"I rather think, Mrs. Blodgett," said Mr. Whitely, in that charmingly deferential manner he has with women, "that some men do not try to win highly educated women because they are abashed by a sense of their own inferiority."
"Where do those men hide themselves, Whitely?" interrogated Mr.
Blodgett.
"I"ll not question the reason," retorted Mrs. Blodgett. "The fact that over-educated girls think themselves above men is all I claim."
"I don"t think, Mrs. Blodgett," you corrected, "it is so much a feeling of superiority as it is a change in the aims of marriage. Formerly, woman married to gain a protector, and man to gain a housewife. Now, matrimony is sought far less for service, and far more for companionship."
"But, Miss Walton," questioned Mr. Whitely, "does not the woman ask too much nowadays? She has the leisure to read and study, but a business man cannot spare the time. Is it fair, then, to expect that he shall be as cultivated as she can make herself?"
"That is, I think, the real cause for complaint," you answered. "The business man is so absorbed in money-making that he sacrifices his whole time to it. I can understand a woman falling in love with a lance or a sword, dull companions though they must have been, but it seems to me impossible for any woman to love a minting-machine, even though she might be driven to marry it for its product."
"That"s rough on us, Whitely," laughed Mr. Blodgett good-naturedly; but Mr. Whitely reddened, and you, as if to divert the subject from this personal tendency, turned and surmised to me:--
"I suppose that as a German, Dr. Hartzmann, you think a woman should be nothing more than a housekeeper?"
"Why not suggest, Miss Walton," I replied, smiling, "that as an Orientalist I must think the seraglio woman"s proper sphere?"
"But, Miss Walton," persisted Mr. Whitely, not accepting your diversion, "a man, to be successful nowadays, must give all his attention to his business.
"I presume that is so," you acceded; "but could he not be content with a little less success in money-making, and strive to acquire a few more amenities?"
"Maizie wants us all to be painters and poets and musicians," a.s.serted Mr. Blodgett.
"Not at all," you denied.
"Oh, Maizie!" cried Agnes. "You know you said the other day that you hoped I wouldn"t marry a business man."
"I said "_only_ a business man," Agnes," you replied, without a trace of the embarra.s.sment so many women would have shown. "Because men cannot all be clergymen is no reason for their knowing nothing of religion.
There would be no painters, poets, or musicians if there were no dilettanti."
"Yet I think," argued Mr. Whitely, still as if he were trying to convince you of something, "that the successful business man has as much brain as most writers or artists."
"I have no doubt that is true," you a.s.sented. "So, too, a day laborer may have a good mind. But of what avail is a brain if it has never been trained, or has been trained to know only one thing?"
"But authors and painters are only specialists," urged Mr. Whitely.
"They are specialists of a very different type," you responded, "from the man whose daily thoughts are engrossed with the prices of pig-iron or cotton sheetings. I think one reason why American girls frequently marry Europeans is that the foreign man is so apt to be more broadly cultivated."
"That"s what I mean by saying that books unfit women to marry wisely,"
interjected Mrs. Blodgett. "They marry foreigners because they are more cultivated, without a thought of character."
"Indeed, Mrs. Blodgett," you observed, "has not the day gone by for thinking dullness a sign of honesty? And certainly a business career is far more likely to corrupt and harden men"s natures than the higher professions, for its temptations and strifes are so much greater."
Your opinion was so in accord with what my father had often preached that I could not but wonder if his teachings still colored your thoughts. To test this idea as well as to learn your present view, I recurred to another theory of his by saying, "Does not the broader and more sensitive nature of the scholar or artist involve defects fully as serious as the hardness and narrowness of the business man? Some one has said that "to marry a literary man is to domesticate a bundle of nerves.""
"A nervous irritability," you replied, "which came from fine mental exertion, would be as nothing compared to my own fretting over enforced companionship with an unsympathetic or sordid nature." Then you laughed, and added, "I must have a very bad temper, for it is the only one which ever really annoys me."
That last speech told me how thoroughly the woman of twenty-three was a development of the child of fourteen, for I remembered how little my mother"s anger used to disturb you, but how deeply and strongly your emotions affected you. I suppose it was absurd, but I felt happy to think that you had changed so little in character from the time when I knew you so well. And from that evening I never for an instant believed that you would marry Mr. Whitely, for I was sure that you could never love him. How could I dream that you, with beauty, social position, and wealth, would make a loveless marriage?
Good-night, my love.
XI
_March 2._ The truth of the difference of quality between the business man and the scholar was quickly brought home to me. On the last evening of my visit, Mr. Blodgett revealed the reason for his latest kindness.
"I got you here," he explained, "to look you over and see what you were fit for, thinking I might work you in somewhere. No," he continued, as he saw the questioning hopefulness on my face, "you wouldn"t do in business. You"ve got a sight too much conscience and sympathy, and a sight too little drive. All business is getting the best of somebody else, and you"re the kind of chap who"d let a fellow up just because you"d got him down." Seeing the sadness in my face, for I knew too well he had fathomed me, he added kindly, "Don"t get chicken-hearted over what I say. It"s easy enough to outwit a man; the hard thing is not to do it. I"d go out of the trade to-morrow, if it weren"t for the boss and Agnes, for I get tired of the meanness of the whole thing. But they want to cut a figure, and that isn"t to be done in this town for nothing.
I"ll find something for you yet that sha"n"t make you sell your heart and your soul as well as your time."
I was too full of my love and my purpose, however, for this to discourage me. The moment my determination to remain in New York was taken, I wrote to Jastrow, Humzel, and others of my German friends, telling them that for business reasons I had decided to be known as Rudolph Hartzmann, and asking if they would stretch friendship so far as to give me letters in that name to such American publishers and editors as they knew. Excepting Jastrow, they all responded with introductions so flattering that I was almost ashamed to present them, and he wrote me that he had not offered my books for sale, and begged me to reconsider my refusal of the professorship. He even offered, if I would accept the appointment, to divide with me his tuition fees, and suggested that his own advancing years were a pledge that his position would erelong be vacant for me to step into. It almost broke my heart to have to write him that I could not accept his generous offer. In July I received a second letter from him, most touching in its attempt to keep back the grief he felt, but yielding to my determination. He sent me many good introductions, and submitted a bid for my library from a bookseller; but knowing the books to be worth at least double the offer, I held the sale in abeyance.
My first six months in New York disheartened me greatly, though now I know that I succeeded far better than I could have expected to do, in the dullness of the summer. My work was the proof-reading of my book of travel in its varying polyglots, seeing through the press English versions of my two text-books, and writing a third in both English and German. Furthermore, my letters of introduction had made me known to a number of the professors of Columbia College, and by their influence I received an appointment to deliver a course of lectures on race movements the following winter; so I prepared my notes in this leisure time. But this work was far too little to fill my time, and I wrote all kinds of editorials, essays, and reviews, fairly wearing out the editors of the various magazines and newspapers with my frequent calls and articles. Finally I attempted to sell my books to several libraries; but though the tomes and the price both tempted several, none had the money to spend on such a collection.
My book of travel was published in September, was praised by the reviews, and at once sprang into a good sale for a work of that cla.s.s; for Europe is interested in whatever bears on her cancer growth, commonly called the Eastern question. Since Europeans approved the book, Americans at once bought and discussed it; to prove, I suppose, that as a nation we are no longer tainted with provincialism,--as if that very subservience to transatlantic opinion were not the best proof that the virus still works within us. It was issued anonymously, through the fear that if I put my pseudonym on the t.i.tle-page it might lead to inquiry about the author which would reveal his ident.i.ty with Donald Maitland, for whom I only wished oblivion. As a result the question of authorship was much mooted, some declaring a well-known Oxford professor to be the man, others ascribing the volume to a famous German traveler, and Humzel being named by some; but most of the reviews suggested that it was the work of an Eastern savant, and I presume that my style was tinged with orientalism.
You cannot tell what a delight it was to me to learn, at our first meeting in the autumn, that you had read my book. I went in November to the Lenox Library to verify a date, and found you there. I could not help interrupting your reading for a moment,--I had so longed for a glimpse and a word,--and you took my intrusion in good part. I drew a book and pretended to read, merely to veil my covert watching of you; and when you rose to go, I asked permission to walk with you.
"Your notebook suggests that you are a writer by profession, Dr.
Hartzmann?" you surmised.
"Yes."
"And you have to come to America for material?"
"I have come to America permanently."
"How unusual!"
"In what respect?"
"For a European writer to come to New York to do more than lecture about himself, have his vanity and purse fed, and return home to write a book about us that we alone read."
I laughed and said, "You make me very glad that I am the exception to the rule."
"I presume more would make the venture if they found the atmosphere less uncongenial. New York as a whole is so absorbed in the task of trans-shipping the products of the busiest nations of two continents that everything is ranked as secondary that does not subserve that end: and the Muses starve."
"I suppose New York is not the best of places in which to live by art or letters, if compared with London or Paris; yet if a man can do what the world wants done, he can earn a livelihood here."
"But he cannot gain the great prizes that alone are worth the winning, I fear. I have noticed that American writers only reach American audiences, while European authors not merely win attention at home, but have vogue and sale here. The London or Paris label is quite as effective in New York or Chicago in selling books as in selling clothes."
"I suppose cultivated Europe is as heedless of the newer peoples as the peoples of the Orient are of those of the Occident. Yet I think that if as good work were turned out in this country as in the Old World, the place of its production would not seriously militate against its success."
"And have you found it so?"
"Nothing I have yet written in this country merits Continental attention."