Sylvia\'s Marriage
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Upton Sinclair >> Sylvia\'s Marriage
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SYLVIA'S MARRIAGE
SOME PRESS NOTICES
"The importance of the theme cannot be doubted, and no one hitherto
ignorant of the ravages of the evil and therefore, by implication,
in need of being convinced can refuse general agreement with Mr.
Sinclair upon the question as he argues it. The character that
matters most is very much alive and most entertaining."--_The Times._
"Very severe and courageous. It would, indeed, be difficult to deny
or extenuate the appalling truth of Mr. Sinclair's indictment."--
_The Nation._
"There is not a man nor a grown woman who would not be better for
reading Sylvia's Marriage."--_The Globe_
"Those who found Sylvia charming on her first appearance will find
her as beautiful and fascinating as ever."--_The Pall Mall.
"A novel that frankly is devoted to the illustration of the dangers
that society runs through the marriage of unsound men with
unsuspecting women. The time has gone by when any objection was
likely to be taken to a perfectly clean discussion of a nasty
subject."--_T.P.'s Weekly._
SYLVIA'S MARRIAGE
A NOVEL
BY
UPTON SINCLAIR
AUTHOR OF "THE JUNGLE," ETC., ETC.
LONDON
CONTENTS
BOOK I SYLVIA AS WIFE
BOOK II SYLVIA AS MOTHER
BOOK III SYLVIA AS REBEL
SYLVIA'S MARRIAGE
BOOK I
SYLVIA AS WIFE
1. I am telling the story of Sylvia Castleman. I should prefer to
tell it without mention of myself; but it was written in the book of
fate that I should be a decisive factor in her life, and so her
story pre-supposes mine. I imagine the impatience of a reader, who
is promised a heroine out of a romantic and picturesque "society"
world, and finds himself beginning with the autobiography of a
farmer's wife on a solitary homestead in Manitoba. But then I
remember that Sylvia found me interesting. Putting myself in her
place, remembering her eager questions and her exclamations, I am
able to see myself as a heroine of fiction.
I was to Sylvia a new and miraculous thing, a self-made woman. I
must have been the first "common" person she had ever known
intimately. She had seen us afar off, and wondered vaguely about us,
consoling herself with the reflection that we probably did not know
enough to be unhappy over our sad lot in life. But here I was,
actually a soul like herself; and it happened that I knew more than
she did, and of things she desperately needed to know. So all the
luxury, power and prestige that had been given to Sylvia Castleman
seemed as nothing beside Mary Abbott, with her modern attitude and
her common-sense.
My girlhood was spent upon a farm in Iowa. My father had eight
children, and he drank. Sometimes he struck me; and so it came about
that at the age of seventeen I ran away with a boy of twenty who
worked upon a neighbour's farm. I wanted a home of my own, and Tom
had some money saved up. We journeyed to Manitoba, and took out a
homestead, where I spent the next twenty years of my life in a
hand-to-hand struggle with Nature which seemed simply incredible to
Sylvia when I told her of it.
The man I married turned out to be a petty tyrant. In the first five
years of our life he succeeded in killing the love I had for him;
but meantime I had borne him three children, and there was nothing
to do but make the best of my bargain. I became to outward view a
beaten drudge; yet it was the truth that never for an hour did I
give up. When I lost what would have been my fourth child, and the
doctor told me that I could never have another, I took this for my
charter of freedom, and made up my mind to my course; I would raise
the children I had, and grow up with them, and move out into life
when they did.
This was when I was working eighteen hours a day, more than half of
it by lamp-light, in the darkness of our Northern winters. When the
accident came, I had been doing the cooking for half a dozen men,
who were getting in the wheat upon which our future depended. I fell
in my tracks, and lost my child; yet I sat still and white while the
men ate supper, and afterwards I washed up the dishes. Such was my
life in those days; and I can see before me the face of horror with
which Sylvia listened to the story. But these things are common in
the experience of women who live upon pioneer farms, and toil as the
slave-woman has toiled since civilization began.
We won out, and my husband made money. I centred my energies upon
getting school-time for my children; and because I had resolved that
they should not grow ahead of me, I sat up at night, and studied
their books. When the oldest boy was ready for high-school, we moved
to a town, where my husband had bought a granary business. By that
time I had become a physical wreck, with a list of ailments too
painful to describe. But I still had my craving for knowledge, and
my illness was my salvation, in a way--it got me a hired girl, and
time to patronize the free library.
I had never had any sort of superstition or prejudice, and when I
got into the world of books, I began quickly to find my way. I
travelled into by-paths, of course; I got Christian Science badly,
and New Thought in a mild attack. I still have in my mind what the
sober reader would doubtless consider queer kinks; for instance, I
still practice "mental healing," in a form, and I don't always tell
my secret thoughts about Theosophy and Spiritualism. But almost at
once I worked myself out of the religion I had been taught, and away
from my husband's politics, and the drugs of my doctors. One of the
first subjects I read about was health; I came upon a book on
fasting, and went away upon a visit and tried it, and came back home
a new woman, with a new life before me.
In all of these matters my husband fought me at every step. He
wished to rule, not merely my body, but my mind, and it seemed as if
every new thing that I learned was an additional affront to him. I
don't think I was rendered disagreeable by my culture; my only
obstinacy was in maintaining the right of the children to do their
own thinking. But during this time my husband was making money, and
filling his life with that. He remained in his every idea the
money-man, an active and bitter leader of the forces of greed in our
community; and when my studies took me to the inevitable end, and I
joined the local of the Socialist party in our town, it was to him
like a blow in the face. He never got over it, and I think that if
the children had not been on my side, he would have claimed the
Englishman's privilege of beating me with a stick not thicker than
his thumb. As it was, he retired into a sullen hypochondria, which
was so pitiful that in the end I came to regard him as not
responsible.
I went to a college town with my three children, and when they were
graduated, having meantime made sure that I could never do anything
but torment my husband, I set about getting a divorce. I had helped
to lay the foundation of his fortune, cementing it with my blood, I
might say, and I could fairly have laid claim to half what he had
brought from the farm; but my horror of the parasitic woman had
come to be such that rather than even seem to be one, I gave up
everything, and went out into the world at the age of forty-five to
earn my own living. My children soon married, and I would not be a
burden to them; so I came East for a while, and settled down quite
unexpectedly into a place as a field-worker for a child-labour
committee.
You may think that a woman so situated would not have been apt to
meet Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver, _née_ Castleman, and to be chosen for
her bosom friend; but that would only be because you do not know the
modern world. We have managed to get upon the consciences of the
rich, and they invite us to attend their tea-parties and disturb
their peace of mind. And then, too, I had a peculiar hold upon
Sylvia; when I met her I possessed the key to the great mystery of
her life. How that had come about is a story in itself, the thing I
have next to tell.
2. It happened that my arrival in New York from the far West
coincided with Sylvia's from the far South; and that both fell at a
time when there were no wars or earthquakes or football games to
compete for the front page of the newspapers. So everybody was
talking about the prospective wedding. The fact that the Southern
belle had caught the biggest prize among the city's young
millionaires was enough to establish precedence with the city's
subservient newspapers, which had proceeded to robe the grave and
punctilious figure of the bridegroom in the garments of King
Cophetua. The fact that the bride's father was the richest man in
his own section did not interfere with this--for how could
metropolitan editors be expected to have heard of the glories of
Castleman Hall, or to imagine that there existed a section of
America so self-absorbed that its local favourite would not feel
herself exalted in becoming Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver?
What the editors knew about Castleman Hall was that they wired for
pictures, and a man was sent from the nearest city to "snap" this
unknown beauty; whereupon her father chased the presumptuous
photographer and smashed his camera with a cane. So, of course, when
Sylvia stepped out of the train in New York, there was a whole
battery of cameras awaiting her, and all the city beheld her image
the next day.
The beginning of my interest in this "belle" from far South was when
I picked up the paper at my breakfast table, and found her gazing at
me, with the wide-open, innocent eyes of a child; a child who had
come from some fairer, more gracious world, and brought the memory
of it with her, trailing her clouds of glory. She had stepped from
the train into the confusion of the roaring city, and she stood,
startled and frightened, yet, I thought, having no more real idea of
its wickedness and horror than a babe in arms. I read her soul in
that heavenly countenance, and sat looking at it, enraptured, dumb.
There must have been thousands, even in that metropolis of Mammon,
who loved her from that picture, and whispered a prayer for her
happiness.
I can hear her laugh as I write this. For she would have it that I
was only one more of her infatuated lovers, and that her clouds of
glory were purely stage illusion. She knew exactly what she was
doing with those wide-open, innocent eyes! Had not old Lady Dee,
most cynical of worldlings, taught her how to use them when she was
a child in pig-tails? To be sure she had been scared when she
stepped off the train, and strange men had shoved cameras under her
nose. It was almost as bad as being assassinated! But as to her
heavenly soul--alas, for the blindness of men, and of sentimental
old women, who could believe in a modern "society" girl!
I had supposed that I was an emancipated woman when I came to New
York. But one who has renounced the world, the flesh and the devil,
knowing them only from pictures in magazines and Sunday supplements;
such a one may find that he has still some need of fasting and
praying. The particular temptation which overcame me was this
picture of the bride-to-be. I wanted to see her, and I went and
stood for hours in a crowd of curious women, and saw the wedding
party enter the great Fifth Avenue Church, and discovered that my
Sylvia's hair was golden, and her eyes a strange and wonderful
red-brown. And this was the moment that fate had chosen to throw
Claire Lepage into my arms, and give me the key to the future of
Sylvia's life.
3. I am uncertain how much I should tell about Claire Lepage. It is
a story which is popular in a certain sort of novel, but I have no
wish for that easy success. Towards Claire herself I had no trace of
the conventional attitude, whether of contempt or of curiosity. She
was to me the product of a social system, of the great New Nineveh
which I was investigating. And later on, when I knew her, she was a
weak sister whom I tried to help.
It happened that I knew much more about such matters than the
average woman--owing to a tragedy in my life. When I was about
twenty-five years old, my brother-in-law had moved his family to our
part of the world, and one of his boys had become very dear to me.
This boy later on had got into trouble, and rather than tell anyone
about it, had shot himself. So my eyes had been opened to things
that are usually hidden from my sex; for the sake of my own sons, I
had set out to study the underground ways of the male creature. I
developed the curious custom of digging out every man I met, and
making him lay bare his inmost life to me; so you may understand
that it was no ordinary pair of woman's arms into which Claire
Lepage was thrown.
At first I attributed her vices to her environment, but soon I
realized that this was a mistake; the women of her world do not as a
rule go to pieces. Many of them I met were free and independent
women, one or two of them intellectual and worth knowing. For the
most part such women marry well, in the worldly sense, and live as
contented lives as the average lady who secures her life-contract at
the outset. If you had met Claire at an earlier period of her
career, and if she had been concerned to impress you, you might have
thought her a charming hostess. She had come of good family, and
been educated in a convent--much better educated than many society
girls in America. She spoke English as well as she did French, and
she had read some poetry, and could use the language of idealism
whenever necessary. She had even a certain religious streak, and
could voice the most generous sentiments, and really believe that
she believed them. So it might have been some time before you
discovered the springs of her weakness.
In the beginning I blamed van Tuiver; but in the end I concluded
that for most of her troubles she had herself to thank--or perhaps
the ancestors who had begotten her. She could talk more nobly and
act more abjectly than any other woman I have ever known. She wanted
pleasant sensations, and she expected life to furnish them
continuously. Instinctively she studied the psychology of the person
she was dealing with, and chose a reason which would impress that
person.
At this time, you understand, I knew nothing about Sylvia Castleman
or her fiancé, except what the public knew. But now I got an inside
view--and what a view! I had read some reference to Douglas van
Tuiver's Harvard career: how he had met the peerless Southern
beauty, and had given up college and pursued her to her home. I had
pictured the wooing in the rosy lights of romance, with all the
glamour of worldly greatness. But now, suddenly, what a glimpse into
the soul of the princely lover! "He had a good scare, let me tell
you," said Claire. "He never knew what I was going to do from one
minute to the next."
"Did he see you in the crowd before the church door?" I inquired.
"No," she replied, "but he thought of me, I can promise you."
"He knew you were coming?"
She answered, "I told him I had got an admission card, just to make
sure he'd keep me in mind!"
4. I did not have to hear much more of Claire's story before making
up my mind that the wealthiest and most fashionable of New York's
young bachelors was a rather self-centred person. He had fallen
desperately in love with the peerless Southern beauty, and when she
had refused to have anything to do with him, he had come back to the
other woman for consolation, and had compelled her to pretend to
sympathize with his agonies of soul. And this when he knew that she
loved him with the intensity of a jealous nature.
Claire had her own view of Sylvia Castleman, a view for which I
naturally made due reservations. Sylvia was a schemer, who had known
from the first what she wanted, and had played her part with
masterly skill. As for Claire, she had striven to match her moves,
plotting in the darkness against her, and fighting desperately with
such weak weapons as she possessed. It was characteristic that she
did not blame herself for her failure; it was the baseness of van
Tuiver, his inability to appreciate sincere devotion, his
unworthiness of her love. And this, just after she had been naively
telling me of her efforts to poison his mind against Sylvia while
pretending to admire her! But I made allowances for Claire at this
moment--realizing that the situation had been one to overstrain any
woman's altruism.
She had failed in her subtleties, and there had followed scenes of
bitter strife between the two. Sylvia, the cunning huntress, having
pretended to relent, van Tuiver had gone South to his wooing again,
while Claire had stayed at home and read a book about the poisoners
of the Italian renaissance. And then had come the announcement of
the engagement, after which the royal conqueror had come back in a
panic, and sent embassies of his male friends to plead with Claire,
alternately promising her wealth and threatening her with
destitution, appealing to her fear, her cupidity, and even to her
love. To all of which I listened, thinking of the wide-open,
innocent eyes of the picture, and shedding tears within my soul. So
must the gods feel as they look down upon the affairs of mortals,
seeing how they destroy themselves by ignorance and folly, seeing
how they walk into the future as a blind man into a yawning abyss.
I gave, of course, due weight to the sneers of Claire. Perhaps the
innocent one really had set a trap--had picked van Tuiver out and
married him for his money. But even so, I could hope that she had
not known what she was doing. Surely it had never occurred to her
that through all the days of her triumph she would have to eat and
sleep with the shade of another woman at her side!
Claire said to me, not once, but a dozen times, "He'll come back to
me. She'll never be able to make him happy." And so I pictured
Sylvia upon her honeymoon, followed by an invisible ghost whose
voice she would never hear, whose name she would never know. All
that van Tuiver had learned from Claire, the sensuality, the
_ennin_, the contempt for woman--it would rise to torment and
terrify his bride, and turn her life to bitterness. And then beyond
this, deeps upon deeps, to which my imagination did not go--and of
which the Frenchwoman, with all her freedom of tongue, gave me no
more than a hint which I could not comprehend.
5. Claire Lepage at this time was desperately lonely and unhappy.
Having made the discovery that my arms were sturdy, used to doing a
man's work, she clung to them. She begged me to go home with her, to
visit her--finally to come and live with her. Until recently an
elderly companion, had posed as her aunt, and kept her respectable
while she was upon van Tuiver's yacht, and at his castle in
Scotland. But this companion had died, and now Claire had no one
with whom to discuss her soul-states.
She occupied a beautiful house on the West Side, not far from
Riverside Drive; and in addition to the use of this she had an
income of eight thousand a year--which was not enough to make
possible a chauffeur, nor even to dress decently, but only enough to
keep in debt upon. Such as the income was, however, she was willing
to share it with me. So there opened before me a new profession--
and a new insight into the complications of parasitism.
I went to see her frequently at first, partly because I was
interested in her and her associates, and partly because I really
thought I could help her. But I soon came to realize that
influencing Claire was like moulding water; it flowed back round
your hands, even while you worked. I would argue with her about the
physiological effects of alcohol, and when I had convinced her, she
would promise caution; but soon I would discover that my arguments
had gone over her head. I was at this time feeling my way towards my
work in the East. I tried to interest her in such things as social
reform, but realized that they had no meaning for her. She was
living the life of the pleasure-seeking idlers of the great
metropolis, and every time I met her it seemed to me that her
character and her appearance had deteriorated.
Meantime I picked up scraps of information concerning the van
Tuivers. There were occasional items in the papers, their yacht, the
"Triton," had reached the Azores; it had run into a tender in the
harbour of Gibraltar; Mr. and Mrs. van Tuiver had received the
honour of presentation at the Vatican; they were spending the season
in London, and had been presented at court; they had been royal
guests at the German army-manoeuvres. The million wage-slaves of the
metropolis, packed morning and night into the roaring subways and
whirled to and from their tasks, read items such as these and were
thrilled by the triumphs of their fellow-countrymen.
At Claire's house I learned to be interested in "society" news. From
a weekly paper of gossip about the rich and great she would read
paragraphs, explaining subtle allusions and laying bare veiled
scandals. Some of the men she knew well, referring to them for my
benefit as Bertie and Reggie and Vivie and Algie. She also knew not
a little about the women of that super-world--information sometimes
of an intimate nature, which these ladies would have been startled
to hear was going the rounds.
This insight I got into Claire's world I found useful, needless to
say, in my occasional forays as a soap-box orator of Socialism. I
would go from the super-heated luxury of her home to visit
tenement-dens where little children made paper-flowers twelve and
fourteen hours a day for a trifle over one cent an hour. I would
spend the afternoon floating about in the park in the automobile of
one of her expensive friends, and then take the subway and visit one
of the settlements, to hear a discussion of conditions which doomed
a certain number of working-girls to be burned alive every year in
factory fires.
As time went on, I became savage concerning such contrasts, and the
speeches I was making for the party began to attract attention.
During the summer, I recollect, I had begun to feel hostile even
towards the lovely image of Sylvia, which I had framed in my room.
While she was being presented at St. James's, I was studying the
glass-factories in South Jersey, where I found little boys of ten
working in front of glowing furnaces until they dropped of
exhaustion and sometimes had their eyes burned out. While she and
her husband were guests of the German Emperor, I was playing the
part of a Polish working-woman, penetrating the carefully guarded
secrets of the sugar-trust's domain in Brooklyn, where human lives
are snuffed out almost every day in noxious fumes.
And then in the early fall Sylvia came home, her honeymoon over. She
came in one of the costly suites in the newest of the _de luxe_
steamers; and the next morning I saw a new picture of her, and read
a few words her husband had condescended to say to a fellow
traveller about the courtesy of Europe to visiting Americans. Then
for a couple of months I heard no more of them. I was busy with my
child-labour work, and I doubt if a thought of Sylvia crossed my
mind, until that never-to-be-forgotten afternoon at Mrs. Allison's
when she came up to me and took my hand in hers.
6. Mrs. Roland Allison was one of the comfortable in body who had
begun to feel uncomfortable in mind. I had happened to meet her at
the settlement, and tell her what I had seen in the glass factories;
whereupon she made up her mind that everybody she knew must hear me
talk, and to that end gave a reception at her Madison Avenue home.
I don't remember much of what I said, but if I may take the evidence
of Sylvia, who remembered everything, I spoke effectively. I told
them, for one thing, the story of little Angelo Patri. Little Angelo
was of that indeterminate Italian age where he helped to support a
drunken father without regard to the child-labour laws of the State
of New Jersey. His people were tenants upon a fruit-farm a couple of
miles from the glass-factory, and little Angelo walked to and from
his work along the railroad-track. It is a peculiarity of the
glass-factory that it has to eat its children both by day and by
night; and after working six hours before midnight and six more
after midnight, little Angelo was tired. He had no eye for the birds
and flowers on a beautiful spring morning, but as he was walking
home, he dropped in his tracks and fell asleep. The driver of the
first morning train on that branch-line saw what he took to be an
old coat lying on the track ahead, and did not stop to investigate.
All this had been narrated to me by the child's mother, who had
worked as a packer of "beers," and who had loved little Angelo. As I
repeated her broken words about the little mangled body, I saw some
of my auditors wipe away a surreptitious tear.
After I had stopped, several women came up to talk with me at the
last, when most of the company was departing, there came one more,
who had waited her turn. The first thing I saw was her loveliness,
the thing about her that dazzled and stunned people, and then came
the strange sense of familiarity. Where had I met this girl before?
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