Her Royal Highness Woman Part 11

and the play. You conclude that they must be married, because they are styled Mrs. and not Miss, but whether they are wives, widows, or divorcees, you rarely think of inquiring, and you go on enjoying their society, even their friends.h.i.+p, year after year, without knowing whether there exists, somewhere in America, a Mr. So-and-so or not.

It was in America only, on calling on my lady friends whose acquaintance I had made in Europe, that I discovered the existence of their husbands. I found them very much alive, having for the companions of their joys and sorrows the telephone and the ticker.

Now, an impression (not an opinion, much less a conviction) to be formed from all this is that the American woman, with all her physical beauty and intellectual attainments, is not always a woman whose characteristic traits are devotion, unselfishness, and self-sacrifice.

But it is not her fault if this should be the case, and I have no reason to suppose that it is. In a community, woman is what man makes her. So long as men's first consideration is business and money-making, so long as they consider clubs the proper place to seek relief in from the pursuits and hards.h.i.+ps of everyday life, so long as wives are practically left to themselves to make the best of the long leisures of the day, the women will study how best they can arrange for themselves a life of comfort, ease and pleasure. Is there any other country where you will find women able to enjoy life without the companions.h.i.+p of men? They have come to an understanding among themselves. They will have lunch, dinner-parties, where no male guest will be seen, and they will have a grand time. They try to please each other, and an American woman will use as much coquetry to win a woman as a French woman will use to win a man. Is there any other country where you see so many women's clubs?

Women's clubs? The idea!

Yet that American woman has male friends. She is a delightful chum and good fellow, the only woman in the world who can have such male friends, 'pals' without the least misconstruction, the least objectionable whisperings on the subject. She calls those male friends by their Christian names in speaking of them, although she invariably mentions her husband as Mr. John B. Smith.

The American men are the most devoted of husbands, but they are not under the influence of their women. They indulge them in all their whims and luxuries, but their status in life is to be their women's husbands--I will not say upper servants, but domestic animals, not pets, of undeniable usefulness, who work at the sweat of their brows to keep in luxury the most lovely, interesting and expensive womankind in the world.

Some years ago, I was spending a Sunday afternoon in the house of a young married man in Chicago who, I was told, possessed twenty millions. The poor fellow! It was the twenty millions which possessed him. He had a most beautiful and interesting wife, and the loveliest little girl of three or four years of age that I ever set my eyes on.

That lovely little girl was kind enough to take to me at once--there's no accounting for taste! We had a little flirtation in the distance at first. By-and-by, she came toward me, nearer and nearer, then she stopped in front of me, and looked at me, hesitating, with her finger in her pretty little mouth. I knew what she wanted, and I said to her: 'That's all right; come on.' She jumped on my knees, settled herself comfortably and asked me to tell her stories. I started at once. Now, you understand, I was not allowed to stop; but I took breath, and I said to her:

'Does not your papa tell you long stories on Sundays?'

That lovely little round face grew sad and quite long.

'Oh no,' she said; 'papa is too tired on Sundays.'

A few weeks after I left Chicago that man was taken ill with a disease not uncommon in America, a disease that starts at the top of your head and takes two or three years to kill you in a lunatic asylum, among drivelling idiots and imbeciles.

A couple of years later, being in Chicago again, I made inquiries and learned that the poor fellow was expected to exist a few weeks, perhaps a few months longer.

What a pity, I thought, that beautiful woman had not enough influence over that good man to stop him!

Do not offer me twenty millions at that price. No twenty millions can cure the disease which afflicted that American.

Put a little girl of three on my knees on Sundays, and I will tell her stories from sunrise and go on till sunset, even if I thus run the risk of being prosecuted by the Lord's Day Observance Society.

CHAPTER XXVII

PETTICOAT GOVERNMENT

Description of all the Anglo-Saxon fads.

I loathe the domination of woman, but I ever crave for her influence, and I believe that any man of refinement and thinking, that any lover and admirer of woman, will echo this sentiment.

I know of one country only where the government by woman was given a real trial, and that is New Zealand. The law was pa.s.sed and the experiment was made. The law, I believe, had to be repealed after six months. The Government had taken such a tyrannical form that that loveliest of spots on the earth was on the eve of a revolution, of a desperate struggle for liberty.

Things were pretty badly managed in a small Ohio city when I was visiting it four years ago. The following year women put up their names as candidates for the City Council in every ward, and were all returned. They did manage the city. The following year the experiment had been made, and not one woman was returned again.

The American men are so busy, so long absent from home, that many of their womankind have to find out a way of using the leisure time left at their disposal, with results that are not always altogether satisfactory. Some devote that time to literature, to the improvement of their brilliant native intellect; some spend it in frivolities; some indulge in all the fads of Anglo-Saxon life.

The women of good society in America are what they are everywhere else--satisfied with their lot, which consists in being the adored G.o.ddesses of refined households; but there exists in that country among the middle--perhaps, what I should call in European parlance, lower middle--cla.s.ses, restless, b.u.mptious, ever-poking-their-noses-everywhere women, who are slowly, but surely and safely, transforming that great land of liberty into a land of petty, fussy tyranny, and trying--often with complete success--to impose on the community fads of every shape and form.

If there is one country in the world where the women appear, in the eyes of the foreign visitor, to enjoy all manner of privileges and to have the men in leading-strings, that country is America. You would imagine, therefore, that America should be the last country where the New Woman was to be found airing her grievances. Yet she is flouris.h.i.+ng throughout the length and breadth of that huge continent. She is petted by her husband, the most devoted and hardworking of husbands in the world; she is literally covered with precious stones by him; she is allowed to wear hats that would 'fetch' Paris in carnival time or start a panic at a Corpus Christi procession in Paris or a Lord Mayor's Show in London; she is the superior of her husband in education and almost in every respect; she is surrounded by the most numerous and delicate attentions, yet she is not satisfied.

The Anglo-Saxon New Woman is the most ridiculous production of modern times, and destined to be the most ghastly failure of the century. She is _par excellence_ the woman with a grievance, and self-labelled the greatest nuisance of modern society. The New Woman wants to retain all the privileges of her s.e.x, and secure besides all those of man; she wants to be a man and to remain a woman. She will fail to become a man, but she may succeed in ceasing to be a woman.

And now, where is that New Woman to be found? Put together a hundred women, intelligent and of good society; take out the beautiful ones; then take out the married ones who are loved by their husbands and their children, and kindly seek the New Woman among what is left--ugly women, old maids, and disappointed and neglected wives.

Woman has no grievance against man. Her only grievance should be, I admit, against Nature, which made her different from man, with duties different, physically and otherwise, almost always to her disadvantage.

The world exists and marches on through love. I pity from the bottom of my heart the good woman who is not to know the whispers of love of a good husband or the caresses of little children, but I am not prepared to see life become a burden for her sake.

There is no possibility of denying or ignoring the fact. The purpose, the _raison d'etre_, of woman is to be a mother, as the _raison d'etre_ of a fruit-tree is to bear fruit. And woe to the next generations, for everybody knows that _only_ the children of quiet and reposed women are healthy and intelligent.

The woman question will only be solved by the partners.h.i.+p in life of man and wife, as it exists in France, where, thank G.o.d! the New Woman is unknown; by the equality of the s.e.xes, but each with different, well-defined duties to perform.

The New Woman is not to be found outside of Great Britain, where woman is her husband's inferior, and of the United States, where she is his superior.

The woman who devotes a good deal of her time to the management of public affairs is a woman who is not required to devote much of it to private ones.

Show me a woman of forty.

Look on this picture: Eyes bright, beaming with joy and happiness, complexion clear, rosy, plump, not a wrinkle, mouth smiling. See her lips bearing the imprint of holy kisses, and her neck the mark of her little children's arms. She has no grievance. Ask her to join the New Woman army. 'No, thanks,' she will say, with a smile of pity; 'the old style is good enough for me.'

And on this: Thin, sallow complexion, eyes without l.u.s.tre, wrinkled, mouth sulky, haughty, the disgust of life written on every feature.

That woman will join the ranks of every organization which aims at taking the cup of love away from the lips of every happy being.

But all this might take the shape of a long digression. Let us see how some American women devote part of the time which they are not probably wanted to devote at home.

I think that of all the grand fads indulged in by some women in America, the palm should be given to the compulsory water-drinking work. That is a colossal ill.u.s.tration of what women can do when left entirely to their own resources.

Now I will lay down as a sort of principle that the 'temperance' woman and the teetotaler are not to be found in refined society, and I don't think that in saying so I shall run the risk of being contradicted. I have often been a guest at the Union Club, the Union League Club, the Manhattan, the Century, the Players, and many other good clubs. I have dined in the best houses of the great American cities, and nowhere have I met teetotalers in those circles of society. Refined, intelligent people of good society, artists, literary men, are not teetotalers--that will be granted by everybody. I don't mention politicians, even of the best cla.s.s, who have at times to be teetotalers to catch votes in a democracy.

The smaller towns of America--and that is America proper--are ruled by fussy, interfering faddists, fanatics of all sorts, old women of both s.e.xes, shrieking c.o.c.katoos, that will by-and-by make life well-nigh intolerable to any man of self-respect, and make him wonder whether he lives in a free country or not.

Take two lively ill.u.s.trations. A few years ago I was in the town of E---- (Kansas). There was a mayor who was married, and the happy pair had a little boy. That little boy was a wicked little boy. One day he was caught smoking a cigarette. Now, what should be done by sensible parents to such a wicked little boy? Why, he should be turned over and given a good hearty--you know. This is not at all what was done. The mayor's wife called up a meeting of women, made a violent speech on the pernicious habit of cigarette-smoking, and it was decided to pet.i.tion the mayor and ask him to forbid the sale of cigarettes within the precincts of his jurisdiction. For the sake of peace and happiness at home, the worthy mayor published an edict prohibiting the sale of cigarettes in his district. However, cigarettes can be had in the town of E----, but you have to walk nearly a mile, just outside the limits of the mayor's jurisdiction, to find a store where a roaring trade in cigarettes is done. All the same, you must admit that it is a nuisance to be obliged to walk a mile in a free country to buy a little article of luxury that you indulge in, without ever abusing it, because there happens to be in the town a wicked little boy who once smoked a cigarette.

When I was in the town of T----(Arkansas), I gave a lecture under the auspices of 'temperance' ladies of the city. They called on me.

Being of a rather inquisitive turn of mind, I said to them: 'Now, ladies, I understand I am in a prohibition State. How do you account for your existence? Do you wish now to advocate the suppression of tea, coffee, and ice-water, which, I must say, would go a long way towards improving the complexion and the digestive apparatus of your compatriots?'

'No,' they said; 'we find that, in spite of the law, there is liquor, wine, and beer still sold in this town, and we want to put a stop to it.'

I knew that such was the case, for I had, _proh pudor!_ a bottle of lager-beer in my pocket which I had bought for my dinner, but which, I am glad to say, was not discovered by the ladies under the auspices of whom I was to lecture in the evening. I can do with ice-water, but in a prohibition State I cannot. The evil spirit prompts me. I must have beer or wine with my meals. I have never been drunk in my life; but if ever I get drunk it will be in a prohibition State.

'Well,' said the lady president of the temperance society of the town of T----, 'could you believe that a few days ago a poor woman of the town and her children actually died of starvation, while every day her husband got drunk with the wages he received?'

'But,' I mildly suggested, 'you should see that that man was punished, not the innocent population of this town. Don't suppress the wine, which is a gift of G.o.d. Punish--suppress, even, if you like--the drunkard. It is not wine that makes a man drunk, it is vice. Don't suppress the wine, suppress the vice or the vicious. Imprison a drunkard, lynch him, hang, shoot him, quarter him, do what you like with him, but allow hundreds of good, wise, temperate people who would use wine in moderation to indulge in a habit that makes men moderate, cheerful, and happy. Don't suppress wine because a few idiots use it to get drunk.'

Every year there are men who use knives to stab fellow-creatures; but there are millions who use their knives to eat their meals peacefully with. The law punishes the criminals, but would not think of forbidding the use of knives in orderly houses.