We looked at each other, and, although two-thirds of us were girls,
several seconds passed without a word being spoken.
“Oh, here comes Mary!” And, looking across the way, I saw Mary Rolfe
briskly tripping down the steps of her father’s residence. Away
scampered Alice and Lucy into the hall; not to unlock the front door for
Mary, for that, Richmond-fashion, stood wide open; but impelled by that
instinctive conviction, never entirely absent from the female breast,
that life is short. I followed with all the dignity of a fledgling
counsellor-at-law, and possible future supreme justice.
The three met on the sidewalk and it began,—_Eurus, Zephyrusque
Notusque_.
All nature is one. Remove the plug from a basin and see how the water,
instead of pouring straight out in a business-like way, spins round and
round, just as though it knew you were late for breakfast. Behold, too,
the planets in their courses. And as in a tornado, which whirls along
through field and forest, across mountain-chain and valley, around its
advancing storm-centre, so in one of those lesser atmospheric
disturbances set up by the conversation, or rather
_contemporaneousversation_, of three or four girls just met (impossible
though it be, in the present state of our knowledge, to determine in
advance the precise location of their area of lowest barometric
pressure), it is clear, even to the eye, that the movement of the girls
themselves is cyclonic. And, further, just as, in a storm, the area of
highest barometer is found to be occupied by a more or less tranquil
atmosphere, so you shall find that the centre of a
contemporancousversation always moves forward around a listener,—some
weakling of a girl, with a bronchitis, perhaps, or, in rare cases, a
stammerer. And again, just as a body of air, itself capable of levelling
houses and uprooting trees, may be forced into quiescence by its
environment of storm, so may a really worthy girl, not otherwise
inferior, be reduced to silence by despair.
This, in fact, was the case with Lucy in the present instance. As the
lovely human cyclone, whose outward sign was a world of fluttering
ribbons and waving flounces, came whirling up the steps, through the
hall, and into the parlor, it was obvious that she was the pivot around
which it revolved.
In plain English, she found it impossible to get in a word.
It appears that Mary had seen, from her window, the Unknown, and watched
his strange performances till he was gone. She had not seen us at our
window, and tripping across the street to tell her dear Alice what a
singular man she had seen sitting on her carriage-block, and talking
with Laura, she had found that Alice had seen and heard more than she.
And so, with that instinctive dread of loss of time so characteristic of
the sex, they both, when they met on the sidewalk, began talking at
once. They began talking to each other; but soon, their words, in
obedience to that law of which Mr. Herbert Spencer makes so much (that
moving bodies always follow the line of least resistance), began flowing
into Lucy’s ears. Not that Mary took possession of one ear, Alice of the
other. Rather did they, in obedience to law, revolve around her, as the
earth around the sun, the moon round the earth, water round its exit,
pouring their tidings into either organ with impartial eagerness.
It may excite wonder among my male readers that Alice should have told
Lucy things that she knew the latter had seen with her own eyes. But
this would be hardly putting the case fairly, as her remarks were
couched rather in the form of exclamatory comments than of pure
narrative. The male reader, again (would that there were no such dull
animals in the world!), must be warned not to suppose that Alice and
Mary were rude in talking simultaneously. It _is_ discourteous, oh,
crass mortal, for one man to interrupt another; but where a party of
girls are met together, it will be found that the words of each, though
many, are no impediment, but a stimulus, rather, to those of the rest.
Like swallows at eventide, circling around some village chimney, the
more of them in the air at once, the more merrily do they flit.
And it will be found, too, that no matter how many have been talking at
once, each will have heard what all have said.
It is when I contemplate this well-known phenomenon that my wonder daily
grows that no allusion has ever been made to this acknowledged
superiority of the female over the male homo, by what are called the
woman-women, in their annual pow-wows in the interest of their sex.
Cropped-haired woman after cropped-haired woman will arise, reinforced,
here and there, by some mild-eyed male, o’er whose sloping shoulders
soft ringlets cluster, and the burden of the plaint of she-he and
he-she, alike, will be _only_ that woman is unjustly excluded by man
from this employment or that privilege, for which she is as well fitted
as he. They seem to me to forget that Hannibal was not overcome till
Africa was invaded; and they will never advance their cause till they
find some female Seipio to put man upon the defensive, and aggressively
insist that the real question is not whether _she_ is capable of
becoming lawyer, physician, preacher, but whether _he_ is, or, at any
rate, will be, in the re-fashioned world which is coming, fit for any
avocation whatever.
Let us take the legal profession for an example. Excluding the male
lawyer of the period, as an interested witness, who can fail to see how
much would be gained were our judges, our counsel, and our jurymen all
women? As things actually stand, the law’s delay has passed into a
proverb. But what delay could there be in a trial wherein all the
witnesses could be examined simultaneously, without a word being lost on
the jury; where the learned (and lovely) counsel could sum up side by
side (like a pair of well-matched trotters), neither of them getting in
the first word, neither (what fairness!) being allowed the last? Again.
Instead of a drowsy Bench, hearing nothing, seeing nothing, you would
have an alert Sofa, capable of lending one ear to the plaintiff’s
counsel, one to the defendant’s; taking in, with one eye, every
convolution of the jury’s back-hair (should such things be), while with
the other, she—the Court—estimated the relative good looks of the
litigants, preparatory to instructing the jury and laying down the law.
And so of the other professions, did space allow.
But this is not the worst of the matter. Already have advanced thinkers
begun dimly to see that, with the approaching extinction of war, the
time will come when courage will be worse than useless; while, in the
rapid multiplication of labor-saving machinery, there is discernible the
inevitable approach of an era when superior strength will be a
disadvantage. For is not strength assimilated food? And in the Struggle
for Existence will not She, requiring less food, and being therefore
Fittest, survive? So that, with Seer’s eye, I seem to behold the day
when my sex, excluded from every avocation, shall perish from off the
face of that earth over which we have so long and so haughtily lorded.
The truth is, my dear lad (would that you were a girl!), I shudder when
I think of your fate and that of your brother males, three hundred years
from now. Preserved here and there in the zoological gardens of the
wealthy and the curious, along with rare specimens of the bison of the
prairie, skeletons of the American Indian and the dodo; exhibited in
mammoth moral shows, and meeting the stare of the unnumbered female of
the period with a once wicked, but now, alas! futile wink, you will rue
the day when your ancestors, mistaking might for right, excluded woman
from that haven of rest, the ballot-box. Why, it was but the other day
that I saw a boy with a basketful of pups, which he was going to drown;
and on my asking him why he condemned them to this fate, he answered, in
the simplest way, “Oh, they are nothing but _she’s_.”
Yet we are never tired of boasting of our nineteenth century!
How the world is to be kept wagging when once the custom is established
of drowning all the boy-babies (except specimens for menageries and
preserves), is a problem for the science of the future. It suffices that
I have recorded my views upon this burning question.
And upon this plank of my platform you, my grand-son-to-the-tenth-power,
will, I trust, be allowed to float by the womankind of your day, in
remembrance of my gallant defence of their rights in mine. Yes, yes, you
will be one of the elect and undrowned!