§ i
IN order to escape she had told the old lady a deliberate lie. She had said she was going shopping with Mrs. Martinsburgh, because Mrs. Martinsburgh was a highly approved of young married woman considered to be a good influence for the peculiar young Mrs. Vincelle. Whereas she was really going to meet Lance. She had written to him to meet her in a certain respectable restaurant where ladies on shopping tours often went to lunch.
It was a risk; she was quite likely to be seen there and her outrageous escapade reported to the old lady, but she was desperate. She had to see him. She went upstairs and secured a table, self-conscious and wretched at being there alone. She dared not look about the room for fear of seeing a familiar face, she dared not tell the waiter she was expecting someone. She pretended to study the menu, taking a long time to order, hoping and hoping that Lance would come. But he was late as he always was. Her lunch was set before her and she felt obliged to begin eating it. The room was full, she expected every moment that someone else would be put at her table. She had laid her muff and hand bag on the chair beside her as a futile protection, and sipped her chocolate with an engrossed air.
By raising her eyes, she could see her own reflection in one of the mirrors which lined the room; she was paler, thinner, more elegant but—what was it that had gone from her face? She fingered her veil with a delicate little gesture, and glanced down again to her hands, adorned with rings. She wondered if Lance would find her changed?
And just at this moment she heard his voice, his calm, serious voice, always so low that it was difficult for strangers to understand him.
“Hello, Claudine!” he said. “Am I late? How are you?”
He sat down beside her and looked at her seriously through his spectacles.
“Well!” he said. “You’ve changed.... What on earth did you want to see me for?”
The recollection of her suffering rushed over her. Her eyes filled with tears.
“I had to—talk to someone,” she said. “And there was nobody else.”
“But—” he began, and stopped. This was a matter for caution, she who had a husband, a mother, a father, brothers and sisters, and yet could find no one but himself to confide in.
Five years before, when he was a boy of twenty, he had come to live with his uncle, Doctor Mason. He was a youth of strongly scientific tendency, too poor to study, and the doctor had offered to keep him. His mother was a garrulous, vulgar woman, with a bitter tongue, well able to make life a burden for her household. Her husband, the doctor’s younger brother, endured her with English fatalism; he was an ineffectual sort of chap, anyway, who like so many of his countrymen had turned to farming in the hope of finding in it a refuge from competition and struggle. He had a wretched, stony, hillside farm in Sullivan County, which produced next to nothing; the family were kept alive only by the exertions of his relentless wife and the boundless charity of his brother. Lance, amazingly christened Launcelot—had lived in calm, unceasing opposition to both parents. He would be a paleontologist, and he would not devote himself to money-making. If he did make anything through that work, his parents could have it, if he didn’t they would have to do without.
He was the most unimpressionable, unsusceptible young man ever born. Nothing moved him, nothing troubled him. He was a pleasant housemate, for he was never impatient or cross, but he remained marvelously aloof. He sat at the doctor’s feet, worshipping his scientific knowledge, grateful to him for the opportunities he had given him, the years in college, the quiet and peace for independent study, he was grateful to his aunt, too, for her kindly care of him. But he would have been delighted to go to the ends of the earth on an expedition, and it wouldn’t have cost him a pang to bid them farewell forever.
The only soul with whom he was really human was Claudine. They had been like brother and sister, only at once more friendly and more formal than brothers and sisters usually are. And Claudine was quite conscious of something not at all brotherly in Lance’s regard. She had had too many suitors to be deceived. She had very carefully maintained a nice balance. She knew that he thought she didn’t know, and she was artful about it. She thoroughly respected Lance, he was the most candid, unbiased, truly independent person she had ever known, and he was kind, consistently and invariably kind, without effort, simply because it was his impulse to be so.
It was upon his candour, his intelligence, his kindness, that she counted now.
“Oh, Lance!” she said. “I’m so unhappy!”
“What’s the trouble?”
The waiter was hovering near.
“You’d better order something,” she murmured.
“I’m not hungry!”
“But you must, Lance! Please! It would look so queer.”
“A glass of milk,” he said, “and a piece of apple pie, then!”
The waiter was astounded and offended at this plebeian order; he had, nevertheless, to go and fetch it and they were able to talk again.
“What makes you unhappy, Claudine?” he asked.
“I suppose I ought to bear it, and say nothing, but I can’t any longer. Lance ...! I want to leave Gilbert!”
This time she had certainly shaken his scientific calm.
“What!” he said. “After three months!”
“I wish I could tell you.... But I could never make anyone understand. It’s just—unendurable.”
“It’s not altogether Gilbert’s fault. He tries to be kind. He thinks he is. But it’s the whole life. Oh, Lance, it’s so horrible! It’s like being buried alive....” She had to stop, to struggle with her tears. “I’ve tried. I’ve really tried my best. But I can’t stand it. I want to go home and live with Father and Mother. Oh, Lance, do you think it would be wrong?”
He regarded her thoughtfully.
“Do you mean as a general principle?” he asked. “Do you mean—do I think it’s wrong for a woman to leave her husband?”
“I suppose I do mean that.”
“It’s hard for me to say,” he went on, frowning. “I can’t say I’ve ever thought much about the modern system of marriage. I suppose it’s the best—or at least, the most expedient system for our present stage of development. But I haven’t considered exactly what it is. Is marriage popularly considered indissoluble? No, there’s divorce. No!... I suppose it’s an arrangement for the convenience of both the parties to the contract. In that case—”
“But I never thought about divorce!” she cried. “I only wanted to get away. Can that possibly be wrong?”
Lance was never greatly concerned about ethical problems, certainly not about the relations between men and women. It didn’t seem a matter of much importance to him. He envisaged the human race as gradually progressing, adopting now this expedient, now that; marriage he had looked upon as a rather silly but necessary part of modern existence. As for woman’s revolt, feminism, and so on, he merely smiled at it all. He knew too much about Pre-Historic Woman.
He bent his mind to the problem as to whether the sanctity of marriage was a help or a hindrance to civilization.
“I can’t see that there’s anything wrong in it, Claudine,” he said.
“Then you think—” she began. “But oh, I don’t know what Father and Mother would say. Everyone but you would think I was wicked—and that my life was ruined.... Just because I want to be myself!”
He glanced up in surprise at her tone, and saw her eyes fastened on him, swimming in tears, the most beautiful eyes he had ever seen. It came to him with a sort of shock that this was Claudine’s specific case, and not a general problem; that it was not women who wished to leave their husbands, but Claudine who wished to leave Gilbert. He saw that she was a lovely and innocent young thing, unhappy and desperate; he saw suddenly what this might lead to. She would be cast adrift, blamed, gossiped about, always under a sort of cloud. Her position in her own home would be an equivocal one, an unending embarrassment and distress. Hers was not a strong spirit; she couldn’t go forward unsupported. A terrible pain seized him, he turned his eyes away because he couldn’t bear to look at her. And the most intolerable part of his pain was his certainty that she could grow out of her pain; that what she now found unbearable she could one day regard with indifference. She suffered cruelly; she thought her fate was a lamentable and wretched one, and it was really nothing; a trifle, a few moments in her history.
“What would be the sense of my going on?” she asked him. “I don’t make Gilbert happy, and I’m—dreadfully unhappy myself.”
“It isn’t important—to be happy,” said Lance. “The question is, are you useful?”
“No! No, I’m not!”
He pushed away his plate with a nervous gesture.
“You want to know what I think,” he said. “Well, I think you’d better go back to your husband.”