CHAPTER VII
THE BATTLE
ELLEN felt her way into the room and sat down in the dim light of the street lamps. She loved this quaint apartment. Five years of strenuous work within its walls had given to it the power of restoring tired nerves and toning the fiber of character. The front half of the floor space was devoted to the one large living-room with three windows opening on Fifth Avenue. The ceiling was unusually high and a gallery with white spindles and mahogany rail circled the two sides and rear end of it. From the balcony in the rear the doors opened into two bedrooms and beneath them on the level of the living-room was the dining-room, kitchen, pantry and maid’s room.
Each piece of furniture was selected with care and expressed some mood or fancy of her vivid imagination.
The walls of the living-room were in brown leather and the furnishings suggested the library and sitting-room combined. The walls for the first four feet up were lined with books--every inch of the space taken with the cases even at the turn of the corners and beneath each window.
On the floor was a rich brown carpet, with an oriental rug here and there to break its wide stretches of plainness.
The quiet dignity of the room soothed her. She walked to the window and looked out on the brightly lighted square. The electric hand of the clock in the tower pointed to eleven. He had gone unusually early to-night. By all the laws of love-customs he should have stayed unusually late.
“Stubborn mule!” she muttered. “He thinks I’ll give in, of course; we’ll see!”
The window was up full height and through its wide space came the faint call of the cricket in the little privet hedge on the roof above.
The cricket’s chirp recalled her tumultuous emotions of the moment when he had swept her into his arms and kissed her lips. How long ago it seemed! She had lived years in the two brief hours. The memory of his kiss stirred now with a strange maddening thrill.
Something new had awakened into being within her body in that first kiss--something sweet and wonderful in its power to torture. She realized it with a sense of joyous awe--the grip of this force on her life and character.
She was stronger because of it. Of this she was sure. New power to will had throbbed within her from the moment of its first call. She breathed deeply. The dimly lighted room with its leather walls and row on row of books gave back her cry of personal triumph in the struggle. This room was hers. No man could claim or dominate it. Here her imagination had found its wings and soared in joyous freedom.
“I’ll keep that freedom too!” she snapped. “The man who enters here shall come as my comrade and equal--not as my lord and master!”
Strange that this passionate wilful being which his kisses had stirred into life within should turn thus on its creator! And yet it was so. Life began to take on new meanings. Never had it seemed so sweet--its mystery so exhaustless. For the first time within memory had the full import of sex consciousness dawned. It brought new dignity and strength.
“My man can not resist me!” she breathed. “I’ll win. I’ll have my way, not his.”
She mounted the short flight of stairs, threw on the light in her bedroom and undressed with a lazy consciousness of power--power to think, to will, to execute her will. The touch of the luxurious bed soothed her vanity. She was mistress of her own life. She had developed the strength to fight and win the first battle for the supremacy of personality. She would win the next one also.
She awoke next morning strong and elated. She caught herself singing again.
“Well, why shouldn’t I sing!” she muttered. “My man I’ve found. He’s fine and strong. His mind is keen. His will is stubborn. But I like it. I’ll bend him to mine----”
She paused and laughed softly.
“Away with doubts and fears; I can twist him ’round my little finger when I am ready.”
She dressed with unusual care. Her bath was a religious ceremony. Never had she been so conscious of beauty or so proud of its power. She would use it to bend the man of her choice.
She began to write again at nine o’clock. Her mind was clear, every faculty alert, her imagination aglow. For two hours her pencil flew over the clean white sheets of paper. She thoroughly enjoyed work.
She paused for a brief rest and thanked God for the gift of expression. Above all she thanked Him for the independence of man which it had brought her. But for this she could never have resisted the temptation to accept the support of Manning by trading on her sex. How degrading the thought! How could any woman with a soul trade on the mysterious and beautiful impulse that thrilled her being now with inspiring power?
She renewed her vow to lead the revolution for the emancipation of womanhood. She vowed anew to demand and secure the vast changes in the social order which this emancipation would mean. The revolution which she would lead would summon millions of sleeping souls into vivid conscious life.
The sharp rap on the brass knocker of her door was unmistakable. It was the nervous call of Lucy Sheldon bent on some important mission. She had heard it before. She heard it now with dread. Of all the friends she had made in New York this demure little woman was her most loyal adviser in every trial. To-day she would resent her advice. She was the most provoking of all the opponents of the radical program. She had the power to provoke because she had been so successful in her career and yet held to her old-fashioned ideal of the home and home life with dogged persistence. She believed in woman’s right to develop her powers to the highest reach of their capacity, yet held with the tenacity of fanaticism to the principle that she must develop as woman, not as man,--that she is fundamentally different. And that feminism must contribute something new to humanity because of this fundamental difference. She was an ardent believer in the cause of woman’s suffrage because she believed that the mind of woman should supplement, not supplant, the mind of man in solving the problems of state. She believed that the salvation of the world awaits the universal training of womanhood to rear a nobler race of men.
Ellen knew her arguments by heart and she was sick of them because she had found no answer satisfactory to her own inner sense of logic and right. She knew the line of argument this morning and resented it more fiercely because its point would be so intensely personal.
Could Manning have made her his confidant so quickly? She would resent that too. Perhaps he had only hinted at the truth. She flushed at the thought of another woman’s knowledge of the daring proposal she had made to her lover. In the next breath she reproached herself for such inconsistency.
“Why should I resent my best friend knowing it if I’m going to defy the world!” she mused bitterly.
She was still busy with her resentful thoughts when the sharp rap was repeated with greater violence.
The maid was still out of town. She sprang to her feet at last to answer the knock. Perhaps her fears were vain after all. It was not probable that Manning had gone so far as she feared.
She opened the door smiling and Lucy Sheldon entered with merely a nod. She had always insisted before on the habit of kissing her. It had always annoyed Ellen. She had submitted to it under protest. But her love for the older woman was too deep for little differences of habit to seriously jar. This morning she resented the omission of the kiss with genuine anger. It struck her with the force of a blow. The hidebound little fool had already assumed the air of superior virtue at the bare thought of the proposal to her nephew!
Ellen looked at her in hurt surprise, her hand still on the door.
“Shut the door!” Lucy commanded sharply.
Ellen closed the door and moved toward the armchair in which her friend usually seated herself for a chat beside the desk.
Lucy Sheldon’s eyes sought hers with a look of yearning tenderness. A smothered cry of pain suddenly broke the silence and she threw herself into Ellen’s arms sobbing.
For a moment the two friends held each other. The older woman touched the flushed young cheek. Her slender fingers trembled with the caress of a mother.
“How beautiful you are this morning, my dear!” she faltered.
Her first words were so unexpected they brought a feeling of uneasy surprise. There would be no stormy argument. Her tactics would be more difficult.
Without response she led Lucy to a chair.
“Sit down now and tell me all about it,” Ellen said briskly.
The older woman looked at her through her tears.
“Oh, how could you, my child! How could you!” she cried.
“Perhaps I haven’t yet,” Ellen laughed.
“But you will. I know how stubborn you are--unless I can stop you.”
“What has he told you?” Ellen asked sharply.
“Not much. But I know you so well that I put two and two together and I understood. The poor boy was so distressed, so heart-sick that I dragged it out of him piece by piece until I got the whole truth.”
“He’ll come round to my way of thinking.”
“Never!”
“He will.”
“And if he does,” Lucy fiercely declared, “he’ll be no kinsman of mine. I’d never see him or speak to him again.”
“Nonsense, my dear, I shall assume the full responsibility of my revolutionary conduct. A leader must lead. I shall lead in this and he will follow.”
“You will deliberately seduce him into such a crime?”
“Deliberately.”
“It’s incredible!”
“It’s not. You believe that I’ll do it, or you wouldn’t be so distressed, you dear old conventional bugbear!”
Lucy’s eyes were blinded with tears.
“You will dare to live with your lover without a marriage ceremony in defiance of law and society?” she asked at last.
“I will,” was the firm response. “In the desert of this money-grubbing, sex-trading metropolis, I’ll create an ideal world for two or die in the effort.”
“You’ll die in the effort.”
“All right, I’ll make it easier for the next.”
“You’ll make it worse, dear, foolish child of impulse. You’re mad. Your cry of personal freedom has led you into anarchy pure and simple--anarchy and the grossest materialism.”
“The highest idealism,” Ellen interrupted.
“Ideal fiddlesticks! You have misread the history of women and the history of the race. Man did not create monogamic marriage----”
“No, the devil did it!”
Lucy ignored the interruption.
“Woman created monogamic marriage by the slow, painful process of thousands of years of struggle with man’s unbridled passions. Man is normally by sex-instinct a polygamous animal. Out of the bog of his promiscuous impulses woman has led him by the tenderness of her devotion into the establishment by law of a social order which protects her in the rearing of her young. You propose to destroy this.”
“I propose to re-establish it on a higher, nobler plane.”
“By restoring to man his license to roam the fields again a mere animal--a beast.”
“He roams to-day in spite of bonds!”
“The law will always be defied by the lawless, while it binds silent millions. You’re absolutely crazy, my child! Marry my nephew as he asks you and he’ll be your loyal mate for life. He will never lift his eyes in lust or love to another woman. I know him. It’s in his blood. A finer breed of men were never born. The home instinct that God has planted in his soul and generations of pious beautiful mothers have cherished is the finest thing in him. And he never will be happy until he realizes it. You may wreck his life, but you will never destroy that craving. He will wreck your life through it.”
“I’m not afraid,” she said defiantly.
“No. You’re just mad with this obsession of individual freedom.”
She paused, leaned closer and continued in low tones:
“The modern woman doesn’t refuse to marry. She doesn’t get the chance to marry. This is the cancer that’s eating out the heart of our social order. The advantage of marriage is all woman’s. The freedom you propose to give is unfair to you. It’s acceptance by any man would be a cruel injustice.”
“Your fine nephew has rejected it with scorn.”
“Of course he did. He wouldn’t be my nephew if he hadn’t. He’s my brother’s son. My brother would have killed any man who made such an offer to me.”
Ellen smiled and lifted her head.
“Yes. He also told me he would do as much for any man who offered this ideal to his sister.”
Lucy straightened her slight figure.
“I’m proud of him for saying it.”
“Which only shows that neither man nor woman is yet civilized.”
“Exactly. That’s why you’d better think before you leap all the way back into barbarism at one bound. It’s bad enough as it is, God knows. You propose to aggravate the disease to effect a cure. Come, my child, forget your theories for a moment and exercise a little common sense. A true study of human society reveals certain facts. God made woman as the supreme instrument for the perpetuation of the race and the saving of all that man has achieved in the centuries of the past, by passing it on in the culture of the child. A man under normal conditions marries because he wants a woman. A woman marries because she wants a child. A man seeks the woman in his wife. A woman seeks the child in her husband. A woman lives through her children--a man through his work. You propose to seek a man in your mate and ask the man to seek only the woman in this free alliance. Your chief aim in life you make your work. You must destroy or crush down your instinct for children. With the child as the bond your man will remain faithful for life. Without it, his eyes will continually roam the world in search of other women, because the supreme law of life has been defied, not fulfilled.”
“He wants me--not the child,” Ellen maintained.
“Certainly, you simpleton. Man’s sex-impulse is overwhelmingly stronger than woman’s. He may not even desire children in the beginning. But nature has seen to it that he cannot live without wanting a wife. It is her business to supply the children.”
“All right!” Ellen replied. “I propose to meet this grave responsibility in my own way and gauge my conduct by higher ideals than moth-eaten customs. I propose to rear a nobler race of freemen than the world has yet seen. I accept my duty to society as paramount. I will be the guardian of the race-body and the race-soul. But I will be responsible to myself--my inner, noblest self. I will not be a slave. I will not sell my sex for my keep, either in the bonds of matrimony or the bonds of the kept woman outside of marriage. I will not be a parasite. I will not obey any man who walks this earth. If I must be the mother of men, I will be their equal at least. I will be freed from conventional slavery. I will be freed as woman from the dominion of the male. I will rise a full human being or welcome extinction!”
“But can’t you see, dear heart,” Lucy pleaded, “that your ideal is purely masculine? You are merely demanding the right to make a man of yourself! The way of human progress lies in exactly the opposite direction if woman is to contribute anything to that progress. Nothing can be gained toward lifting the human race to a higher plane by merely multiplying the number of men. We must improve the breed of men. This can only be done by woman remaining a woman to the highest reach of development. Woman’s organic constitution makes her utterly unlike man. To follow man’s idea would be the most fatal blunder. You wish to live the same life and do the same work as man merely to demonstrate that you are a human being. God called you to live the highest life of which woman is capable; to lead the way for a higher order of human beings. No freedom is worth achieving for woman unless it be to follow her own nature. The free alliance you propose to your lover is not the creature of woman’s imagination. It was borrowed from the masculine mind in the frantic effort of the modern woman to be a man!”
Ellen stubbornly shook her head.
“But how can the mere trick of a marriage ceremony perform the miracles your ideal demands? If I love Ralph Manning I will love him no more, no less, ten minutes after the officer of the law has pronounced us husband and wife. If he is mean and stingy, the ceremony will not make him generous. If he is noble, it will not make him ignoble. If he is a criminal, it will not cleanse him of crime----”
“No,” Lucy broke in, “but because he is a man who has inherited the finest instincts of his ancestors the magic of that ceremony will fix his habits for life. Habit is character. On that home building character the whole structure of civilization rests----”
A soft rap at the door interrupted her.
Ellen searched her friend’s face for an explanation. The truth had flashed into her mind instinctively.
“You told him to come this morning?” Ellen asked.
“Yes. I told him to fight it out to-day, dear. I’ve tried to help him.”
She rose timidly and drew closer.
“You don’t resent it?”
For the first time in her life Ellen slipped her arms around her friend’s slender waist and kissed her.
“Certainly not, you dear old thing; I feel as if you were my aunt now, besides the very best friend I ever had in my life.”
“You’ll listen to him?”
“Of course, I’ll listen.”
“And be sensible?”
“Surely,” she smiled quizzically.
Lucy kissed her impulsively.
“Good-bye, dear, it’s no use to argue with you. Convince a woman against her will--she’ll be of the same opinion still.”
Another gentle rap at the door reminded them that a mere man was quietly waiting their pleasure.
Lucy quickly opened the door.
“I’ve done my best, boy,” she whispered, “you’ll have to do the rest.”
“I’ll win, never fear,” he replied in low tones.
Lucy waved another farewell and hurried away.
Manning advanced smiling.
“Well, I told you I’d come again to-day.”
She met him half way, devouring him with her eyes.
“My love-man!” she cried.
“My love-woman!” he whispered, taking her in his arms.
Their lips met.
“You’ll fix the day?” he asked.
“To-day, if you like.”
He suddenly held her at arm’s length.
“You mean it?”
“Yes.”
He swept her again into his arms.
“You make me the happiest man on earth.”
He paused and smiled into her flushed face.
“I’m afraid that remark is not strikingly original!”
“And I’m afraid you don’t quite understand me,” she said, releasing herself from his arms.
“I do,” he answered promptly. “You’ve just promised to marry me to-day.”
“But in my own way.”
“My way is the only way, dear heart!”
“We’ll have as elaborate a ceremony as you like,” she went on evenly, “provided you don’t bind me with legal chains.”
“But that’s exactly what I demand,” he insisted. “I want the chains double riveted and I want handcuffs on both my wrists as well as on yours. The chains can’t be too strong to suit me.”
“You refuse me?” she asked sternly.
“I refuse to degrade the woman I love.”
“Can you think of the wonderful thing that is drawing our souls and bodies toward each other as degrading?”
“No, but the world will call it so and I will be responsible for your misery.”
“I defy the world.”
“Knowing the world better than you do, I decline to aid you in the defiance.”
She drew close.
“You can deliberately repulse me when I offer you my soul and body?”
“Under such conditions, yes.”
She drew back with sudden passion. Her voice was husky.
“All right, you can go, then; I will never see you again!”
He looked at her in surprise.
“You can’t mean this.”
“I do.”
She lifted her hand to wave him to the door and it dropped as if her strength had failed.
Quick to catch the significance of her weakness, he followed her eagerly.
“You can’t be such a fool,” he cried angrily. “I won’t listen to you. I’m going to do the thinking and the acting for us both in this crisis. You’ve read a lot of radical rubbish and taken it seriously. You’ve written some brilliant essays on the same line and hypnotized yourself into the idea that you really believe the stuff you’ve written. You don’t. You can’t. It’s crazy nonsense when you try to live such theories in this world. And this is the world we’ve got to live in now, you know.”
“That’s just why I’m going to live my life in the light of my ideals,” she broke in. “This old, sin-cursed, sneering, practical, material world needs the inspiration of high ideals. We have more than enough practical materialists. You are going to join me in my holy crusade against sham and humbug, lies and slavery.”
“I’m going to marry you according to law,” he growled.
“You will not!” she snapped.
A long silence followed. The man and the woman held each other in a steady gaze--will clashing on will in a determined fight for mastery. There was no sign of weakening on either side. Her figure slowly stiffened and the chin rose in defiance.
With a gesture of anger he seized his hat and hurried to the door.
“It’s good-bye, then?”
“You’re saying it,” she answered stiffly.
“All right,” he responded in tones so low they were scarcely audible.
The door closed softly and Ellen sank into a chair with a sob.