he is almost a complete occupation for his mother, and a profitable,
satisfying occupation, too. I confess to fears in time past that
girls of Cordelia’s sort did not have enough to do to bring them their
proper growth and keep them happy. If they didn’t go to college and
didn’t marry as soon as they got out of school, they seemed to drift
into a lot of occupations that looked rather futile, and like a mere
provision for killing time. They played around, they visited, they
dabbled in anything that came handy--dances, charities, house-parties,
art, music, extra improvements for the mind--anything that could be
cast into a void of time which should have ached, and doubtless did. It
used to make me sorry for the girls because it seemed so hard for them
to buckle down to anything remunerative and continuous and really get
ahead in it. If they did that, they forfeited too many opportunities of
the leisure class, to which it seems to be intended that the daughters
of the well-to-do, from nineteen to about twenty-three, shall belong.
If they went to college, that solved the problem for those years, but
it came back at them as soon as they came out. If they were satisfied
with their indefinite employments it was bad, and if they were not it
was also bad. So I used to feel sorry for the girls because their
job looked to me so vague, and their employments so fragmentary and
unpromising.
I dare say I was wrong, and that the girls were working more hours
at their proper vocation than I had the wit to recognize. I see it
more clearly now; that there are fruits that ripen best in the sun,
and should not be hurried in the process; that Cordelia did not
really waste those years in which she waited for me to get started
as a wage-earner, but learned in them a kind of patience and useful
domestication, besides other accomplishments that make her better to
live with now.
Major Brace has paid us the compliment to look in and inspect Samuel.
He expressed himself as pleased with him, and was very gratifying in
the warmth of his congratulations to Cordelia and me. Speaking as
a father of almost complete experience, he told me of the special
enthusiasm he felt for a child that had never run up a dentist’s bill.
Samuel hasn’t. There is little or nothing about him as yet that would
interest a dentist; but Cordelia, whose forefinger is a good deal in
his mouth, says there may be any minute.
I must ask mother if that is so. No doubt Cordelia’s enthusiasm is
liable to mislead her.
I believe Cordelia dislikes to spend money. I find her perpetually
weighing something that might be had against its price, and deciding
not to have it. Unless the purchasable object is indispensable or
very positively desirable--like a kodak to snap at Samuel--the money
looks better to her. That’s remarkable, isn’t it? People differ in
temperament as well as in training about that, inheriting tighter or
looser fists, I suppose, according to the forebear they individually
trace back to. To me, now, things that I want always look better than
what money I have. It makes me unhappy to spend _much_ more than I
have, but I enjoy very much spending what I have got. I never have any
money ahead, unless you can see savings in life insurance, to which I
make some inadequate pretense. Maybe that is a defect in my character,
though accumulation on seventy dollars a week has its reluctances when
you have a wife and baby and a cook and flat and all that. Still, if
I had no elders to fall back on I’d have to pinch some salvage out of
every dollar.
But Cordelia is naturally more retentive than I am. It is remarkable
how little she cares, relatively, for things. She has a good many
things, and has always been used to them. She likes them, but with an
interest that is altogether secondary, preferring power, independence,
and tranquillity of mind to objects of convenience or embellishment,
and to almost everything else except health and an easy conscience. She
has a private fortune--I don’t know that I have mentioned that--not
large, but yielding sufficient income to buy her clothes. All girls
ought to have private fortunes. Small ones will do: do better, perhaps,
than larger ones, for I don’t suppose it is quite ideal to be swamped
by your wife’s money. Cordelia gets a great deal of comfort out of
hers, but I see her basis of expenditure is different from mine. Mine
is adjusted to what I have; hers to what, on due reflection, she would
rather have than money. On that basis she spends not only her own
money, but mine. I dare say she will be a rich woman some day, and,
I hope, still married to me; so there is a chance that, with other
good luck, I may gather some surplus too. I believe she dislikes to
shop; indeed, I have heard her say so. There is a streak of Scotch in
the Frenches, and I dare say it happened her way. My! my! What luck!
When you think of the women--and men too, but especially women--whose
highest happiness is to buy things and lug them home, it seems a
marvelous dispensation that I should have acquired a companion of so
opposite a sort. To be sure, no girl that was infatuated with the joys
of purchase would have thought twice of me; and yet, who can tell,
for I suppose there are girls who have neither self-restraint nor
self-denial about anything, and are liable to think they must have
something that really would not suit them at all? I have always thought
that Rosamond Viney in _Middlemarch_ was the most fatal character in
literature. What must it be to be money-grubber for a woman like that,
with an expensive appreciation of the material side of life and no
conception of the rest of it! Stars above! how much better it is to be
lucky than wise, especially in youth, when, as Major Brace assures me,
none of us know anything. There was Solomon, who wrote the Proverbs,
and Ben Franklin, who wrote Poor Richard; both able to make shrewd
discourse by the ream, and neither of them fortunate on the domestic
side. Probably it does not accord with the economy of nature that wise
men should have wise wives; certainly if there is a scheme of things
that is worthy of respect, it would not have fitted into it for me to
have a foolish one.
V
A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE
I remark the disposition of contemporary American families to regulate
their church-going by the inclination of the ladies. I suppose it will
soon happen that Cordelia and I will go to church when Cordelia feels
it to be desirable, and that when she stays at home it will look more
profitable to me to stay at home with her. Although that means that we
will go pretty regularly, it is not quite as it should be, any more
than that I should go without my dinner when she has a failure of the
appetite. But it seems apt to be so with contemporary Protestant people
who get married. Even if the male has a previous habit of church-going,
and convictions or preferences in favor of it, the woman is apt to
be captain in that particular, and to assume command of the family
conscience. That is an item in the contemporary slump of the male in
the business of directing the course of life. He tries to keep a hand
of his own on politics, but in the concerns of religion easily falls
into the practice of looking to the woman to make his decisions and
remind him of his practices. Which is feeble of him, for, as between
religion and politics, religion is decidedly the more important, for it
shapes and inspires and regulates the whole of life, politics included,
whereas politics is no more than a detail.
When I think of women and their needs and powers and rights, and
their office in life--as I do a great deal nowadays, with Cordelia to
observe and those suffragists prodding at the subject all the time--I
have bursts of momentary conviction to the effect that if women go
on assimilating four-fifths of the available religion and leaving
nine-tenths of the alcohol and nearly all the tobacco to the men, they
will govern our world before we know it. The Turks understand better.
The male Turks make a specialty of piety, go without rum, and share
tobacco liberally with their women; so to be a male Turk is still a
relatively powerful condition, though I understand the Turkish ladies
are restless nowadays, in spite of sweetmeats and cigarettes, and are
covetous of education, and suspect that there should be more coming to
them than they are getting.
Cordelia has intimated that that observation of mine about men having
strength, and therefore dominion, is something of a bluff. She is too
polite to contradict it, but not too polite to stir me to further
reflections about it. Are men stronger? Have they dominion?
There is no doubt that the average man we see about can hit harder
than the average woman. He can also run faster and make better time
up a tree, so that he seems to have the best of it, physically, both
in offense and escape. If you come to translate these powers into
practical contemporary factors he can usually earn more money at
present than she can, and is much less vulnerable in the reputation. It
may be argued that this superiority in male abilities is not the work
of nature at all, but a consequence of male malignancy and oppression,
and that if woman had a fair show to get her due development she could
stand up to man when he put up his hooks, and run him down when he ran
away. So Olive Schreiner seems to feel about it. Man’s power to make
more money than woman is challenged as an injustice. Perhaps it is an
injustice in many cases. Perhaps our industrial system is not adjusted
yet to women’s undomestic work in schools and factories and offices,
and maybe the payroll will be revised in time in women’s favor. Still
I think man’s superior money-making powers are of a piece with his
power to hit harder and run faster. Money-getting seems to be more in
the line of his natural job than of hers. He is less distracted from
it by other leanings than she is. I guess he will always be the head
money-getter, though very likely her claim on what he gets may come to
rest even more on a basis of natural right than it does at present.
It is a very much respected claim as it is, and supported by law and
sentiment.
Man is superior in some kinds of bodily strength, and apparently in
some kinds of mental strength, too, but does it give him dominion?
Some, I think. It seems to give him a good deal of dominion among
savages, and less and less as civilization increases. Probably it would
give him more if he were not inferior in some of the kinds of strength,
and in some other respects that we are not used to classify as
strength, but which offset it. There are war-powers and peace-powers.
Admitting, in spite of Kipling’s she-bear poem, that man’s war-powers
beat woman’s, how about peace-powers? Of course they are enormous. If
she uses them for offense, she can spoil the man’s cake at any time.
There is no living without women, and to be assigned to one of them
and have her contrive that there shall be no living with her makes a
serious dilemma. I have discussed this matter with our old friend Major
Brace, and he has illuminated it with such wisdom as his great age (as
he says) has enabled him to supply. “We can’t do anything, Peregrine,”
he said, “but try our utmost [of course he really said damnedest] to
make them happy, and hope that they will be good.” He told me a story
about a house-painter he once knew in the country who had some ferrets.
“I noticed when looking at the ferrets,” the Major said, “that he had a
padlock on the place where he kept them, and he let me know, somehow,
that he carried the key in his pocket and let nobody but himself
meddle with them. I took note of that, because it seemed to me that
the ferrets being part of the domestic establishment, the natural way
would have been to leave the key in the house when he was away and
intrust the ferrets to his wife. But that was not his way, and I set
him down in my mind as a believer in male dominion and an upholder of
the authority of the head of the house. And, accordingly, when I heard
about a year later that his wife had eloped with the butcher I wasn’t
at all surprised. No doubt he had felt about her as he had about the
ferrets--that she was his property. I heard that he was extremely put
out when she ran away, and took it so much to heart that he left the
village. I suppose he didn’t know any better, though of course it
is possible that the woman was a fool and couldn’t be trusted. Her
going off with the butcher implies a certain carelessness, though not
necessarily a lack of intelligence.
“You see, Peregrine, one measure of the liberty of women is the
intelligence of man. And it works the other way round, too. A man who
is intelligent enough to prefer a free woman for his companion will
plan and take thought to have one; and a woman who is clever enough
to prefer a free man will take thought to keep her man free and still
keep him. That’s what all decent people do nowadays who are passably
wise, and I suppose it is what such people have been doing, not
always, perhaps, but easily since the time of Adam. And I dare say the
better-grade animals do the like.”
I asked the Major if he thought Kipling was right about the she-bear
and the superior offensiveness of females. He said he thought there
was a good deal of meat in Kipling’s verses, and that few intelligent
men came to be half a century old without having had to take thought
of the intensity of the female disposition. “Somehow, Peregrine,” said
he, “they seem to be a little nearer nature than we are. The primitive
creature seems to survive in them a little more perceptibly than it
does in us. And it is a very valuable survival--very valuable--and
fit to receive the most respectful consideration, because, as Kipling
intimates, it is a factor in the continuation of the race. When a man
has a wise wife who loves him, as you and I have, Peregrine, it is his
business to get the benefit of everything she has. All her strength as
well as his is needed in their common business. If he troubles her
with his limitations, checks her initiative, and ignores her dissent,
it is as bad for the common interest as when she does the like to him.
He should attend to her risings-up and her sittings-down, and when at
times the primitive creature rises up in her, his best procedure often
is neither to run nor to try to rule the storm, but to sit down in the
sand, wrap his burnoose around his head, and keep his face attentively
to leeward until the gale blows out and calm re-eventuates. Then,
in due time, she will dig him out again, if necessary, and he will
have much less to unsay and repent of than if he had talked back. And
usually, if he has been attentive, he will have learned something that
it is valuable to know.
“Lord love us,” went on the Major, “I hate subdued wives. I hate
subdued husbands also, but subdued wives worse, if possible, because
what subdues a wife is usually such an offensive combination of egotism
and stupidity. And yet I know quite able men who bully their wives and
have checked their wives’ development and diminished their abilities by
doing so. It is a shocking waste, although it is to admire the wives
who bear it. That is apt to be the best thing they can do, under the
circumstances. You see, in marriage that suggestion of Scripture about
cutting off the right hand that offends has only limited application.
Man or woman of us, when we have stood up in church and acquired a
right hand of the opposite gender, we have need to go mighty slow about
casting it from us. To read the divorce statistics, and about the
growth of that practice in this country in the last twenty years, you’d
think divorce was on the way to become a universal habit. But I guess
it won’t. I guess when the ratio has reached a point where it provides
duly for the irresponsible, intemperate, light-minded, and unfortunate,
the increase will stop, and maybe, if civilization improves, the
figures will begin to run the other way. That may seem optimistic, but
I can’t think that woman’s extraordinary gift for living with man, and
man’s surprising talent for getting along with woman, are going to
perish or be wasted.”
* * * * *
My coevals that I meet are still talking about football; not
exclusively, of course, but with perseverance and of a lively
appearance of interest. Talking about it has some obvious advantages
over playing it, but I never learned to be really expert in either.
Cordelia and I saved quantities of money last fall staying away from
football games. Also quite a lot in staying away from the great final
series in professional baseball. Also time and strength on both of
these items. If our circumstances had been four or five times as easy
and Samuel could have spared us, we would have enriched our experience
of contemporary life by taking in several of these contests. As studies
in crowdology they are mighty good and leave permanent impressions
behind them. And they are interesting socially and anthropologically.
And sometimes they are pretty good as sport--the football games better,
I think, than before the rules were changed. But as it was, it was a
very easy economy for us. Cordelia said she had been to football games
and didn’t believe there were any important new thrills left in them
for her; and we read a lot about them in the papers and were content,
though I don’t think football really makes first-class newspaper
reading. I can’t follow the ball in type even as well as from the
seats, and I only get the score and the spectacular features. The
worst of it is I cannot care inordinately who wins. Of course, the
players do. They ought to. And so should the undergraduates and persons
just emerged from that condition. But I don’t understand why such
large masses of adult people contrive to care so much--if they really
do--whether Harvard beats Yale, or either of them beats Princeton, or
whether the Army or the Navy wins.
I am getting deplorably careless in my feelings in this great subject.
To be sure, when there is a big game I want to know how it has gone,
and buy the latest evening paper and take it home and assimilate, and
discuss a little, its disclosures about what the score was and why it
was so. But however it turns out it doesn’t affect my appetite for
dinner, nor my interest in food, and I can’t talk about it more than
half an hour. And when the Sunday paper comes with all the details I
am apt to get interested in other news and skip the football stories
altogether, or until late at night.
Really, I am ashamed. It comes, no doubt, with increase of years and
the pressure of responsibilities and concern about the more vital
details of human existence. Cordelia reviles me and says I am getting
older than my years. Maybe I am, mentally, though she is just about
as much interested in football as I am, and no more. I suppose sport
naturally falls into a secondary place in the thoughts of people
who have a living to make and rent to pay and a child to raise. If
everybody was like us, sport might languish, and that would be a pity.
I’m glad they’re not. The Pharisee was not so far out, perhaps, in
thanking God he was not like other men. The trouble was, he did not
go on and thank God that other men were not like him. There needs to
be great variety in the world if all the jobs are to get attention.
I’m thankful that the prosperity of football does not depend on me,
and that I can be bored by it without detriment to the great cause of
sport, because, I suppose, it really is a great cause, and related to
the perpetuation of vigor and virility in men.
* * * * *
I have been thinking about celibates. There is something to be said for
persons to whom celibacy comes natural. To most persons it does not
come natural. It never did to me, for instance. I hate it when it is
forced, and object with what may be a Protestant detestation to vows
that bind people to it; but there are marvelously useful people in the
ranks of the unmarried.
Brookfield, a contemporary whose line is education, has been telling
me a story about a rich man, named Thompson, who has got interested in
the improvement of mankind. Somebody said the other day that the men
who get rich are those who are able to get more out of other people
than other people get out of them. That is a very plausible definition
and good as far as it goes, but the story I heard made me realize that
it doesn’t cover all the ground, and that many rich men are creators
of wealth. This Thompson that I heard of had extraordinary brains for
business. He could think to the bottom of propositions, and think out
all their details and perceive whether they could be made profitable
and how. He got at business almost as young as Alexander Hamilton, for
his parents, who were good people, both died when he was fifteen and
left him, as you might say, with his hat on, going out to look for
means of support. He went to a big town and got a job with a good
concern. At the end of three years he was ill, probably from overwork.
His employer told him to go away and stay two months and get rested.
He went, and stayed six weeks, and came back with the biggest bunch of
orders that the firm had ever had. His employer saw then that he was
incorrigible, and pretty soon he took him into partnership.
Now there comes another likeness to Hamilton. The boy wanted to know
more, and determined that when he had got money enough he would quit
work and go off and study. He calculated that he would have a million
dollars by the time he was twenty-six, and he thought that would do.
He actually did get his million and something to spare at twenty-six
(and this is not a newspaper story, either; Brookfield told it to me),
and actually did pull out and go off to Europe and spent three years
in France and Germany improving his mind. Now comes in his gift of
celibacy, in which he was quite different from Hamilton--who never
had any discernible talent that way--and from me. Instead of getting
married and raising a family, and having a flower-garden and horses
and cows--this being before they had invented automobiles--and enjoying
life, he did not get married at all. I don’t know why not. Maybe he
didn’t know how and was too old to learn; maybe somebody else persuaded
the girl that he aspired to persuade. At any rate, he didn’t marry,
but came home and made lots more money, and finally retired from
active business and set his wits to see what he could do to make the
world better. Now he lives on twelve or fifteen thousand a year, and
spends most of his strength and his surplus income and more or less
of his principal chiefly on one considerable enterprise that combines
philanthropy and education. But he is dragged back into business now
and then, Brookfield told me, when a commercial rescue job offers, that
looks so difficult that nobody else will touch it.
Of course, celibacy has no particular bearing on Thompson’s usefulness
except that he was qualified to get along with it, and it left him
entirely free to spend himself in trying to better the general
conditions of life. It is not news that there are always some mighty
useful bachelors about. Still less is it news that there are many
indispensable spinsters. I suppose the sentiment that everybody must
get married and have four children has got some open seams in it; but a
life is the thing that folks like best to leave in the world, and with
reason, for, on the whole, a life, if it is good enough, lasts the best
of anything, and leaves the most imperishable effects.
It is too soon yet to say if my son Samuel is going to leave an
imperishable effect in the world, but he is doing well, and the more
perishable effects have already been found to be so little suited to
him that one of his grandmothers has given him a modern rag-doll--an
elegant creation that comes from a shop--and the other a teddy-bear.
Teddy-bears are scarcer in the toy shops than they were, because the
current of politics has rolled on, but they can still be had and may
yet become more plentiful. Samuel lives a care-free life. In that
respect he is an example and encouragement to us all. He assumes no
responsibility about anything, takes his nourishment without turning
a hair or sweating so much as one bead, and shows indifference to the
primal curse. It is cheering and strengthening to have such a spirit in
the family.