A Far Country, Complete

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More vivid than were the experiences themselves of that journey are the
memories of them. We went to windswept, Sabbath-keeping Edinburgh, to
high Stirling and dark Holyrood, and to Abbotsford. It was through Sir
Walter's eyes we beheld Melrose bathed in autumn light, by his aid
repeopled it with forgotten monks eating their fast-day kale.

And as we sat reading and dreaming in the still, sunny corners I forgot,
that struggle for power in which I had been so furiously engaged since
leaving Cambridge. Legislatures, politicians and capitalists receded into
a dim background; and the gift I had possessed, in youth, of living in a
realm of fancy showed astonishing signs of revival.

"Why, Hugh," Maude exclaimed, "you ought to have been a writer!"

"You've only just begun to fathom my talents," I replied laughingly. "Did
you think you'd married just a dry old lawyer?"

"I believe you capable of anything," she said....

I grew more and more to depend on her for little things.

She was a born housewife. It was pleasant to have her do all the packing,
while I read or sauntered in the queer streets about the inns. And she
took complete charge of my wardrobe.

She had a talent for drawing, and as we went southward through England
she made sketches of the various houses that took our fancy--suggestions
for future home-building; we spent hours in the evenings in the inn
sitting-rooms incorporating new features into our residence, continually
modifying our plans. Now it was a Tudor house that carried us away, now a
Jacobean, and again an early Georgian with enfolding wings and a
wrought-iron grill. A stage of bewilderment succeeded.

Maude, I knew, loved the cottages best. She said they were more
"homelike." But she yielded to my liking for grandeur.

"My, I should feel lost in a palace like that!" she cried, as we gazed at
the Marquis of So-and-So's country-seat.

"Well, of course we should have to modify it," I admitted.
"Perhaps--perhaps our family will be larger."

She put her hand on my lips, and blushed a fiery red....

We examined, with other tourists, at a shilling apiece historic mansions
with endless drawing-rooms, halls, libraries, galleries filled with
family portraits; elaborate, formal bedrooms where famous sovereigns had
slept, all roped off and carpeted with canvas strips to protect the
floors. Through mullioned windows we caught glimpses of gardens and
geometrical parterres, lakes, fountains, statuary, fantastic topiary and
distant stretches of park. Maude sighed with admiration, but did not
covet. She had me. But I was often uncomfortable, resenting the vulgar,
gaping tourists with whom we were herded and the easy familiarity of the
guides. These did not trouble Maude, who often annoyed me by asking naive
questions herself. I would nudge her.

One afternoon when, with other compatriots, we were being hurried through
a famous castle, the guide unwittingly ushered us into a drawing-room
where the owner and several guests were seated about a tea-table. I shall
never forget the stares they gave us before we had time precipitately to
retreat, nor the feeling of disgust and rebellion that came over me. This
was heightened by the remark of a heavy, six-foot Ohioan with an
infantile face and a genial manner.

"I notice that they didn't invite us to sit down and have a bite," he
said. "I call that kind of inhospitable."

"It was 'is lordship himself!" exclaimed the guide, scandalized.

"You don't say!" drawled our fellow-countryman. "I guess I owe you
another shilling, my friend."

The guide, utterly bewildered, accepted it. The transatlantic point of
view towards the nobility was beyond him.

"His lordship could make a nice little income if he set up as a side
show," added the Ohioan.

Maude giggled, but I was furious. And no sooner were we outside the gates
than I declared I should never again enter a private residence by the
back door.

"Why, Hugh, how queer you are sometimes," she said.

"I maybe queer, but I have a sense of fitness," I retorted.

She asserted herself.

"I can't see what difference it makes. They didn't know us. And if they
admit people for money--"

"I can't help it. And as for the man from Ohio--"

"But he was so funny!" she interrupted. "And he was really very nice."

I was silent. Her point of view, eminently sensible as it was,
exasperated me. We were leaning over the parapet of a little-stone
bridge. Her face was turned away from me, but presently I realized that
she was crying. Men and women, villagers, passing across the bridge,
looked at us curiously. I was miserable, and somewhat appalled;
resentful, yet striving to be gentle and conciliatory. I assured her that
she was talking nonsense, that I loved her. But I did not really love her
at that moment; nor did she relent as easily as usual. It was not until
we were together in our sitting-room, a few hours later, that she gave
in. I felt a tremendous sense of relief.

"Hugh, I'll try to be what you want. You know I am trying. But don't kill
what is natural in me."

I was touched by the appeal, and repentant...

It is impossible to say when the little worries, annoyances and
disagreements began, when I first felt a restlessness creeping over me. I
tried to hide these moods from her, but always she divined them. And yet
I was sure that I loved Maude; in a surprisingly short period I had
become accustomed to her, dependent on her ministrations and the normal,
cosy intimacy of our companionship. I did not like to think that the keen
edge of the enjoyment of possession was wearing a little, while at the
same time I philosophized that the divine fire, when legalized, settles
down to a comfortable glow. The desire to go home that grew upon me I
attributed to the irritation aroused by the spectacle of a fixed social
order commanding such unquestioned deference from the many who were
content to remain resignedly outside of it. Before the setting in of the
Liberal movement and the "American invasion" England was a country in
which (from my point of view) one must be "somebody" in order to be
happy. I was "somebody" at home; or at least rapidly becoming so....

London was shrouded, parliament had risen, and the great houses were
closed. Day after day we issued forth from a musty and highly respectable
hotel near Piccadilly to a gloomy Tower, a soggy Hampton Court or a
mournful British Museum. Our native longing for luxury--or rather my
native longing--impelled me to abandon Smith's Hotel for a huge hostelry
where our suite overlooked the Thames, where we ran across a man I had
known slightly at Harvard, and other Americans with whom we made
excursions and dined and went to the theatre. Maude liked these persons;
I did not find them especially congenial. My life-long habit of
unwillingness to accept what life sent in its ordinary course was
asserting itself; but Maude took her friends as she found them, and I was
secretly annoyed by her lack of discrimination. In addition to this, the
sense of having been pulled up by the roots grew upon me.

"Suppose," Maude surprised me by suggesting one morning as we sat at
breakfast watching the river craft flit like phantoms through the
yellow-green fog--"suppose we don't go to France, after all, Hugh?"

"Not go to France!" I exclaimed. "Are you tired of the trip?"

"Oh, Hugh!" Her voice caught. "I could go on, always, if you were
content."

"And--what makes you think that I'm not content?"

Her smile had in it just a touch of wistfulness.

"I understand you, Hugh, better than you think. You want to get back to
your work, and--and I should be happier. I'm not so silly and so ignorant
as to think that I can satisfy you always. And I'd like to get settled at
home,--I really should."

There surged up within me a feeling of relief. I seized her hand as it
lay on the table.

"We'll come abroad another time, and go to France," I said. "Maude,
you're splendid!"

She shook her head.

"Oh, no, I'm not."

"You do satisfy me," I insisted. "It isn't that at all. But I think,
perhaps, it would be wiser to go back. It's rather a crucial time with
me, now that Mr. Watling's in Washington. I've just arrived at a position
where I shall be able to make a good deal of money, and later on--"

"It isn't the money, Hugh," she cried, with a vehemence which struck me
as a little odd. "I sometimes think we'd be a great deal happier
without--without all you are going to make."

I laughed.

"Well, I haven't made it yet."

She possessed the frugality of the Hutchinses. And some times my
lavishness had frightened her, as when we had taken the suite of rooms we
now occupied.

"Are you sure you can afford them, Hugh?" she had asked when we first
surveyed them.

I began married life, and carried it on without giving her any conception
of the state of my finances. She had an allowance from the first.

As the steamer slipped westward my spirits rose, to reach a climax of
exhilaration when I saw the towers of New York rise gleaming like huge
stalagmites in the early winter sun. Maude likened them more happily--to
gigantic ivory chessmen. Well, New York was America's chessboard, and the
Great Players had already begun to make moves that astonished the world.
As we sat at breakfast in a Fifth Avenue hotel I ran my eye eagerly over
the stock-market reports and the financial news, and rallied Maude for a
lack of spirits.

"Aren't you glad to be home?" I asked her, as we sat in a hansom.

"Of course I am, Hugh!" she protested. "But--I can't look upon New York
as home, somehow. It frightens me."

I laughed indulgently.

"You'll get used to it," I said. "We'll be coming here a great deal, off
and on."

She was silent. But later, when we took a hansom and entered the streams
of traffic, she responded to the stimulus of the place: the movement, the
colour, the sight of the well-appointed carriages, of the well-fed,
well-groomed people who sat in them, the enticement of the shops in which
we made our purchases had their effect, and she became cheerful again....

In the evening we took the "Limited" for home.

We lived for a month with my mother, and then moved into our own house.
It was one which I had rented from Howard Ogilvy, and it stood on the
corner of Baker and Clinton streets, near that fashionable neighbourhood
called "the Heights." Ogilvy, who was some ten years older than I, and
who belonged to one of our old families, had embarked on a career then
becoming common, but which at first was regarded as somewhat meteoric:
gradually abandoning the practice of law, and perceiving the
possibilities of the city of his birth, he had "gambled" in real estate
and other enterprises, such as our local water company, until he had
quadrupled his inheritance. He had built a mansion on Grant Avenue, the
wide thoroughfare bisecting the Heights. The house he had vacated was not
large, but essentially distinctive; with the oddity characteristic of the
revolt against the banal architecture of the 80's. The curves of the
tiled roof enfolded the upper windows; the walls were thick, the note one
of mystery. I remember Maude's naive delight when we inspected it.

"You'd never guess what the inside was like, would you, Hugh?" she cried.

From the panelled box of an entrance hall one went up a few steps to a
drawing-room which had a bowed recess like an oriel, and window-seats.
The dining-room was an odd shape, and was wainscoted in oak; it had a
tiled fireplace and (according to Maude) the "sweetest" china closet
built into the wall. There was a "den" for me, and an octagonal
reception-room on the corner. Upstairs, the bedrooms were quite as
unusual, the plumbing of the new pattern, heavy and imposing. Maude
expressed the air of seclusion when she exclaimed that she could almost
imagine herself in one of the mediaeval towns we had seen abroad.

"It's a dream, Hugh," she sighed. "But--do you think we can afford
it?"...

"This house," I announced, smiling, "is only a stepping-stone to the
palace I intend to build you some day."

"I don't want a palace!" she cried. "I'd rather live here, like this,
always."

A certain vehemence in her manner troubled me. I was charmed by this
disposition for domesticity, and yet I shrank from the contemplation of
its permanency. I felt vaguely, at the time, the possibility of a future
conflict of temperaments. Maude was docile, now. But would she remain
docile? and was it in her nature to take ultimately the position that was
desirable for my wife? Well, she must be moulded, before it were too
late. Her ultra-domestic tendencies must be halted. As yet blissfully
unaware of the inability of the masculine mind to fathom the subtleties
of feminine relationships, I was particularly desirous that Maude and
Nancy Durrett should be intimates. The very day after our arrival, and
while we were still at my mother's, Nancy called on Maude, and took her
out for a drive. Maude told me of it when I came home from the office.

"Dear old Nancy!" I said. "I know you liked her."

"Of course, Hugh. I should like her for your sake, anyway. She's--she's
one of your oldest and best friends."

"But I want you to like her for her own sake."

"I think I shall," said Maude. She was so scrupulously truthful! "I was a
little afraid of her, at first."

"Afraid of Nancy!" I exclaimed.

"Well, you know, she's much older than I. I think she is sweet. But she
knows so much about the world--so much that she doesn't say. I can't
describe it."

I smiled.

"It's only her manner. You'll get used to that, when you know what she
really is."

"Oh, I hope so," answered Maude. "I'm very anxious to like her--I do like
her. But it takes me such a lot of time to get to know people."

Nancy asked us to dinner.

"I want to help Maude all I can,--if she'll let me," Nancy said.

"Why shouldn't she let you?" I asked.

"She may not like me," Nancy replied.

"Nonsense!" I exclaimed.

Nancy smiled.

"It won't be my fault, at any rate, if she doesn't," she said. "I wanted
her to meet at first just the right people your old friends and a few
others. It is hard for a woman--especially a young woman--coming among
strangers." She glanced down the table to where Maude sat talking to Ham.
"She has an air about her,--a great deal of self-possession."

I, too, had noticed this, with pride and relief. For I knew Maude had
been nervous.

"You are luckier than you deserve to be," Nancy reminded me. "But I hope
you realize that she has a mind of her own, that she will form her own
opinions of people, independently of you."

I must have betrayed the fact that I was a little startled, for the
remark came as a confirmation of what I had dimly felt.

"Of course she has," I agreed, somewhat lamely. "Every woman has, who is
worth her salt."

Nancy's smile bespoke a knowledge that seemed to transcend my own.

"You do like her?" I demanded.

"I like her very much indeed," said Nancy, a little gravely. "She's
simple, she's real, she has that which so few of us possess
nowadays--character. But--I've got to be prepared for the possibility
that she may not get along with me."

"Why not?" I demanded.

"There you are again, with your old unwillingness to analyze a situation
and face it. For heaven's sake, now that you have married her, study her.
Don't take her for granted. Can't you see that she doesn't care for the
things that amuse me, that make my life?"

"Of course, if you insist on making yourself out a hardened,
sophisticated woman--" I protested. But she shook her head.

"Her roots are deeper,--she is in touch, though she may not realize it,
with the fundamentals. She is one of those women who are race-makers."

Though somewhat perturbed, I was struck by the phrase. And I lost sight
of Nancy's generosity. She looked me full in the face.

"I wonder whether you can rise to her," she said. "If I were you, I
should try. You will be happier--far happier than if you attempt to use
her for your own ends, as a contributor to your comfort and an auxiliary
to your career. I was afraid--I confess it--that you had married an
aspiring, simpering and empty-headed provincial like that Mrs. George
Hutchins' whom I met once, and who would sell her soul to be at my table.
Well, you escaped that, and you may thank God for it. You've got a
chance, think it over.

"A chance!" I repeated, though I gathered something of her meaning.

"Think it over, said Nancy again. And she smiled.

"But--do you want me to bury myself in domesticity?" I demanded, without
grasping the significance of my words.

"You'll find her reasonable, I think. You've got a chance now, Hugh.
Don't spoil it."

She turned to Leonard Dickinson, who sat on her other side....

When we got home I tried to conceal my anxiety as to Maude's impressions
of the evening. I lit a cigarette, and remarked that the dinner had been
a success.

"Do you know what I've been wondering all evening?" Maude asked. "Why you
didn't marry Nancy instead of me."

"Well," I replied, "it just didn't come off. And Nancy was telling me at
dinner how fortunate I was to have married you."

Maude passed this.

"I can't see why she accepted Hambleton Durrett. It seems horrible that
such a woman as she is could have married--just for money.

"Nancy has an odd streak in her," I said. "But then we all have odd
streaks. She's the best friend in the world, when she is your friend."

"I'm sure of it," Maude agreed, with a little note of penitence.

"You enjoyed it," I ventured cautiously.

"Oh, yes," she agreed. "And everyone was so nice to me--for your sake of
course."

"Don't be ridiculous!" I said. "I shan't tell you what Nancy and the
others said about you."

Maude had the gift of silence.

"What a beautiful house!" she sighed presently. "I know you'll think me
silly, but so much luxury as that frightens me a little. In England, in
those places we saw, it seemed natural enough, but in America--! And they
all your friends--seem to take it as a matter of course."

"There's no reason why we shouldn't have beautiful things and well served
dinners, too, if we have the money to pay for them."

"I suppose not," she agreed, absently.




XV.

That winter many other entertainments were given in our honour. But the
conviction grew upon me that Maude had no real liking for the social side
of life, that she acquiesced in it only on my account. Thus, at the very
outset of our married career, an irritant developed: signs of it, indeed,
were apparent from the first, when we were preparing the house we had
rented for occupancy. Hurrying away from my office at odd times to
furniture and department stores to help decide such momentous questions
as curtains, carpets, chairs and tables I would often spy the tall,
uncompromising figure of Susan Peters standing beside Maude's, while an
obliging clerk spread out, anxiously, rugs or wall-papers for their
inspection.

"Why don't you get Nancy to help you, too!" I ventured to ask her once.

"Ours is such a little house--compared to Nancy's, Hugh."

My attitude towards Susan had hitherto remained undefined. She was Tom's
wife and Tom's affair. In spite of her marked disapproval of the modern
trend in business and social life,--a prejudice she had communicated to
Tom, as a bachelor I had not disliked her; and it was certain that these
views had not mitigated Tom's loyalty and affection for me. Susan had
been my friend, as had her brother Perry, and Lucia, Perry's wife: they
made no secret of the fact that they deplored in me what they were
pleased to call plutocratic obsessions, nor had their disapproval always
been confined to badinage. Nancy, too, they looked upon as a renegade. I
was able to bear their reproaches with the superior good nature that
springs from success, to point out why the American tradition to which
they so fatuously clung was a things of the past. The habit of taking
dinner with them at least once a week had continued, and their arguments
rather amused me. If they chose to dwell in a backwater out of touch with
the current of great affairs, this was a matter to be deplored, but I did
not feel strongly enough to resent it. So long as I remained a bachelor
the relationship had not troubled me, but now that I was married I began
to consider with some alarm its power to affect my welfare.

It had remained for Nancy to inform me that I had married a woman with a
mind of her own. I had flattered myself that I should be able to control
Maude, to govern her predilections, and now at the very beginning of our
married life she was showing a disquieting tendency to choose for
herself. To be sure, she had found my intimacy with the Peterses and
Blackwoods already formed; but it was an intimacy from which I was
growing away. I should not have quarrelled with her if she had not
discriminated: Nancy made overtures, and Maude drew back; Susan presented
herself, and with annoying perversity and in an extraordinarily brief
time Maude had become her intimate. It seemed to me that she was always
at Susan's, lunching or playing with the children, who grew devoted to
her; or with Susan, choosing carpets and clothes; while more and more
frequently we dined with the Peterses and the Blackwoods, or they with
us. With Perry's wife Maude was scarcely less intimate than with Susan.
This was the more surprising to me since Lucia Blackwood was a
dyed-in-the-wool "intellectual," a graduate of Radcliffe, the daughter of
a Harvard professor. Perry had fallen in love with her during her visit
to Susan. Lucia was, perhaps, the most influential of the group; she
scorned the world, she held strong views on the higher education of
women; she had long discarded orthodoxy for what may be called a
Cambridge stoicism of simple living and high thinking; while Maude was a
strict Presbyterian, and not in the least given to theories. When, some
months after our homecoming, I ventured to warn her gently of the dangers
of confining one's self to a coterie--especially one of such narrow
views--her answer was rather bewildering.

"But isn't Tom your best friend?" she asked.

I admitted that he was.

"And you always went there such a lot before we were married."

This, too, was undeniable. "At the same time," I replied, "I have other
friends. I'm fond of the Blackwoods and the Peterses, I'm not advocating
seeing less of them, but their point of view, if taken without any
antidote, is rather narrowing. We ought to see all kinds," I suggested,
with a fine restraint.

"You mean--more worldly people," she said with her disconcerting
directness.

"Not necessarily worldly," I struggled on. "People who know more of the
world--yes, who understand it better."

Maude sighed.

"I do try, Hugh,--I return their calls,--I do try to be nice to them. But
somehow I don't seem to get along with them easily--I'm not myself, they
make me shy. It's because I'm provincial."

"Nonsense!" I protested, "you're not a bit provincial." And it was true;
her dignity and self-possession redeemed her.

Nancy was not once mentioned. But I think she was in both our minds....

Since my marriage, too, I had begun to resent a little the attitude of
Tom and Susan and the Blackwoods of humorous yet affectionate tolerance
toward my professional activities and financial creed, though Maude
showed no disposition to take this seriously. I did suspect, however,
that they were more and more determined to rescue Maude from what they
would have termed a frivolous career; and on one of these occasions--so
exasperating in married life when a slight cause for pique tempts husband
or wife to try to ask myself whether this affair were only a squall,
something to be looked for once in a while on the seas of matrimony, and
weathered: or whether Maude had not, after all, been right when she
declared that I had made a mistake, and that we were not fitted for one
another? In this gloomy view endless years of incompatibility stretched
ahead; and for the first time I began to rehearse with a certain cold
detachment the chain of apparently accidental events which had led up to
my marriage: to consider the gradual blindness that had come over my
faculties; and finally to wonder whether judgment ever entered into
sexual selection. Would Maude have relapsed into this senseless fit if
she had realized how fortunate she was? For I was prepared to give her
what thousands of women longed for, position and influence. My resentment
rose again against Perry and Tom, and I began to attribute their lack of
appreciation of my achievements to jealousy. They had not my ability;
this was the long and short of it.... I pondered also, regretfully, on my
bachelor days. And for the first time, I, who had worked so hard to
achieve freedom, felt the pressure of the yoke I had fitted over my own
shoulders. I had voluntarily, though unwittingly, returned to slavery.
This was what had happened. And what was to be done about it? I would not
consider divorce.

Well, I should have to make the best of it. Whether this conclusion
brought on a mood of reaction, I am unable to say. I was still annoyed by
what seemed to the masculine mind a senseless and dramatic performance on
Maude's part, an incomprehensible case of "nerves." Nevertheless, there
stole into my mind many recollections of Maude's affection, many passages
between us; and my eye chanced to fall on the ink-well she had bought me
out of the allowance I gave her. An unanticipated pity welled up within
me for her loneliness, her despair in that room upstairs. I got up--and
hesitated. A counteracting, inhibiting wave passed through me. I
hardened. I began to walk up and down, a prey to conflicting impulses.
Something whispered, "go to her"; another voice added, "for your own
peace of mind, at any rate." I rejected the intrusion of this motive as
unworthy, turned out the light and groped my way upstairs. The big clock
in the hall struck twelve.