Part III — Janet on Her Own
Chapter Fifteen I
Earlier in the same day, a special messenger from Claude had brought two notes of regret to the Lorillard tenements, one for Cornelia and one for Janet. A little before evening, these notes were followed by quantities of flowers and fruit, which were for Janet alone. But Cornelia went into ecstasies over the presents and caused the rooms of Number Fifteen to ring with her arpeggio laughter.
The note to Janet read:
Darling Janet:
Business interests and a promise made long ago make it imperative for me to go to Long Island today. The worst of it is, I shall be away for three days, and how unhappy this makes me, you can’t conceive. Six days without you will have loitered by when next we meet! Six endless days away from the miracle of your soft voice and the wonder of your heavenly smile.
I came back from Washington late last night, not knowing that I should be prevented from seeing you today. Even so, I had my car driven, far from its regular course, past the Lorillard houses. How I prayed that a light from your little corner room would invitingly tell me that you were still awake! But all was dark, and I had to be content to let my fancy play around a certain maze of curly bronze hair, two eyes as limpid gray as an Adirondack lake before dawn, and a pair of ruddy lips that smile divinely or talk with so much sense and charm.
You are not like any other girl I have ever known, dearest Janet! I think of you as a rare and delicate flower whose perfume holds my senses as your spirit engrosses my soul.
I want you to have a happy evening, dear girl, despite my absence. Only, every now and then, you are to give a passing thought to me—disconsolate, forlorn impatient to be with you again.
Ever your Claude.
Of course, in Claude’s absence the party was declared off, all but the supper in the pagoda.
Cornelia read the letter over twice. The second time, she uttered some of the more lyrical passages aloud, rendering them with a faintly exaggerated stress or mock-heroic inflection as the case might be.
“Exquisite!” she carolled, handing the note back to Janet. “A perfect love letter! By what an expert hand!”
Lydia Dyson came in just then and had to be told all about the disappointment. The author of “Brothers and Sisters,” in an abbreviated accordion pleated frock, a necklace of jade beads, and very French shoes, looked as professionally Cleopatrish as ever.
“Janet,” she said, knowingly, “Claude has gone to Huntington, to that Armstrong girl, Marjorie—the one that was hotfoot after the Earl of Dunbar. She didn’t get the Earl, you know. Now they all say she’ll marry Claude. I bet she will, too.”
“He doesn’t love her,” protested Janet.
“As if that made any difference! Every man needs a woman to represent him in social life and to advertise the dignity and solidity of his own rooftree. Any woman who can do these things satisfactorily qualifies as a suitable wife. Men, you see, are more conventional than women. Or perhaps I should say, more businesslike.”
“Businesslike!” Cornelia interposed. “Say disgusting, and you’ll be much nearer the truth. Didn’t I tell you, Janet,” she continued, “that men think of women in only one way—and that a beastly one?”
“On the contrary, they think of women in two ways,” contended Lydia in her drawling Southern tongue. “To a man, all womankind is divided into two groups: the woman who stands for his home, and all the others—the women who stand for his pleasure. The one woman is a necessity; all the others a luxury. Every man gets the first at any cost, and then bids for one or more of the second, if he has the price.”
“Don’t be bizarre and crude, Lydia,” said Cornelia, not relishing this analysis in Janet’s presence.
“Crude?” said Lydia, repelling the charge as melodramatically as it was made. “It is not I who am crude. It is man. It is man who divides our whole sex crassly into these two groups. It is man who sees in every woman either a housekeeper or a wanton. It is man who fixes a trade price for affairs of the heart and rates marriages by their market value. Call this crude, if you like! Or call it an incurable blindness to the differing blend of vital forces that makes each woman unique. In this respect, how unlike men are to us, who see in every man a new, mystic union of protector, lover and father of our children!”
“The new trinity!” chanted Cornelia, with a significant laugh. “But I’m sure, dear Lydia, that not every woman has your gift for discovering this mystic trinity in so many unique specimens of the other sex.”
“Dear Cornelia, you flatter me. My only advantage over other women lies in the prudence which caused me to get a husband before I set out to make the discoveries you allude to.”
“Don’t let us talk about marriage as it exists today,” said Cornelia, parrying the blow as best she could. “Marriage is so banal.”
“Yes, and so convenient,” drawled Lydia, who reluctantly supported her husband in idleness and luxury. “Also, so expensive. Husbands now come dearer than ever before in the history of family life, while lovers never were cheaper.”
“Lydia is joking,” said Janet, sending her clear, mollifying voice into the breach.
“No, I’m not joking,” said Lydia, with the utmost gravity. She lit a cigarette, adding as she did so:
“I’m making hay while the sun shines.”
“Does your husband agree with you on this point?” asked Janet, curiously.
“My dear, he’s used to me. He takes my word for everything. Also my money. But I’m frank to say that I don’t hold with Cornelia’s notions about free love. They’re too fantastic and impractical. I hold with the French system: Marry first and experiment afterwards. It’s not logical, Janet, but it works well. If you experiment first, you are sure to be done out of marriage, and you may even be done out of love.”
“Really, Lydia,” said Cornelia, now thoroughly incensed. “You must know that Janet believes, as I do, that love is a surrender, not a sale. She isn’t offering her affections to the highest bidder.”
Janet, intervening, remarked that this was true; but, as she found Lydia’s views very interesting, she begged Cornelia to let their visitor have her say.
“Oh, very well,” said Cornelia, biting her lip.
“That’s right, Janet,” said Lydia Dyson, grateful for her support. “I’m sorry to disagree with Cornelia. But in this matter, she’s all at sea. Believe it or not, in modern life, love is a commodity for sale, like any other commodity. What else can you expect? Do you know of any other gift in the possession of man, woman or child which is not sold to the highest bidder? Doesn’t a playwright subdue his creative faculty to the requirements of the manager who offers the most royalties? Doesn’t the novelist or the musician or the engineer do the same in his line? How indeed can they help it in a country where everything is bought and sold, where the greed and gluttony of men put everything under the hammer, from a glass of water to a draught of genius? Why marvel that women have to sell their bodies, when poets and artists have to sell their souls?”
“Take it from me, Lydia,” Cornelia burst in, caustically, “when you apply the oratorical powers of Robert Lloyd to the moral principles of Mazie Ross, the product is hard to beat!”
“Cornelia, you wouldn’t say spiteful things like that if you only knew the truth about sex relations. I forgive you because you don’t.”
“If I only knew!” said Cornelia. She gave a florid operatic laugh. “Do you really suppose I don’t know?”
“No woman does who hasn’t been married to a man. Not until she has been chained in wedlock for some time does she see the cloven hoof or feel the mark of the beast, or get her fanciful pictures about love put in a proper perspective. That’s one thing marriage does for a woman.”
“By your own admission, then,” remarked Janet, “Cornelia is right in thinking that the game isn’t worth the candle, isn’t she?”
“Dearie,” said Lydia, with unction, “ask the most wretched wife on earth, and she’ll answer: ’Tis better to have wed and lost, than never to have wed at all.’”
II
Cornelia, observing that Janet took Claude’s absence with surprising composure, wondered whether it was a case of still waters running deep. It was partly that, but there was another reason. The apparent ease with which Claude had yielded the preference to Marjorie’s claim upon his time carried with it an unflattering implication as regards the value he set upon Janet’s friendship. To be sure, there was the rapturous love letter. But fine words buttered no parsnips; they pleased the ear but they neither explained Claude’s course nor justified it.
Thus Janet was as much nettled as disappointed by her lover’s absence. Yet it was not her way to stew in misery. And her control of her feelings was made easier by the pressure of some secretarial work for which she had just been engaged by Howard Madison Grey, the playwright.
Immediately after supper, therefore, Janet left her friends in the Japanese pagoda on the roof, having arranged to spend the evening in Harry Kelly’s office in flat Number Thirteen, where she proposed to practice on the athlete’s typewriter.
Her object was to “increase her speed” so that her most recent position might be made securer.
Through the Collegiate Bureau, to which Cornelia had introduced her, she had already been given two opportunities in business offices downtown. She had lost them both within a week, her refinement and charm of manner having been voted poor substitutes for the experience that she still lacked.
The fault was not wholly Janet’s. Before she left home, she had taken a course in shorthand and typewriting (in the teeth of her mother’s opposition) at an Evening High School. It was one of those carefully pasteurized courses for which the American educational system is famous; it was showy, time consuming, and totally useless. But how could Janet have known that high-school stenography was as pitiably inadequate to the practical needs of a modern mercantile office as high-school French or German to the practical needs of a tourist on the Continent?
Not wanting to get into the bad books of the Collegiate Bureau, Janet was anxious to avert a third discharge. Moreover, her post with the playwright had the intrinsic merit of being more congenial, as well as more lucrative than any she had filled before.
Janet was thankful that Cornelia would be occupied with the party, for her efforts to make herself more competent invariably excited her friend to derision. Cornelia, like a true-blue Kipsite, was no devotee of good workmanship. Endowed with the makings of success in any one of half a dozen professions, she had achieved failure in all of them, her inveterate lack of industry and application having botched a promising career in turn as an author, singer, painter, dancer, decorator and dress designer.
A born worker, Janet stood in no danger of imitating Cornelia’s business vagaries. She could not have afforded it, anyway. Unlike Cornelia, she had no private income, her only resources being a small bank deposit (a relative’s bequest), which was dwindling with alarming rapidity. Thus, inclination and necessity were as one in spurring her on to making a success of her new post as typist and amanuensis for Howard Madison Grey.
III
The keys of the typewriter were going at a merry gallop when Robert Lloyd, who had a desk in Kelly’s office, came in.
“What do you mean by breaking the commandments of the Lorillard Tenements?” he said, putting a sheaf of papers on his desk and getting ready to attack them.
“Which commandments, Robert?”
“All ten. The first five prohibit any useful work in the daytime on penalty of loss of caste. The second five prohibit the same at night on penalty of excommunication, if not expulsion.”
She laughed and asked him why he hadn’t joined Cornelia’s supper party in the Japanese pagoda. He explained that he had been detained at a meeting of the Guildsmen’s League, of which he was now the organizing secretary. He added that he had brought home a quantity of raw material to be hammered into a tract on Waste in Industry, a job which would take him all night.
They each buckled to the task in hand. Janet liked to work in the same room with Robert, who knew when to be silent as well as when to talk. He treated her like a fellow worker of his own sex, paying her none of that exaggerated show of consideration which most men give to women outside their own family circle. Thus his presence stimulated her and in no wise interfered with the concentration demanded by her typewriting practice. When she reached a good stopping point, she offered to help him. He accepted the offer eagerly and dictated several letters to her.
“A good job,” he said, after she had handed him the typed sheets to be signed, “and a quick one, too. You’re improving by leaps and bounds. Indeed, you might develop into a ‘speed demon,’ but for your un-American weakness for accuracy.”
“I’ve got to be accurate. I do all sorts of work every morning, for Mr. Grey, the playwright.”
“Grey? The author of ‘The Love that Lies’ isn’t he? The play that ran for two seasons. Is he very exacting?”
“No, but his wife is. She keeps an eagle eye on all the typing that’s done for him.”
“Why?”
“Why? Well, she serves him as a sort of combination mother, nurse, watchdog, and general superintendent. Just as most wives do.”
“And just as most wives will continue to do, until they choose an independent living in preference.”
“Do you think that women are solely responsible for the social arrangement by which two distinct things like motherhood and housekeeping are tied indissolubly together?”
“No. And I don’t believe that men are solely responsible, either.”
“Aren’t they?”
“No. Remember, marriage was not always what it is today. In the middle ages, the home was also the place of business, and the wife was her husband’s business associate as well as his mate. Later, when business went out of the door, slavery came in through the window. This was not exclusively man’s doing. Men and women muddled things up together. Honors are very nearly even on that score.”
“Be fair, Robert! Hitherto, men have had all the power.”
“Yes, and women have had all the glory. They were every bit as well satisfied to belong to the fair, privileged, and law-evading sex, as men were satisfied to belong to the coarse, responsible, and law-making sex. As soon as the majority of women follow the lead of Lady Cicely in ‘Captain Brassbound’s Conversion,’ that is, as fast as they ‘scorn death, spurn fate, and set their hopes above happiness and love,’ they will be able to cope with man’s supremacy as successfully outside the home as they have already done within it. What is more, they will work their will in public much more openly and honorably than they have so far worked it in private.”
“Men are always declaring that women could easily get full independence if only they would go about it in the right way. Clearly, men know the right way and women don’t. Cornelia says that if they are so very much cleverer than we are, it is a pity they don’t set their wits to work so as to help instead of hindering us in the struggle for equality.”
“Never mind what Cornelia says,” exclaimed Robert, energetically. “She is crazy on the subject of men; that is why she keeps forever harping on it. One way of doing this is to accuse men of everything evil under the sun, from the creation of God to the invention of the cardboard kitchenette flat. Please don’t join her in the vulgar senseless game of pitting one sex against the other.”
“You do Cornelia an injustice. She doesn’t maintain that all women are angels and all men devils. Nor do I. But suppose some men are angels. I shouldn’t care to be a housekeeper for the archangel Gabriel.”
Robert hoped that any lady who consented to share Gabriel’s bed and board would find the archangel up-to-date and gentlemanly enough to excuse her from washing dishes and scrubbing floors. Why should an archangelic or any other sort of gentleman shortsightedly insist that a talented bride on her way to becoming an excellent banker, merchant, or politician, should transform herself into a mediocre woman-of-all-work? Why should he consider his own bargain bettered by such a questionable transformation?
“On the other hand, Janet,” he added boldly, “why should an up-to-date young lady jump from the devil of housekeeping into the deep sea of free love, as I fear you will end by doing if you follow Cornelia’s suggestions?”
She knew that he had Claude in mind. But she was unable to take offence at his uncandid candor and his disinterested interest.
“Robert, what a tantalizing mixture of the liberal and the conservative you are!” she exclaimed, refusing to take up his challenge.
“I am merely the child of my age, Janet. I was born with reactionary habits and nursed on radical ideas. All logic counsels me to become an enemy of existing institutions; all instinct drives me to conduct operations within the enemy’s camp. I betray under two flags.”
“You can’t make me believe that. If you were all kinds of a traitor, you wouldn’t be such a jolly companion to work with or to talk to. Do you know the most delightful thing about you, Robert?”
“Modesty forbids me to say—but not to hear. Tell me.”
“It is the fact that you can behave towards a woman friend as frankly and decently and unsentimentally as you would towards a man friend. You can’t imagine what a relief it is to a girl to know one man who’ll always treat her man-to-man fashion.”
“Will I? Janet, if you were perfectly sure of my future conduct you’d find me an insufferable bore. Besides, no fascinating woman ever wanted to be treated like a man—at least not for long at a time. You won’t be the first exception.”
“Don’t be silly, Robert. If ever I should get married—which Heaven forbid!—it will be to a man like you, one who can work with me without constantly remembering my sex.”
“Oh almost any man will be able to do that, as soon as being your husband loses its novelty for him. Still, I’m grateful to you for your well-meant opinion, Janet. I shall try to deserve it by offering you a small business partnership.”
He rapidly sketched the plan he had in mind, pointing out that, as only her mornings were engaged by the playwright, Grey, she might help him afternoons with the Guild League’s work. He was hard pressed for assistance; the League could just afford a part-time worker; there was a good deal of editing and typewriting which he was sure she could undertake.
Janet begged to be taken on trial. The bargain was struck amid the sounds of merrymaking that came, none too faintly, through the walls of flat Number Fifteen. She remarked that Cornelia’s party appeared to have been a huge success after all.
“Yes, it has given birth to the firm of Barr and Lloyd,” said Robert, jestingly.
He was aware of the conflict in Janet between the temptations of the love chase and the attraction of the force that moves the sun and the stars. And he fondly believed that this conflict no longer existed in himself. The love of man for woman against the love of life! He had made his decision, she had not.
Two questions remained uppermost in his mind. One was: “Could he capture Janet’s great natural talents for his own side, the side, not of the fires of sensuous gratification but of the flame that burns at the heart of the world?” The other was: “Did Janet really want him to act towards her precisely as towards a man?”
Curiously enough, the irrelevance of the second question to the first, did not strike him.