Sylvia's Marriage: A Novel

by Upton Sinclair

I went to a college town with my three children, and when they were graduated, having meantime made sure that I could never do anything but torment my husband, I set about getting a divorce. I had helped to lay the foundation of his fortune, cementing it with my blood, I might say, and I could fairly have laid claim to half what he had brought from the farm; but my horror of the parasitic woman had come to be such that rather than even seem to be one, I gave up everything, and went out into the world at the age of forty-five to earn my own living. My children soon married, and I would not be a burden to them; so I came East for a while, and settled down quite unexpectedly into a place as a field-worker for a child-labour committee.

You may think that a woman so situated would not have been apt to meet Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver, née Castleman, and to be chosen for her bosom friend; but that would only be because you do not know the modern world. We have managed to get upon the consciences of the rich, and they invite us to attend their tea-parties and disturb their peace of mind. And then, too, I had a peculiar hold upon Sylvia; when I met her I possessed the key to the great mystery of her life. How that had come about is a story in itself, the thing I have next to tell.

2. It happened that my arrival in New York from the far West coincided with Sylvia’s from the far South; and that both fell at a time when there were no wars or earthquakes or football games to compete for the front page of the newspapers. So everybody was talking about the prospective wedding. The fact that the Southern belle had caught the biggest prize among the city’s young millionaires was enough to establish precedence with the city’s subservient newspapers, which had proceeded to robe the grave and punctilious figure of the bridegroom in the garments of King Cophetua. The fact that the bride’s father was the richest man in his own section did not interfere with this—for how could metropolitan editors be expected to have heard of the glories of Castleman Hall, or to imagine that there existed a section of America so self-absorbed that its local favourite would not feel herself exalted in becoming Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver?

What the editors knew about Castleman Hall was that they wired for pictures, and a man was sent from the nearest city to “snap” this unknown beauty; whereupon her father chased the presumptuous photographer and smashed his camera with a cane. So, of course, when Sylvia stepped out of the train in New York, there was a whole battery of cameras awaiting her, and all the city beheld her image the next day.

The beginning of my interest in this “belle” from far South was when I picked up the paper at my breakfast table, and found her gazing at me, with the wide-open, innocent eyes of a child; a child who had come from some fairer, more gracious world, and brought the memory of it with her, trailing her clouds of glory. She had stepped from the train into the confusion of the roaring city, and she stood, startled and frightened, yet, I thought, having no more real idea of its wickedness and horror than a babe in arms. I read her soul in that heavenly countenance, and sat looking at it, enraptured, dumb. There must have been thousands, even in that metropolis of Mammon, who loved her from that picture, and whispered a prayer for her happiness.

I can hear her laugh as I write this. For she would have it that I was only one more of her infatuated lovers, and that her clouds of glory were purely stage illusion. She knew exactly what she was doing with those wide-open, innocent eyes! Had not old Lady Dee, most cynical of worldlings, taught her how to use them when she was a child in pig-tails? To be sure she had been scared when she stepped off the train, and strange men had shoved cameras under her nose. It was almost as bad as being assassinated! But as to her heavenly soul—alas, for the blindness of men, and of sentimental old women, who could believe in a modern “society” girl!

I had supposed that I was an emancipated woman when I came to New York. But one who has renounced the world, the flesh and the devil, knowing them only from pictures in magazines and Sunday supplements; such a one may find that he has still some need of fasting and praying. The particular temptation which overcame me was this picture of the bride-to-be. I wanted to see her, and I went and stood for hours in a crowd of curious women, and saw the wedding party enter the great Fifth Avenue Church, and discovered that my Sylvia’s hair was golden, and her eyes a strange and wonderful red-brown. And this was the moment that fate had chosen to throw Claire Lepage into my arms, and give me the key to the future of Sylvia’s life.

3. I am uncertain how much I should tell about Claire Lepage. It is a story which is popular in a certain sort of novel, but I have no wish for that easy success. Towards Claire herself I had no trace of the conventional attitude, whether of contempt or of curiosity. She was to me the product of a social system, of the great New Nineveh which I was investigating. And later on, when I knew her, she was a weak sister whom I tried to help.

It happened that I knew much more about such matters than the average woman—owing to a tragedy in my life. When I was about twenty-five years old, my brother-in-law had moved his family to our part of the world, and one of his boys had become very dear to me. This boy later on had got into trouble, and rather than tell anyone about it, had shot himself. So my eyes had been opened to things that are usually hidden from my sex; for the sake of my own sons, I had set out to study the underground ways of the male creature. I developed the curious custom of digging out every man I met, and making him lay bare his inmost life to me; so you may understand that it was no ordinary pair of woman’s arms into which Claire Lepage was thrown.

At first I attributed her vices to her environment, but soon I realized that this was a mistake; the women of her world do not as a rule go to pieces. Many of them I met were free and independent women, one or two of them intellectual and worth knowing. For the most part such women marry well, in the worldly sense, and live as contented lives as the average lady who secures her life-contract at the outset. If you had met Claire at an earlier period of her career, and if she had been concerned to impress you, you might have thought her a charming hostess. She had come of good family, and been educated in a convent—much better educated than many society girls in America. She spoke English as well as she did French, and she had read some poetry, and could use the language of idealism whenever necessary. She had even a certain religious streak, and could voice the most generous sentiments, and really believe that she believed them. So it might have been some time before you discovered the springs of her weakness.