A Voice From the Jury

MY friend and I were discussing the story called ‘The Jury,’published in the Atlantic Monthly for October. It will be remembered that the author leaves with a group of women the problem of whether their old friend, Violet, shall be freely and fully received by them if she accepts the invitation of her husband, Harry, to return to him and to their children, after spending several ‘crimson years’ with Cyril.

My friend is a business woman, trained in the office and the market-place. I am a professional woman, trained in schools and universities. She chose not to marry. I chose to marry. We have become friends somewhat far along the road, after passing various sorts of milestones. Diverse discipline, work, experiences, and acquaintances have shaped our characters and opinions. Yet these opinions, on matters connected with ‘life,’ practically always coincide.

So it proved to be when we imagined ourselves parts of the jury in the case of Violet versus Society. We began by swiftly agreeing that we had the right to decide in favor of a woman once our friend without feeling too sombrely that this decision would be equivalent to a public statement of our own principles. Friendship, once assumed, entails certain obligations; and we claimed the right to stand by a friend without thereby being understood to regard either her action or her character as models for other women. In this matter of Violet it seemed to us clear that, if her husband and daughters wanted her to come back, and it she wanted to come, it was not for us to create obstacles or to omit the ordinary interchanges of social life with a family that had united in a desire to ‘begin again.’

To be sure, we felt that Tina Metcalfe was visionary in thinking that things socially could really be as they were before, and that Harry was tragically mistaken in thinking that his or his children’s happiness would bloom again under the given conditions. Violet was to return as arrogantly as she went, still maintaining that her right to a happy life had been superior to theirs. We smiled somewhat cynically over her concern for the social status of her daughters, whose every other need she had so readily disregarded. The crimson years had evidently not modified her cold egotism. We anticipated no great success for her in reassuming the rôles of wife and mother, friend and hostess. But that was not our affair. As far as we were concerned, Tina might cable as unanimous a ‘come’ as she chose.

The thing that alienated us was Violet’s own willingness to come. We were both shocked by the cowardice of a woman who could not abide by either choice, by either marriage or free love. Violet was as unsatisfactory as Helena in the recent novel called Invisible Tides. Both ‘heroines,’ without even a decent regret, abandoned their husbands as long as men more agreeable to them lived. Then, when death intervened (in time to save the men from disillusionment), instead of standing alone, as many an unmarried or widowed woman stands alone, they made use of the love and chivalry of their former victims to return to the comfortable safeties of a conventional life. By this materialistic meanness Violet stripped from her life any pretense of bravery.

We went on to discuss her earlier vagrancy, her original action which, at least, had rejected conventions for the sake of an emotion. But we could not be stampeded by any such show of ‘idealism.’ The emotion had been one which is glorious only when it submits to be secondary. And with the rejection of certain unessentials went the rejection of priceless treasures that a woman of large mind and large heart would refuse to sacrifice to an isolating passion. Passion harnessed to all the other powers of a generous nature is a mighty dynamo. Divorced from them it shrivels despicably. No, my friend and I knew that. Violet, hiding herself with Cyril, had revealed the cheapness of her fibre. She had shown it, too, in the easy frivolity with which she disregarded obligations still scrupulously observed by the other members of a common undertaking. Accustomed to taking seriously business and professional contracts, we were disgusted by the way she tossed aside her spoken contract with Harry — whose only fault was that she liked Cyril better — and shattered brutally the tacit contract made with her children when she forced life upon them.

In our conversation we had not yet reached the profounder expression of our ethical judgment. There was, of course, a stark question of public right and wrong, which must perplex even Harry in relation to his daughters. But ultimately we judged Violet’s action, not as it broke a law of church or state, but as it offended against moral principles which support more external prohibitions. The love of man and woman is not a thing apart, a fleshly accident set loose from the domain of spiritual law. Two human wills can unite to preserve married love by observing the laws which ensure the health of all love. Of these, the first and the last are that love dies in self-seeking and is renewed in every act of self-forgetfulness. ‘It’s not an exhortation, but an axiom,’I said to my friend as we touched upon the subject.

But we were growing tired of Violet, and the world about us was very beautiful. The October sun was laying a sheet of pure flame behind the trunks of the maple trees on the edge of the wide pasture. There were ardent touches of red on the sumach between the straight green savins. The young moon was silvering above the red and gold of the sunset. In the silence, my friend’s thoughts roamed I know not where. My own circled and alighted on the magnificent lover in Meredith’s Tragic Comedians. The silver moon invited him and Clotilde, on the passion-swept night of their first meeting, to go quite mad. But his brilliant mind refused to be eclipsed — ‘the handsome face of the orb that lights us would be well enough were it only a gallop between us two. Dearest, the orb that lights us two for a lifetime must be taken all round, and I have been on the wrong side of the moon. I know the other face of it — a visage scored with regrets, dead dreams, burned passions, bald illusions, and the like, the like, the like! — sunless, waterless, without a flower.’

How stupid to mistake this evening’s moon for to-morrow’s sun! How stupid to mistake the crimson slash on the sumach for the whole broad upland!