Part 2

“Well, I am inclined to apply the theory of M. Taine, the great French critic, to most of the circumstances of life, and I should say it was the climate; its uncertainty, its constant changes, the heaviness of the atmosphere, the amount of fog, the real stress and strain to live that results from trying physical conditions added to the razor-sharp edge of business and social competition and the close contact that comes of packing forty millions of people of pronounced individuality on an island no bigger than the State of Georgia. To my mind the wonder is that they behave so well!”

Once, when I grew somewhat discouraged and said that I had made no progress for a day or two, my teacher told me that it was just so when she learned: there were growing days and stationary days, and she had always noticed that just after one of these last dull, depressing, and dubious intervals she seemed to get an uplift and went ahead better than ever. It was like a spurt in rowing. This seems to be the law of progress in everything we do; it moves along a spiral rather than a perpendicular; we seem to be actually going out of the way, and yet it turns out that we were really moving upward all the time.

One day, when my most expert trainer twisted the truth a little that she might encourage me, I was reminded of an anecdote.

In this practical age an illustration of the workings of truthfulness will often help a child more than any amount of exhortation concerning the theory thereof. For instance, a father in that level-headed part of the United States known as “out West” found that his little boy was falling into the habit of telling what was not true; so he said to him at the lunch-table, “Johnnie, I will come around with a horse and carriage at four o’clock to take you and mama for a drive this afternoon.” The boy was in high spirits, and watched for his father at the gate; but the hours passed by until six o’clock, when that worthy appeared walking up the street in the most unconcerned manner; and when Johnnie, full of indignation and astonishment, asked him why he did not come as he had promised, the father said, “Oh, my boy, I just took it into my head that I would tell you a lie about the matter, just as you have begun telling lies to me.” The boy began to cry with mingled disappointment and shame to think his father would do a thing like that; whereupon the father took the little fellow on his knee and said: “This has all been done to show you what mischief comes from telling what is not true. It spoils everybody’s good time. If you cannot believe what I say and I cannot believe what you say, and nobody can believe what anybody says, then the world cannot go on at all; it would have to stop as the old eight-day clock did the other day, making us all late to dinner. It is only because, as a rule, we can believe in one another’s word that we are able to have homes, do business, and enjoy life. Whoever goes straight on telling the truth helps more by that than he could in any other one way to build up the world into a beautiful and happy place; and every time anybody tells what is not true he helps to weaken everybody’s confidence in everybody else, and to spoil the good time, not of himself alone, but of all those about him.”

MY TEACHERS

I studied my various kind teachers with much care. One was so helpful that but for my protest she would fairly have carried me in her arms, and the bicycle to boot, the whole distance. This was because she had not a scintilla of knowledge concerning the machine, and she did not wish me to come to grief through any lack on her part.

Another was too timorous; the very twitter of her face, swiftly communicated to her arm and imparted to the quaking cross-bar, convulsed me with an inward fear; therefore, for her sake and mine, I speedily counted her out from the faculty in my bicycle college.

Another (and she, like most of my teachers, was a Londoner) was herself so capable, not to say adventurous, and withal so solicitous for my best good, that she elicited my admiration by her ingenious mixture of cheering me on and holding me back; the latter, however, predominated, for she never relinquished her strong grasp on the cross-bar. She was a fine, brave character, somewhat inclined to a pessimistic view of life because of severe experience at home, which, coming to her at a pitifully early period, when brain and fancy were most impressionable, wrought an injustice to a nature large and generous—one which under happier skies would have blossomed out into a perfect flower of womanhood. My offhand thinkings aloud, to which I have always been greatly given, especially when in genial company, she seemed to “catch on the fly,” as a reporter impales an idea on his pencil-point. We had no end of what we thought to be good talk of things in heaven and earth and the waters under the earth; of the mystery that lies so closely round this cradle of a world, and all the varied and ingenious ways of which the bicycle, so slow to give up its secret to a care-worn and inelastic pupil half a century old, was just then our whimsical and favorite symbol.

We rejoiced together greatly in perceiving the impetus that this uncompromising but fascinating and inimitably capable machine would give to that blessed “woman question” to which we were both devoted; for we had earned our own bread many a year, and she, although more than twenty years my junior, had accumulated an amount of experience well-nigh as great, because she had lived in the world’s heart, or the world’s carbuncle (just as one chooses to regard what has been called in literary phrase the capital of humanity). We saw that the physical development of humanity’s mother-half would be wonderfully advanced by that universal introduction of the bicycle sure to come about within the next few years, because it is for the interest of great commercial monopolies that this should be so, since if women patronize the wheel the number of buyers will be twice as large. If women ride they must, when riding, dress more rationally than they have been wont to do. If they do this many prejudices as to what they may be allowed to wear will melt away. Reason will gain upon precedent, and ere long the comfortable, sensible, and artistic wardrobe of the rider will make the conventional style of woman’s dress absurd to the eye and unendurable to the understanding. A reform often advances most rapidly by indirection. An ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory; and the graceful and becoming costume of woman on the bicycle will convince the world that has brushed aside the theories, no matter how well constructed, and the arguments, no matter how logical, of dress-reformers.

A woman with bands hanging on her hips, and dress snug about the waist and chokingly tight at the throat, with heavily trimmed skirts dragging down the back and numerous folds heating the lower part of the spine, and with tight shoes, ought to be in agony. She ought to be as miserable as a stalwart man would be in the same plight. And the fact that she can coolly and complacently assert that her clothing is perfectly easy, and that she does not want anything more comfortable or convenient, is the most conclusive proof that she is altogether abnormal bodily, and not a little so in mind.

We saw with satisfaction the great advantage in good fellowship and mutual understanding between men and women who take the road together, sharing its hardships and rejoicing in the poetry of motion through landscapes breathing nature’s inexhaustible charm and skyscapes lifting the heart from what is to what shall be hereafter. We discoursed on the advantage to masculine character of comradeship with women who were as skilled and ingenious in the manipulation of the swift steed as they themselves. We contended that whatever diminishes the sense of superiority in men makes them more manly, brotherly, and pleasant to have about; we felt sure that the bluff, the swagger, the bravado of young England in his teens would not outlive the complete mastery of the outdoor arts in which his sister is now successfully engaged. The old fables, myths, and follies associated with the idea of woman’s incompetence to handle bat and oar, bridle and rein, and at last the cross-bar of the bicycle, are passing into contempt in presence of the nimbleness, agility, and skill of “that boy’s sister”; indeed, we felt that if she continued to improve after the fashion of the last decade her physical achievements will be such that it will become the pride of many a ruddy youth to be known as “that girl’s brother.” As we discoursed of life, death, and the judgment to come, of “man’s inhumanity to man,” as well as to beasts, birds, and creeping things, we frequently recurred to a phrase that has become habitual with me in these later years when other worlds seem anchored close alongside this, and when the telephone, the phonograph, and the microphone begin to show us that every breath carries in itself not only the power, but the scientific certainty of registration: “Well, one thing is certain: we shall meet it in the ether.”

One of my companions in the tribulation of learning the bicycle, and the grace of its mastery, was a tall, bright-faced, vigorous-minded young Celt who is devoted to every good word and work and has had much experience with the “submerged tenth,” living among them and trying to build character among those waste places of humanity. I set out to teach this young woman the bicycle, and while she took her lesson—which, as she is young, elastic, and long-limbed, was vastly less difficult than mine—we talked of many things: American women, and why they do not walk; the English lower class, and why they are less vigorous than the Irish; the English girl of the slums, and why she is less self-respecting than an Irish girl in the same station. “There are many things for which we cannot account,” said my young friend; whereupon, with the self-elected mentorship of my half-century, I oracularly observed: “Cosmos has not a consequence without a cause; it is the business of reason to seek for causes, and, if it cannot make sure of them, to construct for itself theories as to what they are or will turn out to be when found. But the trouble is, when we have framed our theory, we come to look upon it as our child, that we have brought into the world, nurtured, and trained up by hand. The curse of life is that men will insist on holding their theories as true and imposing them on others; this gives rise to creeds, customs, constitutions, royalties, governments. Happy is he who knows that he knows nothing, or next to nothing, and holds his opinions like a bouquet of flowers in his hand, that sheds its fragrance everywhere, and which he is willing to exchange at any moment for one fairer and more sweet, instead of strapping them on like an armor of steel and thrusting with his lance those who do not accept his notions.”

My last teacher was—as ought to be the case on the principle of climax—my best. I think she might have given many a pointer to folks that bring up children, and I realized that no matter how one may think himself accomplished, when he sets out to learn a new language, science, or the bicycle he has entered a new realm as truly as if he were a child newly born into the world, and “Except ye become as little children” is the law by which he is governed. Whether he will or not he must first creep, then walk, then run; and the wisest guide he can have is the one who most studiously helps him to help himself. This was a truism that I had heard all my life long, but never did a realizing sense of it settle down upon my spirit so thoroughly as when I learned the bicycle. It is not the teacher who holds you in place by main strength that is going to help you win that elusive, reluctant, inevitable prize we call success, but it is the one who, while studiously keeping in the background, steers you to the fore. So No. 12 had the wit and wisdom to retire to the rear of the saucy steed, that I might form the habit of seeing no sign of aid or comfort from any source except my own reaction on the treadles according to law; yet cunningly contrived, by laying a skilled hand upon the saddle without my observation, knowledge, or consent, to aid me in my balancing. She diminished the weight thus set to my account as rapidly as my own increasing courage and skill rendered this possible.

I have always observed—and not without a certain pleasure, remembering my brother’s hardihood—that wherever a woman goes some man has reached the place before her; and it did not dim the verdure of my laurels or the fullness of my content when I had mastered Gladys to ascertain, from a letter sent me by the wife of a man sixty-four years of age who had just learned, that I was “No. 2” instead of “No. 1,” thus obliging me to rectify the frontier of chronology as I had constructed it in relation to the conquest of the bicycle; for I vainly thought that I had fought the antics of Gladys as a sentry on duty away out on the extreme frontier of time.

But at last (which means in two months or thereabouts, at ten or twenty minutes’ practice off and on daily) I reached the goal, and could mount the bicycle without the slightest foreign interference or even the moral support of a sympathetic onlooker. In doing this I realized that the totality of what I had learned entered into the action. Every added increment of power that I had gained in balancing, pedaling, steering, taking advantage of the surfaces, adjusting my weight according to my own peculiarities, and so on, was set to my account when I began to manage the bulky steed that behaves worst of all when a novice seeks the saddle and strikes out alone. Just so, I felt, it had been all my life and will be, doubtless, in all worlds and with us all. The totality of native forces and acquired discipline and expert knowledge stands us in good stead for each crisis that we have to meet. There is a momentum, a cumulative power on which we can count in every new circumstance, as a capitalist counts upon his credit at the bank. It is not only a divine declaration, it is one of the basic laws of being, that “all things work _together_ for good to them that love God”—that is, to them that are in love with God; and he who loves a law of God and makes himself obedient to that law has by that much loved God, only he does not always have the wit to know it.

The one who has learned latest and yet has really learned the mastery of the bicycle is the best teacher. Many a time I have heard boys in college say that it was not the famed mathematician who could teach them anything—he knew too much, he was too far ahead for them to hear his voice, he was impatient of their halting steps; but the tutor who had left college only the year before, and remembering his own failures and stupidity, had still that fellow-feeling that made him wondrous kind.

As has been stated, my last epoch consisted of learning to mount; that is the _pons asinorum_ of the whole mathematical undertaking, for mathematical it is to a nicety. You have to balance your system more carefully than you ever did your accounts; not the smallest fraction can be out of the way, or away you go, the treacherous steed forming one half of an equation and yourself with a bruised knee forming the other. You must add a stroke at just the right angle to mount, subtract one to descend, divide them equally to hold your seat, and multiply all these movements in definite ratio and true proportion by the swiftest of all roots, or you will become the most minus of quantities. You must foot up your accounts with the strictest regularity; there can be no partial payments in a business enterprise like this.

Although I could now mount and descend, turn corners and get over the ground all by myself, I still felt a lack of complete faith in Gladys, although she had never harmed me but once, and then it was my own fault in letting go the gleaming cross-bar, which is equivalent to dropping the bridle of a spirited steed. Let it be carefully remembered by every “beginning” bicycler that, whatever she forgets, she must forever keep her “main hold,” else her horse is not bitted and will shy to a dead certainty.

As we grew better acquainted I thought how perfectly analogous were our relations to those of friends who became slowly seasoned one to the other: they have endured the vicissitudes of every kind of climate, of the changing seasons; they have known the heavy, water-logged conditions of spring, the shrinkage of summer’s trying heat, the happy medium of autumn, and the contracting cold that winter brings; they are like the bits of wood, exactly apportioned and attuned, that go to make up a Stradivarius violin. They can count upon one another and not disagree, because the stress of life has molded them to harmony. They are like the well-worn robe, the easy shoe. There is no short road to this adjustment, so much to be desired; not any will win it short of “patient continuance in well-doing.”

I noticed that the great law which I believe to be potential throughout the universe made no exception here: “According to thy faith be it unto thee” was the only law of success. When I felt sure that I should do my pedaling with judicial accuracy, and did not permit myself to dread the swift motion round a bend; when I formed in my mind the image of a successful ascent of the “Priory Rise”; when I fully purposed in my mind that I should not run into the hedge on the one side or the iron fence on the other, these prophecies were fulfilled with practical certainty. I fell into the habit of varying my experience by placing before myself the image—so germane to the work in which I am engaged—of an inebriate in action, and accompanied this mental panorama by an orchestral effect of my own producing: “They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man;” but could never go through this three consecutive times without lurching off the saddle. But when I put before me, as distinctly as my powers of concentration would permit, the image of my mother holding steadily above me a pair of balances, and looking at me with that quizzical expectant glance I knew so well, and saying: “Do it? Of course you’ll do it; what else should you do?” I found that it was palpably helpful in enabling me to “sit straight and hold my own” on my uncertain steed. She always maintained, in the long talks we had concerning immortality, that the law I mention was conclusive, and was wont to close our conversations on that subject (in which I held the interrogative position) with some such remark as this: “If Professor —— thinks he is not immortal he probably is not; if I think I am I may be sure I shall be, for is it not written in the law, ‘According to thy faith be it unto thee’?”

Gradually I realized a consoling degree of mastery over Gladys; but nothing was more apparent to me than that we were not yet thoroughly acquainted—we had not summered and wintered together. I had not learned her kinks, and she was as full of them as the most spirited mare that sweeps the course on a Kentucky race-track. Although I have seen a race but once (and that was in the Champs Élysées, Paris, a quarter of a century ago), I am yet so much interested in the fact that it is a Flora Temple, a Goldsmith Maid, a Maud S., a Sunol, a California Maid that often stands first on the record, that I would fain have named my shying steed after one of these; but as she was a gift from Lady Henry Somerset this seemed invidious in me as a Yankee woman, and so I called her _Gladys_, having in view the bright spirit of the donor, the exhilarating motion of the machine, and the gladdening effect of its acquaintance and use on my health and disposition.

As I have said, I found from first to last that the process of acquisition exactly coincided with that which had given me everything I possessed of physical, mental, or moral success—that is, skill, knowledge, character. I was learning the bicycle precisely as I learned the a-b-c. When I set myself, as a stint, to mount and descend in regular succession anywhere from twenty to fifty times, it was on the principle that we do a thing more easily the second time than the first, the third time than the second, and so on in a rapidly increasing ratio, until it is done without any conscious effort whatever. This was precisely the way in which my mother trained me to tell the truth, and my music-teacher taught me that mastership of the piano keyboard which I have lost by disuse. Falling from grace may mean falling from a habit formed—how do we know? This opens a boundless field of ethical speculation which I would gladly have followed, but just then the steel steed gave a lurch as if to say, “Tend to your knitting”—the favorite expression of a Rocky Mountain stage-driver when tourists taxed him with questions while he was turning round a bend two thousand feet above the valley.

And now comes the question “What do the doctors say?” Here follow several testimonies:

“The question now of great interest to girls is in regard to the healthfulness of the wheel. Many are prophesying dire results from this fascinating exercise, and fond parents are refusing to allow their daughters to ride because they are girls. It will be a delight to girls to learn that the fact of their sex is, in itself, not a bar to riding a wheel. If the girl is normally constituted and is dressed hygienically, and if she will use judgment and not overtax herself in learning to ride, and in measuring the length of rides after she has learned, she is in no more danger from riding a wheel than is the young man. But if she persists in riding in a tight dress, and uses no judgment in deciding the amount of exercise she is capable of safely taking, it will be quite possible for her to injure herself, and then it is she, and not the wheel, that is to blame. Many physicians are now coming to regard the ‘wheel’ as beneficial to the health of women as well as of men.”

Dr. Seneca Egbert says: “As an exercise bicycling is superior to most, if not all, others at our command. It takes one into the outdoor air; it is entirely under control; can be made gentle or vigorous as one desires; is active and not passive; takes the rider outside of himself and the thoughts and cares of his daily work; develops his will, his attention, his courage and independence, and makes pleasant what is otherwise most irksome. Moreover, the exercise is well and equally distributed over almost the whole body, and, as Parker says, when all the muscles are exercised no muscle is likely to be over-exercised.”

He advocates cycling as a remedy for dyspepsia, torpid liver, incipient consumption, nervous exhaustion, rheumatism, and melancholia. In regard to the exercise for women he says: “It gets them out of doors, gives them a form of exercise adapted to their needs, that they may enjoy in company with others or alone, and one that goes to the root of their nervous troubles.”

He instances two cases, of girls fourteen and eighteen years of age, where a decided increase in height could be fairly attributed to cycling.