A Man's World

Although she wrote so much about people, the characters she described never seemed human to me. She did not understand the interpretive power of a background. Her outlook was extremely individualistic. Auguste Compte wrote somewhere that there is much more of the dead past in us than of the present generation. I would go further and say that there is much more of the present generation in us than there is of ourselves. If we stripped off the influence of our homes, of our friends, of the contempore books we read, of our thousand and one social obligations, there would be precious little left of us. Ann carried this stripping process so far that even Pasteur, for whom she had the warmest admiration, seemed to me a dead mechanism.

She never referred to our personal relations, never spoke of returning to America. And I avoided these subjects in my answers. I was afraid of them.

I thought about her frequently and almost always with passion. I dreamed about her. Fixed somewhere in my brain was a very definite feeling that such emotions ought not to exist apart from love. I was not in love with Ann. Her letters rarely interested me. It was a task to answer them. Our contacts with life were utterly different.

I kept to the "forms" of chastity. There are those who believe that there is some virtue in preserving forms. I have never felt so. It did not require much effort to keep to this manner of life. I was constantly observing prostitution from the view-point of the Tombs. And to anyone who saw these women, as I did, in their ultimate misery and degradation, they could excite nothing but pity. There is no part of the whole problem of crime so utterly nauseating. Although I held myself back from what is called "vice," the state of my mind in those days was not pleasant, – and I think it was not healthy. It was no particular comfort for me to learn that other men, living, as I was, in outward purity, were also tormented by erotic dreams.

Shortly after we moved into the Teepee a letter came from Ann which was bulkier than usual. The first pages were a statement of new plans. An American doctor, who had been working with Pasteur, was returning to establish a bacteriological laboratory in this country. He had offered her a good salary to come with him as his chief assistant. The laboratory was to be built in Cromley, a Jersey suburb, thirty minutes from the city. As soon as it was ready she was coming. It would be interesting, responsible work and she could make a home for her mother who was becoming infirm.

The rest, pages and pages, was a love letter. Every night, these years of separation – so she wrote – had been filled with dreams of me. As always she put her work above her love. Bacteriology was the great fact of her life. She held it a treason to reality when, as so often happens, people lose their sense of proportion and allow love to usurp the place of graver things. But now that her work brought her towards her love, she looked forward to a fuller life – a life adorned.

The letter brought a great unrest. Her passionate call to me certainly found an echo. I lost much sleep – tormented, intoxicated with the images her words called up. Years before an immense loneliness had pushed me into the comfort of her arms. This was no longer the case. My life was full, almost over-full of work and friends. But the pull towards her seemed even more irresistible now than before.

Marriage seemed to me the only worthy solution. But even more clearly than in the hospital days I knew I did not want to marry her. It was, I suppose, above all because I did not love her. It was partly because I liked my bachelor freedom, the coming and going without reference to anyone. It was partly my deep attachment to Norman. I felt he would not care for Ann. Anyway it would break up our household in the Teepee.

At last a letter came setting the date of her arrival. It coincided with a long-standing engagement I had made to lecture on criminology in a western college. I had an entirely cowardly sense of relief in the realization that the meeting and adjustment were postponed. But I thought of little else. Returning from my lectures, on the long ride across half the continent, with the knowledge that Ann was awaiting me in the city, that I could postpone things no longer, I won to a decision. I would see her at the earliest convenience – it seemed more straightforward to see her than to write – and tell her that I did not wish to recommence our intimacy. I might not be able to explain why I wanted to break with her, but I could at least make it plain that I did.

On my return, I found a letter waiting me in the Teepee. It contained her telephone number and a query as to when I could come out for dinner. I called her up at once. I would come that very day. The train out to Cromley seemed perversely slow. I was impatient to be through with it, to get back undisturbed to my work. It was only a short walk from the station to her house. The row of gingerbread cottages along her street is one of the fixtures of my memories.

Ann opened the door for me. She held me out at arm's length a minute.

"Woof!" she said, "You've grown old." Then she gave me a sudden kiss. "Come. You must meet Mother."

In the little parlor, Mrs. Barton greeted me cordially. She was a tall, angular New England woman, dried up in body, but her eyes were still young. I have seen many women like her down Cape Cod way. But her presence threw me into as much confusion as if she had been some threatening sort of an ogress. I could not fight out this matter with Ann before her mother. And some instinct warned me that I must plunge into my subject at once, if I wished to do it at all.

"Dinner is ready," Ann said in the midst of my embarrassment.

"This is my little grandson, William," Mrs. Barton said of a tow-headed youngster, of three, who caught hold of her skirt.

Ann picked him up.

"Can't you shake hands like a gentleman, Billy Boy?" she asked. "No? Well, you don't have to."

She swung him into a high chair opposite mine. I have never been more embarrassed in my life. It was all so different from what I had foreseen. I suppose I had expected some heroics. It was entirely common-place. It was hard to keep in mind that a big moral issue was at stake. Mrs. Barton was evidently taking my measure. And "Billy Boy" glared at me across the table out of his big, inane, blue eyes.

Ann did the talking, telling us of the wonders of her new laboratory and something of the personality of her chief. She looked younger than when she went away. She had filled out considerably and her face had lost the oldish, narrow look which I remembered. She had that surety of gesture and tone which comes only to those who have found the work they are fitted to. Above all she seemed happy, and contented and merry. Each glance I stole at her told me it would be harder than I had thought to keep my resolution. It was impossible to look at "Billy Boy," he would have stared the Sphinx out of countenance. So I gave most of my attention to Mrs. Barton.

When the dinner was over, we moved into the parlor for coffee. In a few minutes Mrs. Barton took the youngster to bed. The door had hardly closed behind them when Ann's arms were about me. There was a broken flood of words. I do not remember what she said. But somehow it seemed as if I were saying it myself, so wonderfully her words expressed my own longings. A great happiness had fallen upon me. Perhaps this passion was not right, perhaps it was neither moral nor wise, but it was overwhelmingly a part of me. It would have been utter self-repudiation to deny it.

In the morning I again asked Ann to marry me. It was my last ditch.

"Don't," she said, "dearest, don't talk of marriage. Why? Why do you want to take our love into a courthouse? Once for all – let's fight this out and be finished with it."

It was all very clear to her. Promises of love were futile. She had loved once before, had thought it would last forever. She was glad there had been no promises.

"I'm older now – not so likely to change – but why go to law about it? Why do you want to marry me? Isn't it partly because some people – perhaps your own family – would be shocked at a free love union? Well, haven't I a right to think of my people? My sister, who's dead, Billy's mother – she didn't think it was necessary to have a wedding ring and all that. My people would be grieved if I got married. They'd think I'd conformed – gone back on my principles. It would break mother's heart. It would seem like a repudiation of her way of living. And she's the finest mother anyone ever had. Even if I didn't believe in free love, I'd never get married on her account."

Despite what Ann told me I was decidedly embarrassed to meet her mother at breakfast. But when we appeared, Mrs. Barton kissed me. Her hands on my shoulders, she searched my face with her eyes.

"Ann loves you very much, my boy," she said. "Be good to her."

The breakfast was a far pleasanter meal than the dinner had been. Even Billy Boy's stare was not quite so hostile.

Yet as I rode into town on the early train my scruples came back. To be sure I had very little respect for the "sanctity" of formal marriage. I had seen too much of it in the Tombs. Certainly no amount of legal or religious ceremony is a guarantee of bliss or even of common decency. The minor marriage failures are attended to in the civil divorce courts. The domestic difficulties which are threshed out in the criminal courts show very clearly that there is no magic in church ritual to transform a brute into a good husband. Ten wedding rings will not change an alcoholic woman into a good mother. And then I was always witnessing "forced" marriages. Such was the cheap and easy solution in cases of seduction and rape in the second degree. Our law givers have decreed eighteen as the age of consent. The seduction of a girl under that arbitrary age is rape. Most of our grandmothers were married earlier. But the law is too majestic a thing to consider such details. It deals with general principles. If it has been flouted, Justice must be done though the heavens fall. However, it is an expensive matter to send a man to prison. So he is offered the alternative of marrying the girl. Justice gives no heed to the morality nor happiness of the two young people who have fallen in trouble, cares not at all for the next generation. Send the guilty couple to the altar. Their sins are forgiven them. The conventions have been vindicated. The juggernaut is appeased. No. I was very little impressed with the virtue of "legal" marriage.

But I had a strong, if rather indefinite, ideal of a "true" marriage, a real mating, a close copartnership, a community of interest and a comradely growth, sanctified by a mutual passion. I saw no chance of this in my relation to Ann.

At the Tombs that day, I tried, and to a large extent succeeded, in forgetting the problem. But back in the Teepee, at dinner with Norman, it seized me again. Even Guiseppe noticed my preoccupation and walked about on tiptoe.

"What's eating you?" Norman asked as we drank our coffee. "Any way I can lend a hand?"

"A woman," I said.

"That lets me out." And after a while he muttered "Hell."

"What do you think," I asked – suddenly resolved to get an outside opinion – "about one's right to be intimate with a woman, outside of marriage?"

"I don't think about it at all," he snapped. "Not nowadays. Time was when I didn't think of much else. It didn't do me any good. The times are rotten – out of joint. Everything we do is out of joint – inevitably. Ninety per cent of us want to do what's right and as it is ninety-nine per cent of us ball things up. I don't think much of marriage. I tried it once – divorced."

This was news to me.

"I don't like to talk about it. No use now. It was a miserable affair. I tried to be decent – did all I knew how to make it right. But I guess the girl suffered more than I did – which is one of the reasons why I hate God. Some people tumble into happiness – but it seems luck to me – pure luck."

I cannot recall that evening's talk in detail. Norman was unusually reticent. It was only by questions that I could draw him out.

"What do you think about free love?" I asked.

"It's a contradiction in terms. There's nothing free about love. It's tying oneself up in the tightest kind of a knot. A man will not only work his fingers off for the woman he loves – he'll have his hair cut the way she likes. A person in love doesn't want to be free. The hell of it is when the slavery continues after the love is dead. Don't try to free love – what's needed is the emancipation of the loveless."

We were silent for a while, very much distressed that we could find no solid anchorage. I was about to ask some other question when he broke out again on his own line of thought.

"Abolishing marriage won't do it. These Anarchists are naïve. They want to make things simple – say free love would simplify the matter. But all progress – all evolution – is towards more complex forms. Our brains are better than monkey brains because they're more complex. This "simple life" talk is rank reaction. I don't want to see laws abolished, but brought up to date. Civilization means ever increasing complexity in the forms of life. And we try to govern it by Roman law, plus a hodge podge of mediæval common law. Not less laws – but modern laws."

For a while his mind played about this idea, then he ended the discussion abruptly.

"Why put your problem up to me? As far as solving the man and woman question goes, my life has been a miserable failure. No matter what you do, whether you quit or go ahead – unless you're lucky as hell – you'll wish you were a eunuch before you're through."

So I got little help from him in this matter. I never really settled it. More or less it settled itself. There were forces at work which were stronger than my scruples. Sometimes it seemed horribly wrong to me and I decided not to go back to Cromley. But as the days passed I began to think more and more of Ann. Sooner or later I telephoned. I did not surrender without many struggles. But gradually she became an accepted fact in my life and with the years an increasingly valued fact. I am not proud of the moral indecisions, not at all proud of my contentment with what seemed less than perfect. But so it was.

Nothing in my life has seemed to me of so uncertain ethical value. Of course it was a violation of our traditional morality, but there are very few who blindly accept the conventions as always binding. I cannot dismiss it offhand as simply right or wrong; my own judgment in the matter was swung back and forth with almost the regularity of a pendulum.

At first it seemed to me unfair to take so much more than I could give. But after all I think little is gained by trying to treat love like merchandise, by trying to measure and weigh it. Certainly Ann would have been glad if I had loved her more wholly. But she regarded that as a work of fate, which no amount of wishing – by either of us – could change. She would have run away if our intimacy had begun to interfere with her work. She threw herself into her specialty with a wholeheartedness I have never seen equalled. Once I asked her if she had no desire for children.

"Of course I have," she said, "but sometimes I've wanted the moon to wear in my hair. I'd like to live till I could see the triumph of medicine. I'd like to be a pall-bearer at the funeral of the last malignant germ. I'd like a yacht. I never went sailing but once – and it was very wonderful. But I don't want any of these things in the same way I want to work."

She was not entirely satisfied. Who is? She had been taught contempt for the cheap respectability we could have secured for a small fee from a justice of the peace. I think she got as much happiness out of our relationship as most women do from their home lives. I cannot picture her as getting any added pleasure out of sewing buttons onto my clothes or darning my hose. No doubt there were lonely evenings when she wished the fates had given her a more ordinary life and a husband who came home regularly. Although she never complained, I knew that it hurt her if the rush of other – to me more important – affairs kept me in town when she was expecting me. But she would have been more unhappy if she had been in love with a man who interfered in the least in her freedom. It does not seem so unfair to me now as it did at first. We were neither of us getting all we could dream of. But no more was either of us ready to give up the half loaf.

And "half loaf" seems a very inadequate term for my share. I find myself trying to "argue" about this – I am rather vexed by things I cannot call either black or white. But so much of it was utterly unarguable. If we are, as some say, to judge life by the pleasure it brings us, Ann was beyond question the biggest and best thing in my life. I remember one Sunday in the late fall, we were afoot with the first streak of dawn; all day long we tramped through the Jersey mountains. The autumn coloring of the maple groves was unutterably gorgeous. Just at sunset, all the western sky brilliant with red and a hundred shades of hot orange – even more brilliant than the frost nipped leaves had been – we reached a little railroad station and so came back to Cromley and the roaring wood fire and New England supper Mother Barton had prepared for us. I would feel sorry for anyone to whom such a day would not seem glorious. But to me, living six long days a week in the seething slums, in the even gloomier shadow of the Tombs, such outings were a renewal of life, a rebirth.

And besides the evident pleasure of these holidays, Ann brought me a feeling of mental and physical wellbeing and healthfulness I had never before known. My grip on life was surer, my vision clearer, my store of energy was better adjusted, more economically utilized, because of her. I believe that a man, who says he cannot live in celibacy, is lying. But with equal emphasis, I believe that the circumstances which make it wise for a man or woman to live out their lives alone are extremely rare. The hours I spent at Cromley were recreation in the deepest sense of the word.

The rides into town on the early train stick in my mind as a memory apart from all the rest of my life. I seemed at those times to be in a higher mood than usual. Speeding into the city, to my grim task in the Tombs, from the sweet solace of her home, I found inspiration and hope for my daily grind. There was an entirely special sensation, experienced at no other time, when I found myself aboard the ferry, leaning over the fore-rail, watching the sky-scrapers struggle up through the morning mist. Perhaps all of us know some such exhilarating environment, which makes us exult in life and work and purpose. Standing forward on the upper deck, my lungs full of the sweet salt air of the harbor, some foolish association always recalls the lines from the speech of William Tell and makes me want to shout aloud – "Ye rocks and crags, I am with you once again."

None of the obvious objections to such an irregular relationship seem to me to have much weight in the face of the very real good it brought me. And yet – I cannot accept it without qualifications any more than I can condemn it. I have come to feel that its unsatisfactoriness was due to its fragmentary character. I cannot agree with Ann in her theory of keeping work and love apart. A man who divorces his religion from his business finds both of them suffer. I think the same rule holds for our problem. I did not enter in any way into Ann's work, nor she into mine. She gave me new energy for it, rested me from its weariness, but never was a part of it.

I think the fact that I can, in writing of my life, make one section deal with her and another with my work and very seldom mention both in the same paragraph, is the severest criticism which can be brought against our relationship.

III

Benson persuaded an editorial friend to publish as articles some of the lectures on criminology which I had delivered out west. A supreme court justice attempted to answer my criticisms of the judicial system and carelessly denied some patent facts. The newspapers made a nine days sensation out of our controversy. One effect of the discussion was to awaken the Prisoner's Aid Society to a realization that something ought to be done. In order to relieve themselves of this responsibility they proposed to employ me as their secretary in the place of an elderly gentleman who had held that position gratuitously – and sleepily – for twenty odd years. The offer did not, at first, attract me. My work in the Tombs held all my interest. Until Baldwin came along, I did not see any chance of real service with the society.

He was assistant superintendent of the state industrial school – a sort of intermediary prison for those offenders who were too young for state prisons and too old for the house of refuge. He had started out as a "screw" in Sing Sing, had been transferred to the state hospital for insane criminals and from there to the industrial school, where he had worked his way up to the position he then held. He really seemed to like the details of institutional management; he knew convicts and he was filled with a great enthusiasm over the possibility of reforming youthful offenders.

He saw my name in the papers, as one interested in criminology and he wrote to me about this enthusiasm of his. After several letters had been exchanged he came to the city so we might talk it over. We put him up at the Teepee. He was getting close to forty-five, but was the youngest man of that age I have ever known. Benson and I went over his project in detail. For three solid days we talked of nothing else. Although my work dealt chiefly with accused persons who were waiting trial, still I was always being brought face to face with the horrors of our convict prisons. The unspeakable stupidity of treating young boys as we mistreat old offenders has always seemed to me the crowning outrage of our civilization.

It is hard to realize today how revolutionary Baldwin's scheme for a reformatory then sounded. Only the most feeble and timid experiments in such matters had been tried. We were still in those dark ages, when orphan and destitute children were sent to jail.

The weak point in his proposal – as is the case with almost every reform – was the expense. The state paid about ten cents a day for the maintenance of its convicts, the per capita for the reformatory would be three or four times as much. Baldwin had foreseen this criticism and had collected endless figures to prove that it was only an apparent extravagance. One of the biggest elements in the cost of crime is the expense of "habitual offenders." Baldwin had the life-story of one man who was serving his twelfth term in state prison and he had figured out just how much this man's various crimes and arrests and trials and imprisonments had cost the community and how much cheaper it would have been to have spent enough to reform him while he was young. It was an impressive document. By a number of such tables he made a conclusive case. The greater expense of the reformatory, would be a real economy if he could save one third of the boys. He believed that two-thirds could be reformed. With the help of a constitutional lawyer he had crystallized his ideas into a bill, which he hoped to have introduced into the legislature.

As I have said, Norman and I gave three days close attention to the project. Baldwin had had much practical experience in such matters and had prepared his case admirably. The scheme looked feasible to us – as indeed it has since proved. We were all unsophisticated enough to believe that a good plan once explained to the people would be immediately accepted.

I went before the executive committee of the Prisoner's Aid Society and offered to accept the secretaryship, if they would pledge their support to Baldwin's bill. They could find no precedent for such a measure in their books on European penology and I doubt if I could have swung them into line single-handed. But Benson was one of their board of directors and they relied on him to meet their annual deficit. He was able to bring more potent arguments to bear than I.

By this time I had become a sort of established institution in the Tombs. With the exception of O'Neil, I had won the confidence of the judges. They were, within certain limits, well-intentioned men and they did not like to condemn young boys to the contagion of state prison any more than you or I would. I got their signatures to a letter endorsing the reformatory idea, and through them arranged with the district attorney for such leaves of absence as I would need.