Chapter 4

And there's nothing like the right sort of a man to get women to cooperate in some Cause that aims for Woman's Liberty.

And I suppose, really, TWO Secretaries would be better. And they will have to be men who can dance the new dances well, too. That counts a lot nowadays in getting girls to come to places.

I feel that I have Found my Work! One's work lies at one's hand, if one could but see it, always. And mine is to Save the Parasite Women I know from Themselves and their Frivolity.

I will coax the first cheque out of Papa this very evening! It may take some management and jollying, but--well, Papa is EASY!

THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL

WE'RE taking up the House Beautiful -- our Little Group of Serious Thinkers, you know -- for we've decided that Environment has more effect on personality than Heredity.

Interior decoration is the greatest of the arts -- don't you think? -- because it furnishes the proper setting for the spirit.

The loveliest woman gave us a talk on interior decoration the other night -- she wears these slinky, Greek things, you know, with straw sandals, when the weather permits -- and I engaged her to do the house over.

But right away a problem presented itself -- whether to have the house done to fit my personality or whether to have the house done to fit the thing I want my personality to evolve into, and trust the environment to help in the evolution.

Modern thought complicates LIFE immensely, doesn't it?

But I always feel that it is my duty to give the best in myself to these problems.

Someone must help Evolution evolve. Someone must be unselfish enough to give the cosmos new marks to come up to.

And who but the serious thinkers are willing to sacrifice themselves?

Well, we finally decided to do every room in the house differently -- each one to fit a mood, you know.

There's one room now I call "Aspiration," where I go for my little spiritual examinations.

And the next room beyond that is "Resolve."

And then there's a room I call "Brotherly Love," where I go to think out how to help the masses.

For of course I haven't lost my interest in sociological problems.

In fact I'm having some new dresses made -- simple, quiet looking things, you know -- for the express purpose of visiting the very poor in and asking them questions about themselves.

Though I must admit that since helping the war sufferers came into fashion friendly visiting has rather gone out.

MAMA IS SO MID-VICTORIAN

WE'VE been taking ;up Hedonism lately -- our Little Group of Modern Thinkers, you know -- and it's wonderful, just simply WONDERFUL!

Though Mamma -- poor dear Mamma is so hopelessly old fashioned; -- has entirely the wrong idea about it.

"Hermione," she said to me the other evening, after the little talk, "WHAT did the lecturer call himself?"

"He's a Hedonist," I said.

"Indeed!" she said, "and what sort of modern impropriety is Hedonism? Is it something about Sex, or is it something about Psychics?"

I simply couldn't speak.

I just gave her a look and walked out of the room. It is absolutely useless to attempt to explain anything to Mamma.

She is so Mid-Victorian!

And Mid-Victorianism has quite gone out, you know. Really. The loveliest man gave us a talk on the Mid-Victorian recently, and when he was done there wasn't a one of us that didn't go and hide our Tennysons and Ruskins.

Although I always WILL like "Come into the Garden, Maud."

But he did it with such HUMOR, you know. Isn't a sense of humor a perfectly WONDERFUL thing?

A sense of humor is a sense of proportion, you know -- he brought that out so cleverly, the anti-Mid-Victorian man did.

Though so many people who have a sense of humor are so -- so, well so QUEER about it, if you get what I mean. That is, if you know they have one, of course you're naturally watching for them to say humorous things; and they're forever saying the sort of things that puzzle you, because you have never heard those things before in just that way, and if you DO laugh they're so apt to act as if you were laughing in the WRONG place!

And one doesn't dare NOT to laugh, does one? It's really quite unfair and unkind sometimes! Don't you think so?

We took up a volume on The Analysis of Humor one winter -- our Little Group of Serious Thinkers, you know -- and read it completely through, and before the winter was over it got so there wasn't a one of us that dared NOT to laugh at anything any other one said and -- well, it got rather ghastly before spring. Because even if someone wanted to know if a person needed an umbrella someone else would laugh.

Well, I must be going now. I have a committee meeting at three this afternoon. We're going in for this one-day Women's Strike, you know -- our little group is.

VOKE EASELEY AND HIS NEW ART

FOR my acquaintance with Voke Easeley -- --

(Hermione's reporter, and not Hermione herself, is speaking now.) -- --

For my acquaintance with Voke Easeley and his new art, I am indebted to Fothergil Finch.

Fothergil is a kind of genius hound. He scurries sleuthing around the town ever on the scent of something queer and caviar. He is well trained and never kills what he catches himself; he takes it to Hermione; and after Hermione has tired of it I am at liberty to do what I please with it.

The most remarkable thing about Voke Easeley at a casual glance is his Adam's apple. It is not only the largest Adam's apple I have ever seen, and the hardest looking one, and the most active one, but it is also the most intelligent looking one. Voke Easeley's face expresses very little. His eyes are small and full and green. His mouth, while large, misses significance. His nose, indeed, is big; but it is mild; it is a tame nose; one feels no more character in it than in a false nose. His chin and forehead retreat ingloriously from the battle of life.

But all the personality which his eyes should show, all the force which should dwell in his nose, all the temperamental qualities that should reveal themselves in his mouth and chin, all the genius which should illumine his brow -- these dwell within his Adam's apple. The man has run entirely to that feature; his moods, his emotions, his thoughts, his passions, his appetites, his beliefs, his doubts, his hopes, his fears, his resolves, his despairs, his defeats, his exaltations -- all, all make themselves known subtly in the eccentric motions of that unusual Adam's apple.

When I saw him first in action I did not at once get it. He stood stiffly erect in the center of Hermione's drawing-room, surrounded by the serious thinkers, with his head thrown back and his Adam's apple thrust forward, and gave vent to a series of strange noises. Beside him stood a very slender lady, all dressed in apple green, with a long green wand in her hand, and on the end of the wand was an artificial apple blossom. This she waved jerkily in front of Voke Easeley's eyes, and his Adam's apple moved as the wand moved, and from his mouth came the wild sounds in response to it.

Soon I realized that she was conducting him as if he were an orchestra.

But still I did not get it. For it was not words, it was nothing so articulate as speech, that Voke Easeley uttered. Nor was it, to my ear, song. And yet, as I listened, I began to see that a wild rhythm pervaded the utterance; the Adam;'s apple leapt, danced, swung round, twinkled, bounded, slid and leapt again in time with a certain rough barbaric measure; the sounds themselves were all discords, but discords with a purpose; discords that took each other by the hand and kicked and stamped their brutal way together toward some objective point.

I led Fothergil into a corner.

"What is it?" I whispered. It is always well, at one of Hermione's soul fights, to get your cue before the conversation officially starts. If you don't know what is going to be talked about before the talk starts the chances are that you never will know from the talk itself.

"A New Art!" said Fothergil. And then he led me into the hall and explained.

What Gertrude Stein has done for prose, what the wilder vers libre bards are doing for poetry, what cubists and futurists are doing for painting and sculpture, that Voke Easeley is doing for vocal music.

"He is painting sound portraits with his larynx now," said Fothergil. "And the beautiful part of it is that he is absolutely tone deaf! He doesn't know a thing about music. He tried for years to learn and couldn't. The only way he knows when you strike a chord on the piano is because he doesn't like chords near as well as he does discords. He has gone right back to the dog, the wolf, the cave man, the tiger, the bear, the wind, the rock slide, the thunder and the earthquake for his language. He interprets life in the terms of natural sounds, which are discords nearly always; but he has added brains to them and made them all the moods of the human soul!"

"And the lady in green?"

"That is his wife -- he can do nothing without her. There is the most complete psychic accord between them. It is beautiful! Beautiful!"

When we returned the lady in green was announcing:

"The next selection is a Voke Easeley impression of the Soul of Wagner gazing at the sunrise from the peak of the Jungfrau."

The wand waved; the Adam's Apple leapt, and they were off. What followed cannot be indicated typographically. But if a cat were a sawmill, and a dog were a gigantic cart full of tin cans bouncing through a stone-paved street, and that dog and that cat hated each other and were telling each other so, it would sound much like it.

It was well received. Except by Ravenswood Wimble. He always has to have his little critical fling.

"The peak of the Jungfrau!" he grumbled. "Jungfrau indeed! It was Mont Blanc! It was very wonderfully and subtly Mont Blanc! But the Jungfrau -- never!"

"Hermione," I said, "what do you think of the New Art?"

"It's wonderful!" she breathed, "just simply wonderful! So esoteric, and yet so simple! But there is one thing I am going to speak to Mrs. Voke Easely about -- one improvement I am going to suggest. His ears, you know -- don't you think they are too large? Or too red, at least, for their size? They catch the eye too much -- they take away from the effect. Before he sings here again I will have Mrs. Easeley bob them off a little."

HERMIONE ON SUPERFICIALITY

AREN'T you just crazy about the Moral Uplift?

It's coming into every department of life now and one just simply HAS to keep up with it in order to talk intelligently these days.

Not that one can talk too freely about it in mixed company, you know.

There are getting to be the awfullest lot of moral subjects that one can't talk about generally, aren't there?

Eugenics and sex hygiene and all these plays and books with a moral purpose, you know.

Of course lots of people DO talk about them generally. I did myself for quite a while. And then another girl and I got some books and studied up what the things we had been talking of really were and it shocked us horribly!

Mamma has been trying to get me to give up the moral uplift entirely, but you've just simply GOT to talk it or be out of date.

Of course the whole thing depends upon whether you are a serious thinker -- if you're sincere, REALLY sincere, you can take up anything and get good out of it.

The loveliest man talked to us last night -- to our Little Group of Advanced Thinkers, you know.

He said the curse of the age and the country was superficiality. People aren't thorough, you know.

I've noticed that myself and I agree with him. If one is going to take things up and show a serious interest in them one must not limit one's self to a few phases.

One must be broad. One must be thorough. One must cover the whole field of thought.

Our little group this winter has been trying to do that. So far we've take up Bergson, socialism, psychology, Rabindranath Tagore, the meaning of welfare work, culinary science, the new movements in art -- and ever so many more things I can't re- member now.

For the rest of Lent we're going to take up the Cosmic Consciousness.

One of the girls thought it would be a nice sort of thing to take up during Lent -- a quiet kind of thing, you know; not like feminism or chemistry.

Have you seen any of the new parti-colored boots yet?

Isn't it an absurd idea?

And yet, you know -- if it made for Beauty!

That is what one must always say to one's self must one not? I mean: Does it make for Beauty?

That's the reason I left the Suffrage Party, you know. They wanted me to wear one of those hor- rid yellow sashes. And my complexion can't stand yellow. So I quit the Suffrage Party right there.

ISIS, THE ASTROLOGIST

WE'RE taking up astrology quiet seriously -- our Little Group of Serious Thinkers, you know -- and we've hired the loveliest lady astrologer to cast our horoscopes and give us a talk and get us started right.

She wrote a letter to me--the most perfectly fascinating letter -- and I told her to call, and we looked her over. She wore a beautiful sky-blue gown with gold stars on it -- one of those Greek ones, you know, like poor, dear Isadora Duncan wore -- and a gold star in the middle of her forehead.

It makes her look like a unicorn, that star," Ravenswood Wimble said. But then nobody ever pleases Ravenswood Wimble completely. He is so -- if you get me.

"If a unicorn, then a celestial unicorn," Fothy Finch said. Fothy is too dear for anything; he is always hunting for the good in people, like Apollo, or Euripides -- which was it? -- when they gave him the basket full of wheat and chaff, and he separated them. Or maybe it was Diogenes.

She has six sisters, and they are all astrologers, and they call them the Pleiades.

Although Voke Easeley, in his horrid slangy way, said: "Pleiades? She's a Bear!"

Don't you just utterly loathe slang?

Bit I was going to tell you about the lovely letter she wrote -- that's what attracted me to her at the first.

"Have you never asked yourself," it began "'Why was I born?'"

Fancy knowing that about one! If there is one question I have asked myself thousands and thousands of times it is, "Why was I born?"

And then the letter went on to talk about horoscopes and the Inevitable.

"We may not overcome the inevitable," it said, "but it is ours to see that the Inevitable does not overcome us."

Oh, the Inevitable! The Inevitable!

How often I have thought of the Inevitable with despair!

And it has never occurred to me before that one could take it and use it as one pleased. But it seems one can if one knows about it beforehand. It is like Destiny that way. If one is ignorant of one's Destiny, it comes upon one with a surprise. But if one knows beforehand what one's Destiny is to be, one can make onself the master of it. That is where the horoscope comes in handy, you know.

After dipping into Astrology I will never again be afraid of the Inevitable.

As the Letter says: "Every woman with her horoscope before her, and her Soul back of her, should be able to solve any problem and meet any situation that may occur in her life."

Ravenswood Wimble wanted to know, when he met the lady -- did I tell you that her professional name is Isis? -- what would happen if her Soul was before her and her horoscope back of her. But Isis just simply froze him with a look.

Don't you think that levity is horrid in the midst of vital affairs like that?

But I suppose every little group has someone in it that thinks he or she has to be quippy and facetious at times.

Not but what I have a sense of humor myself.

I think a sense of humor is the saving grace, if you get what I mean.

But no one should try to use it unless he is perfectly sure that everyone understands he is being humorous.

We are going to take up the sense of humor -- our Little Group of Thinkers, you know -- in a serious way soon.

But the Swami doesn't like Isis. Poor, dear Swami! She is a charlatan, he says. And she doesn't like him. "My dear," she said to me, "are you SURE he really goes into the Silences? Or does he just PRETEND to?"

Isn't it awful about geniuses that way -- how jealous they ARE of each other? Especially psychics! We had two mediums the same evening a year or two ago who actually quarreled over which one of them a certain spirit control belonged to.

THE SIMPLE HOME FESTIVALS

DON'T you just love the simple old festivals, like Thanksgiving Day and Christmas?

That's is one thing that Papa and Mamma and I agree about. And this year we had a very simple sort of Thanksgiving Day.

Of course, it's rather a bore if you have to invite a lot of relations.

But one must always sacrifice something to gain the worth-while things, mustn't one?

And what is more worth while than simplicity?

Simplicity! Simplicity! Isn't it truly WONDERFUL!

Nearly every night before I go to bed I ask myself: "have I been simple and genuine today? Or have I FAILED?

Papa always has two maiden aunts to Thanks- giving dinner. Dear old souls, I suppose, but frumps, you know.

And Fothergil Finch was there, too. I asked poor dear Fothy, because otherwise he would have had to eat in some restaurant.

I tried to be agreeable to Papa's aunts -- of course. I suppose they are my great-aunts, but I never felt REALLY related to them -- but how could he know how terribly unadvanced they are?

Fothy's only real interests center about Art, you know. And if he had talked of Art it would have been better.

But, as he told me later, he thought he should try to meet my people on their own ground and talk of something practical.

Something with a direct bearing on life, you know.

So he asked Aunt Evelyn what she thought of Trial Marriages.

She didn't know exactly what he meant at first, but Aunt Fanny whispered something to her and she turned white and said, "Mercy!"

Poor dear Fothy saw he must be on the wrong track, so he changed the subject and began to tell Aunt Fanny the plot of a new problem play. One of the sex ones, you know.

"Heavens," said Aunt Fanny, and began to tremble.

And they drew their chairs nearer together and each one took a bottle of smelling salts out of a little black bag, and they sat and trembled and smelled their salts and stared at him perfectly fascinated.

This embarrassed Fothy, but he though his mistake had been in talking about anything artistic, like a play, so he changed the subject again. He told me afterward that he felt if he could get onto a really PRACTICAL subject all would go well.

So he asked Aunt Evelyn what she thought about Genetics.

"What are they?" asked Aunt Evelyn, her teeth chattering.

"Why, Eugenics," said Fothy. And then he had to explain all about Eugenics.

They sat perfectly still and stared at him, and he felt sure he had them interested at last, and he talked on and on about Eugenics and the Future Race, you know, and that led him back to Trial Marriages, and then he go onto the Twilight Sleep.

And, as he said himself afterward, what could be more practical?

But, you know, commonplace people never appreciate the efforts that serious thinkers make for them, and Aunt Evelyn refused to come to the table at all when dinner was announced. She said she had lost her appetite and felt faint.

But Aunt Emmy came. She asked the blessing. Papa always has her do that on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas and New Year's. And she made a regular prayer out of it -- prayed for Fothy, you know, right before him; and prayed for me too. It was awful.

And afterward poor dear Fothy said he wished he had talked about Art.

"It's safe," I said; "then people can't get offended, for nobody knows what you mean at all."

"Oh," said Fothy, "nobody does?" And he went away quite melancholy and injured.

CITRONELLA AND STEGOMYIA

WE were talking about famous love affairs the other evening, and Fothergil Finch said he was thinking of writing a ballad about Citronella and Stegomyia.

And, of course, everybody pretended they knew who Citronella and Stegomyia were. Mrs. Voke Easeley -- You've heard about Voke Easeley and his New Art, Haven't you? -- Mrs. Voke Easeley said:

"But don't you think those old Italian love affairs have been done to death?"

"Italian?" said Fothy, raising his eyebrows at Mrs. Voke Easeley.

You know, really, there wasn't a one of them knew who Citronella and Stegomyia were; but they were all pretending, and they saw Mrs. Voke Easeley was in bad. And she saw it, too, and tried to save herself.

"Of course," she said, "Citronella and Stegomyia weren't Italian lovers THEMSELVES. But so many of the old Italian poets have written about them that I always think of them as glowing stars in that wonderful, wonderful galaxy of Italian romance!"

Fothy can be very mean when he wants to. So he said:

"I don't read Italian, Mrs. Easeley. I have been forced to get all my information about Citronella and Stegomyia from English writers. Maybe you would be good enough to tell me what Italian poet it is who has turned out the most recent version of Citronella and Stegomyia?"

Mrs. Voke Easeley answered without a moment's hesitation: "Why, D'Annunzio, of course."

That made everybody waver again. And Aurelia Dart said -- she's that girl with the beautiful arms, you know, who plays the harp and always has a man or two to carry it about wherever she goes -- somebody else's husband, if she can manage it -- Aurelia said:

"D'Annunzio, of course! Passages of it have been set to music."

"Won't you play some of it?" asked Fothy, very politely.

"It has never been arranged for the harp," said Aurelia. "But if Mrs. Easely can remember some of the lines, and will be good enough to repeat them, I will improvise for it."

That put it up to Mrs. Easeley again, you know. She hates Aurelia, and Aurelia knows it. Voke Easeley carried Aurelia's harp around almost all last winter. And the only way Mrs. Easeley could break Voke of it was to bring their little girl along the one that has convulsions so easily, you know. And then when Voke was getting Aurelia's harp ready for her the little girl would have a convulsion, and Mrs. Easeley would turn her over to Voke, and Voke would have to take the little girl home, and Mrs. Easeley would stay and say what a family man and what a devoted husband Voke was, for an artist.

Well, Mrs. Easeley wasn't stumped at all. She got up and repeated something. I took up Italian poetry one winter, and we made a special study of D'Annunzio; but I didn't remember what Mrs. Easeley recited. But Aurelia harped to it. Improvising is one of the best things she does.

And everybody said how lovely it was and how much soul there was in it, and, "Poor Stegomyia! Poor Citronella!"

The Swami said it reminded him of some passages in Tagore that hadn't been translated into English yet.

Voke Easeley said: "The plaint of Citronella is full of a passion of dream that only the Italian poets have found the language for."

Fothy winked at me and I made an excuse and slipped into the library and looked them up -- and, well, would you believe it! -- they weren't lovers at all! And I might have known it from the first, for I always use citronella for mosquitoes in the country.

They were still pretending when I got back, all of them, and Aurelia was saying: "Citronella differs psychologically from Juliet -- she is more like poor, dear Francesca in her feeling of the cosmic inevitability of tragedy. But stegomyia had a strain of Hamlet in him."

"Yes, a strain of Hamlet," said Voke Easeley. "A strain of Hamlet in his nature, Aurelia -- and more than a strain of Tristram!"

"It is a thing that Maeterlinck should have written, in his earlier manner," said Mrs. Voke Easeley.

"The story has its Irish counterpart, too," said Leila Brown, who rather specializes, you know, on all those lovely Lady Gregory things. "I have always wondered why Yeats or Synge hasn't used it."