THE MAN-HATER DISCUSSES MEN
"Man delights not me."--SHAKESPEARE.
"And the taable staained wi' his aale, an' the mud o' 'is Boots o'
the stairs,
An' the stink o' 'is pipe i' the 'ouse, an' the mark o' 'is 'ead o'
the chairs!"
--TENNYSON.
I didn't ask for any explanation.
I had the sense not to show any surprise at the self-abandonment of
this usually so sturdily reserved little chum of mine.
I just plumped down on the stones beside her and slipped my arm about
the sobbing little overalled body. I suppose it comforted her. For
presently she left off sobbing, drew a long breath, blew her nose,
and began, in a resigned little voice, to open out her whole heart to
me.
"You know who I mean, Joan?"
"Yes, old kid."
The name of "_Colonel Fielding_" seemed to hang in the air above us
as tangibly as those hazel boughs against the sky, but neither of us
uttered it.
In rueful little spurts the truth began to gush from the once silent
and matter-of-fact Elizabeth.
"I guessed you'd guess. Oh, Joan! I'm idiotic about him. Crazy!
As silly about him as you ever were about your precious Harry in
London.
"I used to laugh at you!"
"Everybody starts by laughing at people in love," I said, settling
myself on that wall. "And everybody ends by being quite as silly
themselves. You're no worse than anybody else."
"Yes I am, much," declared Elizabeth.
"Why? Because you've always thought you couldn't like men, and now
you find you can?"
"No!" declared Elizabeth, shaking still more vigorously. "I still
can't like 'men.' It is still true enough about _that_. I still
hate _them_! ... You don't mind my talking, do you? I've bottled
myself up so ever since I met _him_. But as for '_men_'----"
She talked, setting out plainly and sincerely what I do believe is
the attitude of a certain type of girl.
* * * * * * *
Men seldom hear it. If they do, they disbelieve it. But let
them--if any of them are reading this story--be reminded that this
point of view exists. Here's its creed as told me by my bonniest and
best of little pals, Elizabeth Weare.
I'd heard lots of it, in scraps, already. Tonight, when she was
stirred and troubled, I got it in swathes, which I scarcely
interrupted.
"I don't think men are amusing," she declared. "Perhaps I _have_ no
sense of humour. If it is sense of humour that makes their
smoking-room stories funny, I am glad I haven't. They think those
stories funny, I think them far-fetched; as if they'd been thought
out with lots of trouble. It's not the improperness of them that I
mind, those that are supposed to be so 'naughty.' _It's the ugly
sort of pictures they nearly always make_. Think of any you know;
don't they mean something rather horrid to look at? Men haven't
enough imagination to see that's what one hates. Men laugh at those
'jokes,' with a noise like the Prices' old Jack, braying. And they
tell some of them to their wives. And the wives pass them on. And
the girls tell me; pretty girls, with their soft red mouths, repeat
these hideous stupid Limericks and things. And I feel like _crying_,
Joan. Only I have to laugh, or they'd think I didn't understand.
What I _do_ understand is that every time _I've been put a little bit
more off men!_
"Then, I think men are dull. They don't hear what you say quickly
enough. They don't see what it means half the time. And they aren't
noticing what's going on around them. They're wrapped in a _fog_ of
newspaper print and tobacco. They're slow. Slow!
"I think men are so ugly, too. Look at them in omnibuses and trains.
Look at them anywhere! Are they attractive? Not to me. I don't
like their nubbly knuckles and their huge feet (not that I need talk
in these land boots, but still)--I can't bear those great wrists they
have. I hate their horrid skins where they shave--all
nutmeg-graters! How any girl wants to be kissed by them I don't
know. I don't suppose she does really; it's just the Idea. Bristly
moustaches, too. Awful!
"They do such hideous things, men. What can be more revolting than
the sight of one of them knocking out a dirty, smelly black pipe? Or
wolfing down a plateful of half-raw steak? Or mopping up--as they
call it--a fat pint of beer out of a pewter pot? I could not love
one after seeing him do those things!" declared Elizabeth.
"Yet women do, my dear," I reminded her. "They like a man to be even
rather rough-hewn and coarse-fibred, so that he is unlike them. They
don't mind his smelling of tobacco, and wearing scratchy tweeds, and
tanks on his feet. They like him rugged. I--I speak for myself and
for the majority of girls, I think. They like him 'manly.'"
"Heavens!" ejaculated Elizabeth, with equal fervour and truth in her
voice. "How I do loathe what they call 'a manly man'! All lumps,
and a bull's voice, and irregular features!"
"But," I suggested mildly, "you wouldn't want a man to look like the
picture off a chocolate-box lid?"
"I should adore it," declared this exception in girls. "When I was a
little girl, once, I was given a box of sweets with a picture on the
lid called 'The Falconer.' He wore a golden-brown hunting-dress and
he had a hawk on his shoulder, and golden hair and soft eyes, and,
oh! such a pretty face! I thought at the time, 'If only I could ever
see a young man looking like that Falconer!' And now I have.
Colonel Fielding is exactly like that picture. Oh, Joan, I think
he's the most beautiful thing I've seen."
How true it is that when a really reserved person breaks down the
barriers it will babble out ten times more than some one who is more
expansive in every-day life!
I, for instance, should never have dreamt of calling any young man
"the most beautiful thing I'd seen." Not Harry, handsome as he was.
Not Captain Holiday, though he was good-looking enough for any girl
to rave over; manly good looks, too. Very different from the
namby-pamby prettiness of Elizabeth's young Colonel! Personally, I
considered that it would take more than his D.S.O. and the devotion
of his men to their officer to make one forget that he could dress up
and look exactly like a girl!
Yet here was the boyish, resolute, no-nonsense-about-her Elizabeth
glorying in the fact!
Again the force of Contrast, I supposed.
Well! Well, if the Man-hater were drawn to him I could only hope it
was for her happiness. She didn't look happy at the moment, sitting
there on that wall, her chin on her knees and her hands hugging her
gaitered legs.
"To think," she mourned, "that at last I've met the sort of man that
I could care for--even I who never do care for them!--and that it's
no good!'
"Why 'no good,' my dear? Because we're going away? But he's not
going to stay in Careg himself for ever! Besides, he'll write to
you. He always did about the flat, and he will more now," I
comforted her. "I know he likes you."
With her characteristic gesture my chum shook her head till her hair
danced about her face.
"He does like you," I persisted. "I saw it when he met you first!
And at the concert he threw that red carnation straight for you to
catch! I suppose you've kept it?"
A rueful laugh from Elizabeth, a movement of her hand to the breast
of her smock. Kept it? It was her treasure. Oh, yes. She'd got it
badly.
"Besides," I went on, "he met you. He came to talk to you. He
wanted to see you----"
"He used to! But not now!" broke despairingly from the little figure
on the wall. "That's the worst of it! To begin with, he--he did
like me! I was almost sure of it! But not since that girl came down
here to take him from me!"
"Which girl?"
In a tone of passionate despair Elizabeth pronounced the name.
"Muriel Elvey!"
"Muriel--oh, my dear girl, no. That's absurd."
But nothing would persuade Elizabeth that it wasn't true. She had
seen Muriel, who was so lovely that every man must fall in love with
her. She had seen her at the concert, where Colonel Fielding was
talking to her every minute that he was not singing. She'd seen her
at the Tests, still with Colonel Fielding in attendance. She, Miss
Elvey, was staying at The Lodge, where Colonel Fielding was also
staying. Oh! Elizabeth knew what would happen.
I wished I did! Personally, I thought it very unlikely that Muriel
meant to look at Colonel Fielding; but was she going to marry her
host, Captain Holiday? In the meantime she was causing the bitterest
jealousy to both me and my poor little chum!
To think that this was Elizabeth who had strafed me about fretting
over what any young man had said or done!
"I wish I hadn't come," she mourned; "and now it will almost kill me
to go."
Here she stopped, starting as if shot. She lifted her head from her
knees and sprang off the low wall.
There had been a rustling of the leaves that I'd thought was the
breeze; but Elizabeth had heard and recognized the light footstep
that accompanied that rustling.
Another moment and there appeared before us the slim figure and
half-girlish face of the man who was the cause of all this agitation.
I looked hard at him as he saluted and said "How do you do?"
He blushed--yes, he had that trick of blushing which camouflages some
of the effrontery of some of the least diffident of men. I realized
now that it was all a "put-on"--his quietness, his nervousness, his
seeming shyness.
"Er--er--I'm so glad I happened to come across you," he said. "The
fact is I've something I--I rather wanted to ask you--you two people."
How deprecatingly he spoke, but what a gleam of mischief there was
behind those ridiculously long lashes of his! What did he really
mean?
I saw him again as I'd seen him at that concert, dressed up in that
successful imitation of a Spanish beauty, singing in a contralto that
would have lured the bird from the tree, taking in half the audience
by his mock "glad eye" at Captain Holiday, and finally tossing that
red flower into the little brown paw of the Land Girl whom he most
admired. Not too milk-and-watery, all that! And as Elizabeth
herself defended him later, "It's not by being namby-pamby that a man
gets the D.S.O." In spite of his distressingly--to me--pretty-pretty
appearance, there were depths in this idol of Elizabeth's.
Now what had he come to say?
"Er," he began, "I've heard you finished your training and are going
away from here."
"Yes, we're off on Monday," Elizabeth said quite steadily.
He tapped against a moss-covered stick with his cane, and went on, as
if shyly:
"Er--Holiday told me something of the sort. Do--do you like the job
you're going to?"
"We don't know yet," said I, cheerfully enough. "I expect we shall."
"Oh! Holiday didn't know--that is, I expect Holiday might be rather
annoyed if he thought I'd said anything to you about this," returned
this maddeningly puzzling young man. "But, still, it was an idea of
his. And--er--I don't see how he could find out if he didn't ask you
himself, do you?"
Together Elizabeth and I demanded, "Ask us what?"
"Well, Holiday wondered if you two would care to stay on at the
farm," suggested Captain Fielding.
I saw Elizabeth's head go up.
"Stay on?" I echoed. "But we've finished our training!"
"Er--yes. But the Prices want two more land-workers to take the
places of two more men they've had called up. And Holiday thought
that--er--since they're pleased with you, and you've got through the
exam.--well, it could be managed," concluded Colonel Fielding,
diffidently. "It depends upon whether you'd like to stay on jobs
there. Would you?"
Here was a question!
To go--or to stay on?
In less time than it takes you to read about it I'd revolved it
rapidly in my own mind as I stood there by that wall under the
hazels, glancing from Elizabeth to the young officer who had made the
suggestion.
To go meant good-bye to so many things I'd come to care for.
Good-bye to the Prices, the gentle giant and his dainty wife, to whom
her silvered hair gave the look of a little French marquise; good-bye
to their kindliness and interest--not every land-worker finds
employers as helpful and as considerate. However charming the
Rectory people might turn out to be I could not hope that they would
come up to these kind people.
It meant good-bye to the Practice Farm, of which I'd become attached
to every field, every distant view, every shed--even the celebrated
cow-house that I'd cleaned out on that first morning! Good-bye to
the merry midday meals in the jolly kitchen! Good-bye to the dear
old white mare, and the cows who now knew me well! Good-bye to the
morning tramp to work through the dew-spangled, ferny lanes!
Good-bye, too, to the life in camp; good-bye to Vic, the irresistible
Cockney, to Sybil, and little Peggy with her "I'm astonished at
you!"--to Curley, to the red-haired Aggie with her rich Welsh voice,
and to the young forewoman who had mothered the whole mixed lot of us!
We had been one big family; I had found sisters of every class and
kind. Now I had to leave them all, after sharing their life and
their hearts, for six unforgettable weeks. To part--with the chance
that we should never meet again! It's the fate that breaks up so
many a cheery mess, both in the Army and the Land Army! To go meant
all this.
But to stay meant, for me, seeing Captain Holiday still. How could I
grow to forget him and thrust him out of my mind, as I hoped, if I
knew that round any corner I should meet him still, the
golden-and-white collie trailing at his heels? How could I grow
resigned and philosophical, and all those things which I meant to be,
if I had the constant pain of seeing him with Muriel? (The Elveys,
by the way, seemed to be staying on indefinitely at the Lodge.) Oh,
I thought that to stay was the very worst thing I could do for myself!
But then I hadn't only myself to think about.
At the very sound of the words "stay on" I'd seen Elizabeth's small
face lighted up as if by a ray of sunshine from within. She'd turned
it hastily away again. But well I knew what her sentiments were!
So I decided in an instant.
"Oh! If it could be arranged! Of course we'd both prefer to stay on
here. We'll stay!" I said, without hesitating.
Enormous relief appeared in the very tilt of Elizabeth's Board of
Agriculture hat. As for the young Colonel--what did he think or
feel? Was he interested in my little infatuated chum, or wasn't he?
Was he just another slave at the chariot wheels of the all-conquering
Muriel? And what had he said to Captain Holiday about our staying
here? Or had it been the other young man's idea? Afterwards I
wondered very much about this.
Why had Captain Holiday thought of us? The Practice Farm was on his
land but what had the actual working of it got to do with him, he
being merely down in this part of the country on sick leave like his
friend, Colonel Fielding?
Further, I wondered how much longer Muriel and her mother would be
here, and when the coy, uncertain, and hard-to-please Muriel would
make up her mind whom she wanted to marry?