Part II — Love Among the Outlaws
Chapter Seven I
When Janet awoke at eleven, it took her several moments to recollect that she was in Cornelia’s apartment in Kips Bay, where Claude had left her before dawn. She could hear Cornelia bustling about in the living room, but she stayed in bed a little longer to luxuriate in memories of the preceding night.
She got lightly out of bed and stood before the mirror over the chiffonier. But she was less preoccupied with the image in the looking glass than with mental pictures of the night before.
In the bright light of day, the glamour of some of these pictures took on the effect of tinsel. But Janet could still thrill to the excitement of the raid on the Lyceum, the pell-mell escape, the violent dispersal of the mobs in Murray Hill and the hurried collection of a troop of Outlaw refugees and their nocturnal march through Kips Bay streets under the leadership of Claude Fontaine. It had been a very festive troop, swelled by stragglers all the way to the Lorillard tenements, where the party camped in Charlotte Beecher’s double flat.
Of the long merrymaking that followed, Janet cared to remember only the occasions when Claude Fontaine was at her side and at her service. How vividly she could picture him in the dashing part of Charles Surface, his handsome face tinted with rich, young blood, and his eyes of such brightness and depth that surely no infamy could ever dull them!
A knock cut this day dreaming short.
“How do you do, Araminta?” said Cornelia, entering melodramatically. “And what does the Sleeping Beauty want for breakfast?”
“I’m hungry enough to eat sticks and stones and puppy-dog’s bones,” replied Janet. “But I won’t murmur if you have gentler fare.”
As Cornelia insisted that dressing should be deferred until after the meal, Janet tripped to the breakfast table in her nightgown, her curly hair hanging down to her shoulders. Cornelia, her figure lapped precariously in a simple dress, which she had made and pinned together at a cost of fifty cents all told, sat down opposite her young guest.
“This is a picnic!” exclaimed Janet. She was filled with glee at the wrapping paper neatly spread out in place of a table cloth, at the cups, saucers and dishes all made of agateware, and at the compressed paper plates for the slices of bread.
“Well, it isn’t a Barmecide’s feast, by any means,” said Cornelia, who was amused at Janet’s artless joy. “The plates may be made of paper, but they are fresh and so are the eggs and bacon.”
She set these articles on the table.
“All the principal dishes are of agateware,” she said, in answer to a question of Janet’s. “I’ve got four of everything necessary—four cups, four saucers, four glasses, four knives, four spoons, and so on. But don’t imagine that we have wrapping paper for a table cloth every day. Dear, no! That’s only for guests of honor and on Sundays. On week days we use newspapers.”
“That’s a novel way of taking one’s newspaper with one’s meal.”
“Oh, it’s old news. I always use the newspaper of a week ago. And it’s curious how often I run across some interesting bit of politics or scandal that escaped me a week before. Sometimes, while devouring a roll, I catch myself in the midst of a slobbery article by Hutchins Burley in the Evening Chronicle. The wretch is running a series of articles called: ‘The Soul of Woman under Freedom.’”
She gave Janet a circumstantial report of the encounter with Burley during the night. Janet followed this narrative with sympathetic interest, and wished that she and Claude had arrived in time to prevent the occurrence.
“But then your knight-errant would have missed his opportunity,” she said.
“Think of the loss! By the way, I met him this morning, Araminta.”
“In ambush at the door?”
“No, in the hallway downstairs. I had gone out for some cream. On my way back I ran right into his arms.”
“With what result?”
“Very little. He exhausted his eloquence in stammers and deaf mute lingo. And when I thanked him again for last night’s service, he promptly took to his heels. It was cruel.”
“The course of true love always is, Cornelia.”
Cornelia, pleased at the implied assumption that she had inspired a romance, dwelt with gusto on the hero’s exploit. For the fiftieth time she described the skill and celerity with which “the physical culture expert” had propelled Burley from the apartment.
“At the Outlaws’ Ball, Mr. Burley called Claude a diamond smuggler,” said Janet, by way of changing the subject. “What did he mean? Do people accuse the Fontaines of smuggling?”
“I never heard of such a thing,” replied Cornelia. “Merchant princes like the Fontaines would hardly stoop to that. Besides, it wouldn’t pay them. Did Claude notice?”
“Yes, and he seemed to mind it very much. His whole appearance changed as if he had been stung into sudden fury. But he controlled himself bravely.”
“What else could he do with the belle of the ball at his side? He’s always a man of the world—when in the world.”
“But not in private?” asked Janet, anxious to get to the bottom of this veiled aspersion. Cornelia’s reply was evasive.
“A fine summer’s day will often end in a burst of terrifying thunder and lightning,” she said. “Lothario has plenty of good looks and plenty of temper. A man who is accustomed to find people submitting to his will, easily gets indignant when he meets with opposition.”
She sighed as if she could tell much more about Claude Fontaine if she chose.
“Well, I don’t blame him for getting enraged at the abuse of that horrible man,” said Janet, sturdily defending him.
“Nor do I. Once in a while a thunderbolt will strike the wicked as well as the good, won’t it? Claude was quite justified this time, no doubt.”
“How does he happen to come among the Outlaws, Cornelia? He doesn’t seem to belong to them exactly.”
“He doesn’t pretend to. He walks among us humble tenementers like a god among his creatures. Distinctly Like a god, Araminta. That’s the footing on which he associates with mere human beings.”
“Yet he’s hail fellow well met with Robert and Mazie and the others,” protested Janet.
“Ah, yes, but don’t let that deceive you. Jupiter was hail fellow well met with many a mortal, especially with many a mortal maiden. You remember that he visited one earthly princess in a shower of gold. That is what Claude does. He visits the model tenements in—or perhaps I should say with—a shower of gold. I mean,” she added, “he doesn’t think of marriage with a girl on Mazie’s level. Nor with a girl on yours or mine.”
This shaft did not miss its mark. But it perplexed Janet more than it wounded her.
“I thought that made no difference to you,” she said, for she had already been favored with some of Cornelia’s destructive criticism of the institution of marriage.
“It makes no difference to me,” said Cornelia. “But in this stifling room I can’t explain myself as I’d like to. The spacious blue skies and the free pure air of the Hudson will be a more fitting background for the story I’d like to tell you. Put on your things, Araminta, and we’ll go for a charming ride.”
Janet dressed with promptness and pleasure. She appeared to have forgotten that Robert Lloyd had particularly said that he was coming about noon in order to take her home. Her friend did not remind her. The knowledge that Robert would go away in bitter disappointment robbed the outing of none of its zest, so far as Cornelia was concerned.
Claude, too, had promised to drop in at Number Fifteen. This promise Janet bore well in mind. But as his visit was not to take place until late in the afternoon and there was thus no danger of missing him, she joined Cornelia with enthusiasm.
II
At the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Second Avenue, where Kips Bay edges its dingy little proletarian stores into bourgeois respectability, the two young women entered a car bound for the West Twenty-third Street ferry. It proceeded at a jog trot along Second Avenue to Twenty-third Street where it struck the cross-town line west.
Janet felt no annoyance at the snail’s pace from which the car never departed. Manhattan was still a novelty to her, and this section of the East Side was wholly new.
But Cornelia made unflattering comparison between the surface conveyances in Manhattan and the bus transportation which Londoners and Parisians enjoyed. She was annoyed by the complacency that New Yorkers displayed toward their street-car service and the petty provincialism that actually led them to believe this service to be the fastest in the world, when in fact it was the slowest. At the climax of her irritation she gave Janet the benefit of one of Robert Lloyd’s epigrams. Robert had once said that New York “rapid transit,” as it was optimistically called, was the organized effort of the local traction magnates to annihilate the specific advantages of modern electrical machinery. Cornelia did not doubt that in this effort they had triumphed.
The jolts with which the car came to a standstill at each successive street crossing, and the jerks with which it resumed its languid pace again, would ordinarily have frazzled her nerves for the day. This time, however, she bore the ordeal much more composedly. For one thing, Janet’s calm spirit had a soothing influence upon her. For another, it amused her mightily to have so unsophisticated a companion to point out the sights to. She caused Janet to observe the Italian district with its macaroni dens along the cross streets, the Armenian district with the Eastern restaurants parading strange Greek-lettered names, and Kips Bay’s fashionable western fringe with its Madison Avenue hotels, stores and residential palaces.
Janet drank it all in thirstily. Not for a moment did she regret the defiance she had flung at her mother’s wishes by going to the Outlaws’ Ball. On the contrary, this act of insurgency appeared to have heightened her perception as much as it had strengthened her self-esteem. She saw things with different eyes, or believed she did. The people and the shops fairly brandished a life and reality totally new to her experience. She longed to be more than a mere spectator in the tumultuous scene unfolded before her. She would have given anything to be even a cog—an active cog—in this giant metropolis whose roar and grime possessed an immense attraction.
At the North River they left the car. Three big ferry houses confronted them and Cornelia was undecided which to take. It was a grave question in her mind, for she staged the big scenes of her life with as much care as a play producer. The artist in her at once eliminated the Erie ferry.
“The Erie boats are too dinky,” she said. “Shall we take the Jersey Central or the Lackawanna?”
“Let’s take the one that gives the longest ride,” said Janet, for whom the smell of the river quickly cut such minor esthetic knots.
Cornelia’s first and invariable impulse towards any proposal made by another person was to turn it down. The reasons she gave for doing so were usually quite plausible, though sometimes cast in a rather theatrical style.
“The Jersey’s trip is a little longer,” she said, “but the difference is slight. The Lackawanna appeals to me more. Lackawanna! Don’t you love the music in that name? Besides, Araminta, the Jersey boats are painted a sickly gray, while the Lackawanna boats are maroon. A wonderful maroon! And they have a glorious seat on the upper deck, directly facing the bow.”
“Very well, let’s take the Lackawanna,” said Janet, to whom it was all one.
They were soon ensconced in the very seat on the top deck which Cornelia coveted.
But if Janet had any hopes of hearing a great deal more about Claude Fontaine, she was soon disillusioned. She did not yet understand her friend, to whom the world was an audience at a stage play in which Cornelia Covert had the star part. She speedily learned that Cornelia had not gone to all this trouble to analyze the love affairs of other people. No. The moment had been chosen and the stage had been set to make Janet the recipient of the sacred narrative of Cornelia’s experience with Percival Houghton.
The tale did not begin until the boat was well under way, so that Janet had an opportunity to revel in the swell of the mighty Hudson and to contrast the differing aspects of the two banks. The Palisaded Jersey side was almost hidden by huge ocean steamers, except at the spot where the Castle Point Terrace of Stevens Institute rose serenely above a forest of quivering masts.
Janet thought the heights of Hoboken quite dwarfed by the towering office structures of lower Manhattan. Cornelia interrupted her ineffable story long enough to repeat another opinion of Robert’s without acknowledgment. It was to the effect that the commercial skyscrapers on the Hudson were as grimly symbolic of ownership as the castles that overlooked the Rhine. Did Janet realize that the lords of these skyscraping fortresses were the masters of the river and thus of the country on which the river’s port had a strangle hold? In each of the big business edifices, thousands of mercantile retainers served their liege lords with pen or typewriter as industriously as ever men-at-arms flourished crossbow or arquebus in the brave days of old. Only, the economic factor in the comparison was all in favor of the industrial barons of today. Their armies, opulence and power were of a magnitude that would have caused the robber barons of the Rhine to expire with envy.
III
With these brief interruptions, Cornelia pursued the even tenor of the story whose narration was the seal and token of her friendship. What moved her to tell it to Janet was not the idea of self-defence, or the hope of softening the shock a friend might receive on learning the details from a hostile critic. Quite the contrary. She was inordinately proud of her intimate connection with a man as famous as Percival Houghton; and she was altogether anxious that her friends should know of this connection in the form in which she wished it to be known and hoped to make it remembered.
Two years had passed, she told Janet, since Percival Houghton came to the United States. He was a young Englishman, well connected, who had gained an immense vogue as an illustrator. He was said to have “isolated” several rare types of French and English female beauty, and fabulous sums had been paid for his portrait studies in pastel. His press agent having in advance widely advertised the artist’s announced purpose of adding the American girl to his pictorial conquests, his arrival was extremely good copy for the newspapers.
Hutchins Burley, with an eye to the Evening Chronicle’s large feminine clientele, did not let the opportunity slip by. He assigned Cornelia, then attached to his paper, to interview the ambitious Englishman. In her own words, “she went, she saw, she conquered.”
After the flattering notice in the Chronicle, Percival Houghton sought her out and attended her devotedly. Cornelia dwelt on the warm friendship that sprang up between them and on her own quick subjection to his great personal charm.
“He was a wonderful man, Araminta. He had a great leonine head with wild flowing locks; there was fire in his eye and music in his voice; and he had that imperious way with him that opens a path straight to a woman’s heart.”
The week before his departure, he made an avowal of his passion. And she was in a paradise of ecstasy until the next day, when he sent her by mail a piece of information he had not had the courage to give her in person. He confessed to a wife and two children living in England. In a moment of impetuous boyish idealism—like Shelley’s, he said—he had married a girl who was intellectually (though not financially) his inferior. Worst of all, she shared none of his tastes or aspirations. He assured Cornelia that every day of his married existence had been a lifetime of exquisite torture.
This confession, Janet heard, was the prelude to many hours of bitter torment. Cornelia said that the one good outcome of this evil period was that she began to think of the realities of life for the first time. She was led to question the moral conventions which she had always taken for granted and which, she now saw, encrusted the conduct of most of the people around her. Under the tutelage of Percival Houghton, who proclaimed himself a free thinker, as well as a free lover, she became alive to the absurdity of regarding the conventions of an age as immutable laws for all time.
Naturally, at this time, her logic was concentrated on the convention of marriage.
Percival read out many passages from the great writers of today—continued Cornelia—from Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis and Gilbert Cannan; and these passages exposed the unalterable belief of the writers that marriage, in its existing form, was wrong, conclusively and crushingly wrong.
Wrong, she hastened to explain, in so far as it was a contract that was held to be binding even after the death of the love on which the contract was based.
She developed the logic of the situation at some length in arguments with which Janet was greatly impressed.
“You own mother and father hate each other, Janet,” she pointed out. “The result is the cat-and-dog, bite-one-another’s-head-off relationship that passes for family life in your home. Do you see?”;
Janet saw, or thought she saw. Anything that could plausibly be shown to be responsible for family life among the Barrs was sure to receive her cordial detestation. Cornelia, certain of her auditor’s sympathy, continued her story. Percival Houghton’s solution of the difficulty caused by his rash attachment was a highly quixotic one. He proposed that Cornelia accompany him to England, so that they might together lay the facts before his wife and beg her to sue for a divorce after he had furnished her with funds and with technical grounds for the suit. They were to be open and aboveboard in urging the right of true lovers to be free from all the shackles of law and tradition. His wife was not ungenerous, he declared. Moreover, she had never really loved him; and he persuaded himself and Cornelia that, face to face with an overwhelming passion, she would readily consent to an act that was to liberate three lives.
This, he insisted was the only honorable course to pursue. It had the precedent of such great names as Ruskin and Millais. Besides it was the only course that would not seriously affect his career or completely cut him off from his children.
What could Cornelia do but yield? He engaged passage to England for two, and—she emphasized this detail again and again—though they occupied the same stateroom, their union was a union of two souls and nothing more.
Without giving Janet time to grasp the logic of this behavior or of its explanation, she continued:
“Percival said it behooved us to show that free love could rise above the lustful impulses of the flesh. We were to come to each other clean, so as not to do the cause of free love an injury.”
England had been the Paradise of her hopes, but it proved their sepulchre. Scarcely had they docked in the Mersey when reporters representing news associations accosted them for information about their “elopement.” The news had been cabled from New York, where they were featured as “elective affinities.” In London, too, they found themselves headliners in the yellow journals. Needless to say, the most extreme construction was put on their journey together. And the escapade of “affinity Houghton” became an international sensation.
“How did it leak out, Cornelia?” exclaimed Janet. “Had you told anyone you were going together?
“Not a soul. But my connection with a newspaper was fatal. A woman journalist is subject to more gossip than an actress. Every time she’s seen with a new man, she’s reported to have ensnared a new lover.”
As a result of this glaring notoriety, Cornelia went on, Houghton’s manner toward her underwent a radical change. He remained kind and courteous, but his manner grew cool. He urged one pretext after another for postponing what was to have been a historic interview with his wife. In London he took her to a hotel and left her there alone.
Two days later she received a letter from him, in which he said that his wife was unalterably resolved to contest a divorce on any ground, and that the newspaper gossip had almost irretrievably injured his prospects. He added that he was as devoted to her as ever. He was, in fact, broken-hearted, but his clear duty to his family, his children and his career demanded that they should never meet again.
In spite of this note she made several attempts to see him once more. She confessed to Janet that she had been ready to accept any terms he might make, if only he agreed not to part from her forever. It was for love and not for marriage that she had sacrificed herself. It was not marriage but love that she demanded. But he sustained his pitilessly inflexible attitude. Almost prostrated by the notoriety which the experience had thrust upon her, she made a heart-broken return to the United States.
“I landed in New York without hope, without health, and without a home,” said Cornelia, dramatically. “But I had vindicated my belief that love should be free.”
To forestall a social boycott, she had proudly decided to shun all her former friends. To this end she rented a flat in the Lorillard tenements. And here she had remained in eclipse, and in receipt of a small allowance from a brother who was a leading politician in a Western State.
Latterly, old friends of hers, members of the fellowship of Outlaws, had drifted into her rooms in Kips Bay; and so she had been dragged—unwillingly, she alleged—from her retirement.
She asserted that she had no ill-will for Percival Houghton, who would always be the one man in the world for her. After all, he had sold his birthright for a marriage of convenience, and he might well feel that he ought to stick to his bargain, cost what it might. She was persuaded that his coldness to her in London was merely an iron vizor clamped upon his real feelings by the ruthless institution of matrimony. She also appeared to derive some comfort from the thought that though he was “a soul pirate,” though he had “stolen her soul,” his own had been damned in the process.
“Yet I shall always love him,” she said, with tragic resignation. “I shall never love anyone else. And I shall never marry. I’ve suffered enough from marriage as it is.”
The ferryboat docked at the Lackawanna Station. Janet, who had been lost in a reverie, mechanically followed her companion’s suggestion that they take the same boat back. Cornelia’s story—the vivid story of one of the principals—had a very different coloring from the account of the “affinity Houghton” scandal which had filled the front pages of the evening newspapers two years ago. Janet could still recollect the headlines, the pictures, and the expansive gossip; also the strange mixture of curiosity and pious disgust with which she had followed the reports.
Could the horrified Janet Barr of that dimly remembered time be the same girl who was now sitting in the closest intimacy beside the leading female in the case?
On the return across the river, Janet had several questions on the tip of her tongue, but Cornelia’s manner seemed to discourage inquiries of a too personal kind. However, Janet did get in:
“What was Percival Houghton’s excuse for refusing to see you once more?”
“He said we could meet only in secret; but that any continuation of the secrecy was more than he could endure.”
“Do you think that excuse rings true?”
“Why not? I suppose I should say it rings falsely true, as faith unfaithful always does.”
“I think it was the evasion of a coward.”
“Perhaps. But, Araminta, all men are cowards, moral cowards, I mean. They face bullets sublimely, but they shiver and shake before an argument. They gayly lose their lives for a hunting trophy or a football triumph, but they can’t bear to lose their dinners for a belief.”
Janet, thinking of her father, was inclined to agree with this view.
“Is that why men let women keep up the marriage system?”
“My dear, it isn’t the women who keep up the marriage system. It’s the men! Women just fall into a system that’s ready made for them. Most women are all body and no soul. Give them the choice between marriage, which provides for the body while starving the soul, and some other condition which provides for the soul while starving the body, and of course they’ll choose marriage. They prefer to hold a man by his lusts rather than by his spiritual impulses. But the men keep the system up, my dear. Because of the children they want.”
“But, Cornelia, I thought it was the women who wanted children!”
“So we do. We want them because life demands them through us; for are we not the mothers of the race? But that is not the men’s reason. It isn’t the race that is calling through them for immortality. Heavens no! It’s their boundless male egotism. And since they know that they can’t live forever in their own selfish little bodies, they hope to get a new lease of life in the bodies of their sons. That is why they have built up an institution in which they can keep their women wedlocked and can make sure that their children are their own.”
“But perhaps marriage is necessary for the children, Cornelia. They are the better off for it, at least when they are very young.”
“Are you so sure? Remember, loveless marriages seldom result in healthy offspring. Look at Percival Houghton’s two children. One is a girl with hip disease, the other is a feeble-minded, flabby anæmic boy. Yet the parents are both physically sound. Do you think I would have had such children?”
Her vehemence was over-awing, almost over-bearing.
“I’m not sure I can judge from one case, Cornelia,” said Janet, her firm voice and clear distinct utterance betraying a will of her own. “But I’m sure that people who marry and find that they are mistaken in each other, ought to be able to rectify the mistake. It’s horrible to think that they can’t.”
“Ah! Now you’ve come to it. If people find that they are mistaken in their butchers or grocers, they experiment until they find the right one. They won’t go on eating bad steaks forever because luck or inexperience landed them in a poor shop at the first try. But do they take as much trouble to get the right husband or wife as they do to get the right mutton chop? They don’t. Whatever partner luck or inexperience hands them at the altar, they put up with for the rest of their lives.”
“I wonder why we don’t experiment in marriage as in all other matters?” asked Janet thoughtfully.
“My dear, it’s been proposed often enough. By men, of course. You are too young to remember the furor that followed when George Meredith proposed trial marriages. It’s an easy thing for the men to propose, since it’s the women who must risk the beginning. The question is, who is to begin? The plain women daren’t, because the risk is too great; and the fascinating women needn’t, because they get what they want anyway, within the law or beyond it. Now if ever girls like you, Araminta, on whom the eye rests with delight, began to experiment—”
“What then?”
“Oh, I’ve no right to urge my views on individuals. Besides, you are far too young and inexperienced, my dear, to be one of the first. Though I’m sure nothing would suit men like Claude Fontaine better.”
“There, Cornelia, you’re making innuendos about Mr. Fontaine again,” said Janet. “It isn’t fair. If you mean to take me into your confidence at all, you might do it all the way through.”
“Not another word will you get out of me now, Araminta,” replied Cornelia, with one of the queer laughs she gave whenever she blocked people’s wishes.
However, fearing to weaken the hold she had upon Janet, she added:
“I’m too famished to talk. Here we are, landing at last. Come, we’ll get a nice lunch. I know you’re dying to talk about the irresistible Claude. I promise to tell you Lothario’s whole history over our cups of tea.”
Janet begged to be taken to the Y.W.C.A. Cafeteria, whose good food, self-service and picturesque quarters she had heard Cornelia extol. When they reached the restaurant, they saw a very long line of waiting customers.
“This will never do,” said Cornelia, disgustedly. And, quite unwilling to sacrifice comfort in the cause of self-service, she dragged the reluctant Janet to a French pastry restaurant on Fifth Avenue.
“I do like a waiter and a table cloth,” said Cornelia, as she contentedly resigned herself to these dubious luxuries. “And I don’t like to scramble for my napkin and my glass of ice water.”
“What a strange thing for you to say,” said Janet, puzzled. “It sounds as though, in spite of your advanced views, you might at heart be thoroughly in love with conventional ways.”
“Don’t put such ideas into your head, silly!” said Cornelia, giving a high-pitched, self-conscious, stagy laugh, with which she shut off further personal questions.
During lunch, Cornelia contrived to say curiously little about Claude Fontaine, Janet learning hardly anything she did not already know. Claude was heir to the great Fontaine jewelry establishment. He was a social swell. He was very handsome. And he was trying equally hard to dabble in modern paintings and not to dabble in modern amours.
His success in both attempts was dubious, according to Cornelia. Particularly in the matter of the amours. He was, of course, the greatest catch of his day. In his own circle, every mother had marked him for her daughter. And it was to escape the conspiracies of matchmakers that he had taken up with the Outlaws in the model tenements. In their unconventional atmosphere, he had hoped to move and breathe more freely. But if every girl in his own set was willing to become his wife, every girl in the Lorillard tenements seemed willing to become his mistress.
It appeared that Mazie Ross had been particularly shameless in setting herself to catch Claude. Somehow or other, the conversation pivoted chiefly on Mazie, her selfishness, her neglect of her fair share of the work in flat number fifteen, and her willingness to sell herself. This last was the fault which Cornelia proposed to take most exception to.
“I wish I could get rid of her,” she said. “Then you could come and live with me, Araminta. It would be like exchanging a room that smelled of last night’s stale flowers for a garden perfumed by fresh roses.”