Part 10 (1/2)
”Go to it, sister, and luck to you,” cried her pa.s.senger as he rose from his bench. The car was nearing the fourth floor.
”We shall,” she answered; ”no fear of that.” She stopped the car, and they smiled as friends as she let him out of the door. ”Well--good morning,” she said as he turned down the corridor. The ”sir” had left entirely when they reached the fourth floor. And all the women of Europe, excepting perhaps those still behind the harem curtains in Turkey and Germany of whom we know nothing, are dropping the servile ”sir” and are emerging into life at the fourth floor as human beings.
It may be well to digress a moment in this narrative, from our purely martial adventure, that we may consider for a few pages the woman question as it is affected by the war. To me, if not to Henry, who is highly practical, it seemed that in France and Italy, but particularly in England, the new Heaven and the new earth that is forming during this war, has created a new woman. Indeed the European woman of the war is almost American in her liberty.
”European women,” said a former American grand dame of the old order, sipping tea with me at an emba.s.sy in the dim lit gorgeousness of a mediaeval room, ”are of two kinds: Those who are being crucified by the war, and those who are abusing the new found liberties which war has brought them!”
”Liberties?” asked her colloquitor; not Henry. He had no patience with these theoretical excursions into speculative realms. ”Liberties rather than privileges?”
”Yes, liberties. Privileges are temporary,” purred the lady at the emba.s.sy. ”They come and go, but the whole trouble with this new situation is that it is permanent. That also is part of the crucifixion of those who suffer under it. These women never again can return to the lives they have left, to the sheltering positions from which the awful needs of this war have driven them. The cultivated European woman, who I think on the whole was the highest product of our civilization, has gone. She has fallen to the American level.”
”And the continental mistress system,” prodded her American interviewer, ironically, ”will it, too, disappear with the departed superiority of continental womanhood?”
”Yes, the mistress system too--if you want to call it a system--and I suppose it is an inst.i.tution--it too will become degraded and Americanized.”
”Americanized?” the middle western eyebrows went up, and possibly the middle western voice flinched a little. But the wise dowager from Bridgeport, Connecticut, living in Paris on New York Central bonds, continued bitterly: ”Yes, Americanized and vulgarized. The continental mistress system is not the nasty arrangement that you middle cla.s.s Americans think it is. Of course there are European men who acquire one woman after another, live with her a few months or a few years and forget her. Such men are impossible.”
She waved away the whole lady-chasing tribe with a contemptuous hand.
”But the mistress system as we know it in Europe is the by-product of a leisure cla.s.s. Men and women marry for business reasons. The women have their children to love, the man finds his mistress, and clings to her for a lifetime. He cannot afford to marry her--even if he could be divorced; for he would have to work to support her, and be decla.s.sed. But he can support her on his wife's money and a beautiful life-long friends.h.i.+p is thus cherished. It will disappear when men have to work, and when women may go into the world to work without losing their social positions. And this new order, this making the world safe for democracy, as you call it, will rob civilization of its most perfect flower--the cultivated woman who has developed under the shelter of our economic system. I might as well shock your bourgeois morals now as later. So listen to this.
Here is one of the ways the women of Europe are suffering. I talked to a French mother this morning. Her income is gone--part of it taxed away, and the rest of it wiped away by the Germans in Northern France. Her son has only a second lieutenant's income. In this chaos she can find no suitable wife for him. One who is rich today, tomorrow may be poor, so the dear fellow may not marry. And he is looking for a mistress, and his mother fears he will pick up a fool; for only a fool would take him on a lieutenant's salary. And the weeping mother told me she would almost as soon that her son should have no mistress as to have a fool! For a man's mistress does make such a difference in his life! My friend is almost willing to let him marry some bright poor girl and go to work! The world never will know the suffering the women of Europe are enduring in this war!”
Now we may switch off that record with the snort of woe which Henry gave when he heard it. He was trying to tell a d.u.c.h.ess about prohibition in Kansas, who had never heard of either Kansas or prohibition and who was clearly scandalized at what she heard of both. But Henry's other ear was open to what the emba.s.sy ornament was saying to me. On the other side of this record of the swan song of the lady of the emba.s.sy is this record. It is a man's voice. The man has risen from an American farm, hustled his way into a place where as manager of the London factory of an American concern, he works several hundred employees.
”Say, let me tell you something--never again! Never again for mine do the men come back into our shop. We may let a dozen or so of 'em back to handle the big machines. But the next size, which we thought that only men could handle--never again. And when they come back these men will have to work under women foremen. We thought when the war took our men bosses away that we should have to close the shop. But say--never again, I tell you. And let me give you a pointer. You wouldn't know them girls. When the war broke out they were getting ten s.h.i.+llings--about $2.50 a week, the best of 'em, and they were mean and slovenly and kind of skinny and dirty, and every once in awhile one would drop out, and the other girls had a great joke about her--you know. And they would soak the shop whenever they got a chance! The boss had to keep right after 'em, or they'd soldier on the job or break a machine, or slight the product, and they'd lie--why, man, the whole works would stand up and lie for each other against the shop. It took five men to boss them where we have one woman doing it now. And say, it ain't the woman boss that's done it. We pay 'em more. Them same girls is getting ten and twelve and fifteen bucks a week now--Lawsee, man--you ought to see 'em! Dressed up to kill; fat, cheerful, wide-awake!
G.o.ddlemighty, man, you wouldn't know 'em for that same measly bunch of grouches we had three years ago. And they work for the shop now, and not against it. They're different girls. I wouldn't-a believed ten dollars a week would-a turned the trick; but it's sure done it.”
”Perhaps,” suggested his acquaintance, ”the girls are cheerful and competent because they aren't afraid of poverty. Maybe they are motived by hope of getting on in the world and not motived by the terror of slipping down. Does that not make them stand by the shop instead of working against it? Isn't it a developed middle cla.s.s feeling that accepts the shop as 'their kind of people' now?”
”Search me, Cap--I give it up. I just only know what I know and see what I see. And never again--you hear me, man--never again does our shop go back to men. The ten or twelve dollar skirt has made a hit with me! Have a cigarette?”
The net gain of women in this war, all over the world is, of course, a gain in fellows.h.i.+p.
But after all fellows.h.i.+p will be futile if it does not bear fruit.
And the first fruit of the fellows.h.i.+p between men and women in Europe surely will be a wider and deeper influence of women upon the destinies of the European world. And who can doubt who knows woman, that her influence will be thrown first and heaviest toward a just and lasting peace.
Often while we were in London, during the last days of our stay, when the meaning of the war gradually was forming in our minds we talked of these things. There are two Henrys--one, the owner of a ten-story building in Wichita, the editor of a powerful and profitable newspaper; the other a protagonist, a sentimental idealist. To me this was his greatest charm--this infinite variety of Henrys that was forever turning up in our discourse. The owner of the Beacon building and the publisher of the newspaper had small use for my theories about the importance of the rise of woman into fellows.h.i.+p with men in the new democratization of the world. He refused to see the democratization of the world in the war. To him the war meant adjustment of boundaries, economic advantages, and realignments of political and commercial influence on the map of the world. But to the other Henry, to the crusader whom I had seen many times setting out on the quest for the grail in politics, throwing away his political fortunes for a cause and a creed as lightly as a man would toss aside a cigar stub, the war began to mean something more than its military expression.
And one night as we sat in our room waiting for dinner a letter came up from the Eager Soul, with some trinkets she had sent over to us by messenger to take to her mother in Denver. After telling us the news of the hospital, and of Auntie and of the wound in the Young Doctor's hand, she wrote:
”O how I hate war--hate it--hate it! And this war of all wars, I hate it worst. It is so ruthless, so inexorably cruel; so utterly meaningless, viewed at close range. Yesterday they brought me into Northern France, and I spent the twilight last night looking over the ruins of the local church. It is the most important small church in Northern France and contains one of the earliest ribbed vaults in France, they say. It was built about 1100, and now the thing is smashed. It is what our artillerymen call a one-shot church. O the waste of it--churches, men, homes, creeds! How many one-shot creeds have perished in this h.e.l.l-fire! Still out of the old I suppose the new will come. But I have talked to women, to peasant women in their homes, to n.o.ble women in hospitals; to women in their shops and women on the farms, and I know that if the new world brings them as its heritage, only the enlarged comrades.h.i.+p they are taking with men in this time of suffering, then one thing is sure: We women will strike an awful blow at future wars! The womanhood of the past, someway, is like these sad, broken churches of France. It is shattered and gone, and in its ruins we see its exquisite beauty, its ineffable grace, its symbolism of a faith that once sufficed. But it will not be restored. We shall build new temples; we shall know new women. The old had to go, that the new might come. And our new women and our new temples shall be dedicated, not merely to faith, not merely to beauty, not merely to adoration but to service, to service and comrades.h.i.+p in the world.”
As he finished reading the letter Henry's eyes glistened. Its emotion had awakened the crusader, who said gently: ”Well, Bill, I presume it is the potential mother in every woman that makes her worth while. And if this war will only harness motherhood to the public conscience, the net gain will be worth the war, however it is settled.”
CHAPTER VIII
IN WHICH WE DISCOVER ”A NEW HEAVEN AND A NEW EARTH”
Finally our talk left the war and its meaning, and we fell to wondering how the Young Doctor's hand was coming on, and we thought of the Eager Soul, too, standing so wistfully between love and death and the picture of the Young Doctor sitting in the garden among the flowers of early autumn, more poet than soldier or doctor, came to both of us as we talked and then Henry stooped to the floor and picked up two folded sheets of paper. Clearly they had dropped from the envelope sent to us by the Eager Soul. He opened one and remarked:
”Why, Bill, it's poetry. She's written here on the margin, 'Verses by our Doctor friend. I thought you'd like to see them. See other sheet for melody to suit. It was the melody he tried to whistle that night. He wrote them for me to fit the Doctor's words.'”