Told in a French Garden, Mildred Aldrich [children's ebooks online TXT] 📗

the very last moment, if women did not so rigidly hold them to their promises, and if, between two ridiculous positions, marriage having been pushed nearest, had not become desperately inevitable."

"How absurd, Naomi, when you see the whole procession of men walking, according to their dispositions calmly or eagerly to their fate every day."

"Nevertheless, I think the pre nuptial confessions of a majority of men of our class, would prove that what I say is true."

"Are you hinting that it was true in your case?"

"Perhaps."

Shattuck gave an amused laugh. "Do you mean to say that you kept me to the point?"

"Not exactly. At that time I had an able bodied father who would have had to be dealt with. Besides, a man does not own up even to himself not always when he finds himself face to face with the inevitable. I am not speaking of what men talk about in such cases, or of what they do, but of what they feel, of the fact that, in too many instances, Nature not having meant men for bondage, after they have passed the Rubicon to that spot from which the code of civilized honor does not permit them to turn back, they usually have a period of regret, and are forced to make a real effort to face the Future, to go on, in fact."

The smile had died out of Shattuck's face and he said quite seriously: "As far as we are concerned, Naomi, I have very different recollections of the whole affair."

"Have you? And yet, months before we were married, I knew that it would not have broken your heart if the wedding had not come off at all."

"My dear, the modern heart does not break easily in this age. We are schooled to meet the accidents of life with some philosophy."

"And yet to have lost you then, would have killed me."

Shattuck looked at her sharply, with, one might almost have said, a new interest, but she was no longer looking at him. She went on, hurriedly: "You loved me, of course. I was of your world. I was a woman that other men liked, and therefore a desirable woman. I was of good family altogether your social equal, in fact, quite the sort of woman it became you to marry. I pleased you and I loved you."

"Thank you, my dear," he said. "In ten years, I doubt if you have ever made so frank a declaration as that in words." He was wondering, if, after all, she were going to develop into an emotional woman, and his heart gave a quick leap at the very thought for there are hours when a woman who runs too much to head has a man at a cruel disadvantage.

"Things are so much harder, so much more complex for a woman," she went on.

"For the protection of the community?"

"Perhaps. Still, it is not always pleasant to be a woman, and yet think; a woman whose reason has been mistakenly developed at the expense of her capacity to enjoy being a woman, and who is forced at the same time to encounter the laws of Nature, and pay at the same time, the penalty of being a woman, and the penalty of knowledge. For, just so surely as we live, we must encounter love. "

"You might take it out," interrupted the husband, "in feeling flattered that it takes so much to conquer such as you."

"So we might, but that, once conquered, neither man nor Nature has any further use for us, and regret, like art, is long. Not even you can deny," she exclaimed, sitting up in some excitement, and letting her cushions fall in a mess all about her, "that life is very unfair to women."

"Well, I don't see that. Physically it is a little rough on you, but there are compensations."

"I have never been able to discover them. Love itself is hard on a woman. It seems to stir a man's faculties healthily. They seem the stronger and more fit for it. It does not seem to uproot a man's whole being. Does it serve women in that way?"

"I bear witness that it makes some of you deucedly handsome. And I have heard that it makes some of you good."

"Yes, as chastisement does. No, Life seems to have adjusted matters between men and women very badly, very unjustly."

"And yet, as this life is the only one we know we must adjust ourselves to it as we find it."

"No, no. We had better have accepted the thing as Nature gave it to us. We came into this world like beasts why aren't we content to live like beasts, and make no pretenses? Women would have nothing to expect then, and there'd be no such thing as broken hearts. In spite of all the polish of civilization, man is simply bent on conquest. Woman is only one phase of the chase to him a chase in which every active virile man is occupied from his cradle to his grave. You are the conquerors. We are simply the conquered."

Shattuck tried to make his voice light, as he said: "Not always unhappy ones, I fancy."

"I suppose all men flatter themselves that way, and argue that probably the Sabine women preferred their fate to no fate at all."

"Don't be bitter on so old and impersonal a topic, Naomi. It is the law of life that one must give, and one must take. That the emotions differ does not prove that one is better than the other."

Shattuck took a turn up and down the long room, not quite at ease with himself.

Mrs. Shattuck seemed to be thinking. As he passed her, he stopped, picked up her cushions, and re arranged them about her, with an idle caress by the way, a kiss gently dropped on the inside of her white wrist.

She followed his every movement with a strange speculative look in her eyes, almost as if he were some new and strange animal that she was studying for the first time.

When she spoke again, it was to go on as if she had not been interrupted, "It seems to me that man comes out of a great passion just as good as new, while a woman is shattered in a moral sense and never fully recovers herself."

Shattuck's back was toward her when he replied. "Sorry to spoil any more illusions, dear child, but how about the long list of men who are annually ruined by it? The men in the prisons, the men who kill themselves, the men who hang for it?"

"Those are crimes. I am not talking of the criminal classes, but of the world in which normal people live."

"Our set," he laughed, "but that is not the whole world, alas!"

"I know that men well bred, cultivated, refined, even honorable men, seem to be able to repeat every emotion of life. A woman scales the heights but once. Hence it must depend, in the case of women capable of deep love on the men whether the relation into which marriage betrays them be decent or indecent. What I should like to be able to discover is what provision does either man or civilization propose to make for the woman whom Fate, in wanton irony, reduces, even in marriage, to the self considered level of the girl in the street?"

There was amazement even a foreboding on Shattuck's face as he paused in his walk, and, for the first time speaking anxiously ejaculated, "I swear I don't follow you!"

She went on as if she had not been interrupted, as if she had something to say which had to be said, as if she were reasoning it out for herself: "Take my case. I don't claim that it is uncommon. I do claim that I was not the woman for the situation. I was an only child. My father's marriage had not been happy. I was brought up by a disappointed man on philosophy and pessimism."

"Old sceptics, and modern scoffers. I remember it well."

"Before I was out of my teens, I had imbibed a mistrust for all emotions. Perhaps you did not know that? You may have thought, because they were not all on the outside, that I had none. My poor father had hoped, with his teachings, to save me from future misery. He had probably thought to spare me the commonplace sorrows of love. But he could not."

"There is one thing, my child, that the passing generation cannot do for its heirs live for them luckily. Why, you might as well forbid a rose to blossom by word of mouth, as try to thwart nature in a beautiful healthy woman."

"It seems to me that to bring up a woman as I was brought up only prepares her to take the distemper the quicker."

"I do not remember that of you. But I do know that no woman was ever wooed as hotly as you were or ever I swear it more ardently desired. No woman ever led a man the chase you led me. If ever in those days you were as anxious for my love as you have said you were this evening, no one would have guessed it, least of all I."

"My reason had already taught me that mine was but the common fate of all women: that life was demanding of me the usual tribute to posterity: that the sweetness of the emotion was Nature's trick to make it endurable. But according to Nature's eternal plan, my heart could not listen to my head it beat so loud when you were by, it could not hear, perhaps. But there was something of my father's philosophy left in me, and when I was alone it would speak, and be heard, too. Even when I believed in you because I wanted to and half hoped that all my teaching was wrong, I made a bargain with myself. I told myself, quite calmly, that I knew perfectly well all the possibilities of the future. That if I went forward with you, I went forward deliberately with open eyes, knowing what, logically, I might expect to find in the future. Ignorance that blissful comfort of so many women, was denied me. Still, the spell of Nature was upon me, and for a time I dreamed that a depth of passionate love like mine, a life of loyal devotion might wrap one man round, and keep him safe might in fact, work a miracle and make one polygamous man monogamous. But, even while that hope was in my heart, reason rose up and mocked it, bidding me advance into the Future at my peril. I did it, but I made a bargain with myself, I agreed to abide the consequences and to abide them calmly."

"And during all those days when I supposed we were so near together you showed me nothing of this that was in your heart."

"Men and women know very rarely anything of the great struggles that go on in the hearts of one another. Besides, I knew how easily you would reply naturally. We are all on the defensive in this life. It was with things deeper than words that I was dealing the things one _does_ not says.