It might be asked why Patsy Mac Cann permitted the strangers to remain
with him.
Now that they were dressed like himself he had quite forgotten, or he
never thought of their celestial character, and they were undoubtedly a
burden upon his ingenuity. They ate as vigorously as he did, and the
food which they ate he had to supply.
There were two reasons for this kindliness--He had always wished to be
the leader of a troop. In his soul the Ancient Patriarch was alive and
ambitious of leadership. Had his wife given him more children he would
have formed them and their wives and children into a band, and the
affairs of this little world would have been directed by him with pride
and pleasure. He would have observed their goings-out and their
comings-in; he would have apportioned praise and reproach to his little
clann; he would have instructed them upon a multitude of things, and
passed on to them the culture which he had gathered so hardily, and,
when they arrived at the age of ingenuity, it would have still been his
ambition to dash their arguments with his superior knowledge, or put the
happy finish to any plan which they submitted for his approval; he would
have taken the road, like a prince of old, with his tail, and he would
have undertaken such raids and forays that his name and fame would ring
through the underworld like the note of a trumpet.
He could not do this because he only had one child (the others had died
wintry deaths) and she was a girl. But now heaven itself had blessed him
with a following and he led it with skill and enjoyment. Furthermore,
his daughter, of whom he stood in considerable awe, had refused flatly
to desert the strangers whom Providence had directed to them.
She had constituted herself in some strange way the mother of the four
men. She cooked for them, she washed and mended for them, and, when the
necessity arose, she scolded them with the heartiest good-will.
Her childhood had known nothing of dolls, and so her youth made dolls of
these men whom she dressed and fed. Sometimes her existence with them
was peaceful and happy; at other times she almost went mad with jealous
rage. Little by little she began to demand a domestic obedience which
they very willingly gave her; so they were her men and no one else's,
and the exercise of this power gave her a delight such as she had never
known.
She was wise also, for it was only in domestic affairs that she claimed
their fealty; with their masculine movements she did not interfere, nor
did she interfere with the task and apportioning of the day, although
her counsel was willingly listened to in these matters; but when night
came, when the camp was selected, the little cart unloaded, and the
brazier lit, then she stepped briskly to her kingdom and ruled like a
chieftainess.
With her father she often had trouble: he would capitulate at the end,
but not until he had set forth at length his distaste for her
suggestions and his assurance that she was a strap. She seldom treated
him as a father, for she seldom remembered that relationship; she loved
him as one loves a younger brother, and she was angry with him as one
can only be angry with a younger brother. Usually she treated him as an
infant; she adored him, and, if he had permitted it, she would have
beaten him soundly on many an occasion.
For she was a strong girl. She was big in build and bone, and she was
beautiful and fearless. Framed in a rusty shawl her face leaped out
instant and catching as a torch in darkness; under her clumsy garments
one divined a body to be adored as a revelation; she walked carelessly
as the wind walks, proudly as a young queen trained in grandeur. She
could leap from where she stood, as a wild-cat that springs terribly
from quietude; she could run as a deer runs, and pause at full flight
like a carven statue. Each movement of hers was complete and lovely in
itself; when she lifted a hand to her hair the free attitude was a
marvel of composure; it might never have begun, and might never cease,
it was solitary and perfect; when she bent to the brazier she folded to
such an economy of content that one might have thought her half her size
and yet perfect; she had that beauty which raises the mind of man to an
ecstasy which is murderous if it be not artistic; and she was so
conscious of her loveliness that she could afford to forget it, and so
careless that she had never yet used it as a weapon or a plea.
She could not but be aware of her beauty, for her mirrors had tongues;
they were the eyes of those she met and paused with. No man had yet said
anything to her, saving in rough jest as to a child, but no woman could
speak of anything else in her presence, and these exclamations drummed
through all their talk.
She had been worshipped by many women, for to physical loveliness in
their own sex women are the veriest slaves. They will love a man for his
beauty, but a woman they will adore as a singularity, as something
almost too good to be true, as something which may vanish even while
they gaze at it. Prettiness they understand and like or antagonise, but
they have credited beauty as a masculine trait; and as a race long
sunken in slavery, and who look almost despairingly for a saviour, so
the female consciousness prostrates itself before female beauty as
before a messiah who will lead them to the unconscious horrible
ambitions which are the goal of femininity. But, and it is humanity's
guard against a solitary development, while women worship a beautiful
woman the beauty does not care for them; she accepts their homage and
flies them as one flies from the deadliest boredom; she is the widest
swing of their pendulum, and must hurry again from the circumference to
the centre with the violent speed of an outcast who sees from afar the
smoke of his father's house and the sacred roof-tree.
There is a steadying influence; an irreconcilable desire and ambition;
the desire of every woman to be the wife of a fool, her ambition to be
the mother of a genius; but they postulate genius, it is their outlet
and their justification for that leap at a tangent which they have
already taken.
Out there they have discovered the Neuter. Is the Genius always to be
born from an unfertilised womb, or rather a self-fertilised one?
Singular Messiahs! scorners of paternity! claiming no less than the
Cosmos for a father; taking from the solitary mother capacity for
infinite suffering and infinite love, whence did ye gather the rough
masculine intellect, the single eye, all that hardiness of courage and
sensibility of self that made of your souls a battlefield, and of your
memory a terror to drown love under torrents of horrid red! Deluded so
far and mocked! No genius has yet sprung from ye but the Genius of War
and Destruction, those frowning captains that have ravaged our vineyards
and blackened our generations with the torches of their egotism.
To woman beauty is energy, and they would gladly take from their own sex
that which they have so long accepted from man. They are economical; the
ants and the bees are not more amazingly parsimonious than they, and,
like the ants and the bees, their subsequent extravagance is a thing to
marvel at. Food and children they will hoard, and when these are
safeguarded their attitude to the life about them is ruinous. They will
adorn themselves at the expense of all creation, and in a few years they
crush from teeming life a species which nature has toiled through
laborious ages to perfect. They adorn themselves, and too often
adornment is the chief manifestation of boredom. They are world-weary,
sex-weary, and they do not know what they want; but they want power, so
that they may rule evolution once more as long ago they ruled it; their
blood remembers an ancient greatness; they crave to be the queens again,
to hold the sceptre of life in their cruel hands, to break up the mould
which has grown too rigid for freedom, to form anew the chaos which is a
womb, and which they conceive is their womb, and to create therein
beauty and freedom and power. But the king whom they have placed on the
throne has grown wise in watching them; he is their bone terribly
separated, terribly endowed; he uses their cruelty, their fierceness, as
his armies against them--and so the battle is set, and wild deeds may
flare from the stars of rebellion and prophecy.
Mary, who could make women do anything for her, was entirely interested
in making men bow to her will, and because, almost against her
expectation they did bow, she loved them, and could not sacrifice
herself too much for their comfort or even their caprice. It was the
mother-spirit in her which, observing the obedience of her children, is
forced in very gratitude to become their slave; for, beyond all things,
a woman desires power, and, beyond all things, she is unable to use it
when she gets it. If this power be given to her grudgingly she will
exercise it mercilessly; if it is given kindly then she is bound by her
nature to renounce authority, and to live happy ever after, but it must
be given to her.