Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

“Forget it, did I?” he snapped. “Now, where did ye l’ave what ye left?”

“I hid it on top of that shelf--a little, small box,” Kate said. “Will you reach it down, Mr. Kerrigan? You’re as tall as the house yourself, and ’t will not trouble you, like these small men.”

Kerrigan stepped into the room, and in a flash she closed the door and locked it.

“Now, Michael, run, if you love me!” she exclaimed. “Do you think I want to see you murdered before my eyes? Your courage is two sizes too big for your body.”

But Michael did not move.

“Better be murdered than see you making love to that brute,” he said doggedly. “I’ll see it out now.”

She caught him by the shoulders and tried to push him away.

“But it’s not making love, Michael dear,” she replied. “It was just to stir father.” She explained in a word, with Michael’s face gradually relaxing in a grin.

“Well, you’ve stirred him all right,” he said; “he wants you to marry me now. We’ll do it at once before he changes his mind.”

“In a hurry like this!” she cried. “Oh, I couldn’t.”

“All right,” he replied, and seated himself on the door-step. “Then I’ll stay and be murdered.”

For a moment Kate stood irresolute, wringing her hands.

“Oh, what shall I do!” she murmured.

“I told you--marry me now,” he replied. He went to her, and, taking her hands, said quickly: “I’ve the license; I’ve had it for weeks. It would be the fine thing, wouldn’t it, to have it found like that on my dead body?”

“I think I should die of shame,” she confessed. “It would hardly seem decent.”

“It’s the true word you say, Katie dear. You see, there’s nothing left but to use it.”

“Sure, it would make me feel like a widow, and me not yet a wife,” she said. “I’ll go, Michael. It’s all that’s left for us now. Hurry.”

* * * * *

Inside the barred window Kerrigan and her father saw them hasten away. Her father chuckled.

“She fooled ye,” he said, for Kerrigan had not found the box.

“She did,” Kerrigan agreed. He seated himself on a stool and looked about him complacently. “Ye’ve the nice little shop for wet weather,” he went on.

“For anny weather,” Reilly replied. He had suddenly become genial, and he began to talk of his work. “Thirty years I’ve worked here,” he said at the close, “and I’ve put by a little against me owld age. And now Kate will marry, and there’s wan trouble liss off me mind. Michael’s a good b’y.”

“He is,” Kerrigan agreed with great heartiness. “Did ye hear him blackguarrdun’ me to me face as bowld as ye plaze? Me hearrt warrmed to the laad.”

“Aye, and he fooled ye well; they both did,” said Reilly, and chuckled.

“They did,” answered Kerrigan. “And now I’m like a hin in a coop; but I’m not alone.”

For a moment Reilly looked at him, and then a shadow crossed his face.

“Ye take it aisy,” he said suspiciously.

“Ut’s me way,” replied Kerrigan. “I’m a sedenthary mon by nature, though I’m slightly out of practice, though ut all comes back. I’ll shmoke now.” He took his pipe from his pocket and leisurely began to fill it.

“But ye lost the girl,” Reilly told him.

“Can I lose what I niver had or waanted?” Kerrigan asked. “I don’t know.”

“It was not an hour since ye were all but marryin’ her before me eyes,” snapped Reilly. “What of that?”

“I was borrowed only,” exclaimed Kerrigan.

“And what do ye mane?” demanded Reilly.

“’T was what Katie said,” answered Kerrigan. “We were standun’ before the church whin up edged a red-headed little old mon, and says she to me, ‘May I borrow ye for a bit?’ ‘Sure,’ says I. And she borrowed me to get rid of the mon, and now she’s borrowed anither to get rid of you and me. Sure, she’s the bright wan.”

Reilly was staring straight ahead, piecing the broken patches of truth together. Suddenly he looked up.

“And nayther of ye meant nothing at all by all the love-talk?”

“Nothing at all,” answered Kerrigan.

“Thin she’s a desateful hussy,” cried Reilly, angrily. “She’s made me ate me own worrds through fear of ye. I said young Cassidy should niver have her, and now she’s made me fair’ throw him at her, as if he was the last mon on God’s earth! Ye can’t trust a woman at all.”

“Sometimes ye can and sometimes ye cannot,” amended Kerrigan, “but ye niver know which ut is till ut’s too late.”

“It’s the true worrd,” agreed Reilly. He sighed, then added not without a touch of pardonable pride: “Well, she’s no fool, and she’s me own daughter. There’s something in that.”

RECOLLECTIONS OF FREDERIC REMINGTON

BY AUGUSTUS THOMAS

Author of “Arizona,” “The Witching Hour,” etc.

WITH PICTURES BY FREDERIC REMINGTON AND A PORTRAIT

Frederic Remington had a large mind in a big body. The mind had great natural capacity in many directions, and in one of those directions was remarkably self-taught. The body had been splendidly cultivated and came to be unwisely overtaxed. His young manhood was spent in the far West, at work with the cow-boys and near the soldiers and Indians whose picture historian he was destined to become. The life of those men was rude and exciting. Much that would be considered dissipation in civilized surroundings was logical reaction to their environment--man’s answer to nature’s challenge. Remington adopted the cow-boy habit and point of view, and finally assimilated the cow-boy standard and philosophy. It is necessary to consider that fact if one would accurately estimate his character, his work, his achievement, and his untimely end. His very intimacy with the men and the material he drew was purchased at what others may call that cost. Future generations who profit by the facts he recorded must not quarrel with the method of their unconscious acquisition; and the wisest of those who loved him would be less wise if they wished any of his steps retraced. That education reinforced the independence of his nature, made him indifferent to the “cards and custards” of society, and, to speak after his own fashion, kept him “with the bark on.” He worked unhampered by rule, example, or opinion, a veritable child of nature, and he died untamed. Nature and second nature kept him at high pressure. He lived, thought, spoke, and worked by a series of explosions insulated under deep sympathy and great good humor.

Remington was primitive and partizan. Sensitive as an Indian, he liked instinctively and enduringly, he hated intuitively and long. He adored the memory of his father, who had been a soldier, and he remembered him in his uniform. Besides, in the West, in Frederic’s day, the local advent of the troopers meant sudden and inflexible order. The military acted promptly and without debate.

Remington loved the soldiers; he loathed all politicians because they talked.

One of Remington’s distinctions between orators and officers is worth recording. He had been recently visiting General Chaffee and more recently listening to Mr. Bourke Cockran and Mr. William J. Bryan. Indian fashion, he was half acting the manner of all three and feeling inwardly for his answer. “This is it,” he said; “Chaffee tells you to do a thing like this; he looks out from under his eyebrows with his head down; the orator throws his head up and looks out from under his eyelids. The soldier menaces--the orator hypnotizes.”

Remington kept near the ground in all his thinking. The superstructure of things, the embellishment of ideas, the amplification of systems, had small attraction for him. He had a passion for the roots, for the explanations, for the causes. His speech was laconic. If his friends had known the sign language he would generally have used it. His own vocabulary was small, vital, and picturesque, singularly free from slang, but strongly colored with military terms and phrases. He was a good listener and a good laugher. Like the disappearing Carson River, an adequate joke flowing through his system would rise again with recurrent and unexpected irruptions of reflected sunshine. He had also the quality of being humorous himself, and the flavor of his humor was Western, fresh, and wholesome.

One evening he strolled, astonished and abashed, into our half-lighted dining-room, where, unknown to him, a dinner party was in progress. After his own dinner he had come “across lots” for a cigar and our usual argumentative salvation of mankind. The introductions being over, a lady purring at the great man in knickerbockers and herculean stockings asked:

“Did you ride your bicycle, Mr. Remington?”

“Ride it? Ha-ha! Why the blankety-blanked thing wouldn’t let me walk with it.”

FREDERIC REMINGTON]

Mrs. Remington had a liking and a capacity for philosophic study. Some of the modern phases had her attention, and one of them which she felt would be useful she pressed upon Remington’s notice. His hospitality to the idea was more tolerant than acquisitive, and at times he may have really doubted its potency; but if he had any criticism it was never spoken, and perhaps never implied. One morning during that period, however, his man Tim brought me a brief note, which read as follows:

Dear Tommy:

I was in town last night at The Players and I got so out of tune
with the Infinite that you could notice it for two blocks.

“THE SCALP”

MODELED BY FREDERIC REMINGTON]

The value of mere anecdotes of any man is that each reader draws from them that side of the personality which he would have seen and drawn from the man himself, not merely the element open to the proper vision of the reporter; and that must be the excuse for anecdotes. E. W. Kemble, or, as his friends know him, Ed Kemble, introduced the writer to Remington in 1890. The two illustrators were friends, but the most beautiful side of their friendship needed a third friend for its precipitation. Kemble is universally amusing when he cares to be. Few men are his equal in putting the spirit of caricature into ordinary verbal report or comment; even his famous drawings do not show such sure fun. Remington responded promptly to Kemble’s comedy, however expressed. Most men who know it do the same, but Remington went further. When Kemble had left him after any interview, all of Kemble’s woes of which Remington had been the repository were suddenly dwarfed in the larger horizon of Remington’s experiences and transmuted into side-splitting jokes. In his mind, Kemble was never “grown up”; and Kemble reciprocated. Remington’s throes, viewed through Kemble’s prism, were just as amusing. They took even each other’s art as playfellows take each other’s games. There were years when much of their leisure was passed in company; in the winter, skating and long walks over the hills of Westchester; in the summer, swimming baths in the Sound, bicycling, and tennis. Their understanding was mutual and immediate. One night after the theater, on the train home from New York, sitting together, Remington was by the car window, Kemble next to the aisle. An obstreperous commuter was disturbing the passengers, men and women. The busy conductor’s admonition had been ineffective, the brakeman’s repeated expostulations useless. The men passengers seemed cowed; the rowdy was gaining confidence. On his third blatant parade through the car, and as he passed Kemble’s side, Remington’s two hundred and fifty pounds of bone and muscle reached out into the aisle, and, with the precision of a snapping-turtle, lifted him from his feet like a naughty boy and laid him face downward over Kemble’s interposing lap. With the spirit of perfect team-work, as Remington held the ruffian, Kemble spanked him, while the legs in the aisle wriggled frantically for a foothold. The correction, prolonged and ample, was accompanied by roars of laughter from fifty other passengers. Being done, Remington stood the offender on his feet. The man began a threatening tirade. Before half a sentence was uttered Remington had him again exposed to Kemble’s rhythmic tattoo. This was enough; and when again released the fellow rapidly left the car for the relative seclusion of the smoker.

Mrs. Remington used to tell of her husband’s return to her one night when they had transiently taken rooms at a New York hotel. Remington, after escorting her back from the theater, had her consent to a little romp at the club. It had come to be two o’clock in the morning; Mrs. Remington had gone to bed, but was as yet only in the border-land of sleep when she was aroused by the repeated slamming of hallway doors. At the proper moment in the crescendo her own door was opened, and in the frame of light stood her husband, quickly joined by a protesting attendant.

“It’s all right,” said Remington; “this one’s my wife--good-night!”

One early morning in February, 1898, James Waterbury, the agent of the Western Union Company at New Rochelle, telephoned me that the _Maine_ had been blown up and had sunk in the harbor of Havana. Knowing the interest the report would have for Remington, I immediately called him on the telephone and repeated the information. His only thanks or comment was to shout “Ring off!” In the process of doing so I could hear him calling the private telephone number of his publishers in New York. In his mind, his own campaign was already actively under way.

One incident of that campaign illustrates the primitive man in Remington. He and Richard Harding Davis were engaged to go into Cuba by the back way and send material to an evening newspaper. The two men were to cross in the night from Key West to Cuba on a mackerel-shaped speed boat of sheet-iron and shallow draft. Three times the boat put out from Key West and three times turned back, unable to stand the weather. The last time even the crew lost hope of regaining port. Davis and Remington were lying in the scuppers and clinging to the shallow rail to keep from being washed overboard. The Chinaman cook between lurches was lashing together a door and some boxes to serve as a raft. Davis suggested to Remington the advisability of trying something of the kind for themselves.

“Lie still,” Remington commanded; “you and I don’t know how to do that. Let him make his raft. If we capsize, I’ll throttle him and take it from him.”

Some months later, on learning of the incident, I tried to discuss the moral phase of it with him; but he brushed my hypocrisy aside with the remark: “Why, Davis alone was worth a dozen sea-cooks. I don’t have to talk of myself.”

His experiences in Cuba were scarcely more supportable than this unpropitious start. The heat was terrible, the transportation bad, and his physical condition poor. He suffered. Growling over it all, long afterward he said to me:

“From now on I mean to paint fruits and flowers. Then if I’m ordered to the scene of action I can go fearlessly.”

Until his increasing weight made it hard to find a mount, he liked to ride. He had no fear of any horse, and among men he had a man’s courage; but he had an unreasonable fear of dogs. Once, on the occasion of a men’s dinner in the early days of the bicycle’s popularity, Kemble had made a souvenir caricature for each guest. The card at Remington’s plate represented Frederic in the costume of a bronco buster, with chaps, sombrero, and guns, riding a bicycle--a look of terror on his face. The bicycle was bucking half-way over the road, frightened at a little cotton dog on four wooden wheels. Nobody laughed more heartily over the card than Remington, and for years it had a place of honor in his studio.

The waning of his great strength was a more sensitive subject with him than his increasing weight, which produced the condition. Gradually in our Sunday walks, the hills grew steeper for him. His favorite ruse for disguising the strain on him was to stop occasionally and survey the landscape:

“Look there, Tommy, how that land lies. I could put a company of men back of that stone wall and hold it against a thousand until they flanked me.”

As with the Southern gentleman who used to look out of the window after passing the decanter to his guest, it was the part of friendship on these occasions to multiply details of the supposititious fortifications until the commander regained his wind.

One Sunday morning in those later days I went with him to the office of an osteopathic physician who was treating him. The osteopath was a slight man and not tall. Remington, lying face downward on the operating-table, presented a skyline so much higher than that of the average patient that the doctor standing on the floor lacked the angle of pressure necessary to his treatment. The doctor therefore mounted a chair, from which he stepped to the table, and finally sat astride of Remington, applying his full weight to the manipulation which he was giving to the spinal column.

“THE BRONCO BUSTER”

FROM THE SCULPTURE BY FREDERIC REMINGTON]

“I hope I’m not hurting you, Mr. Remington?” said the doctor. Remington answered:

“It’s all right, Doctor--so long as--you don’t--use your spurs.”

Early in his occupancy of the New Rochelle home--perhaps in 1895--he added to his house a studio. This room was twenty by forty feet on the floor, and twenty feet to the roof-tree. A big skylight was in one pitch of the roof; windows with the sills breast-high were on one end, and one side wall. The second end had a double door big enough to admit a horse, or to be opened wide as he painted the horse in the open air outside. All four walls of the studio were covered, above doors and windows and in their dead spaces, with military and Indian and Mexican trappings of all descriptions from spurs to war-bonnets; there were guns of every kind ever carried by an American soldier; all kinds of swords and bridles, saddles, belts, canteens, and cartridge-boxes, powder-horns, bayonets, and knives; there were war clubs, tomahawks, bows, arrows, spears, tom-toms, pipes, scalps, and the wands of medicine-men; moccasins, blankets, beaded deerskins, and the skulls of buffalo, mountain goats, and American carnivora; sombreros, quirts, horsehair lassos, chaps, serapes, ollas, mats, pots, and baskets; in short, not prints or catalogues, but, for all that he might need for any Western picture, the veritable thing itself. He knew the troop and tribe and time and latitude of each. Accuracy in their use was his religion. In his chosen field he abhorred anachronisms. There was considerable éclat over the exhibition of a painting by a new-comer. The subject showed in an Indian fight the rescue of one trooper by another. Remington took one look at it and turned away in disgust. Bits of arms, uniforms, and harness that had never met outside of a museum were assembled in the picture. To the ordinary observer their association was harmonious; but to his expert eye it was falsehood and fake.

In the four arts which he essayed--letters, illustration, painting, and sculpture--Remington was self-taught. His writing was soon abandoned because it was not easy to him, and was not so remunerative as was drawing done in the same time. He had something to say, however, when he did write, and he had an attractive and a graphic style. Great good nature and wholesomeness showed through his lines, and he wrote always from the inside of his subject. It is not the province of this rambling anecdotal recollection of him to attempt an appreciation or a criticism of his art, but one may with propriety note the rapidity with which he overcame the initial difficulties of his tasks and outgrew the unavoidable mistakes of the beginner. Thumbing the older numbers of the magazines in which his earliest illustrations appear,[2] notably those of the Roosevelt articles, one sees that the salient marks of the novice, the small hands and feet of his figures, soon disappear, and in their stead the vigorous members of a master are employed.

“I TOOK YE FOR AN INJIN”]

Remington’s first work was in black-and-white India-ink washes. He was skilled with the pen, but to achieve values by multiplied strokes was foreign to both temperament and training. As those technically informed are aware, but as not all readers know, his illustrations, like all printed pictures, since the direct drawing upon boxwood and lithographic stone was superseded, were made on a large scale and reduced by photographic processes to the size needed for the printed page. He usually worked on a cardboard twenty-four by thirty inches, or thereabout, in size. From black-and-white washes he advanced to black-and-white in oils, and again from these to canvases of such color in flat fields as lent themselves to the earlier reproductions for magazine covers and double pages. During all of this time he was acquiring a technic that grew through the various stages of his contemporaries’ estimate from rebuke to admiration.

THE PACK-HORSE MEN REPELLING AN ATTACK BY INDIANS

FROM THE PAINTING BY FREDERIC REMINGTON]

It was an exhibition of Charles Rolla Peters’s moonlights, about 1894, that gave Remington his most serious wish to paint. The mystery of these efforts and their largeness were keyed to the mute though not inglorious poet in him. He came to see and to master the nuances of the moon’s witchery in all her moods. It was interesting to follow his awakened and developing sense of color. Nature on that side made more and more appeal to him, until in our Sunday-morning and weekday-evening tramps the tints of sky and field and road almost totally dislodged the phantom soldiery from the hillsides.

About 1896 Ruckstuhl, the sculptor, set up a tent on a vacant lot back of our place at New Rochelle, New York, and began in clay the construction of the half-size model for the heroic equestrian statue of General Hartranft that now stands in bronze in front of the State-house at Harrisburg. It was Remington’s first intimate view of sculpture in the making. The horse especially interested him. During the two months that the sculptor labored, Remington made daily visits to the Ruckstuhl tent. The following winter I was sitting one day in his studio watching him at an illustration for some story of Owen Wister’s. He was working “chic,” that is to say, without models, and was making his first marks in charcoal. His outline began to show a cow-boy in the foreground of a bar-room shooting toward the back of the picture, into the perspective of which ran the bar and its stampeding clientele. As it occurred to him that the bulking figure of the local egotist obscured too much of other interesting detail, he quickly dusted off the drawing and reversed his characters, thereby making the aggressor stand in the background and putting the victims to the front. With equal ease he could have put his cow-boy to either side of the room. I said to him:

“Frederic, you’re not an illustrator so much as you’re a sculptor. You don’t mentally see your figures on one side of them. Your mind goes all around them.”

Not long after that he bought a set of tools. Ruckstuhl sent him a supply of modeler’s wax, and he began his “Bronco Buster.” It was characteristic of the man that his first attempt should be a subject difficult enough as a technical problem to have daunted a sculptor of experience and a master of technic. His love of the work when he got at it, his marvelous aptitude for an art in which he had never had a single lesson, are some evidence that it was possibly his _métier_. His few bronze groups and figures that rapidly followed “The Bronco Buster,” and his heroic equestrian monument of “The Pioneer” in Fairmont Park, are the work of one who surely would have excelled in sculpture if he had lived to follow it.

Remington thought he believed in “art for art’s sake,” but I know of nothing that he ever did in any of its departments that did not primarily attempt a story. His wish to tell something that had touched him, and tell it at first hand, was as primitive as the instinct of a caveman.

The boy in the nursery wants something that will go. There is a kinship in Remington’s frequently expressed choice of an epitaph:

“He Knew the Horse.”

His death occurred December 26, 1909. On January 1, 1912, the present Democratic administration of New Rochelle was formally installed. It transacted no business that day except to pass a resolution requesting the New Haven Railroad, which was constructing a new station near Remington’s old home, to call that stop “Remington Place.” The railroad graciously complied. Remington’s fellow sculptor, Robert Aitken, has under way a portrait bust of him and four pedestal bas-reliefs. This monument is to be set up fronting the station, and perhaps it, too, will carry that commemorating phrase.

[2] See ~The Century~ for January, April, July, and August, 1889, June, 1896, and February, 1902.

“PEGGY”

FROM THE MARBLE BUST BY EVELYN BEATRICE LONGMAN]

THE AMERICAN SPINSTER

BY AGNES REPPLIER

Author of “The Fireside Sphinx,” etc.

That this is the Golden Age of spinsters no one will deny, and that America furnishes the soil in which these hardy plants put forth their finest bloom is equally indisputable. How many years have passed since the “antient maydes” of Boston--which term included all unmarried women older than twenty-five--were pronounced by John Dunton to be a “dismal spectacle”?[3] How many years since a few “acute and ingenious gentlewomen” in colonial Virginia had the temerity to remain single and cultivate their own tobacco plantations, for which unnatural behavior they were subjected to repeated “admonishments”? _Now_ the “antient mayde” flaunts her freedom in the faces of those who are patiently doing their duty to the world. _Now_ if a woman runs a successful apple-orchard or dairy-farm, her exploits are heralded far and wide, and other women write exultant papers about her, intimating that the day of the male agriculturist is virtually over. I am not sure that the attitude of our great-great-grandfathers, who jealously and somewhat fearfully guarded their prerogatives, was not more flattering to my sex than this enthusiasm evoked by achievements which in a man would not be found worthy of notice.

As for age--well, who in these years of grace is frankly and confessedly old? We no longer say, “On a l’âge de son cœur,” but “On a l’âge de sa volonté.” Jane Austen settled down to caps and spinsterhood before she was thirty. Dr. Johnson alluded to Miss Lucy Porter’s “hoary virginity” when that lady was fifty-two. The Ettrick Shepherd stubbornly protested that “to ca’ a woman saxty, and then mainteen that ye didna ca’ her auld, is naething short o’ a sophism.” But now no one gets beyond middle age, or “the prime of life.” I have heard a Boston spinster of eighty-two (a remarkable woman, I admit) casually spoken of as middle-aged; and when, in a desperate resolve to push matters to an issue, I said: “Miss D--is not middle-aged; she is old. If you are not old when you are eighty-two, when _are_ you old?” the remark was taken in ill part. “I should not dream of calling Miss D--old,” said one gallant Bostonian, and all his hearers agreed with him.

The French spinster is a negligible factor. The English spinster has conquered her territory and become a force to be reckoned with. But the American spinster is the standard-bearer of the tribe. Her incessant activities and her radiant self-satisfaction have made her appear more dominant than she is, and have caused her critics much needless apprehension. When Mrs. Van Vorst wrote, in 1903, “Our factories are full of old maids, our colleges are full of old maids, our ball-rooms in the worldly centers are full of old maids,” Americans read these words with placid unconcern. They had given too many wedding presents in their day to have any doubts anent the permanent popularity of marriage. But English readers, who are ever prone to be literal, appear to have accepted Mrs. Van Vorst’s statements _au pied de la lettre_. Mr. Marriott Watson, chilled to the heart--as well he might be--by the vision of a ballroom destitute alike of girls and matrons, wrote for the “Nineteenth Century” a severe and agitated protest. He asserted that a woman’s “functions” “alone excuse or explain her existence,”--which is one way of looking at the matter; and he pointed out that American women are the most remote the world can show from the primitive and savage type which represents the dynamic force of a race.

The mere fact that the American spinster is so often and so sharply censured marks the strength of her position. No one dreams of censuring the French _vieille fille_ or the German _jungfrau_. These victims of fate meet with scorn or sympathy, according to the taste and breeding of commentators. In either case, their lives are registered as failures. Nothing can rob the German woman of those vital sensibilities which center in the home and family. “Every great movement of the Teutonic soul,” says Mr. Havelock Ellis, “has been rooted in emotion.” If the women of Germany are demanding “rights,” and demanding them with no uncertain voice, it is because they seek to meet their responsibilities with authority. The sphere of home and child-rearing is their sphere, and they purpose to rule in it.

It is not possible for the Frenchwoman, who understands the structure of society, to welcome spinsterhood. “All her instincts of expansion,” says that acute observer Mr. William Crary Brownell, “are hostile to it. There is no more provision in the French social constitution than in the order of nature itself for the old maid.” Therefore, as the twin passions of the French heart are to be in rational accord with nature and in rational accord with social life, the unmarried woman has no alternative but to feel herself doubly incomplete. She is unstirred by the American woman’s vaulting ambition to be man’s rival, or by an uneasy envy of man’s estate. Perhaps it is because a French girl never regrets her sex that France has produced more eminent women than any other nation in the world. Certainly the only man who ever had the courage to say he would like to be a woman (a beautiful woman, he stipulated) was that distinguished Frenchman M. Jules Lemaître.

No one since De Quincey has spoken so generously of the English spinster as has Mr. John B. Atkins in the pages of ~The Century~. He does not, like so many of his contemporaries, accuse her of gross selfishness. He does not deny her the right to control her own life. He goes so far as to say that she may use it to good purpose, and extract from it some measure of content. He points out the philanthropic paths which it should be her duty and her pleasure to tread. He draws a pleasing picture of the maiden aunt giving to nieces and nephews--to nephews especially--her sympathy and comradeship. Sir Leslie Stephen says that “Woman to a boy is simply an incumbrance upon reasonable modes of life,” and it is to be feared that many women--aunts and others--have the same doubtful regard for boys. But British sentimentality demands of the old maid, if she be a good old maid, that yearning attitude toward other people’s children which marks her as “womanly” and earns for her the tolerance of the world.

The American spinster is seldom sentimental, which is in her favor, and she is seldom emotional, which is both gain and loss. Her attenuation of feeling lessens her charm and influence, but serves to keep her in accord with the orderly conventions of society. She is keenly competitive, and eager for new fields of activity; but she can read Ellen Key’s “Love and Marriage” with intelligent detachment. She cries occasionally for the moon, but she is in no immediate danger of scorching her fingers by trying to play with the sun.

The flexibility of American social life gives to the unmarried woman an assured position which has no counterpart in the older civilizations. She may be an anomaly in nature, but she is in perfect accord with her more or less agreeable surroundings. She has no background to give repute and distinction to her rôle; but she infuses into it her own persuasive personality. She stands free from the common obligations of her sex, but she does work which is well worth doing, and she not infrequently adds to the gaiety of life. “Of how many homes,” says Mr. Brownell, “is she not the decorously decorative ornament! She may have courted or have drifted into her position of dignified singleness; it is in either case equally sure that she has not considered her estate incomplete in itself, or disengaged from the structure of society.”

As a matter of fact, she is wont to feel herself--birth and fortune permitting--a pillar of society. It is no question with her of wasted force or blighted vitality. It is a question of directing her superabundant energy into those channels where she can accomplish measurable results. She seeks and finds a constructive human existence remote from marriage and maternity. The French or German woman remains unmarried because the unkindly fates have so decreed. The English woman occasionally assists fate from sheer love of independence. “The most ordinarie cause of a single life,” says Bacon, “is liberty, especially in certain self-pleasing and humorous minds.” But it is surely reserved for the American woman to remain unmarried because she feels herself too good for matrimony, too valuable to be intrusted to a husband’s keeping. Her attitude bears some resemblance to that of Mademoiselle de Montpensier, who wrote with praiseworthy conviction: “I may say without vanity that just Heaven would not bestow such a woman as myself upon a man who was unworthy of her.”

This is not idle jesting. Would it be possible in any country save our own for a lady to write to a periodical, explaining, “Why I am an Old Maid,” and be paid coin of the realm for the explanation? Would it be possible in any other country to hear such a question as “Should the Gifted Woman Marry?” seriously asked, and seriously answered? Would it be possible for any sane and thoughtful woman who was not an American to consider even the remote possibility of our spinsters becoming a detached class, who shall form “the intellectual and economic élite of the sex, and leave marriage and maternity for the less developed woman”? What has become of the belief, as old as humanity, that marriage and maternity are highly developing processes, forcing into flower a woman’s latent potentialities; and that the less developed woman is inevitably the woman who has escaped this keen and powerful stimulus. “Never,” says Edmond de Goncourt, “has a virgin, young or old, produced a work of art.” One makes allowance for the Latin point of view. And it is probable that M. de Goncourt never read “Emma.”

Signor Ferrero, contemplating the unmarried women of England, those amazing creatures who “devote themselves to sterility, not from religious motives, but from sheer calculation” (which is also a Latin point of view), has recorded his conviction that they will make themselves felt as a force, and has expressed his genuine dismay as to the possible results of their activity. He has even confessed to some whimsical misgivings lest Italian and Sicilian women should acquire this Saxon taste for spinsterhood. Yet England is emphatically a man’s country--which France has never been--and its attitude toward marriage is a robustly masculine attitude, as unacceptable to the French as to the American woman. There is no attempt anywhere to gloss over this rude fact. The Englishman believes with Mr. Kipling:

“He travels the fastest who travels alone.”

He echoes the verdict of Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Marriage narrows and damps the spirits of generous men.” “The position of a single man,” says a stout-hearted writer in the “Contemporary Review,” “is in itself envied and applauded; that of a single woman certainly is not. To every woman marriage is still accounted a promotion. There may be counterbalancing circumstances, but to be married is, in itself, an object of desire and a subject for congratulation.”

In the good old days when English spinsters softened the reproach of spinsterhood by borrowing the prefix “Mrs.,” as did those excellent ladies, Mrs. Hannah More and Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, the position of a single man was neither envied nor applauded. He was held to be (if of decent life,--much allowance was made for rakes) only a little less contemptible than a single woman. “The pain and the opprobrium o’ defunckin an auld bachelor,” writes the Ettrick Shepherd, expressing after his hardy fashion the sentiment of his time. Dr. Johnson firmly maintained that marriage was more necessary for a man than for a woman, because a woman could make herself comfortable and a man could not. The responsibility for the more modern and more supercilious masculine attitude must be placed where it belongs,--on the shoulders of the Englishwoman, who has accepted the creed that for her marriage is a promotion, and that “counterbalancing circumstances” should not be held to weigh too heavily in the scale. As Dean Hole’s friend said to him, when congratulated on her daughter’s engagement: “To be sure, Jenny hates the man, but then there’s always something.”

Miss Austen was the most veracious of chroniclers, one who with careful self-control refused to wander beyond the area of her own observation; but there is nothing in American fiction, and very little, I fancy, in the fiction of any land, which is comparable to the marriage of _Charlotte Lucas_ and _Mr. Collins_. Many novelists have made easy copy of husband-hunting. It is a favorite theme with Trollope, who treats it with ruthless cynicism, and it is a not uncommon element in modern story-telling. But _Charlotte Lucas_ staggers us. Miss Austen calls her “sensible and intelligent.” She is also well-bred, clear-headed, and kind. She is _Elizabeth Bennet’s_ chosen friend. And she marries _Mr. Collins_! Marries him with alacrity, and with permanent satisfaction. If there be any one episode in life and letters which is calculated to reconcile us to the rapid increase of spinsterhood in England and America, it is the amazing fact that Jane Austen not only married _Charlotte Lucas_ to _Mr. Collins_, but plainly considered it a not unnatural thing for her to do.

Ten years ago, when a rage for compiling useless statistics swept over Europe and the United States, it occurred to some active minds that children should be made to bear their part in the guidance of the human race. Accordingly a series of questions--some sensible and some foolish--were put to English, German, and American school children, and their enlightening answers were given to the world. One of these questions read: “Would you rather be a man or a woman, and why?” Naturally this query was of concern only to little girls. No sane educator would ask it of a boy. Even Jules Lemaître at twelve must have shared the convictions of his fellows. German pedagogues, be it noted, struck the question off the list. They said that to ask a child, “Would you rather be something you must be, or something you cannot possibly be?” was both foolish and useless. Interrogations concerning choice were of value only when the will was a determining factor.

In this country no such logical inference chilled the examiner’s zeal. The question was asked and was answered, and we discovered as a result that a great many little American girls (a minority, to be sure, but a respectable minority,) were well content with their sex; not because it had its duties and dignities, its pleasures and exemptions; but because they plainly considered that they were superior to little American boys, and were destined, when grown up, to be superior to American men. One small New England maiden wrote that she would rather be a woman because “Women are always better than men in morals.” Another, because “Women are more use in the world.” A third, because “Women learn things quicker than men, and have more intelligence.” And so on through varying degrees of self-sufficiency. “Lord, gie us a gude conceit o’ ourselves!” prayed the Scotchman, who knew the value of assurance.

Now certainly these little girls were old maids in the making. They had stamped upon them in their tender infancy the hall-mark of the American spinster. In a few more years they will be writing papers on “The Place of Unmarried Women in the World’s Work,” and reading addresses on “The Woman of Intellect: her Duty to Herself and to the State.” There is a formidable lack of humor in this easy confidence, in the somewhat contemptuous attitude of women whose capacities have not yet been tested, toward men who stand responsible for the failures of the world. It denotes, at home or abroad, a density not far removed from dullness. In that dreary little Irish drama, “Mixed Marriages,” which the Dublin actors played in New York two years ago, an old woman, presumed to be witty and wise, said to her son’s betrothed: “Sure, I believe the Lord made Eve when He saw that Adam could not take care of himself”; and the remark, while received with applause, reflected painfully upon the absence of that humorous sense which we used to think was the birthright of Irishmen. The too obvious retort which nobody uttered, but which everybody must have thought, was that if Eve had been designed as a care-taker, she had made a shining failure of her job.

It is conceded, theoretically at least, that woman’s sphere is an elastic term, comprising any work she is able to do well. Therefore, it may be that American spinsters, keen, college-bred, ambitious, and, above all, free, are destined to compete vigorously and permanently with men. They are, we are told, the only women who can give themselves unreservedly to work, and from them alone enduring results are to be expected. Yet it is at least worthy of notice that most of the successful business women of France,--Mme. Clicquot-Ponsardin, Mme. Pommery, Mme. Dumas, Mme. Bernet, Mme. Boucicault,--have been either married women who were their husbands’ partners, or widows who took upon their capable shoulders the burden of their dead husbands’ cares. They were also mothers who, with the definite aims and practical instincts of their race, projected themselves into the future, and wove out of their own pursuits the fabric of their children’s lives.

At present the American spinster is in a transition stage, a stage so replete with advantages that we may be permitted to hope it will last long. She has escaped from the chimney-corner, and is not yet shut up in banks and offices. She does a reasonable amount of work, and embraces every reasonable opportunity of enjoyment. She gratifies her own tastes, and cherishes her natural affinities. She sometimes cultivates her mind, and she never breaks her heart. She is the best of friends, and she has leisure for companionship. She is equally free from _l’esprit gaulois_ and from “_les mœurs de vestales pétrifiées_,” which are the Scylla and Charybdis of the French _vieille fille_. She is content with a contentment which the German _jungfrau_ neither understands nor envies. She is assured with an assurance unknown to the experienced English old maid. She is, as I have said, the standard-bearer of her tribe, and the pibroch to which she marches blithely through life has the ring of the old Covenanting song:

“That a’ the world may see
There’s nane in the right but we.”

All this is far removed, as Mr. Marriott Watson warns us, from the savage and primitive woman, who represents the dynamic force of a race. But who shall ring the bells backward? And who shall reconcile the primitive woman to the exigencies and formalities of civilization? Some years ago in South Carolina I came to know and love an old Negro “mammy,” a wise, fat, kind, mysterious old mammy, whose heart was soft, whose touch was healing, whose voice was like a lullaby, and whose experiences would have colored half a dozen ordinary lives. Her sister, the laundress, was one day under discussion, and I asked, with more than my customary ineptitude: “Aunt Cordelia, is Caroline an old maid?”

Aunt Cordelia turned upon me a look in which contempt for my ignorance blended with a deep acceptance and understanding of life as she had known it, unfiltered, unsheltered, unevasive. “Laws, honey,” she said, “we’s no ole maids. Some’s married, and some isn’t; but we’s no ole maids.”

[3] “Life and Errors of John Dunton,” 1705.

PRAYERS FOR THE LIVING

BY MARY W. PLUMMER

O soul of all souls whitest, what need’st thou
Of solemn masses who with angel choirs
Dost chant enraptured thy most pure desires,
And to the heavenly will, as erst on earth, dost bow?
What can I ask for thee, in halting prayer,
Heavy with grief, that could increase thy bliss?
What in thy perfectness can be amiss
Who grewest to angelhood all unaware?
Rather, pray thou for me. And when ye stand,
Making petition, folding wing on wing,
Drooping your eyes before the glory-light,
Think, if thou may’st, on him who, wandering
Along the lower way, hath lost thy hand,
Yet seeketh for thy footprints day and night!

THE COMING SNEEZE

BY HARRY STILLWELL EDWARDS

Author of “Sons and Fathers,” “Two Runaways,” etc.

What it really was that twisted Aunt Tildy’s features into the anxious expression which inevitably waits on an approaching sneeze, no one, it is likely, will ever discover, though several plausible explanations have been offered; but twisted they were, early in life, and for all time Aunt Tildy was condemned to face the world with wrinkles on her forehead, lifted brows, a ruffled nose, half-closed eyes, and a drawn mouth. The theory of an arrested sneeze was advanced many years ago by Tim Broggins, who still sits around the cotton warehouse and, while he whittles white pine splinters and chews tobacco, is wont to settle all questions as they arise. Tim knows everything worth knowing and probably some things that are not; and of course he knew what was the trouble with Aunt Tildy’s face.

“Hit’s er comin’ sneeze, that’s what!” said he once, when Aunt Tildy, passing in her little country buggy, drew comment after her. “Hit’s er comin’ sneeze! Hit’s er sollum fac’, gentle_men_, that Aunt Tildy ain’t been known ter sneeze in her whole life. She started oncet erlong back in th’ sixties; got her face twisted jes right, looked at th’ sun an’ was er-strainin’ of her corsits when somebody hollered ‘Cyclone!’ She’d been in one cyclone that like ter drug her hair out by th’ roots, an’ when she heard th’ name ag’in, she jes natchully hunted cover an’ forgot to pull ’er face together. When th’ cyclone passed, hit were too late. She ain’t never sneeze’ sence that day. Thought I’d try her some time with snuff or red pepper an’ see if hit wouldn’t tech ’er off an’ straighten out things; but hit’s done growed that erway now. The thing is sot an’ fixed!”

Aunt Tildy, however, did not let the tangled condition of her features interfere with business. From the profits of her little farm and country store she managed to sustain herself admirably; to educate and marry off her niece and lay up a competency for old age. It mattered not how hard the times, how poor the crops, and how bad were general collections, there was seldom a day when she did not have money in bank to loan at legal interest on exceptional collateral. With her bonnet pushed back, her fat umbrella grasped by its middle, and her little worn bag, she was a familiar figure in town on most Saturdays.

It was on a Saturday that Aunt Tildy and handsome Jack Cromby met for the first time, and Jack heard from Tim Broggins the old legend of the coming sneeze. Jack was the wide-awake and pushing representative of an up-State snuff factory, and was flooding the county with little red labeled tin boxes that contained samples of its product.

“Tell yer what, Jack,” said Tim, as he passed his knife-blade under a delicate curl of pine to the end of his splinter, “ef you was ter git th’ ole lady’s face on your boxes an’ call it ‘The Comin’ Sneeze’ brand, hit would ketch th’ town. Say, Jack! why ’n’t you try er little of the stuff on her, anyhow? Seems ter me ef you could jes git her up-town on the Court-House Square whar folks could see it all, an’ git her to turn loose that sneeze that’s been er hangin’ fire forty years, you’d sell er million! I ain’t er-sayin’ yo’ ole stuff could reach it, but it mout. My private opinion is that when that sneeze do come, hit’ll have ter be broke up with dynamite firs’ an’ then took out of her system piece by piece. Still, as I said, yo’ pertickerlar brand of tickler mout tech it off!”

Jack laughed heartily at the drollery of the wag; and then, the spirit of commercial enterprise taking possession of him, he suddenly grew serious.

“Not a bad idea, Tim--that about the picture. Think of the big ones to hang in the window--three colors--‘The coming sneeze’! And what a trade-mark! By George! I wonder whether I can get a photograph of her.”

“Dunno ’bout _that_. But I did hear John Belton who runs the gallery up-town say as how las’ week he took some to sen’ to her niece out in Texas. Maybe you mout git hold o’ one ef you go ’bout it right. But looker here, Jack!--don’t you git me mixed up in this thing! Lord! She run down that sneeze joke o’ mine ten years ago an’ sech er tongue lashin’!--Keep me out o’ hit er I’ll call you er liar, sho’!”

“I’ll keep you out, Tim. Belton, did you say?”

“Yes--John Belton. He’ll let you have one of the pictur’s, mebbe, ef you don’t tell what you want with hit. Ef you tell him _that_, he wouldn’t sell you one fer no price--’cause Belton wants ter live erwhile yet.”

Jack Cromby finessed. He had his own picture taken, being now thoroughly carried away with the advertising scheme, and voluntarily paid cash in advance. He then begged of the well-pleased artist one of Aunt Tildy’s,--to “send away to some friends.” In after days--though it is a shameful thing to print--he very generously assisted the unfortunate Belton to erect a barricade of fiction between himself and his outraged patron.

Jack’s one great error in discretion, after embarking on this perilous enterprise, was committed when he confided his plans to a young belle of the community. Handsome, dashing, well-dressed, and generous, Jack was a favorite, and numbered his sweethearts by dozens up and down the road. Among these was Miss Pinkie Appleby, selected by him in an evil moment to become the joint custodian of his mature plans touching Aunt Tildy’s likeness. Of course, Miss Pinkie laughed. What girl would not, in the circumstances? How could the innocent joke, as Jack described it, in any way injure Aunt Tildy? And what girl would not have promptly confided the secret to several intimates whom Jack had not honored, with strict injunctions as to secrecy?

The little group of idlers around the warehouse were holding their usual morning conversation when Aunt Tildy’s vehicle turned the corner at a pace that caused all four wheels to slide sidewise and give forth a harsh warning. Tim Broggins suspended his whittling a moment, looked at the broad scar left in the dust, and suffered his contemplative gaze to follow the receding figure in the buggy.

“What ails Tildy?” The question came from Judge Oglesby, whose two hundred and fifty pounds were waiting upright in a broad chair while his justice court threatened to convene. “Sorter flustered, ’pears to me.” He crossed his fat hands on his hickory cane and rested them against his zone of greatest circumference, blinking, as the dust began to float in.

“I wonder!--I wonder!” said Tim, reflectively, as he resumed his interrupted occupation. “Now, gentle_men_, I’m goin’ ter give er guess; an’ watch me hit the nail on the head! Jedge, you know how ol’ Squire Jones laugh’ erbout that sneeze picture las’ night, an’ how drunk he were?”

“Squire was putty drunk, Tim. Worse ’n usual.”

“Well, now, I bet squire stop’ an’ tole Aunt Tildy all erbout hit! Right on his way home, her store is, an’ most gener’ly he begins to ricollec’ things he was to bring back ’bout time he gits there! Aunt Tildy gits er big trade o’ that sort. Hit’s a good soberin’-up stan’ for fellows goin’ thet erway an’ totin’ too much of the brand o’ O-be-joyful they buy eroun’ town. Yes, sir, squire tole ’er cert’in--dad blast his ol’ skin, he had oughter be lynched! Where’d she pull up, Jedge?”

“Lawyer Thomas’s office!”