Chapter V: Part 5

After that happened, I had no sooner retired behind that Scripture which says, ‘Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you, for my sake ... for great is your reward in heaven’--and I am taking particular satisfaction in the dark intimation as to the probable nature of this reward--than I was startled by the report that I had become a Catholic. This is a compliment which I shall never deserve, even though I am totally lacking in Protestant animus against the Catholics. If you have been one of those certified widows so highly recommended in Paul’s epistle to Timothy it feels very queer to hear that you have been cutting a swath in the social life of Havana.

Not everything you hear about yourself can be considered good publicity. And if you have delicate sensibilities, the currycomb of public imagination frequently rubs your vanities the wrong way.

You can never choose your own duties or pastimes again. You must work at your thoughts. They hold you and compel you like voices calling to be heard.

Sometimes now I still feel the womanly instinct stirring in me to sew a fine seam. I want to lay a pattern on a piece of beautiful cloth, cut out something sweet and make it. I long to gather a ruffle with my fingers, pin one end of it down and scratch the gathers with my needle as I used to do long ago. But I never can do it. No time. No such cunning left now in my fingers. I have become a sewless woman.

When it is a fine, large, perfectly rounded day, with the sun shining and all the leaves talking in the wind and a faint perfume of woodland flowers floats in through the window like an invitation, I would give much to cast my pen far from me and follow it out and away to the deep green valleys where these blossoms bloom. But I cannot take the day off. I must stay here and write down the things my mind makes believe. No real blossoms, only the things I know--so little, compared with what the trees tell and the river sings, if you know how to listen.

Every author knows what I mean. We become the slaves of our thoughts that must be written before they fade into forgetfulness.

Invitations to speak upon public occasions are among my most grievous embarrassments. Why is it inferred that one is or can be a public speaker because she has written a book? Writing is a very private business. I do not know any other occupation which requires so much privacy unless it is a life of prayer or a life of crime.

During these many years with a bee in my bonnet and a pen in my hand I have practically lost my oral faculties. I cannot scintillate on a rostrum. The flare of so many faces would put out my light. I am accustomed to work in the presence of three open-eyed windows which look upon a wide green forest. Much motion and life out there, but complete and magnificent indifference to the mortal mind in here struggling with the adverb of an idea.

I am not apologizing, you understand, for not being able to live up to this side demand of a literary reputation. I am simply telling what happens to one not anxious to dine on her own fame in a public place. Many people will not believe an author shrinks from committing this act of sublimated cannibalism, because so many of them do it, especially the English writers imported by our women’s clubs. But I cannot be made to believe they enjoy the performance. One must have spent a while in England, realized how repressed their enthusiasms are, for Americans to understand how these speakers must suffer from our goggle-eyed reverence for their voice culture, their outrageous pronunciations and their perfectly exquisite intellectuality. Nothing, I believe, but a sense of financial duty to themselves brings them to us.

Meanwhile women are now the best public speakers in this country. They have something to say, and they are saying it with charm and courage. Heaven forbid that I should ever expose my old ruminating mind among them on the stage! What I mean is this: When you write you may take infinite time and patience to say what you want to say. You write in ten different ways. You reface it and begin again and again until the breathless, speechless idea you had lives and shines. This is how slow the pen-traveling mind may be; but try fumbling the ball of your thought like that before an audience and see what happens to you! The reporters would be justified in publishing the news that you had a stroke which rendered you practically inarticulate soon after you began your address.

As for preparing an address and delivering it with your eyes and spectacles fixed upon the page instead of the audience, I know this is intolerable, for I have been in many an audience on similar occasions and it has frequently occurred to me that the offending person might have chosen something much better from a book to read.

That which so many people strive to win must be a good thing, but I am simply telling you what fame costs. Once you grow accustomed to being famous, you do not realize it, but you are never quite your humble, honest self. No matter how tight you keep the lid on, there is some watered stock of vanity inside. You are always in danger of the thing’s coming off and of giving yourself an air or two. No man or woman was ever so distinguished that this exhibition did not make him ridiculous, especially to those of meaner minds.

But the final and most depressing part comes in the evening of your great day when you are no longer great. Your career has ended. Fame fades like a withered rose in your hair, and you are forgotten even if your works are not. Other writers, whom you naturally feel are not doing so well, are popping up in the public eye.

I am still sufficiently able-bodied in my mind and spirit not to notice the crowding forward of these youngsters; but I have a sort of presentiment that after a while, when I am no longer strong enough to practice nobility of mind, it is going to hurt some to do without the praise and admiration they get. I am dreading the time when I shall be so lonely, so much in need of a little recognition that I may be anxious to accept an invitation to sit on the stage behind the speaker of the evening.

I can feel myself like a pain sitting up there, very old and gray, maybe a little soft in my head, but so pleased to be present and face foremost to the audience! I am waiting for the speaker to conclude his oration and for the applause meant for him to die down. I am hoping like a poor old hungry child that a few people in the audience will recognize me as the author of ‘A Circuit Rider’s Wife,’ or the woman who wrote ‘My Book and Heart’ many years ago. I am all in a flutter lest no one press forward through the crowd about the speaker and clasp me by my old palsied hand to say how glad he is to see me, and how well I am looking--not a day older! How do I manage to keep so young? And he will never forget when this or that circuit-rider story came out. And how he loves ‘My Book and Heart’! Maybe he has just read it all over again. I shall be hoping he will say something like that. Meanwhile I am glowing with childish pleasure at this spoofing, but trying to maintain the air of dignity I used to have when I really was myself.

Heavens, how I do despise those people, now in the strength of their years, who look with contempt or indifference upon the old children we become!

This is the lightning of fate already flashing in my sky. For I have observed the weather at the end of more than one distinguished career. It rarely ever is very warm and bright. You have outgrown the normal mediocre sense of yourself, and you are no longer able to keep up the intellectual expenses of your reputation as a famous person.

XXX

ON LAYING DOWN YOUR LIFE

I doubt if the best people live their own lives. They make themselves the shield and buckler of another’s life, or they are the foundations of peace and security upon which many lives are built.

What impresses me is that they seem to pass beyond the reach of any rewards. They lose the capacity to receive or to shine. If the most devoted mother survives the sacrifices she has made, it is with pathetically folded hands, as the spectator of the brilliant careers of her sons and daughters. I suppose mothers get some sort of half joy out of being merely present; but even that is sacrificial, for they are not puffed up over establishing these young ones; they are simply rejoicing in their success. Something has happened to them, they are tragically emptied of self and cannot share the lives they have made.

It is the same way with preachers, priests, prophets, all that class of men who spend themselves for others--they lose the capacity to live. They are those good, quiet shadows in the background everywhere, strangely contented with your fame or your prosperity, not neglected, but used up.

We are very good about making them the objects of our benefits. We get them out and show them off now and then for conscience’ sake, but they never really enjoy the parade except to be in our reflected glory. They are dead to themselves, which is being dead indeed.

Just practice laying down your life for others and see what happens to you! These others will take it, strengthened by you, and go on about their affairs. I have never seen that Scripture fulfilled in this world which reads, ‘For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake the same shall find it’; so it must be fulfilled in the world to come, which is a long way off and very mysterious, geographically speaking.

Sometimes when I am very low in my mind I get a feeling of terror about the Word. So many Scriptures read like laws every whit as merciless as those which control life in the natural world. All that lives has been and must be fertilized by that decay provided by death. Every flower fades, every leaf falls to enrich the soil for next year’s leaves and blossoms. Must we also lay down our lives forever and ever as living sacrifices that those who come after us shall be stronger and wiser to win what we missed of life and happiness? Is no mercy to be shown to the very good? Must they wait to be raised from the dust of all things to receive their rewards?

Such thinking makes me nervous and a trifle indignant about the way those people who do not lay down their lives seem to flourish more than we do who have served long sentences in that wearying position.

I do not know how it may be with women of other sections, but in this part of the country if you do your own work something goes out of you; not virtue--you are likely to multiply frightfully in virtues--but that bright, fluttering grace of the spirit more becoming to us than all the nobler attributes folds up and disappears. No matter how conscientious she is about setting aside a certain part of each day to improve herself and to keep up with her husband’s times--I never knew one to keep up her music--music is one of the things that go out of her--she cannot do it. She is so busy doing her duty she falls fatally behind his times if he is a man who marches with them. I do not know why this is so, but it is probably a feminine geographical phenomenon.

This is a blessed and glorified land; there is a fragrant inertia in our climate suitable more particularly for the production of the sweetly sitting inspirational woman. She does not need to know so much in the way of mere learning in order to be placidly wise. The dust down here is an alluvial soil, humanly speaking; it has been warmed and brightened for so many ages by the sun, the perfume of so many flowers has sunk into it, the sorrows and misfortunes of a great people have sanctified it. My feeling is that it has a cultural quality which must be got through higher education and the most poignant mental exercises in the other sections where it has been spewed up into hoarfrost for a corresponding number of ages, stauncher dust, but not by nature so pleasant when raised, say, into an able citizen, a strong ballot-bearing woman. Therefore it is not so important for our women to exercise these rights in order to save the country as it is for the abler types in other sections. All they need is two or three of the neater virtues, a prayer capacity in faith, a kind and forgiving heart--and the right look on their faces, effulgent, without being offensively intelligent. I am not one of these, I weep to confess, but I have known such women all my life, as one is acquainted with certain private blessings not shared by the world at large. But I have never known one of them who did all her own work--a noble service diminishing to such a woman.

No matter how correct the pattern of her frock is, or how good her manners are, or how sensible her conversation is, I have never been in the company of one who performed these tasks without becoming immediately aware of the fact, a sort of uneasiness, as if her shoe was pinching her foot. Her seams are too straight. Her draperies do not flow, however voluminous they are. Her eye has a measuring gaze. She feels like the two-edged sword of a just woman made perfect regarding me. Or at the very moment when I am about to confer the bright splash of a thought upon her, my light is put out by the realization that her mind has skipped back home to make sure she did not leave the top off the soda jar and did lock the kitchen door.

I am not complaining of her, you understand; I am endeavoring to compliment her upon her merits. She has all the virtues and you have only your grace in words, a fluttering heart and a mind that climbs her like a clinging vine in conversation. You must lean to her because she will not bend to you. She has lost some graceful elasticity of the spirit. You cannot clasp fingers with one of her thoughts and fly up on an idea and share opinions with her. She is pickling her opinions. You can frequently smell the vinegar of her mind boiling. At such moments I have become so enfeebled spiritually as to be momentarily deprived of my soul. I am of the earth earthy, due entirely, I suppose, to the effect her obvious worth has upon my stricken conscience.

But I am not alone in these sensations, only more vocative about them. I have observed her carefully; she is widely depressing.

I have known such a woman to go abroad, spend a year studying art in all the galleries of Europe, come home, deliver a lecture on the masterpieces she has seen and fatigue her audience to the brink of tears. One must be a person in order to entertain other persons, and she had lost that touch of Nature which makes us kin whether we are kind or not. She is a grammarian of duties, and a recitation of culture if she invades that field. Nothing illuminating sticks to her, nothing softening can happen to her mentally.

Some instinct for liberty warned me from the beginning to avoid the fate of these unfortunate best-of-all women. I have been very busy for forty years, but in my hardest circuit-rider days I never would do all of my own work; only so much of it as could not possibly be avoided. Even then I was careful not to put my whole mind on it. If I had to wash dishes, I always spat enough wit through the kitchen door at Lundy, even if he was in the uttermost parts of the parsonage, to draw his fire and thus divorce my attention from the clatter in the dish pan. Whatever else happens to me, I will never do my own work. If it comes to that, I will escape the disaster to my soul by having no works. Dishes and laundry are not mentioned in the Scriptures, therefore they are not obligatory. I will let my faith praise me rather than my doughnuts.

In recording this scandalous moral limitation I am simply exposing to view the kind of mind I have, knowing well how many better women will take a shot at it. Let them bang away. I would rather have my reputation as a domestic animal riddled than to have my dearer faculties destroyed by a flatiron or dishwater. No one was ever more reduced in poverty than I have been, not one a more considerate or obedient wife. But I managed to remain a wife, never the mere servant of my husband. If you must do it, make the business brief and forgetful. Give him a balanced ration and leave every man to iron his own shirt, would be my motto, even if I went to the field with him afterwards and ploughed a furrow by way of reciprocity. The idea is to keep in with your husband at whatever cost. It works out better in the long run than making a pig of him at the table and a tyrant of him in the house.

The disposition to do that is a senseless weakness in devoted women. Added to their domestic pride, it accounts for the enormous labor now necessary in the conducting of a home and the entertainment of guests.

I am writing this record, however, to prove that the keeping of virtues and those attributes becoming to what you think is your nobler nature is an expensive business, and places you within grasping range of everybody doing business with you who has no such vainglorious sense of himself to serve.

I have never found that it pays in any worldly sense to be outrageously and unscrupulously upright in my dealings. The question is whether the inward foundations one lays that cannot be swept away by earthly misfortunes make up for the losses one sustains. I do not know. I sometimes suffer a very strong temptation to take an inferior’s under-hold upon a person who thinks I am an easy mark and pull off the deal according to his standards in business, not mine, just to learn how it feels to win that way. This, however, is a puerile temptation. My habits are established. I have no practice in shrewdness; only cunning enough not to experiment with my too-long-buried talent.

XXXI

YOU MAKE YOURSELF

The forces that create us pass away, whether they are parents, teachers, or books, and we are left at last to re-create ourselves in the image of our own minds. This was what happened to me after the death of my husband. The woman I was and the mind I had then faded into a sort of peaceful silence. I was not for a long time. I remember feeling strangely like a ghost, surrounded by the same friends, in the midst of familiar scenes, but not of them, removed by death as far, maybe, as he was from the mind and life I had with him. He had been my altar and my church, I discovered.

From that day forth I escaped from the meekness of being merely a Methodist. I was Hagar going off into the wilderness with my own Bible, leaving behind me forever the Abraham and Rebecca brethren and sisters of the established order. I was in danger of raising up the very Ishmael of a mind against them. But this passed. By nature I am short on vindictiveness. I am not even respectable at this point. I have known myself to relax and forgive people whom I doubt if the Lord will ever forgive. They seem to pass out of my thoughts like shadows that obscure the light.

This happened later. Directly after Lundy’s death I was a very dangerous person, quite mad with the pain and horror of what had happened to him.

I have a vivid picture of myself at this time one day in my darkened house. I am sitting outrageously straight, pale and wan in my black dress, but not bowed down or weeping as a widow should be. And I am being visited by a great preacher in our church who has come to pray with me, to the end that I shall find the grace to forgive certain brethren who used my husband despitefully in his last days. But I refuse to kneel or to pray or forgive these men. Let God do it, I told him, since the Lord only knows how and when to pardon us. I left them terribly in His hands and sat with mine neatly folded, while this prince of the Church parted his coat tails and fairly shook the shadows of that sad place with his petition in my behalf. Then he arose, faced about, and stared at me.

‘Their sins be upon their own heads,’ I retorted, feeling very pale and weak, but tearless and determined.

I may have referred to this incident in another place, but I am copying it here to indicate that as soon as that I was stripping my mind of religious sentimentality and assuming a sensible relation to the Lord, who believes profoundly in punishing wickedness even if a good man commits it.

Shortly after this I had an assignment from the editor of ‘The Saturday Evening Post’ to go abroad and write a series of articles about the women of the Old World.

I was seriously ill at the time, depleted in mind and body; but I accepted the commission, as a gambler takes a bet, without giving the editor the least intimation about my physical condition. You cannot be overscrupulous in dealing with editors without queering your own game. Very few of them will arrange with a sick man to do a long piece of work. My idea is to keep my word with them if I die for it, and to leave them to take all the other risks. Even at that I have been obliged to deny myself the vanity of making many contracts with them on account of knowing that I can write just so many words a day, and that there are only three hundred and sixty-five days in a year. Which is as much as I am capable of morally in my relations with them.

On my way home, after making this arrangement, it occurred to me that I would stop over at Dr. Howard Kelly’s hospital in Baltimore and find out exactly how ill I was; not that this would make any difference in my plans to go abroad, but I wanted to get some idea of the odds in my own body against this achievement.

Doctor Kelly was positive that I was in no condition to go. I was a very sick person. If I persisted in this undertaking, he predicted that I would be brought home feet foremost, which in my opinion is a very dull way to arrive.

I sailed two weeks later, stirred around for six months among the women in the various countries of Europe and wrote my impressions of them. Those articles would read now as old daguerreotypes look of a far former generation. Some of the great ones whom I met then are dead, like Frau Cower of Berlin. I doubt if she would be great now if she were living. Women have changed the definition of their greatness since then. She was a neat, dim little old woman with a piece of lace pinned like a rosette on top of her gray hair. She had a patient, enlightened, philosophical mind about the future of her country women. The emperor reviewed his troops that very day in September of 1911, but I do not suppose Frau Cower had the least inkling of the terrible future already dawning for German women. My idea of her is that if she had known she would have skipped the Great War by the length of a century and gone on with her calculations as if that had been an interruption in destiny. She had a long-distance mind.

Rosa Goldberg was the most notorious woman in Germany then, but not the most influential. If there was one with actual influence there at that time, it was Alice Soloman. I have often wondered what became of her. She had power and charm, a certain beautiful enthusiasm that made her effective with men. But Rosa was murdered. This was before the time when it was conceivable to deal so with even the worst of women in public life.

Emma Goldman, a far worse woman, was quite the fashion in this country then. She had her disciples among a certain class of our decadent intellectuals, to say nothing of the great following in her own class. I remember her well, slouchily dressed, with a scrubwoman’s figure, black hair, straight and parted in the middle, black eyes, large and strong, that missed focusing on other women’s faces. Olive skin, flushed, thick, red lips, the lower one loose. She taught dishonor and deserved death, but worked like an evil worm at the foundation of our social order for twenty years before she was even banished. Which always seemed to me a futile sort of gesture, in view of the fact that immigrants are examined at Ellis Island for physical disorders and are rejected on account of having a pimple, but are permitted to enter with the most frightful diseases of the mind.

The point about this first adventure I made abroad is that I survived it and came home head foremost in the business of living as usual.

I have survived a number of physicians who predicted my death. It is not so difficult. You simply make up your mind not to die of your complaint, however fatal it sounds in the diagnosis, but to live according to your spirit as much as possible. I am not expecting to keep up the struggle indefinitely. This body is not so substantial as it used to be. The dear thing will drop off me some day like a worn-out garment. But I shall have got the last shred of wear and tear out of it. And I shall always remember in paradise what a brave chance I had in it to do and think and go about on my two feet, which in my present mortal state still seems a safer way of traveling than by wing.

I do not pretend to be a grasping, discriminating student of the Bible. I have chosen from it what I need, but I cannot even claim to have read it through consecutively. Many enlightening passages may have escaped me, but I do not recall the portrait of a single saint with wings in the Scriptures. Elijah disappeared in a chariot of fire. Moses died like a disappointed man. When they reappeared in that cloud of witnesses, it was a cloud; nothing recorded of their wings. After Jesus was transfigured, He ascended into heaven. No need of wings.

I think it is probably the mortal imaginations of our preachers and artists have added this doctrine of wings to saints, because they felt obliged to illustrate by the familiar symbol of feathers the _modus vivendi_ of immortality to mortal minds. On the contrary, the one authoritative description of how we rise from the dust discreetly records that our corruption puts on incorruption and this body shall be raised a spiritual body. Only angels, those earlier messengers sent to men, are recorded as having wings. I do not suppose these beings ever were in the flesh. I doubt if they are of the same stuff we shall be. It would not surprise me if they turned out to be the mere birds of heaven, and that the saints will be stepping around as usual, very light on their feet, maybe, but wingless.

I do not recommend this idea to others, but to me it is comforting. I have always felt the need of having something firm to rest upon, even when I tuck the head of my spirit beneath the wings of my imagination and pass into a heavenly reverie. I am psychologically opposed to being up in the mere air, here or hereafter.

The minds we have make slaves of us. We build a city or take one. We make laws, establish our institutions and our covetousness in commerce. We call this a civilization; but it is nothing, no more than the dream of a transient world that never stands the tests of the great realities which remain unshaken in us beyond all our knowledge and powers assumed. It is invariably destroyed, blown away before the wind of some change in our minds. And we lie at last buried deep in the dust of our endeavors. But nothing sleeps in the dust. It must rise and live again. So do we come up from the dark wilderness of these disorders and start all over again after the pattern of our own minds. Another dream, in which men walk like somnambulists for centuries to the same doom of death and dust regardless of God, even when we call it a Christian civilization, missing the way, the truth, and the life as we did before.

The importance we attach to the workings of the merely mortal mind seems to me to approach madness. If for one moment we could escape from the illusion created by our own faculties, we should perceive that we make of ourselves the fools of all creation. The sense to live is the only wit that really counts, and we have less of that than any other creature. We have only the sense to overcome, achieve, and to destroy. A flea knows where to hop, but we do not know. A dog knows the way home, but the smarter a man is the more likely he is to lose his way home. He can only think, believe, hope; but he does not know the simplest things that the beasts of the field never have to learn. He will drink from a pool that a thirsty ass will pass by because the ass knows the water is polluted.

The very earth has more sense than we ever show. It is not inanimate, but contains and uses all the elements we call brains without having them incased as ours are in a small bone shell. The life that springs green and silent from its breast is more obedient to law than we are, and survives us. It knows a joy and peace in living that we never learn. We are foolish to think the trees are not wise because they do not speak.

I have long suspected that the power of speech is not a power at all, but a mere form of hysteria from which the living that really know the truth never suffer because they do not fear life or death as we do and can afford to be calm and silent. The frailest flower that blooms knows that it will rise from the dead in the next season’s sun, breathe, feel again the dew and rain. Therefore these little ones make no such tragedy as we do of death. Their knowledge is better than our faith in immortality. We make a religion and an anguish of doubts about an incident which all Nature, every Scripture, and our own instincts prove is a senseless anxiety. We do live again in the spirit if the very dust rises again in myriad forms of beauty and strength.

But no scientist would offer such evidence. He must think it out, when this is something which cannot be thought, but must be accepted as we take our breath from the air without arguing about it. And the very theologians will throw up their hands in pious horror at such an idea, give it a bad name like pantheism, as if this was the name of a peculiarly damnable heresy.

My notion is that it is not our heresies but our sins that damn us, and no Christian name we apply to them will save us. I am no pantheist; I am one of those humbler, more transient manifestations of the will of God. The grass outlives me, the rose outblooms in blossoms that praise Him better than mortal deeds, and I know the stars outshine me, no matter how immortal I am. As a spirit clothed in celestial light, I doubt if I should amount to more than one short beam in a universe filled with the brilliance of His glory.

To me, it appears sillily egotistical to give ourselves such airs about being immortal. Everything else is. The very stones are fertile and furnish elements indispensable to life. We, indeed, are the only created forms of life that entertain trembling, despairing doubts about that. We are even stupid and narrow-minded when our lid comes off and we go insane. We stick to the beaten tracks of the mortal mind, no real imagination in our delusions. The asylums are filled with men and women who believe themselves to be kings and queens or some other great mortals. I have never heard of one who imagined himself a disembodied spirit. The nearest they ever come to that is by claiming to be disastrous prophets. I have never heard of one who had the glory of madness to believe himself a majestic oak or even a blade of grass. The nearest approach I recall was the poor young lunatic who thought he was a grain of corn and invariably took to his heels at the sight of a chicken. We show too many evidences of ignominy to give ourselves airs, sane or insane.

If I should take leave of my senses while I am still in the flesh--for I do not expect to need such senses when I am finally in the spirit, any more than flowers take thought to bloom--I hope I shall swing out into a more becoming conceit than the notion that I am an article of diet suitable for a hen, or even the Queen of Sheba. I have my doubts about whether she was all she should have been, or she could not have been traipsing after a man with Solomon’s notorious reputation. My vanity would be better served with the delusion of being an ever-blooming rose. As it is, I suffer sometimes from the vague regret that I missed blooming at the right time, the weather of my years being inclement then and unsuited to mere happiness.

But this record will prove that I had my delusions along with the rest of my kind, and that though time and experience destroy the dearest illusions, we do cling to the last to whatever delusion we adopt. It is a bondage of the mind which we work up and strengthen year by year until nothing remains but a terrible obedience.

What amazes me now is the shrewdness with which I avoided various forms of bondage by which women are so frequently defeated in their pursuit of happiness.

XXXII

THE LADY POLITICIAN

Without taking thought I have avoided the conscience of the modern woman, which is a very sensitive, diligent, and unhappy conscience. I seem to have lost step with my sex. No one honors more than I do the sincerity of their purpose to reform, improve, and save the world. But I mistrust their judgment. I particularly mistrust their power to achieve their own wills. We have always been dominated in mind and conduct by men. We have never been free moral agents, nor even immoral ones. Cast your eye about and you will always see the string some man pulls to move the puppet we are.

However it may appear to others I do not know, but to me women seem to be more completely under the dominion of men than ever before. The difference is that formerly we were managed or mismanaged by our husbands and fathers; now it takes a whole political party to turn us about and use us for their honor and glory; but they do it. If any one calls attention to the amendments and laws we have been instrumental in getting on the statute books, I call your attention to the fact that the state of the individual woman is not changed. The wife signs away her property as usual if the husband needs it. The mothers have less influence than ever before upon the character and conduct of their sons. The only political influence they have is by adding themselves obediently in subordinate positions to the great political parties. Never were there so many handmaidens to politicians in this world. It is a less elevating service than being a down-trodden ‘widow indeed’ who was required to wash the feet of saints--presumably male saints. They are now atoms of public life, but men control public opinion. So watch the atoms spin.

The trouble is we can pass no amendment to the Constitution that will change our own nature.

How well I understand the predicament of that young woman delegate to the Democratic convention recently held in New York!

No one will deny the frequent assertion made through the press that the women delegates in this convention were an admirable body of women, but those who are most familiar with the attributes of what men call admirable women will have their very grave doubts about whether they had any more to do than they were told with the final choice and nomination of John W. Davis as our presidential candidate, which was the very creditable performance of what appeared at one time to be a convention decidedly discreditable to the great party it represented.

If the women in it had been equal to the emergency, they might at least have insisted upon a physical examination of the contending candidates. This would have eliminated some of the contestants quietly and decently, as we bury the dead, without so much scandal and with less than half the expense incurred in getting rid of them. Right now we do not know whether the livers and kidneys of Coolidge and Davis are sound. But when we consider the casualties in the White House due to electing men depleted in health and vitality, this is as important an issue before a nominating convention as any plank in their respective platforms. More than half these give way anyhow later on under pressure. But when the man himself is sickly the chances are ten to one he will not survive the intolerable burdens he has assumed, and this is always a national tragedy.

The ineffective person is always the shrewdest critic of those who strive, however blindly, to achieve. I seem to belong to that class, but I am so located for the sake of discretion, not for purpose of criticism. I do a bit of haphazard voting now and then for the purifying of my purely conventional conscience, much as one recites a prayer without believing the Lord hears his petition. I know the cards have been stacked and the successful candidate for that office has been predestined. So I never fash myself into a state of enthusiasm or animosity over an election.

The most significant evidence I have of the political importance of women is the change in the character of my own mail. Formerly it consisted entirely of letters from admiring readers or indignant readers of my books, or from those kind private folk who are one’s dearest friends, even if one never beholds their faces. They write by way of clasping hands with you or exchanging confidences with you. But now if a political campaign opens, I suppose every woman receives as many letters as if she had written a particularly appealing book. Every candidate from the coroner type to the more iridescent eloquent type who wants to be a congressman or senator writes to solicit our votes.

These are remarkably dull letters, couched in the embarrassed language of an awkward man writing to a respectable woman, whom he really does not like, inviting her to vote for him. To me it seems a frightful waste of postage, especially when the thing bears a picture of the aspiring author. Yesterday I had such a letter, ornamented with the printed likeness of one who is running for the office of health commissioner in this State, a man so grossly fat that he has practically no lines in his face by which a thought might be expressed. My idea of a health commissioner would be a lean man with a vital athletic expression.

But my political psychology may be wrong. It is possible that an obese commissioner might be moved to preach a healthful gospel of abstinence and a balanced ration. My impression is that they are all glittering generalities so far as the health of the people is concerned, and that the lady demonstrators who travel like missionaries through all the counties teaching girls to can and cook hold the health of the next generation in their frail but diligent hands. Nobody elects them. They get appointed by hook or crook and do valiant service.

In short, I have reached the eye-opening age when a personal letter from the noblest statesman of them could not move me to any real interest in his fate.

Why should one vote? At the present moment the highest official in this state is candidate for reëlection without opposition. Personally, he bears a faintly pathetic resemblance to Lord Byron. And quite the contrary is true of him. He is not a poet. He is totally lacking in that quality which inspired Byron, banished, to lead an insurrection in a foreign country against despotism. And we cannot banish him! I have understood that he is an eminently respectable family man, which really contributes little to his eminence as a public servant. He can lead a prayer meeting accompanied by the amen chorus of the best brethren, but he cannot lead a people.

The instinct for personal liberty mentioned a while ago has also led me to avoid participating in the activities so popular and so ably conducted by the various women’s organizations. Place yourself within reach of the executive committee of any up-and-doing group of women, and find out how much time or strength you have left to spend upon your own affairs! If you are a social climber, they will give you prominence in exchange for as much faithful service as you are capable of rendering. If you desire recognition, which is the complimentary name of publicity, you may have it as a reward for devoting yourself to some department of public service for the benefit of mankind, or for children, or for charity.

If by some fluke of circumstance you have earned distinction, they can use you for the good of half a dozen causes so completely that you will never have another half hour to devote to your own cause. Henceforth you will be identified with their achievements. You will not have one laurel left on your brow which does not belong to womanhood at large. If you belong to that ever-increasing volume of women who crave self-expression, they can provide more ways for you to express yourself than if you were a mere Christian wife and the mother of ten children. They are using up more wasted feminine energy than any other power company known to civilization.

XXXIII

LIVING IN A BOOK

If you have lived in one house all your life, it becomes so familiar to you that you do not think of its corners and angles, how the light comes and the shadows fall through the windows. You do not remember its upper chamber, because you are living in that chamber, nor that quiet inner room where you sometimes go to pray, because you are still going in there, closing the door and falling upon your knees when times are hard in your spirit, and asking for a little comfort. But some day when the door is shut and you are left outside, carried away by some wind of destiny, bereaved of these intimate associations with it, then you remember all the inside of that house, every board in the walls, where you slept and where you worked, the place you used to sit with folded hands when the day’s work was done.

So it has been with me about the Bible. As long as Lundy lived we were in it. It seems to me I was always traveling its pages back and forth from the old dispensation to the new dispensation, from one Gospel to another Gospel, wandering around in Revelation as one walks upon the shores of a strange land, mystified.

In those days it never occurred to me to quote the Scriptures. I left Lundy to do that. I was not even aware of being word-perfect in them. But after his death they came back to me, and I had the use of them as if they belonged to me at last according to my own mind. I recall them by my association with him. I use them right and left as he never would have dared to use them. The little kind ones are like bright footpaths that lead now more particularly to my own God, which I used to travel with him in the shadows. The great ones stretch away before and after me beyond the limits of time and sense. I do not try to reduce them to the dimensions of my own thoughts; I simply spread myself in them and feel immortality eased in all this space.

When you have only one book you use it a great deal. I have read many books, but I never had my own personal rights to but one, the Bible. The others belong to the authors who wrote them. They have been created, but, broadly speaking, they are not creative. The Bible is. I may be pardoned then for referring to it frequently as the source from which I have received most of my inspiration in living and thinking.

Now it is a mistake to fit your life to one or two Scriptures when there is such a wide choice of them. So when these moods of godly depression fall upon me and I am feeling like a poor old How-Firm-a-Foundation, or like a spiritual leaf that has been used a long time for the fattening or healing of the ungodly, I stir about in the Gospels for a better prophecy of myself. Something like this, for example: ‘And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.’

Nothing is changed, you understand; the same law of the spiritual world is demanding the laying down of my life for His sake; but I get an extension of that law for my own mortal sake. Somewhere, sometime I shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, and whatsoever I do shall prosper! I am not above making a literal interpretation of such a promise in the fairing weather of my mind. I begin to feel greener, fresher in my boughs. Suddenly I am conscious of many rivers of kind water that have flowed close to the roots of my life. I have sinned quite a good deal and come short of my own glories, much less the Lord’s glory. Still I have not lost much, only a few of my dearer treasures laid up where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt. I am very well off here. After all, for a bush of my size I have brought forth considerable fruit. I am not old; I feel everlasting. Therefore let the years come; time cannot defeat or harm me.

In such a mood I can swing paragraphs by the hour from the tip of my pen, or I can go forth and plant a field, strutting in the conviction that whatsoever I do shall prosper. It is a grand feeling, kin to that liberty the old-fashioned preachers used to claim when they made sure the Holy Ghost had descended upon them and they fell upon their congregations with power.

It all comes to this again and again when you get the chance to see through your glass clearly for a moment: The Scriptures were made for us. They are the literature of what we are, the great reference book of man. We are not created like victims to fulfill them. By living we do fulfill them, no matter how we live, in the flesh or in the spirit, or, like the mortal hyphens we really are, halfway between. I use my Scriptures this way, regardless of what may happen to the favorite creeds and doctrines of other people. The idea of a church God or a national God is too diffused to meet my personal needs and peculiarities.

I believe this is true of every man.

I cannot tell now how I missed even the faintest association with the Scriptures in the minds of the people who knew me best. Maybe it was because I was never prominent in church work; maybe it was because after the shadows fell upon me and I had premonitions of Lundy’s fate I did not ask the prayers of all Christian people, nor take even one saint into my confidence lest he should suffer by this betrayal. In any case, after he was gone, and I stepped forth in my own written word caparisoned in so many of his favorite passages from the Bible, some of these people were scandalized as if a light and humorous person masqueraded in sacred garments. My own church regarded me askance for a long time. I was never offended. On the contrary, I comprehended their anxiety with a sort of sympathy.

Comparatively few people inherit the Scriptures; they get them as we Protestants accuse the Catholics of getting theirs--predigested, interpreted, laid down for them in creeds and doctrines. My poor brethren could not be sure that I would not presently rise up in the insolence of my own mortal mind and deny the divinity of Jesus Christ or commit some other damnable heresy. This is frequently the way with those who interpret the word for themselves. They want to square it with some half-developed science which will be changed or refuted to-morrow, or they go off on a purely intellectual tangent. As a spiritually endowed person I have always had the sense to look down upon our finite reasoning powers and to despise my intellectual tangents.

I have discovered, however, that in dealing with Christians of whatever denomination it is discreet and valorous to use my mortal wits as shrewdly as if I dealt with the impious. They may not be subject to the same vices, but they have a record as long as the history of man for persecution. That is still an active principle of the religious conscience. I had my doubts about whether a mere woman would be considered eligible to a church trial for heresy, not having heard of one in my times who had suffered this distinction. Still, it was just as well to settle down somewhere beyond the reach of this honor. So, long since, I have allowed my membership to lapse. Not even a presiding elder can summon me before a quarterly conference to be tried either for my sins or my views concerning this or that doctrine. I am a Methodist unconfined, outside in the Lord’s pasture at large. If my church puts on a million-dollar drive for funds, I dutifully give my widow’s mite and spend my real Christian charity on a family of Hardshell Baptists who are in graver need of help than a rich and prosperous church.

When the Southern Methodist Church unites with the Northern branch of this same denomination, as now seems imminent, I contemplate reducing the widow’s mite of my contribution. As the devoted bystander of the Southern Methodist Church, I am opposed to this Union; not on account of prejudices connected with the reconstruction period, when we escaped their maudlin sentimentality concerning the negroes by withdrawing from them. I merely remember that as a warning, but my real objection is that we can be better brethren in Christ further apart.

XXXIV

HAPPINESS