Stories from Everybody's Magazine Part 45

She flinched from it. The inertia of her mind carried her to the ultimate logic of her life. Along about the time of her marriage she began to cease to be the typical normal girl of her type.

She became a woman of the future--OF HER TYPE.

From the facts of modern idleness the positive character reacts toward new-found activity: toward an enormous, never-before-witnessed expenditure of intelligent care on children; toward self-support; toward civic service. The character which is neither positive nor negative runs along as a neutral mixture of modern facts and of old ideals of casual idling and of casual child-rearing. The negative character--like Marie's--just yields to the facts and is swept along by them into final irresponsibility and inutility.

Marie wasn't negative enough--she wasn't positive enough in her negativeness--to plunge into dissipation. It wasn't in her nature to do any plunging of any kind. Good, safe, motionless sponging was her instinct. And she will die in the odor of tubbed and scrubbed respectability. And if you knew her you would like her very much. She is charming.

When she and Chunk were married, they went to live in an apartment appropriate to a rising young man, and Marie's job was on all occasions to look as appropriate as the apartment.

No shallow cynicism, this! Just plain, bald truth without any wig on it. The only thing that you could put your finger on that Marie really did was so to wear clothes and so to give parties as to be the barometer of her husband's prosperity. And in every city you can see lots of such barometers giving themselves an artificially high reading in order to create that "atmosphere" of success which is a recognized commercial a.s.set.

Chunk was hugely pleased with Marie. She looked good at the dinner-table in the cafe of their apartment building. She knew how to order the right dishes when they entertained and dined down-town. She made it possible for him to return deftly and engagingly the social attentions of older people. She completed the "front" of his life, and he not only supported her but, as Miss Salmon, of Va.s.sar, flippantly and seriously says, he "sported" her as he might a diamond s.h.i.+rt stud.

No struggle in Marie's life so far! No HAVING to swim in the cold water of daily enforced duty or else sink. NO BEING ACCUSTOMED TO THE DISAGREEABLE FEEL OF THAT WATER.

She had missed work. That was nothing. She had missed being HARDENED to work. That was everything.

The first demand ever made on her for really disagreeable effort came when Chunk, in order to get a new factory going, had to move for a while to Junction City. When Marie bitterly and furiously objected, Chunk was severely astonished. Why, he had to go! It was necessary. But there had been no necessity in Marie's experience. They became quarrelsome about it. Then stubborn.

Marie talked about her mother and her friends and how she loved them (which was true) and stayed.

For two years she inhabited Chunk's flat in the city and lived on Chunk's monthly check.

She and Chunk were married. Chunk was to support her. Her father used to support her. Her job then was being nice. That was her job now. And she was nice. And she was still supported. Perfectly logical.

For two years, neither really daughter now nor really wife, not being obliged any longer even to make suggestions to her mother about what to have for dinner, not being obliged any longer even to think out the parties for Chunk's business friends, she did nothing but become more and more firmly fixed in her inertia, in her incapacity for hards.h.i.+p, in her horror of pain.

When Chunk came back from Junction City and was really convinced that she didn't want children he was not merely astonished. He thought the world had capsized.

In a way he was right. The world is turning round and over and back to that one previous historical era when the aversion to childbearing was widespread.

Once, just once, before our time, there was a modern world. Once, just once, though not on the scale we know it, there was, before us, a diffusion of leisure.

The causes were similar.

The Romans conquered the world by military force, just as we have conquered it by mechanical invention. They lived on the plunder of despoiled peoples just as we live on the products of exploited continents. They had slaves in mult.i.tudes just as we have machines in ma.s.ses. Because of the slaves, there were hundreds of thousands of their women, in the times of the Empire, who had only denatured housekeeping to do, just as to-day there are millions of our women who, because of machines, have only that kind of housekeeping to do. Along with leisure and semi-leisure, they acquired its consequences, just as we have acquired them.

And the sermons of Augustus Caesar, first hero of their completed modernity, against childlessness are perfect precedents for those of Theodore Roosevelt, first hero of ours.

Augustus, however, addressed himself mainly to the men, who entered into marriage late, or did not enter into it at all, for reasons identical with ours--the increased compet.i.tiveness of the modern life and the decreased usefulness of the modern wife. It was the satirists who addressed themselves particularly to the women. And their tirades against idleness, frivolity, luxury, dissipation, divorce, and aversion to child-bearing leave nothing to be desired, in comparison with modern efforts, for effectiveness in rhetoric--or for ineffectiveness in result.

Now it could not have been the woman who desires economic independence through self-support who was responsible for the ultimate aversion to childbearing in the Roman world--for SHE did not exist. It could not have been the woman who desires full citizens.h.i.+p--for she did not exist. What economic power and what political power the Roman Empire woman desired and achieved was parasitic--the economic power which comes from the inheritance of estates, the political power which comes from the exercise of s.e.xual charm.

The one essential difference between the women of that ancient modern world and the women of this contemporary modern world is in the emergence, along with really democratic ideals, of the agitation for equal economic and political opportunity.

The other kind of New Woman, the woman brought up throughout her girlhood in a home in which there is no adequate employment for her; trained to no tasks, or, at any rate, to tasks (like dusting the dining-room and counting the laundry) so petty, so ridiculously irrelevant that her great-grandmother did them in the intervals of her real work; going then into marriage with none of the discipline of habitual encounter with inescapable toil; taken by her husband not to share his struggle but his prosperity--that sort of New Woman they had, just as we have her in smaller number, it is true, but in identical character.

They tell us it was "luxury" that ruined the Romans. But was luxury the START? Wasn't it only the means to the FINISH?

Eating a grouse destroys in itself, no more moral fiber than eating a ham sandwich. Bismarck, whether he slept on eider-down or on straw, arose Bismarck.

The person who has a job and who does it is very considerably immunized against the consequences of luxury. First, because he is giving a return for it. Second, because he hasn't much time for it.

On the other hand we see the hobo who won't work ruining himself on the luxury of stable-floors and of free-lunch counters, just as thoroughly as any n.o.bleman who won't work can ever ruin himself on the luxury of castles and game preserves.

It is clearly the habitual enjoyment of either grouse or ham sandwiches, of either eiderdown or straw, WITHOUT SERVICE RENDERED AND WITHOUT FATIGUE ENDURED, that ultimately desiccates the moral character and drains it of all capacity for effort.

Marie was as reasonable a proposition as that two and two make four.

She had given her early, plastic, formative years to acquiring the HABIT of effortless enjoyment, and when the time for making an effort came, the effort just wasn't in her.

Her complete withdrawal from the struggle for existence had at last, in her negative, non-resistive mind atrophied all the instincts of that struggle including finally the instinct for reproduction.

The instinct for reproduction is intricately involved in the struggle for existence. The individual struggles for perpetuation, for perpetuation in person, for perpetuation in posterity. Work, the perpetuation of one's own life in strain and pain; work, the clinging to existence in spite of its blows; work, the inuring of the individual to the penalties of existence, is linked psychologically to the power and desire for continued racial life. The individual, the cla.s.s, which struggles no more will in the end reproduce itself no more. In not having had to conquer life, it has lost its will to live.

The detailed daily reasons for this ultimate social law stand clear in Marie's life. And remember what sort of woman she was.

The woman who is coerced by external, authoritative ideals will bear children even when the wish to bear them is really absent.

She will bear them without thinking. She will bear them because she has never thought that anything else was possible. But Marie (and this means millions of women throughout the modern world) was free, wonderfully, unparalleledly free.

She was free, though a leisured woman, from the requirement of an heir for a great family estate. She was free from the dictates of historic Christianity about conjugal duty and unrestricted reproduction. She was free from the old uncomplaining compliance with a husband's will.

Modern life had done all this for her. She was uncoerced by family authority, ecclesiastical authority, or marital authority.

She was limitlessly free, limitlessly irresponsible, a creature of infinite opportunities and no duties.

All social coercion toward childbearing having been withdrawn from her, the only guide she had left (and it would have been her best one) was instinct and impulse.

But with the cessation from struggle, with the cessation from effort and from fatigue and from discipline, and from the sorrow of pain that brings the joy of accomplishment, that instinct and impulse had disappeared. With the petrifaction of its soil, it had withered away.

She had been sedulously trained to sterility.

Nevertheless, when it got talked around among her friends that she didn't want children, everybody thought it very surprising, in view of all that had been done for her.

In the January number Mr. Hard will discuss "The Women of To-morrow" in "Civic Service."

Vol. XXIII December 1910 No. 6

{pages 778-783 are NOT numbered in the printed copy!} THE WATCHMAN

"And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men." Matthew xxviii. 4

BY L. M. MONTGOMERY

My Claudia, it is long since we have met, So kissed, so held each other heart to heart!

I thought to greet thee as a conqueror comes, Bearing the trophies of his prowess home.

But Jove hath willed it should be otherwise-- Jove, say I? Nay, some mightier, stranger G.o.d, Who thus hath laid his heavy hand on me, No victor, Claudia, but a broken man Who seeks to hide his weakness in thy love.

How beautiful thou art! The years have brought An added splendor to thy loveliness, With pa.s.sion of dark eye and lip rose-red, Struggling between its dimple and its pride.

And yet there is somewhat that glooms between Thy love and mine; come, girdle me about With thy true arms, and pillow on thy breast This aching and bewildered head of mine; Here, where the fountain glitters in the sun Among the saffron lilies I will tell-- If so that words will answer my desire-- The shameful fate that hath befallen me.