“Never a word of love,” she went on monotonously. “Yet I don’t suppose any woman ever wanted to hear it more. And no children. Yet I know no woman ever wanted them more. No, not adopted children—but my own flesh and blood. I’ve heard women complain of the burden of bearing a child. It made me wild to listen to them—the fools—the selfish fools! What wouldn’t I have given to have felt a child within me. Does it scandalize you to hear me talk like this?”
“No,” said I. “No.”
“It’s a wonder,” said she, with a grim smile. She was quieting down, was hiding the heart from which she had on impulse snatched the veil, was ashamed of her outburst. “A woman can talk about having a cancer, or a tumor, or any frightful disease inside her, and nobody’s modesty is shocked. But if she speaks of having a child within her—a wonderful, living human being—a lovely baby—why, it’s immodest!” She gave a scornful laugh. “What a world! What a world!”
I looked at her and marveled. What a world, indeed!—where this was one of the sort of relatives of whom pushing arrived people were ashamed!
I think I forced myself to stay three days with them. I cannot recall; perhaps I left the second day. However that may be, I have the sense of a long, a very long visit. To one who has the city habit the country is oppressively deliberate even when it is interesting. It makes you realize how there is room, and to spare, for sixty minutes in an hour, for sixty seconds in each minute. The city entertains; the country compels you to seek entertainment, to make entertainment. People whose mentality tapers away from mediocrity grow old and dull rapidly in the country as soon as childhood’s torrential life begins to slacken. For men of thought the country ought to be ideal, I should say, once they formed its habit and lost the city habit of waiting in confident expectation of being amused. But for men of action like myself, for men whose whole life is dealing directly with their fellow men, to acquire the country habit is a matter of years, of a complete revolution.
I brought a sore and a sick heart to the country. I took back to town one that was on the way toward the normal. And I owed the improvement not to the country directly, but to my sister. Polly Ann had reminded me of the futility of graveyard mooning, of its egotism and hypocrisy. She had reminded me that only the fool walks backward through life. I believed I had been guilty of the folly of blowing a bubble of delusion, pretending to myself that it was no bubble, but permanent, substantial, real. The bubble had burst, as bubbles must—had burst with a mocking and irritating dash of cold spray straight into my face. Well!—the sensible thing to do, the only thing to do, was to laugh and blow no more bubbles.
I went back to finance; I busied myself to the uttermost of my capacity for work. But I could not uproot the idea Mary Kirkwood had set growing in my mind. I saw ever more clearly that my sister was eternally right. Some men might be successful bachelors. I could be fairly successful at that selfish and solitary profession for a few years, perhaps for ten or fifteen years longer. But I knew with the clearness of a vision trained to search the horizon of the future that the feeling of loneliness, of complete futility which already shadowed me, would become a black pall. I must have companionship; and to companionship there is but the one way—the way of wife and children. A poor, an uncertain way; nevertheless the only way.
You have, perhaps, observed the marriages of the rich. You have noted that every rich man and every rich woman is surrounded by a smaller or larger army of satellites—persons nominally their social equals, often distinctly their mental superiors, salaried persons, wearers of cast-off clothing, eaters of luncheons and dinners, permanent free lodgers, constant or occasional pensioners more or less disguised. Family life fails with the rich as it fails with the well off, or with the poor. But while other classes revert to the herd life, the life of clubs, saloons, teas, receptions, the rich take up the parasite-beset life, each rich person aloof with his or her particular circle of flatterers, attendants, coat-holders, joke-makers, and boot-lickers.
Now it so happened that for me there could be no enduring of this standing apart in the meadow, switching my tail while parasites bit and tickled, buzzed and burrowed. Riches, like any other heavy and constantly growing responsibility, usually rob a man of his sense of humor and turn his thoughts in upon himself and make him a ridiculous ass of an egotist. They had not had that effect upon me. I can give no reason; I simply state the fact. So, with my sense of humor active, and my sense of proportion fairly well balanced, I could not give myself up to the dreary life custom assigns to the rich. I retained the normal human instincts.