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SYLVIA'S MARRIAGE

A NOVEL


By Upton Sinclair

Author Of "The Jungle," Etc., Etc.

London




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._



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, _nee_ 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 fiance, 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
