We Can't Have Everything Part 71

"I don't have to. I know that people come to lawyers only to get out of sc.r.a.pes or to get into sc.r.a.pes dishonestly or unwisely. Furthermore, every step that any human being contemplates is a dangerous one and bound to lead to trouble."

"Oh, hush!" said Charity. "Am I supposed to pay you for that sort of advice?"

"Being a friend, and a woman, and very rich, you will doubtless never pay me at all. But let me warn you, Charity, that there is nothing in life more dangerous than taking a step in any possible direction--unless it is staying where you are."

"Oh, dear," sighed Charity, "you're worse than dear Doctor Mosely."

"Ah, you've been to the dear old doctor! And he's refused to help you.

When the Church denies a woman her way she comes to the devil. You interest me. It's a divorce, then?"

"Yes."

McNiven remembered Jim Dyckman's ancient squiredom to Charity and his recent telephony and he said to himself, "Aha!" But he said to Charity, "Go on."

"Sandy, my husband and I have agreed to disagree."

"Then for Heaven's sake don't tell me about it!"

"But I've got to."

"But you mustn't! Say, rather, I have decided to divorce my husband."

"All right. Consider my first break unmade. Peter has asked me--I mean, Peter has said that he will furnish me with the evidence on one condition: that I shall not mention a certain person with whom he has been living. He offers to provide me with any sort of evidence you lawyers care to cook up."

McNiven stared at her and spoke with startling rigor. "Are you trying to involve me in your own crimes?"

"Don't be silly. Peter says it is done all the time."

"Not in this office. Do you think I'd risk and deserve disbarment even to oblige a friend?"

"You mean you won't help me, then?" Charity sighed, rising with a forlorn sense of friendlessness.

McNiven growled: "Sit down! Of course I'll help you, but I don't intend to let you drag me into ruin, and I won't help you get a divorce that would be disallowed at the first peep of light."

"What can I do then? Peter said it could be managed quickly and quietly."

"There are ways and ways, Charity Coe. The great curse of divorce is the awful word 'collusion.' It can be avoided as other curses can with a little attention to the language. Remember the old song, 'It's not so much the thing you say, as the nasty way you say it.' That hound of a husband of yours wants to protect that creature he has been flaunting before the world. So he offers to arrange to be caught in a trap with another woman, and make you a present of the evidence. Isn't that so?"

"I believe it is."

"Now the law says that 'any understanding preceding the act of adultery'

is collusion; it involves the committing of a crime. It would be appalling for a nice little body like you to connive at such a thing, wouldn't it?"

Charity turned pale. "I hadn't realized just what it meant."

"I thought not," said McNiven.

"He'll have to give me evidence of--of something that has already happened, then, won't he?"

"The law calls that collusion also."

"Then what am I to do?"

"Couldn't you get evidence somehow without taking it from him?"

Charity was about to shake her head, but she nodded it violently. She remembered the detectives she had engaged and the superabundant evidence they had furnished her. She told McNiven about it and he was delighted till she reminded him that she had promised not to make use of Zada's name.

McNiven told her that she had no other recourse, and advised her to see her husband. She said that it was hopeless and she expressed a bitter opinion of the law. It seemed harsher than the Church, especially harsh to those who did not flout its authority.

While Charity talked McNiven let his pipe-smoke trail out of the window into the infinite where dreams fade from reality and often from memory, and he thought, "If I can help Jim and Charity to get together after all this blundering it will be a good job."

He was tempted to tell her that Jim was coming to see him, too, but he was afraid that she knew it. If he had told her--but there goes that eternal "if" again!

CHAPTER III

It is a fierce and searching test of a woman's mettle when first she is confronted with temptation to rebel against the control of her preacher.

Men are used to it, and women must grow more and more used to it as they advance into their long-deferred heritage.

Charity Coe Cheever was religious by every instinct. From childhood she had thrilled to the creed and the music and the eloquence of her Sundays. The beautiful industries of Christianity had engaged her. She had been happy within the walls and had felt that her piety gave her wings rather than chains.

And then she came abruptly to the end of her tether. She found her soul revolted by a situation which her pastor commanded her to accept as her lifelong portion. She found that to tolerate, and by tolerating to collaborate in, the adultery of her husband and his mistress was better religion than to free herself from odious triplicity. She found that it was better religion to annul her womanhood and remain childless, husbandless, and comfortless than to claim the privileges, the freedoms, the renewing opportunities the law allowed.

She came suddenly face to face with the terrifying fact that the State offered her help and strength that the Church denied her.

She had reached indeed what the doleful balladists would call "the parting of the ways," though no poet has yet chosen for his heroine the distraught wretch who is driven to the bleak refuge of divorce.

So long as it concerned only her own happiness Charity could put away the choice. But the more she pondered that unless she divorced her husband his mistress's baby would come into the world with a hideous birthmark, the more she felt it her duty to flout the Church. She shuddered to think of the future for that baby, especially if it should be a girl. She felt curiously a mother-obligation toward it. She blamed herself for her husband's infidelity. She humbled herself and bowed her neck to the shame.

She left the Church and went to the law. And then she found that the law had its own cruelties, its own fetters and walls and loopholes and hypocrisies. She found that it is not even possible to be a martyr and retain all one's dignity. One cannot even go to the stake without some guile.

The wicked law which the Church abhorred had its own idea of wickedness, and in the eyes of the law the agreement of a husband and a wife to part was something loathsome. She expressed her amazement to McNiven.

"It seems to me," she sighed, "if both husband and wife want a divorce, they know best; and that fact ought to be sufficient grounds in itself.

And yet you tell me that if the law once gets wind of the fact they've got to live together forever."

"That's it. They've got to live together whether they love together or not--though of course you can get a separation very easily, on almost any ground."

"But a separation is only a guarantee of--of infidelity, I should think."

"Of course it is," said Lawyer McNiven.

"Then everything seems all wrong."

"Of course it is."