LUNDY AND I WALK AND TALK

It is queer how thoughts you had long ago and the very scene of these thoughts come back to you after you have lived a dozen later lives. I recall something now that indicates how narrow the margin was then between me and one of the threadbare fallacies of my sex:

Lundy and I were walking late in the afternoon through the college campus. I remember the deepening twilight beneath the trees. I wore a dark dress. I was young, slender, pale, homely--what I mean is that I remember feeling this way, sad and put upon. Lundy was stepping along innocently beside me, gracefully silent, no doubt enjoying this silence, for he was one who never practiced speech as a relief for intellectual hysteria. He could retain his thoughts like a gentleman. Suddenly I let out what I was thinking about the world’s injustice to women. We were the victims of the whole social and domestic order of mankind. We were the bond servants of a civilization which we had no part in making. We had no rights, only duties to perform, and so on and so forth. I cannot think now how I came by such thoughts. I must have read something along this line, and, like D---- was suffering from, mental regurgitation.

What brought me to my own personal senses was the look Lundy gave me, not reproachful, but startled, as if he had received a thrust and wondered if he deserved it.

We walked on, staring straight ahead; but I could feel my husband searching himself, looking for his sins against me, and his harshness. This was unendurable. I sat down beside the road and made haste to renege. All at once it was clear how good this man had been to me, how hard he worked that I might be a little more comfortable, how patient he was with my ruffian mind, and how he had given me all the love he could spare from his jealous God. And now--appalling thought--what if he went off on one of his remorseful tangents, his ever uncertain peace destroyed by my complaint?

Never did a woman praise her husband more fervently than I did for the next few minutes. I laughed and stroked his legs. He would not sit down! He had the rigid air of a man who preferred to take his punishment standing up. I vowed I was only teasing him. As a matter of fact, I was not thinking of my own husband at all when I began to drool about the wrongs of women. I must have been seeking martyrdom at large.

This was one of those little epochs we make in living. I passed as quick as a flash through an enlightening mental process. From that moment I escaped the idea of grievances from which many women suffer too much in their imaginations. I have been a sluggard ever since about correcting the abuses from which women suffer. I have never been able to cast myself or my pen whole-heartedly into a campaign to clean up the men and bring them to repentance for their trespasses against us. Let somebody else do it! Because, of course, it must be done before we repent of the wrongs we practice against them, such as headaches, indifference, inefficiency, and extravagance. Upon those occasions when I have been even slightly moved to do my duty toward chastening them, I always think of Lundy, the astonished blue look he gave me that time on the campus in Oxford, as if this was the first he knew of his unkindness and injustice to the woman rib in his side. I remember him, the whole mind the man of him had at that moment, and I cannot believe in the light of his kind heart that men really mean to be unfair to women, any more than we mean to be as exasperating as we are to them sometimes.

We are both the victims of some secret plan of Nature in this business. Men are overbearing on account of the kind of gender they are, and women have nervous squalls on account of the kind of gender they are. If they were entirely compatible, the one to the other, their children might be poor, spiritless creatures. For love certainly is a fearfully eager, exacting, and destructive influence upon the dead level of peace. Therefore incompatibility never seemed to me reasonable grounds for divorce. On the contrary, it must be in Nature the best of all genealogical grounds for those two afflicted people to continue to live together.

The success of marriage does not depend upon how well it is financed with money or social position, but almost entirely upon how much love and wit you can put into it. Maybe there is some grave inequality of mind or spirit or quality between you in the beginning, but go on living together and presently there will be six of one and half a dozen of the other. You will develop practically the same horse power of perversity, even if the man becomes ferociously impatient and the wife sinks away into cowardly patience.

There is nothing known to man as exasperating as an infernally patient woman. She is either mean or lacking in wit. She never seems to realize that domestic temper in a man is a form of hysteria and should be treated accordingly with a dash of cold water, figuratively speaking, or some sort of shock, which is not meant to be a suggestion of license in conduct. He would ask no better excuse for a tantrum or a tyranny than for his wife to commit a fault. But there are a thousand ways of twisting the tail of a perverse man’s temper without ceasing to be an artless lady. All you have to do is to put your mind on it. The Lord has endowed every woman with special talents for this emergency.

I know one charming little gentlewoman who married a very ordinary man who never had the opportunity to control anything or anybody until he achieved this lovely wife. Then he set in to exercise his powers along this line. If he had been the warden of a penitentiary he could not have been more exacting than he was as the master of his own house and the husband of this woman. The marvel was the sweet way she went on showing her admiration and affection for him. Some of us were disposed to pity her as a poor creature without spirit. Then I caught on to her game.

When her husband was present she never ceased to augment him by telling what he would permit her to do, or more particularly what he would not allow her to do, say or think. Each revelation was, of course, accompanied by an exchange of eye-flashing intelligence between those present and frequently by an embarrassed flush on the husband’s face. Nothing could stop her from making these revelations of his meanness and tyranny, always as if she approved of him to the point of boasting. We heard that when he reprimanded her for exposing his private authority she remained artless and too simple to be managed.

‘But you know, dear, you did say I should not go to that meeting, and I wanted them to understand why I would not accept their invitation,’ and so on and so forth. In the course of two years she let in the light of so much public opinion on this man and his methods as an overbearing husband that now he practically runs to open the door to her every wish. He is tremendously concerned that his neighbors shall know his wife may do as she almighty pleases. And so she does. It was one of the most diverting and enlightening dramas of married life I have seen in years, played without a single mis-said line, and ended, you may say, with much secret applause.

If it appears that I have turned my light too far forward through the years in the immediately preceding pages, I can only say that we must follow the beam while it shines when one is trailing the mind, even if it is your own mind. This was as good a place as any to set down the effects of that first and last interview with my husband concerning the grievances of women. The reader will recognize it as the veracious record of a strictly feminine mind whatever else he may think.

If I may be permitted to comment upon my own copy in thinking, I should say that once a woman’s mind is divorced from her affections it is a trifle unbalanced and untrustworthy no matter how brilliantly and broadly she uses it. It ricochets like a ball fired at a low angle of elevation which is apt to fall back upon her own destiny disastrously. A good many of these duds are already dropping behind the Nineteenth Amendment. I cannot see much improvement in the character of women, though they are more alert mentally and less satisfied. They have gained something they wanted and they have lost something they needed personally and privately. I have felt obliged for conscience’ sake to believe in equal rights for women, but the best success I ever had along this line has been to go out and win by my own works and wits the rights I preferred and that would be the most becoming to me in the end.