IX
“AND SO THEY WERE MARRIED”
One day when the Professor had called a bachelor a bird without feet, and I had retorted that an old maid was a bird without wings, the Professor remarked significantly: “the old maid at least settles better,” and we fell to talking of settling as a proposition. Between the predicament of a bird who cannot fly and that of a bird who cannot alight, there might not be much of a choice, though the Professor did her utmost to prove that the bird condemned to perpetual flitting was in the more pitiful situation. But it occurred to me as significant that the man should dread to lose the privilege of flight, and the woman the privilege of settling. I wondered if there was anything more in it than the accident of contention.
We had agreed with Tolstoi, that “nothing complicates the difficulties of life so much as a lack of harmony between married people”; we had agreed that much of complication arose from a lack of antecedent harmony as to the matrimonial proposition.
“Do you not think, Professor,” I asked, “that much of the trouble comes—that most of the trouble comes—from the simple error of forgetting that an institution cannot be better than those who represent or expound it? Is there not a tendency, a very old one, doubtless, to expect that marriage, in itself, will somehow, transmute the participants? Can marriage be more of a success than people, or less of a failure than people? Marriage is a bond, with a benediction, if you like; but it is not a translation. Surely we cannot take from marriage more than we carry to it—unless it might be the reasonable and natural interest on the combined capital.”
Seeing that I was entirely serious, the Professor said: “My feeling always has been that the chief reason for the want of success in marriage and the deterrent spectacle it so often has presented, is the tradition that any legerdemain of sentiment or ritual can make two people one. Understand me, I believe wholly in the ideal of a spiritual oneness. I have no quarrel with the Scriptures on that score. But we cannot walk the path toward a spiritual oneness with our eyes shut, by lying to ourselves. The interests of two people may be one in the highest sense, they may have one aim, if they are absolutely congenial they may have one wish; but nothing conceivable under the sky ever can make them more or less than two people. The other day some of us were debating whether we should say ‘seven-and-five is twelve’ or ‘seven and five are twelve.’ They called seven and five here a ‘singular concept’ and some were for is in consequence. But at least man and woman are. One and one do not make one, they make two. Indeed, after marriage, the two are more definitely two than they were before. Personal sacrifice proceeds in the order of intimacy. Society is built upon individual sacrifice. Friendship lives by concession, and the intimacy of marriage carries to the extreme point the idea of inter-personal compromise, the recognition of the personality of another. To expect two people to lose, without effort, by the mere fact of marriage, the individuality which they had before the compact, is as absurd as it would be to take two clocks and tie them together with a piece of pink string and expect them instantly to begin keeping absolutely the same time. What would you find in the case of the clocks? They might be mated clocks, and on opposite sides of the room might pass for two clocks keeping precisely the same time. But when you put them side by side you would discover, unless they were supernatural clocks, that they were running some seconds apart, and those few seconds would be as potent in visibly differentiating the clocks thus married as a full minute or more would be on opposite sides of the room. So that when two lovers, who have made elaborate concession to each other before marriage, anticipating each other’s desires, yielding to each other’s prejudices, proceed after marriage to throw the whole burden of preserving harmony upon some vaguely defined potentiality in the marriage relation itself, they certainly are tempting Providence into impatience. It is the lesson of sociology that man must pay something—yield something—for the companionship of the other man, and the closer you wish to be to the other man the more you must pay, the more you must yield. When it comes to the companionship of the man and the woman, and when the woman receives or demands equal rights and privileges, the need of concession is vastly complicated, for now the association is not only between two persons but between two sexes; there is both the individual equation and the sex equation.”
“Should you not be afraid, Professor, to take away this illusion? Should we not be striking a further blow at marriage if we withheld from those about to marry the hope, false though it be, that something beyond themselves is going to bestow its benediction upon marriage?”
“I cannot agree,” protested the Professor, “that any kind of ignorance can be a good thing in the end. Moreover, I think this false hope, after doing little good, does a vast deal of harm. The trouble comes when the two who are married, and who have looked for this magic, find it not, find that they still are two; and when they are three, the momentous equation must be carried forward.”
I suggested that probably there was no sex in the illusion, that the man and the woman were alike sentimental in the matter.
“Probably,” admitted the Professor; “but as woman suffers the more by it we are likely at times to think that her illusions must have been deeper. I think the American girl has fewer illusions than some others, and I think that somehow she is going to work out a higher plan than the world has had the luck to exploit hitherto.”
“Let us hope so,” I said fervently.
The Professor turned quickly toward me. “Not,” she said, “that I think that marriage has been, relatively, unsuccessful with us. The American marriage has come nearer, in my opinion, to being a happy marriage than any yet invented. The very development of the divorce system, monstrous as that is, shows that nowadays and hereabouts people are beginning to insist that marriages must be happy. Both before and after marriage the American girl is asking fair play.”
“Fair play!” It was like the Professor. It was the Anglo-Saxon of her. Fair play—even in marriage. Applause to the sentiment! If Miss America stands for anything, if she personifies anything, I suppose it is social fair play. Sometimes woman seems to be asking a great deal, like the politicians, on the theory that nature is a reform administration and will cut down the appropriation. But whatever we may think of this, Miss America certainly is showing the influence of large concessions. I scarcely think that investigation will indicate that she is at all sordid. If her personal jurisdiction has thrown upon her the need to know about a man’s income, we must not despise the candor of her investigation. She may not agree with Perdita that “prosperity’s the very bond of love,” but she has seen the miseries engendered in marriages for money by lack of love, and in marriages for love by lack of money, and she perceives that money has caused the trouble in either case.
If marriage is a lottery, we may note that this is one of the reasons for its popularity. The gambling instinct is strong in the human family, and I suppose that if marriage were a sure thing it would appeal to many with inferior force. It was a pretty Texas girl who said: “This lottery suggestion introduces a sort of sporting element into marriage that makes it fascinating. Marriage is the greatest game of all.” And quite plainly she was no cynic.
But women are not such good gamblers as men. I fancy that is one of the reasons why they turn to the last page first. They do not like uncertainties, though they can create them. They will even marry to get at the end of the story.
It is plain enough that Miss America is not losing her sentiment. She can never lose her sentiment while she retains her superstitions. I do not mean to say that she countenances the cheaper superstitions. When I see a woman get off a street car because it is numbered thirteen, or witness the spectacle of a hundred busy shoppers, eager to get somewhere, held at a corner by an interminable funeral, because they dare not cross between the carriages, I accept that safe inference, dear to all patriots, that the victims are foreign. In what we might call the higher superstitions she is versed and even proficient.
Speaking of superstitions, no better name belongs to that prejudice by which it sometimes is held that Miss America is often too tall to pair well, that the bride is not exemplifying a proper proportion. Who shall challenge the processes of evolution? Who shall say that in a wiser era folks may not like the new proportions better? Probably there is no occasion to worry. In this Darwinized era we cannot be persuaded that she very well can get to be taller unless she wants to be, or unless she is preferred that way. If gallantry lags, patriotism will insist that the more we see of her the better we like her.
Did you ever see a bridal scrap-book? A Tennessee girl, wedded a year, unfolded one for me, and it proved to be a wonderful affair. In the early pages were pasted invitations, dancing cards, concert and theatre programs, tinfoil from bouquets, ribbons from gifts, valentines and a curious miscellany of souvenirs. Then came the cover from the box that had held the engagement-ring, a copy of the wedding invitation, newspaper comments on the engagement and the wedding. Later pages held a railroad map showing the wedding journey, Pullman car vouchers, express labels, hotel menus, miniature camera “views,” with much more that I cannot remember. And on a certain page of this scrap book, reserved somehow, for the purpose, all of the guests at the wedding had written their names. A few months after the wedding the husband fell ill, and at the crisis his young wife chanced to find that the list of names in the book omitted, among all of those who were at the wedding, his alone. She was not superstitious, but the absence of that name filled her with a new terror. The thing preyed upon her, and in the still of night she slipped into the sick-room with book and pen, and taking her husband’s unconscious hand, she traced his name there upon the right page. He did not die, and when, one day, he came upon the tremulous lines of that grotesque autograph, he did not chide the forger.
We may have changed the names of some things, the cool breath of realism may have touched the habits of our modern life, but probably the heartbeat of sentiment to-day is not greatly faster or slower than in the long ago. There was a noble tenderness and dignity in some of the formalities of the past, as when John Winthrop began his letter with: “Most kinde Ladie, Your sweete lettres coming from the abundance of your love were joyefully received into the closet of my best affections.” We do not say, “My only beloved Spouse, my most sweet friend & faithful companion of my pilgrimage,” but let us hope that nothing of the intrinsic beauty of love and marriage has suffered any real loss.
Distrust those who seek to show that there is a discordant note in the old tune of love. Distrust those who claim that the old harmonies have been superseded, that the new chords are less sweet than the old, that the eternal duet which has tinkled and murmured down the ages ever will be ended. The strings and the keys are new, but the tune is the old tune. All the new notes and the new titles, and the new words are but an obbligato, an ornament to the love-motive glowing like a golden strain in the majestic symphony of life—the recurring melody always new, always old; always a surprise, always as certain as spring; so conquering in its power that Miss America, with all of her self-reliance, with all of her assumed superiority to wizard wiles and incantations, falls under the spell and has no regret. She is as willing as ever she was to sit at the feet of the right man. She knows her woman’s power. She is as willing as ever to follow a leader. She only asks that she may elect her leader, not with a ballot, but with the benediction of her love. She knows, with her truest insight, that there is no device of science, nor ideal of sentiment that ever has been or ever can be a substitute in this world for the love of one man for one woman and of that one woman for that man. She sees down the long road of life, alternating patches of sunlight and shadow, chances of trial, certainties of pain, but she sees no cowardly doubt of the nobility and the triumph of her free choice. The snows of time will whiten her hair, and what better fate can she ask from the giver of gifts than that she may sit there, as in the other years, beside her re-elected leader in some hour of peaceful communion; to look back on the paths of their journey, and forward over the long road, recalling the joys and sorrows of the pilgrimage, and realizing here as at the beginning that the stoutest defence against the shafts of fate is the divine ægis of love....
The Professor had come into the room girded for one of her intermittent departures into the outer world. I thought then, and it has seemed to me since, that she never presented a more agreeable spectacle than at that moment. She dawned so radiantly there that I never could remember what she wore, save that it was a new gown with a pale becoming pink somewhere.
“Professor,” I said, helpless before her discovery of my glance, “woman is the only product of civilization which we might praise to excess, if we ever found the words, without critical resentment.”
“You always are either rampantly sentimental,” she said over the last button of her glove, “or remorsefully satirical.”
“I protest, Professor, that now I am neither. At this instant, Professor, you are reminding me anew of the infinite variety of woman. It may be that there is something in the raiment, but you, quite typically, I fancy, burst upon me in fresh phases, fresh flavors. A man is a mixture to be sure, a medicine, if you like, or a mixed drink. But a woman is a pousse café, never twice the same nectar, and one drains the glass delighted and confused.”
“I have no means of estimating your comparison,” returned the Professor, “for I never tasted a pousse café. I fancy it is degenerate.”
“Should you ever test my symbolism, Professor, you will, I think, admit that it is more accurate than Thackeray’s comparison of a woman’s heart with a lithographer’s stone. ‘What is once written there,’ he says, ‘never can be rubbed out.’ Now if Thackeray had known anything at all about lithographers’ stones, he would have known that they are used continuously for new writings until they have become too thin for service. Thackeray would have given woman more of the benefit of the doubt if he had called her heart a palimpsest. You sometimes can make out something more than the very last writing on a palimpsest.”
“I am afraid,” murmured the Professor, with a glance that puzzled me, “that you would not be able to read even that last writing.”
“Alas! Professor, I never have boasted any dexterity as an expert in love’s handwriting.”
“You are a man,” she said briefly.
“Is there a last writing on your heart, Professor?”
“Yes,” she answered, a little startled, yet speaking quietly, “there is a first and a last in one, and the ink isn’t dry, either.”
“You don’t mean—”
“Yes, I do,” she added firmly; “I have been intending to tell you about it.”
“You are—not going to be—married?”
“Yes.”
“Professor!” I had breath but for that one gasp. “And you never said a word!”
“Yes, I did—to him.” Then, seeing my look, “I wanted to tease you a little; but I am going to tell you all about it—very soon.”
“I suppose,” I said, after a pause, “it is that fellow who was hurt at Santiago?”
“The very same.”
There was a little awkward silence. Then I arose and stood near her, and she glanced up at me with a droll, fluttering smile. “Does he understand women?”
“No,” she replied softly, yet with some of her old spirit, “he isn’t so foolish as to try. He only understands—me.”
“Oh,” I said.
It was dusk. Somehow the moment was like the end of a chapter. A strange thing had happened, and the Professor—— Who can describe that change which follows the oldest and newest of miracles? It was not the same Professor who shimmered there in the twilight.... No, not the same. Something had gone. And there was a new light in those dauntless eyes.
A little later I saw her at the door, her little gloved hand cajoling for a moment the rebellious bronze of her back hair. I saw her through the window as on the steps she gathered the loose of her gown, flashing the fire of her flounce lining. I saw her flicker for a moment in the windy street. And she was gone.