The Greater Inclination

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She had been prepared for it, of course, as healthy people are said to be
prepared for death, in the sense of knowing it must come without in the
least expecting that it will. She had known from the first that Tillotson
meant to divorce her--but what did it matter? Nothing mattered, in those
first days of supreme deliverance, but the fact that she was free; and not
so much (she had begun to be aware) that freedom had released her from
Tillotson as that it had given her to Gannett. This discovery had not been
agreeable to her self-esteem. She had preferred to think that Tillotson
had himself embodied all her reasons for leaving him; and those he
represented had seemed cogent enough to stand in no need of reinforcement.
Yet she had not left him till she met Gannett. It was her love for Gannett
that had made life with Tillotson so poor and incomplete a business. If
she had never, from the first, regarded her marriage as a full cancelling
of her claims upon life, she had at least, for a number of years, accepted
it as a provisional compensation,--she had made it "do." Existence in the
commodious Tillotson mansion in Fifth Avenue--with Mrs. Tillotson senior
commanding the approaches from the second-story front windows--had been
reduced to a series of purely automatic acts. The moral atmosphere of the
Tillotson interior was as carefully screened and curtained as the house
itself: Mrs. Tillotson senior dreaded ideas as much as a draught in her
back. Prudent people liked an even temperature; and to do anything
unexpected was as foolish as going out in the rain. One of the chief
advantages of being rich was that one need not be exposed to unforeseen
contingencies: by the use of ordinary firmness and common sense one could
make sure of doing exactly the same thing every day at the same hour.
These doctrines, reverentially imbibed with his mother's milk, Tillotson
(a model son who had never given his parents an hour's anxiety)
complacently expounded to his wife, testifying to his sense of their
importance by the regularity with which he wore goloshes on damp days, his
punctuality at meals, and his elaborate precautions against burglars and
contagious diseases. Lydia, coming from a smaller town, and entering New
York life through the portals of the Tillotson mansion, had mechanically
accepted this point of view as inseparable from having a front pew in
church and a parterre box at the opera. All the people who came to the
house revolved in the same small circle of prejudices. It was the kind of
society in which, after dinner, the ladies compared the exorbitant charges
of their children's teachers, and agreed that, even with the new duties on
French clothes, it was cheaper in the end to get everything from Worth;
while the husbands, over their cigars, lamented municipal corruption, and
decided that the men to start a reform were those who had no private
interests at stake.

To Lydia this view of life had become a matter of course, just as
lumbering about in her mother-in-law's landau had come to seem the only
possible means of locomotion, and listening every Sunday to a fashionable
Presbyterian divine the inevitable atonement for having thought oneself
bored on the other six days of the week. Before she met Gannett her life
had seemed merely dull: his coming made it appear like one of those dismal
Cruikshank prints in which the people are all ugly and all engaged in
occupations that are either vulgar or stupid.

It was natural that Tillotson should be the chief sufferer from this
readjustment of focus. Gannett's nearness had made her husband ridiculous,
and a part of the ridicule had been reflected on herself. Her tolerance
laid her open to a suspicion of obtuseness from which she must, at all
costs, clear herself in Gannett's eyes.

She did not understand this until afterwards. At the time she fancied that
she had merely reached the limits of endurance. In so large a charter of
liberties as the mere act of leaving Tillotson seemed to confer, the small
question of divorce or no divorce did not count. It was when she saw that
she had left her husband only to be with Gannett that she perceived the
significance of anything affecting their relations. Her husband, in
casting her off, had virtually flung her at Gannett: it was thus that the
world viewed it. The measure of alacrity with which Gannett would receive
her would be the subject of curious speculation over afternoon-tea tables
and in club corners. She knew what would be said--she had heard it so
often of others! The recollection bathed her in misery. The men would
probably back Gannett to "do the decent thing"; but the ladies' eye-brows
would emphasize the worthlessness of such enforced fidelity; and after
all, they would be right. She had put herself in a position where Gannett
"owed" her something; where, as a gentleman, he was bound to "stand the
damage." The idea of accepting such compensation had never crossed her
mind; the so-called rehabilitation of such a marriage had always seemed to
her the only real disgrace. What she dreaded was the necessity of having
to explain herself; of having to combat his arguments; of calculating, in
spite of herself, the exact measure of insistence with which he pressed
them. She knew not whether she most shrank from his insisting too much or
too little. In such a case the nicest sense of proportion might be at
fault; and how easy to fall into the error of taking her resistance for a
test of his sincerity! Whichever way she turned, an ironical implication
confronted her: she had the exasperated sense of having walked into the
trap of some stupid practical joke.

Beneath all these preoccupations lurked the dread of what he was thinking.
Sooner or later, of course, he would have to speak; but that, in the
meantime, he should think, even for a moment, that there was any use in
speaking, seemed to her simply unendurable. Her sensitiveness on this
point was aggravated by another fear, as yet barely on the level of
consciousness; the fear of unwillingly involving Gannett in the trammels
of her dependence. To look upon him as the instrument of her liberation;
to resist in herself the least tendency to a wifely taking possession of
his future; had seemed to Lydia the one way of maintaining the dignity of
their relation. Her view had not changed, but she was aware of a growing
inability to keep her thoughts fixed on the essential point--the point of
parting with Gannett. It was easy to face as long as she kept it
sufficiently far off: but what was this act of mental postponement but a
gradual encroachment on his future? What was needful was the courage to
recognize the moment when, by some word or look, their voluntary
fellowship should be transformed into a bondage the more wearing that it
was based on none of those common obligations which make the most
imperfect marriage in some sort a centre of gravity.

When the porter, at the next station, threw the door open, Lydia drew
back, making way for the hoped-for intruder; but none came, and the train
took up its leisurely progress through the spring wheat-fields and budding
copses. She now began to hope that Gannett would speak before the next
station. She watched him furtively, half-disposed to return to the seat
opposite his, but there was an artificiality about his absorption that
restrained her. She had never before seen him read with so conspicuous an
air of warding off interruption. What could he be thinking of? Why should
he be afraid to speak? Or was it her answer that he dreaded?

The train paused for the passing of an express, and he put down his book
and leaned out of the window. Presently he turned to her with a smile.
"There's a jolly old villa out here," he said.

His easy tone relieved her, and she smiled back at him as she crossed over
to his corner.

Beyond the embankment, through the opening in a mossy wall, she caught
sight of the villa, with its broken balustrades, its stagnant fountains,
and the stone satyr closing the perspective of a dusky grass-walk.

"How should you like to live there?" he asked as the train moved on.

"There?"

"In some such place, I mean. One might do worse, don't you think so? There
must be at least two centuries of solitude under those yew-trees.
Shouldn't you like it?"

"I--I don't know," she faltered. She knew now that he meant to speak.

He lit another cigarette. "We shall have to live somewhere, you know," he
said as he bent above the match.

Lydia tried to speak carelessly. "_Je n'en vois pas la necessite!_ Why not
live everywhere, as we have been doing?"

"But we can't travel forever, can we?"

"Oh, forever's a long word," she objected, picking up the review he had
thrown aside.

"For the rest of our lives then," he said, moving nearer.

She made a slight gesture which caused his hand to slip from hers.

"Why should we make plans? I thought you agreed with me that it's
pleasanter to drift."

He looked at her hesitatingly. "It's been pleasant, certainly; but I
suppose I shall have to get at my work again some day. You know I haven't
written a line since--all this time," he hastily emended.

She flamed with sympathy and self-reproach. "Oh, if you mean _that_--if
you want to write--of course we must settle down. How stupid of me not to
have thought of it sooner! Where shall we go? Where do you think you could
work best? We oughtn't to lose any more time."

He hesitated again. "I had thought of a villa in these parts. It's quiet;
we shouldn't be bothered. Should you like it?"

"Of course I should like it." She paused and looked away. "But I thought--
I remember your telling me once that your best work had been done in a
crowd--in big cities. Why should you shut yourself up in a desert?"

Gannett, for a moment, made no reply. At length he said, avoiding her eye
as carefully as she avoided his: "It might be different now; I can't tell,
of course, till I try. A writer ought not to be dependent on his _milieu_;
it's a mistake to humor oneself in that way; and I thought that just at
first you might prefer to be--"

She faced him. "To be what?"

"Well--quiet. I mean--"

"What do you mean by 'at first'?" she interrupted.

He paused again. "I mean after we are married."

She thrust up her chin and turned toward the window. "Thank you!" she
tossed back at him.

"Lydia!" he exclaimed blankly; and she felt in every fibre of her averted
person that he had made the inconceivable, the unpardonable mistake of
anticipating her acquiescence.

The train rattled on and he groped for a third cigarette. Lydia remained
silent.

"I haven't offended you?" he ventured at length, in the tone of a man who
feels his way.

She shook her head with a sigh. "I thought you understood," she moaned.
Their eyes met and she moved back to his side.

"Do you want to know how not to offend me? By taking it for granted, once
for all, that you've said your say on this odious question and that I've
said mine, and that we stand just where we did this morning before that--
that hateful paper came to spoil everything between us!"

"To spoil everything between us? What on earth do you mean? Aren't you
glad to be free?"

"I was free before."

"Not to marry me," he suggested.

"But I don't _want_ to marry you!" she cried.

She saw that he turned pale. "I'm obtuse, I suppose," he said slowly. "I
confess I don't see what you're driving at. Are you tired of the whole
business? Or was _I_ simply a--an excuse for getting away? Perhaps you
didn't care to travel alone? Was that it? And now you want to chuck me?"
His voice had grown harsh. "You owe me a straight answer, you know; don't
be tender-hearted!"

Her eyes swam as she leaned to him. "Don't you see it's because I care--
because I care so much? Oh, Ralph! Can't you see how it would humiliate
me? Try to feel it as a woman would! Don't you see the misery of being
made your wife in this way? If I'd known you as a girl--that would have
been a real marriage! But now--this vulgar fraud upon society--and upon a
society we despised and laughed at--this sneaking back into a position
that we've voluntarily forfeited: don't you see what a cheap compromise it
is? We neither of us believe in the abstract 'sacredness' of marriage; we
both know that no ceremony is needed to consecrate our love for each
other; what object can we have in marrying, except the secret fear of each
that the other may escape, or the secret longing to work our way back
gradually--oh, very gradually--into the esteem of the people whose
conventional morality we have always ridiculed and hated? And the very
fact that, after a decent interval, these same people would come and dine
with us--the women who talk about the indissolubility of marriage, and who
would let me die in a gutter to-day because I am 'leading a life of sin'--
doesn't that disgust you more than their turning their backs on us now? I
can stand being cut by them, but I couldn't stand their coming to call and
asking what I meant to do about visiting that unfortunate Mrs. So-and-so!"

She paused, and Gannett maintained a perplexed silence.

"You judge things too theoretically," he said at length, slowly. "Life is
made up of compromises."

"The life we ran away from--yes! If we had been willing to accept them"--
she flushed--"we might have gone on meeting each other at Mrs. Tillotson's
dinners."

He smiled slightly. "I didn't know that we ran away to found a new system
of ethics. I supposed it was because we loved each other."

"Life is complex, of course; isn't it the very recognition of that fact
that separates us from the people who see it _tout d'une piece?_ If _they_
are right--if marriage is sacred in itself and the individual must always
be sacrificed to the family--then there can be no real marriage between
us, since our--our being together is a protest against the sacrifice of
the individual to the family." She interrupted herself with a laugh.
"You'll say now that I'm giving you a lecture on sociology! Of course one
acts as one can--as one must, perhaps--pulled by all sorts of invisible
threads; but at least one needn't pretend, for social advantages, to
subscribe to a creed that ignores the complexity of human motives--that
classifies people by arbitrary signs, and puts it in everybody's reach to
be on Mrs. Tillotson's visiting-list. It may be necessary that the world
should be ruled by conventions--but if we believed in them, why did we
break through them? And if we don't believe in them, is it honest to take
advantage of the protection they afford?"

Gannett hesitated. "One may believe in them or not; but as long as they do
rule the world it is only by taking advantage of their protection that one
can find a _modus vivendi."_

"Do outlaws need a _modus vivendi?"_

He looked at her hopelessly. Nothing is more perplexing to man than the
mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.

She thought she had scored a point and followed it up passionately. "You
do understand, don't you? You see how the very thought of the thing
humiliates me! We are together to-day because we choose to be--don't let
us look any farther than that!" She caught his hands. "_Promise_ me you'll
never speak of it again; promise me you'll never _think_ of it even," she
implored, with a tearful prodigality of italics.

Through what followed--his protests, his arguments, his final unconvinced
submission to her wishes--she had a sense of his but half-discerning all
that, for her, had made the moment so tumultuous. They had reached that
memorable point in every heart-history when, for the first time, the man
seems obtuse and the woman irrational. It was the abundance of his
intentions that consoled her, on reflection, for what they lacked in
quality. After all, it would have been worse, incalculably worse, to have
detected any over-readiness to understand her.

II

When the train at night-fall brought them to their journey's end at the
edge of one of the lakes, Lydia was glad that they were not, as usual, to
pass from one solitude to another. Their wanderings during the year had
indeed been like the flight of outlaws: through Sicily, Dalmatia,
Transylvania and Southern Italy they had persisted in their tacit
avoidance of their kind. Isolation, at first, had deepened the flavor of
their happiness, as night intensifies the scent of certain flowers; but in
the new phase on which they were entering, Lydia's chief wish was that
they should be less abnormally exposed to the action of each other's
thoughts.

She shrank, nevertheless, as the brightly-looming bulk of the fashionable
Anglo-American hotel on the water's brink began to radiate toward their
advancing boat its vivid suggestion of social order, visitors' lists,
Church services, and the bland inquisition of the _table-d'hote_. The mere
fact that in a moment or two she must take her place on the hotel register
as Mrs. Gannett seemed to weaken the springs of her resistance.

They had meant to stay for a night only, on their way to a lofty village
among the glaciers of Monte Rosa; but after the first plunge into
publicity, when they entered the dining-room, Lydia felt the relief of
being lost in a crowd, of ceasing for a moment to be the centre of
Gannett's scrutiny; and in his face she caught the reflection of her
feeling. After dinner, when she went upstairs, he strolled into the
smoking-room, and an hour or two later, sitting in the darkness of her
window, she heard his voice below and saw him walking up and down the
terrace with a companion cigar at his side. When he came up he told her he
had been talking to the hotel chaplain--a very good sort of fellow.

"Queer little microcosms, these hotels! Most of these people live here all
summer and then migrate to Italy or the Riviera. The English are the only
people who can lead that kind of life with dignity--those soft-voiced old
ladies in Shetland shawls somehow carry the British Empire under their
caps. _Civis Romanus sum_. It's a curious study--there might be some good
things to work up here."

He stood before her with the vivid preoccupied stare of the novelist on
the trail of a "subject." With a relief that was half painful she noticed
that, for the first time since they had been together, he was hardly aware
of her presence. "Do you think you could write here?"

"Here? I don't know." His stare dropped. "After being out of things so
long one's first impressions are bound to be tremendously vivid, you know.
I see a dozen threads already that one might follow--"

He broke off with a touch of embarrassment.

"Then follow them. We'll stay," she said with sudden decision.

"Stay here?" He glanced at her in surprise, and then, walking to the
window, looked out upon the dusky slumber of the garden.

"Why not?" she said at length, in a tone of veiled irritation.

"The place is full of old cats in caps who gossip with the chaplain. Shall
you like--I mean, it would be different if--"

She flamed up.

"Do you suppose I care? It's none of their business."

"Of course not; but you won't get them to think so."

"They may think what they please."

He looked at her doubtfully.

"It's for you to decide."

"We'll stay," she repeated.

Gannett, before they met, had made himself known as a successful writer of
short stories and of a novel which had achieved the distinction of being
widely discussed. The reviewers called him "promising," and Lydia now
accused herself of having too long interfered with the fulfilment of his
promise. There was a special irony in the fact, since his passionate
assurances that only the stimulus of her companionship could bring out his
latent faculty had almost given the dignity of a "vocation" to her course:
there had been moments when she had felt unable to assume, before
posterity, the responsibility of thwarting his career. And, after all, he
had not written a line since they had been together: his first desire to
write had come from renewed contact with the world! Was it all a mistake
then? Must the most intelligent choice work more disastrously than the
blundering combinations of chance? Or was there a still more humiliating
answer to her perplexities? His sudden impulse of activity so exactly
coincided with her own wish to withdraw, for a time, from the range of his
observation, that she wondered if he too were not seeking sanctuary from
intolerable problems.

"You must begin to-morrow!" she cried, hiding a tremor under the laugh
with which she added, "I wonder if there's any ink in the inkstand?"

* * * * *

Whatever else they had at the Hotel Bellosguardo, they had, as Miss
Pinsent said, "a certain tone." It was to Lady Susan Condit that they owed
this inestimable benefit; an advantage ranking in Miss Pinsent's opinion
above even the lawn tennis courts and the resident chaplain. It was the
fact of Lady Susan's annual visit that made the hotel what it was. Miss
Pinsent was certainly the last to underrate such a privilege:--"It's so
important, my dear, forming as we do a little family, that there should be
some one to give _the tone_; and no one could do it better than Lady
Susan--an earl's daughter and a person of such determination. Dear Mrs.
Ainger now--who really _ought_, you know, when Lady Susan's away--
absolutely refuses to assert herself." Miss Pinsent sniffed derisively. "A
bishop's niece!--my dear, I saw her once actually give in to some South
Americans--and before us all. She gave up her seat at table to oblige
them--such a lack of dignity! Lady Susan spoke to her very plainly about
it afterwards."

Miss Pinsent glanced across the lake and adjusted her auburn front.

"But of course I don't deny that the stand Lady Susan takes is not always
easy to live up to--for the rest of us, I mean. Monsieur Grossart, our
good proprietor, finds it trying at times, I know--he has said as much,
privately, to Mrs. Ainger and me. After all, the poor man is not to blame
for wanting to fill his hotel, is he? And Lady Susan is so difficult--so
very difficult--about new people. One might almost say that she
disapproves of them beforehand, on principle. And yet she's had warnings--
she very nearly made a dreadful mistake once with the Duchess of Levens,
who dyed her hair and--well, swore and smoked. One would have thought that
might have been a lesson to Lady Susan." Miss Pinsent resumed her knitting
with a sigh. "There are exceptions, of course. She took at once to you and
Mr. Gannett--it was quite remarkable, really. Oh, I don't mean that
either--of course not! It was perfectly natural--we _all_ thought you so
charming and interesting from the first day--we knew at once that Mr.
Gannett was intellectual, by the magazines you took in; but you know what
I mean. Lady Susan is so very--well, I won't say prejudiced, as Mrs.
Ainger does--but so prepared _not_ to like new people, that her taking to
you in that way was a surprise to us all, I confess."

Miss Pinsent sent a significant glance down the long laurustinus alley
from the other end of which two people--a lady and gentleman--were
strolling toward them through the smiling neglect of the garden.

"In this case, of course, it's very different; that I'm willing to admit.
Their looks are against them; but, as Mrs. Ainger says, one can't exactly
tell them so."

"She's very handsome," Lydia ventured, with her eyes on the lady, who
showed, under the dome of a vivid sunshade, the hour-glass figure and
superlative coloring of a Christmas chromo.

"That's the worst of it. She's too handsome."

"Well, after all, she can't help that."

"Other people manage to," said Miss Pinsent skeptically.

"But isn't it rather unfair of Lady Susan--considering that nothing is
known about them?"

"But, my dear, that's the very thing that's against them. It's infinitely
worse than any actual knowledge."

Lydia mentally agreed that, in the case of Mrs. Linton, it possibly might
be.

"I wonder why they came here?" she mused.

"That's against them too. It's always a bad sign when loud people come to
a quiet place. And they've brought van-loads of boxes--her maid told Mrs.
Ainger's that they meant to stop indefinitely."

"And Lady Susan actually turned her back on her in the _salon?_"

"My dear, she said it was for our sakes: that makes it so unanswerable!
But poor Grossart _is_ in a way! The Lintons have taken his most expensive
_suite_, you know--the yellow damask drawing-room above the portico--and
they have champagne with every meal!"

They were silent as Mr. and Mrs. Linton sauntered by; the lady with
tempestuous brows and challenging chin; the gentleman, a blond stripling,
trailing after her, head downward, like a reluctant child dragged by his
nurse.

"What does your husband think of them, my dear?" Miss Pinsent whispered as
they passed out of earshot.

Lydia stooped to pick a violet in the border.

"He hasn't told me."

"Of your speaking to them, I mean. Would he approve of that? I know how
very particular nice Americans are. I think your action might make a
difference; it would certainly carry weight with Lady Susan."

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