Chapter 27

Despair settles down on the scene. There seems to be no likelihood that there will be any dinner at all anywhere. A ray of light penetrates with the inquiry whether you saw the way Jim looked at Dora last night. If _I_ was you, Margaret, and MY husband looked at Dora like that, _I_--. . . No wonder Dora's husband divorced her. . . . The trouble with Margaret is she's too good to Jim. If she had any sense she could make him so jealous he'd stand on his head for her. . . . Why don't you tell Ned to cut in there and pay a little attention to Marge? . . . Oh, Ned's no good. . . . Well, I'll tell MY HUSBAND--. . . Don't you do it: I started my husband once on a thing like that and he--. . . That's right. Ned's not married. Let him do it. . . . Somebody ought to. . . . Call Ned on the 'phone. . . . We'll eat at the Royal Gorge and I'll put 'em side by side. . . . I'LL sit next to Jim and point it out to him. . . . Say, Marge, it's a good thing you've got on your white broadcloth and those willow plumes. . . . You can get 'em at Delatour's now for twenty-five dollars. . . . Say, I called Ned on the 'phone and what do you think? He's got an engagement for to-night. . . . Say, here's Dora now.

Dora: "Got to sweep right along. Goin' to buzz out to the Inland Inn for dinner with Ned."

Talk of nerve!

Exit Dora.

Enter Stern Moralist. Points gaunt finger at ex-members of Lone Tree Crossing Sewing Circle. Says: "Back to your kitchens, women, and get supper for your husbands."

Onlookers: "Great!"

Enter husbands, about to dine with the women right there, or at some other place where dinner is cooked and ready.

Stern Moralist turns to husbands.

Does he? Why not?

Stern Moralist: "Back to the woodshed and chop the kindling for your wife to get supper with."

Onlookers: "Police! Arrest that man! He's crazy."

Stern Moralist, being propelled down corridor: "Well, if the way to restore women to womanliness is to make them do drudgery which they can hire somebody else to do, why isn't----"

His voice dies away.

Jim asks where Dora is. Loud chorus tells him. Details of Dora's divorce begin to fly about. Harry orders a round of drinks. Somebody praises the drawn butter sauce at the Suddington. This is met with the merits of the pineapple parfait at the La Fontaine. Jim thinks Dora's divorce was her husband's fault. Margaret gets up and goes back to the Purple Parlor and cries. Bessie begins to tell Jim how attentive Ned is to Margaret. This is so helpful that Jim gets up to find Margaret and tell her what he thinks of her. Finds her crying and thinks she is crying because Ned is away with Dora. Terrible row in Purple Parlor. Bessie starts in to explain. Everybody stands about in couples explaining. Waiter runs around trying to find gen'l'man to pay for undrunk drinks. Poor Frank, being the only member of the party who hasn't been drinking, is so sober that he pays. He finally corrals the whole crowd into a couple of taxi-cabs. They go down the street with everybody's head out of the cab-window and everybody's voice saying "The Suddington," "The Grunewurst," "Max's," "The Royal Gorge," "Perinique's."

The revulsion from empty leisure in the direction of full-every-night leisure is balanced to some extent by a revulsion toward activity of a useful sort. This latter revulsion has two phases: Economic Independence, which has been spoken of in former articles; Social Service and Citizenship, which will be spoken of next month.

Which one of these two revulsions will be the stronger? If it is the one toward useful activity, we shall see a dam erected against the current which, in carrying women out of the struggle for existence, carries them out of the world's mental strife. If it is the one toward frivolity, we shall see simply an acceleration of that current and a quicker and larger departure from all those habits of toil and service which produce power and character.

With marriage, of course, Marie had a certain opportunity to get back into life. She had before her at least fifteen years of real work. And it would have been work of the realest sort. Effort--to and beyond all other effort! The carrying of new life in fear, the delivery of it in torture, the nourishing of it in relinquishment f all the world's worldliness, the watching over it in sleeplessness, the healing of its sickness in heart-sickness, the bringing of it, with its body strong, its mind matured, up into the world of adults, up into the struggle for existence! What a work!

But what a preparation for it had Marie!

She flinched from it. The inertia of her mind carried her to the ultimate logic of her life. Along about the time of her marriage she began to cease to be the typical normal girl of her type.

She became a woman of the future--OF HER TYPE.

From the facts of modern idleness the positive character reacts toward new-found activity: toward an enormous, never-before-witnessed expenditure of intelligent care on children; toward self-support; toward civic service. The character which is neither positive nor negative runs along as a neutral mixture of modern facts and of old ideals of casual idling and of casual child-rearing. The negative character--like Marie's--just yields to the facts and is swept along by them into final irresponsibility and inutility.

Marie wasn't negative enough--she wasn't positive enough in her negativeness--to plunge into dissipation. It wasn't in her nature to do any plunging of any kind. Good, safe, motionless sponging was her instinct. And she will die in the odor of tubbed and scrubbed respectability. And if you knew her you would like her very much. She is charming.

When she and Chunk were married, they went to live in an apartment appropriate to a rising young man, and Marie's job was on all occasions to look as appropriate as the apartment.

No shallow cynicism, this! Just plain, bald truth without any wig on it. The only thing that you could put your finger on that Marie really did was so to wear clothes and so to give parties as to be the barometer of her husband's prosperity. And in every city you can see lots of such barometers giving themselves an artificially high reading in order to create that "atmosphere" of success which is a recognized commercial asset.

Chunk was hugely pleased with Marie. She looked good at the dinner-table in the cafe of their apartment building. She knew how to order the right dishes when they entertained and dined down-town. She made it possible for him to return deftly and engagingly the social attentions of older people. She completed the "front" of his life, and he not only supported her but, as Miss Salmon, of Vassar, flippantly and seriously says, he "sported" her as he might a diamond shirt stud.

No struggle in Marie's life so far! No HAVING to swim in the cold water of daily enforced duty or else sink. NO BEING ACCUSTOMED TO THE DISAGREEABLE FEEL OF THAT WATER.

She had missed work. That was nothing. She had missed being HARDENED to work. That was everything.

The first demand ever made on her for really disagreeable effort came when Chunk, in order to get a new factory going, had to move for a while to Junction City. When Marie bitterly and furiously objected, Chunk was severely astonished. Why, he had to go! It was necessary. But there had been no necessity in Marie's experience. They became quarrelsome about it. Then stubborn. Marie talked about her mother and her friends and how she loved them (which was true) and stayed.

For two years she inhabited Chunk's flat in the city and lived on Chunk's monthly check.

She and Chunk were married. Chunk was to support her. Her father used to support her. Her job then was being nice. That was her job now. And she was nice. And she was still supported. Perfectly logical.

For two years, neither really daughter now nor really wife, not being obliged any longer even to make suggestions to her mother about what to have for dinner, not being obliged any longer even to think out the parties for Chunk's business friends, she did nothing but become more and more firmly fixed in her inertia, in her incapacity for hardship, in her horror of pain.

When Chunk came back from Junction City and was really convinced that she didn't want children he was not merely astonished. He thought the world had capsized.

In a way he was right. The world is turning round and over and back to that one previous historical era when the aversion to childbearing was widespread.

Once, just once, before our time, there was a modern world. Once, just once, though not on the scale we know it, there was, before us, a diffusion of leisure.

The causes were similar.

The Romans conquered the world by military force, just as we have conquered it by mechanical invention. They lived on the plunder of despoiled peoples just as we live on the products of exploited continents. They had slaves in multitudes just as we have machines in masses. Because of the slaves, there were hundreds of thousands of their women, in the times of the Empire, who had only denatured housekeeping to do, just as to-day there are millions of our women who, because of machines, have only that kind of housekeeping to do. Along with leisure and semi-leisure, they acquired its consequences, just as we have acquired them. And the sermons of Augustus Caesar, first hero of their completed modernity, against childlessness are perfect precedents for those of Theodore Roosevelt, first hero of ours.

Augustus, however, addressed himself mainly to the men, who entered into marriage late, or did not enter into it at all, for reasons identical with ours--the increased competitiveness of the modern life and the decreased usefulness of the modern wife. It was the satirists who addressed themselves particularly to the women. And their tirades against idleness, frivolity, luxury, dissipation, divorce, and aversion to child-bearing leave nothing to be desired, in comparison with modern efforts, for effectiveness in rhetoric--or for ineffectiveness in result.

Now it could not have been the woman who desires economic independence through self-support who was responsible for the ultimate aversion to childbearing in the Roman world--for SHE did not exist. It could not have been the woman who desires full citizenship--for she did not exist. What economic power and what political power the Roman Empire woman desired and achieved was parasitic--the economic power which comes from the inheritance of estates, the political power which comes from the exercise of sexual charm.

The one essential difference between the women of that ancient modern world and the women of this contemporary modern world is in the emergence, along with really democratic ideals, of the agitation for equal economic and political opportunity.

The other kind of New Woman, the woman brought up throughout her girlhood in a home in which there is no adequate employment for her; trained to no tasks, or, at any rate, to tasks (like dusting the dining-room and counting the laundry) so petty, so ridiculously irrelevant that her great-grandmother did them in the intervals of her real work; going then into marriage with none of the discipline of habitual encounter with inescapable toil; taken by her husband not to share his struggle but his prosperity--that sort of New Woman they had, just as we have her in smaller number, it is true, but in identical character.

They tell us it was "luxury" that ruined the Romans. But was luxury the START? Wasn't it only the means to the FINISH?

Eating a grouse destroys in itself, no more moral fiber than eating a ham sandwich. Bismarck, whether he slept on eider-down or on straw, arose Bismarck.

The person who has a job and who does it is very considerably immunized against the consequences of luxury. First, because he is giving a return for it. Second, because he hasn't much time for it.

On the other hand we see the hobo who won't work ruining himself on the luxury of stable-floors and of free-lunch counters, just as thoroughly as any nobleman who won't work can ever ruin himself on the luxury of castles and game preserves.

It is clearly the habitual enjoyment of either grouse or ham sandwiches, of either eiderdown or straw, WITHOUT SERVICE RENDERED AND WITHOUT FATIGUE ENDURED, that ultimately desiccates the moral character and drains it of all capacity for effort.

Marie was as reasonable a proposition as that two and two make four.

She had given her early, plastic, formative years to acquiring the HABIT of effortless enjoyment, and when the time for making an effort came, the effort just wasn't in her.

Her complete withdrawal from the struggle for existence had at last, in her negative, non-resistive mind atrophied all the instincts of that struggle including finally the instinct for reproduction.

The instinct for reproduction is intricately involved in the struggle for existence. The individual struggles for perpetuation, for perpetuation in person, for perpetuation in posterity. Work, the perpetuation of one's own life in strain and pain; work, the clinging to existence in spite of its blows; work, the inuring of the individual to the penalties of existence, is linked psychologically to the power and desire for continued racial life. The individual, the class, which struggles no more will in the end reproduce itself no more. In not having had to conquer life, it has lost its will to live.

The detailed daily reasons for this ultimate social law stand clear in Marie's life. And remember what sort of woman she was. The woman who is coerced by external, authoritative ideals will bear children even when the wish to bear them is really absent. She will bear them without thinking. She will bear them because she has never thought that anything else was possible. But Marie (and this means millions of women throughout the modern world) was free, wonderfully, unparalleledly free.

She was free, though a leisured woman, from the requirement of an heir for a great family estate. She was free from the dictates of historic Christianity about conjugal duty and unrestricted reproduction. She was free from the old uncomplaining compliance with a husband's will.

Modern life had done all this for her. She was uncoerced by family authority, ecclesiastical authority, or marital authority. She was limitlessly free, limitlessly irresponsible, a creature of infinite opportunities and no duties.

All social coercion toward childbearing having been withdrawn from her, the only guide she had left (and it would have been her best one) was instinct and impulse.

But with the cessation from struggle, with the cessation from effort and from fatigue and from discipline, and from the sorrow of pain that brings the joy of accomplishment, that instinct and impulse had disappeared. With the petrifaction of its soil, it had withered away.

She had been sedulously trained to sterility.

Nevertheless, when it got talked around among her friends that she didn't want children, everybody thought it very surprising, in view of all that had been done for her.

In the January number Mr. Hard will discuss "The Women of To-morrow" in "Civic Service."

***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII December 1910 No. 6

{pages 778-783 are NOT numbered in the printed copy!} THE WATCHMAN

"And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men." Matthew xxviii. 4

BY L. M. MONTGOMERY

My Claudia, it is long since we have met, So kissed, so held each other heart to heart! I thought to greet thee as a conqueror comes, Bearing the trophies of his prowess home. But Jove hath willed it should be otherwise-- Jove, say I? Nay, some mightier, stranger god, Who thus hath laid his heavy hand on me, No victor, Claudia, but a broken man Who seeks to hide his weakness in thy love.

How beautiful thou art! The years have brought An added splendor to thy loveliness, With passion of dark eye and lip rose-red, Struggling between its dimple and its pride. And yet there is somewhat that glooms between Thy love and mine; come, girdle me about With thy true arms, and pillow on thy breast This aching and bewildered head of mine; Here, where the fountain glitters in the sun Among the saffron lilies I will tell-- If so that words will answer my desire-- The shameful fate that hath befallen me.

Down in Jerusalem they slew a man, Or god . . . it may be that he was a god . . . Those mad, wild Jews whom Pontius Pilate rules. Thou knowest Pilate, Claudia--a vain man, Too weak to govern such a howling horde As those same Jews. This man they crucified. I knew naught of him--never heard his name Until the day they dragged him to his death; Then all tongues wagged about him and his deeds; Some said that he had claimed to be their king, Some that he had blasphemed their deity. 'Twas certain he was poor and meanly born, No warrior he, nor hero; and he taught Doctrines that surely would upset the world; And so they killed him to be rid of him. Wise, very wise, if he were only man, Not quite so wise if he were half a god!

I know that strange things happened when he died . . . There was a darkness and an agony, And some were vastly frightened--not so I! What cared I if that mob of reeking Jews Had brought a nameless curse upon their heads? _I_ had no part in that bloodguiltiness. At least he died; and some few friends of his Took him and laid him in a garden tomb. A watch was set about the sepulchre, Lest these, his friends, should hide him and proclaim That he had risen as he had foretold. Laugh not, my Claudia. _I_ laughed when I heard The prophecy; I would I had not laughed!

I Maximus, was chosen for the guard, With all my trusty fellows. Pilate knew I was a man who had no foolish heart Of softness all unworthy of a man! I was a soldier who had slain my foes; My eyes had looked upon a tortured slave As on a beetle crushed beneath my tread; I gloried in the splendid strife of war, Lusting for conquest; I had won the praise Of our stern general on a scarlet field, Red in my veins the warrior passion ran, For I had sprung from heroes, Roman born!

That second night we watched before the tomb; My men were merry; on the velvet turf, Bestarred with early blossoms of the spring, They diced with jest and laughter; all around The moonlight washed us like a silver lake, Save where that silent, sealed sepulchre Was hung with shadow as a purple pall. A faint wind stirred among the olive boughs . . . Methinks I hear the sighing of that wind In all sounds since, it was so dumbly sad; But as the night wore on it died away, And all was deadly stillness; Claudia, That stillness was most awful, as if some Great heart had broken and so ceased to beat! I thought of many things, but found no joy In any thought, even the thought of thee; The moon waned in the west and sickly grew, Her light sucked from her in the breaking dawn . . . Never was dawn so welcome as that pale, Faint glimmer in the cloudless, brooding sky!

Claudia, how may I tell what came to pass? I have been mocked at, when I told the tale, For a crazed dreamer punished by the gods Because he slept on guard; but mock not THOU! I could not bear it if thy lips should mock The vision dread of that Judean morn.

Sudden the pallid east was all aflame With radiance that beat upon our eyes As from the noonday sun; and then we saw Two shapes that were as the immortal gods Standing before the tomb; around me fell My men as dead; but I, though through my veins Ran a cold tremor never known before, Withstood the shock and saw one shining shape Roll back the stone; the whole world seemed ablaze, And through the garden came a rushing wind Thundering a paean as of victory. Then that dead man came forth . . . oh, Claudia, If thou couldst but have seen the face of him! Never was such a conqueror! Yet no pride Was in it . . . naught but love and tenderness, Such as we Romans scoff at, and his eyes Bespake him royal. Oh, my Claudia, Surely he was no Jew but very god!

Then he looked full upon me; I had borne Much staunchly, but that look I could not bear! What man may front a god and live? I fell Prone, as if stricken by a thunderbolt; And though I died not, somewhat of me died That made me man; when my long stupor passed I was no longer Maximus . . . I was A weakling with a piteous woman soul, All strength and pride, joy and ambition gone! My Claudia, dare I tell thee what foul curse Is mine because I looked upon a god?

I care no more for glory; all desire For honor and for strife is gone from me, All eagerness for war. I only care To help and save bruised beings, and to give Some comfort to the weak and suffering; I cannot even hate those Jews; my lips Speak harshly of them, but within my heart I only feel compassion; and I love All creatures, to the vilest of the slaves, Who seem to me as brothers. Claudia, Scorn me not for this weakness; it will pass-- Surely 'twill pass in time and I shall be Maximus strong and valiant once again, Forgetting that slain god. And yet . . .and yet . . . . He looked as one who could not be forgot!

***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII December 1910 No. 6

THE MAN WHO MADE GOOD {pages 784-799}

By ARTHUR STRINGER

AUTHOR OF "THE SILVER POPPY," "PHANTOM HOUSE," ETC.

Trotter opened his door and listened. Then he tiptoed out to the stairhead. The coast seemed clear. The house lay beneath him as still as a well. It was nothing more than a three-tiered cavern of quietness.

So he crept back to his own room and closed and locked the door after him. It was a top-floor rear, where a hip-roof gave his back wall the rake of a Baltimore buckeye, and a dismantled electric call-bell bore ignominious testimony to the fact that his skyey abode had once been a servant's quarters.

But the room was quiet, and, what counted more, it was cheap. The thought of ever being put out of it terrified the frugal-minded Trotter. For seven weary months he had wandered about New York's skyline, looking for just the right corner, as peevish as a cow-bird looking for a copse nest.

Yet Mrs. Teetzel's laws were adamantine. Her rule was as Procrustean as her thin-lashed eyes were inquisitive. She daily inspected both her lavishly distributed lambrequins and her "gentleman roomers'" mail, with an occasional discreet excursion into their unlocked trunks. Cooking in a bedroom was as illicit as private laundry work in the second-floor bathtub. A young Toronto poet who had learned the trick of buttering an envelope and in it neatly shirring an egg over a gas jet was first reminded that he was four weeks behind in his rent and then sadly yet firmly ejected from the top-floor skylight room.

So Trotter, once back in his own quarters, moved about with a caution not untouched with apprehension. Mrs. Teetzel, he knew had a tread that was noiseless. She also had the habit of appearing, in curl-papers, at uncouth moments, as unheralded as an apparition from the other world. And Trotter's conscience was not clear. For months past he had kept secreted in his trunk one of those single-holed gas heaters known as a "hot plate." This he surreptitiously attached to the gas jet, and secretly thereon made coffee and cooked his matutinal hard-boiled egg. There was a thrill of excitement about it, a tang of outlawry, a touch of danger. It took on the romance of a vast hazard. And it also rather suited his purse, since that particular newspaper office which he had journeyed to New York both to augment and to uplift showed no undue haste in receiving him.