Chapter Sixteen I
In the days that followed, Janet’s morning duty as Mr. Grey’s secretary and her afternoon employment as assistant to Robert left her with very little leisure. Such time as remained on her hands she spent chiefly with Cornelia or with Claude.
Neither of these friends exhibited much enthusiasm over Janet’s determined effort to earn her own living. Cornelia looked with ill-concealed disfavor on an exhibition of diligence which, besides being foreign to the atmosphere of Kips Bay, used up so much of her protegee’s time that the burden of housekeeping in flat Number Fifteen was inevitably shifted to Cornelia’s own shoulders. As for Claude, his reaction, equally cool, was governed partly by the scarcity value which now attached itself to Janet’s leisure hours, partly also by another reason which he hardly dared to face.
Somewhat daunted by the lukewarm attitude of her friends, Janet nevertheless kept courageously on with the task of making her independence secure.
Howard Madison Grey, the playwright, was then composing his fourth play, “Cleopatra’s Needle.” His practise was to dictate rapidly to Janet for an hour and a half, after which she was expected to typewrite the sketchy dialogue, changes in grammar and syntax and even in diction being left, as time went on, more and more to her discretion. As the work appealed to her interest as well as to her skill, she despatched it with zest.
Bit by bit, two drawbacks emerged, however. One was Janet’s liability to mistakes because of an absorption in the plot, an absorption so deep as to interfere seriously with quick mechanical transcription. The other was Mrs. Howard Madison Grey.
This lady had opened a correspondence with her future husband during the short run of his first play, “The Spice of Life,” for the hero of which (a masterful but incorrigible polygamist) she had conceived an unbounded admiration. The correspondence ripened into matrimony, Mrs. Grey bringing her spouse the money and influence that lifted him swiftly to a solid place in the theatrical world.
When his second play, “The Love that Lies,” financed by her father, scored a big hit, she noticed that he became the gratified recipient of a good deal of feminine attention. Mindful of the polygamous experiments of his two masterful heroes, she remembered that precaution is the better part of safety. Marriage had considerably modified her point of view, and she now had a conviction that there should be a yawning gulf between the pluralistic imaginings of the dramatist and the monogamic behavior of the husband.
To give this conviction shape, she enframed him in a watchful chaperonage. Chaperonage was not the name she used. She called it, “being a helpmeet.”
The helpmeet’s first official act was to place Mr. Grey’s communications with the world beyond-the-home under a strict censorship. She looked after his correspondence, registered his engagements, and kept in telephonic touch with him when he went to a club or directed a rehearsal. Let the enemy idolaters capture him (if they could) through the barbed-wire entanglements of her devotion!
In the same spirit, she threw cold water on his business-like proposal to do his writing in an office building. Such an environment, she said, would kill the soul of his art. Her substitute was a study, comfortably fitted up in his own home; and there, accordingly, he and Janet were obliged to work.
Mrs. Howard Madison Grey was a woman of fixed opinions. She was firm in the belief that a transcendent artistic talent was lodged in her husband; she was equally firm in the belief that a transcendent executive talent was lodged in herself. On the principle that it pays to specialize she held it to be no more than right that any power or glory acquired by the name of Howard Madison Grey should be exercised by the executive branch of the family. About this opinion she was entirely frank.
“I’ve made him,” she said to Janet, one day. “Why should I let others enjoy the fruit of my labors?”
This was said as much in warning as in confidence. Janet was greatly amused, inasmuch as her feelings toward her employer were unsentimental to the point of prosiness.
None the less, Mrs. Grey’s never ending readiness to suspect Janet of a design on her vested interest in Mr. Grey soon became a great bore. It was also somewhat trying to the nerves. At the most unexpected moments, the good lady would shoot in upon her husband and his assistant like a cartridge from a noiseless gun, and explode into embarrassing explanations.
Until, at length, Mr. Grey’s perfectly correct and unemotional attitude towards Janet underwent a dangerous change.
II
By the time Claude returned from his visit to Huntington, Janet had already settled down to her new routine. Claude did not seriously object to her morning engagement with Howard Madison Grey, but her afternoon work in Kelly’s study—the work she did for Robert’s league—this he viewed as an intolerable encroachment on his privileges.
Out of regard for Janet’s warm espousal of the cause of woman’s independence, he concealed his feelings as best he could. But he used his prodigal gifts without scruple to lay siege to Janet’s hours of employment, especially to her afternoons. Four or five days out of seven, on one excuse or another, his imposing car would draw up to the Lorillard tenements, and its owner, handsome, dashing, persuasive, would tempt Janet away from laborious tasks to the delights of an excursion.
In vain did Janet upbraid herself each time she yielded, or school herself diligently against the next occasion. When the next occasion came, she found, as likely as not, that she was as helpless as ever to resist his thrilling voice, his ardent eye, and his magnetic wooing.
In Cornelia, Claude had a subtle and insidious agent on his side. If Janet gave a crushing refusal to one of Claude’s incitements to truancy, Cornelia would flash a reason in his favor as unanswerable as a sword. Or if Janet, persuaded, but not convinced, gave signs of an uneasy conscience, Cornelia was always ready to annihilate doubt with some apt quotation (or misquotation) such as “Work no further, pretty sweeting—youth’s a stuff will not endure.”
Naturally, this spasmodic holiday making was the cause of frequent delays in the performance of the work for the Guildsmen’s League. Janet tried to make up for lost time by working late at night, a practice that drew upon her the reproaches of Cornelia who alleged that it interfered with her sleep. Needless to say, Cornelia exhibited no compunction for the serious inconvenience that all this caused Robert. Far from it. She appeared to get a lively satisfaction from seeing his partnership bedeviled and his remonstrances ignored.
As a fact, she feared that Robert’s influence over Janet was quietly undermining her own ascendancy. But what was there to justify this fear? Janet’s enthusiasm for the free life of the model tenements had not yet abated and her admiration for Cornelia’s talents was still very strong. But a straw showed Cornelia which way the wind was blowing.
Janet was gradually but steadily cutting down the amount of housework she did in Flat Number Fifteen!
The terms on which Cornelia chummed up with her successive companions always included an agreement to have the housework done, share and share alike. In practice, the adoring friend took over most of Cornelia’s share, at least while the friendship was in its early stages. As time went on and illusions were shattered, the unequal burden was slowly whittled away by the active partner until Cornelia’s shoulders stood in grave danger of having a full half of the cleaning and marketing thrust upon them. At this point, she generally unearthed a new adorer as well as excellent reasons for breaking with the old one; and then she started the whole cycle afresh.
Like her predecessor, Janet had begun by doing far more errands, dishes and cooking, than a strictly fair division called for. At first, the respective proportions had stood at about three-quarters for Janet and one-quarter for Cornelia. After a few days of this arrangement, however, Janet had begun so to manipulate matters that her allotment fell rapidly to one-half. And the pendulum had swung gaily on. In fine, within a few months of her arrival, this new convert to modernity had reversed the original proportions so that they now stood at about three-quarters for Cornelia and one-quarter for Janet.
If this was feminism—Cornelia confided to Hercules (“among the faithless, faithful only he”)—it was feminism with a vengeance!
The situation was without precedent in the history of the Outlaws of Kips Bay. Even more unprecedented was Cornelia’s acceptance of the situation. But this compliance of hers was in no wise dictated by generosity or affection, as some innocents conjectured. Cornelia was simply shrewd enough to see that Janet was the magnet which had drawn back to Number Fifteen its departed splendor and had restored to herself the position of the first lady of the Lorillard tenements, a position she greatly prized.
One question that Cornelia put to Hercules was: Had Janet’s repugnance for housework merely kept pace with her growing appetite for women’s rights, or was Robert Lloyd at the bottom of all the mischief? How should the mute and glorious Hercules reply to a purely rhetorical query?—Cornelia favored the second explanation, a fact which boded Robert no good.
III
Although Robert had in no sense entered the lists as one of Janet’s suitors, Cornelia instituted comparisons between him and Claude, never to the former’s advantage. She took occasion to contrast Claude’s noble bearing and look of sovereign strength with Robert’s simpler and frailer appearance. She dwelt on the cosmopolitan aura that clung to Claude, his subtle atmosphere of wealth, breeding and high social origin, the amalgam of gorgeous qualities that offered so much more than Robert’s radical connections and straitened financial circumstances. Her trump card was to call attention to Claude’s free and easy response to the Lorillard conception of the rights of women and to offset this picture with an allusion to Robert’s prudent reservations on the same subject.
If these comparisons were of an offhand and haphazard sort, nothing was thereby lost in effectiveness. Far from it. They glorified Claude by what was carelessly said: they damaged Robert by what was carefully left unsaid.
Although unaware of the Machiavellian promptings of which she was the innocent cause, Janet became dimly conscious of the conflict already sensed by Robert, the conflict between her work (which was bound up with Robert) and her love affair (which was somehow bound up with Cornelia as well as with Claude). She felt the tug of Robert one way and the tug of Claude and Cornelia the other way, without fully grasping the difference in the two directions or the final significance of either goal.
It was Claude, however, and not Cornelia, that gave Janet’s friendship with Robert an importance that none of those concerned attached to it. Claude simply could not understand why Janet should refuse to neglect Robert’s League, whenever the work of the League stood in the way of their outings together. Economic independence, the reason advanced by Janet, was a reason he laughed at. The words meant hardly anything to one who from birth had been glutted with the thing itself. Surely a few beggarly dollars, more or less, did not adequately account for Janet’s readiness to cloister herself in Kelly’s bare and sunless study! Yet what other motive could there be, if not one of tender feeling on Robert’s part, or soft pity on hers?
Still, the rivalry that actually sprang up between the two young men was not a rivalry in love, at least not in Robert’s sense of the word.
For Robert was no fool. He was soon convinced that Claude and Janet had surrendered unconditionally to a mutual infatuation which he was in no position to challenge. Yet he had a magnetism of his own, a magnetism of the spirit rather than of the flesh. To this magnetism Janet responded. Why should he not claim the same title to Janet’s response in the one sphere that Claude laid claim to in the other?
At all events, he meant to fight for what he considered his rights, regardless of Claude’s frowns or vanishing friendship.
Between the two, Janet had a hard time of it. Claude professed to accept free love as a new and improved social principle, and praised her for holding it; yet he grew unmanageable the moment she gave the least hint of exercising this freedom in connection with any other man than himself. On the other hand, Robert rejected free love as a pernicious Greenwich Village or Lorillard tenement eccentricity, and even severely scolded her for entertaining it; yet his actions showed that she might love as many different men as madly as she pleased, without causing his friendship for her to undergo any really radical change.
To cap the oddity of this contrast, she found that Robert’s unlimited tolerance, though socially much the more agreeable attitude, was not without its suggestion of tepidity of sentiment, a suggestion which piqued her not a little.
The rivalry, such as it was, followed a very human course. Robert, as an outgrowth of his work with Janet took to promoting her education in contemporary thought and political theory. Claude, not to be behindhand, made the most of his special knowledge of art as well as of his wide first-hand acquaintance with the men and events that figured picturesquely in the ruling social and political rings of Washington and New York. In the matter of books, Claude generally took the cue from Robert. The latter would lend her works by Shaw, Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, Bertrand Russell, Anatole France, Barbusse, Romaine Rolland; Claude would follow suit with the latest fiction by Robert W. Chambers or Rupert Hughes, his authors ranging as high as Rudyard Kipling, Maeterlinck or Barrie. One would take her to a symphony concert in Carnegie Hall, the other to a Sunday Pop in the Hippodrome. Robert held out invitations to a Theater Guild’s play by Masefield or Andreyev, Claude would counter with an evening at a revival of Florodora or San Toy. If Janet accompanied Robert to a Labor Mass Meeting at Cooper Union or to a radical Cameraderie at the Civic Club, she was sure, soon after, to be escorted by Claude to a Titta Ruffo recital in Aeolian Hall or to a midnight cabaret in Moloch’s Den off Sheridan Square.
To Janet, who had broken with the Barrs of Brooklyn and who was as much on pleasure as on emancipation bent, it was not Robert’s offer that usually seemed the happier one.
Not the least of Claude’s advantages was the fact that he moved in Kips Bay as a representative of the great forces of finance and fashion. He reflected the high lights of that glittering social system of which he was a favorite child. Direct and intimate was his contact with the celebrities of the day—the bankers and politicians, the diplomats and society leaders, the cabinet set in Washington, and the inner opera box set in New York. These were his real people; the Lorillarders were merely the people among whom he was sowing his radical wild oats.
In short, Claude was one of the persons “in the know.” He knew a good deal more about the personages whose names were on everybody’s tongues than the public knew or the newspapers thought fit to print. He could tell about the opera soprano of the first magnitude whose attacks of hysterical jealousy would cause the curtain to be held down between the acts for forty minutes, while the poor director tore his hair in desperation. He could laugh at the “mystery” of the appointment of a certain mediocre woman teacher to a superintendency in the city’s schools, the mystery vanishing upon his inside story of how the lady in question “had been good” to Big Jim Connolly, a local political boss. And he could explain the connection between the failure to float a certain foreign loan and the omission of a well-known financier’s wife from the group of guests invited to meet the Prince of Wales.
Thus Claude Fontaine, whose handsome face and dashing airs would have made him an idol in almost any society, enchanted his fellow Outlaws with the aroma clinging to him from the world of fashion and the glimpses he afforded into the secret workings of the world of power. Small wonder that to Janet, as to the others, Claude was bathed in a romantic glamor.
By contrast with Claude, Robert seemed to lead a decidedly work-a-day or humdrum life. Especially so, since his newspaper employment had been cut off and his active time given up to the League of Guildsmen. As far as Janet could see, Robert’s entire thought and energy were absorbed by an overwhelming interest in the Labor movement. For though he had plenty of esthetic diversions, she noticed that the books he read, the music he delighted in, and the pictures he admired were all in some way expressive of souls in bondage, aspiring to freedom.
Now for the time being, Janet wanted to forget about the lowly and the oppressed. She had the same feeling towards “causes” and “reforms” that a released convict has towards societies for Improving the Condition of Prisoners on Parole.
It must not be supposed that Janet took an unsympathetic view of the movements for human freedom which were convulsing society after the Great War. She was a sincere convert to the principle of woman’s equality and she made an honest effort to be open-minded to the theories that Robert expounded. But her heart was not in theories. Her pulse refused to quicken when Robert told her of the new social cleavage which was fast ranging the useful active people on one side, and the parasitic profiteering people on the other. In common with a great many of her contemporaries, she sat heedlessly on a volcano, enchanted by the twinkle of the stars.
What if Robert did prove up to the hilt that the world was in the birth throes of a new social order! Youth must have its glamor. And there is no glamor about birth throes, not even about the birth throes of a new world.
Besides, the old social alignment in which princes of the purple and masters of the gold ruled in pomp or circumstance over the toilers of the factory, the office and the soil—this old alignment was much more familiar to poor Janet (and to everybody else) than the new one predicted. Literature and legend, the school room, the pulpit and the press—all the regular organs of education, in fact—had mesmerized her into viewing the practical politics and the dominant economics of the day as splendors and glories without parallel. Was the psychology of a lifetime to be uprooted or transformed by a few weeks of unconventional conduct in a Kips Bay tenement, or even by a brief high-tension course of reading in the works of Samuel Butler, Bernard Shaw, Romaine Rolland and other prophets of the life to come?
Clearly not. And so when Claude came with his many-colored news from the seats of the mighty, he found it easy to engross and transport Janet. But when Robert talked to her of strikes, trade unions and labor congresses, he left her bewildered or mystified, though seldom cold. In short, the rivalry even for the mind of Janet was a rather one-sided affair, Claude, the darling of the gods, holding an immense initial advantage over Robert, the advocate of rebel causes.