On Black Men

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On Black Men

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 On Black Men

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.
 Julia was so completely taken by surprise that to her intense
annoyance she colored violently. But she instantly understood his
new tactics, and blazing defiance on him, regardless of
consequences, turned to her neighbor. Whatever she might submit
to in private, pride commanded that she hold her own in public.
But every time that she answered a remark addressed to her by
some one opposite, his dry sarcastic glance crossed hers, and once
he said, raising his voice: “Workin’ in a bonnet shop doesn’t improve
manners, by Jove. But my wife is only a child yet, and my cousin
Kingsborough and Lady Arabella worked too hard over her not to
have been rewarded if she could have remained with them. Of
course, I’m only a rough sailor.”
There was an intense and painful pause after this speech,
although Julia paid no attention, and once more permitted her
musical laugh, not the least of her charms, to ring out. She fancied
this was the last time the county would honor White Lodge, but
shrewdly surmised that it was the last time they would be invited.
They had been brought together to satisfy her husband’s passion for
inflicting torment.
And not once did he betray himself. He looked superior, tolerant,
lightly annoyed, but never vicious. His guests pronounced him a cad
by the grace of God, but too great an ass to know what he was up
to. They had long since accepted the fact that he was off his head
about his wife; and, although this was damned uncomfortable, could
only conclude that he was trying in his blundering way to apologize
for her; why, heaven only knew, as she could give him cards and
spades on breeding. Julia secretly hoped that he would suddenly
lose his self-control and burst out in a torrent of abuse, but France
still had sentinels posted at every turn in his brain, and played his
part throughout the breakfast without an instant’s lapse. He laughed
tolerantly whenever he caught her making an observation or airing
an opinion, but it was not until just before they rose from the table
that he made another attack. The incessant sporting talk had ceased
for a moment, and some one had mentioned Nigel Herbert’s books,
apropos of his fine record in South Africa.
 “Is he goin’ to hammer away at Socialism for the rest of his life?”
asked one of the young women. “Awful bore, because he’s an old pal
of mine, and I’d like to read him. Do use your influence, Mrs. France.
He thinks a towerin’ lot of your opinion.”
“Oh, now! now!” broke in France. “Don’t encourage my little wife
in any of her nonsense. She’s straight, all right, but an awful little
goose about men. Hope you haven’t turned her head, Lansing,”
addressing the young man beside her. “She’s only a child yet, and
devoted to me, but I don’t want to be teased noon and night for a
new toy.”
“By God,” muttered one of the men, “let’s take him to the duck
pond. Serves us right for coming here. Wish I’d opposed his election.
Silly asses, all of us. Leopards don’t change spots. But she’s a brick.”
Julia, at least, had won the admiration of the company by her
attitude, after the first attack, of serene unconsciousness. She might
have been deaf and blind, and at the same time there was no
betraying note of defiance in her voice or flash in her eyes. It was
impossible to call France cruel, but the guests, as they filed out, and
got on their mounts as quickly as possible, voted that it must be
harder to be shut up with a bounder like that than to have lost the
prospect of being a duchess.
After they had gone, and Julia had brought the angry blood from
her head by a long tramp in the opposite direction, she recalled a
visit she had once paid with France to the castle of a young peer of
the realm who had married a wealthy American girl for whom he had
conceived an intense dislike. This man had appeared to take a
peculiar pleasure in mortifying his wife in company, by an irresistible
play of wit directed at herself. Julia had felt a passionate sympathy
for the helpless young duchess, who had neither the subtlety of
tongue nor the bad manners of the man who was spending her
money, and had expressed her wrath to France in no measured
terms. France forgot nothing. When he felt the time had come for a
new weapon, he selected one that is in every husband’s armory,
and, although he used it clumsily, possessing nothing of the young
duke’s cold irony and glancing wit, there was no chance that it
should miss its aim.
Julia was apprehensive that France, irritated at his failure to
provoke her to retort, if not to tears, might seek other vengeance.
But when they met on the following day it was evident by the
expression of his eyes that he was quite satisfied. The arrogance of
his manner, indeed, led her to suspect that his faith in himself was
too great to recognize failure if it sprang at him, and for small
mercies she was thankful.
It was nearly three months before he addressed another remark
to her beyond polite phrases calculated to impress the servants. But
one morning, shortly after the first of the year, he sent her word that
he wished her presence in the library. She went at once and found
him sitting before the table in a magisterial attitude. Before him was
a long itemized bill.
“You have been ordering books,” he said in a voice of cutting
reproof, as if speaking to a dependant who must be shown his place.
“I gave you no permission to run up bills of any sort.”
“I have always ordered books—for years, at least—it did not
occur to me.”
This time Julia was deeply mortified, and showed it as plainly as
he could wish.
“You pretend to loathe me—your own word—and yet you are not
too proud to run up bills for me to pay.”
Julia’s gorge rose, and her humiliation fled. “You compel me to
live with you, and I am entitled to compensation. Besides, after all,
you are my husband and I see no reason why you should not pay
my bills. If you permit me to live away from you, that is another
matter. I had nothing charged to you while I was earning my living.”
“If you want books, my lady, you can write to your mother for
the money to pay for them. Silly ass I was to marry a girl without a
penny. Who else would have married you if I hadn’t, and you thrown
at my head? You ought to be thankful for bread and butter and a
roof. No girl has a right to marry a man in my position unless she
brings him her weight in gold.”
“What a pity I shall cost you so much when I’m a duchess,” said
Julia, mildly. “You would better let me go at once.”
“When you are a duchess, you’ll have clothes, but you’ll have no
books, and no more liberty than you have here. As for this bill, I’ll
pay it—when I get ready—but I shall write to-day and tell them that
you have no further credit. You can go now.”
Julia, as she left the room, felt dismayed for the first time. What
should she do without books? The winter was very wet, and English
winters are very long, and often wet. She was forced to remain
indoors a good deal; and to sit and hold her hands!
In the course of another month she found a new cause for
uneasiness. Several times she awakened suddenly in the night and
listened to heavy breathing outside her door; and when France was
unable to hunt he prowled unceasingly about the house in the
daytime. It was all very well to wish he would go quite out of his
mind, but to be forced to accompany him through the various stages
might be too great an ordeal even for her sound nerves.
 IX
She stood one morning at her window, staring out at the rain.
She had evaded the question for days, but she faced it now. What
was she to do? She had always despised women with nerves, the
strong fibre of her brain and the steel frame in her apparently frail
body balancing her otherwise abundant femininity. When women
had complained to her of nerves, cried out that they hated life, she
had felt like an entomologist looking at specimens on a pin. When
they had demanded sympathy she had asked them why, if they
didn’t like their life, they didn’t go out and make another. Bridgit and
Ishbel had done it, and she had heard of many others, although few
of these were in her own class. Had not her sense of fate been so
strong, she should have gone herself years ago.
These superfluous women had not taken kindly to her advice,
and when she had added that strength was the greatest
achievement of the human character, they had merely stared at her.
These confidences had not been many, but one woman had replied
petulantly that politics and charities were not in her line, and one
had reminded her gently that a woman did not always hold her fate
in her hands. She had despised this woman more than any of the
others. In her youthful arrogance and consciousness of powers of
some sort, she had equal contempt for the woman who submitted to
detested conditions, and for the man who was too poor to keep up
his position and yet grumbled, without seeking the obvious remedy.
But her spirit was chastened. She had discovered one woman, at
least, that was quite helpless, and it seemed to her highly ironic that
this, of all women, should be herself. She had felt her independence
so keenly during the eight months she had earned her bread,
working as hard as any of her humble associates, after she had
persuaded Ishbel that she was broken in. She had often been tried
to the point of fainting, for she had been accustomed always to the
open-air life, and it would take more than eight months and a strong
will to make a well-oiled machine of her; but she had persisted,
never thought of looking for easier work, always rejoicing in her
liberty and in the independent spirit that had bought it. Moreover,
she had formed the habit of work, and soon after her return to
White Lodge she had begun almost automatically to wish for a
regular occupation of some sort. She had understood then why
Ishbel loved her business as she never had loved society and its
pleasures. But after she had made over all the clothes she had left
behind at her flight, and retrimmed all her hats, she realized that
there is no joy to be got out of useless work; with the exception of
the hunt breakfast she had not even crossed the path of one of her
neighbors. Her evening gowns alone had proved necessary, as
France, the day after his return, had issued an edict that she was to
dress for dinner.
She had by no means forgotten her old desire to write, but
although she had essayed it more than once, particularly during the
past month, she could rouse her mind to no vital interest in fiction,
although she had come upon themes enough during her sojourn in
the world. She wondered if such productive faculties as she may
have been born with had withered under the blight of her married
life; not knowing that the genius for fiction survives the death of
every illusion, being, as it is, quite outside the range of personality
and watered by the lost fountain of youth. She had not, however,
dismissed the belief, cunningly nursed by Bridgit and Ishbel, that she
had talents of some sort, and that the expression of them would
manifest itself in due course.
But now? What was she to do meanwhile? Where should she
seek refuge against a possible disaster in her nervous system which
might wreck her life? There was nothing here. If she fled to London
and obtained employment of any sort, even in an obscure shop,
France would carry out his threat and ruin Ishbel, one way or
another. If he dared not employ his original method again—and why
not? He was cunning enough to know that one sensational episode
might be explained away, but not two of the same kind. There is
nothing people weary of so quickly as explanations.
 If she could only take up a difficult language. She had studied
French and German during four of her years in the world, and knew
the power of a foreign tongue to dominate the brain. She had
intended to take up Italian, and it was the resource for which she
most longed at the moment. But she could as easily furnish the
library downstairs.
She was about to turn from the window and go for a ten-mile
tramp in the rain, since nothing was left her but physical exercise,
when she saw a fly crawling up the avenue. She was not particularly
interested, as the occupant was more than likely to have a dun or a
writ in his pocket, but she lingered, watching idly. The least event
broke the monotony of her existence.
As the fly approached the end of the avenue, the door was flung
open and a man jumped out impatiently, paid the driver, and walked
rapidly toward the house. It was Nigel Herbert.
Julia’s first impulse was to run downstairs and embrace him. Her
spirits went up with a wild rush. But she rang the bell and asked the
servant if her husband was in the house. He was tearing across
country with his pack on an independent hunt. She ordered a fire
built in the drawing-room, rearranged her hair, and put on a
becoming house frock of apple-green cloth. She observed with some
pleasure that her skin was as white as ever, if her chin and throat
were not as round as when Nigel had seen her last. Excitement
brought the old brilliance to her eyes, and she smiled for the first
time since the hunt breakfast. She ran downstairs and into the
drawing-room. Nigel, who was standing before the fire in the chill
room, met her halfway and gave both her hands a close clasp.
“Oh, this is so delightful—so delightful—how did you think of it—
when did you come back—” Julia delivered a volley of questions, not
only because she was excited herself, but because she saw that
Nigel had come charged with so much that he could say nothing at
the moment.
They sat down and continued to stare at each other. Nigel was
far more changed than Julia. The smooth pink face she had first
known was lined and rather sallow, his eyes had lost their careless
laughter, his lips their boyish pout.
“Oh, South Africa! South Africa!” said Julia, softly. “How it has
changed all of you.”
“Rather!” said Nigel, sadly. “Those that are left of us. Perhaps
you don’t know that I am literally the last of my name now, except
my poor old father—who has forgiven me once for all. I had four
brothers and six cousins when this war began. Now I have scarcely a
friend of my sex. At all events I know the worst. There is no one left
to mourn for but my father, and he’ll go soon. But I haven’t a pang
left in me—not of that sort. God! What a cursed thing war is! A
cursed, useless, souless thing! But I’ll treat that subject elsewhere.
I’ve come here to see you, and I don’t fancy we’ll be uninterrupted
any too long —”
“Oh, he rarely takes luncheon here—and you are to take yours
with me. Do you know that I haven’t had a soul to talk to since last
November?”
“I know. And that is what I have come to see you about. I—” He
got up and walked to the window, then back, his hands in his
pockets. “The last time I made love to you—the only time, for that
matter—you put me off, turned me down —”
“Alas! I only went out that night because the romantic situation
appealed to me. What a baby I was! And since! Oh! oh! oh!”
She sprang to her feet, and running over to the fire, knelt down,
pretending to arrange the logs. Tragedy rose on the stage of her
mind, but at the same time she felt an impulse to laugh. The hard
shell in which she had fancied her spirit incased, sealed, had melted
the moment the man she liked best had appeared with love in his
eyes. But tragedy swept out humor and took possession. She flung
her head down into her lap and burst into tears. They were the first
she had shed and they beat down the last of her defences.
“Oh, Nigel! Nigel!” she sobbed. “If you knew! If you knew! I
never have dared tell one-tenth. I dare not remember —”
 Nigel, like most of his sex, was distracted and helpless at sight of
tears. “Yes! Yes!” he exclaimed, bending over and trying to raise her.
“I know. You need not tell me. Please get up. I have so much to say
—I can’t say a word while you are like this.”
She let him lift her and put her back in her chair. He made no
attempt to take her in his arms.
He took the chair opposite hers and smiled wryly. “I don’t fancy
I’m as impulsive as I was! Ishbel told me when I returned last week.
If I had heard—say, during the first year of our acquaintance—I
should have got one of these new motor cars and flown to your
rescue without a plan. But much water has flowed under our bridges
since then!”
“Don’t you love me any longer?” Julia sat up alertly and dried her
eyes.
“I’ve always loved you and I fancy I always shall. But—well, we
are only young once—young in the sense of love being the one thing
to live and breathe for. And, then, I have had a resource! There have
been many months when I have been able to put you out of my
head altogether. That is what work, productive work, does for a
chap. And after—well, soon after that night at Bosquith, I hated you
for a time. You could never be the same delicious wonderful child
again. That would have broken my heart if I had not both hated you
and taken the first train into the kingdom of Micomicon. Even when I
found you so charming, when I saw so much of you, that next
season, I still congratulated myself that I was jolly well over it. But—
well—you never really ceased to haunt me—you had a way of
asserting yourself in the most disconcerting fashion. When I heard of
the duke’s marriage, I began to worry—I knew that life would not go
as smoothly with you—I had heard from the girls that you managed
France very cleverly, saw comparatively little of him. Out there in
Africa, I never was alone at night that I didn’t find myself thinking of
you. But I never guessed—When the girls told me, I thought I’d go
off my head. It’s too awful! Too awful!”
“It’s not so bad now. I have five pistols in the house.”
 “I know. But what a life! It is so hideous that it is almost farcical.”
“People’s troubles are generally rather absurd when you come to
think of them. And I fancy I’m a good deal better off than a lot of
women. Many have husbands that are worse than lunatics, and as
the divorce laws won’t help them, they suffer in silence, without a
ray of hope. At least I may hope mine will betray himself in public
sooner or later. I can manage him in a way, and of death I have not
the least fear —”
“Oh! It is all too dreadful! How old are you? Twenty-five? It’s
awful! Awful! But you must end it —”
“If I could conceal two alienists in the house long enough —”
“But you can’t. Nor would their certificate give you real freedom.
I’ve no doubt he’ll go raving mad in time—but when one reflects
upon what he might do first! No! I have not come here without a
plan, and here it is: You must go to the United States at once and
get a divorce. There is a place called Reno, where one can be got at
the end of about ten months. Bridgit will go with you. We held a
conclave over it—we two and Ishbel—not the first! Great heaven!
What an eternity ago that seems—” He laughed bitterly. “Once—was
it only seven years ago?—we three talked the subject over and came
to much the same conclusions, but our plans were frustrated by
France’s illness. Well—we were all young then, but it was a good
plan and we readopted it. You must get away from this without
delay—there has been enough! When the divorce is granted, I’ll
follow and marry you if you will have me. If not, we’ll provide for
you in whatever part of America you choose to live in. But I hope
you’ll marry me. I don’t think I ever really loved you before. When
Ishbel told me! When just now you crouched by that fire!”
“Oh, how good you all are!”
“I’ve not taken to philanthropy. I want you more than I ever did
when we were both careless and young and arrogant. I never
thought it could be. But either Time or what you have endured with
that man has annihilated everything. Can you go to-morrow?”
 “Oh! I must think. I don’t know. It is all very alluring. But I am
not sure.”
“You mean that you don’t love me?”
“Oh, if I could! If I could!”
Julia sprang to her feet and threw out her arms. “Away from all
this!—from the memory of it! The horror! And there are other
memories behind those three months! I don’t know! I have felt so
sure I never could forget. And if I cannot forget, I cannot love you or
any man. I have never felt so sure of anything as of that.”
“You are but twenty-five, remember. The mind is not crystallized
at that age. Even memory is fluid. I believe that anything can be
forgotten, given change of scene—at your age, at least. A year in
the United States, and all this will be a dream. At the end of ten
months in a life which is like a French poster out of drawing, you will
be a different being—no, you will have lived with your old sense of
humor, and be the same enchanting creature—Oh, we young people
take life so tragically, my dear, and we succumb so generously to
time and distance! Blessed antidotes to life! Time and change! And
you are full of buoyancy, to say nothing of your brains. Once I
regretted that you had any. Where would you be without them? A
woman must find them a pretty good substitute when man fails her.
Oh, I have learned! The land of shadows in which we writers of
fiction live is peopled with the luminous egos of women as well as
with their conventional shells; we have only to take our choice! And
you—I shall find Julia Edis again, with all her enchanting possibilities
at least half developed. Oh, you are wonderful! When one thinks of
what you might have become—of the brainless women that brood
and brood. Will you go?”
“I must think! I must think!” The powerful suggestion in his
words seemed to have delivered Julia Edis from the tomb to which
she had crept in terror, but hidden and shivered intact. She ran up
and down the room, she even thrust her hands into her hair as if to
lift its weight from her struggling brain, that it might think faster.
Freedom! The new world! The annihilation of memory! A quick
divorce which would deliver her forever from the terrifying creature
she had married, over to the protection of the new world’s laws. It
was an enchanting prospect. She drew in her breath as if inhaling
the ozone, drinking the elixir of that land of youth and freedom. And
happiness! Happiness! Why shouldn’t she love Nigel —
But she stopped short and dropped her hands. Her whole body
looked paralyzed. The youth seemed to run out of her face.
“It is impossible,” she whispered. “I cannot take with me his
power to avenge himself, and he will do that by ruining Ishbel —”
“We have talked all that over. Ishbel will manage to protect
herself. What are bobbies for —”
“It won’t do. A policeman at the door! People would soon hear of
it—and stay away. Besides he is a fiend for resource —”
“Yes—but Mr. Jones can’t last much longer. And then—well, I
fancy Ishbel will marry Dark—he’s on his feet again, and will be
home before long.”
“Ishbel will never give up her work. Remember she took it up
because it seemed to her the most vital thing she could find in life,
not because she was driven to earn her bread. And it has become a
sort of religion with her.”
“Ishbel never had been in love then! But if she kept the business
on, she would have a husband to protect her. You would be out of
it —”
“But not yet!”
“We are none of us willing you should wait, Ishbel least of all.”
“I know, but I can’t sacrifice her. I should be a beast. Harold is
capable of writing the most frightful anonymous letters to hundreds
of people —”
“Why the devil isn’t he rotting in South Africa? When I think of
the hundreds of fine fellows—Oh, well, I’ve given over trying to
understand space and fate. But I wish I could have run across him
down there. I’d have shot him like a dog if I’d got the chance, and
never felt a pang.”
 “So should I! That is the most dreadful result of it all—the
hardness, the callousness, the cynicism —”
“Oh, it will all fall from you. We don’t change much under the
armor Life forces us into. Dismiss Ishbel from your mind. Take care
of yourself. What is Ishbel’s business when weighed against a
lifetime of horror and demoralization? Nobody knows this better than
Ishbel. I fancy if you don’t go, she’ll chuck the business. It’s a
deuced unpleasant position for her. And she has made enough to
live on comfortably until she can marry Dark —”
“I don’t believe it. It might be years —”
The butler entered and announced luncheon. Julia smoothed her
hair, feeling much herself again.
“I can see the force of all your arguments. And I am tempted. I
don’t deny it. But you must give me time to think it over. Perhaps I
exaggerate about Ishbel. But there is another point: I was not
consulted in regard to my first marriage. I should be something
more than a fool if I rushed blindly into another, no matter what the
temptations. Still—Come, you must be starved.”
 X
Life moves in circles. Some are larger than the span between
infancy and senility, but that is about the only difference we know of.
It is a far cry from the primigenous mere female, or even the
Sabines, to the women that compose the advance guard of their sex
to-day, but when man wants to win and wear this highest product of
civilization, he would better kidnap her, and pay her the compliment
of arguing with her brain later. Her impulses are still primitive, but
they must be taken by assault. The more he reasons, the more
vigorously will she throw up mental defences, and, what is worse, in
the utmost good faith with herself.
This, of course, in regard to women that already know something
of life, or that have an instinctive love of liberty and independence.
The maternal girl, and she is legion, may safely be left in charge of
the race, and wooed in the orthodox fashion favored of society. But
the women that exert a powerful attraction for men, either
exceptionally advanced themselves, or exceptionally weak in
character while possessing every charm of mind, women that are
approaching closer and closer to that exact balance of masculine and
feminine attributes which, when attained, will give them the one
perfect happiness, setting them free, as it must, from the present
curse of the race, the longing for completion, are already too close
to independence to be won by simple methods. It is little, after all,
that man can give them. They are conscious of too many resources
both within themselves and in life; after a man’s novelty has worn
off, they are more likely than not—certainly apt!—to find him their
inferior in brain, and almost inevitably in character, full of the little
weaknesses and dependencies of childhood. If they make these
discoveries after marriage, the man has some small chance of
keeping his spouse, particularly if he has won a measure of respect
by audacity and brute force plus sympathy, but too much
consideration for a woman who is almost half male while he is still
but one-fourth female will lose him the game.
Nigel, of all the men that Julia had met, was the best equipped to
appeal to sentimental, romantic, and clever young women, who
were at the same time cultivating their wings for the higher flights.
As a matter of fact, he had appealed to a good many women of
various sorts in his earlier twenties when he was all freshness,
frankness, adoration, and honest eager youth. Later, when he wore
the literary halo with ease and modesty, his charm was not
diminished; and it was easy to predict that when the war was really
over and London, her mourning laid aside, roused herself to do
honor to her heroes, Nigel would come in for thrice his share of
lionizing. As a matter of fact, he did, and he philosophically accepted
it as a compensation for the lack of better things.
When he stepped from the fly on that gloomy Wednesday
morning and walked across the dripping garden, the dark and
romantic wall of woods behind him, he looked as gallant a knight as
ever came to the rescue of a damsel in distress; and Julia, as dreary
as Mariana in the moated grange, was in the proper frame of mind
to be taken by assault. She was still very young, she was very lonely,
she was on the verge of despair; her imagination, always active, had
been bred in youth by dreams, and developed later by real castles
and titles, purple moors, London society, and great expectations.
She hailed from the West Indies, one of the most romantic spots to
look at on earth, and all the circumstances of her life there had been
exceptional. She was still more or less romantically environed, when
you consider the old world dinginess, inconvenience, and isolation of
White Lodge, a presumptive lunatic always threatening
developments, and that she was as much cut off from her friends as
if she literally were in an underground dungeon with walls instead of
trees dropping the constant tear. Take all this into consideration, and
add the momentous fact that she had never loved, and had arrived
at the susceptible age of twenty-five, that she was more attracted to
Nigel than she ever had been to any man, that underneath her
despair and her manufactured stolidity she was full of eager curiosity
and the desire to live, and it will readily be seen that if Nigel did not
win her, it was strictly his own fault.
He should have retained the fly. He should have descended upon
her like a whirlwind (having ascertained that France was out of the
way,—which, as a matter of fact, he did at Stanmore), refused to
listen to protests, caused in her bewildered mind what psychologists
call an inhibition, swept her out into the fly, up to London, on to an
Atlantic liner (passage already engaged), turned her over to Mrs.
Herbert (thus eliminating every possible excuse for reproach during
the subsequent and less glamorous period of matrimony), joined her
at the earliest possible moment in Reno (where Bridgit and Reno
would have seen that she was sufficiently amused), and when she
walked out of the court-house with her decree, met her with a
license. That is the only way to manage them, my masters. Try it, or
take a back seat, now and forever.
But Nigel, alas! in spite of his manly qualities, was the most
considerate and tender of men. The very idea of kidnapping a
woman would have horrified him. He had all those instincts of the
hunter upon which men pride themselves, but he wanted to hunt
according to the rules of the game. It would have given him the
most exquisite pleasure to woo Julia day by day, in Reno or out of it,
and it never occurred to him that this program might induce a yawn
in Julia.
She sat up all that night thinking. It was a rosy panorama he had
unrolled before her, this charming young man that she might have
loved if he had not given her so many opportunities to like him. He
was a rich man and would one day be richer. They would live in New
York and other wonderful cities of America, play with the
kaleidoscopic society American novelists wrote about, hunt in the
Rockies, steep themselves in the romance of California, vary this
exciting program with frequent trips to Europe and the Orient.
England would be closed to them, lest France cause her arrest for
bigamy, as one of many offensive actions. On the other hand, he
might release her by divorce. Then she could marry according to the
laws of her country, and all the world would be her oyster.
 Above all, and Nigel had emphasized this point during their
afternoon conversation, she would have a strong and devoted
husband to protect her, to shield her from all that was harsh and
unlovely in life, to study her every wish, and make her a queen
among women.
Curiously enough it was this last alluring set of promises that lost
him the game. Nothing he had said to Julia had appealed to her so
forcibly at the moment. He had never looked so handsome and so
manly, so distinguished, so perfect a specimen of his type. His face
had flushed until the lines and the sallowness had disappeared, his
eyes forgot the things they had looked upon this last year, forgot
that their inward gaze saw his heart a tomb crowded with beloved
dead; they flashed with hope and passion, with undying love for the
one woman that must ever make to him the complete appeal. She
had almost put her hands in his then and there. But he had left soon
after, and without even kissing her. Dear knightly soul! Julia never
forgot his tender consideration, but on the other hand she never
regretted it.
For when she had finished visualizing the United States of
America and all their centres of delight, to say nothing of certain
states of Europe and Asia, which she longed unceasingly to visit;
when she had dwelt upon the deep relief of turning her back forever
upon Harold France (France prowling about the halls and breathing
heavily against her door materially assisted Nigel at this point);
when these phases were disposed of, and her imagination, weary,
left the brain free to face the particular ego of Julia France, in some
ways so typical of woman, in others individual and peculiar, a very
different set of ideas marched to the front and argued pro and con.
Did she want another husband, no matter how good, how
devoted, how generous, how strong? It was now nearly a year and a
half since she had lived with France, but if the memories of her
married life were no longer active, no longer embittered her
existence, she had by no means buried them, and they affected her
attitude toward all men. Had Nigel swept her out of England and into
that strange bizarre world of America, no doubt the experiences in
the new land, assisted by the fiction that she was about to begin life
over, really would have annihilated memory; but thinking it all over
in the cold small hours of an English winter morning, wrapped in a
blanket and shovelling coals into a small unwilling English grate, she
failed to visualize love as the sweetest thing in the world.
Even so, this inability to respond to the genuine love that was
offered her might not have prevented her ultimate acceptance. The
man’s foe was far more deadly.
Looking into herself, Julia slowly understood that what she, in her
youth and inexperience, had mistaken for hardness and callousness,
was in reality strength. Nature had endowed her with strength of
character and independence of mind. For eighteen years her mother
had dominated her, almost without her knowledge; then she had
been flung into the world and treated to a succession of experiences
which had left her gasping and dizzy, without either the maturity or
the opportunities to develop herself with deliberation. But the
subsequent years had done their work; ultimately certain influences,
sufferings, horrors, terrors, had pushed her on to a point where she
must sink or swim. In swimming she had proved that she belonged
to the army of the strong, not to the vast and insignificant majority
of her sex that found their only strength in man.
She was strong. She fully realized it for the first time. All the
spurious cynicism and philosophy of youth fell away from her; she
saw herself for what she was, a woman, equipped with a nature of
flexible steel, able to endure any test without snapping, fashioned
not so much for endurance as for conquest. Conquest of what? She
speculated, that something which so long had striven for expression
moving dumbly. Never mind, it was there; she should find the
connection in time.
Her mind rapidly reviewed the whole field of woman. She had no
statistics, but she knew that several millions of her sex were forcing
the world to recognize them as breadwinners, independently of any
assistance from man. It was magnificent, the opportunities of to-day,
when compared with the meagre resources of the past, and the
repeated struggle of woman for expression and independence
almost from the dawn of history. They had found themselves at last,
the twentieth century was theirs, and they were driving rapidly
toward the goal of complete equality with man. But how many of
these women were strong enough to go through life without love?
None, she fancied, until they had undergone a process of disillusion
similar to her own. Then she rejoiced in what for so long had
seemed to her the harshest of destinies; for sitting there in the cold
dawn, the one perfect destiny seemed to her to be an utter
independence of soul and mind and body, the power to cultivate
every faculty toward a state of development in which one human
being, having in perfect balance the highest potencies of both sexes,
should stand alone, indifferent to all extrinsic aid. And this perfect
balance could be attained only by woman, unhampered as she was
by the animality of man.
Perfection. The word started her off on another train of thought.
How was this perfection of strength, character, mind, and poise to be
attained? To stand alone without aid from man or woman was
neither a means nor an end. She had none of the common need of
religion. It could play little or no part in her development. Nor could
happiness be found merely in perfecting self toward a standard
which must inevitably deteriorate into self-righteousness. To stand
alone is the most magnificent ideal of the human character, but that
strength must be used toward some end beyond self. She groped
along and began to see clearly. She must work for the race. She
must regard herself as a chosen instrument of usefulness, as,
indeed, all exceptionally gifted people were. And for this she was
peculiarly equipped, not only by nature, but by life. Had she not
married at all, or at the most, casually, her woman’s nature would
have protested against any such program, demanded its rights first;
but these sources of disturbances were choked with hideous weeds,
and Julia was unable to conceive that the weeds might rot in time
and the waters rise refreshed. She felt that she was fortunately
accoutred, and she longed for her opportunities.
What they might be she had no inkling as yet, nor was she
conscious of love for her kind, and a desire to be useful to it on
general principles. Her ambition, if ambition it could be called, was
centred in her brain. If she had been chosen for a work, she would
perform it. What else, in fact, was there for her to do? It had not
needed Bridgit and Ishbel to teach her contempt for the morbid type
of female that exaggerates sex until it becomes a disease, the
women that play with their nerves until they have become mere
neurotic systems without either sex or brains, and that exhibit egos
either in private or public whose swollen deformities cause a
momentary thrill and a prolonged disgust. Abnormal without
individuality. It was an ideal carefully avoided by all the sane strong
women Julia had met.
For the present, she could only wait and endure. She could not
even go out and study the great problems of life, those problems
she had chosen to ignore. But there is hardly any greater test of
strength than passive endurance; and the time of her liberation
could not be far off. The day Ishbel married Lord Dark she should
leave France and look for work in London.
Nigel’s fate was settled before the rising of the sun. Far away on
what to Europeans seem the confines of civilization, in other words,
San Francisco, a youth was growing to masterful manhood, who, in
due course, would avenge him, and, incidentally, much else. But of
that poor Nigel could know nothing, nor would he have felt consoled
had he foreseen; when he received Julia’s letter, whose finality was
as convincing as a black midnight without stars, he wished that he
had left his wretched heart and bones in South Africa, retired to the
country with his broken father, and began another book. There was
still the Nöbel Peace Prize to work for, and he felt peculiarly fitted to
win it. It may be stated here that he did, and all England (of his
class, and one or two strata just below) was astonished that an
Englishman should have competed for a prize that involved a
damnifying of war. It deeply disapproved.
 XI
The hunting season closed. France still rode for several hours
every day, but it was patent that his restlessness was increasing.
When he was not riding, he was walking, and he walked more than
half the night about the house and grounds. Oddly enough, however,
the serenity of his mien was unruffled, and Julia came upon him
several times standing before a long mirror in one of the halls, his
head so high that the muscles of his neck creaked, his eyes flashing
with a pride and triumph no harassed king ever felt on his
coronation morn. As a rule, he left the table the moment the meal
was over, preferring to take his coffee alone out of doors or in the
library, but one day Julia, who was beginning to take a certain
scientific interest in his developments, arrested his attention as he
was about to rise.
“Didn’t you tell me once that Kingsborough and the little chap
were delicate? I heard the other day that both are remarkably fit.
The little boy always has been, and the duke gets stronger every
day.”
She looked at him ingenuously as she spoke, quite prepared for
an outburst of rage, but he only bestowed upon her a smile of
withering contempt.
“They are merely indulging in what the Americans call ‘bluff.’ I
happen to know that they are both full of disease and cannot last
the year out. I shall be Duke of Kingsborough before Christmas.”
“How nice. That is the reason, I suppose, you don’t mind all
these duns. We may be sold out any day, you know. Summonses are
becoming as thick as rain, and I am told that not a man in the
stables or kennels has been paid —”
“They all understand perfectly. The summonses and grumblings
are a mere matter of form. I have promised an enormous rate of
interest and higher wages when I have moved into Kingsborough
House and Bosquith. The other estates I have already agreed to let
to American millionnaires. They are impatiently awaiting
Kingsborough’s death.”
“Ah? Where have you met the millionnaires?”
“They have been hunting with the Hertfordshire all winter, and
we have discussed matters at my solicitor’s.”
Julia knew that he had not been to London for several months,
save for the queen’s funeral, but forbore to press the subject. She
remarked amiably: —
“What a fine income you will have!”
His eyes flashed. “Ah, yes! Millions.”
“Surely not quite that.”
“Millions. Kingsborough’s income alone is two millions.”
“I thought it was forty thousand pounds.”
“Forty thousand for a duke of Kingsborough! No emperor has a
vaster revenue.”
“How jolly. My robes of state shall be woven of pure gold.
Meanwhile, why don’t you go to Paris for a while? I notice that you
are restless, since you have nothing to ride after, and nothing to kill.
You keep me awake at night banging about the house.”
“Do I?” France’s eyes flashed with something besides triumph,
but it passed almost at once. He was losing interest in her. As he
rose, bent his head graciously and sauntered out into the garden, he
forgot her absolutely in a new vision that had haunted him since the
queen’s funeral. There for the first time he had seen sovereigns en
masse. The sight had thrilled him; he had made up his mind to
signalize his succession by the greatest banquet London had ever
known; all the reigning princes of Europe should attend it. The
letters of invitation were already written. He had written them many
times, finding one of the keenest pleasures he had ever known in
the process, congratulating himself that for the first time in his life
he was about to have associates worthy of his name and ego. But
although he had never heard the word paranoia, and while at
Bosquith had finally dismissed from his mind the haunting thought of
insanity (it was outside of reason that he, Harold France, could even
sprain the wonderful organ he had inherited with other unique
characteristics from the most illustrious house in Europe),
nevertheless, instinct warned him to lock up his letters of invitation,
and keep his grandiose dreams to himself. Only to Julia, and only
when she spurred him to speech, did he admit a very little of what
filled his thoughts day and night.
But he was well aware that his nerves were on edge, and he was
beginning to be troubled with pains in his head. He slept little, and
when he thought of it took a malicious pleasure in disturbing his
prisoner, whom he could imagine sitting on the edge of her bed
pistol in hand.
But it was not the pistol that kept him from breaking down the
door and laughing in her face. He had anticipated amusing himself
with her female terrors as soon as the hunting season closed, but he
found himself grown quite indifferent not only to her charm, but to
the exquisite pleasure it had once given him to torture her. His
dreams and visions, his increasing delusions, filled his life. Woman
was too contemptible to consider; were it not that it gratified his
growing passion for autocracy to have a prisoner of state, he might
have amused himself by turning her out of the house in the middle
of the night and dogging her footsteps to Stanmore or Bushey.
He still compelled her attendance at table, but otherwise took no
notice of her whatever. So absorbed was he that he failed to observe
that his wife was now well supplied with books and no longer looked
desperate or even discontented. Her three devoted friends had made
an arrangement with her bookseller to send her all that she ordered
from his catalogue, and Bridgit had turned over her membership
with the London Library. One of the first books she sent for was a
recent work on insanity. She was not long discovering that France
was a paranoiac, and she wrote to her aunt, asking her to invite him
to dinner, and two alienists to meet him. But Mrs. Winstone was
shocked at the suggestion, not only because she hated increasingly
the “grimy,” in other words serious, side of life, but because it would
be a thankless task to assist in proving that a member of one of the
great families of Britain was a lunatic. She chose, therefore, to
believe Julia quite mistaken, that France was merely a trifle more
impossible than ever, and assumed the high moral ground that it
would be unfair to take advantage of a trusting guest. Julia
concluded that to write to the duke would be equally ineffective,
besides making an enemy of him for life, and she knew that France
would not be induced to dine with either Bridgit or Ishbel. He had
always hated both of them. There was nothing to do, therefore, but
wait for him to develop acute mania, and to keep a pistol in her
pocket; taking her walks abroad while he was forced to sleep, and
locking herself in her room when she was not at table.
It was during this strain on her nerves that she began to long for
the repose of the East. Orientalism was in her brain cells. What
imagination her mother possessed had been projected toward the
East for long before and after her birth. The science of astrology is
the birthright of the East, the very word sways and parts the
shadowy curtains that hang before civilizations old before the
Occident was born, evokes the gorgeous heavy sinister pictures of
ancient cities, of vast arid plains where only the stars were alive.
This mysterious poetical science had been the romance of Julia’s
youth, and the East was the one quarter of the globe, save Great
Britain, that she had ever heard discussed. In London she had
escaped theosophy and other made-up fads of the same nature, but
although the call of the East had often and for long been overlaid in
her consciousness, it never failed to make itself heard if she stood
before a picture portraying India, Arabia, Persia, or read of personal
adventures in the East by writers with the rare gift of atmosphere. In
the loneliness and terrors and constant tension of her present life
she forgot the call of the too modern, too similar life, across the
Channel, hearkened increasingly to that of the East. It promised a
vast repose, an endless feast of beauty, unfathomable mysteries, a
life as different from that of the West as it was in the days of
Mohammed, Zoroaster, or Christ.