sense of humor. At all events, a woman generally likes this kind of
balance. If she calls a spade a spade she likes to make things even by
saying something nice about the hoe.”
“You would appreciate that trait if you happened to be the hoe.”
“Naturally—and growl if I were the spade.”
“Tell me,” she said bending forward, “what sort of fiction do you
yourself write?”
“If I must answer,” I said, “I myself am compelled by artistic and other
circumstances to write realism.”
She threw herself back in the seat with a laugh.
“I will confess,” I went on, “that I have been suspecting you for some
minutes. What sort of fiction do _you_ write?”
She laughed again, then looking at me whimsically without lifting her
head she said, “I wrote ‘The Sacrifice.’”...
“This is all very well,” I said, “but you have yet to tell me why you are
a heroine. I should like to know how you can be an author and a heroine
at the same time?”
“It appears that I can not. I am no longer a heroine.”
“Is this the way you are to get out of it?”
“I am speaking the truth.”
“But not the whole truth. Why _were_ you a heroine?”
“Because I did not bring up the subject of ‘The Sacrifice.’”
I was going to say that to the author of ‘The Sacrifice’ this could be no
heroism at all when there was a muffled rattle at the door.
“First call for dinner in the dining car.”
“The coach awaits,” I said.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
V
WITH A CLUBWOMAN
[Illustration]
She was a young woman of dainty exterior, with entirely modern
appointments in the matter of clothes. She was as Burton would have
wished her, “affable but not familiar,” capable of those impersonal
confidences that mystify the foreigner and delude even the native. Her
effect of being imminent yet so far away, of lurking behind a thin though
definite barrier, occurred to me one day when I looked up at one of those
emergency contrivances in a railway coach which bear the inscription: “In
case of accident, break the glass.” She was intensely equipped. Vast
resources gleamed behind the glass. I suppose the impression should have
been one of security. Perhaps it actually was the impression that an
accident would be a great pity.
It appeared that she had just been to another club meeting. As she always
either had been or was just going, the situation occurred to me as
entirely normal, unless we accept as a variation the fact that, although
the twilight was just falling, she was going to no more that day.
The truth is that we were on the outskirts of one of those intellectual
storm-centres for which there are various euphemisms but which are
colloquially known as clubs. The hum and tinkle of a refreshment room
filtered through a crowded doorway. It was Gentlemen’s Day, and this
justified or at least resulted in a certain broader conviviality than was
supposed to mark the ordinary refreshment hour, as it had resulted in
imparting a touch of levity to the preceding meeting itself.
She herself reflected some of this unseriousness. Doubtless she would
have reflected more had she not come from a purely feminine meeting to
the tea end of this one.
“You are in deep thought,” she said, “which is very impolite, but I will
file your application for forgiveness if you will tell me at once what
you have been thinking.”
“I have been thinking,” I said, “that women like one another better than
they used to.”
She was trying to put up her veil without setting down her tea, and she
could only manage to mutter, “That isn’t saying much.”
“It is saying something pleasant.”
“A man is happy when he can say pleasant wise things to one who will find
them pleasant and wise.”
“Now that is flippantly combative, and I don’t deserve it. I have not
said anything mean.”
“If it comes to that,” she went on, “your remark seemed to me, or rather
it seems to me now that I have had time to get it into perspective, like
one of those unpleasant pleasant things that are the most irritating of
all.”
“Do you object to my thinking that women like one another better than
they used to?”
“No. I only object to your taunting us with it.”
“Will you please—”
“No, I will not explain. It should be obvious that we do not like Man to
look down from his parapet and praise us for a purely human trait.”
“Heavens!” I exclaimed, “did I really look down from a parapet? I never
should have suspected it. It never would have occurred to me that you
would take offence at my simple gratification. Don’t you like to like one
another?”
“Stop bantering,” she said in a different tone, with her cup raised, “and
tell me whether you really think women are getting to like one another.”
“Think it? Is it not one of those things which we may know by
observation?”
“I’m afraid you are deceived. You have inferred too much from the
existence of women’s clubs. Women have a great many more opportunities
to dislike each other than they used to have. Everything has become
complicated. A man should understand. Nowadays there are a great many
ways in which women can be disagreeable.”
“There certainly are a great many ways in which they can be agreeable.”
“There is a thorn under that rose, I fancy. I can feel that you have no
comprehension of how difficult some things have become. Take the strain
we were under this afternoon. Probably I shouldn’t tell you—”
“Then you certainly must.”
“—but we had a dreadful squabble over the question as to whether we
should stop letting in the reporters. That question has been coming up
at least once a year in the Artemis. It is a delicious sensation to be
quoted in eight papers, but it is gall and wormwood to have the hat you
wore because it was raining described in one. The other day we found
out that those delicately satirical things in the _Dynamo_ have been
written by the sweetest little girl you ever saw whom we always supposed
was writing the lovely discriminating notices that appeared in the
_Flashlight_. That turned the scale. We voted to be published no more.”
“What a beautiful story that will make for the _Dynamo_ to-morrow.”
“Do you think so? But then they will be through.”
[Illustration]
“Perhaps.”
“O, we are going to be very strict! The trouble is that the newspaper
people would take some detached part of our meeting and it would look so
queer. You see they have a great many meetings to go to.”
“Just like the rest of you.”
“Yes, just like the rest of us; that’s the trouble. And that makes it so
hard sometimes. I wanted Mrs. Trimwood to read her paper on ‘Children’s
Playgrounds’ at the meeting to-day—it was my committee’s day—and she
could read it only at the very last minute, because she wanted to read it
at the Pocahontas first.”
“What was the subject of your meeting to-day?”
“Well, we have to be dreadfully careful not to frighten people off. I
announced it as ‘The Education of Little Children.’ That sounded well,
and there was a good attendance. Of course there wouldn’t have been a
handful if we had said ‘Kindergartens.’ You know they are a little tired
of that.”
I was staring mutely into my cup.
“Oh, a man’s life is so simple!” she went on. “A man’s club jogs along
with about the same membership year after year. With us it is different.
Women form a club in a great thrill. They swear, like the soldiers,
to fight together until they are all dead, wounded, or promoted. But
things change. There are losses, not merely by death and marriage, but
by the readjustment of enthusiasms. Take Mrs. Montreville. She was a
good member of the Phidias until she joined the Breathing Class. She
hasn’t time for anything now but breathing. It is much the same with Mrs.
Farlowe. She took up with the Relaxing Club. You know how those relaxers
go in for things. Poor woman! I never saw her look so drawn and tired as
she has since she went into that. Mrs. Pellmore was sure that nothing
would lure her from the Dames. But some one kidnapped her into the Ibsen
Club, where they have the most charming times over heredity and microbes,
and of course she has no room for us now.”
“I can see,” I said, “that this might make things very difficult.”
“Difficult! Why, the Progressive Woman is a perfect blur. There was
a time when all clubs looked alike to women. Nowadays we have become
discriminating and there is no peace. The competition is frightful. It
is no longer a matter of wafers. You can’t lure them with things to eat.
They want sensations.”
“It really is too bad,” I said. “You will have to organize a trust and
fight these yellow clubs.”
“As for that, it is pretty hard to find a club without a streak of yellow
in it. We’ve got to work in a vein of novelty somehow. They call it
making the club attractive. The Phidias went in for Shakespeare at first.
Then we found that in order to get new members we had to take up Browning
too. That was well enough for a while. When the younger members got
restless, we had Miss de Villeforte Volé lecture to us on ‘Degeneracy.’
This delighted everybody except Mrs. Bentwell, who lectures herself on
‘The Ascent of Man.’ After that we had some talks by Professor Prinks on
the ‘Marriage Customs of Central Africa.’ There were some criticisms of
this. We are bound to have objectors, and sub-objectors—women like Mrs.
Prittle—do you know Mrs. Prittle? No? Well, Mrs. Prittle is one of those
gorgeously upholstered women who rise with a tremendous rustling and
‘agree with what the last speaker has said.’ Just now there is a row on
because some of them want to take up the North Pole.”
“What on earth do they want to do with that?” I demanded.
“I haven’t the least idea. Probably they haven’t. But they would tell you
that there isn’t anything else left.”
“Anything else left?”
“You see, things last such a little while, at least with the quick clubs.
Why, the Thursday Club did the ‘Origin of Species’ and ‘First Principles’
in one afternoon. We call ourselves very deliberate at the Phidias; that
is to say, we never have more than one topic for a meeting; but we shall
do Schopenhauer’s works to-morrow morning after our annual business
meeting.”
Something in my look must have excited her suspicion, for she went on:
“But I absolutely forbid your commiseration. Except for the strain of
the competition, it all is very nice, I assure you. We have beautiful
times.”
“Of course you do,” I hastened to say. “Even a man can see that. Do you
suppose that a man who had done Sienkiewicz and d’Annunzio and Pestalozzi
this afternoon, and was going to do Pythagoras, prison reform, the
Brahmanas, the Zend-Avesta and bimetallism to-morrow morning, could look
as well as you do?”
“I suppose,” she said, looking at me with her laughing, unperplexed eyes,
“that we can do these things because we can do more with our subjective
minds than you can.”
“So you have been at the Subjective Minds too?”
“One can’t get along at all nowadays without psychology. How should we
ever have got back to ghost stories again without it? We had a delightful
ghost afternoon at the Artemis. Then it all seems to come in well with
the astral body business. Isn’t it a pity that we can’t be in several
places at the same time?”
“You wouldn’t ask that the tea-drinking part of us should be in more than
one place at a time?”
“Not necessarily. The tea-drinking part of us will look out for itself.
Just now you had a far-away look. The other part of you was somewhere
else—perhaps at _your_ club.”
“No, no! I never was more completely present in my life.”
[Illustration]
“Anyway, see how nice it would be if that other part of you could be
off comfortably somewhere while this part was here, holding an empty
cup, and preserving the outward appearance of listening to a young
woman prattle about the momentous concerns of life.... Oh, there’s Mrs.
Crasker! Do you know her? No? You should. She would tell you the most
interesting things. She organized the Zodiac Club last spring and we all
were studying the signs for a month or two. It really was wonderful. She
told me that as I was a Pisces girl I must marry in the sign of Virgo or
Capricorn. It was immensely interesting to study all your friends that
way, to see why they shouldn’t have married the one they did. But of
course you never could make a club that would stay put on such a basis as
that. There was no way of dodging the facts. One may forget one’s age,
but one can not elude one’s birthday. And there is no way of shifting
it. When the woman whom we elected Vice President turned out by her
birthday to be under the sign of—Taurus, was it?—it upset her to find
that she must be inordinately fond of dress, that she would do anything
for clothes, and so on. Why, it was like turning the X-ray on us. And we
found that we all were wearing the wrong colors. The deeper we got into
the thing the more impossible it began to seem that we ever should club
well together, however much the awful discoveries might be expected to
affect the general question of friendship.”
“I will forgive you everything,” I said, “if you will entertain and
enlighten me with an answer to a momentous question, namely: How are
clubs to be explained—by which, of course, I mean feminine clubs.”
For answer to this she gave a little laugh which at first I was at a loss
to explain. Then I saw she was looking across the room toward a tall,
rather heavy woman encased in black jet.
“There is a woman,” she finally said, “who might give you one answer to
that question.”
“Do you mean that now you are going to give me her answer?”
“I could only guess at that. But I might tell you a story.”
“About her?”
“About her.”
“That wouldn’t be gossip, would it?”
“Oh, no! it would be history. You know her name is Ellen—Ellen
Brotcher. She was a Miss Gatt. I’m sure she always has wished that
she was a Louise-Florence-Petronille-Tardien d’Escavelles or a
Julie-Jeanne-Eléonore de Lespinasse. She was very ambitious. That is to
say, she thought she was—coaxed herself to believe that she was. It all
began by her taking up French; perhaps I should say, taking up a little
French professor, a funny little man who looked like a waiter and talked
like the man at the silk-counter. I don’t want to be mean about him,
either, for he is a nice enough man, I understand; but he began to seem
very funny somehow, after Mrs. Brotcher took him up. First they organized
a Cercle Français, at which they started out to talk nothing but French,
but at which they presently settled down to hearing the Professor read
La Fontaine, which, as you might fancy, began to seem like a tepid form
of dissipation after a while. Nothing but the splendid enthusiasm of
Mrs. Brotcher kept the thing going as long as it did go. When the Cercle
melted away, Mrs. Brotcher seems to have made her great resolve, which
was to have a _salon_. Now, I know that that sort of thing has been tried
before, but really no one that you ever heard of ever went into the
business as desperately as Mrs. Brotcher. She trained for it in every
way that a woman could train for such a thing, and I haven’t the least
doubt but that she saw a refulgent success very clearly outlined before
her. Other people have started Americanized versions of the _salon_
idea. Mrs. Brotcher believed that the idea would go if it was done more
closely after the true French pattern. She had studied the whole matter
and knew what she was about. She knew all the traditions of the Hôtel
de Rambouillet and of the Hôtel de Scudéry. She knew all about the
methods of Mme. de Sévigné, of the Grande Mademoiselle and the Duchesse
de Longueville. And she made up her mind to have Samedis. That night
seemed about the best night on which to hope for busy men, and the men
she would have to depend upon would be so much busier than any that ever
had filled the Salon Helvétique. She wanted to have Sunday nights—are you
listening?”
“Listening? Can’t you see that I am absorbed?”
“She wanted to have Sunday nights, but her mother is an anti-Briggs
Presbyterian, and she thought it would be best not to tempt
Providence—her sister-in-law afterward told me this herself.”
“Just like a sister-in-law.”
“Besides, her husband always went to something or other that he belonged
to on Sunday night—yes, I know it was very bad form from a _salon_
standpoint to consider him at all; but you see she didn’t want it to
look as if she had picked out the night when he _had_ to be away. And
the Samedis did sound well. The first Samedi was a great success.
Mrs. Brotcher wore a light mauve princess dress that was made for the
occasion. She got together fifteen or twenty men somehow, and an elderly
French woman, a rather lively widow with a sense of humor that would have
been useful to Mrs. Brotcher, gave some admirable assistance in managing
the crowd. By a happy stroke the French professor brought with him a
young Frenchman who called himself the Comte de Trouvel, or something of
that sort. Ed Tranton, who was there, and who didn’t miss anything, said
that it was killing to see Mrs. Brotcher, who remained seated, motion
the count to a seat on the _fauteuil_ beside her. Her plan for sitting
like a sovereign was really quite wise for her. She is a trifle heavy,
and her awkwardness has the finish that comes with a little Delsarte. Her
method of sitting down always makes me think of a hotel bus backing to a
carriage block. You never could appreciate the fun of this unless I gave
you some of these details.”
“You are living up to your notion of it as history.”
“If you are not _very_ appreciative the historian—”
“I am listening.”
“Ed Tranton says that more of the men talked to the lively French widow
than seemed to him to be exactly symmetrical, but Mrs. Brotcher did not
appear to care so long as she had the count. When Ed Tranton got into
the Brotcher group, Mrs. Brotcher was saying to the count with a flip
of her fan—I can just _see_ it!—that she didn’t consider his behavior
quite _propre_. The count roared and cast a longing glance toward the
widow as if he couldn’t wait the chance to tell her. Poor Mrs. Brotcher
meant _convenable_ or _comme il faut_, of course. I doubt whether she
ever knew why the count seemed so much amused. To her the evening was
a brilliant, an epoch-making occasion. During the following week she
greatly elaborated her plan. Her sister-in-law says that she felt the
need of having one or two stars every night, like the count, who had
enthusiastically promised to come again on the following Saturday. Mrs.
Brotcher had cried over Mme. Roland and made up her mind to keep out of
politics, though I fancy she did not see any immediate danger in any
politics that was at all possible to her _salon_. Her idea was to go
in for as much literary effect as she could get with a sprinkling of
counts, colonels, professors, and judges. Naturally things couldn’t be
as picturesque as when women wore high-waisted gowns and men imitated
Napoleon. It was too bad not to have an abbé. I’m sure she wanted an
abbé, in a circle of _beaux esprits_. A _petit souper_ was planned for
the second Saturday,—they had plain refreshments the first night. Well,
the second Samedi came and with it the Professor, who apologized for the
indisposition of the count, and little Dawlin of the _Dynamo_, who was
to read some _vers de société_. That was all. The heart-breaking thing
was that Brotcher, who had found it impossible to be present on the first
occasion, appeared at the second Samedi to see what sort of an affair a
_salon_ was. Mrs. Brotcher wilted; but she revived somehow and appears
to have expected great things of the third Samedi, which came with the
Professor again, and Dawlin, and a Judge Troot, who had been asked alone,
but who brought his wife. It was pitiful. Brotcher grinned over it,
and told Mrs. Brotcher, it seems, that he thought she had better give
up trying to be ‘saloon-keeper.’ But Mrs. Brotcher was hard to crush.
She complained that so many of the nice men were married, and that you
couldn’t get them very well without their wives, who quite plainly were
impossible to a _salon_. On the other hand, the single men who were worth
having seemed to be wedded to clubs. Even _petits soupers_ would not
fetch them. It was not for two or three months that Mrs. Brotcher gave
up her dream. I believe the failure was a real grief to her, and she has
thrown herself into clubs as if to blot out the past.”
[Illustration: When Women Wore High-waisted Gowns]
[Illustration: And Men Imitated Napoleon.]
“Well,” I said, “that seems to me a better explanation of why we do not
have _salons_ than of why we do have women’s clubs. There were men’s
clubs at the time of the _salons_; and I think we may say that the
_salons_ stopped before the feminine clubs began.”
“Have women taken up with one another because they had to? Is that what
you are going to ask? No; we have taken up with one another in this
modified sort of way for the same reason that the blacksmith whipped
the parson—because we wanted to and because we could. The _salon_ never
kept many women busy, but the decay of the _salon_ was one more reason
why there should be women’s clubs. The logical thing was bound to happen
sometime: clubs for men, clubs for women, clubs for both—society being in
a sort of way the club for both.”
“That is logical,” I admitted. “That is to say, it has a nicely balancing
sound, which is the same thing. Then there is a fine balance in other
ways, as we may observe every day. We have a dozen men to one woman in
political boards, and a dozen women to one man at prayer-meeting. In each
case the minority undergoes a trying test.”
She laughed an unresentful laugh.
“I hope you won’t think me irreverent,” I said, “in suggesting that the
same test is imposed upon all clubs alike: What is our condition when we
leave them?”
“In that case,” she answered, rising. “I’m afraid we shall be obliged to
decide that this club may not have been entirely good for you.”
To which, naturally, I did not agree.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
VI
WITH A CYNIC
[Illustration]
There is in Chicago a certain street corner around which the Lake wind,
which already has made some progress through the city, swings with a
zest that might indicate an intention to illustrate in a grotesque
continuous performance the Lake wind’s utter irreverence and frivolity.
Most Chicagoans know the wind’s mood at this corner, and when you sit in
the window of the club it is quite possible to pick out the frequenters
of the district by the mechanical way they grasp their hats as they
approach the known border of this current of air. You may tell those who
are Chicagoans yet not frequenters of the district by the fact that this
gesture is delayed until a hazardous last moment. The foreigner, hit
unawares, often is placed in a pitiful plight. I myself, a foreigner to
these scenes, staring through the club’s broad French plate, in the space
of half an hour saw a dozen hats whirled at a uniform angle across the
tumultuous street.
It was while I was sitting at the club window, not a little uncertain
whether it was not malicious thus to become the spectator of my fellow
creatures’ misfortunes, and wondering whether the municipality did not
owe it to itself to place a signpost or a large policeman at an effective
angle to this corner, when I saw young Mrs. Fentley approaching. I had
time to notice that Mrs. Fentley wore a pretty fall gown, one of those
defiantly subdued rich gowns, and that she was holding it inelegantly,
for her, as if she were in a hurry, when a most extraordinary thing
happened. A great many hats had blown off; but they were not the hats of
women, and no precedent or procession of disasters could have prepared me
for such a mishap as the sudden careering of Mrs. Fentley’s hat.
In the face of this unspeakable occurrence I sprang up and stood in
a moment of doubt as to whether it would not be the more kind to
Mrs. Fentley to sit down again; then rushed through the corridor and
out-of-doors, across the street, under the nose of an express horse,
and found Mrs. Fentley’s hat miraculously whole at the opposite curb,
just as strange hands were about to seize it. This might have seemed
tragedy enough; but when I looked up toward Mrs. Fentley I saw by an
unmistakable gesture of her free hand that her hair was hopelessly
loosened.
The affair thus having reached its worst possible stage, I approached
Mrs. Fentley, bearing the hat in that tenderly wrong way common to all
men who attempt this office, and exhibiting in my countenance a properly
profound distress.
The first thing that Mrs. Fentley said was, “Please stop that hansom,” a
request to which I attempted to accede without delaying the transfer of
the hat.