The Red Book Magazine/Volume 36/Number 2/The Protecting Instinct

by Alice Duer Miller

When she arrived at the Grand Central, she looked seriously at the kissing couples whom her train had reunited

 

THE
PROTECTING
INSTINCT

By Alice Duer Miller

Illustrated by
RALPH PALLEN COLEMAN

THERE were no problems great or small in the Scarths' married life—not because they were people unaware of the finer adjustments, but because the finer adjustments were all made.

“My brother and his wife remind me of the minstrels,” Emily Scarth used to say bitterly. “They are always doing what I believe is called in the theater feeding each other's parts. Their life is a mutual: 'Yes, Mr. Bones, and what is the difference between—'”

Some one reminded her that married people were partners.

“They seem to me rather more like confederates,” said Emily.

She was, however, very fond of her sister-in-law, who had been her schoolmate, and whom she had introduced to her brother: That was one of the troubles; she had imagined a wider future for Clara Joyce.

“Yes, Clara,” she would say, wagging her head, “I don't mean to flatter you unduly, but I believe you might have accomplished something even greater than making Stephen comfortable.”

“I prefer to call it 'happy,'” replied Mrs. Stephen, who among her other qualities possessed a wonderfully good temper. “But just what do you imagine I might have done?”

“Do you remember your school valedictory?”

“Dearest Emily, I could not go through life delivering school valedictories, could I?”

“You could have done something.”

Mrs. Scarth inclined her pretty head on its slim throat and looked thoughtful. Few women, however domestic, have not wondered how their abilities would have succeeded in less sheltered fields of activity; and Clara as a young girl—perhaps under the influence of Emily's individualism—had not looked forward to matrimony as her only possible career. But that, she liked to think, proved that she had chosen the man and not the state.

The two women were having tea in the Scarths' drawing-room—a high, quiet room, not too large, filled with tall bookcases and firelight and fresh flowers. It was a room very restful to everyone but Emily. Emily did not find it restful, because she was conscious that every detail in its perfection had been thought out only with the object of bringing rest to Stephen after the long day's work was done. The same effect designed for Clara's selfish pleasure would have been perfectly satisfactory to Emily. It annoyed her to think that her lovely sister-in-law used all her powers in nothing more positive than creating a background for Stephen's life. Stephen's life was very creditable—he was a public-spirited citizen and a good lawyer, but Emily did not consider making a background for him a full-time job for a grown woman. “But,” she used to add with her queer nasal laugh, “I've never found a man who agreed with me.”

Clara certainly did not agree with her. Indeed, she thought in her heart that Emily, an unmarried woman without great emotional sensitiveness, did not take in the full difficulty of the task. Only, Clara did not call it making a background; she felt that she had discovered by thought, observation and love, how to reduce the friction of existence so that the great masculine machine of which she had the keeping was able to develop the greatest possible power. In this career her beauty, her brains and her executive ability all found a place.

Nevertheless, Emily's attitude flattered her. The domestic career which she found so thoroughly satisfactory gained dignity in her eyes by the mere suggestion that others had been open to her. The idea amused her—she played with it and put it aside.

“I doubt if I could have done anything, Emily,” she said temperately. “I'm not as independent as I used to imagine. I remember when I was twenty I wanted to go round the world alone, and I was awfully annoyed at my parents for not allowing me to; and now I assure you I tremble if I have to make a journey without Stephen. I shirk the responsibility of tipping the porter. Perhaps it's matrimony.”

“Oh, no! It's Stephen,” said Emily. “No woman can be remotely connected with Stephen—some women cannot even see him without learning to cling to him. You, Mamma, even I in my peculiar way, lean upon Stephen, to such a degree that we are losing our powers of locomotion.”

Clara smiled. There was some truth in what Emily said, and part of the truth was a tribute to Stephen. To be as happy as he had been for ten years did unfit one for other forms of existence; to exercise one set of faculties did not sharpen the others. But would anyone refuse happiness on that account? Would any artist refuse to practice the art of which he was master for fear that it might unfit him for the practice of another which he would never acquire? Clara believed in her own art. She was content with what she gave, as well as with what she received. She knew that if he gave her shelter of one sort, she gave him shelter of another. The walls and the moat of their castle had been built by him, but the flower garden inside the walls was hers, and only she perhaps knew its value.

“I don't think anyone would say you were losing your powers of locomotion, Emily,” she said.

“Oh, I am to a certain degree,” replied her sister-in-law. “But, of course, if we were not willing to be poor weak creatures, how could Stephen exercise his well-known protective instinct?”

“He exercises it so well.”

“And so indiscriminately.”

Mrs. Scarth looked up quickly at the tone, and then her attention was distracted by the sound of her husband's step on the stair. She began hastily making the tea, which she had been delaying.

“I see,” she said as she moved the cups about on the tray, “that you want me to ask what you mean by indiscriminatingly?”

Emily heard her brother's step also, and spoke quickly.

“My dear, he stops every afternoon at the hospital. I have a friend there, and she tells me—”

She paused. Stephen had entered.

“You have come in time to defend yourself,” said his wife lightly. “Emily is attacking you as usual.”

Scarth was a man who exercised great power over women—not always agreeably to themselves. He was tall and nice-looking, but the charm of his looks lay in their suggestion of his dominating will. Masculine will appears to be as attractive to women as feminine beauty to men. Like beauty it must, of course, be adapted to suit the individual, and Stephen's variety of will, molded by his seriousness and kindness and legal training, was of a sort that inspired most women who came in touch with him with a species of terrified dependence.

The smile he gave his sister was undisturbed.

“Is it poor little Frieda again?” he said.

Emily nodded, as if he couldn't escape by that method. “You two are the gossip of the wards.”

“One doesn't have to go very far on the downward path to be that,” replied Stephen. He had been standing with his hand on his wife's shoulder while she poured out his tea, and now that it was made, he took the cup and sat down in his own deep chair by the fire. Then he turned to his wife, ignoring his sister, and said:

“She's better today. They think she will be able to testify in a week or so.”

The girl under discussion was the daughter of a former accountant in Stephen's office who had come to them from another city, leaving his wife and daughter behind him. A month before he had gone home to bring them to New York; the train had run off a trestle; the man and his wife had been killed; and the seventeen-year-old daughter had found herself injured, unknown and penniless in a New York hospital. Here Stephen had discovered her, and was now conducting a suit on her behalf against the railroad company.

“Well, I'm sure I'm glad she's better,” said Emily, rising. “And I hope you'll win her suit. I'd rather the railroad supported her for the rest of her life than you.”

Scarth looked up at her and laughed, “It must make life really interesting, Emily,” he said, “to have such a suspicious nature as yours.”

“Not so interesting as providing the material for suspicion, Stephen,” she returned; and then, feeling that this was good enough for an exit, she hurried away.

Clara smiled at her husband. They both enjoyed Emily in much the same spirit, but now his answering smile was vague, and she noticed for the first time that he looked worried and exhausted. She ran over in her mind the things that could have gone wrong, and in the silence he asked—but still with that slight preoccupation in his voice:

“What have you been doing all day?”

It was more than a form between them. $he began at once. She had been to see an out-of-town client of his—at his request; and she gave him her impression of the old lady. And she had bought those new rugs for the car. And she had been as usual to see his mother..... She stopped, aware that he had not been listening. She would have been more than human if she had not suffered an instant of annoyance. “Why,” she thought, “did he ask me to tell him if he does not want to hear?” And then, for she was a just woman, she reflected that after all, her story was not an interesting one—just chatter, she thought, compared with what he might have to tell: perhaps a great case won, a new bill drawn to improve our laws, a public position offered and refused.

He got up with a sudden restless movement unlike him.

“Why, don't you ask me what I've been doing?” he said, but not looking at her.

“Oh, my interest is so obvious, I don't have to ask. I'm like a dog waiting for a bone.”

“Would you like to hear?”

There was something terrible in his voice—as if he were angry at her, but she managed to say that she would like to hear.

“When I left the house this morning,” he began, “I went straight to the hospital—”

“I thought you went there this afternoon.”

Illustration: She gave him the little sheet with its line of dark blue typewriting.

He went. on as if she had not spoken. “I went straight to the hospital. I waited almost. an hour before they let me see Frieda—the doctor was there. Then I sat with her a long time. It was after twelve when I reached the office. I found a large mail on my desk. I put it into a pigeonhole without opening it. Two clients I was told were waiting to see me. I stole out by the back way; I went to a florist's and sent Frieda some flowers. I was a long time in choosing them. Then I went to lunch, and after lunch I went back to the hospital, and I have been there ever since. How does my day compare with yours?”

There was a pause. It seemed she was the sort of person who sat quiet under great pain.

“Stephen,” she said at last, “you tell me this because you want to, not because—”

He shook his head. “I do not want to,” he answered. “I do not want to tell anyone. I want to keep it to myself—secret and perfect. But I do tell you, because I love you too, Clara—”

“'Too!'”

“I love you, and: know that you are the most important thing in my life, and that I must have you as an ally and not as an enemy. I don't dare leave it to the gossip of people like Emily.”

“Does the girl love you, Stephen?”

“My dear, she is not quite half my age. She probably regards me as her father's employer. This thing is all going on inside of me. Of course, she looks forward to my coming—she has nothing else to look forward to. There is no one else who cares whether she lives or dies. She hasn't a penny or a friend in the world. She turns to me—she talks to me—she clings to me. That's the worst of it, Clara. It isn't the worst things in me that are appealed to—it's the best.”

“The protecting instinct?”

“Yes, I suppose so. Day after day, as I sit beside her bed and watch her bearing suffering heroically, I've felt that my emotion wouldn't be so very different if she were my daughter. I don't want to do anything but help and protect her. It's all right, if only it were not blotting out everything else in my life.”

As far as his wife was concerned, he could not have summed the matter up more accurately. It was blotting out everything— not only her happiness, but her reason for existence. This after a little while, became her predominating feeling—a profound loneliness.

She believed him absolutely, believed that in the end her relation to him would hold, that his present absorption was temporary and really unimportant, that ten years like theirs could not be wiped out in a few weeks, but would emerge perhaps more sound and beautiful than ever.

But for the present, her feeling of jealousy and loss was immensely increased by the emptiness of her daily life. If their positions had been reversed, if she had become suddenly interested in some one else, Stephen would have had his work left, and would have turned to it with a single-mindedness which would have had in it some element of satisfaction. But her occupation—which was making him happy—was now gone, passed beyond her powers. If there had been some department of her life into which he did not enter, she could have gone there to await his return, but there was none. A painter struck blind, a singer who loses his voice, could not have contemplated an emptier future than she. This was an aspect he did not see at all, and she was glad he did not. She had no wish to add to the sense of guilt he already felt. Nor was she herself particularly proud at finding that she was dependent on him not only for happiness, not only for the material things of life, but for the simple daily routine.

She came to her decision by a process slow and difficult enough to inspire confidence, even in the face of Stephen's violent opposition. She would go away for a time. To stay now was to run the risk of losing forever what remained to them. She would not go through the tortures of the jealous wife—watching his comings and goings, catching stray hints about his actions from strangers, studying his expression to read a death-sentence or a reprieve. No, she would go away for a time, on the understanding that the instant he wanted her, she would return.

“You see,” she said, smiling, “I have absolute confidence in your judgment. I leave it for you to determine the right moment. You have only to telegraph you want me and I'll come back.”

HE broke out against her plan, but she had strength to withstand him—particularly as she noticed that his anxiety was concerned entirely with her welfare during their separation, and not at all with his own.

“It is madness,” he said. “A woman like yourself, who has hardly been outside her own home for ten years—”

She did not say that at the moment she felt as if she had no home, but sheltered herself behind his unwillingness to say more clearly that he could not see how in the world she could get on without his guardianship.

At the very last she thought she saw a recognition on his part that her decision was wise; and she went away, encouraged that there was still the old intellectual accord between them. She asked one assurance from him.

“Promise me,” she said, “that you will not send for me until you are sure you want me to stay.”

“Promise to come when I send,” he answered.

That was an easy promise to make.

Clara had an uncle who was a professor of economic large Western university. She had decided to go to him. “What shall you tell him?” Stephen had asked, and had heard without enthusiasm that she intended to tell him the truth. He knew better than she did how much an outsider would believe must lie behind the parting of husband and wife. Being, however very well satisfied with the Joyce household as an asylum for his wife, he made no comment.

JOYCE, born in New England, had gone West as a young man, and had attached himself to Western academic ideals. He worked an excellent mind over areas usually left to the emotions. With a naturally finical manner, he enunciated theories of conduct which were often described as dangerous. He was particularly radical on the subject of the relation of the sexes, and yet lived an extremely domestic life with his wife and four children.

The family as a whole were a delight and an excitement to Clara. In the first place they all worked hard. This was natural enough in the boys, but Clara could not get over the fact that Mrs. Joyce wrote (gardening was her subject), that the elder girl was the private secretary of the president of the university, and that the married daughter, Amelia, was an assistant professor of history. She envied them intensely—envied them as she hung about the house idle, and envied them still more at dinner-time when, illuminated by the demure humor of their father, they talked over the various happenings of the day.

The husband of Amelia was employed in the city water-works, and a few days after the arrival of Clara, he received an offer from another city, which, however, had nothing to offer Amelia. The matter was much discussed in the family. Clara was impressed by the importance everyone attached to Amelia's work. The offer was finally declined. Great tenderness and appreciation had been displayed on both sides; and Clara noted an ideal of married life entirely new to her—not, she thought, so beautiful as her own had been, but still very thrilling and successful.

She had nothing to do all day but to read; and her mind, running along these lines, led her reading to one definite direction—the domestic position of women in other civilizations. She took to working in the college library until late in the evening. Her conduct, which at home would have become a family joke, excited no comment in the Joyce household.

Presently she was asked to read a paper on her subject before a college literary club.

Thinking it over afterward, Professor Joyce was able to explain the reason of her great success, for which at the time he had been totally unprepared. Perhaps it was all her bright hair and blue eyes and nice figure and good clothes; perhaps her naturally modulated voice had a good deal to do with it; but Joyce preferred to think that the main cause lay in her vigorous and exact use of the English language. It was as if her clear, practical mind selected instinctively the best word for her purpose—just as in former times she had chosen the best curtains and the best food. Another element of her success was the extreme freshness of her convictions about facts and theories already long familiar to many in her audience. But of course most interesting of all was her material—a mass of carefully related facts about the social and domestic position of women, beginning with the Chaldean divorce-law, which allowed a man to divorce his wife by saying “Thou art not my wife,” and returning her dowry; but if a woman said to her husband: “Thou art not my husband” she was drowned.

A neighboring State was in the throes of a suffrage campaign, and both sides discovered material in Mrs. Scarth's paper. She was asked to deliver it several times. Finally she was invited by a well-known impresario to make an extended lecture-tour.

No one but herself seemed to find this comic, or to doubt that she would accept. Her aunt merely observed:

“I wish before you go you could find time to give Amelia a few lessons in delivery. Her lectures read so much better than they sound.”

“Whereas just the reverse is true of Clara's,” said her uncle.

“Isn't that an unkind thing to say, Uncle Josiah?”

“On the contrary, my dear—the first characteristic of the true orator.”

She agreed to go on the tour. Her uncle made the arrangements and she was surprised at the magnitude of her checks.

Illustration: He got up with a sudden restless movement, unlike him. “Why don't you ask me what I've been doing?” he said, but not looking at her.

Large as they were, however, they did not repay her for the agony she suffered when she stood facing her first large audience—the first audience who had been, as she felt, buncoed into paying real money to listen to her. Afterward, when it was well over, she felt shame at making money so easily.

“Isn't it funny? Isn't it absurd?” she whispered to her uncle. “What do you suppose the people at home would think?”

“People at home are a good deal like people everywhere else,” said Joyce, “—enormously impressed by success.”

It was not only Clara's egotism that was flattered. Ever since she had left Stephen, she had felt only half alive. Her present activity seemed to give her back her share in life. If she could not be happy, she could at least be interested. She could forget for a few minutes at a time her acute awareness of the loss of Stephen.

But this occasional forgetfulness was a terrible threat to her resolution to remain an exile until recalled; for when memory came back to her, it came from the remoter past. She remembered, not her hideous parting, but the long union of ten years. It would seem too silly, too fantastic to her that she had voluntarily left her home and her own man, and that if she went back she could not find him anything but completely hers. At such moments her will was hardly strong enough to keep her from taking the next train east.

Her lecture-tour was to take her away from the Joyces for several months; but after a few weeks she found herself in a neighboring town, and her uncle came over to hear her. Looking down from the platform, she saw his finely shaped head and folded arms in the front row. The audience was the largest she had had, and from the moment she raised her head and clasped her hands behind her,—her habitual position in speaking,—she knew that this audience was entirely hers; the mysterious contact was established between them. She knew she was a success long before the final applause told her that the audience knew it too.

The experience is intoxicating; and Clara was a little intoxicated as she stepped from the platform. People were crowding about her; a girl wanted an autograph; the editor of the local paper wanted an interview; a gentleman in a clerical coat wanted to know if she were sure that Tertullian had called woman the gateway to hell, and an old lady wanted her to write down the quotation from Sir George Saville's advice to his daughter. She was the center of a pressing congratulatory group, when her eyes fell upon a telegram unopened in the hand of her uncle--a telegram for her.

“Please come home—Stephen.”

She began to cry from pure joy. All the tension and the horrors and the pain of the last months were gone. She pushed her way quickly into a little anteroom, where she could be alone. Everyone thought she had had bad news.

Her uncle followed her, and she gave him the little buff-colored sheet, with its line of dark blue typewriting.

He read it slowly, and nodded. “Let me see—six weeks more, is it? Or Stephen might come out and join you.”

“Join me?”

“Well, you can't break your contract.”

She laughed like a child—from joy, that is, not mirth. “Nothing but the police,” she answered, “can keep me from taking the midnight train.”

Joyce looked at her with unusual seriousness. “My dear, he said, “you are wrong. You have undertaken a piece of work and you must put it through, not only on account of your contract, but on account of your own character. I am delighted that you and your husband are going to take up again a life that made you both so happy, but you must take it up the right way. Telegraph Stephen explaining why it is you cannot come home until—”

Illustration: “I love you so much,” she said, “that I cannot accept something you give to Frieda, to Emily, to almost any woman you meet. I must have your love.”

“I promised to come when he sent for me,” she answered “And do you think that I could stand on platforms talking to other people while Stephen wanted me at home?”

“He'll want you none the less for having to wait a little for you.”

“Oh, we are long past those tricks, Uncle dear.”

“Nobody is past those tricks, my child. It isn't in order to heighten Stephen's wish for you. I'm sure that's there. It's for your own dignity as a woman. Do you think in similar circumstances Stephen wouldn't telegraph you that business detained him?”

“His business would be more important than this ridiculous tour of mine.”

“That is what so many men contrive to make women think.”

He made no impression on her; his theories about the position of women seemed to have but little to do with her own unique relation to Stephen. She started on her long journey home that very night, leaving her uncle to explain to the impresario that she would pay him anything he said, but that he would never see her again.

Professor's Joyce's actual explanation was not quite so sweeping. He said that his niece had been called home by sudden illness, but that she would be back as soon as possible. He thought he might follow this with news of a death in the family, and so reduce the financial penalty of such femininely irresponsible conduct.

CLARA had not sent a telegram announcing her return, for she knew that her husband would not be in any uncertainty. But when she arrived at the Grand Central, she looked enviously at the kissing couples whom her train had reunited. At her own house the man who opened the door, said that Mr. Scarth had not come in yet. She was almost relieved to have an instant to get accustomed to her surroundings once again. The man added that Miss Scarth was in the drawing-room, and there she found Emily in hat and gloves, sitting behind Clara's own tea-table. She sprang up with a cry of surprise.

“Clara! Where in the world did you spring from?”

“Stephen did not tell you he had sent for me?”

“No, but I haven't seen him for a day or two. I knew he was worried. I saw something was stirring in his mind. And to think what you have been doing! Didn't I tell you. I have so often thought of that school valedictory and my own brilliant prophesies.”

The New York papers, it appeared, had been giving a somewhat over-colored account of the lecture-tour—of the immense audiences, the riotous applause, the doors closed to men. Clara was glad to be able to put Emily right on these points. Of course, it had been fun. She found her sister-in-law very sympathetic, as sympathetic as she could have found anyone whose absence she ardently desired. At last she sent Emily away. Miss Scarth rose reluctantly.

“I want to hear ever so much more,” she said. “You know I approve. I approved even when it all sounded so black.”

Clara understood her tone.

“You mean that Stephen didn't?”

“You couldn't expect him to be pleased. You know the great masculine terror.”

Clara smiled. Emily's vein was so unchanged. “No, what is it,” she asked.

“That their womenkind will make fools of themselves in public.”

When Emily was gone, she moved about the beloved room, touching the familiar objects, for which she had been so homesick. She had hoped that to be alone would calm her, but instead she became more aware of the miracle about to happen—Stephen would presently be there.

By the time she heard him on the stairs, she had reached such a state of emotion that she could not speak, could hardly look at him. She flung herself into his arms and huddled her face against his shoulder. There at least was solid comfort,—worth crossing a dozen continents for,—the tangible fact of him with his arms about her.

For perhaps a minute—for sixty brief seconds—she knew perfect peace and joy.

She looked up at him.

“You have missed me?” she said.

He smiled gently. “It would be odd if I hadn't.”

She was conscious of a little chill, but the next moment considered that she was taking the whole thing too emotionally. She moved away from him, wiped her eyes, sat down in her accustomed chair, and felt for her knitting-bag, which was hanging just where she had left it when she went away.

And at that moment the servant came in to say that Mr. Scarth was wanted on the telephone. She saw Stephen hesitate an instant, and then go to the telephone on the desk. She knew it was Frieda, even before he spoke.

As he turned from the telephone, she saw that he was ruffled.

“You won the suit?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, we won it. It gives her a large sum—not enough to live on. The firm would like to do something for her, but she's determined to earn her living.”

“Is not that a laudable desire?”

“I suppose so. I want her to study kindergarten,—a position in certain schools or even in some families as governess,—but she will not hear of it. She knows a little stenography, and she is absolutely fixed on going downtown.”

“I think I agree with her.”

“My dear, you are very ignorant of business life; a girl is absolutely without shelter—”

“Oh, Stephen, there are terrible dangers for women who choose to be sheltered.”

“Women go into these adventures like blind babies on a battlefield,” he went on, “and some man who loves them has to stand by with his hands folded.”

Clara stood up. “Are you thinking of me?” she said.

“Of course, I'm thinking of you,” he answered. “Oh, my dear, it's all over now, but have you ever thought of me all these months?”

“Have I thought of you, Stephen? I've thought of nothing else.”

“Then you must have some conception of what I've been through—a thousand miles away, and knowing that my wife, inexperienced and innocent, was standing on a platform, saying any damned thing that came into her head—”

“Is that why you telegraphed for me?”

“Isn't that enough?”

“Stephen, you broke your word. You promised to send for me only when you wanted me to come.”

“I did want you to come. I never opened a newspaper without a terror that something hideous might have happened to you.”

“You used my love for you to make me do what you thought best?”

“I was justified in using any power I had, Clara.”

She looked at him for a long time; then she said. “I shall go back and go on with what I was doing.”

“Clara, you don't think I am trying to use my authority over you? It isn't that. I am thinking only of you—of what is best for you.”

“I shall go back,” she repeated.

“You want to leave me?”

“It kills me to leave you, but I cannot live with you just because you think I will be safer at home. I cannot stay with you unless you love me, Stephen.”

“I do love you, Clara,” he answered in one of the many tones that can make the phrase mean the exact opposite of what it says.

She walked to the door, and there turned and faced him. “I love you so much,” she said, “that I cannot accept something you give to Frieda, to Emily, to almost any woman you meet. I must have your love, not your instinct of protection.”

“I don't understand you,” he said. And again his tone expressed the opposite. Some new conception was dawning in his mind. While he stood wondering at it, she opened the door and went out.