THE ARITHMETIC AND PHYSIOLOGY OF LOVE.
"Well, have you seen this Fanny Radowski?" said Lord Silverdale, when he
returned the manuscript to the President of the Old Maids' Club.
"Of course. Didn't I tell you I had the story from her own mouth, though
I have put it into Mendoza's?"
"Ah, yes, I remember now. It certainly is funny, her refusing a good
Catholic on the ground that he was a bad Jew. But then according to the
story she doesn't know he's a Catholic?"
"No, it was I who divined the joke of the situation. Lookers-on always
see more of the game. I saw at once that if Mendoza were really a Jew,
he would never have been such an ass as to make the slip he did; and so
from this and several other things she told me about her lover, I
constructed deductively the history you have read. She says she first
met him at a mourning service in memory of her father, and that it is a
custom among her people when they have not enough men to form a
religious quorum (the number is the mystical ten) to invite any brother
Jew who may be passing to step in, whether he is an acquaintance or
not."
"I gathered that from the narrative," said Lord Silverdale. "And so she
wishes to be an object lesson in female celibacy, does she?"
"She is most anxious to enlist in the Cause."
"Is she really beautiful, et cetera?"
"She is magnificent."
"Then I should say the very member we are looking for. A Jewess will be
an extremely valuable element of the Club, for her race exalts marriage
even above happiness, and an old maid is even more despised than among
us. The lovely Miss Radowski will be an eloquent protest against the
prejudices of her people."
Lillie Dulcimer shook her head quietly. "The racial accident which makes
her seem a desirable member to you, makes me regard her as impossible."
"How so?" cried Silverdale in amazement. "You surely are not going to
degrade your Club by anti-Semitism."
"Heaven forefend! But a Jewess can never be a whole Old Maid."
"I don't understand."
"Look at it mathematically a moment."
Silverdale made a grimace.
"Consider! A Jewess, orthodox like Miss Radowski, can only be an Old
Maid fractionally. An Old Maid must make 'the grand refusal!'--she must
refuse mankind at large. Now Miss Radowski, being cut off by her creed
from marrying into any but an insignificant percentage of mankind, is
proportionately less valuable as an object-lesson; she is unfitted for
the functions of Old Maidenhood in their full potentiality. Already by
her religion she is condemned to almost total celibacy. She cannot
renounce what she never possessed. There are in the world, roughly
speaking, eight million Jews among a population of a thousand millions.
The force of the example, in other words, her value as an Old Maid, may
therefore be represented by .008."
"I am glad you express her as a decimal rather than a vulgar fraction,"
said Lord Silverdale laughing. "But I must own your reckoning seems
correct. As a mathematical wrangler you are terrible. So I shall not
need to try Miss Radowski?"
"No; we cannot entertain her application," said Lillie peremptorily, the
thunder-cloud no bigger than a man's hand gathering on her brow at the
suspicion that Silverdale did not take her mathematics seriously.
Considering that in keeping him at arm's length her motive were merely
mathematical (though Lord Silverdale was not aware of this) she was
peculiarly sensitive on the point. She changed the subject quickly by
asking what poem he had brought her.
"Do not call them poems," he answered.
"It is only between ourselves. There are no critics about."
"Thank you so much. I have brought one suggested by the strange farrago
of religions that figured in your last human document. It is a pæan on
the growing hospitality of the people towards the gods of other nations.
There was a time when free trade in divinities was tabu, each nation
protecting, and protected by, its own. Now foreign gods are all the
rage."
"THE END OF THE CENTURY" CATHOLIC CREDO.
I'm a Christo-Jewish Quaker,
Moslem, Atheist and Shaker,
Auld Licht Church of England Fakir,
Antinomian Baptist, Deist,
Gnostic, Neo-Pagan Theist,
Presbyterianish Papist,
Comtist, Mormon, Darwin-apist,
Trappist, High Church Unitarian,
Sandemanian Sabbatarian,
Plymouth Brother, Walworth Jumper,
Southcote South-Place Bible-Thumper,
Christadelphian, Platonic,
Old Moravian, Masonic,
Corybantic Christi-antic,
Ethic-Culture-Transatlantic,
Anabaptist, Neo-Buddhist,
Zoroastrian Talmudist,
Laotsean, Theosophic,
Table-rapping, Philosophic,
Mediæval, Monkish, Mystic,
Modern, Mephistophelistic,
Hellenistic, Calvinistic,
Brahministic, Cabbalistic,
Humanistic, Tolstoistic,
Rather Robert Elsmeristic,
Altruistic, Hedonistic
And Agnostic Manichæan,
Worshipping the Galilean.
For with equal zeal I follow
Sivah, Allah, Zeus, Apollo,
Mumbo Jumbo, Dagon, Brahma,
Buddha _alias_ Gautama,
Jahvé, Juggernaut and Juno--
Plus some gods that but the few know.
Though I reverence the Mishna,
I can bend the knee to Vishna;
I obey the latest mode in
Recognizing Thor and Odin,
Just as freely as the Virgin;
For the Pope and Mr. Spurgeon,
Moses, Paul and Zoroaster,
Each to me is seer and master.
I consider Heine, Hegel,
Schopenhauer, Shelley, Schlegel,
Diderot, Savonarola,
Dante, Rousseau, Goethe, Zola,
Whitman, Renan (priest of Paris),
Transcendental Prophet Harris,
Ibsen, Carlyle, Huxley, Pater
Each than all the others greater.
And I read the Zend-Avesta,
Koran, Bible, Roman Gesta,
Ind's Upanischads and Spencer
With affection e'er intenser.
For these many appellations
Of the gods of different nations,
_I_ believe--from Baal to Sun-god--
All at bottom cover _one_ god.
_Him_ I worship--dropping gammon--
And his mighty name is MAMMON.
"You are very hard upon the century--or rather upon the end of it," said
Lillie.
"The century is dying unshriven," said the satirist solemnly. "Its
conscience must be stirred. Truly, was there ever an age which had so
much light and so little sweetness? In the reckless fight for gold
Society has become a mutual swindling association. Cupidity has ousted
Cupid, and everything is bought and sold."
"Except your poems, Lord Silverdale," laughed Lillie.
It was tit for the tat of his raillery of her mathematics.
Before his lordship had time to make the clever retort the thought of
next day, Turple the magnificent brought in a card.
"Miss Winifred Woodpecker?" said Lillie queryingly. "I suppose it's
another candidate. Show her in."
Miss Woodpecker was a tall stately girl, of the kind that pass for
lilies in the flowery language of the novelists.
"Have I the pleasure of speaking to Miss Dulcimer?"
"Yes, I am Miss Dulcimer," said Lillie.
"And where is the Old Maids' Club?" further inquired Miss Woodpecker,
looking around curiously.
"Here," replied Lillie, indicating the epigrammatic antimacassars with a
sweeping gesture. "No, don't go, Lord Silverdale. Miss Woodpecker, this
is my friend Lord Silverdale. He knows all about the Club, so you
needn't mind speaking before him."
"Well, you know, I read the leader in the _Hurrygraph_ about your Club
this morning."
"Oh, is there a leader?" said Lillie feverishly. "Have you seen it, Lord
Silverdale?"
"I am not sure. At first I fancied it referred to the Club, but there
was such a lot about Ptolemy, Rosa Bonheur's animals and the Suez Canal
that I can hardly venture to say what the leader itself was about. And
so, Miss Woodpecker, you have thought about joining our institution for
elevating female celibacy into a fine art?"
"I wish to join at once. Is there any entrance fee?"
"There _is_--experience. Have you had a desirable proposal of marriage?"
"Eminently desirable."
"And still you do not intend to marry?"
"Not while I live."
"Ah, that is all the guarantee we want," said Lord Silverdale smiling.
"Afterwards--in heaven--there is no marrying, nor giving in marriage."
"That is what makes it heaven," added Lillie. "But tell us your story."
"It was in this way. I was staying at a boarding-house in Brighton with
a female cousin, and a handsome young man in the house fell in love with
me and we were engaged. Then my mother came down. Immediately afterwards
my lover disappeared. He left a note for me containing nothing but the
following verses."
She handed a double tear-stained sheet of letter-paper to the President,
who read aloud as follows:
A VISION OF THE FUTURE.
"Well is it for man that he knoweth not what the future will bring
forth."
She had a sweetly spiritual face,
Touched with a noble, stately grace,
Poetic heritage of race.
Her form was graceful, slim and sweet,
Her frock was exquisitely neat,
With airy tread she paced the street.
She seemed some fantasy of dream,
A flash of loveliness supreme,
A poet's visionary gleam.
And yet she was of mortal birth,
A lovely child of lovely earth,
For kisses made and joy and mirth.
Sweet whirling thoughts my bosom throng,
To link her life with mine I long,
And shrine her in immortal song.
I steal another glance--and lo!
Dread shudders through my being flow,
My veins are filled with liquid snow.
Another form beside her walks,
Of servants and expenses talks,
Her nose is not unlike a hawk's.
Her face is plump, her figure fat,
She's prose embodied, stout gone flat,--
A comfortable Persian cat.
Her life is full of petty fuss,
She wobbles like an omnibus,
And yet it was not always thus.
Alas for perishable grace!
How unmistakably I trace
The daughter's in the mother's face.
Beneath the beak I see the nose,
The poetry beneath the prose,
The figure 'neath the adipose.
And so I sadly turn away:
How _can_ I love a clod of clay,
Doomed to grow earthlier day by day?
Vain, vain the hope from Fate to flee,
What special Providence for me?
I know that what hath been will be.
[Illustration: _The Present and the Future._]
Lillie and Silverdale looked at each other.
"Well, but," said Lillie at last, "according to this he refused you, not
you him. Our rules----"
"You mistake me," interrupted Winifred Woodpecker. "When the first fit
of anguish was over, I saw my Frank was right, and I have refused all
the offers I have had since--five in all. It would not be fair to a
lover to chain him to a beauty so transient. In ten or twenty years from
now I shall go the way of all flesh. Under such circumstances is not
marriage a contract entered into under false pretences? There is no
chance of the law of this country allowing a time-limit to be placed in
the contract; celibacy is the only honest policy for a woman."
Involuntarily Lillie's hand seized the candidate's and gripped it
sympathetically. She divined a sister soul.
"You teach me a new point of view," she said, "a finer shade of ethical
feeling."
Silverdale groaned inwardly; he saw a new weapon going into the
anti-hymeneal armory, and the Old Maids' Club on the point of being
strengthened by the accession of its first member.
"The law will have to accommodate itself to these finer shades," pursued
Lillie energetically. "It is a rusty machine out of harmony with the
age. Science has discovered that the entire physical organism is renewed
every seven years, and yet the law calmly goes on assuming that the new
man and the new woman are still bound by the contract of their
predecessors and still possess the good-will of the original
partnership. It seems to me if the short lease principle demanded by
physiology is not to be conceded, there should at any rate be provincial
and American rights in marriage as well as London rights. In the
metropolis the matrimonial contract should hold good with A, in the
country with B, neither party infringing the other's privileges, in
accordance with theatrical analogy."
"That is a literal latitudinarianism in morals you will never get the
world to agree to," laughed Lord Silverdale. "At least not in theory; we
cannot formally sanction theatrical practice."
"Do not laugh," said Lillie. "Law must be brought more in touch with
life."
"Isn't it rather _vice versâ_? Life must be brought more in touch with
law. However, if Miss Woodpecker feels these fine ethical shades, won't
she be ineligible?"
"How so?" said the President in indignant surprise.
"By our second rule every candidate must be beautiful and undertake to
continue so."
Poor little Lillie drooped her head.
And now it befalls to reveal to the world the jealously-guarded secret
of the English Shakespeare, for how else can the tale be told of how the
Old Maids' Club was within an ace of robbing him of his bride?