"Oh, Ned"s no good."
"Well, then, I"ll tell my husband to----"
"Don"t you do it! I started my husband once on a thing like that and he went at it so strong--Choose a bachelor."
"That"s right. Ned"s not married. Let him do it."
"Somebody ought to."
"Say, Fannie, call Ned on the "phone."
"All right. I"ll be back in a minute."
"Say, Marge, we"ll eat at the Royal Gorge and I"ll put you and Ned side by side."
"And _I"ll_ sit next to your husband and tell him how strong Ned is with the ladies. He"ll take a good look all right."
"Now buck up, Marge, and encourage Ned a little. Don"t be a fool."
"I tell you, Marge, you"ll do a lot more with Jim by cutting up a little bit than by all this dieting you"re trying to do."
"Say, Marge, it"s a good thing you"ve got on your white broadcloth and your willow plumes."
"You can get "em at Delatour"s now for twenty-five dollars."
"h.e.l.lo, Fannie, did you get Ned?"
"I got him all right, but what do you think? He"s got another date for to-night, so he can"t come."
"Oh, flam!"
"Well, well, here"s Dora now, as usual. I suppose she"ll try to b.u.t.t in."
But she doesn"t. She just hesitates beside the table long enough to say: "Got to sweep right along, girlies. Going to buzz out to the Inland Inn for dinner with Ned. Yep. What"s the matter? You know Ned.
Our old friend Ned. The same. He"s waiting for me now. G"bye."
Talk of nerve! You have to hand it to that Dora girl!
Exit Dora. Enter Jim and five or six other men, mostly husbands to the women already present.
Jim begins by asking if anybody has seen Dora. The ensemble tells him not only that but everything else about Dora. Harry orders a round of drinks. So does Charlie. Somebody praises the drawn-b.u.t.ter sauce at the Suddington. This is met with the merits of the pineapple parfait at the La Fontaine. Jim orders a round of drinks. Jim is willing to eat his hat if Dora"s divorce wasn"t her husband"s fault. Must have been. Never saw the husband. But Dora"s character! Jim drinks off one of the c.o.c.ktails standing in front of his right-hand neighbor Frank, and returns to Dora"s character. No straighter little girl ever came to this town. On hearing this from her husband, Margaret gets up and leaves the Tea Room and goes to the Purple Parlor and cries. Fannie takes her opportunity and begins to tell Jim how attentive Ned has been lately to Margaret. This is so helpful that Jim drinks off another of Frank"s c.o.c.ktails and runs to the Purple Parlor to find Margaret. She"s still crying. He thinks she"s crying because Ned is away with Dora. He rebukes her. In King Arthur"s vein. Is he not her husband? Woman, tell him that. But dignity soon tapers off with him into the "Now I warn you to cut it out" of the tyrannical manikin with a cinder in the eye of his self-conceit. Their friends hear them quarreling and follow them into the Purple Parlor. There"s a terrible row in the Purple Parlor. The Purple Parlor is full of persons explaining. Fannie explains. Charlie explains. Each person explains, individually, to each other person, individually. Each couple reaches a satisfactory explanation. But, somehow, when they start to explain that explanation to the next couple, it vanishes. Everybody runs about trying to find it. The waiter runs about trying to find the gen"l"man to pay for the undrunk drinks back in the Tea Room. Frank, being the only member of the party who hasn"t been drinking, can"t help seeing what the waiter means. He pays the bill. Then he exerts himself like a sheep-dog and runs the whole crowd down the corridor and out into a couple of taxicabs. The air reminds them of unsatisfied appet.i.tes.
Conjugal problems are things of the past. As the taxicabs jump out from the curb to the street-center everybody"s head is out of window and everybody"s voice is saying "The Suddington," "The Grunewurst,"
"Max"s," "The Royal Gorge," "Perinique"s."
The revulsion from empty leisure in the direction of full-every-night leisure is balanced to some extent by a revulsion toward activity of a useful sort. This latter revulsion has two phases: Economic Independence, which has been spoken of in former chapters; Social Service and Citizenship, which will be spoken of in the next chapter.
Which one of these two revulsions will be the stronger? If it is the one toward useful activity, we shall see a dam erected against the current which, in carrying women out of the struggle for existence, carries them out of the world"s mental life. If it is the one toward frivolity, we shall see simply an acceleration of that current and a quicker and larger departure from all those habits of toil and of service which produce power and character.
With marriage, of course, Marie had a certain opportunity to get back into life. She had before her at least fifteen years of real work. And it would have been work of the realest sort. Effort--to and beyond all other effort! The carrying of new life in fear, the delivery of it in torture, the nourishing of it in relinquishment of all the world"s worldliness, the watching over it in sleeplessness, the healing of its sickness in heart-sickness, the bringing of it, with its body strong, its mind matured, up into the world of adults, up into the struggle for existence! What a work!
But what a preparation for it had Marie!
She flinched from it. The inertia of her mind carried her to the ultimate logic of her life. Along about the time of her marriage she began to cease to be the typical normal girl of her type.
She became a woman of the future--_of her type_.
From the facts of modern leisure the positive character reacts toward novel activity. It may be a reaction toward Civic Service.
Or toward Self-Support. Or toward an enormous never-before-witnessed expenditure of intelligent care on the physical and mental education of children. The positive character, fighting modern facts, creates new ideals. The character which is neither positive nor negative runs along as a neutral mixture of the old ideals and of the modern facts, of child-rearing made amateurish by idling and of idling made irritable by child-rearing. The negative character--like Marie"s--just yields to the modern facts and is swept along by them into final irresponsibility and inutility.
But Marie wasn"t negative enough--she wasn"t _emotional_ enough in her negativeness--to plunge into _dissipation_. It wasn"t in her nature to do any _plunging_ of any kind. Good, safe, motionless _sponging_ was her instinct. And she will die in the odor of tubbed and scrubbed respectability. And if you knew her you would like her very much. She is charming.
When she and Chunk were married, they went to live in an apartment appropriate to a rising young man, and Marie"s job was on all occasions to look as appropriate as the apartment.
No shallow cynicism, this! Just plain, bald truth without any wig on it. The only thing that you could put your finger on that Marie really did was so to wear clothes and so to give parties as to be the barometer of her husband"s prosperity. And in every city you can see lots of such barometers giving themselves an artificially high reading in order to create that "atmosphere" of success which is a recognized commercial a.s.set.
Chunk was hugely pleased with Marie. She looked good at the dinner table in the cafe of their apartment building. She knew how to order the right dishes when they entertained and dined down town. She made it possible for him to return deftly and engagingly the social attentions of older people. She completed the "front" of his life, and he not only supported her but, as Miss Salmon, of Va.s.sar, flippantly and seriously says, he "sported" her as he might a diamond shirt stud.
No struggle in Marie"s life so far! No _having_ to swim in the cold water of daily enforced duty or else sink. _No being accustomed to the disagreeable feel of that water._
She had missed work. That was nothing. She had missed being _hardened_ to work. That was everything.
The first demand ever made on her for really disagreeable effort came when Chunk, in order to get a new factory going, had to move for a while to Junction City. When Marie bitterly and furiously objected, Chunk was severely astonished. Why, he had to go! It was necessary.
But there had been no necessity in Marie"s experience. They became quarrelsome about it. Then stubborn. Marie talked about her mother and her friends and how she loved them (which was true) and stayed.
For two years she inhabited Chunk"s flat in the city and lived on Chunk"s monthly check.
She and Chunk were married. Chunk was to support her. He was the man nearest to her. Her father had once supported her. Her job then had been Being Nice. Her father had supported her for that, even after she had grown up. Well, she still was nice. And she still was, and deserved to be, supported. Perfectly logical.
For two years, neither really daughter now nor really wife, not being obliged any longer even to make suggestions to her mother about what to have for dinner, not being obliged any longer even to think out the parties for Chunk"s business friends, she did nothing but become more and more firmly fixed in her inertia, in her incapacity for hardship, in her horror of pain.
When Chunk came back from Junction City and was really convinced that she didn"t want children he was not merely astonished. He thought the world had capsized.
In a way he was right. The world is turning round and over and back to that one previous historical era when the aversion to childbearing was widespread.
Once, just once, before our time, there was a modern world. Once, just once, though not on the scale we know it, there was, before us, a diffusion of leisure.
The causes were similar.
The Romans conquered the world by military force, just as we have conquered it by mechanical invention. They lived on the plunder of despoiled peoples, just as we live on the products of exploited continents. They had slaves in mult.i.tudes, just as we have machines in ma.s.ses. Because of the slaves, there were hundreds of thousands of their women, in the times of the Empire, who had only denatured housekeeping to do, just as to-day there are millions of our women who, because of machines, have only that kind of housekeeping to do.
Along with leisure and semi-leisure, they acquired its consequences, just as we have acquired them. And the sermons of Augustus Caesar, first hero of their completed modernity, against childlessness are perfect precedents for those of Theodore Roosevelt, first hero of ours.
Augustus, however, addressed himself mainly to the men, who entered into marriage late, or did not enter into it at all, for reasons identical with ours--the increased compet.i.tiveness of the modern life and the decreased usefulness of the modern wife. It was the satirists who addressed themselves particularly to the women. And their tirades against idleness, frivolity, luxury, dissipation, divorce, and aversion to childbearing leave nothing to be desired, in comparison with modern efforts, for effectiveness in rhetoric--or for ineffectiveness in result.
Now it could not have been the woman who desires economic independence through self-support who was responsible for the ultimate aversion to child-bearing in the Roman world--for she did not exist. It could not have been the woman who desires full citizenship--for _she_ did not exist. What economic power and what political power the Roman Empire woman desired and achieved was parasitic--the economic power which comes from the inheritance of estates, the political power which comes from the exercise of s.e.xual charm.
The one essential difference between the women of that ancient modern world and the women of this contemporary modern world is in the emergence, along with really democratic ideals, of the agitation for equal economic and political opportunity.