BOB TURNS OUT A CONSERVATIVE
But Edith didn't give Ruth her wedding. There was no wedding. Ruth
didn't marry Robert Jennings!
I cannot feel the pain that is Ruth's, the daily loss of Bob's eyes that
worshiped, voice that caressed--no, not that hurt--but I do feel
bitterness and disappointment. They loved each other. I thought that
love always could rescue. I was mistaken. Love is not the most important
thing in marriage. No. They tell me ideals should be considered first.
And yet as I sit here in my room and listen to the emptiness of the
house--Ruth's song gone out of it, Ruth fled with her wound, I know not
where--and see Bob, a new, quiet, subdued Bob, walking along by the
house to the University, looking up to my window and smiling (a queer
smile that hurts every time), the sparkle and joy gone out like a flame,
I whisper to myself fiercely, "It's all wrong. Ideals to the winds. They
loved each other, and it is all wrong."
They were engaged about three months in all. They were so jubilant at
first that they wanted the engagement announced immediately. The college
paper triumphantly blazoned the news, and of course the daily papers
too. Everybody was interested. Everybody congratulated them. Ruth has
hosts of friends, Robert too. Ruth's mail for a month was enormous. The
house was sweet with flowers for days. Her presents rivaled a bride's.
And yet she gave it all up--even loving Bob. She chose to face
disapproval and distrust. Will called her heartless for it; Tom,
fickle; Edith, a fool; but I call her courageous.
There was no doubt of the sincerity of Ruth's love for Robert Jennings.
No other man before had got beneath the veneer of her worldliness.
Robert laid bare secret expanses of her nature, and then, like warm
sunlight on a hillside from which the snow has melted away, persuaded
the expanses into bloom and beauty. Timid generosities sprang forth in
Ruth. Tolerance, gratitude, appreciation blossomed frailly; and over all
there spread, like those hosts of four-petaled flowers we used to call
bluets, which grew in such abundance among rarer violets or wild
strawberry--there spread through Ruth's awakened nature a thousand and
one little kindly impulses that had to do with smiles for servants, kind
words for old people, and courtesy to clerks in shops. I don't believe
that anything but love could work such a miracle with Ruth. If only she
had waited, perhaps it would have performed more wonderful feats.
The book incident was the first indication of trouble. The second was
more trivial. It happened one Sunday noon. We had been to church that
morning together--Ruth, Will and I--and Robert Jennings was expected
for our mid-day dinner at one-thirty. He hadn't arrived when we returned
at one, and after Ruth had taken off her church clothes and changed to
something soft and filmy, she sat down at the piano and played a little
while--five minutes or so--then rose and strolled over toward the front
window. She seated herself, humming softly, by a table there. "Bob's
late," she remarked and lazily reached across the table, opened my
auction-bridge box, selected a pack of cards, and still humming began to
play solitaire.
The cards were all laid out before her when Robert finally did arrive.
Ruth gave him one of her long, sweet glances, then demurely began laying
out more cards. "Good morning, Bob," she said richly.
Bob said good morning, too, but I discerned something forced and
peremptory in his voice. I felt that that pack of playing cards laid out
before Ruth on the Sabbath-day affected him just as it had me when first
Ruth came to live with us. I had been brought up to look upon
card-playing on Sunday as forbidden. In Hilton I could remember when
policemen searched vacant lots and fields on Sunday for crowds of bad
boys engaged in the shocking pastime beneath secreted shade trees. Ruth
had traveled so widely and spent so many months visiting in various
communities where card-playing on Sunday was the custom that I knew it
didn't occur to her as anything out of the ordinary. I tried to listen
to what Will was reading out loud to me from the paper, but the
fascination of the argument going on behind my back by the window held
me.
"But, Bob dear," I heard Ruth's surprised voice expostulate pleasantly,
"you play golf occasionally on Sunday. What's the difference? Both a
game, one played with sticks and a ball, and the other with black and
red cards. I was allowed to play Bible authors when I was a child, and
it's terribly narrow, when you look at it squarely, to say that one pack
of cards is any more wicked than another."
"It's not a matter of wickedness," Bob replied in a low, disturbed
voice. "It's a matter of taste, and reverence for pervading custom."
"But----" put in Ruth.
"Irreverence for pervading custom," went on Bob, "is shown by certain
men when they smoke, with no word of apology, in a lady's
reception-room, or track mud in on their boots, as if it was a country
club. Some people enjoy having their Sundays observed as Sunday, just as
they do their reception-rooms as reception-rooms."
"But, Bob----"
"I think of you as such an exquisite person," he pursued, "so fine, so
sensitive, I cannot associate you with any form of offense or vulgarity,
like this," he must have pointed to the cards, "or extreme fashions, or
cigarette smoking. Do you see what I mean?"
"Vulgarity! Cigarette smoking! Why, Bob, some of the most refined women
in the world smoke cigarettes--clever, intelligent women, too. And I
never could see any justice at all in the idea some people have that
it's any worse, or more vulgar, as you say, for women to smoke
cigarettes than for men."
"Irreverence for custom again, I suppose," sighed Bob.
"Well, then, if it's a custom that's unjust and based on prejudice, why
keep on observing it? It used to be the custom for men to wear satin
knickerbockers and lace ruffles over their wrists, but some one was
sensible enough--or irreverent enough--" she tucked in good-naturedly,
"to object--and you're the gainer. There! How's that for an answer?
Doesn't solitaire win?"
"Custom and tradition," replied Bob earnestly, anxiously, "is the work
of the conservative and thoughtful majority, and to custom and tradition
every civilization must look for a solid foundation. Ignore them and we
wouldn't be much of a people."
"Then how shall we ever progress?" eagerly took up Ruth, "if we just
keep blindly following old-fogey laws and fashions? It seems to me that
the only way people ever get ahead is by breaking traditions. Father
broke a few in his generation--he had to to keep up with the game--and
so must I."
"Oh, well," said Bob, almost wearily, "let's not argue, you and I."
"Why not?" inquired Ruth, and I heard her dealing out more cards as she
went on talking gaily. "I love a good argument. It wakes me up
intellectually. My mind's been so lazy. It _needs_ to be waked up. It
feels good, like the first spring plunge in a pond of cold water to a
sleepy old bear who's been rolled up in a ball in some dark hole all
winter. That's what it feels like. I never knew what fun it was to think
and argue till I began taking the English course at Shirley. We argue by
the hour there. It's great fun. But I suppose I'm terribly illogical and
no fun to argue with. That's the way with most women. It isn't our
fault. Men seem to want to make just nice soft pussy-cats out of us,
with ribbons round our necks," she laughed, "and hear us purr. There!
wait a minute. I'm going to get this. Come and see." Then abruptly,
"Why, Bob, do the cards shock _you_?"
[Illustration: "'Men seem to want to make just nice soft pussy-cats out
of us, with ribbons round our necks, and hear us purr'"--_Page 129_]
"No, no--not a bit," he assured her.
"They do," she affirmed. "How funny. They do." There was a pause.
"Well," she said at last (Will was still reading out loud and I could
barely catch her answer). "Well, I suppose they're only pasteboard, just
as the book was only paper and print. I can give them up."
"I don't want you to--not for me. No, don't. Go right ahead. Please,"
urged Bob. But it was too late.
"Of course not," replied Ruth, and I heard the cards going back into the
box. "If I offend--and I see I do--of course not." And she rose and came
over and sat on the sofa beside me.
From that time on I noticed a change in Robert and Ruth--nothing very
perceptible. Robert came as often, stayed as late--later. That was what
disturbed me. Ruth rose in the morning, after some of those protracted
sessions, suspiciously quiet and subdued. In place of the radiance that
so lately had shone upon her face, often I perceived a puzzled and
troubled expression. In place of her almost hilarious joy, a wistfulness
stole into her bearing toward Bob.
"Of course," she said to me one day, "I have been living a sort
of--well, broad life you might call it for a daughter of father's, I
suppose. He was so straightlaced. But all the modes and codes I've been
adopting for the last several years I adopted only to be polite, to do
as other people did, simply not to offend--as Bob said the other day. I
thought if I ever wanted to go back to the strict laws of my childhood
again, I could easily enough. In fact I intended to, after I had had my
little fling. But I've outgrown them. They don't seem reasonable to me
now. I can't go back to them. Convictions stand in my way."
"Women ought not to have convictions," I said shortly.
"Don't you think so?" queried Ruth.
"Men," I replied, "have so much more knowledge and experience of the
world. Convictions have foundations with men."
"How unfair somehow," said Ruth, looking away into space.
"Just you take my advice, Ruth," I went on, "and don't you let any
convictions you may think you have get in the way of your happiness.
Just you let them lie for a while. When you and Bob are hanging up
curtains in your new apartment, and pictures and things, you won't care
a straw about your convictions, then."
"I don't suppose so," replied Ruth, still meditative. "No, I suppose
you're right. I'll let Bob have the convictions for both of us. I'm
younger. I can re-adjust easier than he, I guess."
A few days later Ruth went to a suffrage meeting in town; not because
she was especially interested, but because a friend she had made in a
course she was taking at Shirley College invited her to go.
It was the winter that everybody was discussing suffrage at teas and
dinner parties; fairs and balls and parades were being given in various
cities in its interest; and anti-organizations being formed to fight it
and lend it zest. It was the winter that the term Feminism first reached
the United States, and books on the greater freedom of women and their
liberalization burst into print and popularity.
On the suffrage question Ruth had always been prettily "on the fence,"
and "Oh, dear, do let's talk of something else," she would laugh, while
her eyes invited. Her dinner partners were always willing.
"On the fence, Kidlet," Edith had once remonstrated to Ruth, "that's
stupid!" Edith herself was strongly anti. "Of course I'm anti," she
maintained proudly. "Anybody who _is_ anybody in Hilton is anti. The
suffragists--dear me! Perfect freaks--most of them. People you never
heard of! I peeked in at a suffrage tea the other day and mercy, such
sights! I wouldn't be one of them for money. We're to give an anti-ball
here in Hilton. I'm a patroness. Name to be printed alongside Mrs.
ex-Governor Vaile's. How's that? 'On the fence,' Ruth! Why, good
heavens, there's simply no two sides to the question. You come along to
this anti-ball and you'll see, Kiddie!"
Well, as I said, Ruth went one day to a suffrage meeting in town. She
had never heard the question discussed from a platform. When she came
into the house about six o'clock, she was so full of enthusiasm that she
didn't stop to go upstairs. She came right into the room where Will and
I were reading by the cretonne-shaded lamp.
"I've just been to the most wonderful lecture!" she burst out, "on
suffrage! I never cared a thing about the vote one way or the other, but
I do now. I'm _for_ it. Heart and soul, I'm for it! Oh, the most
wonderful woman spoke. Every word she said applied straight to me. I
didn't know I had such ideas until that woman got up and put them into
words for me. They've been growing and ripening in me all these years,
and I didn't know it--not until today. That woman said that sacrifices
are made again and again to send boys to college and prepare them to
earn a living, but that girls are brought up simply to be pretty and
attractive, so as to capture a man who will provide them with food and
clothes. Why, Lucy, don't you see that that's just what happened in
_our_ family? We slaved to send Oliver and Malcolm through college--but
for _you_ and for _me_--what slaving was there done to prepare us to
earn a living? Just think what I might be had _I_ been prepared for life
like Malcolm or Oliver, instead of wasting all my years frivoling. Why,
don't you see I could have convictions with a foundation then? I feel so
helpless and ignorant with a really educated person now. Oh, dear, I
wish this movement had been begun when I was a baby, so I could have
profited by it! That woman said that when laws are equal for men and
women, _then_ advantages will be, and that every step we can make toward
equalization is a step in the direction toward a fairer deal for women.
Suffrage? Well, I should say I was for it! I think it's wonderful. I
went straight up to that woman and said I wanted to join the League; and
I did. It cost me a dollar."
"Good heavens, Ruth," exclaimed Will sleepily, from behind his paper.
"Don't you go and get rabid on suffrage----Ease up, old girl. Steady."
"I don't see how any one can help but get rabid, Will, as you say, any
more than a person could keep calm if he was a slave, when he first
heard what Abraham Lincoln was trying to do."
"Steady there, old girl," jibed Will. "Is Bob such a terrific master as
all that?"
"That's not the point, Will. Convention is the master--that's what the
woman said. It isn't free of men we're trying to be."
"We! we! Come, Ruth. You aren't one of them in an hour, are you? Better
wait and consult Bob first."
"Oh, Bob will agree with me. I know he will. It's such a progressive
idea. And I _am_ one of them. I'm proud to be. I'm going to march in the
parade next week."
I came to life at that. "Oh, Ruth, not really--not in Boston!"
"What? Up the center of Washington Street in French heels and a shadow
veil?" scoffed Will.
"Up the center of Washington Street in something," announced Ruth, "if
that's the line of march. Remember, Will, French heels and shadow veils
have been my stock in trade, and not through any choice of mine, either.
So don't throw them at me, please."
Will subsided. "Well, well, what next? A raring, tearing little
suffragette, in one afternoon, too!"
Ruth went upstairs.
"Poor old Bob," remarked Will to me when we were alone.