Chapter Three I
One morning a letter addressed to Miss Janet Barr was delivered at a house in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. The writing was legible enough, but a new and somewhat flustered servant placed the letter next to Miss Emily Barr’s plate. This young lady, Janet’s older sister, was the first member of the family to reach the breakfast table. She was one of those well-filled-out single women who abound in the better districts of Brooklyn, and who look more matronly than a great many married women, perhaps because their figures have not been pared down by wedlock in middle-class circumstances.
Casually she picked up the envelope and opened it. She laid the enclosure down before she had read very far, took it up again, laid it down a second time, and then surveyed it with painful indecision. Finally she rang for the maid.
“Laura, have you called Miss Janet?”
“Not yet, Miss Emily. She told me not to call her before half past eight this morning. She said—”
“Never mind. Don’t call her until I tell you to.”
“Very well, ma’am.”
After the girl had gone, Emily took the letter and went upstairs to the back sitting room. She did not allow the turmoil within her to disturb her dignity or quicken her pace. She found her mother seated in a rocking chair and musing over a passage from the Bible that lay open on her lap.
“Good morning, my child,” said Mrs. Barr, as her daughter entered. “You must have made short work of breakfast. Are you late?”
“No, mother, I’ve brought you a letter I opened by mistake. It is directed to Janet.”
“Oh, well, just lick it together again,” she said, with arid humor, “and lay it beside Janet’s plate. She’ll never know the difference. You know Janet.”
Mrs. Barr’s levity appeared to distress Emily.
“That’s not what’s troubling me, mother. I—”
She hesitated and held out the envelope with a good imitation of helplessness. Her mother stopped rocking and looked in some astonishment from Emily to the letter.
Mrs. Barr was a tall, well-set woman, whose rigid bearing was but little softened by her refined surroundings. She was neither thin nor fleshy; there was something solid and conservative about her that suggested the Chinese wall. Solidity was her pronounced characteristic, solidity of soul no less than solidity of body. Her face was hard; it was full of lines that looked like razor edges drawn in gall.
Mrs. Barr had been beautiful in her youth and might still have been so had she not sacrificed everything—everything but her love of comfort—to a greed for power. Experience had taught her that a fit of sickness was a right royal prop to domestic tyranny. Thus she had cultivated ill-health until nothing saved her from being a professional invalid but her naturally strong constitution and an inherited playfulness which still occasionally emerged between long fits of bad temper.
She was the president of the King’s Daughters’ Society in a local Presbyterian church, and, as she was preparing for a meeting that day, she cut Emily short.
“Well, Emily, what do you want me to do?” she said, less amiably than before. “I’ll explain it to Janet if you like.”
“You don’t understand, mother. I not only opened the letter, I read part of it before I realized my mistake.”
“That’s not a crime, dear.”
“No—But what I read amazed me. It seemed all of a piece with Janet’s strange behavior of late.”
“Indeed? Who is the letter from?”
Emily flushed slightly.
“Mother, I told you I didn’t read as far as that. I couldn’t help seeing the first line, however. And that confirmed the suspicion we have both had, that Janet has been falling under bad influences.”
“Emily, is some man corrupting her?”
“It looks like a woman’s hand to me. What do you think?”
Emily gave the letter to her mother, who scrutinized the handwriting for a moment.
“Well,” she said at length, “there can be no harm in your repeating to me what you inadvertently saw.”
“I don’t like to say anything that may turn out to Janet’s disadvantage,” said Emily, with an effect of reluctance that deceived even herself. “It will seem almost like betraying a confidence.”
“Nonsense, Emily. If evil threatens Janet, it is your duty as a sister to warn me, and my duty as a mother to protect her. Our consciences would reproach us if we failed in this.”
“But Janet and I were such good friends—would be still, if she had never met those Lorillard tenement people.”
Emily said this with the bitterness of outraged feelings.
It was in a studio in one of the model tenements in Kips Bay, three weeks before, that Janet had met Cornelia and other people of radical tendencies. Emily had once enjoyed a monopoly of Janet’s heroine worship. The friendship between the sisters had cooled some time ago, but Emily had chosen, rather arbitrarily, to look upon the Lorillard incident as the turning point.
“I can understand your feelings, my dear,” said Mrs. Barr. “Their delicacy does you credit. But if these people you mention—anarchists and Bohemians, I think you called them—are trying to lure my Janet into wicked ways, it is time for a mother to interfere.”
In spite of these words, she hesitated to read Janet’s letter, open though the envelope was. Her domestic tyranny had its humanly illogical side, and there were certain rules of good breeding which she observed as scrupulously as she imposed them. Not once since her two girls entered High School had she opened their letters or so much as read them by stealth.
“You are sure that it comes from one of those tenement persons?” she asked, picking up the letter again.
“Oh, yes. I’m sure I recognize the handwriting. But, mother, do you think we ought to read it?”
This was the very point Mrs. Barr had been mentally debating. Emily’s feeble protest had the effect of stimulating her to a quick decision.
“Nothing could be further from my mind than any wish to pry into Janet’s legitimate private affairs,” she said magisterially. “But here is a letter opened by mistake. From what you read by accident we may infer that it throws a light on those recent actions of your sister’s that have caused us all great pain. I shall never let considerations of delicacy or etiquette deter me from an action that my conscience tells me is right.”
A look of sanctified resignation passed over Emily’s face as her mother took out the enclosure and read the following:
Friday morning.
Dear Araminta:
Have you heard me speak of the Outlaws? They are artists and writers who live beyond the pale of convention, and in an atmosphere painful to the wealthy, purse-proud darlings of our nation. In order to enjoy their outlawry unmolested, they wish to produce club quarters from which artistic elegance is by no means to be banished. Such quarters cost money. To raise the necessary funds a masked ball will take place two weeks from today, and those who come to dance to the tunes must help to pay the piper.
This means that it has been proposed to add one or two tributary features to the main function. Remembering your wizardry at palm reading, I concluded that your raven locks and appealing eyes would be a perfect match for a gypsy costume, and that a dear little gypsy who could tell wise people their virtues and foolish people their fortunes would be a priceless asset. I know you don’t believe in palmistry any more than I do, but isn’t it your very scepticism that enables you to practice the art with a dash of diablerie that carries conviction?
If you won’t accept, I may be obliged to play the gypsy myself. Can you picture my straw-colored plaits in such an Oriental role? But I know your artistic sense will not permit me to do with amateurish bungling what you can do with professional skill. Besides, two peerless young gentlemen, whom I could name if I chose, will pine away with melancholy if you refuse.
Before you answer “yes” or “no,” come and spend Wednesday afternoon with Yours devotedly, Cornelia.
Mrs. Barr turned the letter over to Emily, who read it while her mother grimly closed the Bible and waited.
“I thought as much!” cried the young lady, as she reached the signature. “It’s from Cornelia Covert.”
“Who is she, pray?”
“Don’t you remember the girl who created a scandal by running away with Percival Houghton, the English artist?”
“Who already had a wife and children in England?”
“Yes, that was Cornelia Covert. You may recall that she was one of my school friends, when we lived in McDonough Street.”
“Don’t remind me of her past,” said Mrs. Barr curtly. “Her present is bad enough. Ring for Laura, please. How did Janet come to know her? Through Robert Lloyd, perhaps. Has she been meeting him again, too?”
“No. It came about in this way. Cornelia left Mr. Houghton not long after their elopement. Or, more likely, he left her. At all events she returned to New York. She was brazen enough to celebrate the occasion. She invited Janet—Janet, though I was her classmate—to a big party in the Lorillard tenements.”
“If I remember aright, Janet asked you to go with her?”
“Yes. But I declined as soon as I heard that tenement artists, movie actors and other queer people like Robert Lloyd were to be present at the affair.”
“The party was given, so Janet assured me at the time, by some society woman.”
“It was held in Miss Lucy Chandler Duke’s studio. I did not know then that the Chandler Dukes were radicals as well as millionaires. And, as Janet begged me very hard not to tell you the particulars, I kept the matter a secret.”
Mrs. Barr tingled with irritation at what she chose to view as Janet’s deceit.
“She said a great deal about the Chandler Dukes!” she exclaimed bitterly, “and nothing at all about Cornelia Covert or Robert Lloyd.”
“I did not think Janet would misuse the occasion to form a fast and furious friendship with a person like Cornelia Covert,” said Emily, insidiously fanning the flame.
“If she gave less thought to the pomps and vanities of the world, Emily, she could have declined, as you did. But you should not have promoted her deceit. See what comes from walking in the ways of ungodly people. Janet hobnobs with unbelievers, you are deprived of a sister’s companionship, and I must give up an important meeting at the church. That is how the flesh and the devil waste the Lord’s time. I pray God to help me bear with the weaknesses of your father and the sinfulness of his daughters.”
Laura, the maid, came in just then and was despatched with an urgent summons for Miss Janet.
Mrs. Barr’s resources of anger were so considerable that when one member of the family displeased her, everyone else received a share of the overflow of her wrath. The weaker the member the more generous the share. Mr. Barr, by all odds the weakest member of the family of which he was the Biblical head, usually bore the brunt of every domestic storm.
But he was in the fairly safe haven of his own room on the top floor. In his absence Emily almost regretted the part she had just played. Being the only available victim for the moment, she had to act as lightning conductor, much against her will.
The maid had not gone very far in her quest of Janet before that young lady herself burst somewhat incontinently into the sitting room. Her slender mobile body with the lustrous black hair and the gray eyes full of life and intelligence, made her a striking contrast to her two inflexible relations.
“Good morning, children,” she cried, without paying the atmosphere any special attention. “How’s this for the role of the early bird? Spare your praises, Emily. It’s papa’s doing. He’s getting up now. And I suppose he’s anxious to advertise the unearthly hour.”
The two petrified figures quite chilled her prattling.
“Is anything the matter? You haven’t swallowed a sour plum, Emily, have you?” she asked, facing them both.
“Janet,” said Mrs. Barr, in a tone that would have frozen quicksilver, “I wish to speak to you for a minute.”
“What have I done now?” asked Janet, sitting down and looking speculatively from her mother to her sister.
“By mistake Emily opened a letter addressed to you. Laura had put it beside her plate.”
“Is that why you’re so glum, Emily? How silly. Don’t give, the matter another thought, please.”
Emily looked very uncomfortable.
“It’s from Cornelia Covert,” she said, averting her eyes from Janet’s, and the mother added with asperity:
“It invites you to mingle with certain persons who call themselves Outlaws.”
“Really? You and Emily have the advantage of me. I haven’t read the letter yet. May I?”
Emily silently relinquished the missive and Janet calmly read it, while the others looked on, keeping their vexation warm. Mrs. Barr spoke as soon as Janet had finished.
“Yes, I have read the letter,” she declared with emphasis.
“Really, mother, you may read all my letters if you wish to. But I think I might be allowed to see them first. I am twenty-four, old enough, therefore, to get my correspondence uncensored.”
“You are my daughter, Janet, and if you were forty-four instead of twenty-four, it would still be my duty to guard you against evil influences, and to look after your spiritual welfare.”
“I don’t see how your spiritual guardianship affects my legal right to my own letters.” She added scornfully: “Am I to consider Emily as one of my moral guardians, too?”
Janet was not easily aroused. When she was, she spoke in low cold tones that irritated her listeners more than the sharpest abuse.
“I read the first sentence accidentally—” began Emily indignantly. Mrs. Barr interrupted her.
“You know quite well that I have made it a rule not to interfere with your correspondence,” she said, acridly. “But I consider that what Emily saw by chance justified me in making this case an exception, especially as you have been so diligent lately in wasting the Lord’s time.”
This was a pet phrase of Mrs. Barr’s.
“I don’t understand the charge,” said Janet, like a prisoner in the dock.
“I refer to your recent godless behavior.”
“Godless!”
“You know quite well what I mean: your flagrant absence from services, your irreverent remarks when a religious topic is discussed, your readiness to put frivolous pleasures before church duties, and your studied avoidance of all the friends of the family.”
“Except Robert Lloyd,” interjected Emily, pointedly.
“Why drag in Robert?” said Janet, flashing a look at her sister. “You got mamma to forbid him the house a whole month ago.”
“I had every reason to believe Mr. Lloyd to be an atheist,” said Mrs. Barr, who thus concisely classified all disbelievers in revealed creeds. “That is why I requested you not to invite him here again.”
“Leaving me to the edifying companionship of Emily’s stuffy pedagogue friends,” said Janet, in a white heat.
“We needn’t pursue that matter now, Janet. What I wish to say at present is merely that a masked ball is out of the question. A masked ball! What are you thinking of, my child? Not to say that the invitation comes from people who are perfectly impossible.”
“Impossible!” cried Janet, bursting out under terrible pressure. “They’re quite possible for me. Do you expect me to chum up with Emily’s high school cats, or the old maids from the King’s daughters, or the decrepit old ladies from your missionary club?”
Her mother fairly reeled at the impudence of the attack.
This from Janet, of all people! The girl had always been a mild-tempered and tractable child. That is, she had been entirely tractable except for half a dozen fits of rebellion so scattered in point of time and so completely suppressed in point of fact that they could conveniently be overlooked. But a face-to-face defiance of a maternal decree was a new and startling departure. It was an unheard of act, such as Mrs. Barr could ascribe only to the promptings of the Evil One, inducted into Janet’s acquaintance by her Kips Bay friends.
Mrs. Barr came of an old New England family with Puritan traditions reaching back beyond Cotton Mather and the witch huntings. It was inconceivable to her that a daughter should be allowed to address a mother as Janet had just addressed her. It was inconceivable to her even in the spring of 1919, when the civil war between parents and children (or rather, the uncivil war between the young and the old), though raging furiously in the dynamic centers of New York, London, Paris and Berlin, had not produced so much as a ripple amongst the Barrs of Brooklyn or the Barrs anywhere in the wide world.
“That will do, Janet,” she said, rising to her full stature and assuming an expression that gave every line of her face its crudest edge. “Your language confirms my worst fears. I shall say no more.”
Janet wished that this were true, but she knew it was a mere euphemism. And, indeed, her mother continued with icy piety:
“I shall pray that understanding may be given you to realize that happiness comes from the spirit, not from the flesh, from an exaltation of the heart, not from the pleasures of dances and parties. As for this Cornelia Covert, her reputation is such that you should shrink from linking your name with hers. A woman who has lived in an unholy alliance with a man is no friend for an innocent girl.”
“Innocent! Am I more innocent than she is, or simply more ignorant?”
“Janet!” remonstrated Emily, “how can you speak in this way—when our sole object is to help you—”
“Help me! Please don’t make me laugh, Emily,” Janet cut in, bitterly. “A little more of this help of yours and mother will have no difficulty whatever in arguing me down to the ground.”
“I don’t propose to argue with you, my dear,” said Mrs. Barr, motioning to Emily, who flounced angrily upstairs. “I simply say that I don’t approve of this masked ball. One thing more. I wish you to promise not to go.”
Janet was really terrified at her mother’s icy tone, but as her convictions were deeply involved, she replied with obstinate defiance:
“I’m sorry, but I see no reason for giving such a promise.”
“Very well,” said her mother, adding, with a veiled menace in the harmless words: “Remember, you don’t go with my approval.”
“Then I’ll go without,” muttered Janet under her breath, as her mother majestically left the room.
III
Janet stood alone, her hands clenched in nervous tension. How passionately she resented her mother’s domestic tyranny! In the narrow, intolerant religious atmosphere of Brooklyn, she had endured it long enough, endured it since childhood as one of the mysterious dispensations of Providence.
Her mind was flooded with hatred of the Barrs and all that they stood for.
The Barrs were a characteristic product of the American environment. Mrs. Barr belonged to a decadent branch of an old Mayflower stock connected with the Bradleys, the Saltonstalls, and other well-known New England names. She had married the American born son of a Scotch immigrant; but, as she ruled him with a rod of iron, few traces of his gentler European parentage had slipped into the household or stayed there long if they had. For Mrs. Barr charged the family atmosphere to its full capacity with all the narrowness, harshness, and spitefulness of her own Puritan inheritance.
Robert Lloyd had assured Janet that her family was as typical an American family as could be found east of the Alleghanies. Its Puritan (or rather, Impuritan) tradition was depressed still further (if that were possible) by contact with the low standard of living introduced during a century of reckless and promiscuous immigration. Its leading tradition was the enforcement of an absolute veto upon all social experiments, a veto springing not from love of life or regard for the community but from hatred of life and contempt for the individual.
It was Robert, too, (in their brief acquaintance) who had pointed out that families like the Barrs were to be found everywhere in the wide world. But it was in backwater places like Brooklyn that they congregated densely enough to work mischief. It was from such points of concentration, all too numerous in America, that their outstanding traits spread like an infectious miasma upon all surrounding efforts at progress.
Janet did not need to be told that one of these outstanding traits was a devotion to the cult of doing nothing. Doing nothing with a restless intermittency and an extravagant expenditure of undirected force.
Doing nothing! Janet had learned that this was not the same as having nothing to do. It was a religion of serried “thou shalt nots” applied with passionate rigor to all adventurous departures from the routine of everyday life. Doing nothing meant the avoidance of actions contrary to custom, law, or the supposed requirements of comfort. As regards herself, it meant a studied observance of restrictions, which your own interpretation of law, or custom, or abstinent appetite (with a light accent on the appetite) prescribed for you. As regards your fellow man, it meant his rigid observance of restrictions which not his, but your, interpretation of law, or custom, or abstinent appetite (with a heavy accent on the abstinent) prescribed for him.
It meant an aggressive policy of wholesale and indiscriminate prohibition.
Janet had often listened, at first unwillingly, later receptively, to Robert’s elaboration of the idea. His views had shaped themselves in some such way as this.
The tradition in which Janet’s childhood was moulded was that baser, narrower, lower class American tradition which has always been at grips with the heroic patrician spirit of the Declaration of Independence. It was a tradition of negation, restriction, deprivation; of deprivation for yourself within reasonable limits, and of deprivation for your neighbor within no reasonable limits at all. It was a tradition that rallied opposition to Sunday newspapers, Sunday novels, Sunday theatres, and Sunday sports, besides minutely networking itself through a thousand insidious channels into all sorts of social behavior every day of the week. It was a tradition, not of the magnificent no of self-control but of the demoralizing no of compulsory rectitude.
In short, it was the tradition from which the successive prohibition movements—beer, sex, manners, and what not—have drawn their ethical backing.
Families like the Barrs were the moral backbone of a strong section of American public opinion. Their prejudices, jealousies and pruderies pitched the tone of national manners, fixed the standard of public taste, curbed the flight of the country’s artistic genius, and gave an American the same cultural standing as against a European that a citizen of Boonville held as against a full-fledged New Yorker.
The same causes erected an Anthony Comstock into a national figure better known than the President’s cabinet, gave rise to episodes like that of Maxim Gorky, and made a raid on the women bathers at Atlantic City a topic of serious discussion throughout the country.
In Robert’s view, the Barrs of America prided themselves on the cast-iron taboos they had laid on all decent and civilized manifestations of sex. They had eliminated every natural, healthy and spontaneous expression of the sex instinct from American books, music, pictures and daily intercourse. This was their first contribution to Western culture.
Their second contribution—and they frankly gloried in it, too—was that they had morally sandbagged all dissenters and almost completely crushed the spirit of dissent.
For they believed—these Barrs of America did—that force is the only effective form of moral propaganda in the world. They believed this with all the fanaticism of intolerance and stupidity. Force and repression were the only two things they did sincerely believe in, though they would have died sooner than acknowledge this. Not theirs the aim of replacing lower forms of enjoyment by higher ones, baser religions by nobler ones. Theirs was the modest if unavowed mission of improving on the example of Jesus Christ. In a moment of divine (and regrettable) weakness, Christ had suffered torture for his enemies. The Barrs undertook the pious duty of counteracting this weakness by making their enemies suffer torture for Christ.
In this atmosphere of moral taboos and sex repression, Janet had grown up like an alien spirit in a foreign land. From the very first stirrings of intelligence, some independent strain in her had set her in antagonism to her environment. She had not been fully conscious of this antagonism, much less of the issues involved, and she had seldom given battle directly to her mother’s despotism. But even when she had bowed her head to the force of argument or to the argument of force, her heart had remained untouched. She had knuckled under time and again, but her service had been lip service and her homage the homage only of the knee.
It was a situation she had but dimly realized when she first met Robert Lloyd. His sensible views and galvanic realism had startled her out of her half-hearted acceptance of a decrepit tradition and carried her at one bound from the shadowy Brooklyn existence of the age of Praise-God-Barebones to the vivid actuality of the age of the airplane. The first novelty of contemporary life had been overwhelming. She felt as though she had lost consciousness in the seventeenth century and, like the fabled princess, had lain in a twilight sleep until Robert Lloyd had awakened her to the throb and stir of the twentieth century.
Her friendship with Robert had begun shortly after the end of the war, the great World War from which the Barrs had learnt as much as a blind man learns from a mirror.
Chance had next thrown her into the arms of Emily’s classmate, Cornelia Covert. Cornelia had taken her in hand and brought her into the free and easy atmosphere of the Lorillard model tenements in Kips Bay. Her furtive visits to Cornelia’s flat had led her by gradual stages into the stress and clash of the metropolis until, what with one new experience and another, she began to distinguish the trumpet-tongued voices of her own generation and to feel in her soul the resurgent willfulness of the modern age.
IV
And now, here she stood, the fire of life stirring her blood, the long arm of her mother’s power fettering her movements. If only she were in Emily’s shoes! Emily had been sent to college and had later achieved economic independence in the profession of high school teacher. But Emily had always had an instinct for taking care of herself. Janet wished she had half her sister’s practical sense, and bitterly reproached herself for having been fool enough to yield to her mother’s hankering after gentility. It was Mrs. Barr’s belief that the family prestige would fall irrecoverably below the rarified heights where the Cabots or the Saltonstalls were presumed to move, unless one daughter, at least, was kept free from the lower class stigma of earning her own living.
Thus, under pressure, Janet had stayed home to become a fine lady, although the limited circumstances of the Barrs obliged her, in effect, to become a domestic servant. For a year past, however, she had been laying desperate plans for going out on her own.
“Hello, little girl, good morning!” interrupted a cheery voice at her side.
“Good morning, father,” replied Janet, to a tall, well-preserved, stately man who kissed her very affectionately.
“Your mother sent for me, Janet,” said Mr. Barr anxiously. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m the matter. She has been pitching into me for receiving an invitation to a masked ball. I’ve been wasting the Lord’s time!”
“Did she blow you up?”
“Down, father, down. I feel very small, I can tell you.”
Janet was of too cheerful a temperament to be sad very long. She and her father habitually exchanged death-cell jests, and even her present gloom was not too thick to be dispelled with a quip. Her father burst into a loud and hearty laugh which he moderated considerably on remembering that he still had his wife to face. His camel-like virtues, which had carried him tolerably far in business—he was manager of a small branch of the Wheat Exchange Bank—had not saved him from being a thorough nincompoop at home.
Mr. Barr had the form of a patrician but the spirit of an obedient slave. Janet despised him for his complete submission to his wife, yet she had one bond of sympathy with him. Though he dared not raise hand or voice against the system of vetoes and taboos under which the Barr family lived, he disliked the system and understood her hatred of it. Janet often wondered whether he was not the passive carrier of some rebellious British strain which, in herself, took the shape of active insurgency against Mrs. Barr’s American passion for denying the body and mortifying the soul.
“Mother is waiting for you upstairs,” she said, trying to feel sorry for him. “She means to give you a scathing address on the moral failings of your youngest daughter.”
“I suppose I’ll get a piece of her mind, too.”
“Depend upon it. The same old piece that passeth understanding.”
“Well, it’s all in the day’s work—it’s family life,” said the old gentleman, trying to keep up a brave front.
He shuffled off with a rueful smile.
Janet almost felt ashamed of her malice as she watched his reluctant steps and pictured his terror of her mother. His kindliness and good nature had once endeared him to her. But she could not check a growing contempt for his weakness of character. It was clearer to her every day that her mother’s cruel bigotry had not been half so fraught with tragic consequences as her father’s spinelessness and moral cowardice.
“Family life—all in the day’s work!” she repeated to herself with a trembling lip. “Well, I don’t mean to have a lifetime of days like this.”
Then she went upstairs to her own room and wrote Cornelia Covert a note of acceptance.