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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