Sylvia's Marriage

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by Upton Sinclair

caught a glimpse of my husband's face!"

  12. I did not hear these stories all at once. I have put them

  together here because they make a little picture of her honeymoon,

  and also because they show how, without meaning it, she was giving

  me an account of her husband.

  There had been even fewer adventures in the life of young Douglas

  van Tuiver than in the life of the Honourable Reginald Annersley.

  When one heard the details of the up-bringing of this "millionaire

  baby," one was able to forgive him for being self-centred. He had

  grown into a man who lived to fulfil his social duties, and he had

  taken to wife a girl who was reckless, high-spirited, with a streak

  of almost savage pride in her.

  Sylvia's was the true aristocratic attitude towards the rest of the

  world. It could never have occurred to her to imagine that anywhere

  upon the whole earth there were people superior to the Castlemans of

  Castleman County. If you had been ignorant enough to suggest such an

  idea, you would have seen her eyes flash and her nostrils quiver;

  you would have been enveloped in a net of bewilderment and

  transfixed with a trident of mockery and scorn. That was what she

  had done in her husband-hunt. The trouble was that van Tuiver was

  not clever enough to realise this, and to trust her prowess against

  other beasts in the social jungle.

  Strange to me were such inside glimpses into the life of these two

  favourites of the gods! I never grew weary of speculating about

  them, and the mystery of their alliance. How had Sylvia come to make

  this marriage? She was not happy with him; keen psychologist that

  she was, she must have foreseen that she would not be happy with

  him. Had she deliberately sacrificed herself, because of the good

  she imagined she could do to her family?

  I was beginning to believe this. Irritated as she was by the solemn

  snobberies of van Tuiver's world, it was none the less true that she

  believed in money; she believed in it with a faith which appalled me

  as I came to realise it. Everybody had to have money; the social

  graces, the aristocratic virtues were impossible without it. The

  rich needed it--even the poor needed it! Could it be that the proud

  Castlemans of Castleman County had needed it also?

  If that guess at her inmost soul was correct, then what a drama was

  her meeting with me! A person who despised money, who had proven it

  by grim deeds--and this a person of her own money-worshipping sex!

  What was the meaning of this phenomenon--this new religion that was

  challenging the priesthood of Mammon? So some Roman consul's

  daughter might have sat in her father's palace, and questioned in

  wonder a Christian slave woman, destined ere long to face the lions

  in the arena.

  The exactness of this simile was not altered by the fact that in

  this case the slave woman was an agnostic, while the patrician girl

  had been brought up in the creed of Christ. Sylvia had long since

  begun to question the formulas of a church whose very pews were

  rented, and whose existence, she declared, had to be justified by

  charity to the poor. As we sat and talked, she knew this one thing

  quite definitely--that I had a religion, and she had none. That was

  the reason for the excitement which possessed her.

  Nor was that fact ever out of my own mind for a moment. As she sat

  there in her sun-flooded morning-room, clad in an exquisite

  embroidered robe of pink Japanese silk, she was such a lovely thing

  that I was ready to cry out for joy of her; and yet there was

  something within me, grim and relentless, that sat on guard, warning

  me that she was of a different faith from mine, and that between

  those two faiths there could be no compromise. Some day she must

  find out what I thought of her husband's wealth, and the work it was

  doing in the world! Some day she must hear my real opinion of the

  religion of motor-cars and hand-woven carpets!

  13. Nor was the day so very far off. She sat opposite me, leaning

  forward in her eagerness, declaring: "You must help to educate me. I

  shall never rest until I'm of some real use in the world."

  "What have you thought of doing?" I inquired.

  "I don't know yet. My husband has an aunt who's interested in a

  day-nursery for the children of working-women. I thought I might

  help this, but my husband says it does no good whatever--it only

  makes paupers of the poor. Do you think so?"

  "I think more than that," I replied. "It sets women free to compete

  with men, and beat down men's wages."

  "Oh, what a puzzle!" she exclaimed, and then: "Is there any way of

  helping the poor that wouldn't be open to the same objection?"

  That brought us once more to the subject I had put aside at our last

  meeting. She had not forgotten it, and asked again for an

  explanation. What did I mean by the competitive wage system?

  My purpose in this writing is to tell the story of Sylvia

  Castleman's life, to show, not merely what she was, but what she

  became. I have to make real to you a process of growth in her soul,

  and at this moment the important event is her discovery of the

  class-struggle and her reaction to it. You may say, perhaps, that

  you are not interested in the class-struggle, but you cannot alter

  the fact that you live in an age when millions of people are having

  the course of their lives changed by the discovery of it. Here, for

  instance, is a girl who has been taught to keep her promises, and

  has promised to love, honour and obey a man; she is to find the task

  more difficult, because she comes to understand the competitive

  wage-system while he does not understand it and does not wish to.

  If that seems to you strange material out of which to make a

  domestic drama, I can only tell you that you have missed some of the

  vital facts of your own time.

  I gave her a little lesson in elementary economics. I showed her

  how, when a capitalist needed labour, he bought it in the open

  market, like any other commodity. He did not think about the human

  side of it, he paid the market-price, which came to be what the

  labourer had to have in order to live. No labourer could get more,

  because others would take less.

  "If that be true," I continued, "one of the things that follows is

  the futility of charity. Whatever you do for the wage-worker on a

  general scale comes sooner or later out of his wages. If you take

  care of his children all day or part of the day, he can work for

  less; if he doesn't discover that someone else does, and underbids

  him and takes his place. If you feed his children at school, if you

  bury him free, if you insure his life, or even give him a dinner on

  Christmas Day, you simply enable his landlord to charge him more, or

  his employer to pay him less."

  Sylvia sat for a while in thought, and then asked: "What can be done

  about such a fact?"

  "The first thing to be done is to make sure that you understand it.

  Nine-tenths of the people who concern themselves with social

  questions don't, and
so they waste their time in futilities. For

  instance, I read the other day an article by a benevolent old

  gentleman who believed that the social problem could be solved by

  teaching the poor to chew their food better, so that they would eat

  less. You may laugh at that, but it's not a bit more absurd than the

  idea of our men of affairs, that the thing to do is to increase the

  efficiency of the workers, and so produce more goods."

  "You mean the working-man doesn't get more, even when he produces

  more?"

  "Take the case of the glass factories. Men used to get eight dollars

  a day there, but someone invented a machine that did the work of a

  dozen men, and that machine is run by a boy for fifty cents a day."

  A little pucker of thought came between her eyes. "Might there not

  be a law forbidding the employer to reduce wages?"

  "A minimum wage law. But that would raise the cost of the product,

  and drive the trade to another state."

  She suggested a national law, and when I pointed out that the trade

  would go to other countries, she fell back on the tariff. I felt

  like an embryologist--watching the individual repeating the history

  of the race!

  "Protection and prosperity!" I said, with a smile. "Don't you see

  the increase in the cost of living? The working-man gets more money

  in his pay envelope, but he can't buy more with it because prices go

  up. And even supposing you could pass a minimum wage law, and stop

  competition in wages, you'd only change it to competition in

  efficiency--you'd throw the old and the feeble and the untrained

  into pauperism."

  "You make the world seem a hard place to live in," protested Sylvia.

  "I'm simply telling you the elementary facts of business. You can

  forbid the employer to pay less than a standard wage, but you can't

  compel him to employ people who aren't able to earn that wage. The

  business-man doesn't employ for fun, he does it for the profit there

  is in it."

  "If that is true," said Sylvia, quickly, "then the way of employing

  people is cruel."

  "But what other way could you have?"

  She considered. "They could be employed so that no one would make a

  profit. Then surely they could be paid enough to live decently!"

  "But whose interest would it be to employ them without profit?"

  "The State should do it, if no one else will."

  I had been playing a game with Sylvia, as no doubt you have

  perceived. "Surely," I said, "you wouldn't approve anything like

  that!"

  "But why not?"

  "Because, it would be Socialism."

  She looked at me startled. "Is that Socialism?"

  "Of course it is. It's the essence of Socialism."

  "But then--what's the harm in it?"

  I laughed. "I thought you said that Socialism was a menace, like

  divorce!"

  I had my moment of triumph, but then I discovered how fond was the

  person who imagined that he could play with Sylvia. "I suspect you

  are something of a Socialist yourself," she remarked.

  She told me a long time afterwards what had been her emotions during

  these early talks. It was the first time in her life that she had

  ever listened to ideas that were hostile to her order, and she did

  so with tremblings and hesitations, combating at every step an

  impulse to flee to the shelter of conventionality. She was more

  shocked by my last revelation than she let me suspect. It counted

  for little that I had succeeded in trapping her in proposing for

  herself the economic programme of Socialism, for what terrifies her

  class is not our economic programme, it is our threat of

  slave-rebellion. I had been brought up in a part of the world where

  democracy is a tradition, a word to conjure with, and I supposed

  that this would be the case with any American--that I would only

  have to prove that Socialism was democracy applied to industry. How

  could I have imagined the kind of "democracy" which had been taught

  to Sylvia by her Uncle Mandeville, the politician of the family, who

  believed that America was soon to have a king, to keep the "foreign

  riff-raff" in its place!

  14. At this time I was living in a three-roomed apartment in one of

  the new "model tenements" on the East Side. I had a saying about the

  place, that it was "built for the proletariat and occupied by

  cranks." What an example for Sylvia of the futility of charity--the

  effort on the part of benevolent capitalists to civilise the poor by

  putting bath-tubs in their homes, and the discovery that the

  graceless creatures were using them for the storage of coals!

  Having heard these strange stories, Sylvia was anxious to visit me,

  and I was, of course, glad to invite her. I purchased a fancy brand

  of tea, and some implements for the serving of it, and she came, and

  went into raptures over my three rooms and bath, no one of which

  would have made more than a closet in her own apartments. I

  suspected that this was her Southern _noblesse oblige_, but I knew

  also that in my living room there were some rows of books, which

  would have meant more to Sylvia van Tuiver just then than the

  contents of several clothes-closets.

  I was pleased to discover that my efforts had not been wasted. She

  had been thinking, and she had even found time, in the midst of her

  distractions, to read part of a book. In the course of our talks I

  had mentioned Veblen, and she had been reading snatches of his work

  on the Leisure Class, and I was surprised, and not a little amused,

  to observe her reaction to it.

  When I talked about wages and hours of labour, I was dealing with

  things that were remote from her, and difficult to make real; but

  Veblen's theme, the idle rich, and the arts and graces whereby they

  demonstrate their power, was the stuff of which her life was made.

  The subtleties of social ostentation, the minute distinctions

  between the newly-rich and the anciently-rich, the solemn

  certainties of the latter and the quivering anxieties of the

  former--all those were things which Sylvia knew as a bird knows the

  way of the wind. To see the details of them analysed in learned,

  scientific fashion, explained with great mouthfuls of words which

  one had to look up in the dictionary--that was surely a new

  discovery in the book-world! "Conspicuous leisure!" "Vicarious

  consumption of goods!" "Oh, de-ah me, how que-ah!" exclaimed Sylvia.

  And what a flood of anecdotes it let loose! A flood that bore us

  straight back to Castleman Hall, and to all the scenes of her young

  ladyhood! If only Lady Dee could have revised this book of Veblen's,

  how many points she could have given to him! No details had been too

  minute for the technique of Sylvia's great-aunt--the difference

  between the swish of the right kind of silk petticoats and the wrong

  kind; and yet her technique had been broad enough to take in a

  landscape. "Every girl should have a background," had been one of

  her maxims, and Sylvia had to have a special phaeton to drive, a

  special horse to ride, special roses which no on
e else was allowed

  to wear.

  "Conspicuous expenditure of time," wrote Veblen. It was curious,

  said Sylvia, but nobody was free from this kind of vanity. There was

  dear old Uncle Basil, a more godly bishop never lived, and yet he

  had a foible for carving! In his opinion the one certain test of a

  gentleman was the ease with which he found the joints of all kinds

  of meat, and he was in arms against the modern tendency to turn such

  accomplishments over to butlers. He would hold forth on the subject,

  illustrating his theories with an elegant knife, and Sylvia

  remembered how her father and the Chilton boys had wired up the

  joints of a duck for the bishop to work on. In the struggle the

  bishop had preserved his dignity, but lost the duck, and the

  bishop's wife, being also high-born, and with a long line of

  traditions behind her, had calmly continued the conversation, while

  the butler removed the smoking duck from her lap!

  Such was the way of things at Castleman Hall! The wild, care-free

  people--like half-grown children, romping their way through life!

  There was really nothing too crazy for them to do, if the whim

  struck them. Once a visiting cousin had ventured the remark that she

  saw no reason why people should not eat rats; a barn-rat was clean

  in its person, and far choicer in its food than a pig. Thereupon

  "Miss Margaret" had secretly ordered the yard-man to secure a

  barn-rat; she had had it broiled, and served in a dish of squirrels,

  and had sat by and watched the young lady enjoy it! And this, mind

  you, was Mrs. Castleman of Castleman Hall, mother of five children,

  and as stately a dame as ever led the grand march at the Governor's

  inaugural ball! "Major Castleman," she would say to her husband,

  "you may take me into my bedroom, and when you have locked the door

  securely, you may spit upon me, if you wish; but don't you dare even

  to _imagine_ anything undignified about me in public!"

  15. In course of time Sylvia and I became very good friends. Proud

  as she was, she was lonely, and in need of some one to open her

  eager mind to. Who was there safer to trust than this plain Western

  woman, who lived so far, both in reality and in ideas, from the

  great world of fashion?

  Before we parted she considered it necessary to mention my

  relationship to this world. She had a most acute social conscience.

  She knew exactly what formalities she owed to everyone, just when

  she ought to call, and how long she ought to stay, and what she

  ought to ask the other person to do in return; she assumed that the

  other knew it all exactly as well, and would suffer if she failed in

  the slightest degree.

  So now she had to throw herself upon my mercy. "You see," she

  explained, "my husband wouldn't understand. I may be able to change

  him gradually, but if I shock him all at once--"

  "My dear Mrs. van Tuiver--" I smiled.

  "You can't really imagine!" she persisted. "You see, he takes his

  social position so seriously! And when you are conspicuous--when

  everybody's talking about what you do--when everything that's the

  least bit unusual is magnified--"

  "My dear girl!" I broke in again. "Stop a moment and let me talk!"

  "But I hate to have to think--"

  "Don't worry about my thoughts! They are most happy ones! You must

  understand that a Socialist cannot feel about such things as you do;

  we work out our economic interpretation of them, and after that they

  are simply so much data to us. I might meet one of your great

  friends, and she might snub me, but I would never think she had

  snubbed _me_--it would be my Western accent, and my forty-cent hat,

  and things like that which had put me in a class in her mind. My

  real self nobody can snub--certainly not until they've got at it."

  "Ah!" said Sylvia, with shining eyes. "You have your own kind of

  aristocracy, I see!"

 

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