THE BATTLE
ELLEN felt her way into the room and sat down in the dim light of the
street lamps. She loved this quaint apartment. Five years of strenuous
work within its walls had given to it the power of restoring tired
nerves and toning the fiber of character. The front half of the floor
space was devoted to the one large living-room with three windows
opening on Fifth Avenue. The ceiling was unusually high and a gallery
with white spindles and mahogany rail circled the two sides and rear
end of it. From the balcony in the rear the doors opened into two
bedrooms and beneath them on the level of the living-room was the
dining-room, kitchen, pantry and maid’s room.
Each piece of furniture was selected with care and expressed some mood
or fancy of her vivid imagination.
The walls of the living-room were in brown leather and the furnishings
suggested the library and sitting-room combined. The walls for the
first four feet up were lined with books--every inch of the space taken
with the cases even at the turn of the corners and beneath each window.
On the floor was a rich brown carpet, with an oriental rug here and
there to break its wide stretches of plainness.
The quiet dignity of the room soothed her. She walked to the window
and looked out on the brightly lighted square. The electric hand
of the clock in the tower pointed to eleven. He had gone unusually
early to-night. By all the laws of love-customs he should have stayed
unusually late.
“Stubborn mule!” she muttered. “He thinks I’ll give in, of course;
we’ll see!”
The window was up full height and through its wide space came the faint
call of the cricket in the little privet hedge on the roof above.
The cricket’s chirp recalled her tumultuous emotions of the moment when
he had swept her into his arms and kissed her lips. How long ago it
seemed! She had lived years in the two brief hours. The memory of his
kiss stirred now with a strange maddening thrill.
Something new had awakened into being within her body in that first
kiss--something sweet and wonderful in its power to torture. She
realized it with a sense of joyous awe--the grip of this force on her
life and character.
She was stronger because of it. Of this she was sure. New power to
will had throbbed within her from the moment of its first call. She
breathed deeply. The dimly lighted room with its leather walls and row
on row of books gave back her cry of personal triumph in the struggle.
This room was hers. No man could claim or dominate it. Here her
imagination had found its wings and soared in joyous freedom.
“I’ll keep that freedom too!” she snapped. “The man who enters here
shall come as my comrade and equal--not as my lord and master!”
Strange that this passionate wilful being which his kisses had stirred
into life within should turn thus on its creator! And yet it was so.
Life began to take on new meanings. Never had it seemed so sweet--its
mystery so exhaustless. For the first time within memory had the full
import of sex consciousness dawned. It brought new dignity and strength.
“My man can not resist me!” she breathed. “I’ll win. I’ll have my way,
not his.”
She mounted the short flight of stairs, threw on the light in her
bedroom and undressed with a lazy consciousness of power--power to
think, to will, to execute her will. The touch of the luxurious bed
soothed her vanity. She was mistress of her own life. She had developed
the strength to fight and win the first battle for the supremacy of
personality. She would win the next one also.
She awoke next morning strong and elated. She caught herself singing
again.
“Well, why shouldn’t I sing!” she muttered. “My man I’ve found. He’s
fine and strong. His mind is keen. His will is stubborn. But I like it.
I’ll bend him to mine----”
She paused and laughed softly.
“Away with doubts and fears; I can twist him ’round my little finger
when I am ready.”
She dressed with unusual care. Her bath was a religious ceremony. Never
had she been so conscious of beauty or so proud of its power. She would
use it to bend the man of her choice.
She began to write again at nine o’clock. Her mind was clear, every
faculty alert, her imagination aglow. For two hours her pencil flew
over the clean white sheets of paper. She thoroughly enjoyed work.
She paused for a brief rest and thanked God for the gift of expression.
Above all she thanked Him for the independence of man which it had
brought her. But for this she could never have resisted the temptation
to accept the support of Manning by trading on her sex. How degrading
the thought! How could any woman with a soul trade on the mysterious
and beautiful impulse that thrilled her being now with inspiring power?
She renewed her vow to lead the revolution for the emancipation of
womanhood. She vowed anew to demand and secure the vast changes in the
social order which this emancipation would mean. The revolution which
she would lead would summon millions of sleeping souls into vivid
conscious life.
The sharp rap on the brass knocker of her door was unmistakable. It was
the nervous call of Lucy Sheldon bent on some important mission. She
had heard it before. She heard it now with dread. Of all the friends
she had made in New York this demure little woman was her most loyal
adviser in every trial. To-day she would resent her advice. She was
the most provoking of all the opponents of the radical program. She
had the power to provoke because she had been so successful in her
career and yet held to her old-fashioned ideal of the home and home
life with dogged persistence. She believed in woman’s right to develop
her powers to the highest reach of their capacity, yet held with the
tenacity of fanaticism to the principle that she must develop as woman,
not as man,--that she is fundamentally different. And that feminism
must contribute something new to humanity because of this fundamental
difference. She was an ardent believer in the cause of woman’s suffrage
because she believed that the mind of woman should supplement, not
supplant, the mind of man in solving the problems of state. She
believed that the salvation of the world awaits the universal training
of womanhood to rear a nobler race of men.
Ellen knew her arguments by heart and she was sick of them because she
had found no answer satisfactory to her own inner sense of logic and
right. She knew the line of argument this morning and resented it more
fiercely because its point would be so intensely personal.
Could Manning have made her his confidant so quickly? She would resent
that too. Perhaps he had only hinted at the truth. She flushed at the
thought of another woman’s knowledge of the daring proposal she had
made to her lover. In the next breath she reproached herself for such
inconsistency.
“Why should I resent my best friend knowing it if I’m going to defy the
world!” she mused bitterly.
She was still busy with her resentful thoughts when the sharp rap was
repeated with greater violence.
The maid was still out of town. She sprang to her feet at last to
answer the knock. Perhaps her fears were vain after all. It was not
probable that Manning had gone so far as she feared.
She opened the door smiling and Lucy Sheldon entered with merely a
nod. She had always insisted before on the habit of kissing her. It
had always annoyed Ellen. She had submitted to it under protest. But
her love for the older woman was too deep for little differences of
habit to seriously jar. This morning she resented the omission of the
kiss with genuine anger. It struck her with the force of a blow. The
hidebound little fool had already assumed the air of superior virtue at
the bare thought of the proposal to her nephew!
Ellen looked at her in hurt surprise, her hand still on the door.
“Shut the door!” Lucy commanded sharply.
Ellen closed the door and moved toward the armchair in which her friend
usually seated herself for a chat beside the desk.
Lucy Sheldon’s eyes sought hers with a look of yearning tenderness. A
smothered cry of pain suddenly broke the silence and she threw herself
into Ellen’s arms sobbing.
For a moment the two friends held each other. The older woman touched
the flushed young cheek. Her slender fingers trembled with the caress
of a mother.
“How beautiful you are this morning, my dear!” she faltered.
Her first words were so unexpected they brought a feeling of uneasy
surprise. There would be no stormy argument. Her tactics would be more
difficult.
Without response she led Lucy to a chair.
“Sit down now and tell me all about it,” Ellen said briskly.
The older woman looked at her through her tears.
“Oh, how could you, my child! How could you!” she cried.
“Perhaps I haven’t yet,” Ellen laughed.
“But you will. I know how stubborn you are--unless I can stop you.”
“What has he told you?” Ellen asked sharply.
“Not much. But I know you so well that I put two and two together and
I understood. The poor boy was so distressed, so heart-sick that I
dragged it out of him piece by piece until I got the whole truth.”
“He’ll come round to my way of thinking.”
“Never!”
“He will.”
“And if he does,” Lucy fiercely declared, “he’ll be no kinsman of mine.
I’d never see him or speak to him again.”
“Nonsense, my dear, I shall assume the full responsibility of my
revolutionary conduct. A leader must lead. I shall lead in this and he
will follow.”
“You will deliberately seduce him into such a crime?”
“Deliberately.”
“It’s incredible!”
“It’s not. You believe that I’ll do it, or you wouldn’t be so
distressed, you dear old conventional bugbear!”
Lucy’s eyes were blinded with tears.
“You will dare to live with your lover without a marriage ceremony in
defiance of law and society?” she asked at last.
“I will,” was the firm response. “In the desert of this money-grubbing,
sex-trading metropolis, I’ll create an ideal world for two or die in
the effort.”
“You’ll die in the effort.”
“All right, I’ll make it easier for the next.”
“You’ll make it worse, dear, foolish child of impulse. You’re mad.
Your cry of personal freedom has led you into anarchy pure and
simple--anarchy and the grossest materialism.”
“The highest idealism,” Ellen interrupted.
“Ideal fiddlesticks! You have misread the history of women and the
history of the race. Man did not create monogamic marriage----”
“No, the devil did it!”
Lucy ignored the interruption.
“Woman created monogamic marriage by the slow, painful process of
thousands of years of struggle with man’s unbridled passions. Man
is normally by sex-instinct a polygamous animal. Out of the bog of
his promiscuous impulses woman has led him by the tenderness of her
devotion into the establishment by law of a social order which protects
her in the rearing of her young. You propose to destroy this.”
“I propose to re-establish it on a higher, nobler plane.”
“By restoring to man his license to roam the fields again a mere
animal--a beast.”
“He roams to-day in spite of bonds!”
“The law will always be defied by the lawless, while it binds silent
millions. You’re absolutely crazy, my child! Marry my nephew as he
asks you and he’ll be your loyal mate for life. He will never lift his
eyes in lust or love to another woman. I know him. It’s in his blood.
A finer breed of men were never born. The home instinct that God has
planted in his soul and generations of pious beautiful mothers have
cherished is the finest thing in him. And he never will be happy until
he realizes it. You may wreck his life, but you will never destroy that
craving. He will wreck your life through it.”
“I’m not afraid,” she said defiantly.
“No. You’re just mad with this obsession of individual freedom.”
She paused, leaned closer and continued in low tones:
“The modern woman doesn’t refuse to marry. She doesn’t get the chance
to marry. This is the cancer that’s eating out the heart of our social
order. The advantage of marriage is all woman’s. The freedom you
propose to give is unfair to you. It’s acceptance by any man would be a
cruel injustice.”
“Your fine nephew has rejected it with scorn.”
“Of course he did. He wouldn’t be my nephew if he hadn’t. He’s my
brother’s son. My brother would have killed any man who made such an
offer to me.”
Ellen smiled and lifted her head.
“Yes. He also told me he would do as much for any man who offered this
ideal to his sister.”
Lucy straightened her slight figure.
“I’m proud of him for saying it.”
“Which only shows that neither man nor woman is yet civilized.”
“Exactly. That’s why you’d better think before you leap all the way
back into barbarism at one bound. It’s bad enough as it is, God knows.
You propose to aggravate the disease to effect a cure. Come, my child,
forget your theories for a moment and exercise a little common sense.
A true study of human society reveals certain facts. God made woman as
the supreme instrument for the perpetuation of the race and the saving
of all that man has achieved in the centuries of the past, by passing
it on in the culture of the child. A man under normal conditions
marries because he wants a woman. A woman marries because she wants
a child. A man seeks the woman in his wife. A woman seeks the child
in her husband. A woman lives through her children--a man through his
work. You propose to seek a man in your mate and ask the man to seek
only the woman in this free alliance. Your chief aim in life you make
your work. You must destroy or crush down your instinct for children.
With the child as the bond your man will remain faithful for life.
Without it, his eyes will continually roam the world in search of other
women, because the supreme law of life has been defied, not fulfilled.”
“He wants me--not the child,” Ellen maintained.
“Certainly, you simpleton. Man’s sex-impulse is overwhelmingly stronger
than woman’s. He may not even desire children in the beginning. But
nature has seen to it that he cannot live without wanting a wife. It is
her business to supply the children.”
“All right!” Ellen replied. “I propose to meet this grave
responsibility in my own way and gauge my conduct by higher ideals than
moth-eaten customs. I propose to rear a nobler race of freemen than
the world has yet seen. I accept my duty to society as paramount. I
will be the guardian of the race-body and the race-soul. But I will be
responsible to myself--my inner, noblest self. I will not be a slave.
I will not sell my sex for my keep, either in the bonds of matrimony
or the bonds of the kept woman outside of marriage. I will not be a
parasite. I will not obey any man who walks this earth. If I must be
the mother of men, I will be their equal at least. I will be freed from
conventional slavery. I will be freed as woman from the dominion of the
male. I will rise a full human being or welcome extinction!”
“But can’t you see, dear heart,” Lucy pleaded, “that your ideal is
purely masculine? You are merely demanding the right to make a man
of yourself! The way of human progress lies in exactly the opposite
direction if woman is to contribute anything to that progress. Nothing
can be gained toward lifting the human race to a higher plane by merely
multiplying the number of men. We must improve the breed of men. This
can only be done by woman remaining a woman to the highest reach of
development. Woman’s organic constitution makes her utterly unlike
man. To follow man’s idea would be the most fatal blunder. You wish to
live the same life and do the same work as man merely to demonstrate
that you are a human being. God called you to live the highest life of
which woman is capable; to lead the way for a higher order of human
beings. No freedom is worth achieving for woman unless it be to follow
her own nature. The free alliance you propose to your lover is not the
creature of woman’s imagination. It was borrowed from the masculine
mind in the frantic effort of the modern woman to be a man!”
Ellen stubbornly shook her head.
“But how can the mere trick of a marriage ceremony perform the miracles
your ideal demands? If I love Ralph Manning I will love him no more,
no less, ten minutes after the officer of the law has pronounced us
husband and wife. If he is mean and stingy, the ceremony will not make
him generous. If he is noble, it will not make him ignoble. If he is a
criminal, it will not cleanse him of crime----”
“No,” Lucy broke in, “but because he is a man who has inherited the
finest instincts of his ancestors the magic of that ceremony will
fix his habits for life. Habit is character. On that home building
character the whole structure of civilization rests----”
A soft rap at the door interrupted her.
Ellen searched her friend’s face for an explanation. The truth had
flashed into her mind instinctively.
“You told him to come this morning?” Ellen asked.
“Yes. I told him to fight it out to-day, dear. I’ve tried to help him.”
She rose timidly and drew closer.
“You don’t resent it?”
For the first time in her life Ellen slipped her arms around her
friend’s slender waist and kissed her.
“Certainly not, you dear old thing; I feel as if you were my aunt now,
besides the very best friend I ever had in my life.”
“You’ll listen to him?”
“Of course, I’ll listen.”
“And be sensible?”
“Surely,” she smiled quizzically.
Lucy kissed her impulsively.
“Good-bye, dear, it’s no use to argue with you. Convince a woman
against her will--she’ll be of the same opinion still.”
Another gentle rap at the door reminded them that a mere man was
quietly waiting their pleasure.
Lucy quickly opened the door.
“I’ve done my best, boy,” she whispered, “you’ll have to do the rest.”
“I’ll win, never fear,” he replied in low tones.
Lucy waved another farewell and hurried away.
Manning advanced smiling.
“Well, I told you I’d come again to-day.”
She met him half way, devouring him with her eyes.
“My love-man!” she cried.
“My love-woman!” he whispered, taking her in his arms.
Their lips met.
“You’ll fix the day?” he asked.
“To-day, if you like.”
He suddenly held her at arm’s length.
“You mean it?”
“Yes.”
He swept her again into his arms.
“You make me the happiest man on earth.”
He paused and smiled into her flushed face.
“I’m afraid that remark is not strikingly original!”
“And I’m afraid you don’t quite understand me,” she said, releasing
herself from his arms.
“I do,” he answered promptly. “You’ve just promised to marry me to-day.”
“But in my own way.”
“My way is the only way, dear heart!”
“We’ll have as elaborate a ceremony as you like,” she went on evenly,
“provided you don’t bind me with legal chains.”
“But that’s exactly what I demand,” he insisted. “I want the chains
double riveted and I want handcuffs on both my wrists as well as on
yours. The chains can’t be too strong to suit me.”
“You refuse me?” she asked sternly.
“I refuse to degrade the woman I love.”
“Can you think of the wonderful thing that is drawing our souls and
bodies toward each other as degrading?”
“No, but the world will call it so and I will be responsible for your
misery.”
“I defy the world.”
“Knowing the world better than you do, I decline to aid you in the
defiance.”
She drew close.
“You can deliberately repulse me when I offer you my soul and body?”
“Under such conditions, yes.”
She drew back with sudden passion. Her voice was husky.
“All right, you can go, then; I will never see you again!”
He looked at her in surprise.
“You can’t mean this.”
“I do.”
She lifted her hand to wave him to the door and it dropped as if her
strength had failed.
Quick to catch the significance of her weakness, he followed her
eagerly.
“You can’t be such a fool,” he cried angrily. “I won’t listen to you.
I’m going to do the thinking and the acting for us both in this crisis.
You’ve read a lot of radical rubbish and taken it seriously. You’ve
written some brilliant essays on the same line and hypnotized yourself
into the idea that you really believe the stuff you’ve written. You
don’t. You can’t. It’s crazy nonsense when you try to live such
theories in this world. And this is the world we’ve got to live in now,
you know.”
“That’s just why I’m going to live my life in the light of my ideals,”
she broke in. “This old, sin-cursed, sneering, practical, material
world needs the inspiration of high ideals. We have more than enough
practical materialists. You are going to join me in my holy crusade
against sham and humbug, lies and slavery.”
“I’m going to marry you according to law,” he growled.
“You will not!” she snapped.
A long silence followed. The man and the woman held each other in a
steady gaze--will clashing on will in a determined fight for mastery.
There was no sign of weakening on either side. Her figure slowly
stiffened and the chin rose in defiance.
With a gesture of anger he seized his hat and hurried to the door.
“It’s good-bye, then?”
“You’re saying it,” she answered stiffly.
“All right,” he responded in tones so low they were scarcely audible.
The door closed softly and Ellen sank into a chair with a sob.