Chapter VII: Part 7

But with all the virtues and aspirations the best of us claim, it does seem strange that we make such an awkward art of living. We are more successful at increasing our capital and decorating ourselves with worldly distinctions than we are at increasing our income in happiness. This is essential. I have no patience with the piety of defeat which yields the point and declares that happiness was never meant for us in this present world, but reserved for us in paradise--a damnable doctrine which reflects upon the goodness of God as they do who lay their misfortunes to Providence when they alone are responsible for them.

It is we who miss our cue. We suffer from some blindness of the mind which leads us to mistake the circumstances that produce happiness. Nothing will satisfy us but riches, when we know that relative poverty insures more peace and fewer responsibilities. We have built a social, industrial and commercial civilization, so expensive that it cannot be financed. And the more wealth we get the less capable we are of achieving our own lives.

It is the laborers, servants, and professional people whom we employ that determine the conditions under which we exist, which is a form of frightful tyranny. We get the idea or the ideal, then pay some one else to achieve it. An architect draws the plans of our house. Carpenters build it. A decorator chooses the furnishings, and servants keep it. A landscape artist lays off the grounds and we employ someone to dress the garden, because we lack the will and skill to do any of these things.

I do not think we should give ourselves such airs about art and culture as we do, seeing that we buy most of the mere effects of these things and that they are really produced by a class of people with whom we do not associate. No man is really learned who speaks his wisdom instead of practicing it. No woman is really cultured because she is up on art and music and literature, or because she wears beautiful clothes designed by a modiste, or because she lives in a splendid house, or because she is surrounded by people who think and speak well about what they know and see and exquisitely feel. She is merely the living portrait of many arts accomplished by other people. I should call her the decadent mollusk of refinement, never to be confounded with that woman depicted a while ago in these pages as the more endearing type of Southern woman. They have their occupations. They are amazingly executive when it comes to ordering others to do it. They have taste and piety and know how to exercise these virtues.

The effects of the theories about the art of living which I have been recording in these pages are plainly visible in this valley. The gaping logs of the one-room cabin left by the Cherokee Indians have been restored, and so many rooms added that it stretches a distance of one hundred and thirty feet--pieced together with open entries, winged with a long vine-covered court on one side and a living porch on the other side. So you may see through this house to the valley below or the hills beyond, as one should see through a good man’s heart to the scenes and Scriptures which account for his existence. I doubt if an architect could have drawn plans of a house so satisfying to the spirit.

There is no color scheme inside. To my mind, a house furnished in a strictly harmonious manner seems to be designed for publication and read by guests, but not to be lived in at ease in your own private everyday moods lest you break a note by moving something of a blue shade to that place which calls for orange-yellow, or by dropping your old green coat upon the divan covered with iridescent tapestry. Even the company bedrooms in this house are so plain and comfortable that a guest might feel at home in them, clean and fragrant, but faded; little messy conveniences in every one of them to delude the occupant into thinking he or she is not a transient there, but may stay a long time. And the living-room is such a humanly gifted place that I may leave my walking shoes on the hearth upon a winter evening and they will add a note of peace to the firelit scene, as if they were warming and drying and resting after a hard day’s walking out of doors in bad weather.

Not one thing in this house is to be admired, but is to be appropriated and used for your ease. You are to shine and talk, hold a book in your hand to taste now and then, as in the old days a gentleman sipped his wine. I have seen very dull people exhilarated before my fire on a winter evening; I have also seen very bright ones let go their weary wits and nod. These are triumphs which color-scheming hostesses rarely enjoy, because you feel that you must sit up with their harmonies and take note or be damned.

Besides, these women are never contented for long with their furniture or draperies. They must tear them up, send for the decorator and try some other effect. I do not change my furniture or move it about. Let the scenes of the world and all fashions change. I have laid my inside scenes like one of those prayers for peace and honor to be found in the Episcopal prayer book written and finished. All you have to do is recite it. God has been familiar with it for a long time, and would probably be astonished to hear a new word or phrase in it.

There is an old-man chair here which, by all the canons of art, should never be found in a cabin; mahogany, with hideously carved legs, toe nails sticking out, the arms finished with two human heads, females, but not goddesses--houris, I should say. The springs in the seat have weakened in precisely the right place to make sitting in it more restful. About as often as an old man is barbered, this chair is rubbed up and the faces of the ladies polished; but it is never moved from the corner beside the fireplace. I have observed that the elderly men who come here invariably choose it as their resting place. There is a huge couch beneath a long row of casement windows on the living porch which has enticed some of the stiffest, most elegant people known to modern society in this section to relax upon it and fall asleep, when by all the rules of polite conversation they should have been erect and vocative.

This is boasting--I admit it--but not of my possessions. I am simply showing the kind of mind I have toward a house, to fill it with snares of peace and good will whatever happens to art. It is not a bad idea. You excite less criticism and confer more happiness. It cannot be done by an interior decorator. He has an expensive eye and a furniture collector’s intellect.

By the same token, I have declined the services of a landscape gardener. My idea of a landscape is a good deal of it, preferably green, and merely frilled with flowers, with the trees of an original forest surrounding the whole thing. I planted my flowers years ago, perennials, with much the same mind the Lord had when he said to the original creatures and little leaves, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’ They do. Poppies, peonies, gladioli, zinnias, marigolds, phlox, dianthus, snapdragons, like good hardy people of the soil in bloom, making a thousand wreaths of loveliness around this green hill in their seasons. No wet-nursing to keep them alive during a drought, no coddling to preserve them through the winter. They die down as we do, and come again, as we shall do.

During these first years here I was near the verge of happiness, at least by anticipation. If my mind could have rested I might have made it; but what with writing a book or two every year, conducting the farm and building everything from barns to stone walls that popped into my head, I lacked the leisure to be glad.

It seems to me now that I indulged in too much self-expression without looking for the reward of gratified vanity such persons usually crave. Comparatively few people have ever seen this valley or know what has been accomplished here. I have occupied it much as I shall presently occupy my grave, alone, but doubtless with a great deal more activity than the narrow confines of a grave with a tombstone over you can possibly afford.

I cannot think what made me so furiously industrious laying scenes so rarely to be praised. As to that, we must always wonder why the Lord required such limitless spaces for His creation and made so many unintelligible stars. Fewer would have been rarer and shown to a better advantage. And what measly sight-seers of the heavens we make, always snooping and squinting at His handiwork without being able to find out anything about it, with no mind to comprehend the glory of these populous heavens.

There must be another audience somewhere. Surely the Almighty has had more encouragement than we could give Him, more inspiration than our pathetically inadequate existence affords Him. I am so religious at times that I can conceive of a great council chamber of creators located upon one of the grander stars between burning suns. Not that I crave more than one Lord to serve. When we consider the Ten Commandments and the rules laid down for our obedience in the Scriptures of our Jehovah, it is apparent that no man could serve more than one God; but in certain moods one likes to speculate in gods by way of the most gallant and adventurous spiritual exercise.

The thing that confounds and depresses me is, Why are so many of us born? Why is there so much of everything anyhow, when we can understand and use so little of anything? And what strange madness is this in us which perpetually compels us to add to the sum total of everything? I have had fearful thoughts along this line--the dreadful fate we are under to keep on thinking and doing, because if we stop something happens to us, a slow and monstrous decay. And at the end of it all, poor old Solomon--after he had been King of Jerusalem and ruled a long time, after he had built his golden temple and won his reputation for being the wisest man--sitting in his royal robes, tired of his crown, tired of his wisdom, calling to us down the ages, ‘Vanity, vanity, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.’

He gives this conclusion a note of authority by signing it, ‘Thus saith the Preacher.’ But I have always felt that if Solomon had been a better man he might have been a better preacher. Like father, like son. David was a fine, true singer of the hearts of men; but I cannot think he set a good example for Solomon in his youth, which accounts for the depressing wisdom he acquired by living.

I never take one of these headers in spiritual speculations, however, without falling to pieces afterwards. I seem to suffer from some kind of nervous prostration of the soul. In these ailing moods no wise man or great divine could comfort me. I am longing to hear the Word preached by a simple man who has lived a good little life and who can pray like a child. It is like taking the shortest, narrowest path back home by faith.

I never have believed it is a far journey to the real kingdom of Heaven. If you start off with great preparations for a long pilgrimage, you may be sure you have missed your way. There is in the heart of every man a fair and lovely land, never betrayed by his transgressions, never sold to the world and never darkened by mortal wisdom. I have been there sometimes, an ineffable place. As a child I lived there.

These little old preachers mentioned a while ago are the only pastors of the children we have been left among us. They do not know us now, they are not acquainted with the world in which we have learned so much; but they know where every man’s land of Canaan lies, and they have only one Rock of Ages tune that leads to it.

Looking back, we can see how smart we were when at the time we simply followed some instinct in the right direction.

For years I went on trying to create my own little kingdom of Heaven here behind these hills. A place visible to the naked eye, very deceptive in its loveliness and silence. I had sense enough to keep the world out, which was not difficult, since I have never been one of those popular writers whose doorsill the people seek. And I was rarely tempted out into the world.

XXXIX

WAR

During the spring and summer of 1914 I put seventy acres of the valley under cultivation, added eight rooms to the old cabin, and wrote a serial. The inspiration of love or of any consuming ambition greatly augments the powers of even an ordinary person to achieve. This is the reason why men in love frequently accomplish so much for a time, then fall back into their former state of indolence. The illusion of love has failed. It is by nature a brief enchantment. This is the reason why the man fired by ambition frequently accomplishes prodigious tasks far beyond his normal capacity to achieve.

I was inspired at this time with the hope of winning a happy ending to what had been a harsh sentence in living. I was creating a very small world to fit me behind the world at large; and this period, I should say, was about the morning and evening of the third day at the business. Things were beginning to turn green. I could see my little herbs of the field glistening in the early morning dew, and my sun was shining. I remember a certain notion I had then, which has remained a part of my personal definition of the Lord--that besides being almighty and obviously beneficent He must be a happy God every time he created another world, divided the light from the darkness in that place and set up all the miracles of life there.

This notion was not so blasphemous as it sounds written out in words. One cannot copy His omniscience or His almightiness, but it does _not_ seem to me nearly so profane to give one’s self a few airs about having imitated Him in a small way that turns out green and triumphant like a field of corn, as it does to dig down and snoop the heavens with the idea of proving there is no God at all.

I had only to take a whiff around the farm in those days, have an altercation with the carpenters about another window needed to keep the cabin from looking too much like a fortress, then retire to my study upon the farther rim of the forest and copy the green leaves of my thoughts for the next chapter of the serial.

On the third day of August in that year the Great War began in Europe. The editor of ‘The Saturday Evening Post’ sent his first batch of war correspondents across the following week. I was to have been one of them, but I had promised another serial for another magazine which was still to be written. The editor would neither release me from the contract nor risk me in the war zone until this copy was delivered.

I suppose it would require one of those latest expositors of the mysteries human beings are, an alienist, to explain why disappointment over being detained brought on the first attack of hay fever I ever had. There is more psychology than pathology in our diseases.

But I was determined to go to France in 1914. I had been living at such a high tension nervously for some time that nothing short of a bloody war could have quieted me and reduced me to a normal condition. The motive here confessed was overlaid with the usual noble emotions; but this is a truthful record of my mind, which is sufficiently nearly related to human minds in general for me to risk the assertion that a great many other people did valiant service in France who were attracted there by a similar motive. We seek reactions from what we are in excitement. The use made of us under these circumstances proves the shrewd economies of Providence by employing our lower instincts to trap us into the performance of the greatest, most unselfish services, else very few men would volunteer for military service, and very few women would have volunteered for canteen service in France.

I hurried off somewhere, wrote that serial, returned to New York and sailed for Liverpool all within thirty days.

I have written briefly of my impressions during this harrowing period in ‘My Book and Heart.’ What we know now is that the most victorious battles and the most disastrous defeats never settle the issues involved. The Great War has increased our debts, doubled our problems and added incredibly to the moral confusion of our times. Still, if there should be a call to arms in this country to-morrow, I doubt if I could bear the mortal ignominy of being a pacifist.

There is no sense in war. It is the way we are made that brings on the red fury of arms. Neither the ambition of politicians nor the greed of financiers could draw a nation into war if the people were not so easily moved by an invitation to shed blood. It seems invariably to produce a state of terrific exaltation, similar to a religious revival. I doubt if this is due so much to the survival of brutal instincts in men as to some provision of Providence against the ultimate emergencies of mankind. When law, civilization and the artificial restraints of society fail him, he will still have his fists and a faculty for believing in God. These two capacities alone should reproduce men of better quality than the shrinking creeds of pacifism. Whatever we believe theoretically about peace, we should always be ready by nature to fight.

But another set of youths must grow into the pugilistic period now before we could actually stage another World War. My observation has been that the soldiers who fought in the recent one are more or less shell-shocked. I have employed more soldiers here than any other class of men since the war, because they are more intelligent and better trained; and no matter how brave the record is they have left behind them in the Saint-Mihiel drive or the Argonne Forest, they are more concerned than other men to avoid personal difficulties. One must think it out to understand them; their reputation for courage has been established beyond any shadow of a doubt so long as history lasts. There is no reason why a battle-scarred man should prove his courage, which is probably the chief reason why men fight. They are the only admirable pacifists in the world; and if it comes to the test, they will have more to do with keeping this nation out of war than a World Court or any other talking method we can devise, however wise or diplomatic.

War, however victoriously ended, is not a profitable subject to discuss in the retrospect. It dies down in the emotions of men and passes into history. After that, the next generation reads history and discovers what burdens and strange defeats were entailed upon their future by these victories. But I am setting down one incident in connection with my experiences in France by way of proving a theory I have--that merely by living we fulfil more prophecies than the seers of the Old Testament ever dreamed of. We are becoming terrible predicators of the future.

It was in October of 1914. A clear starlit night. A battle was on. News from the front ran through Paris in whispers all day. Now darkness and silence. No one could sleep. I came down from my room in the old Saint James Hotel and stood in the street, reaching a long look through this tomb of terrors that had been the gayest city in Europe three months ago. Not a soul in sight, not the sound of a voice or the rumble of a wheel, peopled now only with the shadows of great shapes. Yet in this fearful stillness these very palaces and spires seemed to listen, to be waiting for something about to happen.

Then from the high distances came a rhythmic sound, thunder throttled down, stars purring, a pulse beating faster in the heavens. Now the ominous roar of motors. Swift as swallows in flight, I saw them rise above the horizon and flash by like great silver birds through the searchlights above the city--German aeroplanes coming to drop bombs on Paris! Red blasts, earth-rocking detonations! This tomb of terrors gave up its dead, a frightful population of men and women rushed half clad and disheveled from their hiding places into the open street. They shrieked, babbled, waved their arms, milled and circled, frenzied with fear and hate.

I stood aside like a mere leaf of life not yet caught in this whirlwind of dreadful passions. The scene was no longer linked in my mind with war, but with something else far back in memory, associated with quietness and peace. Then it came back to me, that night so many years ago, the world not yet in sight, the quiet heavens, father thrusting his arm out in a gesture like a scythe aimed at all the spaces overhead; the child I was then, bare feet resting staunchly upon the toes of his boots, clinging to him, face upturned to him, feeling like any other young bird about to be borne aloft upon magnificently gesticulating wings.

Through all this uproar of a panic-stricken people, in a strange city on the other side of the world, forty years later, I heard again the very tones of father’s voice: ‘You will live to see airships up there flying like a flock of birds.’ Then mother’s sharper tones breaking in upon this rumbling prophecy: ‘Come in and go to bed,’ calling me away from the temptation of so great an imagination, anxious lest I should be birthmarked mentally with that mad passion to fly which had frequently cropped out in father’s family.

Well, I had lived to see his prophecy fulfilled. But what a fulfillment! This happens frequently to the best efforts made by seers. The world twists the tail of their prophecy and makes it come true like a disaster.

On the twenty-third day of December in this same year of 1914 I was at home again in the valley, sitting beside my own log fire, very quiet, but not serene. I was suffering from a curious pallor of the mind, not due entirely to the dreadful scenes I had passed through in the war zone. We were homeward bound from Liverpool when the boat struck a mine off the coast of Ireland. This catastrophe happened in the middle of the night, and I was still convalescing from the peculiarly sickening sensation of suddenly standing on my head in the berth with no such acrobatic intentions. I could not forget the tremors which passed through that ship as if it had been a living body pierced to the heart, the awful heaviness with which it settled back into the sea, the moments like ages of dreadful silence that followed, then the roar and confusion on deck, the sibilant sounds of many voices hushed to whispers by fear, the rush of bare feet along the corridors inside as the passengers fled for the lifeboats, which were not needed after all. And I shall never entirely recover from the recollection of that jagged hole in the side of the boat, so frailly mended, nor from the sound of the water pouring in and the rhythmic strokes of the pumps upon which our lives depended.

I am wondering if the critics who found ‘My Book and Heart’ the record of a narrow and monotonous existence can claim one year filled with so many varied activities as the year 1914 was for me. And I am merely offering it as a sample of my years in general.

XL

WIDOWHOOD

The older you are the greater risk to your happiness, and even to your peace, there is in marriage. I cannot conceive of a husband revolving comfortably in the widow’s orbit I have measured off and made for myself. Least of all can I conceive of his sitting still in it with any peace of mind. I suppose many other women feel the same way, else there would not be four times as many widows as widowers in this country, according to the United States census.

A widower is probably the most transient manifestation of man there is among us. I have often wondered why this is so. I am no alienist, which is now that supreme authority among us for determining our character and conduct according to our glands; but my suspicion is that marriage once contracted becomes a habit with a man, and that he is the most invincible habit-forming creature on this earth.

You may feed one only three articles of food for a year and he will stick to them as long as he lives! I knew one who cured himself of indigestion twenty years ago by taking a cup of tea and two pieces of dried apricot for lunch. He has never varied his midday meal from that day to this. If his wife died, I suppose he would marry again precisely as he goes to his club and orders that cup of tea and the preserved apricots for lunch.

On the other hand, marriage is a state of love for women--barring the alimony class, of course--and they are so narrow and personal in their devotion that they do not so readily transfer their allegiance to another husband. Apparently they are not so enterprising or broad-minded in their romantic emotions as men are, though we seem to be widening out considerably in these latter years. It would not surprise me if the time comes when even widows may become obsolete, and we shall have no such wisdom among us as a sad, sweet-faced elderly woman wearing her widow’s weeds and sitting in the amen corner, or ambling about doing good deeds in the neighborhood. She may have her second or third husband and be engaged in a campaign for a better sewerage system in the city where she lives.

What I mean is that we seem to be growing more like men mentally and morally every day and in every way. I reckon it is all for the best, but it does feel queer if you are a woman and a widow who cannot keep up with the quick step of your times and know yourself to be dwindling away into the narrow, withered-faced relict of your former husband.

I remember one day years ago, decorating myself with such ladylike views as these in a conversation with Mark Sullivan, who had just refused a story I offered for Collier’s Magazine. He listened kindly and patiently until I had probably exhausted my repertoire of noble sentiments for that day. Then he seized his hat and made for the door, thought better of it, paused, looked back at me curiously and delivered himself of this warning:

‘You may be that good, but if you are, you are bound to be lonesome.’

For a moment I experienced some kind of faint alarm, as sinners must when the preacher gives them one last chance at the end of a revival to repent and be free men. It occurred to me that I had better hurry out while the spirit moved me and do something rash. But I could think of nothing sane, discreet, and becoming to do that would also be rash. I am not so sure it is conscience that makes cowards of us all. It may be the vanity of self-respect that holds us in check.

After all, I have not been so very lonely, only slightly peeved as I grow older at the implication of having lived a narrow, dreary life.

Years ago, after the death of my husband, I adopted one of the milder sins of our times, much as my mother, who was a very frugal woman, used to be wasteful with pins because she insisted that a little inexpensive extravagance was good for the soul. I do not know about that; but I am still so ashamed of my transgression I will not confess it, although with a discerning eye you may see it for yourself as one of the complimentary details in the picture on the frontispiece page of ‘My Book and Heart.’ Otherwise I am far behind my times in yielding to temptations.

If you had only one lover when you were a girl, and married him, and if you lived very quietly with him until death parted you, not taking in more than the spiritual edges of the world, you do not know men; you know only one man. As to the rest, you know some by their reputations--some good, some not good; some who will lead in prayer. The great majority are beyond your ken because they will not lead in prayer, nor contribute to foreign missions, nor even to the pastor’s salary. If you have been a preacher’s wife for nearly a quarter of a century, you entertain a vague suspicion of such men without having any information about their real characters.

This is what happened to me as long as Lundy lived. A man was a sheep or a goat, and that was the limit of my powers of classification; a very remote way of thinking about them.

I do not know how it may be with other widows. I suppose if they have a competency, and can afford to employ an agent to look after their affairs, they frequently retain their social and romantic ideals of these wonderful beings and remain peacefully ignorant of their sterner manifestations. But if you must earn your own livelihood and manage your own affairs, you will discover that you come face to face and hand to hand with men every day in every way upon a totally different basis. You cannot practice the arts and policies which made you so successful in managing your dear husband, not if you mean to be an honest, upstanding widow. Your mourning veil may appeal to their compassion, but it will have practically no effect upon loosening up their business sense in your favor. What is more to the point, it is a sly, unfair way of playing upon their sex or your sex to expect concessions in your favor.

My idea of a ‘widow indeed’ is somewhat broader and more practical than Saint Paul’s. I am not objecting to his requirements--that she shall have washed the saint’s feet, if her piety takes this form, and if she can find the saint; but I do not see why she should be more diligent than any other woman in ‘following every good work,’ unless, as I suspect was the case with the widows in Timothy’s church at Macedonia, she was a charge upon the charity of that church and repaid in humble service to the brethren. The modern widow is not so reduced in circumstances, even if she is left without means. She can usually earn a living, though it may not be so good a living as her husband provided. In any case, a self-respecting ‘widow indeed’ now is one who takes a job instead of charity and performs it with valor instead of tears. The pith of honor in such a woman is not to play the feminine rôle to any man for largess or advantage in her affairs. Even on this basis she is apt to get more than is coming to her if she deals with the right man. The great majority of honest men actually shrink from the responsibility of handling widows’ funds lest some unavoidable loss occur.

On the other hand, there is an average, I should say, of at least ten mite collectors for every widow in existence. They are easily recognized, however, by the noble and vicarious disposition they show for being her financial savior or her Aladdin genius in a get-rich-quick scheme. Not long ago I had a letter from such a victim. She is a stranger to me in the flesh, but I should recognize her in paradise--an elderly widow, religious, full of kindness, always protected, whose creed is faith in the goodness, honesty, and kindness of others.

She wrote to tell me that she had just invested all she could spare in an oil well. And she asked me to pray that this money might bring her ten or even a hundred fold in return. Imagine the Lord babbling in wildcat oil speculations to answer even two widows’ prayers! Teach us some sense by not answering such prayers--which is a thing many people wiser than widows do not know about the functioning of the Almighty toward prayers. Maybe in time we shall learn that the Maker of all laws will not break one natural or moral law to save us from either death or bankruptcy. It is no use to call upon God like a fool to save you when He has endowed you with the wit to save yourself if you will only use it.

The last I heard of this widow she was the poor dear shorn lamb of those oil speculators. Where one wins her golden fleece, a thousand are clipped clean of their honest wool.

After the death of my husband I suffered for the first time in my life from the inferiority complex. I was left not merely a widow but strangely benighted, like a foreigner who is totally ignorant of the manners and customs of the people with whom he is to deal. I suppose many women have had this experience, and may think it is grief. It is terror and uncertainty. If she survives it honorably, with her head up and her banners flying, she will be obliged to shed her widow’s veil and be born again mentally no matter how soundly she may have been converted previously to the wisdom of spiritual things. She will be obliged to study something besides the Scriptures, and get stout secular doctrines for dealing with a vastly competitive and acquisitive world. Clinging to the cross is nothing to the way she must cling to her own good sense. The Lord encourages us to cling to that symbol of faith, but it is no use clinging to the world that way. She must step around in it with a firm tread and do business with her spectacles properly adjusted.

Therefore I am recording it as truth here, hardly earned, that an up-and-doing widow’s mind is one of the most remarkable mental phenomena in existence; and I defy the ablest metaphysician to analyze the thing. It is made up of feminine faculties, stiffened, sharpened, sweetened, soured and tempered to any emergency, and she has ten emergencies where a man has one, because every one with whom she deals perceives that she is a woman and proceeds upon that basis. She is much more of one than the average woman ever learns to be, but, good heavens, what a furtive, brave, serpentine, dove-good use she has got of her little old knitting-needle faculties!

I spent three years after the death of my husband walking softly beneath my widow’s veil, studying the situation which the world was to me. I worked hard, made no investments and suffered from one long nightmare of terror and grief. I know exactly how it feels to have lost my right hand for achieving life, to get up cured of the wound, but with only my left hand to support me, when I had never been obliged to support myself at all.

Widows deal with men if they earn a living, or even if they do not. The thing which alarmed me was the discovery that I knew nothing about men, and that they are mysterious. Their mental processes are different from those of women, although emotionally and every other way the family resemblance between us is so strong as to be misleading. They have a different way of planning and accomplishing their purposes. They have a conscience, probably a better and more scrupulous conscience than we have about a few things, but theirs has a wide-open loose end, through which they can pass out to achieve without a qualm some great deed that we would never pay the price in piety to accomplish.

I perceived with a sort of terror how able and uncanny they are, due chiefly to this circumstance. They have by nature more liberty of action than we can afford to exercise. This is one reason why many modern women look so queer and out of drawing. They are making the experiment. The result is a parody. No originality, they are aping men, as a feebler race imitates a stronger race. If I am any judge of the real moral greatness of women, they will suffer a revulsion of sensibility presently and take to their heels. It is safe and honorable to associate intimately with one’s husbands, sons and father, and discreetly with one’s Christian brethren in the Church, though I am wary about that; but my notion is that it is dangerous, indelicate, frequently degrading to what we are, to associate too intimately with men in their political, professional, and other manifestations.

I may be wrong about this. My opinion may spring like hypocrisy from cowardice, because I have not the courage to risk the losses these women sustain. My only excuse is that I came up in a different age and had my morals and sense of womanhood formed under different influences. If the modern woman does hold fast, and win and prove herself an asset instead of a liability in this civilization, I hope to bow my old gray head to her and take off my shoes before her in reverent recognition of the fact that she will have become the greatest pioneer of the ages, against the greatest odds, with the noblest courage.

In the meantime I am wearing my shoes, holding my neck stiff and regarding her over the top of my spectacles like a harsh, narrow-minded old mother who would like to snatch her daughters from a dangerous maelstrom and set them to the tasks at home that would make men instead of bandits of their sons, and proper maidens instead of adventurous flappers of their daughters. The best mother I ever knew never cast a ballot, but she established her sons in the way they should go. She has been dead for years, but she is still voting these men in every election.

Maybe I should have omitted these reflections. When you have survived your own world, and are now merely the spectator of another world in the making, you cannot be qualified to pass judgment upon it. I let that go with this polite apology and return to the problems which faced me so many years ago when I became a widow.

XLI

ALL SORTS OF MEN

At safe distance I have spent much time observing men and the world they are making through the field glasses of my mind. I still prefer it to any world women can make. This is not an indication of turpitude, but due, no doubt, to my gender and the association of ideas. We know that men are strong by the deeds they have performed, the cities they have built and the cities they have taken; by the courage they have shown in war and in the face of wildernesses to be conquered, and by every hardship which women endure but cannot overcome. So I instinctively look up to men.

I am not defending myself, although women have made great strides recently in discovering how weak and unworthy men have always been of the confidence we reposed in them. I am not reposing much confidence in them, but I am simply admitting that the tilt of my gaze toward them is instinctive and prayerful, not rational, any more than personal faith in God would be regarded as reasonable by a materialist. But observe the advantage I have of the rationalist, who is reduced to the dirt dauber’s creed of worshiping his own intellect, while I enjoy the more becoming distinction of spreading wider wings upward.

My ideas about men spring from the same shrewd source of financing my future by faith--that evidence of things hoped for but not seen. I am determined to remain the weaker vessel and to hold them to the higher altitude of superior beings. It is more profitable and the surest way of forcing them to make good. They are only too willing to part with their responsibilities to these valiant modern women who are so anxious to prove their own ability to assume these burdens and bear them.

I have no doubt there is a smile up the sleeve of every man in this country as he watches the return of his women to servitude, not the old domestic bondage, but every other kind. Millions of them bread winners, filling positions at half the price these positions paid when men filled them. No wonder men can afford an eight-hour working day. Enough women are working longer hours to more than make up the difference in the common-to-all income. No wonder there are so many strikes. They can afford the luxury and disturbance on the sweat of the women.

In the same way they are serving men in politics, because they can reach a class of constituents the male candidate cannot reach, and because they can practice arts he never had to get him elected. I am wondering what will happen when these women discover that they cannot make this a good little world to live in by amendments, and that all their labor and devotions have been spent for the promotion and gratification of men, as usual. My prediction is that there will be such a shrieking strike as the whole National Guard cannot put down, because every striker will rush home, and fling herself upon the bed to do her shrieking.

I hope I shall live to see that holy day. It will mark the defeat of men and their return to duty in a strangely diminished frame of mind. But I shall never see it. The thing will come to pass so gradually, one woman at a time coming to her senses, and then taking refuge in nervous prostration or some other condition obviously and naturally beyond the power of men to reach or control her.

The only man I had ever known was, as it happened, different from other men. He desired above all things to be meekly and truly blameless before the Lord. God was his public opinion. I was amazed, you may say, to the point of fainting spiritually to discover that men in general have no such instinct for piety. In his heart I do believe the veriest saint among them would shrink from a too notorious reputation for being merely good and entirely virtuous, although the least and meanest one of them wishes to appear great, if it is only to one woman, no matter how short he is in personal virtues.

I believe they are all more spiritually inclined than we are; but heavens, what unscrupulous spirituality! It is a sort of noble side line they carry. They crave as we never do the sensations of power, exaltation. This, I believe, is the psychological explanation of why many men take to intoxicants before they feel the need of artificial stimulants which the hard pressure of this swiftly moving age now brings. They want to feel like gods, they wish to enjoy the sensations of being hard-boiled, when by nature they are polite, timid little fellows. They wish to feel for a moment the power in their heel to kick the world around, though as a rule they remain sufficiently sober not to lift a foot in the actual experiment.

The fool wants to be witty. The Smart Aleck wishes to light all his candles at once and watch himself shine. The man with a bad conscience longs for the false courage to swank about like a supervillain and rejoice in his iniquities. And there are those who drink to drown their sorrows, although my observation is that they will do it before they have any griefs or legitimate depressions from weariness or hardship to overcome. They are really suffering from that masculine embarrassment in sobriety of knowing how limited they are in power and other godlikenesses which all men perpetually crave. If even all the women in the world would concede these qualities, humor them with sufficient admiration and reverence, we should have no need for the Eighteenth Amendment, seeing that these several classes of men would be already sublimely intoxicated.

They have not made good as gods in spite of these divine retchings, but they have built a magnificent world. I will warrant there is nothing comparable to their achievements on any of the other planets of our solar system. But you will not find the mark of one feminine finger upon the architecture of this one and very few traces of the feminine imagination in these great accomplishments. We have our good points, but they are not architecturally or literally constructive. We are, I should say, at best the patient conservators of what men make, win, and produce. This is the reason why dissipation is far less excusable in women than men. They have their vanities and virtues, but no such boundless egotism to keep up and satisfy. When we are forever physically incapable of being the builders and achievers that men are, I do think it is regrettable that we should imitate that vice in them which is merely the mortal weakness of a sublime quality.

We have our feminine deceits, ten thousand, but obvious and appealing. Men have another kind, which also spring from their passion for augmenting themselves, not endearing themselves. The vainest woman who ever lived does not crave the admiration of men as men crave that of women. They want it whether they want her or her love or even her property, whether she is young, old or blind. This is the reason why they cannot be truthful or quite honest in their relation to us. It is not the desire to deceive, but to shine, to rule and overcome us with their minds and their wills.

I do not think any exercise of our recent rights as citizens will ever overcome this handicap. The fact is it is fatal to do so. The moment a man perceives himself diminished to his true proportions in a woman’s eyes, she becomes offensive and repugnant to him, and he is right about that. She was originally designed by her Maker to be the complimentary mirror in which Adam might gaze to spoof himself to greater endeavors.

When I found out all these things about men it had a queer effect upon me. I distinctly recall facing about, thinking Lundy up out of his dust and reviewing him in the light of this new information. Had I ever really understood my husband? I never shall know. That perfect illusion which love is still clothed him, and I could make nothing of all my remembered evidence beyond the kindness and patience and prayers of our life together. I remember still with pleasure how grand and superior he used to look when he flared into flames of fine eloquence that put my light out. But just let any man try that now! I can see the difference every time between the mere man of him and his eloquence. I am not moved. I simply regard him with a listening eye while I divide the light of his words from his own darkness, whether real or potential. If I should be won by his eloquence or his arguments, he has the advantage. Presently I shall be taking his advice or adopting his opinions against my own woman’s judgment, which is bad business, if you know what I mean.

As near as I can tell the truth from memory, it was this instinct of inferiority which led me to earn my life and my living in strict retirement after my husband’s death. I perceived that the training I had had with him in the scriptural simplicities of living was no adequate preparation for competing with men in any way. I might hold a candle to them, but I’d never hold my own with them. And trying to get a working knowledge of them at the age I was then would have been like trying to learn a foreign language after you are forty when you were born with a lisping, stammering tongue.

There was another consideration that influenced me. As a wife I had practiced the habits of obedience. My husband laid the scenes of our life and controlled our destiny. I simply helped him do that. I had been confirmed in the womanly attribute of being guided by his stronger will. What I discovered at the end of these three years’ thoughtfulness is that every man’s will is stronger than any woman’s. She may outwit him, but she cannot outwill him. It was not my idea to dizzy around as a widow, being guided by this man or that one in my affairs. The best thing I could do was to break the entail of that beautiful attribute of obedience I had as a wife, tear it up like a scrap of paper, and retreat to a safe distance. I meant to lay a few scenes of my own devising and to become the captain of my own fate, let the Lord do as he saw fit about my soul.

I was near to being tired of my soul by this time from worrying with it and straining spiritually for so many years to the exclusion of all earthly profits. Later, I did resume intimate relations with it, because once you have adopted the ideals of a spiritual life you are meanly impoverished without them. You are degraded in your own consciousness as bitter, worm-eaten dust without this sublime reservation held by faith, that there is eternal life no matter what griefs you have had or what happiness you have missed or what an ordinary person you have been all your life.

I feel these limitations keenly, and have always been extremely anxious to find out for sure that I really am extraordinary and immortal and worthy of my own admiration at the very last. I wish to die proud.

This is something that can only happen to us in the next world, where I hope to forget my mortal limitations and some of the ridiculous as well as tragic mistakes I have made here that caricature me now to myself. For the same reason I am not inclined to interpret too literally and painfully those Scriptures which intimate that our memories will be resuscitated with us. I do hope this is not obligatory. For I should need no memory to recognize Lundy or Faith. I should know them as one comes again in full possession of his mind and heart after a long sleep. My idea of a happy resurrection would be to rise from my dust cleansed from every embarrassing and diminishing recollection, because this is the only way to be as prideful as one expects to be in Heaven.

Grief, however poignant, is like a wound, if you are not by nature infirm, but a normal person with a strong mental constitution, you recover from it as you would from any other wound or sickness. So I recovered from the death of my husband. The health of my spirit returned, and with it the idea of happiness began to freshen in my mind.

Faith was married by this time. I was alone and free to live that life of mine which I had wished for as saints long for immortality. My feeling has always been that happiness lies somewhere in Genesis, in those first scenes of man. For this reason I set out for the hills behind the world in Georgia, where the days come and go much as they did in the beginning, where human speech is such a rare sound that the dogs bark when they hear it in this valley, and where the song of birds is the real language one hears. It is a place where there is no wealth, no learning, and much natural wisdom of the woods, the hills and streams. There are a few people, but I know them only as one knows a little prose, a little poetry and a few Scriptures, not personally nor intimately.