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THE TINDER-BOX
[Illustration: "You don't need another vine," I answered mutinously.]
THE TINDER-BOX
BY
MARIA THOMPSON DAVIESS
Author of
"The Melting of Molly," "Miss Selina Lue," "Sue Jane," Etc.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHN EDWIN JACKSON
NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO.
_Published, November, 1913_
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO HANNAH DAVIESS PITTMAN WHO BLAZED MY TRAIL AND
STILL DOES
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE LOAD 3
II. THE MAIDEN LANCE 26
III. A FLINT-SPARK 48
IV. SWEETER WHEN TAMED? 79
V. DEEPER THAN SHOULDERS OR RIBS 105
VI. MAN AND THE ASAFETIDA SPOON 136
VII. SOME SMOLDERINGS 173
VIII. AN ATTAINED TO-MORROW 211
IX. DYNAMITE 248
X. TOGETHER? 282
ILLUSTRATIONS
"You don't need another vine," I answered mutinously....._Frontispiece_
He stood calmly in the midst of Sallie's family and baggage, both
animate and inanimate 38
"Say, Polk, I let the Pup git hung by her apron to the wheel of your
car" 98
His gray eyes were positively mysterious with interrupted dreams 182
"We must not allow the men time to get sore over this matter of the
League" 218
"Is this right?" he asked 244
"She's our Mother," he said 276
Scrouged so close to his arm that it was difficult for both of them to
walk 280
THE TINDER BOX
CHAPTER I
THE LOAD
All love is a gas, and it takes either loneliness, strength of
character, or religion to liquefy it into a condition to be ladled out
of us, one to another. There is a certain dangerously volatile state of
it; and occasionally people, especially of opposite sexes, try to
administer it to each other in that form, with asphyxiation resulting to
both hearts. And I'm willing to confess that it is generally a woman's
fault when such an accident occurs. That is, it is a mistake of her
nature, not one of intent. But she is learning!
Also when a woman is created, the winds have wooed star-dust, rose-dew,
peach-down, and a few flint-shavings into a whirlwind of deviltry, and
the world at large looks on in wonder and sore amazement, as well as
breathless interest. I know, because I am one, and have just been waked
up by the gyrations of the cyclone; and I'm deeply confounded. I don't
like it, and wish I could have slept longer, but Fate and Jane Mathers
decreed otherwise. At least Jane decreed, and Fate seems so far helpless
to controvert the decree.
I might have known that when this jolly, easy-going old Fate of mine,
which I inherited from a lot of indolent, pleasure-loving Harpeth Valley
Tennesseans, let me pack up my graduating thesis, my B.S., and some
delicious frocks, and go off to Paris for a degree from the Beaux Arts
in Architecture, we would be caught up with by some kind of Nemesis or
other, and put in our place in the biological and ethnological scheme of
existence. Yes, Fate and I are placed, and Jane did it.
Also, I am glad, now that I know what is going to happen to me, that I
had last week on shipboard, with Richard Hall bombarding my cardiac
regions with his honest eyes and booming voice discreetly muffled to
accord with the moonlight and the quiet places around the deck. I may
never get that sort of a joy-drink again, but it was so well done that
it will help me to administer the same to others when the awful occasion
arrives.
"A woman is the spark that lights the flame on the altar of the inner
man, dear, and you'll have to sparkle when your time comes," he warned
me, as I hurried what might have been a very tender parting, the last
night at sea.
"_Spark_"--she's a conflagration by this new plan of Jane's, but I'm
glad he didn't know about it then. He may have to suffer from it yet. It
is best for him to be as happy as he can as long as he can.
"Evelina, dear," said Jane, as she and Mary Elizabeth Conners and I sat
in the suite of apartments in which our proud Alma Mater had lodged us
old grads, returned for our second degrees, "your success has been
remarkable, and I am not surprised at all that that positively creative
thesis of yours on the Twentieth Century Garden, to which I listened
to-night, procured you an honorable mention in your class at the Beaux
Arts. The French are a nation that quickly recognizes genius. I am very
happy to-night. All your honors and achievements make me only the more
certain that I have chosen the right person for the glorious mission I
am about to offer you."
"Oh, no, Jane!" I exclaimed, from a sort of instinct for trouble to
come. I know that devoted, twenty-second century look in Jane's intense,
near-sighted eyes, and I always fend from it. She is a very dear person,
and I respectfully adore her. Indeed, I sometimes think she is the real
spine in my back that was left out of me, and of its own strength got
developed into another and a finer woman. She became captain of my
Freshman soul, at the same time she captured the captaincy of the boat
crew, on which I pulled stroke, and I'm still hitting the water when she
gives the word, though it now looks as if we are both adrift on the high
and uncharted seas--or sitting on the lid of a tinder-box, juggling
lighted torches.
"You see, dear," she went on to say slowly, drawing Mary Elizabeth into
the spell-bound circle of our intensity, as we three sat together with
our newly-engraved sheepskins on our knees, "for these two years while
you have been growing and developing along all your natural lines in a
country which was not your own, in a little pool I should call it, out
of even sight and sound of the current of events, we have been here in
your own land engaged in the great work of the organization and
reorganization which is molding the destinies of the women of our
times, and those that come after us. That is what I want to talk to you
about, and devoutly have I been praying that your heart will be
receptive to the call that has claimed the life of Mary Elizabeth and
me. There is a particular work, for which you are fitted as no other
woman I have ever known is fitted, and I want to lay the case plainly
before you to-night. Will you give me a hearing?"
And the hearing I gave that beloved and devout woman was the _reveille_
that awakened me to this--this whirlwind that seems to be both inside me
and outside me, and everywhere else in the whole world.
It's not woman's suffrage; it has gone way down past the road from votes
for women. I wish I could have stopped in that political field of
endeavor before Jane got to me. She might have left me there doing
little things like making speeches before the United States Senate and
running for Governor of Tennessee, after I had, single-handed, remade
the archaic constitution of that proud and bat-blind old State of my
birth; but such ease was not for me.
Of course for years, as all women have been doing who are sensible
enough to use the brains God gave them and stop depending on their
centuries-seasoned intuitions and fascinations, I have been reading
about this feminist revolution that seems all of a sudden to have
revoluted from nobody knows where, and I have been generally indignant
over things whether I understood them or not, and I have felt that I was
being oppressed by the opposite sex, even if I could not locate the
exact spot of the pain produced. I have always felt that when I got to
it I would shake off the shackles of my queer fondness and of my
dependence upon my oppressors, and do something revengeful to them.
When my father died in my Junior year and left me all alone in the
world, the first thing that made me feel life in my veins again was the
unholy rage I experienced when I found that he had left me bodaciously
and otherwise to my fifth cousin, James Hardin.
Cousin James is a healthy reversion to the primitive type of Father
Abraham, and he has so much aristocratic moss on him that he reminds me
of that old gray crag that hangs over Silver Creek out on Providence
Road. Artistically he is perfectly beautiful in an Old-Testament
fashion. He lives in an ancient, rambling house across the road from my
home, and he is making a souvenir collection of derelict women.
Everybody that dies in Glendale leaves him a relict, and including his
mother, Cousin Martha, he now has either seven or nine female charges,
depending on the sex of Sallie Carruthers's twin babies, which I can't
exactly remember, but will wager is feminine.
My being left to him was an insult to me, though of course Father did
not see it that way. He adored the Crag, as everybody else in Glendale
does, and wouldn't have considered not leaving him precious me. Wanting
to ignore Cousin James, because I was bound out to him until my
twenty-fifth year or marriage, which is worse, has kept me from Glendale
all these four years since father died suddenly while I was away at
college, laid up with the ankle which I broke in the gymnasium. Still,
as much as I resent him, I keep the letter the Crag wrote me the night
after Father died, right where I can put my hand on it if life suddenly
panics me for any reason. It covers all the circumstances I have yet
met. I wonder if I ought to burn it now!
But, to be honest with myself, I will have to confess that the
explosively sentimental scene on the front porch, the night I left for
college, with Polk Hayes has had something to do with my cowardice in
lingering in foreign climes. I feel that it is something I will have to
go on with some day, and the devil will have to pick up the chips. Polk
is the kind of man that ought to be exterminated by the government in
sympathy for its women wards, if his clan didn't make such good citizens
when they do finally marry. He ought at least to be labeled "poison for
the very young." I was very young out on the porch that night. Still, I
don't resent him like I do the archaic Crag.
And as Jane talked, my seasoned indignation of four years against my
keeper flared up, and while she paused at intervals for breath I hurled
out plans for his demolishment. I wish now I had been more
conservatively quiet, and left myself a loophole, but I didn't. I walked
into this situation and shut the door behind me.
"Yes, Evelina, I think you will have to insist forcibly on assuming
charge of your own social and financial affairs in your own home. It may
not be easy, with such a man as you describe, but you will accomplish
it. However, many mediocre women have proved their ability to attend to
their own fortunes, and do good business for themselves; but your battle
is to be fought on still higher grounds. You are to rise and establish
with your fellow-man a plane of common citizenship. You do it for his
sake and your own, and for that of humanity."
"Suppose, after I get up there on that plateau, I didn't find any man at
all," I ventured faint-heartedly, but with a ripple of my risibles; the
last in life I fear.
"You must reach down your hands to them and draw them up to you," she
answered in a tone of tonic inspiration. "You are to claim the same
right to express your emotions that a man has. You are to offer your
friendship to both men and women on the same frank terms, with no
degrading hesitancy caused by an embarrassment on account of your sex.
It is his due and yours. No form of affection is to be withheld from
him. It is to be done frankly and impressively, and when the time
comes--" I can hardly write this, but the memory of the wonderful though
fanatic light in Jane's eyes makes me able to scrawl it--"that you feel
the mating instinct in you move towards any man, I charge you that you
are to consider it a sacred obligation to express it with the same
honesty that a man would express the same thing to you, in like case,
even if he has shown no sign of that impulse toward you. No contortions
and contemptible indirect method of attack, but a fearless one that is
yours by right, and his though he may not acknowledge it. The barbaric
and senseless old convention that denies women the right of selection,
for which God has given her the superior instinct, is to be broken down
by just such women as you. A woman less dowered by beauty and all
feminine charm could not do it just yet, but to you, to whom the
command of men is a natural gift, is granted the wonderful chance to
prove that it can be done, honestly and triumphantly, with no sacrifice
of the sacredness of womanhood."
"Oh, Jane." I moaned into the arm of the chair on which I had bowed my
head.
I am moaning; now just as much, down in the bottom of my heart. Where
are all my gentle foremothers that smiled behind their lace fans and had
their lily-white hands kissed by cavalier gentlemen in starched ruffles,
out under the stars that rise over Old Harpeth, that they don't claim me
in a calm and peaceful death? Still, as much as I would like to die, I
am interested in what is going to happen.
"Yes, Evelina," she answered in an adamant tone of voice, "and when I
have the complete record of what, I know, will be your triumphant
vindication of the truth that it is possible and advisable for women to
assert their divine right to choose a mate for their sacred vocation of
bearing the race, I shall proceed, as I have told you, to choose five
other suitable young women to follow your example, and furnish them the
money, up to the sum of a hundred thousand dollars, after having been
convinced by your experience. Be careful to make the most minute
records, of even the most emotional phases of the question, in this book
for their guidance. Of course, they will never know the source of the
data, and I will help you elucidate and arrange the book, after it is
all accomplished."
If Jane hadn't had two million dollars all this trouble would not be.
"I can never do it!" I exclaimed with horror, "And the men will hate
it--and me. And if I did do it, I couldn't write it."
I almost sobbed as a vision flashed before me of thus verbally
snap-shotting the scene with dear old Dickie as we stood against the
rail of the ship and watched the waves fling back silvery radiance at
the full moon, and I also wondered how I was to render in serviceable
written data his husky:
"A woman is the flame that lights the spark--"
Also, what would that interview with Polk Hayes look like reproduced
with high lights?
"Now," she answered encouragingly, "don't fear the men, dear. They are
sensible and business-like creatures, and they will soon see how much to
their advantage it is to be married to women who have had an equal
privilege with themselves of showing their preferences. Then only can
they be sure that their unions are from real preferences and not
compromises, on the part of their wives, from lack of other choice. Of
course, a woman's pride will make her refrain from courtship, as does
her brother man, until she is financially independent, and
self-supporting, lest she be put in the position of a mendicant." Jane
has thought the whole thing out from Genesis to Revelation.
Still, that last clause about the mendicant leaves hope for the
benighted man who still wants the cling of the vine. A true vine would
never want--or be able--to hustle enough to flower sordid dollars
instead of curls and blushes.
"A woman would have to be--to be a good deal of a woman, not any less
one, to put such a thing across, Jane," I said, with a preflash of some
of the things that might happen in such a cruel crusade of reformation
and deprivation of rights.
"That is the reason I have chosen you to collect the data, Evelina,"
answered Jane, with another of those glorious tonic looks, issuing from
my backbone in her back. "The ultimate woman must be superb in body,
brain, and heart. You are that now more nearly than any one I have ever
seen. You are the woman!"
I was silenced with awe.
"Jane plans to choose five girls who would otherwise have to spend their
lives teaching in crowded cities after leaving college and to start them
in any profession they choose, with every chance of happiness, in the
smaller cities of the South and Middle West," said Mary Elizabeth
gently, and somehow the tears rose in my eyes, as I thought how the poor
dear had been teaching in the high school in Chicago the two glorious
years I had been frolicking abroad. No time, and no men to have good
times with.
And there were hundreds like her, I knew, in all the crowded parts of
the United States. And as I had begun, I thought further. Just because I
was embarrassed at the idea of proposing to some foolish man, who is of
no importance to me, himself, or the world in general, down in Glendale,
where they have all known me all my life, and would expect anything of
me anyway after I have defied tradition and gone to college, five
lovely, lonely girls would have to go without any delightful suitors
like Richard--or Polk Hayes, forever.
And, still further, I thought of the other girls, coming under the
influence of those five, who might be encouraged to hold up their heads
and look around, and at least help out their Richards in their
matrimonial quest, and as I sat there with Jane's compelling and Mary
Elizabeth's hungry eyes on me, I felt that I was being besought by all
the lovers of all the future generations to tear down some sort of awful
barrier and give them happiness. And it was the thought of the men that
was most appealing. It takes a woman who really likes them as I do, and
has their good really at heart, to see their side of the question as
Jane put it, poor dears. Suddenly, I felt that all the happiness of the
whole world was in one big, golden chalice, and that I had to hold it
steadily to give drink to all men and all women--with a vision of
little unborn kiddies in the future.
Then, before I could stop myself, I decided--and I hope the dear Lord--I
say it devoutly--indeed I do!--will help that poor man in Glendale if I
pick out the wrong one. I'm going to do it.
"I accept your appointment and terms, Jane," I said quietly, as I looked
both those devout, if fanatic, women in the face. "I pledge myself to go
back to Glendale, to live a happy, healthy, normal life, as useful as I
can make it. I had intended to do that anyway, for if I am to evolve the
real American garden. I can't do better than sketch and study those in
the Harpeth Valley, for at least two seasons all around. I shall work at
my profession whole-heartedly, take my allotted place in the community,
and refuse to recognize any difference in the obligations and
opportunities in my life and that of the men with whom I am thrown, and
to help all other women to take such a fearless and honest attitude--if
Glendale blows up in consequence. I will seek and claim marriage in
exactly the same fearless way a man does, and when I have found what I
want I shall expect you to put one hundred thousand dollars, twenty to
each, at the disposal of five other suitable young women, to follow my
example, as noted down in this book--if it has been successful. Shall I
give you some sort of written agreement?"
"Just record the agreement as a note in the book, and I will sign it,"
answered Jane, in her crispest and most business-like tone of voice,
though I could see she was trembling with excitement, and poor Mary
Elizabeth was both awe-struck and hopeful.
I'll invite Mary Elizabeth down to Glendale, as soon as I stake out my
own claim, poor dear!
And here I sit alone at midnight, with a huge, steel-bound,
lock-and-keyed book that Jane has had made for me, with my name and the
inscription, "In case of death, send unopened to Jane Mathers, Boston,
Massachusetts," on the back, committed to a cause as crazy and as
serious as anything since the Pilgrimages, or the Quest of the Knights
for the Grail. It also looks slightly like trying to produce a modern
Don Quixote, feminine edition, and my cheeks are flaming so that I
wouldn't look at them for worlds. And to write it all, too! I have
always had my opinion of women who spill their souls out of an
ink-bottle, but I ought to pardon a nihilist, that in the dead of night,
cold with terror, confides some awful appointment he has had made him,
to his nearest friend. I am the worst nihilist that ever existed, and
the bomb I am throwing may explode and destroy the human race. But, on
the other hand, the explosion might be of another kind. Suppose that
suddenly a real woman's entire nature should be revealed to the world,
might not the universe be enveloped in a rose glory and a love
symphony? We'll see!
Also, could the time ever come when a woman wouldn't risk hanging over
the ragged edge of Heaven to hold on to the hand of some man? Never!
Then, as that is the case, I see we must all keep the same firm grip on
the creatures we have always had, and haul them over the edge, but we
must not do it any more without letting them know about it--it isn't
honest. Yes, women must solidify their love into such a concrete form
that men can weigh and measure it, and decide for themselves whether
they want to--to climb to Heaven for it, or remain comfortable old
bachelors. We mustn't any more lead them into marriage blinded by the
overpowering gaseous fragrance called romantic love.
But, suppose I should lose all love for everybody in this queer quest
for enlightenment I have undertaken? Please, God, let a good man be in
Glendale, Tennessee, who will understand and protect me--no, that's the
wrong prayer! Protect him--no--both of us!