CHAPTER IV

LONG CIRCUITS AND SHORT

James Randolph was a native Chicagoan, but his father, an intelligent

and prosperous physician, with a general practise in one of the northern

suburbs, afterward annexed to the city, did not belong to the old

before-the-fire aristocracy that Rodney and Frederica, and Martin

Whitney, the Crawfords and Violet Williamson were born into. The medical

tradition carried itself along to the third generation, when James made

a profession of it, and in him, it flowered really into genius. From the

beginning his bent toward the psychological aspect of it was marked and

his father was sympathetic enough to give it free sway. After graduating

from one of the Chicago medical colleges he went to Johns Hopkins, and

after that to Vienna, where he worked mostly under Professor Freud.

It was in Vienna that he met Eleanor Blair. She, too, was a native of

Illinois, but this fact cut a very different figure in her life from

that which it cut in his. Her grandfather, a pioneer, forceful, thrifty

and probably rather unscrupulous, had settled on the wonderfully fertile

land at a time when one had almost to drive the Indians off it. He had

accumulated it steadily to the day of his death and died in possession

of about thirty thousand acres of it. It was in much this fashion that a

feudal adventurer became the founder of a line of landed nobility, but

the centrifugal force of American life caused the thing to work out

differently. His son had an eastern college education, got elected to

Congress, as a preliminary step in a political career, went to

Washington, fell in love with and married the beautiful daughter of an

unreconstructed and impoverished southern gentleman. She detested the

North, and as her love for the South found its expression in passionate

laments over its ruin, uncomplicated by any desire to live there, she

spent more and more of her time--her husband's faint wishes becoming

less and less operative with her until they ceased altogether--in one

after another of the European capitals.

So Eleanor, two generations away from the fertile soil of central

Illinois, was as exotic to it as an orchid would be in a New England

garden. Two or three brief perfunctory visits to the land her income

came from, and to the relatives who still lived upon it, became the

substitute for what, in an older and stabler civilization, would have

been the dominant tradition in her life.

She must have been a source of profound satisfaction to large numbers of

French, Italian, Austrian and English persons, to whose eminent social

circles her mother's wealth and breeding gained admittance, by embodying

for them, with perfect authenticity, their notion of the American girl.

She was rich, beautiful, clever in a rather shallow, "American" way, she

had a will of her own, and was indulged by her mother with an astounding

amount of liberty; she was audacious, yet with a tempering admixture of

cool shrewdness, which kept her out of the difficulties she was always

on the brink of.

Kept her out of them, that is, until, in Vienna, as I have said, she met

James Randolph. That she fell in love with him is one of those facts

which seem astonishing the first time you look at them, and inevitable

when you look again. Physically, a sanguine blond, with a narrow head, a

forward thrusting nose, and really blue eyes, his dominating spiritual

quality was the sort of asceticism which proclaims not weak anemic

desires, but strong unruly ones, curbed in by the hand of a still

stronger will. He was highly imaginative, as a successful follower of

the Freudian method must be. He was capable of the gentlest sympathy,

and of the most relentless insistence. And he thought, until he met

Eleanor Blair, that he was, indisputably, his own master.

The wide social gulf between them--between a beautiful American heiress

with the entry into all circles of aristocratic society, except the

highest, and an only decently pecunious medical student, caught both of

them off their guard. The utter unlikelihood of anything coming of such

an acquaintance as theirs, was just the ambush needed to make it

possible for them to fall in love. They would, probably, have attracted

each other anywhere. But, in a city like Vienna, where all the sensuous

appurtenances of life are raised to their highest power, the attraction

became irresistible.

He did resist as long as he could--successfully, indeed, to the point of

holding himself back from asking her to marry him, or even explicitly

from making love to her. But the thing shone through his deeply-colored

emotions, like light through a stained-glass window. And when she asked

him to marry her, as she did in so many words--pleaded her homesickness

for a home she had never known, and a loneliness she had suddenly become

aware of, amid would-be friends and lovers, who could not, not one of

them, be called disinterested, his resistance melted like a powder of

April snow.

It was the only serious obstacle she had to overcome. The terms of her

father's will left her share of the income of the estate wholly at her

disposal. And so, in spite of her mother's horrified protest, they were

married, and not long afterward, her mother, who was still a year or two

on the sunny side of fifty, gratified her aristocratic yearnings by

marrying a count herself.

The Randolphs came back to America and, somewhat against Eleanor's

wishes, settled in Chicago. With her really very large income, her

exotic type of beauty and her social skill, she was probably right in

thinking she could have made a success anywhere. One of the larger

eastern cities--preferably New York or Washington, would have suited her

better. But Chicago, he said, was where he belonged and where his best

chance for professional success lay, and she yielded, though without

waiving her privilege of making a more or less good-humored grievance of

it. However, she found the place much more tolerable than riding into

and out of it on the train a few times had led her to expect.

She knew a few people of exactly the right sort and she neatly and

almost painlessly detached her husband from his old Lake View

associations. She looked out a house in precisely the right

neighborhood, and furnished it to combine the splendor of her income

with the simple austerity of his profession in just the right

proportions. She trailed her game with unfailing precision, never barked

up the wrong tree, could distinguish a goat from a sheep as far as she

could see one, and in no time at all had won the exact position she

wanted.

Her attitude toward her husband (you have already had a sample of it at

Frederica's famous dinner, where Rodney was supposed to take the

preliminary steps toward marrying Hermione Woodruff) attracted general

admiration, and it was fortified, of course, by the story of their

romantic marriage. It was conceded she had done a very fine and splendid

thing in marrying the man she loved, settling down to live with him on

so comparatively simple and modest a scale, and devoting herself so

whole-heartedly to his career. She had an air--and it wasn't consciously

assumed, either--of living wholly with reference to him, which people

found exceedingly engaging. (A cynic might observe at this point that

the same quality in a homely unattractive woman would fail of producing

this effect.)

Indeed, he had much to be grateful for. But for the fact that his wife

was accepted without reserve, a man whose principal preoccupation was

with matters of sex psychology, who was said to cure hysterical and

neurasthenic patients by the interpretation of their dreams, would have

been regarded askance by the average run of common-sense, golf-playing

men of affairs. Even his most miraculous cures would be attributed to

the imaginary nature of the disease, rather than to the skill of the

physician.

Not even his wife's undeniable charm could altogether efface this

impression from the mind of this sort of man. But though his way of

turning the theme of a smoking-room story into a subject for serious

scientific discussion might make you uncomfortable, you couldn't meet

James Randolph and hear him talk, without respecting him. He was

attractive to women (it amounted almost to fascination with the neurotic

type), and to men of high intelligence, like Rodney, he was a boon and

a delight. And the people who liked him least were precisely those most

attracted by his wife. Anyhow, no one refused an invitation to their

dinners.

Rose's arrival at this one--a little late, to be sure, but not

scandalously--created a mild sensation. None of the other guests were

strangers, either, on whom she could have the effect of novelty. They

were the same crowd, pretty much, who had been encountering one another

all winter--dancing, dining and talking themselves into a state of

complete satiety with one another. They'd split up pretty soon and

branch out in different directions--the Florida east coast, California,

Virginia Hot Springs and so on, and so galvanize their interest in life

and in one another. At present they were approaching the lowest ebb.

But when Rose came into the drawing-room--in a wonderful gown that dared

much, and won the reward of daring--a gown she'd meant to hold in

reserve for a greater occasion, but had put on to-night because she had

felt somehow like especially pleasing Rodney--when she came in, she

reoxygenated the social atmosphere. She won a moment of complete

silence, and when the buzz of talk arose again, it was jerky--the

product of divided minds and unstable attentions.

She was, in fact, a stranger. Her voice had a bead on it which roused a

perfectly unreasoning physical excitement--the kind of bead which, in

singing, makes all the difference between a church choir and grand

opera. The glow they were accustomed to in her eyes, concentrated itself

into flashes, and the flush that so often, and so adorably, suffused her

face, burnt brighter now in her cheeks and left the rest pale.

And these were true indices of the change that had taken place within

her. From sheer numb incredulity, which was all she had felt as she'd

walked away from Rodney's office door, and from the pain of an

intolerable hurt, she had reacted to a fine glow of indignation. She had

found herself suddenly feeling lighter, older, indescribably more

confident. That dinner was to be gone through with, was it? Well, it

should be! They shouldn't suspect her humiliation or her hurt. She was

conscious suddenly of enormous reserves of power hitherto unsuspected--a

power that could be exercised to any extent she chose, according to her

will.

Her husband, James Randolph reflected, had evidently either been making

love to her, or indulging in the civilized equivalent of beating her; he

was curious to find out which. And having learned from his wife that

Rose was to sit beside him at the table, he made up his mind that he

would make her tell him.

He didn't attempt it, though, during his first talk with her--confined

himself rigorously to the carefully sifted chaff which does duty for

polite conversation over the same hors-d'oeuvres and entrées, from one

dinner to the next, the season round. It wasn't until Eleanor had turned

the table the second time, that he made his first gambit in the game.

"No need asking you if you like this sort of thing," he said. "I would

like to know how you keep it up. You have the same things said to you

seven nights a week and you make the same answers--thrust and parry,

carte and tierce, buttons on the foils. It can't any of it get anywhere.

What's the attraction?"

"You can't get a rise out of me to-night," said Rose. "Not after what

I've been through to-day. Madame Gréville's been talking to me. She

thinks American women are dreadful dubs,--or she would if she knew the

word--thinks we don't know our own game. Do you agree with her?"

"I'll tell you that," he said, "after you answer my question. What's the

attraction?"

"Don't you think it would be a mistake," said Rose, "for me to try to

analyze it? Suppose I did and found there wasn't any! You aren't

supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth, you know."

"Is that what's the matter with Rodney?" he asked. "Is this sort of"--a

gesture with his head took in the table--"caramel diet, beginning to go

against his teeth?"

"He had to work to-night," Rose said. "He was awfully sorry he couldn't

come."

She smiled just a little ironically as she said it, and exaggerated by

a hair's breadth, perhaps, the purely conventional nature of the reply.

"Yes," he observed, "that's what we say. Sometimes it gets us off and

sometimes it doesn't."

"Well, it got him off to-night," she said. "He was pretty impressive. He

said there was a ruling decision against him and he had to make some

sort of distinction so that the decision wouldn't rule. Do you know what

that means? I don't."

"Why didn't you ask him?" Randolph wanted to know.

"I did and he said he could explain it, but that it would take a month.

So of course there wasn't time."

"I thought," said Randolph, "that he used to talk law to you by the

hour."

The button wasn't on the foil that time, because the thrust brought

blood--a bright flush into her cheeks and a sudden brightness into her

eyes that would have induced him to relent if she hadn't followed the

thing up of her own accord.

"I wish you'd tell me something," she said. "I expect you know better

than any one else I could ask. Why is it that husbands and wives can't

talk to each other? With people who live the way we do, it isn't that

they've worn each other out, because they see no more of each other,

hardly, than they do of the others. And it isn't that they're naturally

more uninteresting to each other than the rest of the people they know.

Because then, why did they marry each other in the first place, instead

of any one of the others who are so easy to talk to afterward? Imagine

what this table would be if the husbands and wives sat side by side!

Would Eleanor ever be able to turn it so that they talked that way?"

"That's a fascinating speculation," he said. "I wish I could persuade

her some time to indulge the wild eccentricity of trying it out."

"Well, why?" she demanded.

"Shall I try to say something witty," he asked, "or do you want it, as

near as may be, absolutely straight?"

"Let's indulge," she said, "in the wild, eccentricity of talking

straight."

The cigarettes came around just then, and he lighted one rather

deliberately, at one of the candles, before he answered.

"I am under the impression," he said, "that husbands and wives can talk

exactly as well as any other two people. Exactly as well, and no better.

The necessary conditions for real conversation are a real interest in

and knowledge of a common subject; ability on the part of both to

contribute something to that subject. Well, if a husband and wife can

meet those terms, they can talk. But the joker is, as our legislative

friend over there would say," (he nodded down the table toward a young

millionaire of altruistic principles, who had got elected to the state

assembly) "the joker is that a man and a woman who aren't married, and

who are moderately attracted to each other, can talk, or seem to talk,

without meeting those conditions."

"Seem to talk?" she questioned.

"Seem to exchange ideas mutually. They think they do, but they don't.

It's pure illusion, that's the answer."

"I'm not clever, really," said Rose, "and I don't know much, and I

simply don't understand. Will you explain it, in short words,"--she

smiled--"since we're not married, you know?"

He grinned back at her. "All right," he said, "since we're not married,

I will. We'll take a case ..." He looked around the table. "We'll be

discreet," he amended, "and take a hypothetical case. We'll take Darby

and Joan. They encounter each other somewhere, and something about them

that men have written volumes about and never explained yet, sets

up--you might almost call it a chemical reaction between them--a

physical reaction, certainly. They arrest each other's attention--get to

thinking about each other, are strongly drawn together.

"It's a sex attraction--not quite the oldest and most primitive thing in

the world, but nearly. Only, Darby and Joan aren't primitive people. If

they were, the attraction would satisfy itself in a direct primitive

way. But each of them is carrying a perfectly enormous superstructure of

ideas and inhibitions, emotional refinements and capacities, and the sex

attraction is so disguised that they don't recognize it. Do you know

what a short circuit is in electricity?"

"I think so," said Rose, "but you'd better not take a chance. Tell me

that, too."

"Why," he said, "the juice that comes into your house to light it and

heat the flat-irons and the toaster, and so on, comes in by one wire and

goes out by another. Before it can get out, it's got to do all the work

you want it to do--push its way through the resistance of fine tungsten

filaments in your lamps and the iron wires in your heaters that get

white hot resisting it. When it's pushed its way through all of them and

done the work you want it to do, it's tired out and goes away by the

other wire. But if you cut off the insulation down in the basement,

where those two wires are close together, and make it possible for the

current to jump straight across without doing any work, it will take the

short circuit instead of the long one and you won't have any lights in

your house. Now do you see what I mean?

"Darby and Joan are civilized. That is to say, they're insulated. The

current's there, but it's long-circuited. The only expression it's got

is through the intelligence,--so it lights the house. Absence of common

knowledge and common interests only adds to the resistance and makes it

burn all the brighter. Naturally Darby and Joan fall victims to the very

dangerous illusion that they're intellectual companions. They think

they're having wonderful talks. All they are doing, is long-circuiting

their sex attraction. Well, marriage gives it a short circuit. Why

should the current light the lamps when it can strike straight across?

There you are!"

"And poor Joan," said Rose, after a palpable silence, but evenly enough,

"who has thought all along that she was attracting a man by her

intelligence and her understanding, and all that, wakes up to find that

she's been married for her long eyelashes, and her nice voice--and her

pretty ankles. That's a little hard on her, don't you think, if she's

been taking herself seriously?"

"Nine times in ten," he said, "she's fooling herself. She's taken her

own ankles much more seriously than she has her mind. She's capable of

real sacrifices for them--for her sex charm, that is. She'll undergo a

real discipline for it. Intelligence she regards as a gift. She thinks

the witty conversation she's capable of after dinner, on a cocktail and

two glasses of champagne, or the bright letters she can write to a

friend, are real exercises of her mind--real work. But work isn't done

like that. Work's overcoming something that resists; and there's strain

in it, and pain and discouragement."

In her cheeks the red flared up brighter. She smiled again--not her own

smile--one at any rate that was new to her.

"You don't 'solve an intellectual problem' then;" she quoted, "'by

having your hand held, or your eyes kissed?'"

Whereupon he shot a look at her and observed that evidently he wasn't as

much of a pioneer as he thought.

She did not rise to this cast, however. "All right;" she said,

"admitting that her ankles are serious and her mind isn't, what is Joan

going to do about it?"

"It's easier to say what she's not to do," he decided, after hesitating

a moment. "Her fatal mistake will be to despise her ankles without

disciplining her mind. If she will take either one of them seriously, or

both for that matter--it's possible--she'll do very well."

He could, no doubt, have continued on the theme indefinitely, but the

table turned the other way just then and Rose took up an alleged

conversation with the man at her right which lasted until they left the

table and included such topics as indoor golf, woman's suffrage, the new

dances, Bernard Shaw, Campanini and the Progressive party; with a

perfectly appropriate and final comment on each.

Rose didn't care. She was having a wonderful time--a new kind of

wonderful time. No longer gazing, big-eyed like little Cinderella at a

pageant some fairy godmother's whim had admitted her to, but consciously

gazed upon; she was the show to-night, and she knew it. Her low, finely

modulated voice so rich in humor, so varied in color, had to-night an

edge on it that carried it beyond those she was immediately speaking to

and drew looks that found it hard to get away again. For the first time

in her life, with full self-consciousness, she was producing effects,

thrilling with the exercise of a power as obedient to her will as

electricity to the manipulator of a switchboard.

She was like a person driving an aeroplane, able to move in all three

dimensions. Pretty soon, of course, she'd have to come hack to earth,

where certain monstrously terrifying questions were waiting for her.

Madame Gréville's final apothegm had suggested one of them. Was all she

valued in the world just so much fairy gold that would change over night

into dry leaves in her treasure chest because she had never earned

it--paid the price for it that life relentlessly exacts for all we may

be allowed to call ours?

Her tragi-comic scene with Rodney suggested another. What was her value

to him? Was she something enormously desirable when he wanted his hand

held and his eyes kissed, but an infernal nuisance when serious matters

were concerned? A fine and luxurious dissipation, not dangerous unless

recklessly indulged in, but to be kept strictly in her place? Before her

talk with Randolph she'd have laughed at that.

But did the horrible plausibility of what he had said actually cover the

truth? Did she owe that first golden hour with Rodney, his passionate

thrilling avowal of his life's philosophy, to nothing deeper in herself

than her unconscious power of rousing in him an equally unconscious,

primitive sex desire? Was the fine mutuality of understanding she had so

proudly boasted to her mother clear illusion? Now that the short circuit

had been established, would the lights never burn in the upper stories

of their house again? Turned about conversely the question read like

this: Was the thing that had, in Randolph himself, aroused his vivid

interest in the subject--well, nothing more than the daring cut of her

gown, the gleam of her jewels, the whiteness of her skin ...?

Those questions were waiting for her to come back to earth; and they

wouldn't get tired and go away. But for the present the knowledge that

they were there only made the aeroplane ride the more exhilarating.

She was called to the telephone just as she was on the point of

starting reluctantly for home, and found Rodney on the wire. He told her

that he had got hold of the thing he was looking for, but that there

were still hours of work ahead of him while he was fortifying himself

with necessary authorities. He wouldn't come home to-night at all, he

said. When his work was finished, he'd go to the club and have a Turkish

bath and all the sleep he had time for. When he got through in court

to-morrow afternoon, he'd come home.

It was all perfectly reasonable--it was to her finely tuned ear just a

shade too reasonable. It had been thought out as an excuse. Because it

wasn't for the Turkish bath nor the extra hour's sleep that he was

staying away from home. It was herself he was staying away from. He

wanted his mind to stay cold and taut, and he was afraid to face the

temptation of her eyes and her soft white arms. And in the mood of that

hour, it pleased her that this should be so--that the ascetic in him

should pay her the tribute of fear.

Afterward, of course, she felt like lashing herself for having felt like

that and for having replied, in a spirit of pure coquetry, in a voice of

studied, cool, indifferent good humor:

"That's a good idea, Roddy. I'm glad you're not coming back. Good

night."