The Co-Citizens Part 8

The obituary of Sarah Hayden Mosely followed below. This was so brief that it might have been placed in capital letters on her tombstone without crowding the margins. It appeared to have been written with the circ.u.mspection of a person who desired his readers to understand that he was in no way responsible for the deceased nor for her deeds. The t.i.tle was stereotyped. Every woman who died in Jordantown appeared in the _Signal_ obituary tribute as "An Estimable Christian Woman."

It was at the next column that every man stared with amazement mixed with fear and indignation. This contained "The Last Will and Testament of Sarah Hayden Mosely," the t.i.tle written in smaller, paler type. The text of the will followed:

In the name of G.o.d, Amen.

I, Sarah Hayden Mosely, being weak in body but of sound and perfect mind, do make this my last will and testament:

I give and dispose of my entire estate, real and personal, to a self-perpetuating Board of Trust, the members of which are hereinafter named.

The said estate shall no longer be known as the William J. Mosely Estate, but it shall be called the Co-Citizens' Foundation Fund of Jordan County.

This fund shall not be subject to liquidation, but the income from it, or such part of it as is necessary, shall be spent each year in the effort to obtain equal suffrage for the women of Jordan County.

No part of the said income shall be spent for any other purpose until the said women shall have the right to vote in all elections held in the said county.

But after they have obtained the ballot, the said Board of Trust shall found and maintain at the expense of this fund a department of Common Law in the Jordantown Female Seminary. And all possible efforts shall be made to establish here a school of law for the women of this state where they may receive that legal training which alone insures to women the proper knowledge and mental discipline necessary for the preservation of their property and their rights as citizens of this commonwealth.

This self-perpetuating Board of Trust shall consist of three members, one man and two women.

Each shall receive a salary of twelve hundred dollars a year for services rendered.

I appoint John Regis, Susan Walton, and Selah Adams members of this self-perpetuating Board of Trust and executors of my will.

And they shall not give bond nor be held accountable to the court for the manner in which they exercise these functions.

If any member or members of the said board appointed in this will shall refuse to serve, the remaining members or member shall choose and elect a suitable person or persons to fill each vacancy.

No monument or stone shall mark my grave until the conditions of this will have been fulfilled.

In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal this the 3d day of April, 1914.

[Seal]

SARAH HAYDEN MOSELY.

Signed and sealed by the above named Sarah Hayden Mosely as her last will and testament, and by us in her presence and at her request subscribed as witnesses.

ENOS CANN.

MARY CANN.

In a brief paragraph beneath this extraordinary doc.u.ment the editor added that in an interview Judge John Regis admitted that all the trustees had accepted, that they were confident of carrying out the terms of the will, but that the board was not ready now to give information concerning its plans.

No woman had ever been "interviewed" in Jordantown by a newspaper reporter. This may have accounted for the fact that Carter did not call upon either Mrs. Walton or Selah Adams before going to press. Besides, the sixteen-hundred-dollar mortgage on the _Signal_ was now owned by the Co-Citizens' Foundation. He could not trust himself even in the presence of these powerful women. The very form of his question, his manner, might betray his secret feelings and do incredible damage.

In fact all domestic conversation in Jordantown was now censored as carefully both by the men and the women as if they belonged to opposing armies. Every man regarded his wife with suspicion, and he was at the same time conscious of a strange cheerful indifference on the part of his wife that was unnatural and offensive. Half the clinging-vine love with which women entwine their husbands is not love at all, but a nameless anxiety due to their sense of helplessness. Transpose the conditions of each and the same beseeching look so often seen in women's faces will be ludicrously mixed with the whiskers on the faces of their lords. The only ineradicable difference between men and women is gender.

They are singularly alike in every other particular. Give a woman liberty, and she will go a man one better in license. Take a man's liberty from him, and he surpa.s.ses any woman in timidity. If men have more strength, women have more endurance. If the one is more active, the other is the more persistent. And it depends entirely upon the emergency which will show the most courage. Place them side by side under the same conditions to accomplish the same thing, and while each will go about the business in a different manner, the same proportion of both s.e.xes will succeed at the job.

The difficulty is that men and women neither live nor work under the same conditions. The former have the overwhelming advantage, owing to the fact that they create their own public opinion and hold the balance of power, prestige, and influence.

This was precisely the balance which had been destroyed in Jordantown.

The women now had all the advantage. It was monstrous and called for the exercise of all the furnace language of which men are naturally capable.

The one hope expressed everywhere was that, being the timid things that they were, the women would not know how to keep the grip they had upon the situation.

"Hang it! They are our wives and daughters. We ought to be able to do what we always have done, direct them and control them through their affections," said Acres, turning up the ends of his moustache with a kind of bantam bravado.

"If a woman has nothing but her affections it is easy enough to manage her, but n.o.body knows what use she may make of her heels if she has everything else besides," growled Coleman, who had just come from a breakfast table where his wife, Agatha, had pointedly refused to give him certain information about the Co-Citizens' Foundation which he knew she had.

"It's all a huge joke, that's what this damphule will is," said Briggs gloomily.

"Of course the suffrage part of it is a joke. The state const.i.tution is plain on that question. Only males can vote," Acres agreed.

"But, hang it! They've got this vast estate, which affects every business interest in this town, and the devil only knows what they will do with it!" exclaimed Coleman.

"Ask your wife," Sasnett suggested.

"I did ask Mabel," Acres admitted.

"What'd she say?"

"Said they'd collect the rents and interest first thing."

Sasnett laughed, and Briggs seized his hat and left the room with the air of an injured man.

While these desultory conferences were being held all over the town Monday morning, where two or three were gathered together on the streets, Susan Walton was sitting opposite Judge Regis in his office.

Her knees were wide apart, her hands folded above her fat stomach. She had untied her bonnet strings, which was a bad-weather indication.

The Judge was listening with his eye fixed keenly upon her, the hair above his temples sticking out like owl's ears.

"I've bluffed it so far, John Regis. I've reorganized the Civic League and Cemetery a.s.sociation into the Co-Citizens' League, which was no small undertaking, I can tell you. Half the women would not have joined if they'd known what they were doing. I got them by not explaining how immediate the business of getting suffrage is, and by offering scandalous committee appropriations. But I'm shaking in my shoes. I don't know how we are to carry out the conditions of this trust. The more I think of it, the more I suspect Sarah Mosely of being plain crazy!"

"She's the first woman in this country to meet the issue of suffrage for women with the sanity of practical common sense," he answered.

"But she's limited her bequest to use in this county. Suffrage is a state issue. I should know. I have given years of thought to it."

"Yes, you've spent your energies like the rest of them, Susan, in mere agitation, in parades with transparencies bearing the legend, 'Votes for Women!' The last one of you might as well be blowing your breath against the order of things. Nothing could be more futile."

"We are beginning to create a sentiment for suffrage," she protested.

"Yes, in women. But can women give it to you? What's the good of undertaking the impossible? The income from this Foundation will not exceed twenty thousand dollars a year. That would not be a drop in the bucket in a state campaign, where you would be compelled to fight the most powerful political machines, and the graft and vice elements of the cities, all of which are naturally opposed to suffrage for women."

"Still, I don't see what we can do here in this county alone with the whole state against us," she objected.

"That is the question Mrs. Mosely answered. This little old woman fading into a mere shadow behind the doors of her house saw the solution which the rest of you missed with all your breadth of vision--too much breadth of vision, Susan, is as bad as not having any at all. No focus to it, not enough rays to burn through."

"I think you know I have had some experience in political affairs, more than most women, and I must say I don't see yet where Sarah Mosely focussed her rays," snapped Susan.

"I had several conferences with her. It appeared that she had thought of nothing else for years but this Foundation. She got the idea, she told me, from living with her husband. He was a man whose wife was his rib, not a separate human being. He was kind to her, but she had no more liberty than a child. She never knew anything of his affairs. She told me that she was and had always been absolutely incapable of attending to any business. She had been obliged to trust an agent. In any case she would have been forced to trust some one. She thought most women were in this condition of helplessness, and that they would remain so, always the prey of circ.u.mstances of the forces about them. And she wished to change that."

"Go on," the old lady commanded as the Judge paused.