Sylvia's Marriage

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  Title: Sylvia's Marriage

  Author: Upton Sinclair

  Release Date: June, 2004 [EBook #5807]

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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 mil
d 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, _n�e_ 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

&
nbsp; 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 fianc�, 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