our minds we have never been satisfied with the arrangement. We feel
that there is some kind of imposition connected with it. We were simply
thought of afterwards; we were not an inspiration of creation, but we
were created to meet a necessity afterwards. This makes a difference.
We are not quite normal as men are. We still have a futile instinct to
escape from what we are. Thousands and thousands of years have not made
us contented and at home in ourselves. No man ever wished himself a
woman, but ask any one of us and if she is in a truthful mood she will
admit that she wishes she were a man. I have no doubt Eve regretted she
was not Adam.
Circumstances have favored us. From winning privileges, protections and
perquisites as we came up through the ages, we are at last getting some
queer advantages of the situation one way or another. But this makes no
difference. If we obtain the balance of power we seek, live the lives
men live and do the things they do, we shall still be women, subject as
usual to fits of nerves and tears on account of the long strain of not
being quite normal and at home in ourselves.
But when you have been a woman a long time, and have grown accustomed,
you may say by defeat, to the sensations of being one, you may look
back through your mind, which is quite different from looking back
through your history, and pick up much strange information about
yourself which you would never discover except in the retrospect.
For example, seeing the woman I used to be more clearly than I could
possibly have seen and measured her then, it occurs to me that I
may have been a kind of idiot, femininely speaking. What I mean is
that I seem to have been almost totally devoid of that engaging
self-consciousness which makes women noticeable and attractive to
men. I am embarrassed lest my husband may have found me delinquent in
the mere airs of femininity. I do not recall ever being coquettish
or feeling attractive; merely honest, kind, devoted, and at times
freakishly witty or gravely intelligent.
Maybe this was due to the fact that I was not pretty as men see
prettiness, and knew it, although I always felt beautiful, and must
have been absurdly contented with this inward conviction. Still I
have known many a homely woman who was amazingly attractive, like
that heroine in one of Madame de Staël’s novels to whose ‘bright dark
homeliness’ she refers so flatteringly. That is the point--if you must
be homely it is better to be dark about it. With black hair, black
eyes and even a swarthy skin you have only to turn on your light from
within to glow. I am too fair, not enough contrast between my blondness
and any brightness of expression I could turn on. Besides, I have what
would be called a lofty brow in a man, which gives me a damnably noble
look so far as beauty is concerned. During the thin years of my earlier
womanhood it was out of all sweetly feminine proportion to the lower
part of my face.
I am only suggesting a probable explanation, you understand; not that I
believe it myself, but hope some one else will. The feeling I have now
is that I missed part of my conduct as a woman at a time when it might
have contributed some to that happiness which I have also missed. What
I should like to know is whether women who have flown their banners in
many men’s hearts during their youth have memories of happiness that I
have not got. Do they recall those episodes with pleasure? Or do they
recall them at all? I have a queer, ruthless feeling that I could have
forgotten many men, and remembered forever only one. I wish I knew what
so many other women know about this. Maybe it is idle curiosity, but it
feels like lines I failed to recite in living.
At this late day I wonder what Lundy really thought of me. I have
observed this--that very few wives know what their husbands think of
them. I even wonder sometimes with the gravest trepidations what he
would think of me now. I have grown so sensible. I have almost lost the
gift of doing anything foolish and sweetly feminine, if I ever had it.
And yet the woman I never have been sits and looks through this bright
veil of mysteries, as we sometimes gaze reverently at the masterpiece
we never could have painted.
The only consolation I get in such a mood is a mean one. The women I
have known who enjoyed all these benefits do not impress me as being
eased by their experiences. I can think of a dozen who were belles in
their youth, who were happily married, who enjoyed all the distinctions
society and wealth can confer upon charming women. And now, at my age,
they have a curious, beautifully painted, bankrupt expression, as if
they had lost several fortunes and were facing the direst poverty in
their old age. I may be mistaken about this. They may have acquired
that restless, frantic look characteristic of them from habit on
account of doing things instead of sitting for years thinking things as
I have done.
Still, I feel like a stranger among them, as if they had practiced
some kind of feminine wit and dexterity in living that I do not know.
I believe it is something they learned of themselves which I cannot
learn. They know how to make an attraction of their modesty.
Now I have often wondered whether modesty is a cultivated virtue or
a quality of femininity. If it is a virtue to be attained by taking
thought, I have lacked it through the whole of my life. For I have
never been consciously modest, nor even felt the need of protecting
myself anywhere, nor the least anxiety about remaining neatly folded
and decent to the last.
One of the mysteries of feminine consciousness which I have never
fathomed is why so many women feel in some vague danger from men.
Why do they look under the bed to make sure no man is there? Years
ago I was going to prayer meeting one evening in a city accompanied
by a spinster. She was a dear good soul, but you may say almost
conscientiously homely. This was during that period when we wore broad
black leather belts to gear in our shirt waists and skirts. We were
stepping primly around the corner to the church when my companion
leaped into the air and screamed. Clinging to me in the wildest terror,
she vowed that a man had seized her by the belt from behind. It was no
use to ask her if she was sure it was a man: they always know it is a
man if anything happens to them. He alone is the plausible explanation.
It was a fact that she had lost her belt. The buckle had slipped and it
lay directly behind us on the pavement. Now why did she do that? One
might be tempted to suspect some indelicate lesion of the imagination
if it were not for the fact that good women, pure enough in heart to
see God, are subject to these vagaries.
When I had lived alone in this old cabin for ten years, without ever
suspecting it of having a man concealed in it, a friend came to spend
a month with me. She was seven years my senior, and you may say the
very pincushion of every feminine virtue, very modest. Nevertheless,
every evening before she retired she would take her candle and go
man-hunting through the house, upstairs, downstairs, and even into both
basements--just to make sure no man was in it.
Sometimes in the deeper, darker hours of the night she would appear
like a ghost in my room to whisper excitedly that she was sure she
had heard a man in the house. Then we would start forth to find this
wraith of her imagination, two elderly women buttoned to the chin in
our plain middle-aged nighties, her gray hair and my thin hair skewed
so tightly that it left nothing to be revealed concerning our faded
faces--terrible looking, but harmless creatures, bearing our quaking
candles, thrusting them into such corners and places as burglars only
inhabit in the feminine imagination. If we had actually discovered one
it would not have been we but the burglar who must have fainted at the
sight of us.
She could never realize the absurdity of these fruitless adventures,
but I always felt embarrassed and apologetic to mankind in general.
A woman must have more presumption than I have ever felt to imagine
herself in any kind of danger from men.
But that is my point. They are the more womanly women, and the dearer
kind to men. The telepathy of terror they experience toward this
imaginary man is none the less telepathy when they are not alarmed if
they are in social sight and distance of men. I suppose in the dark or
when they are alone and unprotected their fears are due to the survival
of a primitive instinct, out of date now, like the appendix in the
human body, but brought up with them from that far time when women were
in real danger of being seized and borne off by some marauding knight
on his saddlebow.
I suppose in the daytime, in the parlor or on the street, when these
same women are armed to the teeth with every charm, it is the same
instinct of self-consciousness in a victorious mood. They are on the
offensive then and more or less irresistible. For men certainly are
more easily attracted by the self-conscious woman, whether she is
shrinkingly or boldly so, than they are by one who sleeps soundly
unmindful of them and who goes about her business the next day with no
animated sense of them.
What I mean is that modesty of this kind is the fine art of
self-consciousness, and to be without it is to be femininely stupid,
no matter how much other sense you have. At my age, I suppose no woman
with a proper sense of dignity would want romantic attention. It would
come to the same thing as being caricatured. Even at that, I do get
tired sometimes of seeing in every man’s eye with whom I deal that I
have come to do business with him or that he has come to do business
with me. I feel the need of a little more versatility of manners
between us. I should like to take a pleasant feminine shot at him as I
see other women do, but so far as I know I have never capered one such
glancing remark at a man, even if I met him upon my own copygrounds,
much less in a business way. And I have wished for compliments, not
aimed at my brains or my diligence, as other women wish much more
fortunately, but no man ever lies in that beautiful way to me.
I am not regretting the dignity of my conduct, nor the awful dignity
with which I am treated; but I am merely intimating that it is dry
stuff being a woman when some dull wisdom in you keeps you from acting
altogether like one. It is a tearful thing to know that you will go
down to your grave loved and honored for the good you have done and not
for the sweetness and loveliness of the woman you were or might, could
or would have been if you had used your mind less and your talents more.
It would be interesting to know how the modern woman is coming out at
this point. They are bolder than we were. I read of one lately who left
her husband listening on the front porch while she went back in the
dark house and shot the burglar whom he was too sensible to face. And
it is absolutely amazing to me how many of them kill their own husbands
upon provocations that formerly drew only a few tears from a wife. To
slay your husband, no matter what kind of husband he is, seems to me a
frightful kind of suicide. Formerly only men killed their wives. Now
they flunk and desert them. They have lost some power of endurance they
used to have with all their faults in the married relation. As near as
I can make out, two people who marry now are not one in the sense we
used to be, because from the start they contemplate no such involving
unity. We are founding a precarious domestic life upon the grounds of
mutual intolerance.
I do not know how they have managed it, but it is perfectly clear to
an observing person that modern men are shy of modern women not as
fellow sports but as prospective husbands. Maybe it is because so many
women sue for alimony, when they used to give up and do the best they
could according to their marriage vows. Maybe it is because so many
young women now will bring suit for damages on account of a breach of
promise and prove the latter by the signature of a love letter.
In my day, if a girl was jilted she died of a broken heart, or became
an old maid, or married better, and nothing was said of that earlier
affair. Getting damages evens matters up, but it does seem strangely
gross and unwomanly to do such a thing, as if the victoress sold her
self-respect in the open court for so many thousand dollars. Can the
definition of self-respect change with the changing times with a woman?
I have often wondered how they feel when they win such a suit.
The effect of all this courage in women is to develop the bump of
matrimonial caution in the best men to the point of absurdity. I
remember very well the first hero we had in American fiction who dared
not write letters like Saint Paul, with his own hand, to his lady love,
lest these should be used as evidence against him. This was Annixter
in Frank Norris’s novel, ‘The Octopus.’ We thought at the time that
this was a false note in the story. Now the world is teeming with these
discreet young bachelors.
The fashion of what we are is changing. Women do seem to have a better
working knowledge of men than they had even a dozen years ago. But I am
wondering how it will turn out. If you are by nature the weaker vessel,
it is a dangerous thing to break too many of the stronger vessels. We
need them. The safest and wisest way of getting the better of a man if
you are a woman is by sticking to him.
XLIII
MERE MIND
The trouble is that I have been too much concerned in writing the
scriptures of human hearts according to the light of my own heart.
One cannot be such an interpreter and figure at the same time as the
sophisticated heroine of an adventurous and highly colored existence.
Will no one appreciate the delicacy and courtesy I have shown in
failing to reveal his sins by not recording mine? Then, indeed, I
should deserve the charge of having lived a particularly narrow and
uninteresting life.
No one will bury me on top of a high mountain in honor of my brilliant
transgressions or make a pilgrimage to lay wreaths upon my tomb later.
Any respectable person could commit them and get away with it. I have
a temper which perpetually glows like a coal of fire on my altar. The
lies I tell as a rule are good little lies offered to comfort somebody,
or to shield myself from the snooping eye of the uncharitable. I have
no more conscience about that than softly closing the door of my
chamber when the devil passes by.
I am an ungodly, intemperate and uncharitable woman when it comes
to bearing with laziness and shiftlessness. I still believe an idle
brain is the devil’s workshop. If I exposed some of the convictions
I entertain along this line, they would forever bar me from polite
society. I am so profoundly conscious of my own sex that I cannot
endure the license of modern conversation on this subject. Not only
that, but I am so mean-minded that I cannot believe the people who
indulge in it have decent minds, no matter how high and noble they look
at the time or what excellent diction they use.
I believe firmly in the fig leaves of language and that God still walks
in the garden in the cool of the evening, looking for that damned Adam
of us all. I believe the mere minds we have lead to mischief. They are
roguish and unscrupulous. I believe that we are in touch with something
else, spirit, which leads to righteousness, honor, and things of good
report. I am not pretending, however, to keep up this connection.
Just let me make a good resolution, especially to the effect that I
will exercise charity toward all and malice toward none, and I am sure
to fly off the handle before that day is done to administer mortal
justice merely, you may say, as a public service against a neighbor who
has cheated, or beaten his horse unmercifully, or started a scandal, or
gone a-fishing while his wife and children remain at home to work in
the fields--none of which is my business. Still, I will attend to it as
if it was.
I have long since made up my mind that there is more mortal relief in
judging people and taking the consequences of having the same judgment
meted to me again than sitting like an innocuous saint with my mouth
shut. If that scripture should be literally and universally obeyed, how
could we develop public opinion? And after all is said and done in
the name of the law and religion, does not public opinion remain the
strongest moral force we have for controlling the conduct of men?
I may be a trifle short now and then in my contributions to charity,
but no one can accuse me of not being liberal and constant in my
contributions to public opinion. The result is that, so far as I know,
I have one of the worst-weathered reputations in this section. I am
coming to that presently. In the meantime, if you take my word for it,
there is nothing novel or inflammable in the sins I have committed.
I am not excusing myself for the lack of valor I have shown along this
line, you understand; but I am offering an explanation, which relieves
me in a large measure both from blame or praise in this matter. When
you have had the Ten Commandments striped upon your conscience with
a switch at a tender age, when you have spent nearly a quarter of a
century practicing the beatitudes in spite of your own carnal desire to
raise the dust occasionally with an instinct more effective in mortal
affairs than a beatitude, and when you have spent the remaining years
of your life serving a sentence to hard labor, a flirtation seems
a frivolous waste of time, even if such an affair affords you the
gratification of being a worldly wise and tragically experienced woman.
I have contemplated this kind of diversion much as one considers a wild
speculation; but after mature reflection I have always decided not to
invest, because it seems to me the man gets the diversion and the
woman gets the black eye, no matter how sweetly and beautifully and
modestly she conducts her romance, especially if it ends in marriage.
What I mean is that it is useless to pretend to be very good or very
wise. We cannot be, and overcome one another as frequently as we do
in the long competition of living. I suppose this is one reason why
righteousness and wisdom make such slow progress in this world and have
had so many backsets. The sensible thing to do is to choose a life
within your capacity to achieve and do most of your thinking along the
line you have chosen.
So I have gone on, writing a few books on the side, but laying the
scenes of my mind in the valley. I can go out any day and trace my
real thoughts for the last ten years. By the looks of them it is easy
to infer that I have no great mind and not much money to spend. But it
is also clear that I was thinking and planning for happiness, not for
riches. The forests still stand taller and greener than when I came,
though the timber in them is worth three times as much as my whole
estate here. The red hillsides have been changed into green pastures.
It has been like taking over the care and maintenance of an old, sick,
and impoverished relative to restore the land to health and vitality.
But it is fertile and willing now. I make no apologies for what it has
cost. I have been too wise to keep books with Nature and the weather.
But I doubt if what I have spent in buildings, dams and breaks in all
this time equals what the average woman with the same income would have
spent on clothes, operas, motors and journeys from her favorite summer
resorts to her favorite winter resorts in half as many years. And I
still have my investments, while she must repeat her expenses each
season if she keeps up her indulgences. It all depends upon your taste
in living and your idea of pleasure whether you spend lavishly for the
splendors and gayeties of the fashionable world, or moderately for the
long peace of a quiet place, round quiet days and starlit nights.
I do not appear to have been brilliant or very extravagant anywhere;
but the only place where I fail to show at a modest advantage is on the
banks of the creek which flows through this valley, gory with mud in
the spring and winter floods, clear and sparkling as a happy woman’s
eye at other seasons. Twice every year I contend with this treacherous
watercourse, twice every year it rises and sweeps over the land.
Afterwards there remains not a vestige of my works along the banks to
restrain it.
Still, this valorous worm of a creek is near to being my dearest
possession. The time was when my heart was filled with anxieties
and fears for those whom I loved. Now there is no one to love and
nothing to fear. The time was when I was at grips with poverty and
every vicissitude. Now I am no longer very poor, and I do miss my
vicissitudes as a demoted soldier misses his decorations for gallant
service. And there was a time when the world inside the Church was
fiercely critical of me and my works. Now the weather has changed and
I miss the lash of the harsher saints. But I have a happy presentiment
that when all my works are finished, and I am a memory grown faint
in the minds of men, I shall still be an aged willful woman in this
valley, prancing majestically back and forth along the banks of this
creek, ordering fortifications raised against its violence. The world
will have passed and I shall have been reduced to littleness of
consequences there; but I shall have something to do, one last fight to
win. This is something to which to look forward when you have nothing
else to win.
This record, as truthful as I can make it, must read like a very
well-constructed plan for a kind of happiness suitable for a person
of my age and gender. But looking back through these years, I cannot
recall any such experiences. It seems to me that I have always been
in an anguish of labor or in a state of suspense, always looking for
more burdens to bear, giving more bonds for title to my own life and
liberties. It may be that happiness is a state of unconsciousness, and
that I have been too consciously looking for it; but I am beginning to
have a faint spiritual intimation that I have practiced my Scriptures
to the wrong tune. I am not so sure now that the key-note of a good
life should be self-sacrifice.
I am finally beginning to believe that the Scriptures were meant to
preserve us from too many awful sacrifices, and that I may have used
them too much like the shroud of my mortal mind. I am ready to concede
that Nature is full of tricks to serve its own ends; but it does seem
beneath the dignity of the good God to have persuaded the simple
minority to sacrifice themselves for the profit and comfort of the
indifferent and unrighteous majority, which is precisely what happens.
It is really written that we shall present ourselves living sacrifices
wholly acceptable to God.
I wish I had remembered and understood the meaning of that passage
sooner. It would have saved me much hardship and left more space for
human happiness. It comes to me now that it is less exhausting to make
one’s self wholly acceptable to the Lord than to those of our fellow
men who can fish for our services with these Scriptures. For they want
as many sacrifices as you can make, and will give you as many of their
burdens to bear as you will carry; but our heavenly Father only demands
a right spirit toward Him to make us reasonably safe in our relations
to our fellow men--which would by no means cover the terrific labors
and sacrifices some of us have made along this line.
I am coming now to the closing scenes of my life as I have lived it in
the past, because I mean to close these scenes. As a Christian, I have
had the wrong training; as a middle-aged woman, it will be difficult
to go against this training; but I do hope to have time to make the
experiment.
XLIV
ISN’T LIFE EXCITING ENOUGH?
Why should one take to strong drink because this is now a fashionable
perversity practiced against the prohibition amendment, as ill-bred
people disregard other people’s respect for law and decency? We
depend too much upon artificial stimulation. There used to be a
home-brew known as fine conversation which was much more delightfully
intoxicating than any brand of bootleg liquor now known to polite
society. Lacking conversation here, I have frequently risen to a state
of happy inebriation by following a particularly entrancing train of
thought.