Stories from Everybody's Magazine Part 33

We're single. Very well. We'll change it. I'm working. You're working. We're married. Have we lost anything? And we've gained each other."

Two years later she stopped working.

In those two years she had helped John to start a home. She couldn't operate soap-kettles and candle-molds and looms and smokehouses and salting-tubs and spinning-wheels for him. But she brought him an equivalent of it in money. She earned from $900 to $1000 a year.

Being married, they were more thrifty. They saved a large part of her earnings. John was still spending a large part of his on extending his business, on traveling, on entertaining prospective clients, on making acquaintances. Sometimes she had to contribute some of her own money to his expense accounts. That was the fortune of war. She helped him pursue success.

"I wouldn't give up the memory of these two years," Mary used to say, as she sat and st.i.tched for her children, "for anything. I shared at least a part of my husband's youth."

By sharing it, she won a certain happiness otherwise unattainable. They had come to know each other and to help form each other's characters and to share each other's difficulties in the years when only there is real joy in the struggle of life.

They had not postponed their love till, with a settled income, John could support her in comfort and they could look back like Browning's middle-aged estranged lovers to say:

We have not sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted, despaired,--been happy.

"It used to take two to start a home in colonial days," Mary would say. "I am really an old-fas.h.i.+oned woman. I helped to make this home. We had twelve hundred dollars in the bank when I stopped working, and John was pretty well established.

"I don't regret it," she went on, still speaking as a woman of the future, "even for the children. Of course I do wish we had started earlier. But I would have wanted to wait a while for the children in any case. People risk too much when they start a family before they become sufficiently used to marriage and to each other to know that they can keep on loving each other and to know that they have in them through their mutual, continued happiness the power to make a happy home, a n.o.ble home, for children to live in."

As for the number of children she will have--we reserve that subject to a future article. We call attention here only to this:

That the facts which were cited from the Smith College records are harmonious with many other facts and records tending to show that the fertility of the modern wife has been considerably underrated, just as the fertility of the colonial wife has been considerably exaggerated.

And this:

That Mary got to her childbearing period sooner than she would have if she hadn't insisted on marrying John before he was ready to support her. Those two years would have been childless years in any case. But they would probably, if it hadn't been for Mary's money, have been lengthened into four or five.

Of course, later marriages in themselves tend to reduce the number of children. As to quality, however, the evidence is not clear. There is even some reason to think that a moderate postponement is conducive to an improvement in quality.

Did you ever read Havelock Ellis's book called "A Study of British Genius"?

He made a list of the most distinguished of Eminent British Persons and studied everything about them from their religious opinions to the color of their hair.

In the matter of the age of their parents, he finds that the average age of the father at the birth of the person of genius was thirty-seven years, while the average of the mother was thirty-one. His conclusion is: "On the whole it would appear, so far as the evidence goes, that the fathers of our eminent persons have been predominantly middle-aged and to a marked extent elderly at the time of the distinguished son's birth; while the mothers have been predominantly at the period of greatest vigor and maturity and to a somewhat unusual extent elderly. There has been a notable deficiency of young fathers and, still more notably, of young mothers."

And did you ever see the study which Mr. R. S. Holway made for the Department of Education of Leland Stanford University on "The Age of Parents: Its Effects upon Children"? His conclusions are:

"In most physical qualities the children of mature parents tend to come out best.

"In mental ability the children of young parents show best at an early age but rapidly lose their precocity.

"The elder children who show best tend to be the children of mature and old parents.

"The children of elderly mothers show a tendency to superiority throughout."

Mary did not know about all this, but she had a very strong opinion to the effect that, in so far as the quality of her children could be affected by their home training, she was glad she had spent at least a few years earning her living.

"Every woman," said Mary, "ought to have some little time for developing into an individual. Home won't do it altogether. Not nowadays. The colonial home did, being part of the working world.

But what is the modern home? It is a nest, an eddy, a shelf, a nook. It's something apart from the world. If a woman is going to prepare her son for a knowledge of the real world, if she's going to be able to give him a training which has in it an understanding and an appreciation of the real world, if she's going to be able to educate him into real living, she must nowadays and increasingly in the future have some experience of her own on her own account in the real world before she becomes a mother. There's no getting away from that. A reasonable postponement of motherhood till the future mother becomes a competent individual is a good thing."

"The trouble about that," said John, "is that it makes you too independent of me. Your proposition is to start in and earn your living till you're pretty good at it. That is, you wouldn't marry me till you were sure you could chuck me. How about that?"

Well, it has that side. But it has its other side, too.

Isn't there, after all, something rather pleasant for John in knowing, KNOWING, that Mary isn't cleaving unto him simply because she can't s.h.i.+ft for herself? Something exquisitely gratifying in being certain, CERTAIN, that it isn't just necessity that keeps her a home woman?

"If I were a man living in wedlock," said Mary, "I should want the door of the cage always wide open, with my mate fluttering straight by it every minute to still nestle by me. And I should want her wings to be strong, and I should want her to know that if she went through the door she could fly.

"For keeping her," said Mary, "I should want to trust to my own wings and not to bars.

"However," said Mary, going farther into the future, "the process isn't complete. Freedom is not yet completely acquired. Children!

We want them! We must have them! Yet how often they tie us to unions which have come to be unholy, vile, full of all uncleanness. Women will never be completely free till, besides being able to earn their bread when they are NOT bearing children, they are relieved of dependence on the individual character of another human person while they ARE. Mr. H. G. Wells is clearly right about it. When women bear children they perform a service to the state. Children are important to the state. They are its future life. To leave them to the eccentricities of the economic fate of the father is ridiculous. The woman who is bringing up children should receive from the state the equivalent of her service in a regular income. Then, and then only, in the union of man and woman, will love and money reach their right relations.h.i.+p--love a necessity, money a welcome romance!

"It's remote, very remote," said Mary. "And we can't dream it out in detail. But when it comes it won't come out of personal sentiment. It will come because of being demanded by the economic welfare of the community. It will come because it is the best way to get serviceable children for the state. It will come because, after all, it is the final answer to the postponement of marriage."

In the November instalment of "The Women of To-morrow," Mr. Hard will discuss "The Wasters."

Vol. XXIII October 1910 No. 4

The Poison Bugaboo {pages 518-525}

By SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS

AUTHOR OF "THE GREAT AMERICAN FRAUD," "THE MYSTERY" (WITH STEWART EDWARD WHITE), ETC.

ROMANCE revels in the peril of the unknown. Lapped about with the armor-plate of civilization, the modern citizen muses relis.h.i.+ngly, like a child beguiling himself with ogre tales, upon the terrors which lie just beyond his ken. To his mind,

A stone's throw out on either hand, And all the world is wild and strange.

Avid for sensation, he peoples the remoteness of forest and mountain with malign and destructive creatures, whence has grown up an extensive and astonis.h.i.+ng literature of snake and insect poison lore.

"Deadly" is the master word of the cult. The rattlesnake is "deadly." The copperhead and moccasin are "deadly." So is the wholly mythical puff adder. In hardly less degree is the tarantula "deadly," while varying lethal capacities are ascribed to the centipede, the scorpion, the kissing-bug, and sundry other forms of insect life. The whole matter is based upon the slenderest foundations. I don't mean, by this, that these ill-famed species are wholly innocuous. It would be highly inadvisable to s.n.a.t.c.h a kiss from a copperhead or to stroke a tarantula's fur the wrong way. But one could do it and live to boast of the achievement. Pseudoscience to the contrary notwithstanding, there is no living thing within the boundaries of the United States of America whose bite or sting is sure death or (with one possible exception) even probable death.

There are five varieties of venomous serpents in this country: three of them Crotalids, and two belonging to the Elaps family.

The Elaps are rather rare. The Crotalids (rattlesnake, moccasin, and copperhead) are common, and of the widest geographical distribution. Yet, on the basis of actual evidence, the amazing fact stands out that only about eighty persons, so far as is ascertainable, have ever died from snake bite in the United States. Nowhere in the Civil War records does a death from this cause appear, though hundreds of thousands of men were living "on the country," and at a time when the serpent clan was much more numerous than now.

Estimates vary as to the proportion of deaths to bites. Prentiss Willson believes that something over ten per cent. of all persons bitten by venomous snakes in the United States die. As to how many of these succ.u.mb, not to the venom, but to the misdirected efforts of misguided friends at treatment--an extremely important differentiation--he lacks the data upon which to base a reckoning. S. Weir Mitch.e.l.l's figures indicate 8.7 per cent.

mortality for rattlesnake bite. This would make the venom about as dangerous as the toxin of typhoid fever, which is not generally regarded as a necessarily "deadly" disease. Other writers go as high as fifteen per cent. for the rattlesnake and as low as one per cent. for the copperhead.

All general estimates seem to me to leave one basic element out of consideration--the unnoted, non-fatal snake bites. That a bite resulting in death will eventually get itself reported is reasonably certain. On the other hand, I am satisfied, from talking with plantation owners in the South, with ranchmen in the West, and with woodsmen and hunters all over the country, that, in the remoter regions, many instances of poisoning by copperheads and the smaller rattlesnakes never attain the dignity of being listed, so insignificant are they in their effects. Were all these to be recorded, I believe that the mortality ratio would fall notably.

Although I have been interested in the subject for many years, I have never met a man who has seen a fatal case of snake bite.

More than this, my friend Mr. Stewart Edward White, a noted hunter and explorer of untrodden ground in regions infested by reptiles, has known of but one case terminating in death which he believes to be authentic. Dr. J. A. Mitch.e.l.l, of Victoria, Texas, one of the most experienced of field observers, has never met with an instance of fatality from this cause. Dr. Mitch.e.l.l believes that horses always, and dogs almost always, recover from rattlesnake bite. He confirms, from observation, the mysterious fact that hogs exhibit absolute immunity from the venom.

WHISKY VS. SNAKEBITE