which says, ‘Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute
you, and say all manner of evil against you, for my sake ... for great
is your reward in heaven’--and I am taking particular satisfaction in
the dark intimation as to the probable nature of this reward--than
I was startled by the report that I had become a Catholic. This is
a compliment which I shall never deserve, even though I am totally
lacking in Protestant animus against the Catholics. If you have been
one of those certified widows so highly recommended in Paul’s epistle
to Timothy it feels very queer to hear that you have been cutting a
swath in the social life of Havana.
Not everything you hear about yourself can be considered good
publicity. And if you have delicate sensibilities, the currycomb of
public imagination frequently rubs your vanities the wrong way.
You can never choose your own duties or pastimes again. You must work
at your thoughts. They hold you and compel you like voices calling to
be heard.
Sometimes now I still feel the womanly instinct stirring in me to sew
a fine seam. I want to lay a pattern on a piece of beautiful cloth,
cut out something sweet and make it. I long to gather a ruffle with my
fingers, pin one end of it down and scratch the gathers with my needle
as I used to do long ago. But I never can do it. No time. No such
cunning left now in my fingers. I have become a sewless woman.
When it is a fine, large, perfectly rounded day, with the sun shining
and all the leaves talking in the wind and a faint perfume of woodland
flowers floats in through the window like an invitation, I would give
much to cast my pen far from me and follow it out and away to the deep
green valleys where these blossoms bloom. But I cannot take the day
off. I must stay here and write down the things my mind makes believe.
No real blossoms, only the things I know--so little, compared with what
the trees tell and the river sings, if you know how to listen.
Every author knows what I mean. We become the slaves of our thoughts
that must be written before they fade into forgetfulness.
Invitations to speak upon public occasions are among my most grievous
embarrassments. Why is it inferred that one is or can be a public
speaker because she has written a book? Writing is a very private
business. I do not know any other occupation which requires so much
privacy unless it is a life of prayer or a life of crime.
During these many years with a bee in my bonnet and a pen in my hand
I have practically lost my oral faculties. I cannot scintillate on
a rostrum. The flare of so many faces would put out my light. I am
accustomed to work in the presence of three open-eyed windows which
look upon a wide green forest. Much motion and life out there, but
complete and magnificent indifference to the mortal mind in here
struggling with the adverb of an idea.
I am not apologizing, you understand, for not being able to live up to
this side demand of a literary reputation. I am simply telling what
happens to one not anxious to dine on her own fame in a public place.
Many people will not believe an author shrinks from committing this act
of sublimated cannibalism, because so many of them do it, especially
the English writers imported by our women’s clubs. But I cannot be made
to believe they enjoy the performance. One must have spent a while in
England, realized how repressed their enthusiasms are, for Americans
to understand how these speakers must suffer from our goggle-eyed
reverence for their voice culture, their outrageous pronunciations and
their perfectly exquisite intellectuality. Nothing, I believe, but a
sense of financial duty to themselves brings them to us.
Meanwhile women are now the best public speakers in this country. They
have something to say, and they are saying it with charm and courage.
Heaven forbid that I should ever expose my old ruminating mind among
them on the stage! What I mean is this: When you write you may take
infinite time and patience to say what you want to say. You write in
ten different ways. You reface it and begin again and again until the
breathless, speechless idea you had lives and shines. This is how
slow the pen-traveling mind may be; but try fumbling the ball of your
thought like that before an audience and see what happens to you! The
reporters would be justified in publishing the news that you had a
stroke which rendered you practically inarticulate soon after you began
your address.
As for preparing an address and delivering it with your eyes and
spectacles fixed upon the page instead of the audience, I know this is
intolerable, for I have been in many an audience on similar occasions
and it has frequently occurred to me that the offending person might
have chosen something much better from a book to read.
That which so many people strive to win must be a good thing, but I am
simply telling you what fame costs. Once you grow accustomed to being
famous, you do not realize it, but you are never quite your humble,
honest self. No matter how tight you keep the lid on, there is some
watered stock of vanity inside. You are always in danger of the thing’s
coming off and of giving yourself an air or two. No man or woman was
ever so distinguished that this exhibition did not make him ridiculous,
especially to those of meaner minds.
But the final and most depressing part comes in the evening of your
great day when you are no longer great. Your career has ended. Fame
fades like a withered rose in your hair, and you are forgotten even
if your works are not. Other writers, whom you naturally feel are not
doing so well, are popping up in the public eye.
I am still sufficiently able-bodied in my mind and spirit not to
notice the crowding forward of these youngsters; but I have a sort of
presentiment that after a while, when I am no longer strong enough to
practice nobility of mind, it is going to hurt some to do without the
praise and admiration they get. I am dreading the time when I shall
be so lonely, so much in need of a little recognition that I may be
anxious to accept an invitation to sit on the stage behind the speaker
of the evening.
I can feel myself like a pain sitting up there, very old and gray,
maybe a little soft in my head, but so pleased to be present and face
foremost to the audience! I am waiting for the speaker to conclude his
oration and for the applause meant for him to die down. I am hoping
like a poor old hungry child that a few people in the audience will
recognize me as the author of ‘A Circuit Rider’s Wife,’ or the woman
who wrote ‘My Book and Heart’ many years ago. I am all in a flutter
lest no one press forward through the crowd about the speaker and clasp
me by my old palsied hand to say how glad he is to see me, and how well
I am looking--not a day older! How do I manage to keep so young? And he
will never forget when this or that circuit-rider story came out. And
how he loves ‘My Book and Heart’! Maybe he has just read it all over
again. I shall be hoping he will say something like that. Meanwhile
I am glowing with childish pleasure at this spoofing, but trying to
maintain the air of dignity I used to have when I really was myself.
Heavens, how I do despise those people, now in the strength of their
years, who look with contempt or indifference upon the old children we
become!
This is the lightning of fate already flashing in my sky. For I have
observed the weather at the end of more than one distinguished career.
It rarely ever is very warm and bright. You have outgrown the normal
mediocre sense of yourself, and you are no longer able to keep up the
intellectual expenses of your reputation as a famous person.
XXX
ON LAYING DOWN YOUR LIFE
I doubt if the best people live their own lives. They make themselves
the shield and buckler of another’s life, or they are the foundations
of peace and security upon which many lives are built.
What impresses me is that they seem to pass beyond the reach of any
rewards. They lose the capacity to receive or to shine. If the most
devoted mother survives the sacrifices she has made, it is with
pathetically folded hands, as the spectator of the brilliant careers of
her sons and daughters. I suppose mothers get some sort of half joy out
of being merely present; but even that is sacrificial, for they are not
puffed up over establishing these young ones; they are simply rejoicing
in their success. Something has happened to them, they are tragically
emptied of self and cannot share the lives they have made.
It is the same way with preachers, priests, prophets, all that class
of men who spend themselves for others--they lose the capacity to
live. They are those good, quiet shadows in the background everywhere,
strangely contented with your fame or your prosperity, not neglected,
but used up.
We are very good about making them the objects of our benefits. We get
them out and show them off now and then for conscience’ sake, but they
never really enjoy the parade except to be in our reflected glory.
They are dead to themselves, which is being dead indeed.
Just practice laying down your life for others and see what happens to
you! These others will take it, strengthened by you, and go on about
their affairs. I have never seen that Scripture fulfilled in this world
which reads, ‘For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but
whosoever will lose his life for my sake the same shall find it’; so
it must be fulfilled in the world to come, which is a long way off and
very mysterious, geographically speaking.
Sometimes when I am very low in my mind I get a feeling of terror about
the Word. So many Scriptures read like laws every whit as merciless as
those which control life in the natural world. All that lives has been
and must be fertilized by that decay provided by death. Every flower
fades, every leaf falls to enrich the soil for next year’s leaves and
blossoms. Must we also lay down our lives forever and ever as living
sacrifices that those who come after us shall be stronger and wiser to
win what we missed of life and happiness? Is no mercy to be shown to
the very good? Must they wait to be raised from the dust of all things
to receive their rewards?
Such thinking makes me nervous and a trifle indignant about the way
those people who do not lay down their lives seem to flourish more than
we do who have served long sentences in that wearying position.
I do not know how it may be with women of other sections, but in this
part of the country if you do your own work something goes out of you;
not virtue--you are likely to multiply frightfully in virtues--but that
bright, fluttering grace of the spirit more becoming to us than all the
nobler attributes folds up and disappears. No matter how conscientious
she is about setting aside a certain part of each day to improve
herself and to keep up with her husband’s times--I never knew one to
keep up her music--music is one of the things that go out of her--she
cannot do it. She is so busy doing her duty she falls fatally behind
his times if he is a man who marches with them. I do not know why this
is so, but it is probably a feminine geographical phenomenon.
This is a blessed and glorified land; there is a fragrant inertia
in our climate suitable more particularly for the production of the
sweetly sitting inspirational woman. She does not need to know so much
in the way of mere learning in order to be placidly wise. The dust
down here is an alluvial soil, humanly speaking; it has been warmed
and brightened for so many ages by the sun, the perfume of so many
flowers has sunk into it, the sorrows and misfortunes of a great people
have sanctified it. My feeling is that it has a cultural quality which
must be got through higher education and the most poignant mental
exercises in the other sections where it has been spewed up into
hoarfrost for a corresponding number of ages, stauncher dust, but not
by nature so pleasant when raised, say, into an able citizen, a strong
ballot-bearing woman. Therefore it is not so important for our women
to exercise these rights in order to save the country as it is for
the abler types in other sections. All they need is two or three of
the neater virtues, a prayer capacity in faith, a kind and forgiving
heart--and the right look on their faces, effulgent, without being
offensively intelligent. I am not one of these, I weep to confess, but
I have known such women all my life, as one is acquainted with certain
private blessings not shared by the world at large. But I have never
known one of them who did all her own work--a noble service diminishing
to such a woman.
No matter how correct the pattern of her frock is, or how good her
manners are, or how sensible her conversation is, I have never been
in the company of one who performed these tasks without becoming
immediately aware of the fact, a sort of uneasiness, as if her shoe was
pinching her foot. Her seams are too straight. Her draperies do not
flow, however voluminous they are. Her eye has a measuring gaze. She
feels like the two-edged sword of a just woman made perfect regarding
me. Or at the very moment when I am about to confer the bright splash
of a thought upon her, my light is put out by the realization that her
mind has skipped back home to make sure she did not leave the top off
the soda jar and did lock the kitchen door.
I am not complaining of her, you understand; I am endeavoring to
compliment her upon her merits. She has all the virtues and you have
only your grace in words, a fluttering heart and a mind that climbs her
like a clinging vine in conversation. You must lean to her because she
will not bend to you. She has lost some graceful elasticity of the
spirit. You cannot clasp fingers with one of her thoughts and fly up on
an idea and share opinions with her. She is pickling her opinions. You
can frequently smell the vinegar of her mind boiling. At such moments
I have become so enfeebled spiritually as to be momentarily deprived
of my soul. I am of the earth earthy, due entirely, I suppose, to the
effect her obvious worth has upon my stricken conscience.
But I am not alone in these sensations, only more vocative about them.
I have observed her carefully; she is widely depressing.
I have known such a woman to go abroad, spend a year studying art
in all the galleries of Europe, come home, deliver a lecture on the
masterpieces she has seen and fatigue her audience to the brink of
tears. One must be a person in order to entertain other persons, and
she had lost that touch of Nature which makes us kin whether we are
kind or not. She is a grammarian of duties, and a recitation of culture
if she invades that field. Nothing illuminating sticks to her, nothing
softening can happen to her mentally.
Some instinct for liberty warned me from the beginning to avoid the
fate of these unfortunate best-of-all women. I have been very busy
for forty years, but in my hardest circuit-rider days I never would
do all of my own work; only so much of it as could not possibly be
avoided. Even then I was careful not to put my whole mind on it. If I
had to wash dishes, I always spat enough wit through the kitchen door
at Lundy, even if he was in the uttermost parts of the parsonage, to
draw his fire and thus divorce my attention from the clatter in the
dish pan. Whatever else happens to me, I will never do my own work.
If it comes to that, I will escape the disaster to my soul by having
no works. Dishes and laundry are not mentioned in the Scriptures,
therefore they are not obligatory. I will let my faith praise me rather
than my doughnuts.
In recording this scandalous moral limitation I am simply exposing
to view the kind of mind I have, knowing well how many better women
will take a shot at it. Let them bang away. I would rather have
my reputation as a domestic animal riddled than to have my dearer
faculties destroyed by a flatiron or dishwater. No one was ever more
reduced in poverty than I have been, not one a more considerate
or obedient wife. But I managed to remain a wife, never the mere
servant of my husband. If you must do it, make the business brief and
forgetful. Give him a balanced ration and leave every man to iron his
own shirt, would be my motto, even if I went to the field with him
afterwards and ploughed a furrow by way of reciprocity. The idea is to
keep in with your husband at whatever cost. It works out better in the
long run than making a pig of him at the table and a tyrant of him in
the house.
The disposition to do that is a senseless weakness in devoted women.
Added to their domestic pride, it accounts for the enormous labor now
necessary in the conducting of a home and the entertainment of guests.
I am writing this record, however, to prove that the keeping of virtues
and those attributes becoming to what you think is your nobler nature
is an expensive business, and places you within grasping range of
everybody doing business with you who has no such vainglorious sense of
himself to serve.
I have never found that it pays in any worldly sense to be outrageously
and unscrupulously upright in my dealings. The question is whether
the inward foundations one lays that cannot be swept away by earthly
misfortunes make up for the losses one sustains. I do not know. I
sometimes suffer a very strong temptation to take an inferior’s
under-hold upon a person who thinks I am an easy mark and pull off the
deal according to his standards in business, not mine, just to learn
how it feels to win that way. This, however, is a puerile temptation.
My habits are established. I have no practice in shrewdness; only
cunning enough not to experiment with my too-long-buried talent.
XXXI
YOU MAKE YOURSELF
The forces that create us pass away, whether they are parents,
teachers, or books, and we are left at last to re-create ourselves in
the image of our own minds. This was what happened to me after the
death of my husband. The woman I was and the mind I had then faded
into a sort of peaceful silence. I was not for a long time. I remember
feeling strangely like a ghost, surrounded by the same friends, in the
midst of familiar scenes, but not of them, removed by death as far,
maybe, as he was from the mind and life I had with him. He had been my
altar and my church, I discovered.
From that day forth I escaped from the meekness of being merely a
Methodist. I was Hagar going off into the wilderness with my own Bible,
leaving behind me forever the Abraham and Rebecca brethren and sisters
of the established order. I was in danger of raising up the very
Ishmael of a mind against them. But this passed. By nature I am short
on vindictiveness. I am not even respectable at this point. I have
known myself to relax and forgive people whom I doubt if the Lord will
ever forgive. They seem to pass out of my thoughts like shadows that
obscure the light.
This happened later. Directly after Lundy’s death I was a very
dangerous person, quite mad with the pain and horror of what had
happened to him.
I have a vivid picture of myself at this time one day in my darkened
house. I am sitting outrageously straight, pale and wan in my black
dress, but not bowed down or weeping as a widow should be. And I am
being visited by a great preacher in our church who has come to pray
with me, to the end that I shall find the grace to forgive certain
brethren who used my husband despitefully in his last days. But I
refuse to kneel or to pray or forgive these men. Let God do it, I told
him, since the Lord only knows how and when to pardon us. I left them
terribly in His hands and sat with mine neatly folded, while this
prince of the Church parted his coat tails and fairly shook the shadows
of that sad place with his petition in my behalf. Then he arose, faced
about, and stared at me.
‘Their sins be upon their own heads,’ I retorted, feeling very pale and
weak, but tearless and determined.
I may have referred to this incident in another place, but I am copying
it here to indicate that as soon as that I was stripping my mind of
religious sentimentality and assuming a sensible relation to the Lord,
who believes profoundly in punishing wickedness even if a good man
commits it.
Shortly after this I had an assignment from the editor of ‘The Saturday
Evening Post’ to go abroad and write a series of articles about the
women of the Old World.
I was seriously ill at the time, depleted in mind and body; but I
accepted the commission, as a gambler takes a bet, without giving the
editor the least intimation about my physical condition. You cannot
be overscrupulous in dealing with editors without queering your own
game. Very few of them will arrange with a sick man to do a long piece
of work. My idea is to keep my word with them if I die for it, and
to leave them to take all the other risks. Even at that I have been
obliged to deny myself the vanity of making many contracts with them on
account of knowing that I can write just so many words a day, and that
there are only three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Which is as
much as I am capable of morally in my relations with them.
On my way home, after making this arrangement, it occurred to me that
I would stop over at Dr. Howard Kelly’s hospital in Baltimore and find
out exactly how ill I was; not that this would make any difference in
my plans to go abroad, but I wanted to get some idea of the odds in my
own body against this achievement.
Doctor Kelly was positive that I was in no condition to go. I was a
very sick person. If I persisted in this undertaking, he predicted that
I would be brought home feet foremost, which in my opinion is a very
dull way to arrive.
I sailed two weeks later, stirred around for six months among the women
in the various countries of Europe and wrote my impressions of them.
Those articles would read now as old daguerreotypes look of a far
former generation. Some of the great ones whom I met then are dead,
like Frau Cower of Berlin. I doubt if she would be great now if she
were living. Women have changed the definition of their greatness since
then. She was a neat, dim little old woman with a piece of lace pinned
like a rosette on top of her gray hair. She had a patient, enlightened,
philosophical mind about the future of her country women. The emperor
reviewed his troops that very day in September of 1911, but I do not
suppose Frau Cower had the least inkling of the terrible future already
dawning for German women. My idea of her is that if she had known she
would have skipped the Great War by the length of a century and gone on
with her calculations as if that had been an interruption in destiny.
She had a long-distance mind.
Rosa Goldberg was the most notorious woman in Germany then, but not the
most influential. If there was one with actual influence there at that
time, it was Alice Soloman. I have often wondered what became of her.
She had power and charm, a certain beautiful enthusiasm that made her
effective with men. But Rosa was murdered. This was before the time
when it was conceivable to deal so with even the worst of women in
public life.
Emma Goldman, a far worse woman, was quite the fashion in this country
then. She had her disciples among a certain class of our decadent
intellectuals, to say nothing of the great following in her own class.
I remember her well, slouchily dressed, with a scrubwoman’s figure,
black hair, straight and parted in the middle, black eyes, large and
strong, that missed focusing on other women’s faces. Olive skin,
flushed, thick, red lips, the lower one loose. She taught dishonor
and deserved death, but worked like an evil worm at the foundation of
our social order for twenty years before she was even banished. Which
always seemed to me a futile sort of gesture, in view of the fact that
immigrants are examined at Ellis Island for physical disorders and are
rejected on account of having a pimple, but are permitted to enter with
the most frightful diseases of the mind.
The point about this first adventure I made abroad is that I survived
it and came home head foremost in the business of living as usual.
I have survived a number of physicians who predicted my death. It is
not so difficult. You simply make up your mind not to die of your
complaint, however fatal it sounds in the diagnosis, but to live
according to your spirit as much as possible. I am not expecting to
keep up the struggle indefinitely. This body is not so substantial as
it used to be. The dear thing will drop off me some day like a worn-out
garment. But I shall have got the last shred of wear and tear out of
it. And I shall always remember in paradise what a brave chance I had
in it to do and think and go about on my two feet, which in my present
mortal state still seems a safer way of traveling than by wing.