She stretched out her arms, and her face was a grief-stricken appeal for mercy. “You can’t be so cruel to me—your Edna.”
I smiled mockingly at her and left the room.
XII
I have not been unaware of your anger and disgust with me, gentle reader, during the progress of the preceding scene. In real life—in your own life—you would have understood such a scene. But you are not in the habit of reading realities in books—real men, real women, real action. Everything is there toned down, put in what is called an artistic perspective. Well, I am not an artist, and perhaps I have no right to express an opinion upon matters of art. But I’ll venture. To me art means a point of view upon life; so, I see nothing artistic, nothing but more or less grotesque nonsense, in an art that is not a point of view but a false view. But to keep to Edna and myself.
You think I should have been moist and mushy, should have taken her back, should have burdened myself for the rest of my days with her insincere and unsympathetic personality. You are saying: “But after all she loved him.” Even so—what does the word love mean when used by a person of her character? It means nothing but the narrowest, blighting selfishness. She had for years used me without any thought for or of my feelings, wishes, needs. When we moved into our grand New York house she gave me as a bedroom the noisiest room in the house, one overlooking the street where the rattling of carriages, cabs, and carts and the talk and laughter of pedestrians kept me awake until far into the night and roused me about four in the morning—this, when I was working with might and main all day long and needed every moment of rest I could get. Why did she give me that room? Because she wanted the only available quiet room—beside her own bedroom—for a dressing room! She said the light in the room she gave me was unfit to dress by! I thought nothing of all this at the time. It is characteristic of American wives to do these things; it is characteristic of American men to regard them as the matter of course. I cite the small but not insignificant incident to show the minuteness of her indifference to me. I have already given many of the larger though perhaps less important instances, and I could give scores, hundreds, in the same tenor. She professed to love me at that time—and she either had or simulated a very ardent passion. But that was not love, was it? Love is generous, is considerate, finds its highest pleasure of self-gratification in making the loved one happy. Such a conception of love never entered her head—and how many American women’s heads does it enter? How it amuses me to watch them as they absorb everything, give nothing, sit enthroned upon their vanities—and then wonder and grow sulky or sour when their husbands or lovers tire of the thankless task of loving them and turn away—or turn them away.
If Edna had awakened to genuine love, gentle outraged reader, would she not have been overwhelmed with shame as she looked back upon her married life? Would she have come to me with the offer of her love as a queen with the offer of her crown? She would not have indulged in empty words; she would have tried to do something by way of reparation. She would not have demanded that she be taken back; but, feeling that she had forfeited her rights, she would have tried to find out whether I would consent to take her back; and if she had found that I would not, she would have accepted her fate as her desert.
In those circumstances do you think I could have laughed at her and remained firm? No one not a monster could have done that.
But the thing she called love was not love at all, was merely as I described it to her—a newly discovered way of using me after she had thought all possible use for me exhausted. Such, gentle reader, is the simple truth. Yet because I had intelligence enough to see the truth and firmness enough not to be swayed by shallow and meaningless sentimentalities, you call me hard, harsh, cruel. One of your impulsive kindly souls would have taken her weeping to his arms, would have begun to live with her. And there the novel would have ended, with you, gentle reader, all tears and thrills. For, having no imagination, you would have been unable to picture the few weeks of cat-and-dog life after the “happy ending,” then the breaking apart in hatred and vindictiveness. But this is not an “artistic” novel. It is a story of life, a plain setting forth of actualities, in the hope that it may enable some men and women to understand life more clearly and to live their own lives more wisely and perhaps less mischievously.
I went to my daughter. “Margot,” said I, “your mother threatens to try to stop the divorce. It is best for both her and me that we be free. I am determined not to live with her again, for I abominate the sort of life she and you lead. If you will do what you can to bring her to her senses, I will see that you don’t regret it.”
Margot rather liked me, I believe. Not as a father; as a father I made her ashamed, like everything else American about her. But it was a resigned kind of shame, and she appreciated my money, my good nature about it and my services in bringing back her marquis and making possible her son the earl. I knew I could count on her active sympathy; for she would vastly prefer that her mother be the Princess Frascatoni.