Man's Country/Chapter 25
SECLUDED in a room of the Pontchartrain Hotel, high up from the street, sparing himself nothing, yet trying to be fair to himself as to Fay, George Judson told the scientist the story of his life and of hers and of their life together.
"Just the old familiar story, Mr. Judson," the doctor diagnosed wearily, as if his shoulders were already bowed by the great weight of domestic woe the practice of his peculiar profession devolved. "One I have heard a hundred times before—a husband absorbed in business and a wife with abundant energies and nothing to do."
"But, Doctor," protested George, "she has a lot to do—if she would do it."
"Nothing adequate to do!" emphasized the doctor; "and, and—" But the neurologist this time interrupted himself. He had been going on to complete the world-old triangle by adding, "And the other man."
But the obvious intensity of Judson's nature warned him. He saw that the reaction after this long passivity of a generous and unsuspecting heart might be a sudden impulse to violence. After a moment of restrained and restraining silence, therefore, he continued in a much more professional tone.
"These wander-lust obsessions tell the story, Mr. Judson. In effect they are dreams—day-dreams, indeed, but nevertheless the porthole gleamings out of the subconscious. They reveal the whole tragic story, and they tell us exactly what to apprehend."
"Tragic? Apprehend?" George's voice was startled.
But the doctor skilfully avoided a direct answer now by saying: "First, if you please, Mr. Judson, let us consider your wife's character and temperament. She is, I gather, a soft, warm little woman—imaginative, romantic, wilful but essentially loving, fond of caresses, fond of attention, pleased with compliments, very proud of her possessions, whether material or personal. Her child is the most wonderful child. Her husband is the most wonderful hushand—or was."
"Was?"
Again that startled query, and again the doctor holding his answer in abeyance while George Judson's expression slowly lost every trace of its ingrained habit of self-assurance.
"Her inheritance of character is strong, but her environing has weakened and subordinated it. She is strong-impulsed but not strong-willed. She never had that kind of seasoning. A pout, a tear, or a plea has all her life got her everything she wanted. Isn't that so?"
"It is!"
"And, with it all, one of the dearest, one of the sweetest and most companionable little women in the world."
"Every bit of that and more," declared George. "And whatever is the—"
"Then we must not demand the impossible of this little woman, must we?" the doctor cut in skilfully.
"God knows I never have demanded it!" exclaimed George, conscious of a virtue.
"Then don't demand it now, after what I am to tell you, but first sit humbly at the feet of this distracted wife of yours and learn a lesson in devotion to ideals and to duty that will melt your heart. If it does not also provoke you to reverence and awe, I shall be much surprised."
"Why, what do you mean, Doctor?" inquired George, further disconcerted by such a manner.
"I mean to prepare you for the discovery that you have never properly appreciated your wife."
"Appreciated her? Why, Doctor, I—"
"Listen!" commanded the doctor, and he was now in his tone of most professional exposition: "These wander-lust dreams have one thing common to them all. You, her husband, are in them every one, and they take you away always to some far corner of the world where your business concerns cannot claim you—can scarcely reach you. Do you get the significance of that, Mr. Judson? These dreams reveal a devotion to you that is pathetic, a fear of the motor works as a rival for your affections that is tragic. She wanted to get you away from it. That deep want—"
"But that is where she was so unreasonable," broke in George, a trifle irritated at all this bearing down upon a demand for the impossible.
"Unreasonable, but not incomprehensible," declared the doctor, with significant emphasis. "There's the pity of it. She knew it was unreasonable and conceded it, yet her wish-nature would not be denied, and it devised all these fantastic projects one after another, that had as their primary impulse, though she never realized it herself, this passionate desire to have you secure for herself for all her life. Every dream, every absurd proposal to travel—every burst of tears or outbreak of hysteria—or long period of depression following one of your refusals—whether harsh or gentle—was either an expression of her love or a bitter mourning for its fancied loss."
A sad, worshipful light began to burn in the husband's eyes, and a slow conviction of guilt to dawn in his mind, the awful guilt of blindness. "Is that what it meant?" he murmured in an awed whisper. "And I thought she was just selfish and whimsical."
"And I presume she thought she was, too," conceded the doctor. "But that is what the wander-lust meant. At least that is what a part of it meant."
"Did it mean something else?" asked George, hanging now upon the doctor's words.
"Yes. There is a second detail common to all these dreams. Each involved an expedition which required distinguished and able leadership and contemplated achievements calculated to shed luster on its directing mind—its hero. You were to be that leader always—that hero. She thirsted continually to see her husband glorified, exalted, made a hero of."
"Gosh!" sighed George, impressed and yet out of patience with the fantastic conception. "Why, why, should she want to pin such crazy exploits on me?"
The doctor regarded the young man in silence for a moment, as if waiting to see if another idea would not now associate itself. When there was no indication that it would, the psychoanalyst went on impressively: "That is where the touch of deeper pathos comes in. There has been in your city, going in and out of your home, a world-traveler of appealing social and personal graces who has visited obscure corners of the globe and done one or two things which, in the eyes of an imaginative and romantic young woman, might attach a certain glamour that would outshine the most brilliant achievements of a mere domestic variety of business man."
"That's Hook, of course," said George, recognizing the picture; "but why on earth would Fay want to see me doing the kind of things that nervy young Englishman does?"
"Because admiration is a great quickener of woman's love, and her love for you was being threatened."
"But Doctor," the husband reminded, "we—we still love each other. We're just not—not happy." And then the hint in the specialist's words caught him. "Threatened?" he suddenly demanded.
"By her admiration for Sir Brian Hook."
George Judson's face turned livid. "Go on! Go on!" he said helplessly. "What are you going to tell me next?"
The doctor had remained perfectly calm, unresentful, pitying. "Simply that this four-year struggle which you narrated to me is a struggle between two loves. One love was being starved, deprived of some of the things that love feeds on. The other was being nurtured by a full diet of those very qualities as displayed in Sir Brian Hook."
"Hook!" bellowed George, angrily disrespectful. "I tell you there's nothing between them!"
"Except love—I am sure of that," said the doctor with niceness of distinction, and refusing to be insulted by the man he was compelled to hurt in order that perhaps he might help him. "The pathos of the struggle, the thing that should make you in this moment extend to your wife the supremest consideration, is that for the last few months, perhaps a year, there has been but one love."
George's hands gripped the chair arms tightly; he was making the supremest effort to control himself. "Go on! Go on with your damnable deductions," he challenged. "I can answer them every one. She lovesme. My wife loves me!"
"But one love," iterated the doctor, with painstaking firmness, still unresentful and pitying, compassionate because of the pain his verbal exploratory slashings caused. "Of late it has been a fierce struggle between love of one man and loyalty to another. She has tried to be your faithful wife; she has tried by a thousand arts and inventions and games she played with herself to keep her love for you alive, to resurrect it when it was dead, to—"
"Doctor!" groaned George, appealingly, as conviction was breaking surely in. "Doctor—don't say that it's dead."
"I wish I didn't have to," responded the doctor kindly, and laid a soothing hand on the shoulder of the distressed husband, "but I must tell you what I see from the full narrative of her behavior which you have given and the unusually informing glimpses of her own mental state which she afforded me last night. To resume: she had remained loyal, never allowing you to suspect the truth, herself perhaps so unwilling to believe it that she is hardly aware of itnow. Lacking that steadfastness of will of which we spoke, she has lacked steadfastness to make the deliberate plunge out of your life which her love impels."
"Doctor! You are wrong—all wrong!" George insisted. "If any other person than yourself had intimated what you have this morning, I should be twisting his head off now."
He stood stupefied, one hand tearing at his hair, the fingers of the other working nervously, while the full extent of what the doctor had so delicately but clearly intimated went crashing through his consciousness.
"Fool! Fool! Fool!" he accused himself. "Poor, doting, trusting fool!" And then, oddly enough, he thought of his wife sympathetically. "Poor, poor little Fay! So white—so clean—so pure! Oh, this is horrible! Horrible!" But a sense of his own wrongs came back to him. "This is my reward," he reproached, "for being a generous, trustful husband."
But the doctor felt that he could not permit this man who touched his sympathies to do himself the injury of self-pity when self-pity was neither justified nor commendable. "On the contrary, it is your punishment for assuming that the marriage ceremony and a few casual kindnesses that are after all selfish in their origin and selfish in their aim, give a man a strangle-hold on a woman's heart. It is your nature, I judge, Mr. Judson, to assume too much. It is an American trait. You mean well. There is an old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. You are what I should call a hell-paver. The hell-paver is such a sanguine optimist that he doesn't put all his cards on the table—even to himself. The country is full of them—hell-paving businessmen, hell-paving statesmen, hell-paving editors, preachers, doctors, and soon. You area hell-paving husband. You meant well, but—"
"I'll kill that Englishman," George cried, with a roar of rage, and started for the door, "I'll kill him!"
The doctor did not even reach out a hand to restrain this potential homicide on his way to do the deed. Instead he remarked thoughtfully, "Perhaps that is the first thing to do," and he said it speculatively, eyes on distance as if, once his mind were convinced, he might actually participate in this solemn act of retributive justice.
Such a manner was more arresting to George Judson than hands laid on him could have been. He halted and turned upon the doctor strangely.
"But let's be sure it is before we do it," qualified the psychoanalyst, and centered his glance upon George calmly as though he addressed a reasoning being.
"I must have been blind. I must have been blind," George now reiterated.
"Blind! You were worse than blind," declared the doctor bluntly. "You were stupid!"
"But the question is now—what to do?"
"If you're a big man—big enough—" calculated the doctor, as weighing his man estimatingly, "you might win her back."
"Win her back?" George cried hoarsely.
"Yes. Although the bits of dreams she told me last night revealed clearly that the issue had been settled in her heart, she has hesitated so long in her mind that she might hesitate longer still, and so I say that you might—win her back."
"In God's name, how?" the husband appealed.
"By doing what she, wants. Humor her. Indulge her. Shame her. Drop everything and go with her—go hunt the Garden of Eden! That was pitiful! She has lost her Eden all right—poor little girl. Go look for it with her. Buy a yacht and cruise round the world—anything like that and—buck up, Judson! You're not the man to quit when you've got a fighting chance. Drop everything and go."
But George stood motionless—petrified. "Drop everything? Sell out? I couldn't do it." A look of awful pain was in his eyes.
The doctor for the first time grew impatient. "But isn't the love of your wife worth more than your factory? That's where you've been weak, Judson—all along."
"But you don't understand, Doctor," he argued dismally. "I'm nailed to the spot. The very existence of the Judson-Morris Motor Works as financed now is based on an operation programmed through a number of years yet, and it's like the two spans of a bridge building out toward each other. Once they're joined, it will have the strength of Gibraltar—but that will take three years yet. In the meantime I'm the Atlas that's planted like a false pier in the stream. Holding both ends."
"More hell-paving!" scorned the doctor. "Let it crash!" He said this quite unfeelingly.
"But it isn't myself alone that would crash," explained George miserably. "A lot of people, widows and wage-earners and small investors generally, have put money in our company. Our stock and our bonds have been peddled through the banks to the little people who can't afford to Jose and who have trusted their pitiful all in the name and business ability of George Judson. I can't go back on them. My life is not my own exactly. I can't leave, don't you see—in honor, in justice, I can't. Fay knows that—if she hasn't forgotten. I've explained it to her times enough."
"I see you can't," admitted the doctor quickly—"Not the kind of man you are." He had liked George Judson from the first, and pitied him; now he began to have a large respect for him.
"What shall I do, then?" the man appealed.
"Let her go!" answered the doctor incisively.
"Let her go?" George sprang up in protest.
"Yes. She has contemplated going. Her dream showed that."
"Not in a million years!"
"You don't want to condemn a woman to wifehood after she has ceased to love you, do you? Go and tell her she is free. Acknowledge your failure. Since you have lost her love, give up trying to hold her body with a bond that is legal and conventional, but hellish for all that and that she can snap at any time."
George Judson backed away, a horror in his eye and shaking his head stubbornly.
"Sit down. Think!" commanded the doctor, asserting autocratically the moral dominance he had gained, and Judson obeyed as a patient should obey his physician. "Be fair to her! She loved you—she bore your child—she has fought out this moral battle till it is making a wreck of her physically and mentally. There can be but two alternatives left. One is to permit her to go of her own act to a life that, with her sensitive nature and inheritance of the puritan conscience, can never be anything else than prolonged torture. The other is for you to be big enough to go to her and tell her she is free. Tell her you have failed, and to seek her happiness where she thinks it lies."
Every atom of George's combative disposition was roused; every element of his moral nature—or was it his mere male instinct for possession?—rejected as horrible such a cold cutting away of a relation to him that, however unhappy, was sacred and still had in it the element of hope. But he was willing to contemplate the suggestion merely to scorn it.
"And then what?" he demanded with quivering nostrils.
"Women are contrary creatures," asserted the doctor. "Freedom offered by you may be all that is necessary to cause her to change. You may shock her out of her present mood by the very unexpectedness of such an act on your part. Her condition is psychological as well as pathological. The mere fact that you, at obvious pain to yourself, take the big, the noble course, may challenge her admiration and send her flying into your arms, as you say she used to come at the end of your minor quarrels."
This was like a sudden letting in of light of reasonable hope upon a chaos of utter darkness: "Oh, God! If she only would!" George Judson was reflecting fervently, when another ghastly perception stabbed him, and he burst out with, "But if she does not, I will be turning her out to go with—with—" Speech halted in his constricted throat. He could not utter the name that had become a symbol of horror.
"She might not go with him," meditated the doctor.
"Might not!"
"From the glimpses of her nature I have had, and from the long resistance she has put up, I do not think she would go with him at first. She would be more likely to go away from both of you—far away. One of these mad trips most likely. Well? If she does that, you have an even break—more than an even break—for distance lends enchantment, and besides you are the father of her boy."
"Junior!" George remembered poignantly. "Why, that's another reason why she couldn't leave me—Junior. He is ours. She might be mad enough to wish to undo her marriage, but she couldn't wish to undo Junior. Not possibly."
"But she might decide that an unhappy home was the worst place in the world for a child to grow up. Besides, my friend," and the doctor's voice took on a note of warning that was austere, "this is no time for debate over theories. A condition confronts you. As we physicians say, haste is indicated. Again reverting to that dream your wife told me last night, things are at a crisis. If you do not act immediately, you may find it too late to act at all. The best advice I can give you is to go to your wife immediately."
George Judson sprang up. "You may be right," he said. "I will go to her at once, and I should like permission to come back to you at three o'clock this afternoon. Perhaps I may bring my wife back with me." There was the leap of a new encouragement in his voice.
"By all means do," said the doctor heartily. "I will hold the time for you."