sins of our times, much as my mother, who was a very frugal woman,
used to be wasteful with pins because she insisted that a little
inexpensive extravagance was good for the soul. I do not know about
that; but I am still so ashamed of my transgression I will not confess
it, although with a discerning eye you may see it for yourself as one
of the complimentary details in the picture on the frontispiece page of
‘My Book and Heart.’ Otherwise I am far behind my times in yielding to
temptations.
If you had only one lover when you were a girl, and married him,
and if you lived very quietly with him until death parted you, not
taking in more than the spiritual edges of the world, you do not know
men; you know only one man. As to the rest, you know some by their
reputations--some good, some not good; some who will lead in prayer.
The great majority are beyond your ken because they will not lead in
prayer, nor contribute to foreign missions, nor even to the pastor’s
salary. If you have been a preacher’s wife for nearly a quarter of a
century, you entertain a vague suspicion of such men without having any
information about their real characters.
This is what happened to me as long as Lundy lived. A man was a sheep
or a goat, and that was the limit of my powers of classification; a
very remote way of thinking about them.
I do not know how it may be with other widows. I suppose if they have
a competency, and can afford to employ an agent to look after their
affairs, they frequently retain their social and romantic ideals of
these wonderful beings and remain peacefully ignorant of their sterner
manifestations. But if you must earn your own livelihood and manage
your own affairs, you will discover that you come face to face and hand
to hand with men every day in every way upon a totally different basis.
You cannot practice the arts and policies which made you so successful
in managing your dear husband, not if you mean to be an honest,
upstanding widow. Your mourning veil may appeal to their compassion,
but it will have practically no effect upon loosening up their business
sense in your favor. What is more to the point, it is a sly, unfair way
of playing upon their sex or your sex to expect concessions in your
favor.
My idea of a ‘widow indeed’ is somewhat broader and more practical
than Saint Paul’s. I am not objecting to his requirements--that she
shall have washed the saint’s feet, if her piety takes this form, and
if she can find the saint; but I do not see why she should be more
diligent than any other woman in ‘following every good work,’ unless,
as I suspect was the case with the widows in Timothy’s church at
Macedonia, she was a charge upon the charity of that church and repaid
in humble service to the brethren. The modern widow is not so reduced
in circumstances, even if she is left without means. She can usually
earn a living, though it may not be so good a living as her husband
provided. In any case, a self-respecting ‘widow indeed’ now is one who
takes a job instead of charity and performs it with valor instead of
tears. The pith of honor in such a woman is not to play the feminine
rôle to any man for largess or advantage in her affairs. Even on this
basis she is apt to get more than is coming to her if she deals with
the right man. The great majority of honest men actually shrink from
the responsibility of handling widows’ funds lest some unavoidable loss
occur.
On the other hand, there is an average, I should say, of at least
ten mite collectors for every widow in existence. They are easily
recognized, however, by the noble and vicarious disposition they
show for being her financial savior or her Aladdin genius in a
get-rich-quick scheme. Not long ago I had a letter from such a victim.
She is a stranger to me in the flesh, but I should recognize her
in paradise--an elderly widow, religious, full of kindness, always
protected, whose creed is faith in the goodness, honesty, and kindness
of others.
She wrote to tell me that she had just invested all she could spare
in an oil well. And she asked me to pray that this money might bring
her ten or even a hundred fold in return. Imagine the Lord babbling in
wildcat oil speculations to answer even two widows’ prayers! Teach us
some sense by not answering such prayers--which is a thing many people
wiser than widows do not know about the functioning of the Almighty
toward prayers. Maybe in time we shall learn that the Maker of all laws
will not break one natural or moral law to save us from either death or
bankruptcy. It is no use to call upon God like a fool to save you when
He has endowed you with the wit to save yourself if you will only use
it.
The last I heard of this widow she was the poor dear shorn lamb of
those oil speculators. Where one wins her golden fleece, a thousand are
clipped clean of their honest wool.
After the death of my husband I suffered for the first time in my
life from the inferiority complex. I was left not merely a widow but
strangely benighted, like a foreigner who is totally ignorant of the
manners and customs of the people with whom he is to deal. I suppose
many women have had this experience, and may think it is grief. It is
terror and uncertainty. If she survives it honorably, with her head
up and her banners flying, she will be obliged to shed her widow’s
veil and be born again mentally no matter how soundly she may have
been converted previously to the wisdom of spiritual things. She will
be obliged to study something besides the Scriptures, and get stout
secular doctrines for dealing with a vastly competitive and acquisitive
world. Clinging to the cross is nothing to the way she must cling to
her own good sense. The Lord encourages us to cling to that symbol of
faith, but it is no use clinging to the world that way. She must step
around in it with a firm tread and do business with her spectacles
properly adjusted.
Therefore I am recording it as truth here, hardly earned, that an
up-and-doing widow’s mind is one of the most remarkable mental
phenomena in existence; and I defy the ablest metaphysician to analyze
the thing. It is made up of feminine faculties, stiffened, sharpened,
sweetened, soured and tempered to any emergency, and she has ten
emergencies where a man has one, because every one with whom she deals
perceives that she is a woman and proceeds upon that basis. She is
much more of one than the average woman ever learns to be, but, good
heavens, what a furtive, brave, serpentine, dove-good use she has got
of her little old knitting-needle faculties!
I spent three years after the death of my husband walking softly
beneath my widow’s veil, studying the situation which the world was
to me. I worked hard, made no investments and suffered from one long
nightmare of terror and grief. I know exactly how it feels to have lost
my right hand for achieving life, to get up cured of the wound, but
with only my left hand to support me, when I had never been obliged to
support myself at all.
Widows deal with men if they earn a living, or even if they do not. The
thing which alarmed me was the discovery that I knew nothing about men,
and that they are mysterious. Their mental processes are different from
those of women, although emotionally and every other way the family
resemblance between us is so strong as to be misleading. They have a
different way of planning and accomplishing their purposes. They have
a conscience, probably a better and more scrupulous conscience than we
have about a few things, but theirs has a wide-open loose end, through
which they can pass out to achieve without a qualm some great deed that
we would never pay the price in piety to accomplish.
I perceived with a sort of terror how able and uncanny they are, due
chiefly to this circumstance. They have by nature more liberty of
action than we can afford to exercise. This is one reason why many
modern women look so queer and out of drawing. They are making the
experiment. The result is a parody. No originality, they are aping
men, as a feebler race imitates a stronger race. If I am any judge of
the real moral greatness of women, they will suffer a revulsion of
sensibility presently and take to their heels. It is safe and honorable
to associate intimately with one’s husbands, sons and father, and
discreetly with one’s Christian brethren in the Church, though I am
wary about that; but my notion is that it is dangerous, indelicate,
frequently degrading to what we are, to associate too intimately with
men in their political, professional, and other manifestations.
I may be wrong about this. My opinion may spring like hypocrisy from
cowardice, because I have not the courage to risk the losses these
women sustain. My only excuse is that I came up in a different age and
had my morals and sense of womanhood formed under different influences.
If the modern woman does hold fast, and win and prove herself an asset
instead of a liability in this civilization, I hope to bow my old gray
head to her and take off my shoes before her in reverent recognition of
the fact that she will have become the greatest pioneer of the ages,
against the greatest odds, with the noblest courage.
In the meantime I am wearing my shoes, holding my neck stiff and
regarding her over the top of my spectacles like a harsh, narrow-minded
old mother who would like to snatch her daughters from a dangerous
maelstrom and set them to the tasks at home that would make men instead
of bandits of their sons, and proper maidens instead of adventurous
flappers of their daughters. The best mother I ever knew never cast a
ballot, but she established her sons in the way they should go. She
has been dead for years, but she is still voting these men in every
election.
Maybe I should have omitted these reflections. When you have survived
your own world, and are now merely the spectator of another world in
the making, you cannot be qualified to pass judgment upon it. I let
that go with this polite apology and return to the problems which faced
me so many years ago when I became a widow.
XLI
ALL SORTS OF MEN
At safe distance I have spent much time observing men and the world
they are making through the field glasses of my mind. I still prefer it
to any world women can make. This is not an indication of turpitude,
but due, no doubt, to my gender and the association of ideas. We know
that men are strong by the deeds they have performed, the cities
they have built and the cities they have taken; by the courage they
have shown in war and in the face of wildernesses to be conquered,
and by every hardship which women endure but cannot overcome. So I
instinctively look up to men.
I am not defending myself, although women have made great strides
recently in discovering how weak and unworthy men have always been of
the confidence we reposed in them. I am not reposing much confidence in
them, but I am simply admitting that the tilt of my gaze toward them is
instinctive and prayerful, not rational, any more than personal faith
in God would be regarded as reasonable by a materialist. But observe
the advantage I have of the rationalist, who is reduced to the dirt
dauber’s creed of worshiping his own intellect, while I enjoy the more
becoming distinction of spreading wider wings upward.
My ideas about men spring from the same shrewd source of financing my
future by faith--that evidence of things hoped for but not seen. I am
determined to remain the weaker vessel and to hold them to the higher
altitude of superior beings. It is more profitable and the surest way
of forcing them to make good. They are only too willing to part with
their responsibilities to these valiant modern women who are so anxious
to prove their own ability to assume these burdens and bear them.
I have no doubt there is a smile up the sleeve of every man in this
country as he watches the return of his women to servitude, not the old
domestic bondage, but every other kind. Millions of them bread winners,
filling positions at half the price these positions paid when men
filled them. No wonder men can afford an eight-hour working day. Enough
women are working longer hours to more than make up the difference in
the common-to-all income. No wonder there are so many strikes. They can
afford the luxury and disturbance on the sweat of the women.
In the same way they are serving men in politics, because they can
reach a class of constituents the male candidate cannot reach, and
because they can practice arts he never had to get him elected. I am
wondering what will happen when these women discover that they cannot
make this a good little world to live in by amendments, and that
all their labor and devotions have been spent for the promotion and
gratification of men, as usual. My prediction is that there will be
such a shrieking strike as the whole National Guard cannot put down,
because every striker will rush home, and fling herself upon the bed
to do her shrieking.
I hope I shall live to see that holy day. It will mark the defeat of
men and their return to duty in a strangely diminished frame of mind.
But I shall never see it. The thing will come to pass so gradually, one
woman at a time coming to her senses, and then taking refuge in nervous
prostration or some other condition obviously and naturally beyond the
power of men to reach or control her.
The only man I had ever known was, as it happened, different from other
men. He desired above all things to be meekly and truly blameless
before the Lord. God was his public opinion. I was amazed, you may say,
to the point of fainting spiritually to discover that men in general
have no such instinct for piety. In his heart I do believe the veriest
saint among them would shrink from a too notorious reputation for being
merely good and entirely virtuous, although the least and meanest one
of them wishes to appear great, if it is only to one woman, no matter
how short he is in personal virtues.
I believe they are all more spiritually inclined than we are; but
heavens, what unscrupulous spirituality! It is a sort of noble side
line they carry. They crave as we never do the sensations of power,
exaltation. This, I believe, is the psychological explanation of why
many men take to intoxicants before they feel the need of artificial
stimulants which the hard pressure of this swiftly moving age now
brings. They want to feel like gods, they wish to enjoy the sensations
of being hard-boiled, when by nature they are polite, timid little
fellows. They wish to feel for a moment the power in their heel to kick
the world around, though as a rule they remain sufficiently sober not
to lift a foot in the actual experiment.
The fool wants to be witty. The Smart Aleck wishes to light all his
candles at once and watch himself shine. The man with a bad conscience
longs for the false courage to swank about like a supervillain and
rejoice in his iniquities. And there are those who drink to drown their
sorrows, although my observation is that they will do it before they
have any griefs or legitimate depressions from weariness or hardship to
overcome. They are really suffering from that masculine embarrassment
in sobriety of knowing how limited they are in power and other
godlikenesses which all men perpetually crave. If even all the women
in the world would concede these qualities, humor them with sufficient
admiration and reverence, we should have no need for the Eighteenth
Amendment, seeing that these several classes of men would be already
sublimely intoxicated.
They have not made good as gods in spite of these divine retchings,
but they have built a magnificent world. I will warrant there is
nothing comparable to their achievements on any of the other planets
of our solar system. But you will not find the mark of one feminine
finger upon the architecture of this one and very few traces of the
feminine imagination in these great accomplishments. We have our good
points, but they are not architecturally or literally constructive.
We are, I should say, at best the patient conservators of what men
make, win, and produce. This is the reason why dissipation is far less
excusable in women than men. They have their vanities and virtues, but
no such boundless egotism to keep up and satisfy. When we are forever
physically incapable of being the builders and achievers that men are,
I do think it is regrettable that we should imitate that vice in them
which is merely the mortal weakness of a sublime quality.
We have our feminine deceits, ten thousand, but obvious and appealing.
Men have another kind, which also spring from their passion for
augmenting themselves, not endearing themselves. The vainest woman
who ever lived does not crave the admiration of men as men crave that
of women. They want it whether they want her or her love or even her
property, whether she is young, old or blind. This is the reason why
they cannot be truthful or quite honest in their relation to us. It is
not the desire to deceive, but to shine, to rule and overcome us with
their minds and their wills.
I do not think any exercise of our recent rights as citizens will ever
overcome this handicap. The fact is it is fatal to do so. The moment a
man perceives himself diminished to his true proportions in a woman’s
eyes, she becomes offensive and repugnant to him, and he is right about
that. She was originally designed by her Maker to be the complimentary
mirror in which Adam might gaze to spoof himself to greater endeavors.
When I found out all these things about men it had a queer effect
upon me. I distinctly recall facing about, thinking Lundy up out of
his dust and reviewing him in the light of this new information. Had
I ever really understood my husband? I never shall know. That perfect
illusion which love is still clothed him, and I could make nothing of
all my remembered evidence beyond the kindness and patience and prayers
of our life together. I remember still with pleasure how grand and
superior he used to look when he flared into flames of fine eloquence
that put my light out. But just let any man try that now! I can see the
difference every time between the mere man of him and his eloquence.
I am not moved. I simply regard him with a listening eye while I
divide the light of his words from his own darkness, whether real or
potential. If I should be won by his eloquence or his arguments, he has
the advantage. Presently I shall be taking his advice or adopting his
opinions against my own woman’s judgment, which is bad business, if you
know what I mean.
As near as I can tell the truth from memory, it was this instinct
of inferiority which led me to earn my life and my living in strict
retirement after my husband’s death. I perceived that the training
I had had with him in the scriptural simplicities of living was no
adequate preparation for competing with men in any way. I might hold a
candle to them, but I’d never hold my own with them. And trying to get
a working knowledge of them at the age I was then would have been like
trying to learn a foreign language after you are forty when you were
born with a lisping, stammering tongue.
There was another consideration that influenced me. As a wife I had
practiced the habits of obedience. My husband laid the scenes of our
life and controlled our destiny. I simply helped him do that. I had
been confirmed in the womanly attribute of being guided by his stronger
will. What I discovered at the end of these three years’ thoughtfulness
is that every man’s will is stronger than any woman’s. She may outwit
him, but she cannot outwill him. It was not my idea to dizzy around as
a widow, being guided by this man or that one in my affairs. The best
thing I could do was to break the entail of that beautiful attribute
of obedience I had as a wife, tear it up like a scrap of paper, and
retreat to a safe distance. I meant to lay a few scenes of my own
devising and to become the captain of my own fate, let the Lord do as
he saw fit about my soul.
I was near to being tired of my soul by this time from worrying with
it and straining spiritually for so many years to the exclusion of
all earthly profits. Later, I did resume intimate relations with
it, because once you have adopted the ideals of a spiritual life
you are meanly impoverished without them. You are degraded in your
own consciousness as bitter, worm-eaten dust without this sublime
reservation held by faith, that there is eternal life no matter what
griefs you have had or what happiness you have missed or what an
ordinary person you have been all your life.
I feel these limitations keenly, and have always been extremely
anxious to find out for sure that I really am extraordinary and
immortal and worthy of my own admiration at the very last. I wish to
die proud.
This is something that can only happen to us in the next world, where I
hope to forget my mortal limitations and some of the ridiculous as well
as tragic mistakes I have made here that caricature me now to myself.
For the same reason I am not inclined to interpret too literally and
painfully those Scriptures which intimate that our memories will be
resuscitated with us. I do hope this is not obligatory. For I should
need no memory to recognize Lundy or Faith. I should know them as one
comes again in full possession of his mind and heart after a long
sleep. My idea of a happy resurrection would be to rise from my dust
cleansed from every embarrassing and diminishing recollection, because
this is the only way to be as prideful as one expects to be in Heaven.
Grief, however poignant, is like a wound, if you are not by nature
infirm, but a normal person with a strong mental constitution, you
recover from it as you would from any other wound or sickness. So
I recovered from the death of my husband. The health of my spirit
returned, and with it the idea of happiness began to freshen in my mind.
Faith was married by this time. I was alone and free to live that life
of mine which I had wished for as saints long for immortality. My
feeling has always been that happiness lies somewhere in Genesis, in
those first scenes of man. For this reason I set out for the hills
behind the world in Georgia, where the days come and go much as they
did in the beginning, where human speech is such a rare sound that
the dogs bark when they hear it in this valley, and where the song of
birds is the real language one hears. It is a place where there is no
wealth, no learning, and much natural wisdom of the woods, the hills
and streams. There are a few people, but I know them only as one knows
a little prose, a little poetry and a few Scriptures, not personally
nor intimately.
I have written at some length in ‘My Book and Heart’ of this old
cabin and the surroundings, but I am setting down now the real reason
for coming here. It was to escape the mind and will of the world, to
practice my own will and mind in living and so find happiness--that
animation of the mortal spirit which is far more refreshing than peace.
It was my way of laying claim to my own life. I am now in a position
to say that I very much doubt whether there is such a thing as a human
life which belongs exclusively to one person. It is something we borrow
from other men, from books, from a thousand sources, and something
we spend or lend likewise; but life does not belong to us as it does
to other living creatures, nor even to the grass. We are the most
dependent of all God’s creatures, not only upon one another, but upon
the beasts of the fields and upon everything that lives. And nothing we
win, even if it is everything, can possibly satisfy us. I suppose this
is one of those terrific provisions of Providence to keep us doing and
moving toward some far-off divine event.
What follows is the record of my adventures in this business. Launcelot
looking for the Holy Grail never traveled farther or endured greater
hardships than I have in this narrow valley looking for happiness. I
have worn all my virtues to a frazzle and I am about to grow old in
sorrowful defeats without attaining even the bright rim of the cup of
happiness. And now, when maybe it is too late, I have discovered the
mistake I made. This is scarcely reason enough to go on with these
annals, because when at the end I prove it and set it down in plain
words, not one who reads this tale can avoid making it. We are the
perpetual victims of an illusion. We may as well take what comes,
whether it is happiness or not, and avoid the struggle.
XLII
VARIOUS TYPES OF WOMEN