Chapter Twelve I
And so it had. None the less, the experience had taught Claude a lesson which, for once, he took to heart. He never again supposed that Janet’s friendship was to be had on the same terms as Mazie’s or even Cornelia’s.
True, he remained in the dark as to what precisely her idea of self-respect was. Conflicting and irreconcilable inferences were the only ones he could draw from the conduct of a girl who lived in the Lorillard tenements, moved in the Outlaws’ circle, professed to be hostile to marriage, yet stood on her dignity withal, in quite a traditional womanly way.
But Claude was not the man to waste time on psychological conundrums. Besides, he was too happy to be critical. He was back in the good graces of Janet, or rather, as he soon paraphrased the case, she was back in his. He flattered himself that he was the dominant influence over a girl who was a piquant, if puzzling, amalgam of Brooklyn and Bohemia.
In the next two weeks, his position as Janet’s particular friend was established beyond dispute. Few afternoons passed in which his motor car did not drive up to the Lorillard and whirl her away to a place of gayety or recreation. The chief rival claimant upon her time was Robert Lloyd. But as Claude, in point of social advantages and personal graces, far outdistanced him, this rivalry was not taken seriously by any of the three persons concerned, least of all by Claude.
One day, to Cornelia’s astonishment, Janet announced that she had planned to spend the afternoon, not with Claude, but with Robert. She made the announcement from a tuffet on which she sat soberly, while reading a book by Mrs. Beatrice Webb.
“Is this your pensive day?” asked Cornelia, ironically.
“Yes,” replied Janet. “Robert complains that I’m neglecting him, and consequently my education. I think I ought to give him a chance to prove both assertions. So I’ve asked him to come here this afternoon. I can’t spend all my days in sky-larking, can I?”
“My dear, ‘youth’s a stuff will not endure.’ If you choose Mrs. Sidney Webb and Robert Lloyd rather than Claude Fontaine, the choice is your own. Of course, Robert is very entertaining. He pledges you with facts and figures. But when I was a rosebud like you, Araminta, I preferred a man who drank to me only with his eyes.”
“Cornelia, I adore being made love to; yet I get horribly tired of it—even of Claude’s love making—when it’s kept up too long. And I hate facts and figures; yet Robert’s never bore me.”
“What a morbid symptom, my dear!”
“Oh, don’t say that. I feel sure it’s quite a natural condition, in my case. But perhaps there’s a quality left out of me, a quality that other women possess.”
Janet was clearly eager to carry on her self-analysis, but Cornelia gave no sign of sharing this eagerness.
Cornelia, in fact, was far from pleased. Her unconscious game was to keep Robert revolving in an orbit around herself. He was such an excellent drawing card! For had he not the rare power of raising the value of any object or person he admired? Not that people ever credited him with unusual discernment or insight. Yet the fact remained that Robert had only to praise a human being or a work of art hitherto undervalued or overlooked, and presto, the article or the person instantly became subject to an urgent popular demand. This was one of the reasons why Cornelia (who felt that she had been handsome enough in surrendering Claude without a murmur) did not wish Robert as well to gravitate from her stellar system to Janet’s.
But, seeing no way of cancelling Robert’s visit, she determined not to be a spectator of it.
“I must run in next door, Janet,” she said, “and ask the Gorilla to do an errand for me.”
She left, omitting her customary lyrical phrases of affection. Janet did not suspect the jealousy behind this omission. But she was undeniably disappointed because Cornelia had not encouraged her to discuss her friendships with Claude and Robert about whom her heart and her thoughts were brimful.
Thus quickly did Cornelia damp down the fire of intimacy by treating the exchange of self-revelation as a strictly one-sided transaction. She had (so it struck Janet) a very low opinion of all confidences—other than her own.
II
When the bell rang, Janet opened the door wondering why Robert had come an hour before the appointed time.
But it was Claude who entered! He came in, like the god of the glorious spring without, in his gayest, most engaging mood.
“What luck, to find you in!” he cried. “Janet, I’ve come in an open car on the chance of taking you for a spin to Mineola to see the start of the great Cross-Continental airplane race.”
“Oh, Claude, how nice of you. But—I’m afraid I can’t go.”
“Why not?”
“Well—you see—I’ve promised to go out with Robert this afternoon.”
His face clouded.
“And you never told me!” escaped from him.
“You are not my diarist,” she said, faintly ironical.
“Please forgive me, Janet,” he said, dropping his possessive tone, as he reminded himself how touchy she was about her independence. “But I’m disappointed, bitterly disappointed. I planned the excursion as a surprise for you. And how I’ve counted on it!”
“Not more than I long to go, Claude. But what can I do?”
He took her hands in his, and said eagerly:
“Must you keep the engagement? Can’t you think of some excuse? Where on earth was he going to take you to?”
“To the Japanese Industrial Exhibition at the Grand Central Palace.”
He made a contemptuous grimace.
“A stuffy exhibition!” he exclaimed. “Good Heavens, Janet, why hesitate to change your plans? It isn’t as if Robert wanted you for himself, as I do. He’ll understand.”
Janet wondered whether Claude would understand if she confessed that she was actually more interested in the Japanese Exhibition than in the cross-continent air race. But though she kept silent on this point, because she really wanted greatly to go with Claude, she was rather troubled. It was not easy for her to gratify a private desire at the expense of a social obligation.
“I don’t like to hurt Robert’s feelings,” she said, turning away in her indecision.
“Oh, very well, if you don’t wish to come with me!”
He flung himself sulkily into a chair.
Janet was astonished at his complete change of mood. She might have felt hurt, had she not had a woman’s instinctive weakness for spoiling the man she was fond of.
She sat down irresolutely, and reflected that this would be the second time she had broken an engagement with Robert.
“It’s idiotic,” he said, rising, with a sense of deep injury. “Here is the most sensational race in a century, on a perfectly glorious day. And I’m mad to be with you.”
“Perhaps Robert is, too,” she said, a merry light dancing in her eyes.
“Of course, he’s no fool. He’d rather be with a wonderful girl than an ordinary one. But what he wants more even than a wonderful girl is a chopping-block, any chopping-block, for his sociological theories. Why on earth did you leave your home, if all you crave is more instruction, and if the only freedom you want is the freedom to stand on more ceremony than before?”
“That has nothing to do with the matter, Claude,” said Janet, refusing to ignore the truth simply because it was disagreeable. “Robert may not be offended at finding me away, but he is sure to be offended at finding me rude.”
“It seems to me that you are far more concerned with Robert’s feelings than with mine,” said Claude, changing to a tone of melancholy reproach.
“But I really haven’t a good excuse, Claude,” she said, troubled, but still indecisive.
“I know girls who wouldn’t take two minutes to find an excellent one,” he said, with a return of his superior authoritative air.
Janet’s temptation was great; greater yet when Claude, in his most handsome and daring manner, drew her out of the chair and put an arm around her waist.
“It’s an occasion in a million, Janet. I’ve set my heart on this ride with you. What does it matter what Robert may think, or what anyone may think, as long as we two want so much to be together? You must come. I shall believe you don’t care a straw for me, if you don’t.”
His flawless form and vibrant voice annihilated argument. With a happy heart but a guilty conscience, Janet dismissed her scruples.
On the way out, she stopped in at Number Thirteen to beg Cornelia to smooth matters over with Robert.
Cornelia, serene and all smiles again, promised to do her best.
III
Robert came home soon after and, getting no response from Number Fifteen, went to his own room in Kelly’s suite next door.
He got all the news from Cornelia, who politely tried not to gloat over his disappointment. She professed to see no reason for finding fault with Janet’s easy submission to the force of an irresistible attraction.
As it was fairly plain that Robert would have preferred to be alone, Cornelia perversely lost no time in proposing that he carry out his original intention of visiting the Japanese Industrial Exhibition, she, of course, to take Janet’s place as his companion.
She had another reason for inviting herself out with Robert. This reason was the Harlem Gorilla. He, though almost superstitiously devoted to her, sometimes had to be “managed,” in accordance with Cornelia’s view that love makes the most constant of men uncertain, coy, and hard to please. Luckily, the treatment that Harry Kelly’s case required was not a subtle one, and so it was Cornelia’s practice to alternate a little encouraging discouragement, with a little discouraging encouragement. On this occasion, by accompanying Robert who didn’t want her, and deserting Kelly who wanted her very much, she neatly killed two birds with the same stone.
On the way to the exhibition, Robert gave Cornelia an account of his latest occupation. He had been made organizing secretary of a body called the League of Guildsmen. Was this a fanciful name for another set of Outlaws? No, the Guildsmen were servers of the community, the Outlaws were spongers on it.
“You have golden opinions of us,” said Cornelia, theatrically. “I marvel that you soil your garments by staying in our midst.”
“It’s nothing to marvel at, Cornelia. I had to learn what Kips Bay and its slum population were at first hand before I could desire in earnest to destroy them, root and branch. Familiarity, which sometimes breeds contempt, often breeds homicidal mania. Do you recollect how Caesar spent a short vacation among a band of desperate pirates and how the experience filled him with a conviction that it was his duty to exterminate them? Well, I am filled with the same conviction about Kips Bay.”
“What a passion you have for reforming everybody and everything, Cato! I am sure it is a very noble passion, though it does include poor me in its program of extermination. Still, I wonder whether reform, like charity, oughtn’t to begin at home?”
“I used to think so,” replied Robert, unmoved by her sarcasm. “In my schooldays, my elders obliged me to hack my way through obsolete French tragedies or the differential calculus instead of allowing me to gain a working knowledge of current English plays or of modern political economy. And when I made a fearful hash of their instruction, they voted me a miserable failure. Whereupon, I determined to reform myself in order that I might reform the world. I am wiser now. I know that I must reform the world before I can hope to reform myself.”
“Cato, you are a perfectly gorgeous mixture of building air castles and of seeing things upside down! One can never tell whether your head is in the clouds or on the ground.”
Robert indulgently proceeded to say that the Guildsmen were young people of like sentiments with his own. In a general way, their aim was to advance the idea that the producers and servers of society, being the rightful possessors of the earth, must eliminate the profiteers and the parasites who have usurped possession.
“If that is your aim, Robert, I predict that your league and your secretaryship will have a short life and a merry one.”
Robert laughed and admitted that he did not expect a long tenure of office. The Guild plan was a European idea for which America was by no means ripe.
“I fancy we are as progressive in industrial matters as the Europeans are,” said Cornelia, on her mettle.
“Oh, more so,” replied Robert, drily. “Our giant industries lead the world in maximizing the production of things of a mediocre quality and the creation of human life of a contemptible quality. Yes, in crude capacity, we are ahead of our European competitors. But in political capacity, we still lag far behind. Hence the difficulty of transplanting to our soil a high-class social policy like that of the Guildsmen.”
“But when this Guild plan dies a natural death, what forlorn hope will you champion next?”
“I fear there’ll be nothing left but to throw myself on the mercy of a rich uncle.”
“What, an uncle in a fairy tale?”
“No, an uncle in California, a real live one.”
Cornelia evinced little more than a languid interest in Robert’s information. Fabulously rich relatives—who were cast for the parts of Deus ex machina, but who never materialized in flesh or cash—made a golden splash in the ’scutcheon of too many veteran Lorillard inhabitants. She preferred a conversation dealing with more tangible personages. Truth to tell, she rather hoped that Robert would try to undo the painful impression he had made on her by his recent criticism of her affair with Percival Houghton.
All the greater was her chagrin when he brought the talk around to the subject of Janet.
IV
He began adroitly enough by complimenting her on the success with which she had made Janet alive to the galvanic interests of contemporary life. It was a miracle of education, he assured her, and he begged her not to spoil the achievement by converting Janet to her favorite theory of free love. He hoped she would rather warn her friend of the folly of contracting a free union under existing social sanctions.
“Like the majority of men, you believe love and sex emotion to be one and the same thing,” she retorted, cuttingly. “That’s why you have no understanding of what freedom in love means.”
“Now, Cornelia, I won’t be drawn into a controversy on the merits of free love.”
“Then don’t sneer at it.”
“I don’t. In fact, like every healthy young human being, I am by nature something of a varietist myself. But, as a civilized member of society, I’m bound to take the institutions of my country and generation as I find them. I believe Janet will be better off, if she does so too. Let her set out to alter or revolutionize our institutions, but not to defy them.”
“My poor Cato! Don’t you know that numbers of the young women of today are quietly doing what numbers of the young men have always done?”
“Living in illicit relations, you mean?”
“That is what a ridiculous man-made custom calls it.”
“But, Cornelia, although many of the Lorillard girls have admittedly flung a glove in the face of social conventions—”
“I’m not talking of Lorillard girls, Robert. I’m talking of teachers, lawyers, stenographers—the ‘respectable’ girls who remain in their schools and offices without any loss of self-respect or public esteem, and who merely do what the ‘respectable’ men do, that is, pay a mock tribute to outward appearances, and go scot free.”
“Exactly, Cornelia,” said Robert, triumphantly. “They pay a tribute to appearances. They quietly disobey existing conventions. But they don’t defy them, much less try to alter them. They are frequently their staunchest supporters.”
“Just like the men.”
“Just like the men. But you are wrong when you say they go scot free. You are wrong again when you say that the tribute they pay is a mock tribute. It is anything but that. It is an endless payment by installments, a payment in degrading stealth and harassing secrecy.”
“What are you driving at?”
“Janet is not the girl to pay a tribute of this kind,” he said, with emphasis. “If she champions the cause of free love, she won’t do so merely to experience the ups and downs of an underground existence. She will do so, believing it to be a wise or progressive departure. And she will defend her championship in the teeth of the whole world, regardless of its effect on her future.”
Cornelia received this speech unmoved.
“Well, why shouldn’t she?” she said. “Others have endured much more for their beliefs. To be candid, I really don’t see how Janet’s behavior concerns you, any way.”
“You forget, Cornelia, that I, too, talked modernism in a blue streak to her before she broke with her people. And so I feel that I share with you the responsibility for her present course.”
“Oh, do you?”
“Yes. There’s a lot of moonshine in Kips Bay that passes for modernity. I think the least we can do is to show Janet that modernity is not simply a new watchword for moonshine. We ought to prevent her from being taken in by the illusion which the Outlaws produce of easy, satisfying intimacies between the sexes.”
A stream of silvery laughter escaped Cornelia. Then, in a studied tone of superiority, she replied:
“My dear boy, the love relation between two individuals is strictly their own private affair. It is nobody else’s business whatever. I have no right to interfere in Janet’s intimacies, and neither have you. Anyhow, I believe she is quite competent to stand on her own feet.”
“I’m not so sure, Cornelia. Janet is utterly different from the Lorillard Outlaw girl, or the Greenwich Village Bohemian girl. The effect of Greenwich Villageism is to make irregularity (what regularity so often is) a bore. The purpose of Lorillardism is to make irregularity pay. But Janet is not likely to adopt a radical creed merely as a pose or with an eye to its profit. She will adopt it in a spirit of sheer blind self-sacrifice. And every advantage will be taken of her, precisely because she’s not a sex profiteer.”
“Cato, the beginning of wisdom is self-knowledge. Have you ever heard of any gain in self-knowledge without some loss of happiness? No. It is a law of life which neither you, nor I, nor Janet can escape.”
“But,” he urged, “you must admit that Janet’s case is a special one. She has just left a home where purely private gratifications dictate which conventions shall be kept; and she has entered this model tenement life where, again, purely private gratifications dictate which conventions shall be broken. She may not grasp this difference all at once. Are we to let her inexperience cause her unnecessary suffering?”
“I, too, have suffered for my convictions, Robert!” she said, with a conclusive gesture of impatience.
Robert felt like telling her that, at this moment, she reminded him forcibly of the fox that had its tail cut off. But he didn’t quite dare.
Naturally, under the circumstances, the visit to the Grand Central Palace was a complete failure. Cornelia, loathing the exhibition, seized the first available excuse for asking to be taken home.
The resentment she harbored was too strong to be hidden beneath the ordinary civilities of polite intercourse. Her affection for Robert, which had long been hanging by a slender thread, was now sharply snapped through the complete revulsion of feeling she experienced towards him.
From her point of view, the fault was entirely his. She had always hated what she termed his moralistic nature. But never before had he shown such a callous want of sympathy with her past misfortunes or such a frank hostility to her present outlook on life. What she did not acknowledge to herself was that his concern for Janet had given her amour propre a mortal wound for which she could never forgive him.
On their return to the Lorillard tenements, she promptly called Harry Kelly into Number Fifteen. The Harlem Gorilla (renicknamed Hercules as a mark of favor) was highly flattered and only too willing to be a listener and a comforter.
“Robert is getting to be quite impossible!” she exclaimed, with a lurid Belasco intonation. “I can’t imagine what has come over him, or why he continues to honor the Outlaws with his presence, seeing that he is now an enemy of freedom and not a friend of it. Hercules, will you believe it, he cannot hear the word Lorillard so much as mentioned without showing the cloven hoof.”