GRANDMOTHER EVE
Very different in almost every imaginable respect from Adam was his
attractive lady, Madame Eve. Indeed, so radically different from each
other were this rather ill-assorted pair that it was always difficult
for us to believe that they were related even by marriage, and I
hesitate to say what I think would have been the outcome of their little
romance had there been any competition for the lady's hand when Adam set
out to win it. I have personally always had a feeling that this first of
hymeneal experiments was rather a marriage of convenience than anything
else, and I have heard my great-great-great-grandmother say that in the
old pioneer days there was very little for a woman to choose from in the
matter of men's society.
"For a long time," she remarked, "Adam was the only man in sight, and
I was a young thing entirely without experience in worldly matters. He
seemed to my girlish fancy to be all that a man should be. His habits
were good. He neither smoked nor drank, cared apparently nothing for
cards, and barring an interest in Discosaurus Racing, had very few
sporting proclivities. We were thrown together a great deal, and
inasmuch as the life in the Garden was a somewhat lonely one, we took
considerable pleasure in each other's society. For myself, I was not
particularly anxious to be married, preferring the free and
independent life of the spinster, but as time went on and we came to
realize that the people of future generations might misunderstand us
and, as people will do, talk about us, we decided that the best way
to avoid all gossip was to announce our engagement, and at the end of
the usual period, settle down together as man and wife. I don't know
that I have ever regretted the step, though I will say that I think it
is undesirable for a young girl to enter too hastily into the
obligations of matrimony, or to marry the first man that comes along,
unless she is absolutely sure that he is the only man she could
possibly endure through three meals a day for the balance of her
life."
It must not be assumed from this little reminiscence of this first
lady in the land that her marriage was an unhappy one. I think, that
as a matter of fact, it was quite the contrary, for subsequent to the
wedding each was too busy with other matters to get thinking either
morbidly or otherwise on the subject of their individual happiness.
They took it as a matter of course, and in the division of labor which
the social conditions of the day involved, found too much to occupy
them to worry over such unimportant abstractions as mere personal
felicity.
"We were spared one of the direst afflictions of modern social life,"
Madame Eve once remarked to my mother, in talking over the old days,
"in the absence of domestic servants from our family circle. Adam was
head of the house, general provider, hired-man, stable-boy,
head-gardener, coach-man, night-watchman and everything else of the
male persuasion on the place; whilst I was cook, laundress, nurse,
housekeeper, manicure, stenographer, and general housemaid, as well as
the mother of the family--a situation that even though it involved us
in no end of hard work, had its compensations. Living off in suburbs
as we did, you can have no idea of what a comfort it was to us not to
be at the mercy of a cook who would threaten to leave us every time
anything happened to displease her, such as an extra meal to be cooked
in emergency cases, or the failure of the cooking-sherry to come up to
the exalted standards of her taste as a connoisseur in wines, and hard
as the housework was, as I look back upon it now, I realize how much
trouble I was spared in not having to follow a yellow-haired fluffy
ruffles about the house all day long cleaning up after her. If there
is anything of the labor-saving device in that modern invention known
as a chambermaid, I don't know where it comes in. I'd rather sweep
three floors, and make twenty-nine beds, every day of my life than put
in one single week trying to get seven cents worth of efficient work
out of a fourteen-dollar housemaid."
At this point I ventured to put in the suggestion that I should have
thought some use could have been made of the monkeys in the matter of
Domestic Service, whereupon the dear lady, who was not nearly so
sensitive on the subject of the Simian family as her husband had
always shown himself to be, patted me on the head, and smiled
indulgently, as she cracked her little joke.
"Monkeys, my dear Methy," she replied, "were always more efficient in
the higher branches. Seriously, however," she went on, "we had that
same idea ourselves, and we tried Simian labor for a while, but it was
far from satisfactory. They were too playfully impetuous, and we had
to give them up as indoor servants. We had a Monkey Butler one season,
and nothing could induce him to serve our dinner in that dignified
fashion in which a dinner should be served. He would pass the soup
with one paw, the fish with the other, while serving the bread with
his tail, and all simultaneously, so that instead of dinner becoming a
peaceful meal, it was at all times, a highly excitable function that
left us all in a state of trembling nervousness when it was over. Try
as we might we could not induce them to do one thing at a time, and
finally when this particular butler, to whom I have referred, instead
of standing as he was instructed to do behind Adam's chair, insisted
on swinging from the chandelier over the center of the table suspended
by his caudal appendage, we decided that we would rather wait on
ourselves."
Asked once if she had not found the primitive life uncomfortable, she
shook her head in a decided negative.
[Illustration: Eve's Scrap Book.]
"There were too many compensations in our freedom from the things that
make your social life of to-day a complex problem," she replied. "In
the first place I never had to worry much over Adam. When he was not
out getting the raw material for our daily meals he was most generally
at home, for the very excellent reason that there was no other place
to go. We hadn't any Clubs to begin with, so that on his way home from
business there was no temptation for him to stop off anywhere and
frivol away his time playing billiards, or squandering his limited
means on rubbers of bridge or other ruinous games. The only Vaudeville
shows we had at the time consisted of the somewhat too continuous
performances of the monkeys and the poll-parrots right there in our
own back-yard, so that that menace to the happy home was entirely
unknown to us, and inasmuch as I was the only cook in all Christendom
at the time, the idea of not coming home to dinner never occurred to
Adam. It is true that at times he criticised my cooking, but in view
of certain ancestral limitations from which he suffered, I never had
to sit quietly and listen to an exasperating disquisition on the Pies
That Mother Used To Make, a line of conversation that in these modern
days has broken up many an otherwise happy home. Socially the time had
its draw-backs, but even in that respect there were advantages. The
fact that we had no next-door neighbors enabled us to live without
ostentation. I have discovered that much of the trouble in the world
to-day arises from a love of showing-off, and of course, if there is
no one about to show-off to, you don't indulge in that sort of
foolishness. Being the only family in the place we were not spurred
into extravagances of living, either because we had to keep up an end
in society, or because we wished to make a better showing than someone
else was making. There was correspondingly no gossip going on all
about us. The absence of society meant that there were no Sewing
Circles anywhere where peoples' reputations were pulled apart while
under-clothes for alleged heathen were put together. Nobody ever
descended upon us at unreasonable hours with unwelcome Surprise
Parties eating us out of house and home and compelling us to stay up
all night dancing the Virginia Reel when we were so sleepy we could
hardly keep our eyes open. We didn't have to give dinners to people we
didn't like, or make calls on persons in whom we took no earthly
interest whatever. There was no question of Woman's Suffrage to make
an everlasting breach between Adam and myself; no church squabbles
over whether the new carpet should be pink or green, and as for
politics, there was not anything even remotely resembling a politic in
the whole broad land. If Adam or I felt the need of a law now and
then, we'd make it, and if it didn't work, we'd repeal it, so that
there were no endless discussions on such subjects, involving hard
feeling, acrimonious correspondence, and an endless chain of Chapters
of the Ananias Club all over creation. And when the children came
along I was permitted to bring them up according to my own ideas,
thanks to the entire absence from the country of inspired old-maids,
and omniscient editors, ceaselessly endeavoring to reduce a natural
maternal function to an arbitrary science. It has been said that I did
not have much to be proud of in the results of my efforts to bring up
my children right, and I suppose that in the case of Cain and Abel I
must admit that I have not; but I am not so sure that things would
have turned out any different if I had reared them after a Fireside
Companion pattern for the making of a panne velvet posterity. I will
go so far as to say that after looking over the comic supplements of
the Sunday Newspapers, I believe Cain would have killed Abel ten years
earlier than he did if he had had the example of the Katzenjammer Kids
and Buster Brown before him in the formative years of his life. So, on
that score, I am comfortable in my mind, much as I regret the
disastrous climax of the lives of those two boys. In connection with
this matter of the bringing up of children I believe, too, that
despite the narrowness of our outlook, the primitive conditions were
better than those which now exist. I never heard of my boys running
loose about town waking up the whole community with their cheers
because their college football team had crippled eleven other boys
from another college for life; and hard to manage as Cain and Abel
were at times, Adam and I never had to put them to bed at five
o'clock in the morning because they had paralyzed their throats at a
college banquet announcing to an exasperated world that they were Sons
of a Gambolier. In fact, the educational problem of those early days
was an educational problem and not a social one. We did not spend our
time teaching boys to speak seventeen languages, without any ideas to
express in any one of them, but went in for the ideas first. We
regarded speech merely as a vehicle for the expression of ideas, and
went at it from that point of view, rather than the other way around
according to modern notions. Cain and Abel didn't have to go to a
military school to learn how to haze each other, and no young man of
that day ever thought of qualifying for his A. B. by compelling
another young man to sip Tabasco sauce through a straw. What they
learned, they learned by experience, and not through the pages of a
book. If we felt it well to teach one of them that water was wet, we
did not subject his young mind to a nine months course of lectures by
a Professor on Hydropathy, but took him out and dropped him in the
duck-pond and let him draw his own conclusions; and when it came to
Botany, we found that either one of them could get a more
comprehensive idea of the habits of growing plants from weeding a
ten-acre lot than he could get out of a four years' course at a
Correspondence School. The result was that when he came to graduate
and go out into the world he was ready for business, and didn't have
to serve as an Office-Boy on a salary of nothing a week for
seventy-five or a hundred years before he was able to earn his own
living."
It surely was an idyllic picture that the dear old lady drew, and I
have often wished myself amid the rush and roar of modern life, that
we might go back to the simpler methods of those Arcadian days.
On the subject of dress, Eve was entirely out of accord with her
husband. She viewed Adam's theories on that subject with toleration,
however, and always laughed when they were mentioned.
"He's just like a man," she smiled. "He really has no objection to
fetching costumes when they are worn by other people. He merely does
not wish to be bothered with such things himself. He has just as much
of an eye for a daintily dressed little bit of femininity as anybody
else, but he is eternally afraid that if I go in for that sort of
thing he will be turned into a lady's maid. The idea of a hook-and-eye
fills him with horror. His eyesight is not as good as it used to be,
and he dreads the notion that if I come out in one of these
new-fangled waists that hook up at the back he will be compelled to
put in an hour or two fastening it up for me every time I put it on,
and I don't blame him. It seems to me that if there is anything in
this world that is unbefitting the glorious manhood of a true
masculine being it is to have to sit down in a chair for an hour
before dinner looking for a half million hooks and eyes, or
cloth-covered buttons and loops, on the back of his wife's gown, and
trying to fasten them up properly without the use of language unsuited
to a lady's ears. When you think that the hand of man was made to
wield the sceptre of imperial power over this magnificent world, it
becomes a gross impropriety to divert it from the path of destiny into
so futile an effort as hooking up a mere bit of fuss, feathers and
fallals. You might just as well hitch up a pair of thoroughbred
elephants to a milk wagon. It will do, as Adam says, for the
Mollycoddle and the meticulous weakling, but never for a real man
worthy of the name. But after all that is no reason why woman should
be shorn of one of her chief glories, and I totally disagree with him
in his condemnation of all clothes just because some of them are
conceived in foolishness. Dresses can be made to button up at the
side, or in front, and when I think of some of the new fall styles
that are coming in I find myself regretting that I am over five
hundred years old, and cannot with strict propriety, go in for them
myself. Take those little chiffon--"
And so the dear old lady went on into an enthusiastic disquisition on
the glories of dress that was so intimately feminine that I hesitate
to attempt to quote her words in this place, knowing little as I do on
the subject, and hardly able myself to tell the difference between a
gimp and a café parfait. I will merely close this chapter by quoting
Eve's last remark on the subject.
"All I can say is," she observed, "that Adam makes a great mistake in
objecting to woman's thinking so much about her clothes, for I can
tell him that if she didn't think about her own clothes she would
begin to think about his, and if that were to happen it wouldn't be
long before all men in creation would be going about looking as if
somebody had picked them off a Christmas tree. In the matter of
clothes woman is the court of last resort, and it is better for men
that she should concentrate all her attention on herself!"
Incidentally let me add that when someone once asked Eve if she hadn't
often wished she had been a man, she replied:
"Lord no! In that case there would have been two of us, and goodness
knows one was enough!"