Part 54 (1/2)
Ah, but there had been a difference there! She had loved there, and been awakened by great love. Her child's crumpled, rosy foot had come to mean more to her than all the world had meant before.
The smile, or the frown, in her husband's eyes had been her suns.h.i.+ne or her storm. Through love she had come to know the br.i.m.m.i.n.g life of the world, the pathos, the comedy that is ready to spill itself over every humble window-sill, the joy that some woman's heart feels whenever the piping cry of the new-born sounds in a darkened room, the sorrow held by every shabby white hea.r.s.e that winds its way through a hot and unnoticing street. She had clung to husband and sons with the tigerish tenacity that is the rightful dower of wife and mother; she had thought the world well lost in holding them.
And then the sordid, selfish past rose like an ugly mist before her, and she found at her lips the bitter cup she had filled herself. She was not so safe now, behind her barrier of love, but that the terrible machinery she had set in motion might bring its grinding wheels to bear upon the lives she guarded. She had flung her solemn promise aside, once; what defence could she make for a second solemn promise now? The world, divorce mad, spun blindly on, and the echo of her own complacent ”one in twelve” came faintly, sickly back to her after the happy years.
”Divorce has actually no place in our laws, it isn't either wrong or right,” Rachael said one autumn day when they were walking slowly to the beach. Over their heads the trees were turning scarlet; the days were still soft and warm, but twilight fell earlier now, and in the air at morning and evening was the intoxicating sharpness, the thin blue and clear steel color that mark the dying summer. Alice's three younger children were in school, and the family came to Clark's Hills only for the week- ends, but Rachael and her boys stayed on and on, enjoying the rare warmth and beauty of the Indian Summer, and comfortable in the old house that had weathered fifty autumns and would weather fifty more.
”In some states it is absolutely illegal,” Rachael continued, ”in others, it's permissible. In some it is a real source of revenue.
Now fancy treating any other offence that way! Imagine states in which stealing was only a regrettable incident, or where murder was tolerated! In South Carolina you cannot get a divorce on any grounds! In Was.h.i.+ngton the courts can give it to you for any cause they consider sufficient. There was a case: a man and his wife obtained a divorce and both remarried. Now they find they are both bigamists, because it was shown that the wife went West, with her husband's knowledge and consent, to establish her residence there for the explicit purpose of getting a divorce. It was well- established law that if a husband or wife seek the jurisdiction of another state for the sole object of obtaining a divorce, without any real intent of living there, making their home there, goes, in other words, just for divorce purposes, then the decree having been fraudulently obtained will not be recognized anywhere!”
”But thousands do it, Rachael.”
”But thousands don't seem to realize--I never did before--that that is illegal. You can't deliberately move to Reno or Seattle or San Francisco for such a purpose. All marriages following a divorce procured under these conditions are illegal. Besides this, the divorce laws as they exist in Was.h.i.+ngton, California, or Nevada are not recognized by other states, and so because a couple are separated upon the grounds of cruelty or incompatibility in some Western state, they are still legally man and wife in New York or Ma.s.sachusetts. All sorts of hideous complications are going on: blackmail and perjury!
”I wonder why divorce laws are so little understood?” Alice mused.
”Because divorce is an abnormal thing. You can't make it right, and of course we are a long way from making it wrong. But that is what it is coming to, I believe. Divorce will be against the law some day! No divorce on ANY GROUNDS! It cannot be reconciled to law; it defies law. Right on the face of it, it is breaking a contract. Are any other contracts to be broken with public approval? We will see the return of the old, simple law, then we will wonder at ourselves! I am not a woman who takes naturally to public work--I wish I were. But perhaps some day I can strike the system a blow. It is women like me who understand, and who will help to end it.”
”It is only the worth-while women who do understand,” said Alice.
”You are the marble worth cutting. Life is a series of phases; we are none of us the same from year to year. You are not the same girl that you were when you married Clarence Breckenridge--”
”What a different woman!” Rachael said under her breath.
”Well,” said Alice then a little frightened, ”why won't you think that perhaps Warren might have changed, too; that whatever Warren has done, it was done more like--like the little boy who has never had his fling, who gets dizzy with his own freedom, and does something foolish without a.n.a.lyzing just what he is doing?”
”But Warren, after all, isn't a child!” Rachael said sadly.
”But Warren is in some ways; that's just it,” Alice said eagerly.
”He has always been singularly--well, unbalanced, in some ways.
Don't you know there was always a sort of simplicity, a sort of bright innocence about Warren? He believed whatever anybody said until you laughed at him; he took every one of his friends on his own valuation. It's only where his work is concerned that you ever see Warren positive, and dictatorial, and keen--”
Rachael's eyes had filled with tears.
”But he isn't the man I loved, and married,” she said slowly. ”I thought he was a sort of G.o.d--he could do no wrong for me!”
”Yes, but that isn't the way to feel toward anybody,” persisted Alice. ”No man is a G.o.d, no man is perfect. You're not perfect yourself; I'm not. Can't you just say to yourself that human beings are faulty--it may be your form of it to get dignified and sulk, and Warren's to wander off dreamily into curious paths--but that's life, Rachael, that's 'better or worse,' isn't it?”
”It isn't a question of my holding out for a mere theory, Alice,”
Rachael said after a while; ”I'm not saying that I'm all in the right, and that I will never see Warren again until he admits it, and everyone admits it--that isn't what I want. But it's just that I'm dead, so far as that old feeling is concerned. It is as if a child saw his mother suddenly turn into a fiend, and do some hideously cruel act; no amount of cool reason could ever convince that child again that his mother was sweet and good.”
”But as you get older,” Alice smiled, ”you differentiate between good and good, and you see grades in evil, too. Everything isn't all good or all bad, like the heroes and the villains of the old plays. If Warren had done a 'hideously cruel' thing deliberately, that would be one thing; what he has done is quite another. The G.o.d who made us put s.e.x into the world, Warren didn't; and Warren only committed, in his--what is it?--forty-eighth year one of the follies that most boys dispose of in their teens. Be generous, Rachael, and forgive him. Give him another trial!”
”How CAN I forgive him?” Rachael said, badly shaken, and through tears. ”No, no, no, I couldn't! I never can.”
They had reached the beach now, and could see the children, in their blue field coats, following the curving reaches of the incoming waves. The fresh roar of the breakers filled a silence, gulls piped their wistful little cry as they circled high in the blue air. Old Captain Semple, in his rickety one-seated buggy, drove up the beach, the water rising in the wheel-tracks. The children gathered about him; it was one of their excitements to see the Captain wash his carriage, and the old mare splash in the shallow water. Alice seated herself on a great log, worn silver from the sea, and half buried in the white sand, but Rachael remained standing, the sweet October wind whipping against her strong and splendid figure, her beautiful eyes looking far out to sea.
”You two have no quarrel,” the older woman added mildly. ”You and Warren were rarely companionable. I used to say to George that you were almost TOO congenial, too sensitive to each other's moods.
Warren knew that you idolized him, Rachael, and consequently, when criticism came, when he felt that you of all persons were misjudging him, why, he simply flung up his head like a horse, and bolted!”
”Misjudging?” Rachael said quickly, half turning her head, and bringing her eyes from the far horizon to rest upon Alice's face.