Little Journey in the World

C >> Charles Dudley Warner >> Little Journey in the World


There was a little stir at Margaret's entrance; Mr. Lyon was introduced
to her, and my wife, with that subtle feeling for effect which women
have, slightly changed the lights. Perhaps Margaret's complexion or her
black dress made this readjustment necessary to the harmony of the room.
Perhaps she felt the presence of a different temperament in the little
circle.

I never can tell exactly what it is that guides her in regard to the
influence of light and color upon the intercourse of people, upon their
conversation, making it take one cast or another. Men are susceptible to
these influences, but it is women alone who understand how to produce
them. And a woman who has not this subtle feeling always lacks charm,
however intellectual she may be; I always think of her as sitting in the
glare of disenchanting sunlight as indifferent to the exposure as a man
would be. I know in a general way that a sunset light induces one kind of
talk and noonday light another, and I have learned that talk always
brightens up with the addition of a fresh crackling stick to the fire. I
shouldn't have known how to change the lights for Margaret, although I
think I had as distinct an impression of her personality as had my wife.
There was nothing disturbing in it; indeed, I never saw her otherwise
than serene, even when her voice betrayed strong emotion. The quality
that impressed me most, however, was her sincerity, coupled with
intellectual courage and clearness that had almost the effect of
brilliancy, though I never thought of her as a brilliant woman.

"What mischief have you been attempting, Mr. Morgan?" asked Margaret, as
she took a chair near him. "Were you trying to make Mr. Lyon comfortable
by dragging in Bunker Hill?"

"No; that was Mr. Fairchild, in his capacity as host."

"Oh, I'm sure you needn't mind me," said Mr. Lyon, good-humoredly. "I
landed in Boston, and the first thing I went to see was the Monument. It
struck me as so odd, you know, that the Americans should begin life by
celebrating their first defeat."

"That is our way," replied Margaret, quickly. "We have started on a new
basis over here; we win by losing. He who loses his life shall find it.
If the red slayer thinks he slays he is mistaken. You know the
Southerners say that they surrendered at last simply because they got
tired of beating the North."

"How odd!"

"Miss Debree simply means," I exclaimed, "that we have inherited from the
English an inability to know when we are whipped."

"But we were not fighting the battle of Bunker Hill, or fighting about
it, which is more serious, Miss Debree. What I wanted to ask you was
whether you think the domestication of religion will affect its power in
the regulation of conduct."

"Domestication? You are too deep for me, Mr. Morgan. I don't any more
understand you than I comprehend the writers who write about the
feminization of literature."

"Well, taking the mystery out of it, the predominant element of worship,
making the churches sort of good-will charitable associations for the
spread of sociability and good-feeling."

"You mean making Christianity practical?"

"Partially that. It is a part of the general problem of what women are
going to make of the world, now they have got hold of it, or are getting
hold of it, and are discontented with being women, or with being treated
as women, and are bringing their emotions into all the avocations of
life."

"They cannot make it any worse than it has been."

"I'm not sure of that. Robustness is needed in churches as much as in
government. I don't know how much the cause of religion is advanced by
these church clubs of Christian Endeavor if that is the name,
associations of young boys and girls who go about visiting other like
clubs in a sufficiently hilarious manner. I suppose it's the spirit of
the age. I'm just wondering whether the world is getting to think more of
having a good time than it is of salvation."

"And you think woman's influence--for you cannot mean anything else--is
somehow taking the vigor out of affairs, making even the church a soft,
purring affair, reducing us all to what I suppose you would call a mush
of domesticity."

"Or femininity."

"Well, the world has been brutal enough; it had better try a little
femininity now."

"I hope it will not be more cruel to women."

"That is not an argument; that is a stab. I fancy you are altogether
skeptical about woman. Do you believe in her education?"

"Up to a certain point, or rather, I should say, after a certain point."

"That's it," spoke up my wife, shading her eyes from the fire with a fan.
"I begin to have my doubts about education as a panacea. I've noticed
that girls with only a smattering--and most of them in the nature of
things can go, no further--are more liable to temptations."

"That is because 'education' is mistaken for the giving of information
without training, as we are finding out in England," said Mr. Lyon.

"Or that it is dangerous to awaken the imagination without a heavy
ballast of principle," said Mr. Morgan.

"That is a beautiful sentiment," Margaret exclaimed, throwing back her
head, with a flash from her eyes. "That ought to shut out women entirely.
Only I cannot see how teaching women what men know is going to give them
any less principle than men have. It has seemed to me a long while that
the time has come for treating women like human beings, and giving them
the responsibility of their position."

"And what do you want, Margaret?" I asked.

"I don't know exactly what I do want," she answered, sinking back in her
chair, sincerity coming to modify her enthusiasm. "I don't want to go to
Congress, or be a sheriff, or a lawyer, or a locomotive engineer. I want
the freedom of my own being, to be interested in everything in the world,
to feel its life as men do. You don't know what it is to have an inferior
person condescend to you simply because he is a man."

"Yet you wish to be treated as a woman?" queried Mr. Morgan.

"Of course. Do you think I want to banish romance out of the world?"

"You are right, my dear," said my wife. "The only thing that makes
society any better than an industrial ant-hill is the love between women
and men, blind and destructive as it often is."

"Well," said Mrs. Morgan, rising to go, "having got back to first
principles--"

"You think it is best to take your husband home before he denies even
them," Mr. Morgan added.

When the others had gone, Margaret sat by the fire, musing, as if no one
else were in the room. The Englishman, still alert and eager for
information, regarded her with growing interest. It came into my mind as
odd that, being such an uninteresting people as we are, the English
should be so curious about us. After an interval, Mr. Lyon said:

"I beg your pardon, Miss Debree, but would you mind telling me whether
the movement of Women's Rights is gaining in America?"

"I'm sure I don't know, Mr. Lyon," Margaret replied, after a pause, with
a look of weariness. "I'm tired of all the talk about it. I wish men and
women, every soul of them, would try to make the most of themselves, and
see what would come of that."

"But in some places they vote about schools, and you have conventions--"

"Did you ever attend any kind of convention yourself, Mr. Lyon?"

"I? No. Why?"

"Oh, nothing. Neither did I. But you have a right to, you know. I should
like to ask you one question, Mr. Lyon," the girl, continued, rising.

"Should be most obliged."

"Why is it that so few English women marry Americans?"

"I--I never thought of that," he stammered, reddening. "Perhaps--perhaps
it's because of American women."

"Thank you," said Margaret, with a little courtesy. "It's very nice of
you to say that. I can begin to see now why so many American women marry
Englishmen."

The Englishman blushed still more, and Margaret said good-night.

It was quite evident the next day that Margaret had made an impression on
our visitor, and that he was struggling with some new idea.

"Did you say, Mrs. Fairchild," he asked my wife, "that Miss Debree is a
teacher? It seems very odd."

"No; I said she taught in one of our schools. I don't think she is
exactly a teacher."

"Not intending always to teach?"

"I don't suppose she has any definite intentions, but I never think of
her as a teacher."

"She's so bright, and--and interesting, don't you think? So American?"

"Yes; Miss Debree is one of the exceptions."

"Oh, I didn't mean that all American women were as clever as Miss
Debree."

"Thank you," said my wife. And Mr. Lyon looked as if he couldn't see why
she should thank him.

The cottage in which Margaret lived with her aunt, Miss Forsythe, was not
far from our house. In summer it was very pretty, with its vine-shaded
veranda across the front; and even in winter, with the inevitable
raggedness of deciduous vines, it had an air of refinement, a promise
which the cheerful interior more than fulfilled. Margaret's parting word
to my wife the night before had been that she thought her aunt would like
to see the "chrysalis earl," and as Mr. Lyon had expressed a desire to
see something more of what he called the "gentry" of New England, my wife
ended their afternoon walk at Miss Forsythe's.

It was one of the winter days which are rare in New England, but of which
there had been a succession all through the Christmas holidays. Snow had
not yet come, all the earth was brown and frozen, whichever way you
looked the interlacing branches and twigs of the trees made a delicate
lace-work, the sky was gray-blue, and the low-sailing sun had just enough
heat to evoke moisture from the frosty ground and suffuse the atmosphere
into softness, in which all the landscape became poetic. The phenomenon
known as "red sunsets" was faintly repeated in the greenish crimson glow
along the violet hills, in which Venus burned like a jewel.

There was a fire smoldering on the hearth in the room they entered, which
seemed to be sitting-room, library, parlor, all in one; the old table of
oak, too substantial for ornament, was strewn with late periodicals and
pamphlets--English, American, and French--and with books which lay
unarranged as they were thrown down from recent reading. In the centre
was a bunch of red roses in a pale-blue Granada jug. Miss Forsythe rose
from a seat in the western window, with a book in her hand, to greet her
callers. She was slender, like Margaret, but taller, with soft brown eyes
and hair streaked with gray, which, sweeping plainly aside from her
forehead in a fashion then antiquated, contrasted finely with the flush
of pink in her cheeks. This flush did not suggest youth, but rather
ripeness, the tone that comes with the lines made in the face by gentle
acceptance of the inevitable in life. In her quiet and self-possessed
manner there was a little note of graceful timidity, not perhaps
noticeable in itself, but in contrast with that unmistakable air of
confidence which a woman married always has, and which in the unrefined
becomes assertive, an exaggerated notion of her importance, of the value
added to her opinions by the act of marriage. You can see it in her air
the moment she walks away from the altar, keeping step to Mendelssohn's
tune. Jack Sharpley says that she always seems to be saying, "Well, I've
done it once for all." This assumption of the married must be one of the
hardest things for single women to bear in their self-congratulating
sisters.

I have no doubt that Georgiana Forsythe was a charming girl, spirited and
handsome; for the beauty of her years, almost pathetic in its dignity and
self-renunciation, could not have followed mere prettiness or a
commonplace experience. What that had been I never inquired, but it had
not soured her. She was not communicative nor confidential, I fancy, with
any one, but she was always friendly and sympathetic to the trouble of
others, and helpful in an undemonstrative way. If she herself had a
secret feeling that her life was a failure, it never impressed her
friends so, it was so even, and full of good offices and quiet enjoyment.
Heaven only knows, however, the pathos of this apparently undisturbed
life. For did a woman ever live who would not give all the years of
tasteless serenity, for one year, for one month, for one hour, of the
uncalculating delirium of love poured out upon a man who returned it? It
may be better for the world that there are these women to whom life has
still some mysteries, who are capable of illusions and the sweet
sentimentality that grows out of a romance unrealized.

Although the recent books were on Miss Forsythe's table, her tastes and
culture were of the past age. She admired Emerson and Tennyson. One may
keep current with the news of the world without changing his principles.
I imagine that Miss Forsythe read without injury to herself the
passionate and the pantheistic novels of the young women who have come
forward in these days of emancipation to teach their grandmothers a new
basis of morality, and to render meaningless all the consoling epitaphs
on the mossy New England gravestones. She read Emerson for his sweet
spirit, for his belief in love and friendship, her simple
Congregationalist faith remaining undisturbed by his philosophy, from
which she took only a habit of toleration.

"Miss Debree has gone to church," she said, in answer to Mr. Lyon's
glance around the room.

"To vespers?"

"I believe they call it that. Our evening meetings, you know, only begin
at early candlelight."

"And you do not belong to the Church?"

"Oh, yes, to the ancient aristocratic church of colonial times," she
replied, with a little smile of amusement. "My niece has stepped off
Plymouth Rock."

"And was your religion founded on Plymouth Rock?"

"My niece says so when I rally her deserting the faith of her fathers,"
replied Miss Forsythe, laughing at the working of the Episcopalian mind.

"I should like to understand about that; I mean about the position of
Dissenters in America."

"I'm afraid I could not help you, Mr. Lyon. I fancy an Englishman would
have to be born again, as the phrase used to be, to comprehend that."

While Mr. Lyon was still unsatisfied on this point, he found the
conversation shifted to the other side. Perhaps it was a new experience
to him that women should lead and not follow in conversation. At any
rate, it was an experience that put him at his ease. Miss Forsythe was a
great admirer of Gladstone and of General Gordon, and she expressed her
admiration with a knowledge that showed she had read the English
newspapers.

"Yet I confess I don't comprehend Gladstone's conduct with regard to
Egypt and Gordon's relief," she said.

"Perhaps," interposed my wife, "it would have been better for Gordon if
he had trusted Providence more and Gladstone less."

"I suppose it was Gladstone's humanity that made him hesitate."

"To bombard Alexandria?" asked Mr. Lyon, with a look of asperity.

"That was a mistake to be expected of a Tory, but not of Mr. Gladstone,
who seems always seeking the broadest principles of justice in his
statesmanship."

"Yes, we regard Mr. Gladstone as a very great man, Miss Forsythe. He is
broad enough. You know we consider him a rhetorical phenomenon.
Unfortunately he always 'muffs' anything he touches."

"I suspected," Miss Forsythe replied, after a moment, "that party spirit
ran as high in England as it does with us, and is as personal."

Mr. Lyon disclaimed any personal feeling, and the talk drifted into a
comparison of English and American politics, mainly with reference to the
social factor in English politics, which is so little an element here.

In the midst of the talk Margaret came in. The brisk walk in the rosy
twilight had heightened her color, and given her a glowing expression
which her face had not the night before, and a tenderness and softness,
an unworldliness, brought from the quiet hour in the church.

"My lady comes at last,
Timid and stepping fast,
And hastening hither,
Her modest eyes downcast."

She greeted the stranger with a Puritan undemonstrativeness, and as if
not exactly aware of his presence.

"I should like to have gone to vespers if I had known," said Mr. Lyon,
after an embarrassing pause.

"Yes?" asked the girl, still abstractedly. "The world seems in a vesper
mood," she added, looking out the west windows at the red sky and the
evening star.

In truth Nature herself at the moment suggested that talk was an
impertinence. The callers rose to go, with an exchange of neighborhood
friendliness and invitations.

"I had no idea," said Mr. Lyon, as they walked homeward, "what the New
World was like."




III

Mr. Lyon's invitation was for a week. Before the end of the week I was
called to New York to consult Mr. Henderson in regard to a railway
investment in the West, which was turning out more permanent than
profitable. Rodney Henderson--the name later became very familiar to the
public in connection with a certain Congressional investigation--was a
graduate of my own college, a New Hampshire boy, a lawyer by profession,
who practiced, as so many American lawyers do, in Wall Street, in
political combinations, in Washington, in railways. He was already known
as a rising man.

When I returned Mr. Lyon was still at our house. I understood that my
wife had persuaded him to extend his visit--a proposal he was little
reluctant to fall in with, so interested had he become in studying social
life in America. I could well comprehend this, for we are all making a
"study" of something in this age, simple enjoyment being considered an
unworthy motive. I was glad to see that the young Englishman was
improving himself, broadening his knowledge of life, and not wasting the
golden hours of youth. Experience is what we all need, and though love or
love-making cannot be called a novelty, there is something quite fresh
about the study of it in the modern spirit.

Mr. Lyon had made himself very agreeable to the little circle, not less
by his inquiring spirit than by his unaffected manners, by a kind of
simplicity which women recognize as unconscious, the result of an
inherited habit of not thinking about one's position. In excess it may be
very disagreeable, but when it is combined with genuine good-nature and
no self-assertion, it is attractive. And although American women like a
man who is aggressive towards the world and combative, there is the
delight of novelty in one who has leisure to be agreeable, leisure for
them, and who seems to their imagination to have a larger range in life
than those who are driven by business--one able to offer the peace and
security of something attained.

There had been several little neighborhood entertainments, dinners at the
Morgans' and at Mrs. Fletcher's, and an evening cup of tea at Miss
Forsythe's. In fact Margaret and Mr. Lyon had been thrown much together.
He had accompanied her to vespers, and they had taken a wintry walk or
two together before the snow came. My wife had not managed it--she
assured me of that; but she had not felt authorized to interfere; and she
had visited the public library and looked into the British Peerage. Men
were so suspicious. Margaret was quite able to take care of herself. I
admitted that, but I suggested that the Englishman was a stranger in a
strange land, that he was far from home, and had perhaps a weakened sense
of those powerful social influences which must, after all, control him in
the end. The only response to this was, "I think, dear, you'd better wrap
him up in cotton and send him back to his family."

Among her other activities Margaret was interested in a mission school in
the city, to which she devoted an occasional evening and Sunday
afternoons. This was a new surprise for Mr. Lyon. Was this also a part of
the restlessness of American life? At Mrs. Howe's german the other
evening the girl had seemed wholly absorbed in dress, and the gayety of
the serious formality of the occasion, feeling the responsibility of it
scarcely less than the "leader." Yet her mind was evidently much occupied
with the "condition of women," and she taught in a public school. He
could not at all make it out. Was she any more serious about the german
than about the mission school? It seemed odd at her age to take life so
seriously. And was she serious in all her various occupations, or only
experimenting? There was a certain mocking humor in the girl that puzzled
the Englishman still more.

"I have not seen much of your life," he said one night to Mr. Morgan;
"but aren't most American women a little restless, seeking an
occupation?"

"Perhaps they have that appearance; but about the same number find it, as
formerly, in marriage."

"But I mean, you know, do they look to marriage as an end so much?"

"I don't know that they ever did look to marriage as anything but a
means."

"I can tell you, Mr. Lyon," my wife interrupted, "you will get no
information out of Mr. Morgan; he is a scoffer."

"Not at all, I do assure you," Morgan replied. "I am just a humble
observer. I see that there is a change going on, but I cannot comprehend
it. When I was young, girls used to go in for society; they danced their
feet off from seventeen to twenty-one. I never heard anything about any
occupation; they had their swing and their fling, and their flirtations;
they appeared to be skimming off of those impressionable, joyous years
the cream of life."

"And you think that fitted them for the seriousness of life?" asked his
wife.

"Well, I am under the impression that very good women came out of that
society. I got one out of that dancing crowd who has been serious enough
for me."

"And little enough you have profited by it," said Mrs. Morgan.

"I'm content. But probably I'm old-fashioned. There is quite another
spirit now. Girls out of pinafores must begin seriously to consider some
calling. All their flirtation from seventeen to twenty-one is with some
occupation. All their dancing days they must go to college, or in some
way lay the foundation for a useful life. I suppose it's all right. No
doubt we shall have a much higher style of women in the future than we
ever had in the past."

"You allow nothing," said Mrs. Fletcher, "for the necessity of earning a
living in these days of competition. Women never will come to their
proper position in the world, even as companions of men, which you regard
as their highest office, until they have the ability to be
self-supporting."

"Oh, I admitted the fact of the independence of women a long time ago.
Every one does that before he comes to middle life. About the shifting
all round of this burden of earning a living, I am not so sure. It does
not appear yet to make competition any less; perhaps competition would
disappear if everybody did earn his own living and no more. I wonder,
by-the-way, if the girls, the young women, of the class we seem to be
discussing ever do earn as much as would pay the wages of the servants
who are hired to do the housework in their places?"

"That is a most ignoble suggestion," I could not help saying, "when you
know that the object in modern life is the cultivation of the mind, the
elevation of women, and men also, in intellectual life."

"I suppose so. I should like to have asked Abigail Adams's opinion on the
way to do it."

"One would think," I said, "that you didn't know that the spinning-jenny
and the stocking-knitter had been invented. Given these, the women's
college was a matter of course."

"Oh, I'm a believer in all kinds of machinery anything to save labor.
Only, I have faith that neither the jenny nor the college will change
human nature, nor take the romance out of life."

"So have I," said my wife. "I've heard two things affirmed: that women
who receive a scientific or professional education lose their faith,
become usually agnostics, having lost sensitiveness to the mysteries of
life."

"And you think, therefore, that they should not have a scientific
education?"

"No, unless all scientific prying into things is a mistake. Women may be
more likely at first to be upset than men, but they will recover their
balance when the novelty is worn off. No amount of science will entirely
change their emotional nature; and besides, with all our science, I don't
see that the supernatural has any less hold on this generation than on
the former."

"Yes, and you might say the world was never before so credulous as it is
now. But what was the other thing?"

"Why, that co-education is likely to diminish marriages among the
co-educated. Daily familiarity in the classroom at the most
impressionable age, revelation of all the intellectual weaknesses and
petulances, absorption of mental routine on an equality, tend to destroy
the sense of romance and mystery that are the most powerful attractions
between the sexes. It is a sort of disenchanting familiarity that rubs
off the bloom."

"Have you any statistics on the subject?"

"No. I fancy it is only a notion of some old fogy who thinks education in
any form is dangerous for women."

"Yes, and I fancy that co-education will have about as much effect on
life generally as that solemn meeting of a society of intelligent and
fashionable women recently in one of our great cities, who met to discuss
the advisability of limiting population."