Yet as I rode into town on the early train my scruples came back. To be sure I had very little respect for the "sanctity" of formal marriage. I had seen too much of it in the Tombs. Certainly no amount of legal or religious ceremony is a guarantee of bliss or even of common decency. The minor marriage failures are attended to in the civil divorce courts. The domestic difficulties which are threshed out in the criminal courts show very clearly that there is no magic in church ritual to transform a brute into a good husband. Ten wedding rings will not change an alcoholic woman into a good mother. And then I was always witnessing "forced" marriages. Such was the cheap and easy solution in cases of seduction and rape in the second degree. Our law givers have decreed eighteen as the age of consent. The seduction of a girl under that arbitrary age is rape. Most of our grandmothers were married earlier. But the law is too majestic a thing to consider such details. It deals with general principles. If it has been flouted, Justice must be done though the heavens fall. However, it is an expensive matter to send a man to prison. So he is offered the alternative of marrying the girl. Justice gives no heed to the morality nor happiness of the two young people who have fallen in trouble, cares not at all for the next generation. Send the guilty couple to the altar. Their sins are forgiven them. The conventions have been vindicated. The juggernaut is appeased. No. I was very little impressed with the virtue of "legal" marriage.
But I had a strong, if rather indefinite, ideal of a "true" marriage, a real mating, a close copartnership, a community of interest and a comradely growth, sanctified by a mutual passion. I saw no chance of this in my relation to Ann.
At the Tombs that day, I tried, and to a large extent succeeded, in forgetting the problem. But back in the Teepee, at dinner with Norman, it seized me again. Even Guiseppe noticed my preoccupation and walked about on tiptoe.
"What's eating you?" Norman asked as we drank our coffee. "Any way I can lend a hand?"
"A woman," I said.
"That lets me out." And after a while he muttered "Hell."
"What do you think," I asked—suddenly resolved to get an outside opinion—"about one's right to be intimate with a woman, outside of marriage?"
"I don't think about it at all," he snapped. "Not nowadays. Time was when I didn't think of much else. It didn't do me any good. The times are rotten—out of joint. Everything we do is out of joint—inevitably. Ninety per cent of us want to do what's right and as it is ninety-nine per cent of us ball things up. I don't think much of marriage. I tried it once—divorced."
This was news to me.
"I don't like to talk about it. No use now. It was a miserable affair. I tried to be decent—did all I knew how to make it right. But I guess the girl suffered more than I did—which is one of the reasons why I hate God. Some people tumble into happiness—but it seems luck to me—pure luck."