Twilight Sleep (Wharton)/Chapter 15
XV
MANFORD, the day after his daughter had caught sight of him at the Housetop, started out early for one of his long tramps around the Park. He was not due at his office till ten, and he wanted first to walk himself tired.
For some years after his marriage he had kept a horse in town, and taken his morning constitutional in the saddle; but the daily canter over the same bridle paths was too much like the circuit of his wife's flower-garden. He took to his feet to make it last longer, and when there was no time to walk had in a masseur who prepared him, in the same way as everybody else, for the long hours of sedentary hurry known as "business." The New York routine had closed in on him, and he sometimes felt that, for intrinsic interest, there was little to choose between Pauline's hurry and his own. They seemed, all of them—lawyers, bankers, brokers, railway-directors and the rest—to be cheating their inner emptiness with activities as futile as those of the women they went home to.
It was all wrong—something about it was fundamentally wrong. They all had these colossal plans for acquiring power, and then, when it was acquired, what came of it but bigger houses, more food, more motors, more pearls, and a more self-righteous philanthropy?
The philanthropy was what he most hated: all these expensive plans for moral forcible feeding, for compelling everybody to be cleaner, stronger, healthier and happier than they would have been by the unaided light of Nature. The longing to get away into a world where men and women sinned and begot, lived and died, as they chose, without the perpetual intervention of optimistic millionaires, had become so strong that he sometimes felt the chain of habit would snap with his first jerk.
That was what had secretly drawn him to Jim's wife. She was the one person in his group to whom its catchwords meant absolutely nothing. The others, whatever their private omissions or indulgences, dressed up their selfish cravings in the same wordy altruism. It used to be one's duty to one's neighbour; now it had become one's duty to one's self. Duty, duty—always duty! But when you spoke of duty to Lita she just widened her eyes and said: "Is that out of the Marriage Service? 'Love, honour and obey'—such a funny combination! Who do you suppose invented it? I believe it must have been Pauline." One could never fix her attention on any subject beyond her own immediate satisfaction, and that animal: sincerity seemed to Manford her greatest charm. Too great a charm . . . a terrible danger. He saw it now. He thought he had gone to her for relaxation, change—and he had just managed to pull himself up on the edge of a precipice. But for the sickening scene of the other evening, when he had shown her the photograph, he might, old fool that he was, have let himself slip into sentiment; and God knows where that tumble would have landed him. Now a passionate pity had replaced his fatuous emotion, the baleful siren was only a misguided child, and he was to help and save her for Jim's sake and her own.
It was queer that such a mood of calm lucidity had come out of the fury of hate with which he rushed from her house. If it had not, he would have gone mad—smashed something, done something irretrievable. And instead here he was, calmly contemplating his own folly and hers! He must go on seeing her, of course; there was more reason than ever for seeing her; but there would be no danger in it now, only help for her—and perhaps healing for him. To this new mood he clung as to an inviolable refuge. The turmoil and torment of the last months could never reach him again: he had found a way out, an escape. The relief of being quiet, of avoiding a conflict, of settling everything without effusion of blood, stole over him like the spell of the drug-taker's syringe. Poor little Lita . . . never again to be adored (thank heaven), but, oh, so much the more to be helped and pitied. . .
This deceptive serenity had come to him during his call on Mrs. Landish—come from her very insensibility to any of the standards he lived by. He had gone there—he saw it now—moved by the cruel masculine desire to know the worst about a fallen idol. What he called the determination to "face things"—what was it but the savage longing to accumulate all the evidence against poor Lita? Give up the Mahatma investigation? Never! All the more reason now for going on with it; for exposing the whole blackguardly business, opening poor Jim's eyes to his wife's past (better now than later), and helping him to get on his feet again, start fresh, and recover his faith in life and happiness. For of course poor Jim would be the chief sufferer. . . Damn the woman! She wanted to get rid of Jim, did she? Well, here was her chance—only it would be the other way round. The tables would be turned on her. She'd see—! This in his first blind outbreak of rage; but by the time he reached Mrs. Landish's door the old legal shrewdness had come to his rescue, and he had understood that a public scandal was unnecessary, and therefore to be avoided. Easy enough to get rid of Lita without that. With such evidence as he would soon possess they could make any conditions they chose. Jim would keep the boy, and the whole thing be settled quietly—but on their terms, not hers! She would be only too thankful to clear out bag and baggage—clean out of all their lives. Faugh—to think he had delegated his own Nona to look after her. . . the thought sickened him.
And then, in the end, it had all come out so differently. He needed his hard tramp around the Park to see just why.
It was Mrs. Landish's own attitude—her silly rambling irresponsibility, so like an elderly parody of Lita's youthful carelessness. Mrs. Landish had met Manford's stern interrogations by the vague reply that he mustn't ever come to her for dates and figures and statistics: that facts meant nothing to her, that the only thing she cared for was Inspiration, Genius, the Divine Fire, or whatever he chose to call it. Perhaps she'd done wrong, but she had sacrificed everything, all her life, to her worship of genius. She was always hunting for it everywhere, and it was because, from the first, she had felt a touch of it in Lita that she had been so devoted to the child. Didn't Manford feel it in Lita too? Of course she, Mrs. Landish, had dreamed of another sort of marriage for her niece. . . Oh, but Manford mustn't misunderstand! Jim was perfect—too perfect. That was the trouble. Manford surely guessed the meaning of that "too"? Such absolute reliability, such complete devotion, were sometimes more of a strain to the artistic temperament than scenes and infidelities. And Lita was first and foremost an artist, born to live in the world of art—in quite other values—a fourth-dimensional world, as it were. It wasn't fair to judge her in her present surroundings, ideal as they were in one way—a way that unfortunately didn't happen to be hers! Mrs. Landish persisted in assuming Manford's complete comprehension. . . "If Jim could only be made to understand as you do; to see that ordinary standards don't apply to these rare natures. . . Why, has the child told you what Klawhammer has offered her to turn one film for him, before even having seen her dance, just on the strength of what Jack Staley and Ardwin had told him?"
Ah—there it was! The truth was out. Mrs. Landish, always in debt, and always full of crazy schemes for wasting more money, had seen a gold mine in the exploitation of her niece's gifts. The divorce, instead of frightening her, delighted her. Manford smiled as he thought how little she would be moved by Pauline's threat to cut off the young couple. Pauline sometimes forgot that, even in her own family, her authority was not absolute. She could certainly not compete financially with Hollywood, and Mrs. Landish's eyes were on Hollywood.
"Dear Mr. Manford—but you look shocked! Absolutely shocked! Does the screen really frighten you? How funny!" Mrs. Landish, drawing her rambling eyebrows together, seemed trying to picture the inner darkness of such a state. "But surely you know the smartest people are going in for it? Why, the Marchesa di San Fedele was showing me the other day a photograph of that beautiful son of hers—one of those really Greek beings in bathing tights and telling me that Klawhammer, who had seen it, had authorized her to cable him to come out to Hollywood on trial, all expenses paid. It seems they can almost always recognize the eurythmic people at a glance. Funny, wouldn't it be, if Michelangelo and Lita turned out to be the future Valentino and—"
He didn't remember the rest of the rigmarole. He could only recall shouting out, with futile vehemence: "My wife and I will do everything to prevent a divorce—" and leaving his astonished hostess on a threat of which he knew the uselessness as well as she did.
That was the air in which Lita had grown up, those were the gods of Viking Court! Yet Manford had stormed instead of pitying, been furious instead of tolerant, risked disaster for Lita and Jim instead of taking calm control of the situation. The vision of Lita Wyant and Michelangelo as future film stars, "featured" jointly on every hoarding from Maine to California, had sent the blood to his head. Through a mist of rage he had seen the monstrous pictures and conjectured the loathsome letter-press. And no one would do more than look and laugh! At the thought, he felt the destructive ire of the man who finds his private desires pitted against the tendencies of his age. Well, they would see, that was all: he would show them!
The resolve to act brought relief to his straining imagination. Once again he felt himself seated at his office desk, all his professional authority between him and his helpless interlocutors, and impressive words and skilful arguments ordering themselves automatically in his mind. After all, he was the head of his family—in some degree even of Wyant's family.