“Exactly?” demanded the Girton Girl.
“Precisely,” I replied.
“Strange,” murmured the Girton Girl. “There is no accounting for it, yet
it always is so.”
“What is there no accounting for?” I inquired. “What is strange?”
“It is a German superstition,” explained the Girton Girl, “I learnt it at
school. Whenever complete silence falls upon any company, it is always
twenty minutes past the hour.”
“Why do we talk so much?” demanded the Minor Poet.
“As a matter of fact,” observed the Woman of the World, “I don’t think we
do—not we, personally, not much. Most of our time we appear to be
listening to you.”
“Then why do I talk so much, if you prefer to put it that way?” continued
the Minor Poet. “If I talked less, one of you others would have to talk
more.”
“There would be that advantage about it,” agreed the Philosopher.
“In all probability, you,” returned to him the Minor Poet. “Whether as a
happy party we should gain or lose by the exchange, it is not for me to
say, though I have my own opinion. The essential remains—that the stream
of chatter must be kept perpetually flowing. Why?”
“There is a man I know,” I said; “you may have met him, a man named
Longrush. He is not exactly a bore. A bore expects you to listen to
him. This man is apparently unaware whether you are listening to him or
not. He is not a fool. A fool is occasionally amusing—Longrush never.
No subject comes amiss to him. Whatever the topic, he has something
uninteresting to say about it. He talks as a piano-organ grinds out
music steadily, strenuously, tirelessly. The moment you stand or sit him
down he begins, to continue ceaselessly till wheeled away in cab or
omnibus to his next halting-place. As in the case of his prototype, his
rollers are changed about once a month to suit the popular taste. In
January he repeats to you Dan Leno’s jokes, and gives you other people’s
opinions concerning the Old Masters at the Guild-hall. In June he
recounts at length what is generally thought concerning the Academy, and
agrees with most people on most points connected with the Opera. If
forgetful for a moment—as an Englishman may be excused for being—whether
it be summer or winter, one may assure oneself by waiting to see whether
Longrush is enthusing over cricket or football. He is always up-to-date.
The last new Shakespeare, the latest scandal, the man of the hour, the
next nine days’ wonder—by the evening Longrush has his roller ready. In
my early days of journalism I had to write each evening a column for a
provincial daily, headed ‘What People are Saying.’ The editor was
precise in his instructions. ‘I don’t want your opinions; I don’t want
you to be funny; never mind whether the thing appears to you to be
interesting or not. I want it to be real, the things people _are_
saying.’ I tried to be conscientious. Each paragraph began with ‘That.’
I wrote the column because I wanted the thirty shillings. Why anybody
ever read it, I fail to understand to this day; but I believe it was one
of the popular features of the paper. Longrush invariably brings back to
my mind the dreary hours I spent penning that fatuous record.”
“I think I know the man you mean,” said the Philosopher. “I had
forgotten his name.”
“I thought it possible you might have met him,” I replied. “Well, my
cousin Edith was arranging a dinner-party the other day, and, as usual,
she did me the honour to ask my advice. Generally speaking, I do not
give advice nowadays. As a very young man I was generous with it. I
have since come to the conclusion that responsibility for my own muddles
and mistakes is sufficient. However, I make an exception in Edith’s
case, knowing that never by any chance will she follow it.”
“Speaking of editors,” said the Philosopher, “Bates told me at the club
the other night that he had given up writing the ‘Answers to
Correspondents’ personally, since discovery of the fact that he had been
discussing at some length the attractive topic, ‘Duties of a Father,’
with his own wife, who is somewhat of a humorist.”
“There was the wife of a clergyman my mother used to tell of,” said the
Woman of the World, “who kept copies of her husband’s sermons. She would
read him extracts from them in bed, in place of curtain lectures. She
explained it saved her trouble. Everything she felt she wanted to say to
him he had said himself so much more forcibly.”
“The argument always appears to me weak,” said the Philosopher. “If only
the perfect may preach, our pulpits would remain empty. Am I to ignore
the peace that slips into my soul when perusing the Psalms, to deny
myself all benefit from the wisdom of the Proverbs, because neither David
nor Solomon was a worthy casket of the jewels that God had placed in
them? Is a temperance lecturer never to quote the self-reproaches of
poor Cassio because Master Will Shakespeare, there is evidence to prove,
was a gentleman, alas! much too fond of the bottle? The man that beats
the drum may be himself a coward. It is the drum that is the important
thing to us, not the drummer.”
“Of all my friends,” said the Woman of the World, “the one who has the
most trouble with her servants is poor Jane Meredith.”
“I am exceedingly sorry to hear it,” observed the Philosopher, after a
slight pause. “But forgive me, I really do not see—”
“I beg your pardon,” answered the Woman of the World. “I thought
everybody knew ‘Jane Meredith.’ She writes ‘The Perfect Home’ column for
_The Woman’s World_.”
“It will always remain a riddle, one supposes,” said the Minor Poet.
“Which is the real ego—I, the author of ‘The Simple Life,’ fourteenth
edition, three and sixpence net—”
“Don’t,” pleaded the Old Maid, with a smile; “please don’t.”
“Don’t what?” demanded the Minor Poet.
“Don’t ridicule it—make fun of it, even though it may happen to be your
own. There are parts of it I know by heart. I say them over to myself
when— Don’t spoil it for me.” The Old Maid laughed, but nervously.
“My dear lady,” reassured her the Minor Poet, “do not be afraid. No one
regards that poem with more reverence than do I. You can have but small
conception what a help it is to me also. I, too, so often read it to
myself; and when— We understand. As one who turns his back on scenes of
riot to drink the moonlight in quiet ways, I go to it for sweetness and
for peace. So much do I admire the poem, I naturally feel desire and
curiosity to meet its author, to know him. I should delight, drawing him
aside from the crowded room, to grasp him by the hand, to say to him: ‘My
dear—my very dear Mr. Minor Poet, I am so glad to meet you! I would I
could tell you how much your beautiful work has helped me. This, my dear
sir—this is indeed privilege!’ But I can picture so vividly the bored
look with which he would receive my gush. I can imagine the contempt
with which he, the pure liver, would regard me did he know me—me, the
liver of the fool’s hot days.”
“A short French story I once read somewhere,” I said, “rather impressed
me. A poet or dramatist—I am not sure which—had married the daughter of
a provincial notary. There was nothing particularly attractive about her
except her _dot_. He had run through his own small fortune and was in
some need. She worshipped him and was, as he used to boast to his
friends, the ideal wife for a poet. She cooked admirably—a useful
accomplishment during the first half-dozen years of their married life;
and afterwards, when fortune came to him, managed his affairs to
perfection, by her care and economy keeping all worldly troubles away
from his study door. An ideal _Hausfrau_, undoubtedly, but of course no
companion for our poet. So they went their ways; till, choosing as in
all things the right moment, when she could best be spared, the good lady
died and was buried.
“And here begins the interest of the story, somewhat late. One article
of furniture, curiously out of place among the rich appointments of their
fine _hôtel_, the woman had insisted on retaining, a heavy, clumsily
carved oak desk her father had once used in his office, and which he had
given to her for her own as a birthday present back in the days of her
teens.
“You must read the story for yourselves if you would enjoy the subtle
sadness that surrounds it, the delicate aroma of regret through which it
moves. The husband finding after some little difficulty the right key,
fits it into the lock of the bureau. As a piece of furniture, plain,
solid, squat, it has always jarred upon his artistic sense. She too, his
good, affectionate Sara, had been plain, solid, a trifle squat. Perhaps
that was why the poor woman had clung so obstinately to the one thing in
the otherwise perfect house that was quite out of place there. Ah, well!
she is gone now, the good creature. And the bureau—no, the bureau shall
remain. Nobody will need to come into this room, no one ever did come
there but the woman herself. Perhaps she had not been altogether so
happy as she might have been. A husband less intellectual—one from whom
she would not have lived so far apart—one who could have entered into her
simple, commonplace life! it might have been better for both of them. He
draws down the lid, pulls out the largest drawer. It is full of
manuscripts, folded and tied neatly with ribbons once gay, now faded. He
thinks at first they are his own writings—things begun and discarded,
reserved by her with fondness. She thought so much of him, the good
soul! Really, she could not have been so dull as he had deemed her. The
power to appreciate rightly—this, at least, she must have possessed. He
unties the ribbon. No, the writing is her own, corrected, altered,
underlined. He opens a second, a third. Then with a smile he sits down
to read. What can they be like, these poems, these stories? He laughs,
smoothing the crumpled paper, foreseeing the trite commonness, the
shallow sentiment. The poor child! So she likewise would have been a
_littérateure_. Even she had her ambition, her dream.
“The sunshine climbs the wall behind him, creeps stealthily across the
ceiling of the room, slips out softly by the window, leaving him alone.
All these years he had been living with a fellow poet. They should have
been comrades, and they had never spoken. Why had she hidden herself?
Why had she left him, never revealing herself? Years ago, when they were
first married—he remembers now—she had slipped little blue-bound
copy-books into his pocket, laughing, blushing, asking him to read them.
How could he have guessed? Of course, he had forgotten them. Later,
they had disappeared again; it had never occurred to him to think. Often
in the earlier days she had tried to talk to him about his work. Had he
but looked into her eyes, he might have understood. But she had always
been so homely-seeming, so good. Who would have suspected? Then
suddenly the blood rushes into his face. What must have been her opinion
of his work? All these years he had imagined her the amazed devotee,
uncomprehending but admiring. He had read to her at times, comparing
himself the while with Molière reading to his cook. What right had she
to play this trick upon him? The folly of it! The pity of it! He would
have been so glad of her.”
[Picture: Comparing himself the while with Molière reading to his cook]
“What becomes, I wonder,” mused the Philosopher, “of the thoughts that
are never spoken? We know that in Nature nothing is wasted; the very
cabbage is immortal, living again in altered form. A thought published
or spoken we can trace, but such must only be a small percentage. It
often occurs to me walking down the street. Each man and woman that I
pass by, each silently spinning his silken thought, short or long, fine
or coarse. What becomes of it?”
“I heard you say once,” remarked the Old Maid to the Minor Poet, “that
‘thoughts are in the air,’ that the poet but gathers them as a child
plucks wayside blossoms to shape them into nosegays.”
“It was in confidence,” replied the Minor Poet. “Please do not let it
get about, or my publisher will use it as an argument for cutting down my
royalties.”
“I have always remembered it,” answered the Old Maid. “It seemed so
true. A thought suddenly comes to you. I think of them sometimes, as of
little motherless babes creeping into our brains for shelter.”
“It is a pretty idea,” mused the Minor Poet. “I shall see them in the
twilight: pathetic little round-eyed things of goblin shape, dimly
luminous against the darkening air. Whence come you, little tender
Thought, tapping at my brain? From the lonely forest, where the peasant
mother croons above the cradle while she knits? Thought of Love and
Longing: lies your gallant father with his boyish eyes unblinking
underneath some tropic sun? Thought of Life and Thought of Death: are
you of patrician birth, cradled by some high-born maiden, pacing slowly
some sweet garden? Or did you spring to life amid the din of loom or
factory? Poor little nameless foundlings! I shall feel myself in future
quite a philanthropist, taking them in, adopting them.”
“You have not yet decided,” reminded him the Woman of the World, “which
you really are: the gentleman we get for three and sixpence net, or the
one we are familiar with, the one we get for nothing.”
“Please don’t think I am suggesting any comparison,” continued the Woman
of the World, “but I have been interested in the question since George
joined a Bohemian club and has taken to bringing down minor celebrities
from Saturday to Monday. I hope I am not narrow-minded, but there is one
gentleman I have been compelled to put my foot down on.”
“I really do not think he will complain,” I interrupted. The Woman of
the World possesses, I should explain, the daintiest of feet.
“It is heavier than you think,” replied the Woman of the World. “George
persists I ought to put up with him because he is a true poet. I cannot
admit the argument. The poet I honestly admire. I like to have him
about the place. He lies on my drawing-room table in white vellum, and
helps to give tone to the room. For the poet I am quite prepared to pay
the four-and-six demanded; the man I don’t want. To be candid, he is not
worth his own discount.”
“It is hardly fair,” urged the Minor Poet, “to confine the discussion to
poets. A friend of mine some years ago married one of the most charming
women in New York, and that is saying a good deal. Everybody
congratulated him, and at the outset he was pleased enough with himself.
I met him two years later in Geneva, and we travelled together as far as
Rome. He and his wife scarcely spoke to one another the whole journey,
and before I left him he was good enough to give me advice which to
another man might be useful. ‘Never marry a charming woman,’ he
counselled me. ‘Anything more unutterably dull than “the charming woman”
outside business hours you cannot conceive.’”
“I think we must agree to regard the preacher,” concluded the
Philosopher, “merely as a brother artist. The singer may be a heavy,
fleshy man with a taste for beer, but his voice stirs our souls. The
preacher holds aloft his banner of purity. He waves it over his own head
as much as over the heads of those around him. He does not cry with the
Master, ‘Come to Me,’ but ‘Come with me, and be saved.’ The prayer
‘Forgive them’ was the prayer not of the Priest, but of the God. The
prayer dictated to the Disciples was ‘Forgive us,’ ‘Deliver us.’ Not
that he should be braver, not that he should be stronger than they that
press behind him, is needed of the leader, but that he should know the
way. He, too, may faint, he, too, may fall; only he alone must never
turn his back.”
[Picture: The singer may be a heavy, fleshy man with a taste for beer]
“It is quite comprehensible, looked at from one point of view,” remarked
the Minor Poet, “that he who gives most to others should himself be weak.
The professional athlete pays, I believe, the price of central weakness.
It is a theory of mine that the charming, delightful people one meets
with in society are people who have dishonestly kept to themselves gifts
entrusted to them by Nature for the benefit of the whole community. Your
conscientious, hard-working humorist is in private life a dull dog. The
dishonest trustee of laughter, on the other hand, robbing the world of
wit bestowed upon him for public purposes, becomes a brilliant
conversationalist.”
“But,” added the Minor Poet, turning to me, “you were speaking of a man
named Longrush, a great talker.”
“A long talker,” I corrected. “My cousin mentioned him third in her list
of invitations. ‘Longrush,’ she said with conviction, ‘we must have
Longrush.’ ‘Isn’t he rather tiresome?’ I suggested. ‘He is tiresome,’
she agreed, ‘but then he’s so useful. He never lets the conversation
drop.’”
“Why is it?” asked the Minor Poet. “Why, when we meet together, must we
chatter like a mob of sparrows? Why must every assembly to be successful
sound like the parrot-house of a zoological garden?”
“I remember a parrot story,” I said, “but I forget who told it to me.”
“Maybe one of us will remember as you go on,” suggested the Philosopher.
“A man,” I said—“an old farmer, if I remember rightly—had read a lot of
parrot stories, or had heard them at the club. As a result he thought he
would like himself to be the owner of a parrot, so journeyed to a dealer
and, according to his own account, paid rather a long price for a choice
specimen. A week later he re-entered the shop, the parrot borne behind
him by a boy. ‘This bird,’ said the farmer, ‘this bird you sold me last
week ain’t worth a sovereign!’ ‘What’s the matter with it?’ demanded the
dealer. ‘How do I know what’s the matter with the bird?’ answered the
farmer. ‘What I tell you is that it ain’t worth a sovereign—’tain’t
worth a half a sovereign!’ ‘Why not?’ persisted the dealer; ‘it talks
all right, don’t it?’ ‘Talks!’ retorted the indignant farmer, ‘the damn
thing talks all day, but it never says anything funny!’”
“A friend of mine,” said the Philosopher, “once had a parrot—”
“Won’t you come into the garden?” said the Woman of the World, rising and
leading the way.
V
“MYSELF,” said the Minor Poet, “I read the book with the most intense
enjoyment. I found it inspiring—so inspiring, I fear I did not give it
sufficient attention. I must read it again.”
“I understand you,” said the Philosopher. “A book that really interests
us makes us forget that we are reading. Just as the most delightful
conversation is when nobody in particular appears to be talking.”
“Do you remember meeting that Russian man George brought down here about
three months ago?” asked the Woman of the World, turning to the Minor
Poet. “I forget his name. As a matter of fact, I never knew it. It was
quite unpronounceable and, except that it ended, of course, with a double
f, equally impossible to spell. I told him frankly at the beginning I
should call him by his Christian name, which fortunately was Nicholas.
He was very nice about it.”
“I remember him distinctly,” said the Minor Poet. “A charming man.”
“He was equally charmed with you,” replied the Woman of the World.
“I can credit it easily,” murmured the Minor Poet. “One of the most
intelligent men I ever met.”
“You talked together for two hours in a corner,” said the Woman of the
World. “I asked him when you had gone what he thought of you. ‘Ah! what
a talker!’ he exclaimed, making a gesture of admiration with his hands.
‘I thought maybe you would notice it,’ I answered him. ‘Tell me, what
did he talk about?’ I was curious to know; you had been so absorbed in
yourselves and so oblivious to the rest of us. ‘Upon my word,’ he
replied, ‘I really cannot tell you. Do you know, I am afraid, now I come
to think of it, that I must have monopolised the conversation.’ I was
glad to be able to ease his mind on that point. ‘I really don’t think
you did,’ I assured him. I should have felt equally confident had I not
been present.”
“You were quite correct,” returned the Minor Poet. “I have a distinct
recollection of having made one or two observations myself. Indeed, if I
may say so, I talked rather well.”
“You may also recollect,” continued the Woman of the World, “that the
next time we met I asked you what he had said, and that your mind was
equally a blank on the subject. You admitted you had found him
interesting. I was puzzled at the time, but now I begin to understand.
Both of you, no doubt, found the conversation so brilliant, each of you
felt it must have been your own.”
“A good book,” I added—“a good talk is like a good dinner: one
assimilates it. The best dinner is the dinner you do not know you have
eaten.”
“A thing will often suggest interesting thought,” observed the Old Maid,
“without being interesting. Often I find the tears coming into my eyes
as I witness some stupid melodrama—something said, something hinted at,
will stir a memory, start a train of thought.”
“I once,” I said, “sat next to a country-man in the pit of a music-hall
some years ago. He enjoyed himself thoroughly up to half-past ten.
Songs about mothers-in-law, drunken wives, and wooden legs he roared at
heartily. At ten-thirty entered a well-known _artiste_ who was then
giving a series of what he called ‘Condensed Tragedies in Verse.’ At the
first two my country friend chuckled hugely. The third ran: ‘Little boy;
pair of skates: broken ice; heaven’s gates.’ My friend turned white,
rose hurriedly, and pushed his way impatiently out of the house. I left
myself some ten minutes later, and by chance ran against him again in the
bar of the ‘Criterion,’ where he was drinking whisky rather copiously.
‘I couldn’t stand that fool,’ he explained to me in a husky voice.
‘Truth is, my youngest kid got drowned last winter skating. Don’t see
any sense making fun of real trouble.’”
“I can cap your story with another,” said the Philosopher. “Jim sent me
a couple of seats for one of his first nights a month or two ago. They
did not reach me till four o’clock in the afternoon. I went down to the
club to see if I could pick up anybody. The only man there I knew at all
was a rather quiet young fellow, a new member. He had just taken Bates’s
chambers in Staple Inn—you have met him, I think. He didn’t know many
people then and was grateful for my invitation. The play was one of
those Palais Royal farces—it cannot matter which, they are all exactly
alike. The fun consists of somebody’s trying to sin without being found
out. It always goes well. The British public invariably welcomes the
theme, provided it be dealt with in a merry fashion. It is only the
serious discussion of evil that shocks us. There was the usual banging
of doors and the usual screaming. Everybody was laughing around us. My
young friend sat with rather a curious fixed smile upon his face.
‘Fairly well constructed,’ I said to him, as the second curtain fell amid
yells of delight. ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘I suppose it’s very funny.’ I
looked at him; he was little more than a boy. ‘You are rather young,’ I
said, ‘to be a moralist.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Oh! I shall grow out
of it in time,’ he said. He told me his story later, when I came to know
him better. He had played the farce himself over in Melbourne—he was an
Australian. Only the third act had ended differently. His girl wife, of
whom he was passionately fond, had taken it quite seriously and had
committed suicide. A foolish thing to do.”
“Man is a beast!” said the Girton Girl, who was prone to strong
expression.
“I thought so myself when I was younger,” said the Woman of the World.
“And don’t you now, when you hear a thing like that?” suggested the
Girton Girl.
“Certainly, my dear,” replied the Woman of the World; “there is a deal of
the animal in man; but—well, I was myself expressing that same particular
view of him, the brute, to a very old lady with whom I was spending a
winter in Brussels, many years ago now, when I was quite a girl. She had
been a friend of my father’s, and was one of the sweetest and kindest—I
was almost going to say the most perfect woman I have ever met; though as
a celebrated beauty, stories, dating from the early Victorian era, were
told about her. But myself I never believed them. Her calm, gentle,
passionless face, crowned with its soft, silver hair—I remember my first
sight of the Matterhorn on a summer’s evening; somehow it at once
reminded me of her.”
“My dear,” laughed the Old Maid, “your anecdotal method is becoming as
jerky as a cinematograph.”
“I have noticed it myself,” replied the Woman of the World; “I try to get
in too much.”
“The art of the _raconteur_,” observed the Philosopher, “consists in
avoiding the unessential. I have a friend who never yet to my knowledge
reached the end of a story. It is intensely unimportant whether the name
of the man who said the thing or did the deed be Brown or Jones or
Robinson. But she will worry herself into a fever trying to recollect.
‘Dear, dear me!’ she will leave off to exclaim; ‘I know his name so well.
How stupid of me!’ She will tell you why she ought to recollect his
name, how she always has recollected his name till this precise moment.
She will appeal to half the people in the room to help her. It is
hopeless to try and induce her to proceed, the idea has taken possession
of her mind. After a world of unnecessary trouble she recollects that it
was Tomkins, and is delighted; only to be plunged again into despair on
discovery that she has forgotten his address. This makes her so ashamed
of herself she declines to continue, and full of self-reproach she
retires to her own room. Later she re-enters, beaming, with the street
and number pat. But by that time she has forgotten the anecdote.”
“Well, tell us about your old lady, and what it was you said to her,”
spoke impatiently the Girton Girl, who is always eager when the subject
under discussion happens to be the imbecility or criminal tendency of the
opposite sex.
“I was at the age,” continued the Woman of the World, “when a young girl
tiring of fairy stories puts down the book and looks round her at the
world, and naturally feels indignant at what she notices. I was very
severe upon both the shortcomings and the overgoings of man—our natural
enemy. My old friend used to laugh, and that made me think her callous
and foolish. One day our _bonne_—like all servants, a lover of
gossip—came to us delighted with a story which proved to me how just had
been my estimate of the male animal. The grocer at the corner of our
_rue_, married only four years to a charming and devoted little wife, had
run away and left her.
“‘He never gave her even a hint, the pretty angel!’ so Jeanne informed
us. ‘Had had his box containing his clothes and everything he wanted
ready packed for a week, waiting for him at the railway station—just told
her he was going to play a game of dominoes, and that she was not to sit
up for him; kissed her and the child good-night, and—well, that was the
last she ever saw of him. Did Madame ever hear the like of it?’
concluded Jeanne, throwing up her hands to heaven. ‘I am sorry to say,
Jeanne, that I have,’ replied my sweet Madame with a sigh, and led the
conversation by slow degrees back to the subject of dinner. I turned to
her when Jeanne had left the room. I can remember still the burning
indignation of my face. I had often spoken to the man myself, and had
thought what a delightful husband he was—so kind, so attentive, so proud,
seemingly, of his dainty _femme_. ‘Doesn’t that prove what I say,’ I
cried, ‘that men are beasts?’ ‘I am afraid it helps in that direction,’
replied my old friend. ‘And yet you defend them,’ I answered. ‘At my
age, my dear,’ she replied, ‘one neither defends nor blames; one tries to
understand.’ She put her thin white hand upon my head. ‘Shall we hear a
little more of the story?’ she said. ‘It is not a pleasant one, but it
may be useful to us.’ ‘I don’t want to hear any more of it,’ I answered;
‘I have heard enough.’ ‘It is sometimes well,’ she persisted, ‘to hear
the whole of a case before forming our judgment.’ And she rang the bell
for Jeanne. ‘That story about our little grocer friend,’ she said—‘it is
rather interesting to me. Why did he leave her and run away—do you
know?’ Jeanne shrugged her ample shoulders. ‘Oh! the old story,
Madame,’ she answered, with a short laugh. ‘Who was she?’ asked my
friend. ‘The wife of Monsieur Savary, the wheelwright, as good a husband
as ever a woman had. It’s been going on for months, the hussy!’ ‘Thank
you, that will do, Jeanne.’ She turned again to me so soon as Jeanne had
left the room. ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘whenever I see a bad man, I peep
round the corner for the woman. Whenever I see a bad woman, I follow her
eyes; I know she is looking for her mate. Nature never makes odd
samples.’”
“I cannot help thinking,” said the Philosopher, “that a good deal of harm
is being done to the race as a whole by the overpraise of women.”
“Who overpraises them?” demanded the Girton Girl. “Men may talk nonsense
to us—I don’t know whether any of us are foolish enough to believe it—but
I feel perfectly sure that when they are alone most of their time is
occupied in abusing us.”
“That is hardly fair,” interrupted the Old Maid. “I doubt if they do
talk about us among themselves as much as we think. Besides, it is
always unwise to go behind the verdict. Some very beautiful things have
been said about women by men.”
“Well, ask them,” said the Girton Girl. “Here are three of them present.
Now, honestly, when you talk about us among yourselves, do you gush about
our virtue, and goodness, and wisdom?”
“‘Gush,’” said the Philosopher, reflecting, “‘gush’ would hardly be the
correct word.”
“In justice to the truth,” I said, “I must admit our Girton friend is to
a certain extent correct. Every man at some time of his life esteems to
excess some one particular woman. Very young men, lacking in experience,
admire perhaps indiscriminately. To them, anything in a petticoat is
adorable: the milliner makes the angel. And very old men, so I am told,
return to the delusions of their youth; but as to this I cannot as yet
speak positively. The rest of us—well, when we are alone, it must be
confessed, as our Philosopher says, that ‘gush’ is not the correct word.”
“I told you so,” chortled the Girton Girl.
“Maybe,” I added, “it is merely the result of reaction. Convention
insists that to her face we show her a somewhat exaggerated deference.
Her very follies we have to regard as added charms—the poets have decreed
it. Maybe it comes as a relief to let the pendulum swing back.”
“But is it not a fact,” asked the Old Maid, “that the best men and even
the wisest are those who have held women in most esteem? Do we not gauge
civilization by the position a nation accords to its women?”
“In the same way as we judge them by the mildness of their laws, their
tenderness for the weak. Uncivilised man killed off the useless numbers
of the tribe; we provide for them hospitals, almshouses. Man’s attitude
towards woman proves the extent to which he has conquered his own
selfishness, the distance he has travelled from the law of the ape: might
is right.
“Please don’t misunderstand me,” pleaded the Philosopher, with a nervous
glance towards the lowering eyebrows of the Girton Girl. “I am not
saying for a moment woman is not the equal of man; indeed, it is my
belief that she is. I am merely maintaining she is not his superior.
The wise man honours woman as his friend, his fellow-labourer, his
complement. It is the fool who imagines her unhuman.”
[Picture: It is the fool who imagines her inhuman]
“But are we not better,” persisted the Old Maid, “for our ideals? I
don’t say we women are perfect—please don’t think that. You are not more
alive to our faults than we are. Read the women novelists from George
Eliot downwards. But for your own sake—is it not well man should have
something to look up to, and failing anything better—?”
“I draw a very wide line,” answered the Philosopher, “between ideals and
delusions. The ideal has always helped man; but that belongs to the land
of his dreams, his most important kingdom, the kingdom of his future.
Delusions are earthly structures, that sooner or later fall about his
ears, blinding him with dust and dirt. The petticoat-governed country
has always paid dearly for its folly.”
“Elizabeth!” cried the Girton Girl. “Queen Victoria!”
“Were ideal sovereigns,” returned the Philosopher, “leaving the
government of the country to its ablest men. France under its
Pompadours, the Byzantine Empire under its Theodoras, are truer examples
of my argument. I am speaking of the unwisdom of assuming all women to
be perfect. Belisarius ruined himself and his people by believing his
own wife to be an honest woman.”
“But chivalry,” I argued, “has surely been of service to mankind?”
“To an immense extent,” agreed the Philosopher. “It seized a natural
human passion and turned it to good uses. Then it was a reality. So
once was the divine right of kings, the infallibility of the Church, for
cumbering the ground with the lifeless bodies of which mankind has paid
somewhat dearly. Not its upstanding lies—they can be faced and
defeated—but its dead truths are the world’s stumbling-blocks. To the
man of war and rapine, trained in cruelty and injustice, the woman was
the one thing that spoke of the joy of yielding. Woman, as compared with
man, was then an angel: it was no mere form of words. All the tender
offices of life were in her hands. To the warrior, his life divided
between fighting and debauchery, his womenfolk tending the sick, helping
the weak, comforting the sorrowing, must have moved with white feet
across a world his vices had made dark. Her mere subjection to the
priesthood, her inborn feminine delight in form and ceremony—now an
influence narrowing her charity—must then, to his dim eyes, trained to
look upon dogma as the living soul of his religion, have seemed a halo,
deifying her. Woman was then the servant. It was naturally to her
advantage to excite tenderness and mercy in man. Since she has become
the mistress of the world. It is no longer her interested mission to
soften his savage instincts. Nowadays, it is the women who make war, the
women who exalt brute force. Today, it is the woman who, happy herself,
turns a deaf ear to the world’s low cry of pain; holding that man
honoured who would ignore the good of the species to augment the comforts
of his own particular family; holding in despite as a bad husband and
father the man whose sense of duty extends beyond the circle of the home.
One recalls Lady Nelson’s reproach to her lord after the battle of the
Nile. ‘I have married a wife, and therefore cannot come,’ is the answer
to his God that many a woman has prompted to her lover’s tongue. I was
speaking to a woman only the other day about the cruelty of skinning
seals alive. ‘I feel so sorry for the poor creatures,’ she murmured;
‘but they say it gives so much more depth of colour to the fur.’ Her own
jacket was certainly a very beautiful specimen.”
[Picture: It seized a natural human passion and turned it to good uses]
“When I was editing a paper,” I said, “I opened my columns to a
correspondence on this very subject. Many letters were sent to me—most
of them trite, many of them foolish. One, a genuine document, I
remember. It came from a girl who for six years had been assistant to a
fashionable dressmaker. She was rather tired of the axiom that all
women, at all times, are perfection. She suggested that poets and
novelists should take service for a year in any large drapery or
millinery establishment where they would have an opportunity of studying
woman in her natural state, so to speak.”
[Picture: She suggested that poets and novelists should take service for
a year in any large drapery or millinery establishment]
“It is unfair to judge us by what, I confess, is our chief weakness,”
argued the Woman of the World. “Woman in pursuit of clothes ceases to be
human—she reverts to the original brute. Besides, dressmakers can be
very trying. The fault is not entirely on one side.”
“I still fail to be convinced,” remarked the Girton Girl, “that woman is
over-praised. Not even the present conversation, so far as it has gone,
altogether proves your point.”
“I am not saying it is the case among intelligent thinkers,” explained
the Philosopher, “but in popular literature the convention still lingers.
To woman’s face no man cares to protest against it; and woman, to her
harm, has come to accept it as a truism. ‘What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice and all that’s nice.’ In more or less varied form the
idea has entered into her blood, shutting out from her hope of
improvement. The girl is discouraged from asking herself the
occasionally needful question: Am I on the way to becoming a sound,
useful member of society? Or am I in danger of degenerating into a vain,
selfish, lazy piece of good-for-nothing rubbish? She is quite content so
long as she can detect in herself no tendency to male vices, forgetful
that there are also feminine vices. Woman is the spoilt child of the
age. No one tells her of her faults. The World with its thousand voices
flatters her. Sulks, bad temper, and pig-headed obstinacy are translated
as ‘pretty Fanny’s wilful ways.’ Cowardice, contemptible in man or
woman, she is encouraged to cultivate as a charm. Incompetence to pack
her own bag or find her own way across a square and round a corner is
deemed an attraction. Abnormal ignorance and dense stupidity entitle her
to pose as the poetical ideal. If she give a penny to a street beggar,
selecting generally the fraud, or kiss a puppy’s nose, we exhaust the
language of eulogy, proclaiming her a saint. The marvel to me is that,
in spite of the folly upon which they are fed, so many of them grow to be
sensible women.”
“Myself,” remarked the Minor Poet, “I find much comfort in the conviction
that talk, as talk, is responsible for much less good and much less harm
in the world than we who talk are apt to imagine. Words to grow and bear
fruit must fall upon the earth of fact.”
“But you hold it right to fight against folly?” demanded the Philosopher.
“Heavens, yes!” cried the Minor Poet. “That is how one knows it is
Folly—if we can kill it. Against the Truth our arrows rattle
harmlessly.”