A Far Country, Complete

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The little railway carriage in which we sat rocked with speed as we flew
through the French landscape. I caught glimpses of solid, Norman farm
buildings, of towers and keeps and delicate steeples, and quaint towns;
of bare poplars swaying before the March gusts, of green fields ablaze in
the afternoon sun. I took it all in distractedly. Here was Maude beside
me, but a Maude I had difficulty in recognizing, whom I did not
understand: who talked of a life she had built up for herself and that
seemed to satisfy her; one with which I had nothing to do. I could not
tell how she regarded my re-intrusion. As she continued to talk, a
feeling that was almost desperation grew upon me. I had things to say to
her, things that every moment of this sort of intercourse was making more
difficult. And I felt, if I did not say them now, that perhaps I never
should: that now or never was the appropriate time, and to delay would be
to drift into an impossible situation wherein the chance of an
understanding would be remote.

There was a pause. How little I had anticipated the courage it would take
to do this thing! My blood was hammering.

"Maude," I said abruptly, "I suppose you're wondering why I came over
here."

She sat gazing at me, very still, but there came into her eyes a
frightened look that almost unnerved me. She seemed to wish to speak, to
be unable to. Passively, she let my hand rest on hers.

"I've been thinking a great deal during the last few months," I went on
unsteadily. "And I've changed a good many of my ideas--that is, I've got
new ones, about things I never thought of before. I want to say, first,
that I do not put forth any claim to come back into your life. I know I
have forfeited any claim. I've neglected you, and I've neglected the
children. Our marriage has been on a false basis from the start, and I've
been to blame for it. There is more to be said about the chances for a
successful marriage in these days, but I'm not going to dwell on that
now, or attempt to shoulder off my shortcomings on my bringing up, on the
civilization in which we have lived. You've tried to do your share, and
the failure hasn't been your fault. I want to tell you first of all that
I recognize your right to live your life from now on, independently of
me, if you so desire. You ought to have the children--" I hesitated a
moment. It was the hardest thing I had to say. "I've never troubled
myself about them, I've never taken on any responsibility in regard to
their bringing up."

"Hugh!" she cried.

"Wait--I've got more to tell you, that you ought to know. I shouldn't be
here to-day if Nancy Durrett had consented to--to get a divorce and marry
me. We had agreed to that when this accident happened to Ham, and she
went back to him. I have to tell you that I still love her--I can't say
how much, or define my feelings toward her now. I've given up all idea of
her. I don't think I'd marry her now, even if I had the chance, and you
should decide to live away from me. I don't know. I'm not so sure of
myself as I once was. The fact is, Maude, circumstances have been too
much for me. I've been beaten. And I'm not at all certain that it wasn't
a cowardly thing for me to come back to you at all."

I felt her hand trembling under mine, but I had not the courage to look
at her. I heard her call my name again a little cry, the very poignancy
of pity and distress. It almost unnerved me.

"I knew that you loved her, Hugh," she said. "It was only--only a little
while after you married me that I found it out. I guessed it--women do
guess such things--long before you realized it yourself. You ought to
have married her instead of me. You would have been happier with her."

I did not answer.

"I, too, have thought a great deal," she went on, after a moment. "I
began earlier than you, I had to." I looked up suddenly and saw her
smiling at me, faintly, through her tears. "But I've been thinking more,
and learning more since I've been over here. I've come to see that that
our failure hasn't been as much your fault as I once thought, as much as
you yourself declare. You have done me a wrong, and you've done the
children a wrong. Oh, it is frightful to think how little I knew when I
married you, but even then I felt instinctively that you didn't love me
as I deserved to be loved. And when we came back from Europe I knew that
I couldn't satisfy you, I couldn't look upon life as you saw it, no
matter how hard I tried. I did try, but it wasn't any use. You'll never
know how much I've suffered all these years.

"I have been happier here, away from you, with the children; I've had a
chance to be myself. It isn't that I'm--much. It isn't that I don't need
guidance and counsel and--sympathy. I've missed those, but you've never
given them to me, and I've been learning more and more to do without
them. I don't know why marriage should suddenly have become such a
mockery and failure in our time, but I know that it is, that ours hasn't
been such an exception as I once thought. I've come to believe that
divorce is often justified."

"It is justified so far as you are concerned, Maude," I replied. "It is
not justified for me. I have forfeited, as I say, any rights over you. I
have been the aggressor and transgressor from the start. You have been a
good wife and a good mother, you have been faithful, I have had
absolutely nothing to complain of."

"Sometimes I think I might have tried harder," she said. "At least I
might have understood better. I was stupid. But everything went wrong.
And I saw you growing away from me all the time, Hugh, growing away from
the friends who were fond of you, as though you were fading in the
distance. It wasn't wholly because--because of Nancy that I left you.
That gave me an excuse--an excuse for myself. Long before that I realized
my helplessness, I knew that whatever I might have done was past doing."

"Yes, I know," I assented.

We sat in silence for a while. The train was skirting an ancient town set
on a hill, crowned with a castle and a Gothic church whose windows were
afire in the setting sun.

"Maude," I said, "I have not come to plead, to appeal to your pity as
against your judgment and reason. I can say this much, that if I do not
love you, as the word is generally understood, I have a new respect for
you, and a new affection, and I think that these will grow. I have no
doubt that there are some fortunate people who achieve the kind of mutual
love for which it is human to yearn, whose passion is naturally
transmuted into a feeling that may be even finer, but I am inclined to
think, even in such a case, that some effort and unselfishness are
necessary. At any rate, that has been denied to us, and we can never know
it from our own experience. We can only hope that there is such a
thing,--yes, and believe in it and work for it."

"Work for it, Hugh?" she repeated.

"For others--for our children. I have been thinking about the children a
great deal in the last few months especially about Matthew."

"You always loved him best," she said.

"Yes," I admitted. "I don't know why it should be so. And in spite of it,
I have neglected him, neglected them, failed to appreciate them all. I
did not deserve them. I have reproached myself, I have suffered for it,
not as much as I deserved. I came to realize that the children were a
bond between us, that their existence meant something greater than either
of us. But at the same time I recognized that I had lost my right over
them, that it was you who had proved yourself worthy.... It was through
the children that I came to think differently, to feel differently toward
you. I have come to you to ask your forgiveness."

"Oh, Hugh!" she cried.

"Wait," I said.... "I have come to you, through them. I want to say again
that I should not be here if I had obtained my desires. Yet there is more
to it than that. I think I have reached a stage where I am able to say
that I am glad I didn't obtain them. I see now that this coming to you
was something I have wanted to do all along, but it was the cowardly
thing to do, after I had failed, for it was not as though I had conquered
the desires, the desires conquered me. At any rate, I couldn't come to
you to encumber you, to be a drag upon you. I felt that I must have
something to offer you. I've got a plan, Maude, for my life, for our
lives. I don't know whether I can make a success of it, and you are
entitled to decline to take the risk. I don't fool myself that it will be
all plain sailing, that there won't be difficulties and discouragements.
But I'll promise to try."

"What is it?" she asked, in a low voice. "I--I think I know."

"Perhaps you have guessed it. I am willing to try to devote what is left
of my life to you and to them. And I need your help. I acknowledge it.
Let us try to make more possible for them the life we have missed."

"The life we have missed!" she said.

"Yes. My mistakes, my failures, have brought us to the edge of a
precipice. We must prevent, if we can, those mistakes and failures for
them. The remedy for unhappy marriages, for all mistaken, selfish and
artificial relationships in life is a preventive one. My plan is that we
try to educate ourselves together, take advantage of the accruing
knowledge that is helping men and women to cope with the problems, to
think straight. We can then teach our children to think straight, to
avoid the pitfalls into which we have fallen."

I paused. Maude did not reply. Her face was turned away from me, towards
the red glow of the setting sun above the hills.

"You have been doing this all along, you have had the vision, the true
vision, while I lacked it, Maude. I offer to help you. But if you think
it is impossible for us to live together, if you believe my feeling
toward you is not enough, if you don't think I can do what I propose, or
if you have ceased to care for me--"

She turned to me with a swift movement, her eyes filled with tears.

"Oh, Hugh, don't say any more. I can't stand it. How little you know, for
all your thinking. I love you, I always have loved you. I grew to be
ashamed of it, but I'm not any longer. I haven't any pride any more, and
I never want to have it again."

"You're willing to take me as I am,--to try?" I said.

"Yes," she answered, "I'm willing to try." She smiled at me. "And I have
more faith than you, Hugh. I think we'll succeed."....

At nine o'clock that night, when we came out through the gates of the
big, noisy station, the children were awaiting us. They had changed, they
had grown. Biddy kissed me shyly, and stood staring up at me.

"We'll take you out to-morrow and show you how we can ride," said
Moreton.

Matthew smiled. He stood very close to me, with his hand through my arm.

"You're going to stay, father?" he asked.

"I'm going to stay, Matthew," I answered, "until we all go back to
America."....





PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

Barriers were mere relics of the superstition of the past
Benumbing and desiccating effect of that old system of education
Conscience was superstition, the fear of the wrath of the gods
Conventionality was part of the price we had willingly paid
Conviction that government should remain modestly in the background
Everybody should have been satisfied, but everybody was not
I hated to lie to her,--yet I did so
I'm incapable of committing a single original act
It was not money we coveted, we Americans, but power
Knowledge was presented to us as a corpse
Marriage! What other career is open to a woman?
Meaningless lessons which had to be learned
Opponent who praises one with a delightful irony
Righteousness a stern and terrible thing implying not joy
Staunch advocate on the doctrine of infant damnation
That's the great thing, to keep 'em ignorant as long as possible
The saloon represented Democracy, so dear to the American public
They deplored while they coveted
We lived separate mental existences
We had learned to pursue our happiness in packs
What you wants, you gets
Your American romanticist is a sentimental spoiled child