaret and Rose. You spent a summer week with your mother, to the discomfort of both. Larry, ready for college, came and wandered around Cleveland for a month, sleeping in the room next to yours at the club and refusing most of your offers of entertainment; graciously and sensibly, for while you were willing to pretend a fond intimacy which did not exist, he reasonably saw no point in it.
It is amusing to speculate on the probabilities in Pearl Street if you had not had that piece of paper signed by Erma in your safe deposit box. You might have found yourself looking for a job; on the other hand it’s quite possible that necessity would have quickened your resources and discovered unrealized capacities. Unlikely; but Dick, relieved of the annual unpleasantness, however nominal, of an agreement with your equal authority regarding the membership of the directorate and other problems, might have been disposed to find in you parts not entirely negligible. Though that’s not fair either; why must you constantly pretend that Dick tried to choke you off?
He was very funny about it, in a way dumb, as transparent as a horse pretending it’s lame and then leaping on four good legs on a sudden impulse or a need for action. Now and then, he would consult you on some minor point regarding which you could not possibly have an intelligent opinion, and the next day make some important decision without even informing you that it was being made. You did once, somewhat to your own surprise, assert the reality of your power—the time that he proposed to put Charlie Harper on the Board and you firmly declined to acquiesce, on the ground that Erma violently disliked him and would not want him under any circumstances. It was well that Dick didn’t regard it as very important.
One day he said to you:
“What do you think of this New York thing? We might as well decide it. I was thinking last night—I say yes, at once. Gustafson says that England alone will place half a billion in six months. If we handle it right, and if those idiots keep on fighting a year or two, there’ll be no limit—hell, anything’s possible. I’m uncomfortable every minute I’m away from those boatloads of easy money, damn it, I itch. What do you think?”
“I think I’ll go home and pack up,” you laughed.
The next day you and Schwartz went to New York to find offices, and paid a fortune in premiums to vacate leases. Within six weeks the entire organization, sales and administrative, was moved and installed. Exhausted by your labors, you were nevertheless stimulated and refreshed by the interest of the new activities and the new scene. The tempo everywhere was quickened; not only was there the change to the greatest of all modern arenas, but also there was the feverish excitement reflected from the battlefields three thousand miles away, where stupidity and greed were consuming in ten minutes all that the Carr Corporation, with its mines and furnaces and factories and thousands of men, could produce in a month. The most superb and profitable market to be imagined, beyond the grandest dream of optimism; and American business, of which the Carr Corporation was a not inconsiderable unit, justified its claim to alert efficiency by grasping every opportunity and squeezing it dry. Dazed and feebly trying to orient yourself in the strange madhouse, you helped a bit here and there, but for the most part remained an open-mouthed spectator, while Dick, for instance, plunged into the boiling middle of it, his mouth shut but his eyes open, grabbing with both hands. You reflected that he was making himself and his sister two of the richest persons in America, but certainly it never occurred to him; he was much too busy to think about it.
Then Larry came, was welcomed graciously by Dick, and sent off to the Carrton plant, and you began to feel a solidity in life; you were catching hold of an edge here and there. Above all, one particular edge.
On arriving in New York you had suggested that Jane and Margaret and Rose leave the little flat in Sullivan Street and set up a household for you, in any part of the city they might select. This was your most cherished gesture and the thought of it warmed you for months. Their income was scanty, for half the interest on the capital realized from the sale of the drug store went to your mother; Jane’s salary as a staff writer on the New World was equally meager; and, speaking casually of your twenty thousand a year, you tried to keep exultation from your voice as you suggested a joint household to be entirely supported by you. Never, you told yourself, never could any man’s dream be more perfectly realized. The shortcomings of Margaret and Rose were merely the necessary flaw for perfection. There would be two servants, a maid and a cook, you said, leaving Jane free for her work and Margaret and Rose for school; separate large rooms for everyone, much nicer than their tiny flat.…
Jane said no. The others were more than willing, but she vetoed it flatly. She said that you might want to get married, that you should get married, and that you should assume no such encumbrance. You protested that you were only thirty-one, and that you wanted never to get married, anyway. No, she wouldn’t do it. You remained in your little two-room suite at the Garwood.
You were a great deal with her, more than at any period before or since. You took her to plays and concerts, subscribed to the opera, and persuaded her to use the accounts you opened at two or three of the stores. What a keen pleasure it was to feel that, at last, you were repaying her for all that she had done! Granted that money couldn’t really do it, still it was fun, the best fun you’ve ever had. You’d get a bill from Altman’s, for some gloves maybe, and stockings and a nightgown, and the next time you were with her you’d take it from your pocket and say with mock irritation:
“You’d better check this up, and where the devil do all the stockings go to?”
She would look at it:
“The stockings were for Margaret, and Rose bought the nightgown without telling me, and I won the gloves from you anyhow on that bet about the Panama Canal.”
“All right,” you would say, “I won’t ask Margaret and Rose about it because I’d hate to catch you in a lie.”
When the 1915 Christmas bonus was paid, a whole year’s salary extra, in a lump, you bought her a Packard roadster and drove it down to Sullivan Street yourself. Margaret and Rose smothered you with embraces while Jane stood and looked at you; she appeared rather serious, you thought, as you hoped that what you felt in your eyes were not tears.
“But my dear,” she said, “it’s much too grand. We can’t afford to keep it, can we? You’re a darling, and I don’t wonder the girls want to eat you up, but you shouldn’t have done it.”
You struck a pose:
“My dear Miss Sidney, a mere nothing. I wanted to get you a Pullman sleeping-car, but they’d just sold the last one. And arrangements have already been made with the Sullivan Garage to send the bill to Fifty Broadway, the first of each and every month.”
You had her get in and sit beside you, and showed her the gears and brakes and the mysteries of the dashboard.
“Saturday afternoon we’ll run her uptown and I’ll give you your first lesson,” you said.
She turned suddenly and put her arms close around your neck and kissed you on the mouth. That was the only time she has ever done that; curious that it should have been about an automobile; it doesn’t seem like her. Perhaps it wasn’t; maybe it was just something she happened to feel.…
You met a lot of her friends—a strange assortment, there were none you ever really liked. Except young Cruikshanks, then just a boy, writing verses on the back of menus and grandly offering them to the restaurant manager as payment for his meal. You thought Margaret was in love with him. And the girl with copper hair who was arrested in the strike out in Jersey and Jane got you to furnish bail for her. She was a Russian or something. You were irritated most by the fellow with the dirty grey moustache, a professor at Columbia, who used to sit around and make wisecracks about women. What did Jane see in him? She said he was amusing and instructive because he was a decadent satyr, and Victor said, not decadent, impotent.
You liked Victor at first; no use denying it, you thought him agreeable and likable. He seemed to you more normal and balanced than anyone else in that crowd.
You contemplated elaborate plans for the spring and summer. You would rent a place somewhere in the country or at the seashore, a modest place not too far out, and there install the family. You and Jane could commute together, using the Packard morning and evening to the railroad station, and at the end of school Margaret and Rose could tell the little flat goodbye until autumn. Jane could have all the funny friends she wanted, though for your part you could do just as well without them. By the middle of February you were already making inquiries as to localities and getting lists from renting agents.
Jane didn’t seem very enthusiastic about it. Twice you wanted her to spend a Sunday looking at places with you, and each time she had something else to do. Then she objected that it couldn’t be done anyway until the girls were out of school at the end of June, as she couldn’t leave them in town alone, and when you suggested that they also might commute that was held to be impractical. You felt that there was beginning to be something queer about Jane; she was the last person in the world to temporize. She was being demoralized by her funny friends.
One Saturday in May, lunching with her downtown, you insisted that she drive with you the following morning to look at a house somewhere north of White Plains which you had been told of by one of the men in the office.
“There are nine rooms, two baths, everything modern, and it’s at the edge of a wood on top of a hill overlooking one of the reservoirs,” you told her. “Sounds like the very thing we want. Completely furnished, four bedrooms, and a room over the garage for a maid or a couple. I called up the agent and he’s holding it for us; I told him we’d be out before noon—”
Something in her face stopped you. Something in her eyes made you feel suddenly silly and unreal, as if you had been caught offering a stick of candy to a queen on her throne.
“I think you’d like it,” you said lamely, feeling a fear expand in your heart.
“I know I would,” said Jane warmly, too warmly. “It sounds perfect. I’d love it.”
“Well—”
“But it’s impossible. I’m going to be married. I’m telling you first, as we decided only a week ago, and it’s going to be a secret for a little while. Even the girls don’t know.” She laughed, a short deep little laugh. “When I refused your offer to set up housekeeping because you ought to get married, I didn’t guess I’d crowd in ahead of you. Maybe you were just being polite and waiting for me to go first because I’m older.”
“I thought—I thought—” you stammered.
You stopped. You couldn’t say that.
“Who is it?”
“As if you didn’t know,” she smiled.
Good god, she was being kittenish about it.
“I don’t know,” you said. “Who is it?”
“Victor, of course. You really didn’t know? You must have. I’ve been as silly as a schoolgirl.”
She laughed again; why did she have to sit there and laugh like a simpleton? Then instantly she was serious; she looked at you gravely:
“I’m so happy, Bill, but don’t think I haven’t thought of you. I know this interferes with your plans for the summer, and I suppose it’s ungrateful, you’ve been so generous—”
She made quite a speech about your generosity.
You lost your head and almost made a scene there in the restaurant. Your feeling that you had been betrayed was surely not entirely unreasonable. This was the twentieth century and you claimed no patriarchal rights, but after all you were her brother, had been granted all the privileges and prerogatives and expectations of a brother, and certainly consultation on the choice of a husband was one of them. She might have asked your advice if only to ignore it. You pretended to no power of veto, but by heaven, if you had it you would certainly use it on Victor Knowlton—a half-baked writer and lecturer, coarse-grained, opinionated, most of his success due to his questionable methods of persuading presidents of women’s clubs that it was worth five hundred dollars to hear him spout for an hour about nothing. You had heard curious tales about him which had amused you at the time, but which, remembered now, convinced you that he was no man to marry your sister.
Jane, at first apparently amazed at your violence, assumed a patient and soothing forbearance which infuriated you. She offered no defense; if this petulant child has bruised himself, she seemed to say, I shall not aggravate the wound, I must humor him, poor kid. It was maddening.
“Very well,” you exclaimed, “if you will have it, yes, that’s what I mean. No man is expected to be a saint, but neither should he be a promiscuous pig, if he expects a decent woman to marry him.”
“I don’t think I need defend Victor against the charge of being a promiscuous pig,” said Jane slowly. “That’s a little strong isn’t it? Anyway it’s his own affair, just as my own checkered past is mine. And from your own standard you must admit it’s decent of him to want to marry me after having had me for nearly a year. Of course it’s true that I’ve argued against it, but now that we’ve decided to have children—”
You stared at her. This couldn’t possibly be your sister, your dear Jane. This was some mocking harlot.…
You wanted to yell at her, shout some insult at her, but you felt suddenly weak, done in, and frightened. You felt also that you were incapable of movement, which was just as well, for you felt a desire to lay your hands on her, choke her perhaps, or strike her in the face, not hard enough to leave a mark, but enough to move her, to make her feel your outraged virility.… She deserved it. Had she not encouraged you to believe that she felt about the family as you did, that it was the closest and most important of all human relations; had she not permitted you to spend considerable sums of money on her and the girls which you could very well have used for other purposes; had she not treacherously pretended to a complete confidence and intimacy, all the while—nearly a year, she said—withholding from you her vulgar—
Discussing, probably, with him, her generous brother.…
Well, it s all over, that’s that, you told yourself, standing on the narrow Fulton Street sidewalk, after she had parted from you at the restaurant door and hurried off to the subway. Nothing tragic, of course, but deeply annoying and irritating—and revealing a hard selfishness, along with other weaknesses and impurities, where you would least expect to find them. An experience presumably shared by all brothers who have some regard for their natural obligations and try to do the right thing.
You wandered aimlessly up Broadway. You might as well telephone that agent that you wouldn’t go up there tomorrow; what the devil could you do with a house on top of a hill with four bedrooms? What was there to do anywhere, with anything?
Monday there was a letter from her, suggesting that you get the Packard, or send for it, saying that as it had really been meant for the four of you she couldn’t very well keep it any longer, especially in view of your dislike for Victor, which she ardently hoped would disappear when you knew him better; and anyway, he already had a little touring car and there was no sense in owning two. You replied briefly that the roadster was hers; she could do as she liked with it, give it to Margaret and Rose or sell it for junk, it was none of your business.
You had the idea that even if she had told the truth regarding the past year, marriage need not be inevitable, with its finality and permanency. She would tire of him, or he of her, and then a generous brother with a sense of responsibility and money enough to buy motor cars and rent summer homes would be again welcomed and appreciated. You would see her once more and put it up to her: she didn’t like the idea of marriage, she had argued against it, then don’t do it. There may be no children. It would be easy to persuade her that it would at least be more sensible to wait.…
You were still turning it over in your mind when a few days later, in the morning mail, that thing came saying that they were married. It was like them not to use a plain dignified engraved announcement. It was on some kind of art paper, purple or blue, and the lettering was so cockeyed you could hardly read it: something about Jane Sidney and Victor Knowlton, having sacrificed to the gods at the City Hall on May twenty-first, would be legally at home.…
Any man who expects to get anything from a woman is a fool, or if he does it’s just an accident. No matter who she is, she takes what she wants, and a fat lot she cares about you. Essentially they’re barbarians, animals, they’ll tear you to pieces in an instant and think nothing of it, like a jackal, and then lie down and stretch and lick themselves, and expect to be patted by the next one that comes along. It’s too bad they don’t do it literally, devour you, then it could happen only once. Erma would agree with you all right; she’s at least honest about it. Mrs. Davis didn’t hurt you any maybe; she used you; what did she give you? A son; a hell of a favor that was, he ate a dozen dinners at your expense and made an ass of you with that joke of a statue—though he may not have meant it—and he’s spent over seven thousand dollars of your money hanging around Paris and Rome probably cracking more jokes about rich boobs who don’t know anything about art.
Lucy—Lucy wasn’t a woman, she was Lucy. It would have been the same with her—no. No! That was like a raindrop that never falls from the cloud—is whirled upward instead, to float above the atmosphere eternally, finding no home; or a flower bud, congealed still folded, preserved in a crystal, lifeless without having lived.
The most savage and insolent feast though was that of little Millicent, in that room with the afternoon sun blazing at the window, long ago, as she went silently back and forth collecting things from your closet and dresser and piling them on a chair, and finally turned and came towards you.…
Abandoned, bitter, with nothing anywhere in reach to hold onto, you were not surprised that the old familiar fantasy returned; you accepted it, and felt her hands again for the first time in many months, the night after Jane left you standing in front of the restaurant.