Chapter Nineteen I
On reaching her own street, Janet had to plough her way to the Lorillard tenements through shoals of children that scampered about as derelict as herself. She felt the keenest pity for these little tots who came from the very immodel tenements not far away, where five or even eight people existed in a single room, defying the decencies of life by day and mocking them by night in order to live up to “the highest standard of living” in the world.
She did not expect Robert until two o’clock, when he regularly returned from the League of Guildsmen. In the interval she looked, as a matter of course, under Cornelia’s alarm clock, where the four friends were in the habit of putting brief communications for one another. She found the following note addressed to her in Robert’s painstaking hand:
Dear Janet:
Forgive me for not being on hand this afternoon. During the next few days, and perhaps longer, I shall be in Pittsburgh. For some time, therefore, the whole burden of the firm of Barr & Lloyd will have to rest on the shoulders of one partner. Lucky that this partner is so thoroughly staunch and dependable, isn’t it?
What is taking me out of town is the strike in Pittsburgh. Thousands of steel workers have laid down their tools in protest against the conditions under which they are obliged to work. The contest between these men and their all-powerful employers is horribly uneven, and the apathy of the general public towards the issues at stake is appalling. Naturally, every agency that is pledged to the success of a healthy labor movement must pitch into this prickly business. For the strikers need all the help they can get, whether of a material or a moral kind.
It is on the moral side that our League of Guildsmen comes in. The recent war has filled the earth with indescribable bitternesses and resentments. It has also given sovereign strength to the idea that henceforth the control of the world’s affairs must be taken away from the idlers and profiteers and given to the workers and producers. At every turn, omens of a vast incalculable change force themselves upon our senses.
Clearly, those who don’t want a bloody revolution have got to work tooth and nail for a pacific one. Now the Guildsmen, being advocates of a change that shall be peaceful though drastic, have a vital interest in drumming it into people’s heads that violence can never breed anything save violence and violence again.
You see, don’t you, that I am needed there far more than here? Please believe that I’m sorry in the last degree to upset our joint business plans and to hold up “The Klondike Mail” on the typewriter at just the critical moment when Mr. Grey’s double-dyed desperadoes are holding it up in the middle of the third act. It makes me feel like an accessory to the crime, all the more so in that it gives you, at the secretarial end, the task of foiling one more villain.
Arrangements have been made at the League office for the delivery to you of another batch of Mss. Could you call in there tomorrow afternoon?
More later, as soon as my plans are surer.
Ever yours, Robert.
P.S. On second thoughts, it seems a shame that you should be saddled with a partner who is bound to be more or less on the jump. I recall the plan you confided to me last week, the plan of turning Barr & Lloyd into a real secretarial business on an extensive scale. With this on your mind, you may well fear that my haphazard movements will prove ruinous to any settled policy. If so, and whenever you can find a more stable associate, please have no compunction about making a change. We must not let sentiment stand in the way of good management.
“He can’t even say good-bye without delivering a lecture,” said Janet bitterly.
She felt aggrieved. Just when she needed Robert most, he left her in the lurch. True, his direct connection with the labor movement made his departure inevitable. But did he have to rush off to Pittsburgh the very moment the strike broke out? She supposed his haste was partly prompted by his injured feelings. If not, why had he so needlessly offered to dissociate himself from her, why, indeed, had he written such an entirely cold, unsympathetic letter?
“Like his cold, unsympathetic views on love,” she said to herself, recalling with some scorn his severe, intolerant pronouncements on the free love theme.
She reviewed the business-like contents of the letter with a growing sense of desolation. It looked as though she were in for a dismal evening, one of those dismal evenings that are enormously good for us afterwards, because at the time they so thoroughly plough up our deepest feelings.
II
But the facts of the present were too disturbing to permit her to extract much consolation from a philosophy of the future.
For Janet’s difficulties were by no means entirely sentimental.
Much as Claude’s anger and Robert’s coolness tortured her feelings, it was the destruction of her plans that chiefly occupied her thoughts. These were the plans that Robert had referred to in his letter.
Ably assisted by Cornelia, whose power of sketching the most imposing schemes quite exhausted her capacity for executing even the humblest ones, Janet had mapped out a very ambitious career for herself. Her intention was to make the most of her stenographic foothold; to accumulate enough resources to permit a spur, so to speak, to be run into the domain of the law; and eventually to reach a point where the secretarial specialty and its legal intertwinings should be united in one occupation.
It was, as Cornelia all aglow remarked, a time when women were not only casting down the barriers raised by men around the old professions, but were actually bestirring themselves to carve out brand-new professions.
What Cornelia put into enthusiasm, Janet proposed to put into cold deeds.
As a first step in this direction, she resolved that the firm of Barr & Lloyd, which had been born in jest, should be reared in dead earnest. Her work for Mr. Grey, a certain amount of casual work which she was getting from friends of the playwright, and such odd jobs as Robert brought from the Guild League—these three sources were to form the basis of a secretarial office dealing with authors’ manuscripts in relation to typing, revision, criticism, and so on.
In short, Barr & Lloyd (Barr first, because Robert, as an advocate of the absolute equality of men and women, insisted that the correct order of precedence was a strictly alphabetical one)—Barr & Lloyd were to be manuscript specialists, handling every conceivable matter linked up with the preparation and sale of manuscripts and the protection of authors’ rights.
From Robert, Janet had extracted a promise to supervise the department of criticism and revision. Claude (this was before his flight in a fit of pique) had refused to take the project seriously. Cornelia, in her most pronounced bel canto style, had volunteered to “lend a helping hand” to the typewriting department and to give her moral support to most of the other departments. As Janet’s last illusions about Cornelia were being speedily dissipated, and as she judged that some birds in a bush are worth ten in the hand, she contracted for Cornelia’s moral support and nothing but her moral support in all the departments.
Then, as regards the legal department. Janet held that, in order to round out her business in the most complete way, one member of the firm ought to be equipped with a first-hand training in jurisprudence. She saw nothing for it but to be this member herself, and accordingly she had already made arrangements to attend the coming fall sessions of an Evening Law School. Needless to say, this part of her dream had not been so much as breathed to Claude.
Janet intended, as soon as she had passed her bar examination, to specialize on all points of law bearing on literary and dramatic productions, the rights of authors, and the relations between the buyers and sellers of manuscripts. She had been put onto this idea by a popular short-story writer, one of Mr. Grey’s friends. This man had assured her that the literary field, on its legal side, was practically a virgin field. Merchants, inventors, landlords, captains of industry and the like could, where the law touched their spheres of influence, find appropriate legal specialists with all the precedents, traditions, decisions, appeals, evasions, etc., at their fingers’ ends. Authors alone were in no such happy case. The legal background of authorship was a vast morass of contradictions, quibbles and uncertainties. Authors were frequently at sea in respect of their rights, constantly handicapped in the matter of expert advice, and always liable to be done in the eye by the more unscrupulous members of the fraternity of editors, publishers, managers and agents.
This, then, was the field that Janet meant to conquer. She had a roseate vision of Barr & Lloyd occupying a suite of offices on the lower end of Madison or Park Avenue. If fortune favored her, these offices were to be staffed with ambitious young women assistants whom she would help to useful and honorable careers (as far as male prejudice and discrimination would allow). Barr & Lloyd, in other words, besides their primary business as manuscript practitioners, would have a secondary mission, namely, that of multiplying the avenues along which woman might march towards economic equality with men.
Such was the purpose which Janet had already begun to work for. She now saw all her plans collapsing like a pricked balloon. The action taken by Mrs. Grey meant the loss of much potential custom which she had hoped would grow by recommendation out of the Grey patronage. The most galling, stabbing fact in all this sorry business was the reflection that she had failed not merely in her human and business dealings but in her workmanship. If only she hadn’t made a mess of those last manuscripts for the playwright, the ones she had prepared under the strain of Claude’s tempestuous displeasure! Mrs. Grey’s taunt still rankled in her ears: “As a typist, you cut a very poor figure—”
True, Mrs. Grey had tacked on another phrase—the one about her “magic combination.” But what did this trumped-up compliment weigh against the maddening behavior of Claude and Robert?
Both of them had deserted her!
Janet was not addicted to the windy heroics cultivated by the Outlaws of Kips Bay, but for once she believed herself entitled to indulge in them. She really felt deserted. By Claude, by Robert, by Cornelia and, of course, by her family.
“How naturally I think of the family when I’m glum!” was her silent comment.
Her thoughts ran back to the time when she had left home in defiance of Mrs. Barr’s ultimatum.
Since then, her mother had written one letter full of that spirit of Christian forbearance that has driven so many people into the devil’s camp. After that, not another word from her. But there had followed a steady stream of appeals from her father, imploring her to come back at any price, swearing that life at home was not worth living without her, and promising to do anything in the wide world she demanded (except, as Janet sardonically observed to herself, damp down her mother’s tyranny a trifle. He had never had, and he never would have, the nerve to do this or to put up the least show of fight.)
As a last effort, her sister Emily had paid a visit to the Lorillard tenements—partly perhaps from curiosity. She affirmed that she had come of her own free will, and probably believed this statement to be the truth. Janet knew very well that her sister was, consciously or unconsciously, the family ambassador. The Barrs always throve best when their right hand did not know what their left hand was doing.
Emily, all a-tingle with the exhilaration which an angel inevitably feels when descending upon a glittering abode of vice, had tried hard not to betray her excitement. In a tone essenced with pious sorrow and celestial distress! She had assured the erring one (though not in these words), that all would be forgiven if only she returned to her home before the world (of the Barrs) should discover that a Barr had abandoned Brooklyn for Kips Bay, and her family for the society of atheists, Bolshevists, and Bohemians!
“But I haven’t the faintest notion of abandoning you,” Janet had replied. “I believe I can lead a fuller, freer, more active life away from mother’s apron strings, that’s all. Of course I want to see the family from time to time. I could come on short visits—”
Emily had assured her, not without a trace of exultation, that Mrs. Barr would never hear of such a cool arrangement. Either the prodigal daughter returned once and for all, or the family would treat her as dead.
“Really! But how you’ll miss the funeral!” Janet had wickedly exclaimed.
At which Emily had put on her gloves.
All later messages sent by Janet to her mother in an effort to put their mutual relations on a more reasonable footing had been severely ignored. The only communications she had received were growingly infrequent notes from her father, and these contained nothing but the same old appeals—sentimental, pathetic, fatuous.
III
The doorbell startled her out of her long, melancholy reverie. She flew to the threshold, and in came Claude! She had proposed to treat him coolly at their next meeting. But his return was as sudden as it was unexpected. And he was Claude, the same Claude with the same striking appearance, the same telling voice, the same handsome face. Instantly, the magnetic spark that had darted from one to the other at the Outlaws’ Ball made its swift, poignant, thrilling leap between them again.
Though words were superfluous, Claude, as he clasped her in a passionate embrace, murmured:
“Janet, darling, forgive me. I was a beast to write a letter like that.”
“Confession is good for the soul,” said Janet, laughing and trying to release her head.
“Are you angry? Well, you ought to be. And I ought to grovel in the dust at your feet. You are a saint to forgive me, and I should be ashamed to accept forgiveness if I hadn’t suffered. Yes, Janet, I’ve suffered cruelly. I never had so keen a grief and I never so thoroughly deserved one. But I’m nearly ill with worry.”
He did look pale, nor did it hurt his cause that pallor became him. Besides, his apologies were as overwhelming as his fits of temper. How could the poor girl help forgiving him?
And so Janet, who but a few minutes before had been considering (mock-heroically to be sure) sundry historic forms of self-slaughter, now forgot all about jumping off Brooklyn Bridge, etc., and poured a heavenly compassion on Claude.
“Something happened in Huntington,” she said. “Something serious. Does it involve me? I want you to tell me straight.”
“That scoundrel Burley tipped my father off about us, and as a result, the old man is half out of his wits. He is determined that my marriage with Marjorie shall not fall through, for the one terror of his life is that of disobliging Mr. Armstrong. In what form the word was passed along the line, I don’t know. But they were at me, one and all, day and night, giving me a hundred and one sly intimations of the general satisfaction that would follow the much desired event. The pressure got to be unbearable.”
He said that the older people had left no stone unturned to bring the Armstrong-Fontaine alliance to pass. Pacing the floor restlessly, he spoke of the delicate hints, the veiled references, the consummate skill with which he and Marjorie were engineered into tete-a-tetes. Could Janet picture him alone with Marjorie, and the resultant sessions of sweet, silent thought? Had she any idea of what the imperious will of Armstrong’s daughter could do in the way of maneuvering a man into the most difficult situations? Janet had little difficulty in calling up an image of the stately brunette with lustrous dark hair, patrician nose, and sulky, discontented mouth. This imposing young lady had impressed herself indelibly upon Janet’s mind at the Mineola Aerodrome, and, such are the unfathomable processes of sex, Janet profoundly pitied Claude. She did this without a suspicion that he might be drawing generously upon his imagination for the sake of that very pity of hers, which she gave him so divinely. Nor did it occur to her that there were few young men in all New York who would have been in unrelieved misery if Marjorie Armstrong had set her cap at them.
As a matter of fact, Claude quite omitted to mention that he had gone to Huntington with more than a vague notion of finding out whether he and Marjorie couldn’t hit it off together, after all; also that, if Marjorie, with all her eagerness to capture him, had not so plainly exposed her design of “bossing” the marriage after it had taken place—well, then—
What he did say, was:
“Of course, I was left quite free to do as I pleased. Oh, quite free. They wouldn’t lead the horse to water—not they, that would be brutal coercion—they would simply make it drink.”
This irony expressed the full truth. Claude had virtually given his father a promise not to marry Janet. But Mr. Fontaine senior put no faith in vows that were subject to the stresses and strains of love. Mistrustful of his son’s infatuation and also of the unknown quantity of Janet’s ambition, he did not scruple to adopt any tactical measure by which the union of the Armstrong-Fontaine forces might be achieved.
“What do you mean to do?” asked Janet, greatly troubled.
“What can I do? What can any prisoner do? Run away, I suppose.”
“What—without me?”
“Well, you see, I’m planning to go to Europe, darling. Separated by the Atlantic I shall be able to make my position much clearer to my father. An ocean is an astonishing convenience when it stands between the giver and the receiver of an explanation.”
“Yes, but why can’t I go, too?”
“You dear innocent,” he said, taking her hand tenderly, “we can’t go cavorting over two continents as if we were merely joy-riding from here to Quakertown.”
“Why not?” she persisted, with her customary refusal to be sidetracked.
IV
The question embarrassed him. Even had he been clear about the train of thought at the back of his mind, he could not, in all brutal directness, have said: “A man in my station does not flaunt his mistresses in the face of the public. That is all very well for the vulgar rich. But not for my sort. High-class polygamy is strictly sub rosa.”
Claude did not explicitly think this, much less say it. His chief difficulty in the way of reaching a straightforward understanding with Janet was that his mind did not work straightforwardly upon the problem of sex relations. His adopted radical professions were entirely subordinate to powerful, instinctive reactions along traditional lines.
Thus, at heart, he had little use for Janet’s views about free love. To Janet, the term meant a public abandonment of an obsolete institution. To Claude, it was little more than a polite synonym for illicit intercourse.
Claude, in fact, had no deep quarrel with existing institutions. He prided himself on being tolerant, and his tolerance extended to the institutions of Bohemianism (which had no recognition in law), as well as to the institutions of the established order (which enjoyed this recognition). His support of “advanced” art, his membership in the Outlaws’ Club, his philandering among the Lorillard tenementers—these were all ways of escape from the particularity of normal civilized life. Bohemianism, by systematically discarding troublesome forms, costly conventions and restrictive social obligations, really organized these ways of escape for him and provided a maximum of pleasure with a minimum of effort.
He was, therefore, by no means prepared to go as far as Janet wished to go, openly; yet he was fully prepared to go to the limit, clandestinely. So much so, that a severe critic like Robert would have said that Claude was deliberately taking advantage of Janet’s inexperienced outlook on life. And it was quite true that Claude was willing to profit by her belief in free love, although he was far from willing to champion this belief, much less to become a martyr in its promotion.
But if he was exploiting Janet’s infatuation for him, he was not doing so consciously. And the fact remained that, had she been so minded, she could just as easily have exploited his infatuation for her. Indeed, the latter would have been easier. Claude was not aware of this. He was aware only of his own power, and he believed he was exercising almost superhuman self-control in an effort to avoid compromising her future.
He believed he was doing this now, whilst fishing for an answer to Janet’s candid “why not?” A few hours earlier, in Huntington, under the concerted pressure of the Armstrong family, he had realized that he would have to give up either Marjorie or Janet; and it had occurred to him that if he took Janet now, Marjorie was not lost to him later; whereas if he took Marjorie now, Janet was lost to him forever.
Naturally, it was not in terms of pitiless realism that he sought to explain his choice.
A more heroic explanation was that he had given up Marjorie for Janet’s sake, and that, on a peremptory summons of the heart, he had run away from Huntington determined to risk everything—from his father’s wrath to the loss of Mr. Armstrong’s protection in the matter of smuggled diamonds. The heroic explanation was the one he meant to give to Janet.
Looking, at the moment, into Janet’s gray eyes in their superb setting of long, dark lashes, he was ready to give his thoughts any form that might be acceptable to her. Surely, such a mixture of radical daring and native good sense, of enticement and candor, of self-reliance that ennobled her and soft yielding that flattered him—such a mixture had never before been found in one woman. It made her exquisite, enigmatic, thrilling and quite indispensable to him.
So reasoned his heart. And all his commanding nonchalance returned.
V
The result was that when Janet, failing to get an answer to her question, repeated anew her wish to accompany him abroad, he enfolded her in his arms and said:
“After all, why not?”
And after a fervent embrace, he added:
“Janet, I think you ought to face what’s in store for us.”
“Don’t let’s cross bridges, Claude,” she pleaded.
“We’ll get married, of course,” he went on, unheeding her. “Frankly, my father won’t like it. He’ll probably make Rome howl. However, he’ll get used to it in the end—especially when he meets you. But, though there’s a storm ahead, you are brave and we’ll weather it, I’m sure.”
“Your father won’t raise a storm,” said Janet, with a strange smile, “for a small but important reason. Remember, I’m not going to be married.”
“Janet!”
“You know I don’t believe in it.”
They argued the matter pro and con, she spiritedly, he lamely. Janet pointed out, among other things, that when Mr. Fontaine senior learnt of their free union he was little likely to attempt any serious interference, but would count on time to separate them.
“‘Love’s not Time’s fool!’” said Claude, quoting dithyrambically. “We’ll never be separated, darling, will we?”
“Well—not for the present,” said Janet, with dancing eyes. “I won’t vouch for our dim and distant feelings.”
“No teasing, you darling imp!”
“Claude, I mean it. If—if it should turn out that your father was right, that will merely prove that we were wrong.”
He was at a complete loss how to treat her incredible self-surrender. As a man of the world, he was part scandalized, part uneasy, according as he swerved from the conviction that Janet was candid, to the suspicion that she was designing. Again, as a gay Bohemian trifler, he saw in her attitude an easy way out of possible complications. Whether he should or should not carry out his offer of marriage was now a question he would not have to face. She did not mean to put his vows to the test! This was breath-bereaving, staggering; it was even slightly annoying. But, her eccentric choice being a fact, surely the consequences did not rest on his soul?
“Janet, you don’t know what you are doing!” he cried out involuntarily, being torn many ways at once.
She, too, was greatly agitated; but, under the pressure of her theory, she kept her head. While he stood there as if distraught, she poured out a flood of reasons to which he scarcely listened. For instance, she said it was criminal for two people to form a permanent union or bring children into a family until they were sure of being well-suited to each other and of establishing a family that children would wish to enter.
All marriages ought to be trial marriages of the kind that George Meredith had suggested long ago.
Moreover, until she became independent in the matter of money, she couldn’t dream of subscribing to any permanent arrangement.
He replied that this was all nonsense and derided Meredith as a bookworm and a dreamer. For his own part, hadn’t he money enough to provide for them both? If she wouldn’t take half his money, she didn’t love him. That was flat!
“I do love you!” cried Janet, with more visible emotion than before. “That’s why I mustn’t marry you.”
He rose with a wild movement.
“I must save myself—and you, too!” he murmured. “I’m going abroad by the first steamer.”
But these words were dashed with insurgent passion. Handsome, hypnotic, intense, his whole being vibrated towards her. She surrendered incontinently.
“Not without me!” she said, enchaining him in her arms.
He kissed her tempestuously.
“It’s a daring step, and a perilous one,” he said, more in weak protest than in forceful remonstrance.
“No, no, no!” she cried, as with a gesture of ecstasy she hid her face on his shoulder.