The Greater Inclination

Their railway-carriage had been full when the train left Bologna; but at the first station beyond Milan their only remaining companion—­a courtly person who ate garlic out of a carpet-bag—­had left his crumb-strewn seat with a bow.

Lydia’s eye regretfully followed the shiny broadcloth of his retreating back till it lost itself in the cloud of touts and cab-drivers hanging about the station; then she glanced across at Gannett and caught the same regret in his look.  They were both sorry to be alone.

“Par-ten-za!” shouted the guard.  The train vibrated to a sudden slamming of doors; a waiter ran along the platform with a tray of fossilized sandwiches; a belated porter flung a bundle of shawls and band-boxes into a third-class carriage; the guard snapped out a brief Partensa! which indicated the purely ornamental nature of his first shout; and the train swung out of the station.

The direction of the road had changed, and a shaft of sunlight struck across the dusty red velvet seats into Lydia’s corner.  Gannett did not notice it.  He had returned to his Revue de Paris, and she had to rise and lower the shade of the farther window.  Against the vast horizon of their leisure such incidents stood out sharply.

Having lowered the shade, Lydia sat down, leaving the length of the carriage between herself and Gannett.  At length he missed her and looked up.

“I moved out of the sun,” she hastily explained.

He looked at her curiously:  the sun was beating on her through the shade.

“Very well,” he said pleasantly; adding, “You don’t mind?” as he drew a cigarette-case from his pocket.

It was a refreshing touch, relieving the tension of her spirit with the suggestion that, after all, if he could smoke—!  The relief was only momentary.  Her experience of smokers was limited (her husband had disapproved of the use of tobacco) but she knew from hearsay that men sometimes smoked to get away from things; that a cigar might be the masculine equivalent of darkened windows and a headache.  Gannett, after a puff or two, returned to his review.

It was just as she had foreseen; he feared to speak as much as she did.  It was one of the misfortunes of their situation that they were never busy enough to necessitate, or even to justify, the postponement of unpleasant discussions.  If they avoided a question it was obviously, unconcealably because the question was disagreeable.  They had unlimited leisure and an accumulation of mental energy to devote to any subject that presented itself; new topics were in fact at a premium.  Lydia sometimes had premonitions of a famine-stricken period when there would he nothing left to talk about, and she had already caught herself doling out piecemeal what, in the first prodigality of their confidences, she would have flung to him in a breath.  Their silence therefore might simply mean that they had nothing to say; but it was another disadvantage of their position that it allowed infinite opportunity for the classification of minute differences.  Lydia had learned to distinguish between real and factitious silences; and under Gannett’s she now detected a hum of speech to which her own thoughts made breathless answer.

How could it be otherwise, with that thing between them?  She glanced up at the rack overhead.  The thing was there, in her dressing-bag, symbolically suspended over her head and his.  He was thinking of it now, just as she was; they had been thinking of it in unison ever since they had entered the train.  While the carriage had held other travellers they had screened her from his thoughts; but now that he and she were alone she knew exactly what was passing through his mind; she could almost hear him asking himself what he should say to her….

* * * * *

The thing had come that morning, brought up to her in an innocent-looking envelope with the rest of their letters, as they were leaving the hotel at Bologna.  As she tore it open, she and Gannett were laughing over some ineptitude of the local guide-book—­they had been driven, of late, to make the most of such incidental humors of travel.  Even when she had unfolded the document she took it for some unimportant business paper sent abroad for her signature, and her eye travelled inattentively over the curly Whereases of the preamble until a word arrested her:—­Divorce.  There it stood, an impassable barrier, between her husband’s name and hers.

She had been prepared for it, of course, as healthy people are said to be prepared for death, in the sense of knowing it must come without in the least expecting that it will.  She had known from the first that Tillotson meant to divorce her—­but what did it matter?  Nothing mattered, in those first days of supreme deliverance, but the fact that she was free; and not so much (she had begun to be aware) that freedom had released her from Tillotson as that it had given her to Gannett.  This discovery had not been agreeable to her self-esteem.  She had preferred to think that Tillotson had himself embodied all her reasons for leaving him; and those he represented had seemed cogent enough to stand in no need of reinforcement.  Yet she had not left him till she met Gannett.  It was her love for Gannett that had made life with Tillotson so poor and incomplete a business.  If she had never, from the first, regarded her marriage as a full cancelling of her claims upon life, she had at least, for a number of years, accepted it as a provisional compensation,—­she had made it “do.”  Existence in the commodious Tillotson mansion in Fifth Avenue—­with Mrs. Tillotson senior commanding the approaches from the second-story front windows—­had been reduced to a series of purely automatic acts.  The moral atmosphere of the Tillotson interior was as carefully screened and curtained as the house itself:  Mrs. Tillotson senior dreaded ideas as much as a draught in her back.  Prudent people liked an even temperature; and to do anything unexpected was as foolish as going out in the rain.  One of the chief advantages of being rich was that one need not be exposed to unforeseen contingencies:  by the use of ordinary firmness and common sense one could make sure of doing exactly the same thing every day at the same hour.  These doctrines, reverentially imbibed with his mother’s milk, Tillotson (a model son who had never given his parents an hour’s anxiety) complacently expounded to his wife, testifying to his sense of their importance by the regularity with which he wore goloshes on damp days, his punctuality at meals, and his elaborate precautions against burglars and contagious diseases.  Lydia, coming from a smaller town, and entering New York life through the portals of the Tillotson mansion, had mechanically accepted this point of view as inseparable from having a front pew in church and a parterre box at the opera.  All the people who came to the house revolved in the same small circle of prejudices.  It was the kind of society in which, after dinner, the ladies compared the exorbitant charges of their children’s teachers, and agreed that, even with the new duties on French clothes, it was cheaper in the end to get everything from Worth; while the husbands, over their cigars, lamented municipal corruption, and decided that the men to start a reform were those who had no private interests at stake.

To Lydia this view of life had become a matter of course, just as lumbering about in her mother-in-law’s landau had come to seem the only possible means of locomotion, and listening every Sunday to a fashionable Presbyterian divine the inevitable atonement for having thought oneself bored on the other six days of the week.  Before she met Gannett her life had seemed merely dull:  his coming made it appear like one of those dismal Cruikshank prints in which the people are all ugly and all engaged in occupations that are either vulgar or stupid.

It was natural that Tillotson should be the chief sufferer from this readjustment of focus.  Gannett’s nearness had made her husband ridiculous, and a part of the ridicule had been reflected on herself.  Her tolerance laid her open to a suspicion of obtuseness from which she must, at all costs, clear herself in Gannett’s eyes.

She did not understand this until afterwards.  At the time she fancied that she had merely reached the limits of endurance.  In so large a charter of liberties as the mere act of leaving Tillotson seemed to confer, the small question of divorce or no divorce did not count.  It was when she saw that she had left her husband only to be with Gannett that she perceived the significance of anything affecting their relations.  Her husband, in casting her off, had virtually flung her at Gannett:  it was thus that the world viewed it.  The measure of alacrity with which Gannett would receive her would be the subject of curious speculation over afternoon-tea tables and in club corners.  She knew what would be said—­she had heard it so often of others!  The recollection bathed her in misery.  The men would probably back Gannett to “do the decent thing”; but the ladies’ eye-brows would emphasize the worthlessness of such enforced fidelity; and after all, they would be right.  She had put herself in a position where Gannett “owed” her something; where, as a gentleman, he was bound to “stand the damage.”  The idea of accepting such compensation had never crossed her mind; the so-called rehabilitation of such a marriage had always seemed to her the only real disgrace.  What she dreaded was the necessity of having to explain herself; of having to combat his arguments; of calculating, in spite of herself, the exact measure of insistence with which he pressed them.  She knew not whether she most shrank from his insisting too much or too little.  In such a case the nicest sense of proportion might be at fault; and how easy to fall into the error of taking her resistance for a test of his sincerity!  Whichever way she turned, an ironical implication confronted her:  she had the exasperated sense of having walked into the trap of some stupid practical joke.

Beneath all these preoccupations lurked the dread of what he was thinking.  Sooner or later, of course, he would have to speak; but that, in the meantime, he should think, even for a moment, that there was any use in speaking, seemed to her simply unendurable.  Her sensitiveness on this point was aggravated by another fear, as yet barely on the level of consciousness; the fear of unwillingly involving Gannett in the trammels of her dependence.  To look upon him as the instrument of her liberation; to resist in herself the least tendency to a wifely taking possession of his future; had seemed to Lydia the one way of maintaining the dignity of their relation.  Her view had not changed, but she was aware of a growing inability to keep her thoughts fixed on the essential point—­the point of parting with Gannett.  It was easy to face as long as she kept it sufficiently far off:  but what was this act of mental postponement but a gradual encroachment on his future?  What was needful was the courage to recognize the moment when, by some word or look, their voluntary fellowship should be transformed into a bondage the more wearing that it was based on none of those common obligations which make the most imperfect marriage in some sort a centre of gravity.

When the porter, at the next station, threw the door open, Lydia drew back, making way for the hoped-for intruder; but none came, and the train took up its leisurely progress through the spring wheat-fields and budding copses.  She now began to hope that Gannett would speak before the next station.  She watched him furtively, half-disposed to return to the seat opposite his, but there was an artificiality about his absorption that restrained her.  She had never before seen him read with so conspicuous an air of warding off interruption.  What could he be thinking of?  Why should he be afraid to speak?  Or was it her answer that he dreaded?

The train paused for the passing of an express, and he put down his book and leaned out of the window.  Presently he turned to her with a smile.  “There’s a jolly old villa out here,” he said.

His easy tone relieved her, and she smiled back at him as she crossed over to his corner.

Beyond the embankment, through the opening in a mossy wall, she caught sight of the villa, with its broken balustrades, its stagnant fountains, and the stone satyr closing the perspective of a dusky grass-walk.

“How should you like to live there?” he asked as the train moved on.

“There?”

“In some such place, I mean.  One might do worse, don’t you think so?  There must be at least two centuries of solitude under those yew-trees.  Shouldn’t you like it?”

“I—­I don’t know,” she faltered.  She knew now that he meant to speak.

He lit another cigarette.  “We shall have to live somewhere, you know,” he said as he bent above the match.

Lydia tried to speak carelessly. “Je n’en vois pas la necessite! Why not live everywhere, as we have been doing?”

“But we can’t travel forever, can we?”

“Oh, forever’s a long word,” she objected, picking up the review he had thrown aside.

“For the rest of our lives then,” he said, moving nearer.

She made a slight gesture which caused his hand to slip from hers.

“Why should we make plans?  I thought you agreed with me that it’s pleasanter to drift.”

He looked at her hesitatingly.  “It’s been pleasant, certainly; but I suppose I shall have to get at my work again some day.  You know I haven’t written a line since—­all this time,” he hastily emended.

She flamed with sympathy and self-reproach.  “Oh, if you mean that—­if you want to write—­of course we must settle down.  How stupid of me not to have thought of it sooner!  Where shall we go?  Where do you think you could work best?  We oughtn’t to lose any more time.”

He hesitated again.  “I had thought of a villa in these parts.  It’s quiet; we shouldn’t be bothered.  Should you like it?”

“Of course I should like it.”  She paused and looked away.  “But I thought—­ I remember your telling me once that your best work had been done in a crowd—­in big cities.  Why should you shut yourself up in a desert?”

Gannett, for a moment, made no reply.  At length he said, avoiding her eye as carefully as she avoided his:  “It might be different now; I can’t tell, of course, till I try.  A writer ought not to be dependent on his milieu; it’s a mistake to humor oneself in that way; and I thought that just at first you might prefer to be—­”

She faced him.  “To be what?”

“Well—­quiet.  I mean—­”

“What do you mean by ’at first’?” she interrupted.

He paused again.  “I mean after we are married.”

She thrust up her chin and turned toward the window.  “Thank you!” she tossed back at him.

“Lydia!” he exclaimed blankly; and she felt in every fibre of her averted person that he had made the inconceivable, the unpardonable mistake of anticipating her acquiescence.

The train rattled on and he groped for a third cigarette.  Lydia remained silent.

“I haven’t offended you?” he ventured at length, in the tone of a man who feels his way.

She shook her head with a sigh.  “I thought you understood,” she moaned.  Their eyes met and she moved back to his side.

“Do you want to know how not to offend me?  By taking it for granted, once for all, that you’ve said your say on this odious question and that I’ve said mine, and that we stand just where we did this morning before that—­ that hateful paper came to spoil everything between us!”

“To spoil everything between us?  What on earth do you mean?  Aren’t you glad to be free?”

“I was free before.”

“Not to marry me,” he suggested.

“But I don’t want to marry you!” she cried.

She saw that he turned pale.  “I’m obtuse, I suppose,” he said slowly.  “I confess I don’t see what you’re driving at.  Are you tired of the whole business?  Or was I simply a—­an excuse for getting away?  Perhaps you didn’t care to travel alone?  Was that it?  And now you want to chuck me?” His voice had grown harsh.  “You owe me a straight answer, you know; don’t be tender-hearted!”

Her eyes swam as she leaned to him.  “Don’t you see it’s because I care—­ because I care so much?  Oh, Ralph!  Can’t you see how it would humiliate me?  Try to feel it as a woman would!  Don’t you see the misery of being made your wife in this way?  If I’d known you as a girl—­that would have been a real marriage!  But now—­this vulgar fraud upon society—­and upon a society we despised and laughed at—­this sneaking back into a position that we’ve voluntarily forfeited:  don’t you see what a cheap compromise it is?  We neither of us believe in the abstract ‘sacredness’ of marriage; we both know that no ceremony is needed to consecrate our love for each other; what object can we have in marrying, except the secret fear of each that the other may escape, or the secret longing to work our way back gradually—­oh, very gradually—­into the esteem of the people whose conventional morality we have always ridiculed and hated?  And the very fact that, after a decent interval, these same people would come and dine with us—­the women who talk about the indissolubility of marriage, and who would let me die in a gutter to-day because I am ’leading a life of sin’—­ doesn’t that disgust you more than their turning their backs on us now?  I can stand being cut by them, but I couldn’t stand their coming to call and asking what I meant to do about visiting that unfortunate Mrs. So-and-so!”

She paused, and Gannett maintained a perplexed silence.

“You judge things too theoretically,” he said at length, slowly.  “Life is made up of compromises.”

“The life we ran away from—­yes!  If we had been willing to accept them”—­ she flushed—­“we might have gone on meeting each other at Mrs. Tillotson’s dinners.”

He smiled slightly.  “I didn’t know that we ran away to found a new system of ethics.  I supposed it was because we loved each other.”

“Life is complex, of course; isn’t it the very recognition of that fact that separates us from the people who see it tout d’une piece? If they are right—­if marriage is sacred in itself and the individual must always be sacrificed to the family—­then there can be no real marriage between us, since our—­our being together is a protest against the sacrifice of the individual to the family.”  She interrupted herself with a laugh.  “You’ll say now that I’m giving you a lecture on sociology!  Of course one acts as one can—­as one must, perhaps—­pulled by all sorts of invisible threads; but at least one needn’t pretend, for social advantages, to subscribe to a creed that ignores the complexity of human motives—­that classifies people by arbitrary signs, and puts it in everybody’s reach to be on Mrs. Tillotson’s visiting-list.  It may be necessary that the world should be ruled by conventions—­but if we believed in them, why did we break through them?  And if we don’t believe in them, is it honest to take advantage of the protection they afford?”

Gannett hesitated.  “One may believe in them or not; but as long as they do rule the world it is only by taking advantage of their protection that one can find a modus vivendi.”

“Do outlaws need a modus vivendi?”

He looked at her hopelessly.  Nothing is more perplexing to man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.

She thought she had scored a point and followed it up passionately.  “You do understand, don’t you?  You see how the very thought of the thing humiliates me!  We are together to-day because we choose to be—­don’t let us look any farther than that!” She caught his hands. “Promise me you’ll never speak of it again; promise me you’ll never think of it even,” she implored, with a tearful prodigality of italics.

Through what followed—­his protests, his arguments, his final unconvinced submission to her wishes—­she had a sense of his but half-discerning all that, for her, had made the moment so tumultuous.  They had reached that memorable point in every heart-history when, for the first time, the man seems obtuse and the woman irrational.  It was the abundance of his intentions that consoled her, on reflection, for what they lacked in quality.  After all, it would have been worse, incalculably worse, to have detected any over-readiness to understand her.