Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  “In my reading, Mr. Widfield. I read rather extensively in ancient history, as you know, and the literature of the ancients is full of proverbial philosophy. The wisdom of Solomon we now know to have been based upon the gathered wisdom of centuries.”

  “Those ancients seem to have been profoundly ungallant, I must say. What was that comparison with asinine acrobatics?”

  “When an ass climbs a ladder you may look to find wisdom in women.”

  Alicia smiled her placid little smile. “I don’t think it matters,” she said. “I don’t think men want wisdom in women — do they? Any more than donkeys on ladders?”

  “Wise head! I didn’t know you did that much thinking.”

  She took no offense. One of her strong points was a lack of personal sensitiveness, a steady sweetness of temper. It was no fun to tease her, because she would not be irritated, but Morgan was always trying.

  “Oh, well, feel, then,” she answered, still smiling. “A woman’s feelings are more valuable than her thoughts, seems to me.”

  “Right you are, Alicia!” agreed her father-in-law. “It is better to marry a quiet fool than a witty scold.”

  “Dear me, Papa, how you do run us down! One would think there were only two kinds of women to choose from.”

  The Colonel was quite in his element. He leaned forward, cheerfully rubbing his hands.

  “Four kinds, my dear, four kinds. ‘Fair and foolish, dark and proud, long and lazy, little and loud.”’

  Morgan laughed outright. “It’s no use. I’ve been up against your categories before. You have a proverb to fit every occasion. And when it comes to women, you are merciless.”

  “Why don’t you get Stella in and we can play bridge?” urged Alicia presently.

  “She’s engaged,” Morgan answered, his irritation rising once more. “That newspaperwoman is there again.”

  “What a nuisance,” his cousin agreed, and the Colonel demanded, “Why don’t you refuse to see her?”

  “She’s an old friend of Stella’s, you know — and, what’s worse, she has done things for her now and then — and just because she has put the woman under obligation she won’t turn her down, you see.”

  “How splendid of Stella,” murmured Alicia, but Morgan was too much displeased with Miss Peckham to agree with her. He did not think it splendid of Stella but rather absurd; on the other hand, he felt it distinctly nice of Alicia to see it that way.

  “We might play dummy bridge,” the Colonel suggested, but Alicia broke in with “Oh, no — let’s play solo — wasn’t that it? That game you learned out West somewhere, Morgan — if we haven’t forgotten it.” The Colonel protested that he had no head for new games, but Alicia was up at once, feeling about with a plump shining little foot for the dropped slipper, and going to bring the card table. Morgan was before her, but she insisted on helping and brought out her new packs of cards, counters, poker chips, paper and pencil.

  “Is there anything else?” she asked, looking over the array, and reassuring her father-in-law in affectionate asides, “Oh, yes — you’ll remember, Papa — you beat us last time. I can remember that! And I shall be a victim for both of you.”

  Alicia would have been an ideal partner but for her deficiency in the science of the game — of any game. She would have been an ideal opponent if her very sweetness and placidity had not somehow robbed victory of half its excitement. There is really no sport in fighting a blue-eyed lamb.

  But the Colonel made up for this by the extreme vigor of his play, his acrimony displayed in defeat; and in conquering, he showed the modest reserve of a Roman Triumph.

  That night fortune was cold to Colonel Cushing. “I’ve had enough of this,” he announced after he had been cruelly extinguished three times in succession. “You two can play cribbage or dominos or jackstraws. I’m going to smoke.”

  “It’s too bad, Papa!” Alicia comforted him. “Try again. The games are so short—”

  “They’re liable to be hours long, my dear. No, you’ll have to excuse me!”

  “Never mind, Morgan,” she amiably agreed. “You needn’t play jackstraws. Come sit over here and smoke, or talk if you want to.” She reestablished herself in her sofa corner, where the light was just right for reading or needlework or for a becoming idleness, settling into the cushions without an unnecessary motion, a picture of peaceful repose.

  Morgan watched her with a subconscious expectation of some nervous rearrangement of the pillows, some alert starting up to get something. She continued placid and motionless, her white hands relaxed in her silken lap.

  “You are a most comfortable person, Alicia,” he remarked, idly noting her graceful lines. “It’s restful just to see your placidity. Seems to me all the women nowadays have some kind of jumps.”

  Alicia smiled her friendly little smile, and said nothing at all.

  The Colonel had sunk back into his favorite chair with The Nation at hand, his usual soporific. His cigar went out for lack of due attention; his breathing grew more insistent. The gas logs purred softly, and the scent of roses was in the air.

  Alicia did not care for “plants” — they were so much trouble, she said; but cut flowers she had always about — the maid could arrange them. It was no Japanese longing for beauty on her part, nor that half-aesthetic, half-maternal instinct which makes New England winter windows into hospitals for defective geraniums, but merely a love of sweet odors.

  She herself was sweet enough, with a modest taste for perfumes, and she liked the house about her to be warmly fragrant.

  Morgan stretched his long legs toward the fire, let his head rest on the smooth stuffed back of the chair, and drew a long breath of utter relaxation.

  It certainly was comfortable with Cousin Alicia.

  Nothing but a growing sense of duty, a feeling that Miss Peckham must certainly be gone by this time and that his wife would be won dering where he was, waiting up for him, worrying about him, made him rise at last and say good night.

  Only a flight of stairs lay between this home and his, but it was with a strong impression of changing climate that he opened his own door.

  Stella was waiting as he had supposed.

  Stella had been crying, and had tried to conceal it, he could see that. She met him with a bright cheerfulness that clearly showed a lack of the full, sweet understanding which allows some margin for protest.

  “She’s gone?” he asked in a whisper.

  And Stella said: “Yes — come in, dear,” instead of “Gone hours ago — where have you been?” She did not ask where he had been, which made him feel obliged to mention it, and that again made it seem as if she thought he had something to conceal, which was utterly untrue.

  In five minutes his nervous mood came back, his forced patience, the mingling of pity and affection and weariness which was making their life so tense and strained. But when she came through the cedar-closeted dressing room to say good night to him, in her shimmering white-ribboned negligee, and stood in the doorway for a moment, her rich soft hair in two long braids that hung long over her shoulders before her, like those of some Merovingian queen, the affection rose to dominance, and he gave her good-night kisses of genuine tenderness. He fell asleep with a feeling that he had a good and beautiful wife and two fine boys, a comfortable home — and — Oh, well, women were queer, but that couldn’t be helped, and life was hard, anyway.

  She did not “fall asleep” at all, but lay for hours trying her best to climb into it, sidling up to take it unawares, striving to deceive it, shutting her eyes and breathing deep, long, steady breaths that sleep might think her overcome and make it a fact, unnoticing.

  CHAPTER 6

  Mrs. MacAvelly’s dinners exhibited no special luster of decoration, no “pecuniary canons of taste” in provision or serving. A soft-stepping, clean-gowned colored woman changed the plates and brought the dishes, and those dishes contained mere food, plain, common-place American food, of singular perfection. It was not made apparent how, livin
g in New York, she contrived to furnish her guests with roast chickens which could be carved with easy abandon, yet which sent up a tempting savor, instead of a steaming breath from the long past; which had the tenderness of youth instead of the flaccidity of age and impending dissolution. She never discussed her own household methods, though listening with sympathy and patience to the recitals of her many friends; never complained of the incompetence and expense of servants, yet condoled sweetly with those who did.

  There was a firm, round table, chairs comfortable to sit in, glasses easy to hand and lip, silver which was no tax on one’s muscles, a clear soft, becoming light, which was not on the table, a simple decoration that interposed nothing between face and face, and never too many guests for general conversation — in a word a dinner which offered good food, allowed good talk, and resembled neither a florist’s and confectioner’s display nor an exhibition of arts and crafts.

  Colonel Cushing regretted that he could not come, a dinner of his State Society preventing, but his daughter-in-law was there, also Mr and Mrs. Widfield, Mr. Tillotson, and — observed with varying interest by all the others — Mr. J. Smith.

  Mrs. MacAvelly placed Mr. Widfield at her left hand and Mr. Smith at her right, between her and Stella, then the journalist with the gently smiling Alicia between him and Morgan, and they began what promised to be a pleasant meal. So far as five persons could make it so the promise was fulfilled, but the grim insurgent face of Mr. Smith was darkly irreconcilable.

  Mrs. MacAvelly had asked her friends not to wear evening clothes on his account, and he, on their account, had halved his dinners for a week to hire a dress suit. Now he was torn between two suspicions — that he had denied himself under a mistake and was wrongly dressed, or that they had discussed his poverty and dressed down to him.

  He was inwardly planning a bitter article for one of the “labor papers” for which he wrote; satiric periods formed themselves in his mind; the very fact that he had so far considered their conventions as to wear this strange, ill-fitting garb added venom to the shafts. As he swallowed his soup in labored quiet, he was thinking: “They so utterly overestimate the value of their silly customs that when they condescend to invite a working man to their bourgeois banquets they say to themselves, ‘We must not wear our dress suits — lest he be overawed! We will wear our ordinary clothes and put him at his ease.’ They forget that their ordinary clothes are so superior to his in cloth and workmanship that a sharper contrast is shown than in their waiter’s costumes.” The last phrase pleased him, and he smiled.

  Mrs. Widfield noted the smile and saw possibilities in the dark face. “They tell me you are doing good work, Mr. Smith — work that promises greatness.”

  “I am,” he replied, facing her squarely. “Who told you?”

  “Mrs. MacAvelly heard it at the Clam Street Settlement, you know. Miss Woodstone is a good friend of yours, I am sure.”

  Again he smiled, a sort of Assyrian smile of calm, unquestioning pride. “She is. Miss Woodstone has some critical ability.”

  Stella studied him with interest. Here was one who had at least no false modesty, whatever of the true he might conceal. She glanced across at Morgan to see if he had heard, but Morgan was exchanging calm remarks with his hostess.

  Mr. Tillotson gazed on the young man with a guarded twinkle in his eye, and Alicia looked at him with approval.

  “We’ve all heard about your work, Mr. Smith, and we’re very anxious to know more of it,” she said. “You’re going to read it to us, aren’t you?”

  “I am to read a portion of some small part of it,” he replied. “A fragment of a play — as yet uncompleted.”

  Morgan did not like him. He had the not unusual American dislike of foreigners, and this man did not look to him as if his name was really Smith. All nations, in their ignorance, are apt to look down on other nations; we inherit from England that unshakable insular pride, the deeper for its narrowness; and beyond that comes the peculiar misfortune of our country, that the majority of our foreign immigrants are recruited from the poorest classes of other nations. His Southern blood had English prejudice unimpaired, and he possessed plenty of later ones as well. But also he was unshakably polite, even to Malina Peckham when he had to talk to her, so now he courteously inquired: “What is your play about? Is it a problem play?”

  Mr. Smith eyed him a little resentfully, replying: “It treats of the old problem between men and women, and of the new problem between rich and poor.”

  “Haven’t we been rich and poor almost as long as we have been men and women?” Mr. Tillotson inquired.

  “Aren’t they the same thing?” suggested Stella to him aside, whereat his twinkle grew perceptible as he smiled at her.

  But Mr. Smith was not smiling. No one should jest, before him, about poverty.

  “They are by no means the same thing,” he sternly contradicted Mrs. Widfield, “although some of the problems of sex are governed by economic conditions. But the growth of riches and of poverty — together, the dual disease of a bourgeois civilization — is the overwhelming problem of today.”

  “How can you bring it into a play?” asked Mrs. MacAvelly. And Mr. Tillotson gravely suggested: “You must have wonderful power if you can dramatize world issues as a legitimate background to personal issue.”

  Then it was Stella’s turn to give him a swift little shining smile, but Mr. Smith merely replied: “I have.”

  Alicia was visibly impressed. “Have you been writing long?” she inquired, her soft blue eyes roundly open.

  The young man was suspiciously resentful of a possible patronage on the part of Mrs. MacAvelly, and of a possible criticism on the part of Mrs. Widfield, but here was simple goodwill and admiration; here was the eternal feminine with no hidden sting.

  “I have been writing always,” he burst forth. “I learned to read before I can remember. I read always, everything I could reach. I went to school before I was big enough to work, to night school after I was at work, and to college — working always — and writing always.”

  “Miss Woodstone told me how wonderful you have been,” said his hostess. “It must be a great joy to her — it is, I know — to be part of that helpful work down there. You did find it helpful, didn’t you?”

  He swallowed hastily, evidently regarding the dinner as a bar to conversation. “The Settlement furnishes an infinitesimal fraction of the necessities of growth to an infinitesimal fraction of the poor. It is, as you say, helpful. But the horror of it is that a few people can go arbitrarily to live among the miseries of the poor, and find comfort in distributing these doles.”

  “A fragment of sponge cake in a bucket of ink.’ Sinclair called it, didn’t he?” offered Mr. Tillotson, impartially.

  Alicia showed a gentle continuity:

  “Have you written much?” she inquired.

  “I have written many words,” he answered her, “many columns, pages, sheets. But no books yet — only the newspaper work, the petty perishable work that one must do to live. The great work that might be done — the noble work the world loses because of poverty — we shall never know.”

  Mr. Tillotson smiled like sunny ice. “You see nothing great in newspaper work then, Mr. Smith?”

  “If newspapers were free they could do great work,” he answered calmly, “but what can we expect from a commercial bourgeois press?”

  Then Mrs. MacAvelly asked him a question about the drama in Russia, and paid such attention to his opinions that he turned to her with relief and pleasure, while Morgan began teasing Alicia, or trying to, about her interest in the arts, and Stella listened with pleasure to her other neighbor.

  But not all the intelligent sympathy of his kind entertainer could keep Mr. Smith from hearing the cheerful lightness of the others. When they laughed he felt an inner conviction that they were laughing at him; the gay little intimacies of the cousins he suspected to mean something more, and lowered at them with dramatic intensity. That Mrs. Widfield should prefer t
alking to Mr. Tillotson to talking to him he resented, and in any case, though he might utter epigrammatic criticism in four languages to Mrs. MacAvelly, the others were not listening. So he folded his arms, ignored the ice cream, and sat back in his chair with Jovian hauteur.

  The worst of it was that no one seemed to mind; they chattered amicably to and about and across him, and presently were all gathered in the other larger room with their coffee at hand. The percolator flashed and bubbled in a tray in a safe corner; the sugar and cream and cognac were there, and anyone could help himself or herself at will.

  “You are the only person I know, Mrs. MacAvelly,” said Mr. Tillotson, seating himself near her, “who has a chair for everyone, and everyone in his chair. How do you do it?”

  “I don’t always,” she sadly replied. “Do you see that tiny rocker over there?”

  “I see it. It’s a frail, delicate hardwood thing, palpably intended for small-sized old ladies — opinionative, straight-backed old ladies, I should think,” he replied with a critical glance.

  “And do you see that one,” she continued, “the dark-blue one yonder?” This was a chair for a lazy giant, a person whose femoral bones might have been a yard long and be still comfortable therein. “One day two men called on me. One was from Maine, very long and very heavy, all bones; the other was a diplomat from Central America, about half-size and plump as a sausage. Do what I would, they sought to thwart each other and insisted on taking each other’s chairs. The little man sat on the front edge of that blue one like — like—”

  “Like a tourist looking at the Grand Canyon,” he suggested to her smiling delight.

  “Yes, exactly. And as for the other — the Maine gentleman’s knees stood out like a katydid’s. I had to send that chair to be repaired next day. It has never quite recovered.”

  “She’s a fine creature — your Mrs. Widfield,” he observed softly, dropping sugar into his second cup. “A woman of brains evidently. But she doesn’t look contented, somehow. Why are our American women so discontented — tell me that, won’t you?”