A CHANGED CRUSOE.
IN the third night Emily had ten hours of the sleep of exhausted youth.
She awoke in the mood of the brilliant July morning which was sending
sunshine and song and the odour of honeysuckles through the rifts in
the lattices of her shutters. She was restored to her normal self. She
was able to examine her affairs calmly in the light of her keen and
courageous mind.
Ever since she had been old enough to be of active use, she had had
the training of responsibility--responsibility not only for herself,
but also for her mother and the household. She had had the duties of
both woman and man forced upon her and so had developed capacity and
self-reliance. She had read and experienced and thought perhaps beyond
the average for girls of her age and breeding. Undoubtedly she had read
and thought more than most girls who are, or fancy they are, physically
attractive. Her father’s caustic contempt for shallow culture, for
ignorance thinly disguised by good manners, had been his one strong
influence on her.
“All my own fault,” she was saying to herself now, as she lay propped
on her elbow among her pillows. “It was a base plan, unworthy of me. I
ought to be glad that the punishment was not worse. The only creditable
thing about it is that I played the game so badly that I lost.” And
then she smiled, wondering how much of her new virtue was real and how
much was mere making the best of a disastrous defeat.
Why had she lost? What was the false move? She could not answer, but
she felt that it was through ignorance of some trick which a worse
woman would have known.
“Never again, never again,” she thought, “will I take that road. What
I get I must get by direct means. Either I’m not crafty enough or not
mean enough to win in the other way.”
She was singing as she went downstairs to join her aunt. The old woman,
her father’s sister who had never married, was knitting in the shady
corner of the front porch, screened from the sun by a great overhanging
tree, and from the drive and the road beyond, by the curtain of
honeysuckles and climbing roses. As Emily came into view, she dropped
the knitting and looked at her with disapproval upon her thin old face.
“But why, auntie?” said the girl, answering the look. “I feel like
singing. I feel so young and well and--hopeful. You don’t wish me to
play the hypocrite and look glum and sad? Besides, the battle must
begin soon, and good spirits may be half of it.”
Her aunt sighed and looked at her with the unoffending pity of
sympathy. “Perhaps you’re right, Emmy,” she said. “God knows, life is
cruel enough without our fighting to prolong its miseries. And it does
seem as if you’d had more than your share of them thus far.” She was
admiring her beautiful niece and thinking how ill that fragile fineness
seemed fitted for the struggle which there seemed no way of averting.
“You’re almost twenty-one,” she said aloud. “You ought to have had a
good husband and everything you wanted by this time.”
Emily winced at this unconscious stab into the unhealed wound. “Isn’t
there anything in life for a woman on her own account?” she asked
impatiently. “Is her only hope through some man? Isn’t it possible for
her to make her own happiness, work out her own salvation? Must she
wait until a man condescends to ask her to marry him?”
“I’d like to say no,” replied her aunt, “but I can’t. As the world is
made now, a woman’s happiness comes through home and children. And
that means a husband. Even if her idea of happiness were not home and
children, still she’s got to have a husband.”
“But why? Why do you say ‘as the world is made now?’ Aren’t there
thousands, tens of thousands of women who make their own lives, working
in all sorts of ways--from teaching school to practising medicine or
law or writing or acting?”
“Yes--but they’re still only women. They may lie about it. But with a
few exceptions, abnormal women, who are hardly women at all, they’re
simply filling a gap in their lives--perhaps trying to find husbands
in unusual ways. Everybody must have an object, to be in the least
happy. And children is the object the world has fixed for us women.
Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we pursue it. And if we’re
thwarted in it, we’re--well, we’re not happy.”
The old woman was staring out sadly into space. The cheerfulness had
faded from the girl’s face. But presently she shook her head defiantly
and broke the silence.
“I refuse to believe it,” she said with energy. “Oh, I don’t deny that
I _feel_ just as you describe. And why shouldn’t I? Why shouldn’t we
all? Aren’t we brought up that way? Are we ever taught anything else?
It’s the way women have been trained from the beginning. But--that
doesn’t make it so.”
“No, it doesn’t,” replied her aunt. “And probably it isn’t so. But
don’t make the mistake, child, of thinking that the world is run on
a basis of what’s so. It isn’t. It’s run on a basis of think-so and
believe-so and hope-so.”
Emily stood up beside her aunt and looked out absently through the
leaves. “I don’t care what any one says or what every one says,” she
said. “I don’t say that I don’t want love and home and all that. I
do want it. But I think I want it as a man wants it. I want it as
my very own, not as the property of some man which he graciously or
grudgingly permits me to share. And I purpose to try to make my own
life. If I marry, it will be as a man marries--when I’m pleased and not
before. No, don’t look frightened, auntie. I’m not going to do anything
shocking. I understand that the game must be played according to the
rules, or one is likely to be excluded.”
“Well, you’ve got to make your living--at least for the present,”
replied her aunt. “And it doesn’t matter much what your theory is. The
question is, what can you do; and if you can do something, how are you
to get the chance to do it. I can’t advise you. I’m only a useless old
maid--waiting in a corner for death, already forgotten.”
Emily put on an expression of amused disbelief that was more flattering
than true, and full of vague but potent consolation. “I don’t think I
need advice,” she said, “so much as I need courage. And there you can
help me, auntie dear--can, and will.”
“I?” The old woman was pleased and touched. “What can I say or do? I
can only tell you what you already know--though I must say I didn’t
when I was your age--can only tell you that there’s nothing to be
afraid of in all this wide world except false pride.”
She looked thoughtfully at her knitting, then anxiously at the
resolute face of her niece. “In our country,” she went on, “it’s been
certain from the start, it seems to me, that what you’ve been saying
would be the gospel of the women as well as of the men. But it takes
women a long time to get over false pride. You are going to be a
working-woman. If only you can see that all honest work is honourable!
If only you can remember that your life must be made by yourself, that
to look timidly at others and dread what they will say about you is
cowardly and contemptible! How I wish I had your chance! How I wish I’d
had the courage to take my own chance!”