Part 11

“Certainly, my dear,” replied the Woman of the World; “there is a deal of the animal in man; but—well, I was myself expressing that same particular view of him, the brute, to a very old lady with whom I was spending a winter in Brussels, many years ago now, when I was quite a girl. She had been a friend of my father’s, and was one of the sweetest and kindest—I was almost going to say the most perfect woman I have ever met; though as a celebrated beauty, stories, dating from the early Victorian era, were told about her. But myself I never believed them. Her calm, gentle, passionless face, crowned with its soft, silver hair—I remember my first sight of the Matterhorn on a summer’s evening; somehow it at once reminded me of her.”

“My dear,” laughed the Old Maid, “your anecdotal method is becoming as jerky as a cinematograph.”

“I have noticed it myself,” replied the Woman of the World; “I try to get in too much.”

“The art of the raconteur,” observed the Philosopher, “consists in avoiding the unessential. I have a friend who never yet to my knowledge reached the end of a story. It is intensely unimportant whether the name of the man who said the thing or did the deed be Brown or Jones or Robinson. But she will worry herself into a fever trying to recollect. ‘Dear, dear me!’ she will leave off to exclaim; ‘I know his name so well. How stupid of me!’ She will tell you why she ought to recollect his name, how she always has recollected his name till this precise moment. She will appeal to half the people in the room to help her. It is hopeless to try and induce her to proceed, the idea has taken possession of her mind. After a world of unnecessary trouble she recollects that it was Tomkins, and is delighted; only to be plunged again into despair on discovery that she has forgotten his address. This makes her so ashamed of herself she declines to continue, and full of self-reproach she retires to her own room. Later she re-enters, beaming, with the street and number pat. But by that time she has forgotten the anecdote.”

“Well, tell us about your old lady, and what it was you said to her,” spoke impatiently the Girton Girl, who is always eager when the subject under discussion happens to be the imbecility or criminal tendency of the opposite sex.

“I was at the age,” continued the Woman of the World, “when a young girl tiring of fairy stories puts down the book and looks round her at the world, and naturally feels indignant at what she notices. I was very severe upon both the shortcomings and the overgoings of man—our natural enemy. My old friend used to laugh, and that made me think her callous and foolish. One day our bonne—like all servants, a lover of gossip—came to us delighted with a story which proved to me how just had been my estimate of the male animal. The grocer at the corner of our rue, married only four years to a charming and devoted little wife, had run away and left her.

“‘He never gave her even a hint, the pretty angel!’ so Jeanne informed us. ‘Had had his box containing his clothes and everything he wanted ready packed for a week, waiting for him at the railway station—just told her he was going to play a game of dominoes, and that she was not to sit up for him; kissed her and the child good-night, and—well, that was the last she ever saw of him. Did Madame ever hear the like of it?’ concluded Jeanne, throwing up her hands to heaven. ‘I am sorry to say, Jeanne, that I have,’ replied my sweet Madame with a sigh, and led the conversation by slow degrees back to the subject of dinner. I turned to her when Jeanne had left the room. I can remember still the burning indignation of my face. I had often spoken to the man myself, and had thought what a delightful husband he was—so kind, so attentive, so proud, seemingly, of his dainty femme. ‘Doesn’t that prove what I say,’ I cried, ‘that men are beasts?’ ‘I am afraid it helps in that direction,’ replied my old friend. ‘And yet you defend them,’ I answered. ‘At my age, my dear,’ she replied, ‘one neither defends nor blames; one tries to understand.’ She put her thin white hand upon my head. ‘Shall we hear a little more of the story?’ she said. ‘It is not a pleasant one, but it may be useful to us.’ ‘I don’t want to hear any more of it,’ I answered; ‘I have heard enough.’ ‘It is sometimes well,’ she persisted, ‘to hear the whole of a case before forming our judgment.’ And she rang the bell for Jeanne. ‘That story about our little grocer friend,’ she said—‘it is rather interesting to me. Why did he leave her and run away—do you know?’ Jeanne shrugged her ample shoulders. ‘Oh! the old story, Madame,’ she answered, with a short laugh. ‘Who was she?’ asked my friend. ‘The wife of Monsieur Savary, the wheelwright, as good a husband as ever a woman had. It’s been going on for months, the hussy!’ ‘Thank you, that will do, Jeanne.’ She turned again to me so soon as Jeanne had left the room. ‘My dear,’ she said, ‘whenever I see a bad man, I peep round the corner for the woman. Whenever I see a bad woman, I follow her eyes; I know she is looking for her mate. Nature never makes odd samples.’”

“I cannot help thinking,” said the Philosopher, “that a good deal of harm is being done to the race as a whole by the overpraise of women.”

“Who overpraises them?” demanded the Girton Girl. “Men may talk nonsense to us—I don’t know whether any of us are foolish enough to believe it—but I feel perfectly sure that when they are alone most of their time is occupied in abusing us.”

“That is hardly fair,” interrupted the Old Maid. “I doubt if they do talk about us among themselves as much as we think. Besides, it is always unwise to go behind the verdict. Some very beautiful things have been said about women by men.”

“Well, ask them,” said the Girton Girl. “Here are three of them present. Now, honestly, when you talk about us among yourselves, do you gush about our virtue, and goodness, and wisdom?”

“‘Gush,’” said the Philosopher, reflecting, “‘gush’ would hardly be the correct word.”

“In justice to the truth,” I said, “I must admit our Girton friend is to a certain extent correct. Every man at some time of his life esteems to excess some one particular woman. Very young men, lacking in experience, admire perhaps indiscriminately. To them, anything in a petticoat is adorable: the milliner makes the angel. And very old men, so I am told, return to the delusions of their youth; but as to this I cannot as yet speak positively. The rest of us—well, when we are alone, it must be confessed, as our Philosopher says, that ‘gush’ is not the correct word.”

“I told you so,” chortled the Girton Girl.

“Maybe,” I added, “it is merely the result of reaction. Convention insists that to her face we show her a somewhat exaggerated deference. Her very follies we have to regard as added charms—the poets have decreed it. Maybe it comes as a relief to let the pendulum swing back.”

“But is it not a fact,” asked the Old Maid, “that the best men and even the wisest are those who have held women in most esteem? Do we not gauge civilization by the position a nation accords to its women?”

“In the same way as we judge them by the mildness of their laws, their tenderness for the weak. Uncivilised man killed off the useless numbers of the tribe; we provide for them hospitals, almshouses. Man’s attitude towards woman proves the extent to which he has conquered his own selfishness, the distance he has travelled from the law of the ape: might is right.

“Please don’t misunderstand me,” pleaded the Philosopher, with a nervous glance towards the lowering eyebrows of the Girton Girl. “I am not saying for a moment woman is not the equal of man; indeed, it is my belief that she is. I am merely maintaining she is not his superior. The wise man honours woman as his friend, his fellow-labourer, his complement. It is the fool who imagines her unhuman.”

“But are we not better,” persisted the Old Maid, “for our ideals? I don’t say we women are perfect—please don’t think that. You are not more alive to our faults than we are. Read the women novelists from George Eliot downwards. But for your own sake—is it not well man should have something to look up to, and failing anything better—?”

“I draw a very wide line,” answered the Philosopher, “between ideals and delusions. The ideal has always helped man; but that belongs to the land of his dreams, his most important kingdom, the kingdom of his future. Delusions are earthly structures, that sooner or later fall about his ears, blinding him with dust and dirt. The petticoat-governed country has always paid dearly for its folly.”

“Elizabeth!” cried the Girton Girl. “Queen Victoria!”

“Were ideal sovereigns,” returned the Philosopher, “leaving the government of the country to its ablest men. France under its Pompadours, the Byzantine Empire under its Theodoras, are truer examples of my argument. I am speaking of the unwisdom of assuming all women to be perfect. Belisarius ruined himself and his people by believing his own wife to be an honest woman.”

“But chivalry,” I argued, “has surely been of service to mankind?”

“To an immense extent,” agreed the Philosopher. “It seized a natural human passion and turned it to good uses. Then it was a reality. So once was the divine right of kings, the infallibility of the Church, for cumbering the ground with the lifeless bodies of which mankind has paid somewhat dearly. Not its upstanding lies—they can be faced and defeated—but its dead truths are the world’s stumbling-blocks. To the man of war and rapine, trained in cruelty and injustice, the woman was the one thing that spoke of the joy of yielding. Woman, as compared with man, was then an angel: it was no mere form of words. All the tender offices of life were in her hands. To the warrior, his life divided between fighting and debauchery, his womenfolk tending the sick, helping the weak, comforting the sorrowing, must have moved with white feet across a world his vices had made dark. Her mere subjection to the priesthood, her inborn feminine delight in form and ceremony—now an influence narrowing her charity—must then, to his dim eyes, trained to look upon dogma as the living soul of his religion, have seemed a halo, deifying her. Woman was then the servant. It was naturally to her advantage to excite tenderness and mercy in man. Since she has become the mistress of the world. It is no longer her interested mission to soften his savage instincts. Nowadays, it is the women who make war, the women who exalt brute force. Today, it is the woman who, happy herself, turns a deaf ear to the world’s low cry of pain; holding that man honoured who would ignore the good of the species to augment the comforts of his own particular family; holding in despite as a bad husband and father the man whose sense of duty extends beyond the circle of the home. One recalls Lady Nelson’s reproach to her lord after the battle of the Nile. ‘I have married a wife, and therefore cannot come,’ is the answer to his God that many a woman has prompted to her lover’s tongue. I was speaking to a woman only the other day about the cruelty of skinning seals alive. ‘I feel so sorry for the poor creatures,’ she murmured; ‘but they say it gives so much more depth of colour to the fur.’ Her own jacket was certainly a very beautiful specimen.”

“When I was editing a paper,” I said, “I opened my columns to a correspondence on this very subject. Many letters were sent to me—most of them trite, many of them foolish. One, a genuine document, I remember. It came from a girl who for six years had been assistant to a fashionable dressmaker. She was rather tired of the axiom that all women, at all times, are perfection. She suggested that poets and novelists should take service for a year in any large drapery or millinery establishment where they would have an opportunity of studying woman in her natural state, so to speak.”

“It is unfair to judge us by what, I confess, is our chief weakness,” argued the Woman of the World. “Woman in pursuit of clothes ceases to be human—she reverts to the original brute. Besides, dressmakers can be very trying. The fault is not entirely on one side.”

“I still fail to be convinced,” remarked the Girton Girl, “that woman is over-praised. Not even the present conversation, so far as it has gone, altogether proves your point.”

“I am not saying it is the case among intelligent thinkers,” explained the Philosopher, “but in popular literature the convention still lingers. To woman’s face no man cares to protest against it; and woman, to her harm, has come to accept it as a truism. ‘What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and all that’s nice.’ In more or less varied form the idea has entered into her blood, shutting out from her hope of improvement. The girl is discouraged from asking herself the occasionally needful question: Am I on the way to becoming a sound, useful member of society? Or am I in danger of degenerating into a vain, selfish, lazy piece of good-for-nothing rubbish? She is quite content so long as she can detect in herself no tendency to male vices, forgetful that there are also feminine vices. Woman is the spoilt child of the age. No one tells her of her faults. The World with its thousand voices flatters her. Sulks, bad temper, and pig-headed obstinacy are translated as ‘pretty Fanny’s wilful ways.’ Cowardice, contemptible in man or woman, she is encouraged to cultivate as a charm. Incompetence to pack her own bag or find her own way across a square and round a corner is deemed an attraction. Abnormal ignorance and dense stupidity entitle her to pose as the poetical ideal. If she give a penny to a street beggar, selecting generally the fraud, or kiss a puppy’s nose, we exhaust the language of eulogy, proclaiming her a saint. The marvel to me is that, in spite of the folly upon which they are fed, so many of them grow to be sensible women.”