The Husband's Story: A Novel

by David Graham Phillips

My first question at the station had, of course, been as to Mrs. Loring. I was assured that her ladyship’s mother was somewhat better, but still awaiting the dangerous crisis of the fever. Margot, not a whit less girlish for her maternity, met me in the doorway, and had the nurse there with the boy—the Earl of Gorse. They said he looked like me—and he did, though I do not believe they thought so. Why should they say it? I was still a young man and might marry again. I fancy the same prudent instinct prompted them to give him Godfrey as one of his four or five names. Why do I think they did not believe he looked like me? Because all of them were ashamed of everything American. In the frequent quarrels between Margot and Hugh, he never failed to use the shaft that would surely pierce the heart of her vanity and rankle there—her low American birth, in such ghastly and grotesque contrast to the illustrious descent of her husband. She had an acid tongue when it came to quarreling; she could hurl taunts about his shifts to keep up appearances before he met her that made ugly and painful marks on his hide. She had discovered, probably by gossiping with some traitor servant, that he had been flouted by a rich English girl for a chauffeur—and you may be sure she put it to good use. But nothing she could say made him quiver as she quivered when he opened out on the subject of those “filthy bounders in the States.”

Do not imagine, gentle reader, that my daughter was unhappily married. She would not have exchanged places with anyone but the wife of a duke; and Hugh—well, he needed the money. Nor should you think that they lived unhappily together. They saw little of each other alone; and in public they were as smiling and amiable with each other as—perhaps as you and your husband.

A fine baby was the Earl of Gorse—one who in a decent environment would have grown up a sensible, useful person. But hardly, I feared, when he was already living in his own separate apartment, with his name—“The Earl of Gorse”—on a card beside the door, and with all the servants, including his mother, treating him as if he were of superior clay. This when he barely had his sight. They say a baby learns the utility of bawling at about three days old; I should say the germ of snobbishness would get to work very soon thereafter.

You are waiting to hear what was the matter with Edna. No, it was not a fake illness to draw me within reach for some further trimming. She had indeed fallen dangerously ill—did not expect to live when Margot telegraphed me. It was an intestinal fever brought on by the excesses of the London season. I wonder when the biographers, poets, playwrights, novelists, and other gentry who give us the annals of the race will catch up with the progress of science? How long will it be before they stop telling us of germ and filth diseases as if they were the romantic physical expressions of soul states? There was a time when such blunders were excusable. Now, science has shown us that they are so much twaddle. So, gentle reader, I cannot gratify your taste for humbug and moonshine by telling you that Edna was stricken of remorse or of overjoy or of secret grief or of any other soul state whatever. The doctor bosh was, of course, nervous exhaustion. It always is if the patient is above the working class. The truth was that she fell ill, even as you and I. She ate and drank too much, both at and between meals, and did not take proper care of herself in any way. She wore dresses that were nearly nothing in cold carriages and draughty rooms, when she was laden with undigested food. Vulgar—isn’t it? Revolting for me to speak thus of a lady? But I am trying to tell the truth, gentle reader, not to increase your stock of slop and lies which you call “culture.” And if a lady will put herself in such a condition, why should it not be spoken of? Why go on lying about these things, and encouraging people to attribute to sensitive nerves and souls the consequences of gluttony, ignorance, and neglect?

I am not criticising Edna for getting into such an internal physical state that a pestilence began to rage within her. The most intelligent of us is only too foolish and ignorant in these matters, thanks to stupid education from childhood up. And she has the added excuse of having been exposed to the temptations of a London season. She fell; it is hardly in human nature not to fall.

You have been through a London season? It is a mad chase from food to food. You rise and hastily swallow a heavy English breakfast. You ride in the Row a while, ride toward a lunch table—and an English lunch, especially in the season, means a bigger dinner than any Frenchman or other highly civilized person ever willingly sat down to. Hardly is this long lunch over before it is time for tea—which means not merely tea, but toast, and sandwiches, and hot muffins, and many kinds of heavy cake, and often fruit or jam. Tea is to give you an appetite for the dinner that follows—and what a dinner! One rich, heavy course upon another, with drenchings of wine and a poisonous liqueur afterward. You sit about until this has settled a bit, then—on to supper! Not so formidable a meal as the dinner, but still what any reasonable person would call a square meal. Then to bed? By no means. On to a ball, where you eat and drink in desultory fashion until late supper is served. You roll heavily home to sleep. But hardly have your eyes closed when you are roused to eat again. It is breakfast time, and another day of stuffing has begun.

Starvation, they tell me, is one of the regular causes of death in London. But that is in the East End. In the West End—and you, gentle reader, are interested only in that section—death, I’ll wager, reaps twenty from overfeeding to one he gets in the East End through underfeeding. Famine is a dreadful thing. But how characteristic of the shallowness of human beings it is that you can make a poetic horror out of famine, when no one would listen while you told the far more horrible truth of the frightful ravages of overfeeding, chief cause of all the diseases that torture and twist the human body, aging and killing it prematurely.

Edna had been for many years most cautiously careful of her health. She loved her youth, her beautiful body. She fought against her natural fondness for food and wine. I fancy that, for this first season after freedom she relaxed her rules, and turned herself loose to “celebrate.” I know she must have had something of this sort in mind, because her French maid—I could not talk with the Italian—told me that madame had arranged an elaborate programme of “cures” on the Continent after the season. “And they were to be serious cures,” said she.

Her illness took such a course of ups and downs, with death always hovering, that it was impossible for me to leave. I wrote Mary; I got no reply. I sent Rossiter to Paris; he reported that Mrs. Armstrong and Mrs. Kirkwood had left for the country, but that he could get no address.

You probably picture me as scarcely able to restrain myself from acting like a madman. How little you know of me! Do you think I could have achieved my solid success before I reached forty-five years if I had been one of the little people who fret and fume against the inevitable? All men who amount to anything are violent men. Jesus, the model of serenity and patience, scourged the money changers from the temple. Washington, one more great exemplar of the majesty of repose, swore like a lunatic at the battle of Monmouth. These great ones simply had in the highest form the virtues that make for success in every department of leadership. Certainly, I am a violent man; but I have rarely been foolish enough to go crazy to no purpose.