Part 5

Was there any done? Take it by and large, is it a misfortune to born a girl and not a boy? That may happen to any of us any time we happen to be born. It’s a toss-up. It’s not the slightest credit to us to be born male, and certainly it should not be the slightest discredit to us to be born female; but according as we are born male or female we are born to different duties. If political government is one of the male duties, civilization will not get ahead by having men loosen their hold on it. For my part I suppose that down in the intricacies of my composition I have an instinctive conviction, or hunch, that political government is a male attribute, and that out of that comes my objection to abdicate, or even dilute, my share of it. Instinctive convictions have great weight in these matters, though the surface arguments they put out may be inadequate or mistaken, as the anti-suffrage arguments are so apt to be. The suffragist expounders demolish them, and think that they have accomplished something; but, alas! the demolition of puerile arguments leaves the question just where it was, with the pith of it still untouched. Still I think the agitation does good, bothering people like me, and making us think; asking us, What does belong to women, then, if not votes? How else are you going to give them equal life? What does justice demand for them if not the suffrage?

If the males since the beginning of time have overestimated their importance and erred in regarding themselves as specialists in government, then it is only a matter of time when we shall be disabused of that error and shaken down into our rightful places. But if government--meaning political government rather than domestic--really prospers better in the long run in the hands of males, in their hands it is likely to stay--the substance of it certainly, however that shadow we call a vote may flutter off, and wherever it may alight.

Nothing happens without a cause. If the men are to be abased, doubtless it will be for their abundant sins. If they will not work as men should, they will lose their jobs. If they will not govern as men should, they will be governed. History is a record of the strong races subduing the weak, and the wise the foolish, to the end that strength and wisdom shall prevail in human affairs. In these days of Monroe doctrines and alliances and arbitration treaties those harsh processes seem to have been superseded. Is this invasion by women of the province of men a new expedient of Nature to preserve the competition that is essential to human progress?

We cannot beat Nature. She is obdurate, resourceful, impossible to fool, with a trick to meet every trick that is offered her. She seems determined that man shall come to something and plays man against man to make him better himself, and is probably equal, if occasion demands it, to play one half of him against the other. For of course that is what woman is--the other half of man. There cannot be a real competition between the two halves, for they are inseparably joined and have to pull each other along. But for all that, they are distinct individuals, and one in a given period may make faster progress than the other, with a good deal of disturbance of relations and equities and ideas. What man gets, woman gets; what woman gets, man gets. When woman gets education, liberty, opportunity, protection, the whole race gets those benefits.

Then shall we say that when woman gets the vote the race is that much ahead? It may be, but to me it has not been so revealed up to these presents. Who gave man strength gave him dominion. If he loses dominion it will be because he has either misused his strength or lost it.

Samuel has not lost his. He is truly a great power. As I have said, he is almost a complete occupation for his mother, and a profitable, satisfying occupation, too. I confess to fears in time past that girls of Cordelia’s sort did not have enough to do to bring them their proper growth and keep them happy. If they didn’t go to college and didn’t marry as soon as they got out of school, they seemed to drift into a lot of occupations that looked rather futile, and like a mere provision for killing time. They played around, they visited, they dabbled in anything that came handy--dances, charities, house-parties, art, music, extra improvements for the mind--anything that could be cast into a void of time which should have ached, and doubtless did. It used to make me sorry for the girls because it seemed so hard for them to buckle down to anything remunerative and continuous and really get ahead in it. If they did that, they forfeited too many opportunities of the leisure class, to which it seems to be intended that the daughters of the well-to-do, from nineteen to about twenty-three, shall belong. If they went to college, that solved the problem for those years, but it came back at them as soon as they came out. If they were satisfied with their indefinite employments it was bad, and if they were not it was also bad. So I used to feel sorry for the girls because their job looked to me so vague, and their employments so fragmentary and unpromising.

I dare say I was wrong, and that the girls were working more hours at their proper vocation than I had the wit to recognize. I see it more clearly now; that there are fruits that ripen best in the sun, and should not be hurried in the process; that Cordelia did not really waste those years in which she waited for me to get started as a wage-earner, but learned in them a kind of patience and useful domestication, besides other accomplishments that make her better to live with now.

Major Brace has paid us the compliment to look in and inspect Samuel. He expressed himself as pleased with him, and was very gratifying in the warmth of his congratulations to Cordelia and me. Speaking as a father of almost complete experience, he told me of the special enthusiasm he felt for a child that had never run up a dentist’s bill. Samuel hasn’t. There is little or nothing about him as yet that would interest a dentist; but Cordelia, whose forefinger is a good deal in his mouth, says there may be any minute.

I must ask mother if that is so. No doubt Cordelia’s enthusiasm is liable to mislead her.

I believe Cordelia dislikes to spend money. I find her perpetually weighing something that might be had against its price, and deciding not to have it. Unless the purchasable object is indispensable or very positively desirable--like a kodak to snap at Samuel--the money looks better to her. That’s remarkable, isn’t it? People differ in temperament as well as in training about that, inheriting tighter or looser fists, I suppose, according to the forebear they individually trace back to. To me, now, things that I want always look better than what money I have. It makes me unhappy to spend _much_ more than I have, but I enjoy very much spending what I have got. I never have any money ahead, unless you can see savings in life insurance, to which I make some inadequate pretense. Maybe that is a defect in my character, though accumulation on seventy dollars a week has its reluctances when you have a wife and baby and a cook and flat and all that. Still, if I had no elders to fall back on I’d have to pinch some salvage out of every dollar.

But Cordelia is naturally more retentive than I am. It is remarkable how little she cares, relatively, for things. She has a good many things, and has always been used to them. She likes them, but with an interest that is altogether secondary, preferring power, independence, and tranquillity of mind to objects of convenience or embellishment, and to almost everything else except health and an easy conscience. She has a private fortune--I don’t know that I have mentioned that--not large, but yielding sufficient income to buy her clothes. All girls ought to have private fortunes. Small ones will do: do better, perhaps, than larger ones, for I don’t suppose it is quite ideal to be swamped by your wife’s money. Cordelia gets a great deal of comfort out of hers, but I see her basis of expenditure is different from mine. Mine is adjusted to what I have; hers to what, on due reflection, she would rather have than money. On that basis she spends not only her own money, but mine. I dare say she will be a rich woman some day, and, I hope, still married to me; so there is a chance that, with other good luck, I may gather some surplus too. I believe she dislikes to shop; indeed, I have heard her say so. There is a streak of Scotch in the Frenches, and I dare say it happened her way. My! my! What luck! When you think of the women--and men too, but especially women--whose highest happiness is to buy things and lug them home, it seems a marvelous dispensation that I should have acquired a companion of so opposite a sort. To be sure, no girl that was infatuated with the joys of purchase would have thought twice of me; and yet, who can tell, for I suppose there are girls who have neither self-restraint nor self-denial about anything, and are liable to think they must have something that really would not suit them at all? I have always thought that Rosamond Viney in _Middlemarch_ was the most fatal character in literature. What must it be to be money-grubber for a woman like that, with an expensive appreciation of the material side of life and no conception of the rest of it! Stars above! how much better it is to be lucky than wise, especially in youth, when, as Major Brace assures me, none of us know anything. There was Solomon, who wrote the Proverbs, and Ben Franklin, who wrote Poor Richard; both able to make shrewd discourse by the ream, and neither of them fortunate on the domestic side. Probably it does not accord with the economy of nature that wise men should have wise wives; certainly if there is a scheme of things that is worthy of respect, it would not have fitted into it for me to have a foolish one.

V

A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE

I remark the disposition of contemporary American families to regulate their church-going by the inclination of the ladies. I suppose it will soon happen that Cordelia and I will go to church when Cordelia feels it to be desirable, and that when she stays at home it will look more profitable to me to stay at home with her. Although that means that we will go pretty regularly, it is not quite as it should be, any more than that I should go without my dinner when she has a failure of the appetite. But it seems apt to be so with contemporary Protestant people who get married. Even if the male has a previous habit of church-going, and convictions or preferences in favor of it, the woman is apt to be captain in that particular, and to assume command of the family conscience. That is an item in the contemporary slump of the male in the business of directing the course of life. He tries to keep a hand of his own on politics, but in the concerns of religion easily falls into the practice of looking to the woman to make his decisions and remind him of his practices. Which is feeble of him, for, as between religion and politics, religion is decidedly the more important, for it shapes and inspires and regulates the whole of life, politics included, whereas politics is no more than a detail.

When I think of women and their needs and powers and rights, and their office in life--as I do a great deal nowadays, with Cordelia to observe and those suffragists prodding at the subject all the time--I have bursts of momentary conviction to the effect that if women go on assimilating four-fifths of the available religion and leaving nine-tenths of the alcohol and nearly all the tobacco to the men, they will govern our world before we know it. The Turks understand better. The male Turks make a specialty of piety, go without rum, and share tobacco liberally with their women; so to be a male Turk is still a relatively powerful condition, though I understand the Turkish ladies are restless nowadays, in spite of sweetmeats and cigarettes, and are covetous of education, and suspect that there should be more coming to them than they are getting.

Cordelia has intimated that that observation of mine about men having strength, and therefore dominion, is something of a bluff. She is too polite to contradict it, but not too polite to stir me to further reflections about it. Are men stronger? Have they dominion?

There is no doubt that the average man we see about can hit harder than the average woman. He can also run faster and make better time up a tree, so that he seems to have the best of it, physically, both in offense and escape. If you come to translate these powers into practical contemporary factors he can usually earn more money at present than she can, and is much less vulnerable in the reputation. It may be argued that this superiority in male abilities is not the work of nature at all, but a consequence of male malignancy and oppression, and that if woman had a fair show to get her due development she could stand up to man when he put up his hooks, and run him down when he ran away. So Olive Schreiner seems to feel about it. Man’s power to make more money than woman is challenged as an injustice. Perhaps it is an injustice in many cases. Perhaps our industrial system is not adjusted yet to women’s undomestic work in schools and factories and offices, and maybe the payroll will be revised in time in women’s favor. Still I think man’s superior money-making powers are of a piece with his power to hit harder and run faster. Money-getting seems to be more in the line of his natural job than of hers. He is less distracted from it by other leanings than she is. I guess he will always be the head money-getter, though very likely her claim on what he gets may come to rest even more on a basis of natural right than it does at present. It is a very much respected claim as it is, and supported by law and sentiment.

Man is superior in some kinds of bodily strength, and apparently in some kinds of mental strength, too, but does it give him dominion? Some, I think. It seems to give him a good deal of dominion among savages, and less and less as civilization increases. Probably it would give him more if he were not inferior in some of the kinds of strength, and in some other respects that we are not used to classify as strength, but which offset it. There are war-powers and peace-powers. Admitting, in spite of Kipling’s she-bear poem, that man’s war-powers beat woman’s, how about peace-powers? Of course they are enormous. If she uses them for offense, she can spoil the man’s cake at any time. There is no living without women, and to be assigned to one of them and have her contrive that there shall be no living with her makes a serious dilemma. I have discussed this matter with our old friend Major Brace, and he has illuminated it with such wisdom as his great age (as he says) has enabled him to supply. “We can’t do anything, Peregrine,” he said, “but try our utmost [of course he really said damnedest] to make them happy, and hope that they will be good.” He told me a story about a house-painter he once knew in the country who had some ferrets. “I noticed when looking at the ferrets,” the Major said, “that he had a padlock on the place where he kept them, and he let me know, somehow, that he carried the key in his pocket and let nobody but himself meddle with them. I took note of that, because it seemed to me that the ferrets being part of the domestic establishment, the natural way would have been to leave the key in the house when he was away and intrust the ferrets to his wife. But that was not his way, and I set him down in my mind as a believer in male dominion and an upholder of the authority of the head of the house. And, accordingly, when I heard about a year later that his wife had eloped with the butcher I wasn’t at all surprised. No doubt he had felt about her as he had about the ferrets--that she was his property. I heard that he was extremely put out when she ran away, and took it so much to heart that he left the village. I suppose he didn’t know any better, though of course it is possible that the woman was a fool and couldn’t be trusted. Her going off with the butcher implies a certain carelessness, though not necessarily a lack of intelligence.

“You see, Peregrine, one measure of the liberty of women is the intelligence of man. And it works the other way round, too. A man who is intelligent enough to prefer a free woman for his companion will plan and take thought to have one; and a woman who is clever enough to prefer a free man will take thought to keep her man free and still keep him. That’s what all decent people do nowadays who are passably wise, and I suppose it is what such people have been doing, not always, perhaps, but easily since the time of Adam. And I dare say the better-grade animals do the like.”

I asked the Major if he thought Kipling was right about the she-bear and the superior offensiveness of females. He said he thought there was a good deal of meat in Kipling’s verses, and that few intelligent men came to be half a century old without having had to take thought of the intensity of the female disposition. “Somehow, Peregrine,” said he, “they seem to be a little nearer nature than we are. The primitive creature seems to survive in them a little more perceptibly than it does in us. And it is a very valuable survival--very valuable--and fit to receive the most respectful consideration, because, as Kipling intimates, it is a factor in the continuation of the race. When a man has a wise wife who loves him, as you and I have, Peregrine, it is his business to get the benefit of everything she has. All her strength as well as his is needed in their common business. If he troubles her with his limitations, checks her initiative, and ignores her dissent, it is as bad for the common interest as when she does the like to him. He should attend to her risings-up and her sittings-down, and when at times the primitive creature rises up in her, his best procedure often is neither to run nor to try to rule the storm, but to sit down in the sand, wrap his burnoose around his head, and keep his face attentively to leeward until the gale blows out and calm re-eventuates. Then, in due time, she will dig him out again, if necessary, and he will have much less to unsay and repent of than if he had talked back. And usually, if he has been attentive, he will have learned something that it is valuable to know.

“Lord love us,” went on the Major, “I hate subdued wives. I hate subdued husbands also, but subdued wives worse, if possible, because what subdues a wife is usually such an offensive combination of egotism and stupidity. And yet I know quite able men who bully their wives and have checked their wives’ development and diminished their abilities by doing so. It is a shocking waste, although it is to admire the wives who bear it. That is apt to be the best thing they can do, under the circumstances. You see, in marriage that suggestion of Scripture about cutting off the right hand that offends has only limited application. Man or woman of us, when we have stood up in church and acquired a right hand of the opposite gender, we have need to go mighty slow about casting it from us. To read the divorce statistics, and about the growth of that practice in this country in the last twenty years, you’d think divorce was on the way to become a universal habit. But I guess it won’t. I guess when the ratio has reached a point where it provides duly for the irresponsible, intemperate, light-minded, and unfortunate, the increase will stop, and maybe, if civilization improves, the figures will begin to run the other way. That may seem optimistic, but I can’t think that woman’s extraordinary gift for living with man, and man’s surprising talent for getting along with woman, are going to perish or be wasted.”

* * * * *

My coevals that I meet are still talking about football; not exclusively, of course, but with perseverance and of a lively appearance of interest. Talking about it has some obvious advantages over playing it, but I never learned to be really expert in either. Cordelia and I saved quantities of money last fall staying away from football games. Also quite a lot in staying away from the great final series in professional baseball. Also time and strength on both of these items. If our circumstances had been four or five times as easy and Samuel could have spared us, we would have enriched our experience of contemporary life by taking in several of these contests. As studies in crowdology they are mighty good and leave permanent impressions behind them. And they are interesting socially and anthropologically. And sometimes they are pretty good as sport--the football games better, I think, than before the rules were changed. But as it was, it was a very easy economy for us. Cordelia said she had been to football games and didn’t believe there were any important new thrills left in them for her; and we read a lot about them in the papers and were content, though I don’t think football really makes first-class newspaper reading. I can’t follow the ball in type even as well as from the seats, and I only get the score and the spectacular features. The worst of it is I cannot care inordinately who wins. Of course, the players do. They ought to. And so should the undergraduates and persons just emerged from that condition. But I don’t understand why such large masses of adult people contrive to care so much--if they really do--whether Harvard beats Yale, or either of them beats Princeton, or whether the Army or the Navy wins.

I am getting deplorably careless in my feelings in this great subject. To be sure, when there is a big game I want to know how it has gone, and buy the latest evening paper and take it home and assimilate, and discuss a little, its disclosures about what the score was and why it was so. But however it turns out it doesn’t affect my appetite for dinner, nor my interest in food, and I can’t talk about it more than half an hour. And when the Sunday paper comes with all the details I am apt to get interested in other news and skip the football stories altogether, or until late at night.

Really, I am ashamed. It comes, no doubt, with increase of years and the pressure of responsibilities and concern about the more vital details of human existence. Cordelia reviles me and says I am getting older than my years. Maybe I am, mentally, though she is just about as much interested in football as I am, and no more. I suppose sport naturally falls into a secondary place in the thoughts of people who have a living to make and rent to pay and a child to raise. If everybody was like us, sport might languish, and that would be a pity. I’m glad they’re not. The Pharisee was not so far out, perhaps, in thanking God he was not like other men. The trouble was, he did not go on and thank God that other men were not like him. There needs to be great variety in the world if all the jobs are to get attention. I’m thankful that the prosperity of football does not depend on me, and that I can be bored by it without detriment to the great cause of sport, because, I suppose, it really is a great cause, and related to the perpetuation of vigor and virility in men.

* * * * *

I have been thinking about celibates. There is something to be said for persons to whom celibacy comes natural. To most persons it does not come natural. It never did to me, for instance. I hate it when it is forced, and object with what may be a Protestant detestation to vows that bind people to it; but there are marvelously useful people in the ranks of the unmarried.