Chapter VIII: Part 8

I have written at some length in ‘My Book and Heart’ of this old cabin and the surroundings, but I am setting down now the real reason for coming here. It was to escape the mind and will of the world, to practice my own will and mind in living and so find happiness--that animation of the mortal spirit which is far more refreshing than peace.

It was my way of laying claim to my own life. I am now in a position to say that I very much doubt whether there is such a thing as a human life which belongs exclusively to one person. It is something we borrow from other men, from books, from a thousand sources, and something we spend or lend likewise; but life does not belong to us as it does to other living creatures, nor even to the grass. We are the most dependent of all God’s creatures, not only upon one another, but upon the beasts of the fields and upon everything that lives. And nothing we win, even if it is everything, can possibly satisfy us. I suppose this is one of those terrific provisions of Providence to keep us doing and moving toward some far-off divine event.

What follows is the record of my adventures in this business. Launcelot looking for the Holy Grail never traveled farther or endured greater hardships than I have in this narrow valley looking for happiness. I have worn all my virtues to a frazzle and I am about to grow old in sorrowful defeats without attaining even the bright rim of the cup of happiness. And now, when maybe it is too late, I have discovered the mistake I made. This is scarcely reason enough to go on with these annals, because when at the end I prove it and set it down in plain words, not one who reads this tale can avoid making it. We are the perpetual victims of an illusion. We may as well take what comes, whether it is happiness or not, and avoid the struggle.

XLII

VARIOUS TYPES OF WOMEN

I suppose women are one of the essential provisions of Nature, but in our minds we have never been satisfied with the arrangement. We feel that there is some kind of imposition connected with it. We were simply thought of afterwards; we were not an inspiration of creation, but we were created to meet a necessity afterwards. This makes a difference. We are not quite normal as men are. We still have a futile instinct to escape from what we are. Thousands and thousands of years have not made us contented and at home in ourselves. No man ever wished himself a woman, but ask any one of us and if she is in a truthful mood she will admit that she wishes she were a man. I have no doubt Eve regretted she was not Adam.

Circumstances have favored us. From winning privileges, protections and perquisites as we came up through the ages, we are at last getting some queer advantages of the situation one way or another. But this makes no difference. If we obtain the balance of power we seek, live the lives men live and do the things they do, we shall still be women, subject as usual to fits of nerves and tears on account of the long strain of not being quite normal and at home in ourselves.

But when you have been a woman a long time, and have grown accustomed, you may say by defeat, to the sensations of being one, you may look back through your mind, which is quite different from looking back through your history, and pick up much strange information about yourself which you would never discover except in the retrospect.

For example, seeing the woman I used to be more clearly than I could possibly have seen and measured her then, it occurs to me that I may have been a kind of idiot, femininely speaking. What I mean is that I seem to have been almost totally devoid of that engaging self-consciousness which makes women noticeable and attractive to men. I am embarrassed lest my husband may have found me delinquent in the mere airs of femininity. I do not recall ever being coquettish or feeling attractive; merely honest, kind, devoted, and at times freakishly witty or gravely intelligent.

Maybe this was due to the fact that I was not pretty as men see prettiness, and knew it, although I always felt beautiful, and must have been absurdly contented with this inward conviction. Still I have known many a homely woman who was amazingly attractive, like that heroine in one of Madame de Staël’s novels to whose ‘bright dark homeliness’ she refers so flatteringly. That is the point--if you must be homely it is better to be dark about it. With black hair, black eyes and even a swarthy skin you have only to turn on your light from within to glow. I am too fair, not enough contrast between my blondness and any brightness of expression I could turn on. Besides, I have what would be called a lofty brow in a man, which gives me a damnably noble look so far as beauty is concerned. During the thin years of my earlier womanhood it was out of all sweetly feminine proportion to the lower part of my face.

I am only suggesting a probable explanation, you understand; not that I believe it myself, but hope some one else will. The feeling I have now is that I missed part of my conduct as a woman at a time when it might have contributed some to that happiness which I have also missed. What I should like to know is whether women who have flown their banners in many men’s hearts during their youth have memories of happiness that I have not got. Do they recall those episodes with pleasure? Or do they recall them at all? I have a queer, ruthless feeling that I could have forgotten many men, and remembered forever only one. I wish I knew what so many other women know about this. Maybe it is idle curiosity, but it feels like lines I failed to recite in living.

At this late day I wonder what Lundy really thought of me. I have observed this--that very few wives know what their husbands think of them. I even wonder sometimes with the gravest trepidations what he would think of me now. I have grown so sensible. I have almost lost the gift of doing anything foolish and sweetly feminine, if I ever had it. And yet the woman I never have been sits and looks through this bright veil of mysteries, as we sometimes gaze reverently at the masterpiece we never could have painted.

The only consolation I get in such a mood is a mean one. The women I have known who enjoyed all these benefits do not impress me as being eased by their experiences. I can think of a dozen who were belles in their youth, who were happily married, who enjoyed all the distinctions society and wealth can confer upon charming women. And now, at my age, they have a curious, beautifully painted, bankrupt expression, as if they had lost several fortunes and were facing the direst poverty in their old age. I may be mistaken about this. They may have acquired that restless, frantic look characteristic of them from habit on account of doing things instead of sitting for years thinking things as I have done.

Still, I feel like a stranger among them, as if they had practiced some kind of feminine wit and dexterity in living that I do not know. I believe it is something they learned of themselves which I cannot learn. They know how to make an attraction of their modesty.

Now I have often wondered whether modesty is a cultivated virtue or a quality of femininity. If it is a virtue to be attained by taking thought, I have lacked it through the whole of my life. For I have never been consciously modest, nor even felt the need of protecting myself anywhere, nor the least anxiety about remaining neatly folded and decent to the last.

One of the mysteries of feminine consciousness which I have never fathomed is why so many women feel in some vague danger from men. Why do they look under the bed to make sure no man is there? Years ago I was going to prayer meeting one evening in a city accompanied by a spinster. She was a dear good soul, but you may say almost conscientiously homely. This was during that period when we wore broad black leather belts to gear in our shirt waists and skirts. We were stepping primly around the corner to the church when my companion leaped into the air and screamed. Clinging to me in the wildest terror, she vowed that a man had seized her by the belt from behind. It was no use to ask her if she was sure it was a man: they always know it is a man if anything happens to them. He alone is the plausible explanation. It was a fact that she had lost her belt. The buckle had slipped and it lay directly behind us on the pavement. Now why did she do that? One might be tempted to suspect some indelicate lesion of the imagination if it were not for the fact that good women, pure enough in heart to see God, are subject to these vagaries.

When I had lived alone in this old cabin for ten years, without ever suspecting it of having a man concealed in it, a friend came to spend a month with me. She was seven years my senior, and you may say the very pincushion of every feminine virtue, very modest. Nevertheless, every evening before she retired she would take her candle and go man-hunting through the house, upstairs, downstairs, and even into both basements--just to make sure no man was in it.

Sometimes in the deeper, darker hours of the night she would appear like a ghost in my room to whisper excitedly that she was sure she had heard a man in the house. Then we would start forth to find this wraith of her imagination, two elderly women buttoned to the chin in our plain middle-aged nighties, her gray hair and my thin hair skewed so tightly that it left nothing to be revealed concerning our faded faces--terrible looking, but harmless creatures, bearing our quaking candles, thrusting them into such corners and places as burglars only inhabit in the feminine imagination. If we had actually discovered one it would not have been we but the burglar who must have fainted at the sight of us.

She could never realize the absurdity of these fruitless adventures, but I always felt embarrassed and apologetic to mankind in general. A woman must have more presumption than I have ever felt to imagine herself in any kind of danger from men.

But that is my point. They are the more womanly women, and the dearer kind to men. The telepathy of terror they experience toward this imaginary man is none the less telepathy when they are not alarmed if they are in social sight and distance of men. I suppose in the dark or when they are alone and unprotected their fears are due to the survival of a primitive instinct, out of date now, like the appendix in the human body, but brought up with them from that far time when women were in real danger of being seized and borne off by some marauding knight on his saddlebow.

I suppose in the daytime, in the parlor or on the street, when these same women are armed to the teeth with every charm, it is the same instinct of self-consciousness in a victorious mood. They are on the offensive then and more or less irresistible. For men certainly are more easily attracted by the self-conscious woman, whether she is shrinkingly or boldly so, than they are by one who sleeps soundly unmindful of them and who goes about her business the next day with no animated sense of them.

What I mean is that modesty of this kind is the fine art of self-consciousness, and to be without it is to be femininely stupid, no matter how much other sense you have. At my age, I suppose no woman with a proper sense of dignity would want romantic attention. It would come to the same thing as being caricatured. Even at that, I do get tired sometimes of seeing in every man’s eye with whom I deal that I have come to do business with him or that he has come to do business with me. I feel the need of a little more versatility of manners between us. I should like to take a pleasant feminine shot at him as I see other women do, but so far as I know I have never capered one such glancing remark at a man, even if I met him upon my own copygrounds, much less in a business way. And I have wished for compliments, not aimed at my brains or my diligence, as other women wish much more fortunately, but no man ever lies in that beautiful way to me.

I am not regretting the dignity of my conduct, nor the awful dignity with which I am treated; but I am merely intimating that it is dry stuff being a woman when some dull wisdom in you keeps you from acting altogether like one. It is a tearful thing to know that you will go down to your grave loved and honored for the good you have done and not for the sweetness and loveliness of the woman you were or might, could or would have been if you had used your mind less and your talents more.

It would be interesting to know how the modern woman is coming out at this point. They are bolder than we were. I read of one lately who left her husband listening on the front porch while she went back in the dark house and shot the burglar whom he was too sensible to face. And it is absolutely amazing to me how many of them kill their own husbands upon provocations that formerly drew only a few tears from a wife. To slay your husband, no matter what kind of husband he is, seems to me a frightful kind of suicide. Formerly only men killed their wives. Now they flunk and desert them. They have lost some power of endurance they used to have with all their faults in the married relation. As near as I can make out, two people who marry now are not one in the sense we used to be, because from the start they contemplate no such involving unity. We are founding a precarious domestic life upon the grounds of mutual intolerance.

I do not know how they have managed it, but it is perfectly clear to an observing person that modern men are shy of modern women not as fellow sports but as prospective husbands. Maybe it is because so many women sue for alimony, when they used to give up and do the best they could according to their marriage vows. Maybe it is because so many young women now will bring suit for damages on account of a breach of promise and prove the latter by the signature of a love letter.

In my day, if a girl was jilted she died of a broken heart, or became an old maid, or married better, and nothing was said of that earlier affair. Getting damages evens matters up, but it does seem strangely gross and unwomanly to do such a thing, as if the victoress sold her self-respect in the open court for so many thousand dollars. Can the definition of self-respect change with the changing times with a woman? I have often wondered how they feel when they win such a suit.

The effect of all this courage in women is to develop the bump of matrimonial caution in the best men to the point of absurdity. I remember very well the first hero we had in American fiction who dared not write letters like Saint Paul, with his own hand, to his lady love, lest these should be used as evidence against him. This was Annixter in Frank Norris’s novel, ‘The Octopus.’ We thought at the time that this was a false note in the story. Now the world is teeming with these discreet young bachelors.

The fashion of what we are is changing. Women do seem to have a better working knowledge of men than they had even a dozen years ago. But I am wondering how it will turn out. If you are by nature the weaker vessel, it is a dangerous thing to break too many of the stronger vessels. We need them. The safest and wisest way of getting the better of a man if you are a woman is by sticking to him.

XLIII

MERE MIND

The trouble is that I have been too much concerned in writing the scriptures of human hearts according to the light of my own heart. One cannot be such an interpreter and figure at the same time as the sophisticated heroine of an adventurous and highly colored existence. Will no one appreciate the delicacy and courtesy I have shown in failing to reveal his sins by not recording mine? Then, indeed, I should deserve the charge of having lived a particularly narrow and uninteresting life.

No one will bury me on top of a high mountain in honor of my brilliant transgressions or make a pilgrimage to lay wreaths upon my tomb later. Any respectable person could commit them and get away with it. I have a temper which perpetually glows like a coal of fire on my altar. The lies I tell as a rule are good little lies offered to comfort somebody, or to shield myself from the snooping eye of the uncharitable. I have no more conscience about that than softly closing the door of my chamber when the devil passes by.

I am an ungodly, intemperate and uncharitable woman when it comes to bearing with laziness and shiftlessness. I still believe an idle brain is the devil’s workshop. If I exposed some of the convictions I entertain along this line, they would forever bar me from polite society. I am so profoundly conscious of my own sex that I cannot endure the license of modern conversation on this subject. Not only that, but I am so mean-minded that I cannot believe the people who indulge in it have decent minds, no matter how high and noble they look at the time or what excellent diction they use.

I believe firmly in the fig leaves of language and that God still walks in the garden in the cool of the evening, looking for that damned Adam of us all. I believe the mere minds we have lead to mischief. They are roguish and unscrupulous. I believe that we are in touch with something else, spirit, which leads to righteousness, honor, and things of good report. I am not pretending, however, to keep up this connection.

Just let me make a good resolution, especially to the effect that I will exercise charity toward all and malice toward none, and I am sure to fly off the handle before that day is done to administer mortal justice merely, you may say, as a public service against a neighbor who has cheated, or beaten his horse unmercifully, or started a scandal, or gone a-fishing while his wife and children remain at home to work in the fields--none of which is my business. Still, I will attend to it as if it was.

I have long since made up my mind that there is more mortal relief in judging people and taking the consequences of having the same judgment meted to me again than sitting like an innocuous saint with my mouth shut. If that scripture should be literally and universally obeyed, how could we develop public opinion? And after all is said and done in the name of the law and religion, does not public opinion remain the strongest moral force we have for controlling the conduct of men?

I may be a trifle short now and then in my contributions to charity, but no one can accuse me of not being liberal and constant in my contributions to public opinion. The result is that, so far as I know, I have one of the worst-weathered reputations in this section. I am coming to that presently. In the meantime, if you take my word for it, there is nothing novel or inflammable in the sins I have committed.

I am not excusing myself for the lack of valor I have shown along this line, you understand; but I am offering an explanation, which relieves me in a large measure both from blame or praise in this matter. When you have had the Ten Commandments striped upon your conscience with a switch at a tender age, when you have spent nearly a quarter of a century practicing the beatitudes in spite of your own carnal desire to raise the dust occasionally with an instinct more effective in mortal affairs than a beatitude, and when you have spent the remaining years of your life serving a sentence to hard labor, a flirtation seems a frivolous waste of time, even if such an affair affords you the gratification of being a worldly wise and tragically experienced woman.

I have contemplated this kind of diversion much as one considers a wild speculation; but after mature reflection I have always decided not to invest, because it seems to me the man gets the diversion and the woman gets the black eye, no matter how sweetly and beautifully and modestly she conducts her romance, especially if it ends in marriage.

What I mean is that it is useless to pretend to be very good or very wise. We cannot be, and overcome one another as frequently as we do in the long competition of living. I suppose this is one reason why righteousness and wisdom make such slow progress in this world and have had so many backsets. The sensible thing to do is to choose a life within your capacity to achieve and do most of your thinking along the line you have chosen.

So I have gone on, writing a few books on the side, but laying the scenes of my mind in the valley. I can go out any day and trace my real thoughts for the last ten years. By the looks of them it is easy to infer that I have no great mind and not much money to spend. But it is also clear that I was thinking and planning for happiness, not for riches. The forests still stand taller and greener than when I came, though the timber in them is worth three times as much as my whole estate here. The red hillsides have been changed into green pastures. It has been like taking over the care and maintenance of an old, sick, and impoverished relative to restore the land to health and vitality. But it is fertile and willing now. I make no apologies for what it has cost. I have been too wise to keep books with Nature and the weather. But I doubt if what I have spent in buildings, dams and breaks in all this time equals what the average woman with the same income would have spent on clothes, operas, motors and journeys from her favorite summer resorts to her favorite winter resorts in half as many years. And I still have my investments, while she must repeat her expenses each season if she keeps up her indulgences. It all depends upon your taste in living and your idea of pleasure whether you spend lavishly for the splendors and gayeties of the fashionable world, or moderately for the long peace of a quiet place, round quiet days and starlit nights.

I do not appear to have been brilliant or very extravagant anywhere; but the only place where I fail to show at a modest advantage is on the banks of the creek which flows through this valley, gory with mud in the spring and winter floods, clear and sparkling as a happy woman’s eye at other seasons. Twice every year I contend with this treacherous watercourse, twice every year it rises and sweeps over the land. Afterwards there remains not a vestige of my works along the banks to restrain it.

Still, this valorous worm of a creek is near to being my dearest possession. The time was when my heart was filled with anxieties and fears for those whom I loved. Now there is no one to love and nothing to fear. The time was when I was at grips with poverty and every vicissitude. Now I am no longer very poor, and I do miss my vicissitudes as a demoted soldier misses his decorations for gallant service. And there was a time when the world inside the Church was fiercely critical of me and my works. Now the weather has changed and I miss the lash of the harsher saints. But I have a happy presentiment that when all my works are finished, and I am a memory grown faint in the minds of men, I shall still be an aged willful woman in this valley, prancing majestically back and forth along the banks of this creek, ordering fortifications raised against its violence. The world will have passed and I shall have been reduced to littleness of consequences there; but I shall have something to do, one last fight to win. This is something to which to look forward when you have nothing else to win.

This record, as truthful as I can make it, must read like a very well-constructed plan for a kind of happiness suitable for a person of my age and gender. But looking back through these years, I cannot recall any such experiences. It seems to me that I have always been in an anguish of labor or in a state of suspense, always looking for more burdens to bear, giving more bonds for title to my own life and liberties. It may be that happiness is a state of unconsciousness, and that I have been too consciously looking for it; but I am beginning to have a faint spiritual intimation that I have practiced my Scriptures to the wrong tune. I am not so sure now that the key-note of a good life should be self-sacrifice.

I am finally beginning to believe that the Scriptures were meant to preserve us from too many awful sacrifices, and that I may have used them too much like the shroud of my mortal mind. I am ready to concede that Nature is full of tricks to serve its own ends; but it does seem beneath the dignity of the good God to have persuaded the simple minority to sacrifice themselves for the profit and comfort of the indifferent and unrighteous majority, which is precisely what happens. It is really written that we shall present ourselves living sacrifices wholly acceptable to God.

I wish I had remembered and understood the meaning of that passage sooner. It would have saved me much hardship and left more space for human happiness. It comes to me now that it is less exhausting to make one’s self wholly acceptable to the Lord than to those of our fellow men who can fish for our services with these Scriptures. For they want as many sacrifices as you can make, and will give you as many of their burdens to bear as you will carry; but our heavenly Father only demands a right spirit toward Him to make us reasonably safe in our relations to our fellow men--which would by no means cover the terrific labors and sacrifices some of us have made along this line.

I am coming now to the closing scenes of my life as I have lived it in the past, because I mean to close these scenes. As a Christian, I have had the wrong training; as a middle-aged woman, it will be difficult to go against this training; but I do hope to have time to make the experiment.

XLIV

ISN’T LIFE EXCITING ENOUGH?

Why should one take to strong drink because this is now a fashionable perversity practiced against the prohibition amendment, as ill-bred people disregard other people’s respect for law and decency? We depend too much upon artificial stimulation. There used to be a home-brew known as fine conversation which was much more delightfully intoxicating than any brand of bootleg liquor now known to polite society. Lacking conversation here, I have frequently risen to a state of happy inebriation by following a particularly entrancing train of thought.

This is one thing I have observed about gambling--it renders a man or a woman sinister and silent when other people present are obvious and vocative. They are mortgaged mentally by a fixed idea. In this connection I recall a visit made years ago to Monte Carlo. I missed the thrill. All my life I have been such a desperate gambler against fate, adversity, and the weather that the games I saw played there seemed childishly inadequate so far as gratifying an adventurous spirit is concerned. Men and women simply pawned themselves for a little gold, lost it or doubled it in a moment, and then repeated the experiment indefinitely. My notion about such people is that they lack the courage to sit in the long game of life and play it according to the rules.

I am something of a piker, financially speaking; but I have always entertained the conceit that I might have done very well in Wall Street if I had not been more profitably engaged. My dealings have been chiefly with the earth and editors. Both are frightful risks. A flood or a drought may destroy your harvest. The forensic mind of the editor may have changed while you are writing the thing he thought he wanted, or you may have missed your cue and produced something he never dreamed of. My rule is never to kick against the pricks. What is the use of adding wounds to your misfortune, because if you push one of them he can give you reasons frightfully diminishing to your vanity for turning down your copy. They are the most convincing men on earth at that business.

I recall only one triumphant exception in my twenty-five years’ experience with them. In 1915 I had a contract to deliver three short stories to be published in a New York magazine. When they were delivered, the editor wired me that he would take them, since he was obliged to do so under the terms of the contract, but that he did not want them. The implication was not complimentary. Two days later I arrived in New York, called the editor of another magazine and offered him the same stories at an advance of two hundred dollars each on the original price. He agreed to take them sight unseen. I hurried off to call on the other editor who held the manuscripts.

He was astonished, and obviously not glad to see me. But my manner was so regretful and apologetic that he recovered his more vehement faculties at once. Never have I heard such a scathing criticism of literary composition. But I let him do his worst; I urged him on to speak yet more contemptuously of the things until words failed him.

I do not remember ever feeling meek in the presence of mere man, but any woman can look meek. I folded my hands and regarded him like a shorn lamb in a cold wind.

He accepted the compliment and relaxed. He said he regretted the necessity of being perfectly frank, but he thought under the circumstances it was his privilege to tell the truth about those stories. He was willing to keep the things, but they were not worth the price he had promised to pay for them, and so on and so forth. Oh, certainly not, I agreed; they were not worth anything to him, but to me, everything. My honor was involved; I could not think of allowing him to keep them, and so on and so forth, in a sad, low tone.

This contest lasted an hour before I was at last obliged to fling off my sheep’s clothing, give him a glint of my real mind and demand them. He yielded then only on condition that I send him another story within the year. I agreed on condition that he should pay for it at once in advance, for no other reason that I can think of than to see how far I could go, seeing that I had started so glibly on this adventure.

I delivered the three condemned stories to the other editor, having told him the scandal connected with them, and returned to my hotel with checks amounting to nearly four thousand dollars.

This indicates that I have some natural talent for speculating, but I am thinking my career as a writer has lasted longer because I have had the shrewdness not to develop the gift.

There is a wideness of the mind not dependent upon the experience of a broad manner of living, if you know what I mean. But let that go; I suppose after all is said that can be said one way or the other, a man’s point of view about such matters depends upon his quality and his taste. Many people mistake jazz for joy, a loose life for a full life, successful selfishness for the survival of the fittest and the rationalism of a dirt dauber’s intellect for wisdom. Mine tend toward the great simplicities, whether they are actually to be attained or not. I prefer to clothe my egotism according to the nobler scriptures defining immortality rather than in the less expensive worldly vanities.

This is a mean advantage to take of those critics who lack the spunk of such divine egotism without ever being able to prove immortality is an illusion of the mortal mind inspired by the fear of death. I have my anxieties about the traveling passports of saints in the next world; but if it is possible to obtain a furlough from paradise, I shall apply for one as soon as I am incorruptible and spirit-proved, return to this world and pinch a few friends and critics who now look askance upon my professions of faith. If I shall have developed no more than one wing, I mean to spread it in a smile, rustle it triumphantly in their ears by way of whispering, ‘Thou fool!’ But I do not suppose this will make any difference. It has already been written and proved that ‘even if one rose from the dead’ they will not believe.

So my years have gone by. If you have read this record so far you will have perceived that these last ones lack the glory and loveliness of those earlier years. I am better known in the world and not so dependent in spirit as I used to be upon the angels in Heaven. I have not outgrown their ministrations; I seem to have lost them. Sometimes at night in this lonely house, lying awake, I remember the child I used to be in the little room at home, when I literally believed in my own guardian angels, one at the head and one at the foot of my bed.

What sublime experiences children have, and how serenely they accept them! I used to fall asleep nonchalantly conscious of these angels and their protection. Now if for one fleeting moment I could be aware of such hallowed companionship, I am certain my corruption would put on incorruption and I should rise from that bed a spiritual body. I should be young and lovely; and the next morning, though I might look the same, I should be changed. I should have the heart of a child, know no evil, believe everything and draw all men to me.

Very few people enjoy the privilege of laying the scenes of their own minds. They are controlled by circumstances, conventions, and that windy weather of other people’s minds known as the spirit of the times. If a man conceives the ambition to do such a thing, the easiest way is to climb into an attic, close the door and write out the scenes of his mind on paper. And this is pure fiction so far as he is concerned, even if he produces a volume of the profoundest philosophy. He has not lived it; he has merely thought it.

This is the reason why I have never bowed my dizzy old head to the greatest thinker of them all. I have done too much active living between the devil and the deep blue sea to be petrified into a state of admiration by a mere system of thought. Let him try out his theories on the land, in the street, in the commercial or industrial world, in society, even in the Church, and find out how long they will last.

But watch the philosopher! He keeps out of the ructions of real life, which is the only personal evidence he shows of being one. All that stuff he has written is for you to practice. I never heard of an up-and-doing ubiquitous philosopher. He may lecture, but he does not live; he only exists. His books are popular or unpopular, but the man as a man would prove ineffective if he should be put to the tests the simplest of us must pass in order to matriculate as serviceable scholars in the real arts of living. I should be willing to match one of my narrow circuit rider’s days in living, or a half of one of my own days spent in this green attic of the hills, with one of Herbert Spencer’s days anytime; not that I know his private life, but I have my suspicions that there was not much of it. He was too entirely absorbed in recording his ideas to have had the energy and initiative to dramatize his thinking into deeds.

The more one reflects upon the business rather than the theories of living, the more do creeds and philosophies shrink in importance. It is like starting on a long and arduous journey burdened with luggage. You are handicapped by too many doctrines and complicated systems of thinking, which interferes with that moral elasticity so essential to courage and a good conscience. You may become famous for your piety or your wisdom, but you do not arrive. Respect for a doctrine or for logic trips you at the very moment when you might have made the grade. You may found a transient school of thought, obtain the flighty tail of a following; but there is no profit beyond that of gratified vanity in such an adventure. The world will presently swing through the lightening dust of your great mind and go on its way as if you had never happened--as this earth would scarcely be spattered by radiance if it passed through the flame tail of the brightest comet.

XLV

AS WE SEEM TO OTHERS

It is a queer experience to gaze into the crystal ball that your mind really is and behold there the image of the woman you were and are and ever shall be, in spite of everything you have done and can do to glorify her.

The life you live never reveals the person you are by nature; only the kind of person you have drifted into being or have been constrained to become. So your autobiography, however intimately written, is not the record of you, but of your feelings and performances under the circumstances, what happened to you by the day or by the year; what you lost and what you won. All of it is history manufactured by you in living, but not you. Some luminous dust of your trials and triumphs obscures your vision and makes the record shine at a time when no one who knew you then noticed the faintest rim of a halo above you.

It is your nature to put your best foot foremost if you can get so much as the toe of it in print, so you instinctively drop the curtain on this scene or that one in your life because one hint of it would give the reader a glimpse of you, not garnished for the moment by your good deeds or extolled by your rhetoric of these performances.

I do not suppose any one who reads ‘My Book and Heart’ will ever suspect what a commonplace person the author of that record really is. I was frequently moved to tears and laughter while I was writing the thing. Sometimes for whole days I felt translated into the good words and the noble ones I used to set down merely the things I had suffered and achieved.

But you have only to observe the impression you are making upon the people who see you every day and know your literal expression, your disposition, the cut of your eye, to have the soaring wings of your vanity as an autobiographer clipped. Very few of us would recognize one another by our scriptures, but we do it by the personal impression we make. For example, I have never felt that I should have been personally attracted to George Washington, although I respect and admire him as the Father of his Country. I do not think I would have invited him to a dinner party at my house even if I had been in a position to do so, because I have a very strong feeling that he would have been a short circuit socially. The conversation would have had to be adjusted to him. Our minds would have had to be the obsequious footmen to his outrageously noble soul. I do not believe tradition is responsible for this notion I have of him, but some intuition of the man which not even history can obscure.

On the other hand, I have a vaguely regretful feeling that I might have enjoyed dining with Abraham Lincoln. And I am certain that I should have felt comfortable and blessed on merely the rim of the presence of Robert E. Lee. He would not have missed me even if I had been a very plain and undistinguished person in the darkest corner of the room. He would have contributed a glance of simple human recognition. I have the feeling that if I looked very insignificant he might have made the space between us with a fine complimentary air of having just seen some one with whom he particularly wished to pass a few pleasant words. I have had that happen to me more than once in the course of my life.

When you have never learned to sit gracefully like a lady lyre in your chair with your draperies drawn close at exactly the right place; when you have a motionless countenance socially and a blunder-buss mind, and you are kept busy putting out the fuse of it lest the thing should go off with the explosion of an idea too loud for such an occasion--I do not know of any more gratifying experience than to be suddenly soothed by the recognition of a truly great man or woman who apparently does not suspect what an awkward person you are in that company. Such people are never moved by mere manners; they perform an act of social piety to you which springs from the gallantry of a kind heart.

I remember once, before I ever dreamed of such an extravagance as an afternoon frock, I received an invitation to a very fashionable garden party. I wore a shirt waist and skirt. The latter was long and trailed, I hoped, elegantly behind me. But getting my foot caught in it as I descended caused me actually to tumble from the hack in which I arrived directly upon the fluttering edge of that garden party.

This was an abrupt way of entering the social life of a large town where I had been a stranger for seven years. But I made it, due entirely to one circumstance. A lovely woman, distinguished for her social graces, caught sight of me sitting upon a bench pathetically removed from the gayety of the occasion. She said she had been looking for me. Had I had any punch? Innocent stuff, a kind of sublimated lemonade. Did I know many of these people?

I had had no refreshment, and I did not know any of these people. I might have added that my knees were still trembling from having fallen out of the hack, but I made out to accompany her. It was like walking in a rainbow of smiles and good will. Presently I came to my other self, a woman I had never been before, a social creature at ease. I had liberty, and remembered making several bright remarks, not droll, but neatly and prettily funny, at which every one laughed and looked at me as if I were a pleasant surprise.

I caught the tune, even the step, of that occasion. I remember mincing from one group to another, holding up my skirt with an air, as conscious of the lace in the frill of my petticoat as any other woman present was of her rustling silk petticoats, accompanied through the whole afternoon by that gracious woman who anchored me with a look or a smile until my poor tight-fitting lid as a preacher’s wife came off and I was near to being a song which was not a hymn. I may have been ridiculous for all I know, but I felt very light in my heart. Maybe this was happiness. If so, it was a long time ago, and I am by social functions now as literary critics are by a new novel. I am too learned in the things; I know too much about how they are made and what they cost in jealousies and competitions to enjoy them as I did that first garden party I attended in Nashville so many years ago.

But what I started out to prove was that as one person to another person we are not the same character as we seem to be in history or even a conscientiously written autobiography.

After the publication of ‘A Circuit Rider’s Wife,’ my attributes as a good Christian woman were severely damaged by some of the whispering brethren. Quite inadvertently, the records of that book reflected upon a few of the inside workings of the Church; and Lundy being so tragically dead, these brethren dared not defend themselves by attacking his memory. The only thing left to do was to discredit the witness who had given damaging testimony concerning these matters.

This was how I lost my reputation the first time--an entirely satisfactory item of expense to me so long as the crown I had written above Lundy’s head had remained untarnished.

I kept silence, not by way of turning the other cheek, which is a form of piety unsuited to my disposition; but looking back now, I believe I was thinking out a few Scriptures. When you have nothing to lose you have everything to gain. I was in this grand state of destitution at that time. I had lost my husband; I had also lost my reputation under the same frightful circumstances. But the moment I began to revolve that excellent Scripture in my mind which says, ‘Judge not ... for with what judgment ye judge ... it shall be measured to you again,’ I began to perk up. I had been most unmercifully judged, and here was the Lord’s own permission to return the compliment.

I had several million readers by this time, which was considerable advantage to have gained in the scrimmage. I wrote three more circuit-rider stories. Besides having struck a rich vein of the finest human nature, I may have been inspired by some retributive sense of justice, according to the Scripture quoted above. Certainly my motive was not without mortal guile to guide it. But I have known very few effective people who stuck themselves up with a noble motive under fire. My idea is to whip, even if you perish in the fight. I am always willing to perish, knowing well that I shall rise again every time, everywhere according to the Word; but I am teetotally opposed to being defeated. If you do not take too many of the meeker Scriptures without balancing them with the fiercer elder Scriptures, it will be perfectly apparent to any sensible person that the Lord does not sanction submission to any unfriendly fate.

I stuck to my text honorably, however, and confined my revealing wit to certain regrettable methods in the government of our church, and I may have touched lightly upon one or two doctrines which I believed to have been doubtfully derived from the Word. But no man’s reputation suffered in these stories as mine had suffered at the hands of some of the brethren.

Strange as it may seem, my reputation began to improve in the churchly silence which followed the publication of these later stories. I do not know whether I have reëstablished some kind of pop-eyed confidence in my own piety and character, or if I have been merely forgiven. I remain warily and politely on the outside, not knowing what service I yet may be inspired to render this church, which is infinitely dear to me. But I have been comforted with the hope that it has grown more tolerant of me, as I have become less intolerant of its shortcomings. I am beginning to realize how difficult it is to maintain any Christian organization in a world which specializes in worldly values without using secular methods. More courage and more faith are needed than modern Christians seem to have in order to comprehend that the glory of a church does not consist in its wealth and earthly power, but that God alone is the glory of the Church. I have a feeling that if Jesus should suddenly appear among us, clothed once more in our minds with divine authority, He would say to all these churches of whatever denomination, ‘Sell all thou hast and follow me.’

It depends upon where you lay your scenes in living what kind of reputation you get, and how you lose it, in case that happens. If you lay them like a good little Dorcas, in the church, somebody will defeat you for the presidency of the missionary society because you are the most efficient woman for that place. If you stretch them like a climbing Jacobess in women’s clubs, a certain clique in that club will pull the social ladder from under your aspiring feet and elect you to the office of kitchen manager for the afternoon refreshments. If you move a trifle briskly in smart society, you are in danger of losing your reputation on the front page of the daily paper on account of having done something newsy the night before the morning after. I know a splendid old gray-haired widow who will not dim the snap in her fine eyes, nor break her habit of having small feet beautifully shod, nor even change the contours of a figure outrageously youthful for her years. One morning this summer she appeared in the striding togs of a smart lady pedestrian and stepped vigorously past a dear friend on her way out.

‘Where are you going?’ the dear friend called out.

‘For my morning walk,’ she returned, swinging youthfully down the steps into the street.

‘She is doing nothing of the kind. She is going to meet a man!’ the friend informed me.

‘At her age?’ I protested.

‘Age has nothing to do with her. She has resigned from her last ten years,’ was the indignant retort.

‘Still, at this innocent and halcyon hour of a summer morning, a man cannot be such a doubtful person to meet,’ I suggested.

The sense of sex has changed its location. It no longer exists merely as a sacred natural instinct, but it has become a conversational feature of the modern mind, leading to the wildest social and intellectual speculations. And there is literally no way of escaping its damaging enterprises.

In any case, if you retain the delicacy of your sensibilities, it is difficult to determine which is the more embarrassing--to have lost the reputation you were so careful to make for yourself or to endure the one imposed upon you by others.

This is precisely what has happened to me. Somewhere along the way during these last ten years I have lost my reputation again. A second growth, to be sure, but one which I fondly believed to be normal and more becoming to me than the one I lost to the brethren. And not enough time left to build up another one before I pass forever out of the zone where all earthly reputations are made!