Kate was alone at last. She had time to think. There were still three
days left of the vacation for which she had begged when she perceived
Honora's need of her, and these she spent in settling her room. It would
not accommodate all of the furniture she had accumulated during those
days of enthusiasm over Ray McCrea's return, so she sold the superfluous
things. Truth to tell, however, she kept the more decorative ones.
Honora's fate had taught her an indelible lesson. She saw clearly that
happiness for women did not lie along the road of austerity.
Was it humiliating to have to acknowledge that women were desired for
their beauty, their charm, for the air of opulence which they gave to an
otherwise barren world? Her mind cast back over the ages--over the
innumerable forms of seduction and subserviency which the instinct of
women had induced them to assume, and she reddened to flame sitting
alone in the twilight. Yet, an hour later, still thinking of the
subject, she realized that it was for men rather than for women that she
had to blush. Woman was what man had made her, she concluded.
Yet man was often better than woman--more generous, more just, more
high-minded, possessed of a deeper faith.
Well, well, it was at best a confusing world! She seemed to be like a
ship without a chart or a port of destination. But at least she could
accept things as they were--even the fact that she herself was not "in
commission," and was, philosophically speaking, a derelict.
"Other women seem to do things by instinct," she mused, "but I have,
apparently, to do them from conviction. It must be the masculine traits
in me. They say all women have masculine traits, that if they were
purely feminine, they would be monstrous; and that all civilized men
have much of the feminine in them or they would not be civilized. I
suppose there's rather more of the masculine in me than in the majority
of women."
Now Mary Morrison, she concluded, was almost pure feminine--she was the
triumphant exposition of the feminine principle.
Some lines of Arthur Symons came to her notice--lines which she tried in
vain not to memorize.
"'I am the torch,' she saith; 'and what to me
If the moth die of me? I am the flame
Of Beauty, and I burn that all may see
Beauty, and I have neither joy nor shame,
But live with that clear light of perfect fire
Which is to men the death of their desire.
'"I am Yseult and Helen, I have seen
Troy burn, and the most loving knight lies dead.
The world has been my mirror, time has been
My breath upon the glass; and men have said,
Age after age, in rapture and despair,
Love's few poor words before my mirror there.
"'I live and am immortal; in my eyes
The sorrow of the world, and on my lips
The joy of life, mingle to make me wise!'" ...
Was it wisdom, then, that Mary Morrison possessed--the immemorial wisdom
of women?
Oh, the shame of it! The shame of being a woman!
Kate denied herself to McCrea when he called. She plunged into the
development of her scheme for an extension of motherhood. State
motherhood it would be. Should the movement become national, as she
hoped, perhaps it had best be called the Bureau of Children.
It was midsummer by now and there was some surcease of activity even in
"welfare" circles. Many of the social workers, having grubbed in
unspeakable slums all winter, were now abroad among palaces and
cathedrals, drinking their fill of beauty. Many were in the country near
at hand. For the most part, neophytes were in charge at the settlement
houses. Kate was again urged to domesticate herself with Jane Addams's
corps of workers, but she had an aversion to being shut between walls.
She had been trapped once,--back at the place she called home,--and she
had not liked it. There was something free and adventurous in going from
house to house, authoritatively rearranging the affairs of the
disarranged. It suited her to be "a traveling bishop." Moreover, it left
her time for the development of her great Idea. In a neighborhood house
privacy and leisure were the two unattainable luxuries.
She was still writing at odd times'; and now her articles were
appearing. They were keen, simple, full of meat, and the public liked
them. As Kate read them over, she smiled to find them so emphatic. She
was far from _feeling_ emphatic, but she seemed to have a trick of
expressing herself in that way. She was still in need of great economy.
Her growing influence brought little to her in the way of monetary
rewards, and it was hard for her to live within her income because she
had a scattering hand. She liked to dispense good things and she liked
to have them. A liberal programme suited her best--whatever gave free
play to life. She was a wild creature in that she hated bars. Of all the
prison houses of life, poverty seemed one of the most hectoring.
But poverty, to be completely itself, must exclude opportunity. Kate had
the key to opportunity, and she realized it. In the letters she received
and wrote bringing her into association with men and women of force and
aspiration, she had a privilege to which, for all of her youth, she
could not be indifferent. She liked the way these purposeful persons put
things, and felt a distinct pleasure in matching their ideas with her
own. As the summer wore on, she was asked to country homes of charm and
taste--homes where wealth, though great, was subordinated to more
essential things. There she met those who could further her
purposes--who could lend their influence to aid her Idea, now shaping
itself excellently. At the suggestion of Miss Addams, she prepared an
article in which her plan unfolded itself in all its benevolent length
and breadth--an article which it was suggested might yet form a portion
of a speech made before a congressional committee. There was even talk
of having Kate deliver this address, but she had not yet reached the
point where she could contemplate such an adventure with calmness.
However, she was having training in her suffrage work, which was now
assuming greater importance in her eyes. She addressed women audiences
in various parts of the city, and had even gone on a few flying motor
excursions with leading suffragists, speaking to the people in villages
and at country schoolhouses.
There was an ever-increasing conviction in this department of her work.
She had learned to count the ballot as the best bulwark of liberty, and
she could find no logic to inform her why, if it was a protection for
man,--for the least and most insignificant of men,--it was not equally a
weapon which women, searching now as never before for defined and
enduring forms of liberty, should be permitted to use. She not only
desired it for other women,--women who were supposed to "need it"
more,--but she wished it for herself. She felt it to be merely
consistent that she, in whom service to her community was becoming a
necessity, should have this privilege. It never would be possible for
her to exercise murderous powers of destruction in behalf of her
country. She would not be allowed to shoot down innocent men whose
opinions were opposed to her own, or to make widows and orphans. She
would be forbidden to stand behind cannon or to sink submarine
torpedoes. But it was within her reach to add to the sum total of peace
and happiness. She would, if she could get her Bureau of Children
established, exercise a constructive influence completely in accord with
the spirit of the time. This being the case, she thought she ought to
have the ballot. It would make her stand up straighter, spiritually
speaking. It would give her the authority which would point her
arguments; put a cap on the sheaf of her endeavors. She wanted it
precisely as a writer wants a period to complete a sentence. It had a
structural value, to use the term of an architect. Without it her
sentence was foolish, her building insecure.
"Why is it," she demanded of the women of Lake Geneva when, in company
with a veteran suffragist, she addressed them there, "that you grow
weary in working for your town? It is because you cannot demonstrate
your meaning nor secure the continuation of your works by the ballot.
Your efforts are like pieces of metal which you cannot weld into useful
form. You toil for deserted children, indigent mothers, for hospitals
and asylums, starting movements which, when perfected, are absorbed by
the city. What happens then to these benevolent enterprises? They are
placed in the hands of politicians and perfunctorily administered. Your
disinterested services are lost sight of; the politicians smile at the
manner in which you have toiled and they have reaped. You see sink into
uselessness, institutions, which, in the compassionate hands of women,
would be the promoters of good through the generations. The people you
would benefit are treated with that insolent arrogance which only a
cheap man in office can assume. Causes you have labored to establish,
and which no one denies are benefits, are capriciously overthrown. And
there is one remedy and one only: for you to cast your vote--for you to
have your say as you sit in your city council, on your county board, or
in your state legislature and national congress.
"You may shrink from it; you may dread these new responsibilities; but
strength and courage will come with your need. You dare not turn aside
from the road which opens before you, for to tread it is now the test of
integrity."
"Ought you to have said that?" inquired the older suffragist, afterward
looking at Kate with earnest and burning eyes from her white spiritual
face. "I dare say I care much more about suffrage than you. I have been
interested in it since I was a child, and I am now no longer a young
woman. Yet I feel that integrity is not allied to this or that opinion.
It is a question of sincerity--of steadfastness of purpose."
"There, there," said Kate, "don't expect me to be too moderate. How can
I care about anything just now if I have to be moderate? I love suffrage
because it gives me something to care about and to work for. The last
generation has destroyed pretty much all of the theology, hasn't it?
Service of man is all there is left--particularly that branch of it
known as the service of woman. Isn't that what all of the poets and
playwrights and novelists are writing about? Isn't that the most
interesting thing in the world at present? You've all urged me to go
into it, haven't you? Very well, I have. But I can't stay in it if I'm
to be tepid. You mustn't expect me to modify my utterance and cut down
my climaxes. I've got to make a hot propaganda of the thing. I want the
exhilaration of martyrdom--though I'm not keen for the discomforts of
it. In other words, dear lady, because you are judicious, don't expect
me to be. I don't want to be judicious--yet. I want to be fervid."
"You are a dear girl," said the elder woman, "but you are an egotist, as
of course you know."
"If I had been a modest violet by a mossy stone," laughed Kate, "should
I have taken up this work?"
"I'm free to confess that you would not," said the other, checking a
sigh as if she despaired of bringing this excited girl down to the
earth. "Yet I am bound to say--" She hesitated and Kate took up
the word.
"I _do_ know--I really understand," she cried contritely. "You are not
an egotist at all, dear lady. Though you have held many positions of
honor, you have never thought of yourself. Your sacrifices have been
_bona fide_. You who are so delicate and tender have done things which
men might have shrunk from. I know what you mean by sincerity, and I am
aware that you have it completely and steadily, whereas I have more
enthusiasm than is good either for myself or the cause. But you wouldn't
want me to form myself on you, would you now? Temperament is just as
much a fact as physique. I've got to dramatize woman's disadvantages if
I am to preach on the subject. Though I really think there are tragedies
of womanhood which none could exaggerate."
"Oh, there are, there are, Miss Barrington."
"How shall I make you understand that I am to be trusted!" Kate cried.
"I know I'm avid. I want both pain and joy. I want to suffer with the
others and enjoy with the others. I want my cup of life full and running
over with a brew of a thousand flavors, and I actually believe I want to
taste of the cup each neighbor holds. I have to know how others feel and
it's my nature to feel for them and with them. When I see this great
wave of aspiration sweeping over women,--Chinese and Persian women as
well as English and American,--I feel magnificent. I, too, am standing
where the stream of influence blows over me. It thrills me
magnificently, and I am meaning it when I say that I think the women who
do not feel it are torpid or cowardly."
The elder woman smiled patiently. After all, who was she that she should
check her flaming disciple?