He was leaning forward fiercely, ignoring the curving comfort of the big chair, and, as usual, talking continuously.
She had made an opening by suddenly rising to her feet, a motion not followed by his automatic imitation, as would have been the case with every other man she knew. He was not in the least concerned to have her stand before him, not in the least offended by her sharp demand, but for the moment he hesitated, because her question was quite aside from the subject they, or at least he, had been discussing.
She followed up her advantage swiftly, having learned the necessity. To converse with Mr. Smith was like launching a lifeboat in heavy surf; one must watch opportunity and rush boldly in.
“You would not come here if you had not something to gain by it; that something is knowledge of and experience in the habits and customs of an unknown species. If you are to write intelligibly about the master class, the bourgeoisie, the oppressors and exploiters, you’ve got to know something about them. In the interests of your work you come here for wider experience — and then you talk all the time.”
“There is something in what you say,” he admitted, not in the least mortified by her charge, but recognizing that he was missing something of what he had come for.
They got on much better after that. By constant vigilance she succeeded in holding her own for about one quarter of the time, and in the wary contest her own mind grew keener, quicker, stronger.
His flat contradictions staggered her at first. There was no tradition in his mind that one must not contradict a lady. He would have contradicted an archangel unhesitatingly. She reeled back at first, as from a rain of blows, under the sharp words with which he demolished a weak position, refuted unsound argument, knocked to pieces false premise. But in time she learned to “take punishment” without losing temper; learned to sidestep and counterthrust, and grew to enjoy the game as a game. For all his fierce tenacity he had the sense of logical conclusion, and was to be held up at any time by strong clear reasoning.
Like an athlete under training she grew “harder” and stronger, and after she had rubbed her bruises and returned to the combat after many defeats, she had at last the rich delight of fairly beating him. She was advancing the claim of economic independence for women, largely driven to it by his intolerant attitude. With German thoroughness, with technical glibness, with the sweeping fervor of a Single Taxer, he had waved the whole proposition aside on the ground that the strength of women was all expended in “maternal energy” and there was none available for “economic energy” without injury to motherhood.
With eager eyes she laid her plan of attack: “If an unmarried woman is working as a servant for wages, ten hours a day, is she not using economic energy?”
This he must needs grant. “If she marries, but has no children, and continues working as a servant, though without wages, doing the same work, for the same hours, she is still using economic energy, is she not?”
This, too, he had to admit.
“Now, when she has children, she gives to their bearing and rearing her maternal energy, but she continues to do the work of the servant — more work as a servant for each additional child, and that, you have already allowed, is economic energy. A woman who is a mother has more work to do than a woman who is not — and she does it. These are the facts.”
Mr. Smith had cut short the interview that day and taken himself off, but Stella never again felt browbeaten and timid. She had won her spurs.
Moreover, besides the rather drastic training, she did gather from his flow of fiery words a wider knowledge of literature, a new understanding of the drama, a sense of pushing power. Feelings and hopes that had not stirred for many years stirred now. To her deep and wondering joy as of one long barren and now hoping motherhood, she began to feel again the impulse to write. The coming of love had meant so much to her that its splendid tide had washed away all more personal ambitions. The fulfillment of love, and the cares and labors we have attached to it, had taken the very power. Her life had been so richly filled by husband and children, had flowed so thickly in domestic joys, that all those earlier buds and shoots had been forgotten.
Now that the rich petals of girlhood’s beauty were necessarily less softly brilliant, now that the children had already branched off sharply from the parent stem, she who had been feeling so lonely and deprived, so grieved for the falling of those sweet petals of early joy, began to know strange prickings and stirrings of new life — not towards flowers or fruit this time, but the equally natural law of growth that “makes wood.”
Mr. Tillotson came oftener than Mr. Smith, and proved as valuable. When she met him on an evening, bruised and breathless still perhaps from some rough-and-tumble encounter with the Socialist, he brought balm for her wounds and the sweet stimulant of appreciation to supplement the sharp tonic already taken. Mr. Widfield always enjoyed him, and Stella began to recognize a peculiar effect of the presence of this new friend. When he was there her husband talked more freely, not only with them both, but even with her than when they were alone. The third mind seemed to enlarge the area common to all. Strangely enough she felt nearer to Morgan, more at ease with him, when Mr. Tillotson was there. Even when they were alone together she found now a new sense of comfort, a feeling that was not so insistent in its demands, as had been the case a few months since, and was more satisfied.
What Morgan felt he did not say, but he did seem happier, less near the verge of irritability. He responded also to that clearer atmosphere when this friend was present, and did not at all object to the fact that when Tillotson called in the afternoon or spent an evening with his wife when he was absent, the comradeship grew apace between them.
A quiet man was this hard-writing editor, hiding under his cheerful air of gentle cynicism much deeper springs of feeling. He was not young, not handsome; his thin hair was graying fast; his work, even in power and steady in volume, was known far and wide through its publication; but there were only one or two of his closest friends who knew the man inside.
This knowledge was now opening to Stella.
However much one loves one person, there remains the possibility of some interest in others. When the other person brings the new wine of sympathy in work, in thought, in inner purpose, even the closest love can spread its wings a shade, extend a few feathers to the newcomer. Not for a moment wavering in her heart from deep allegiance to her husband, Stella did reach out a warm hand to this new friend who brought so much to her.
“Have Tillotson around,” Morgan would say. “I’ve got to go to Pittsburgh tonight — be back Thursday.” Or, “Can’t we get Tillotson up to dinner — he’s not been here for a week.”
“He’s been twice,” Stella would say.
“Well, I haven’t seen him. I’ll call him up now.”
And Tillotson generally came.
He abounded in new books, freely lent and given, in theater tickets also, and when Mr. Widfield could not go, and he himself was too busy, he would send a cheerful young reporter to accompany her.
A rich and varied diet this, with the rigorous exercise of eternal combat with Mr. Smith, and the sunshine and fresh air of new friendship.
Stella grew apace.
Her letters to the boys changed subtly in tone and substance. She was no longer Rachel mourning for her children and refusing to be comforted, but a mother proud of accomplishment and looking forward to the further flowering of her work.
“It does my heart good to see you looking so much brighter,” Mrs. MacAvelly told her, dropping in for a quiet talk one evening when she was alone. “You do feel better, don’t you?”
“Oh — immensely!” Stella answered. “Things look so different somehow. Of course I miss the boys still, but I’m getting to see their side of it — their end of this great business of growing up. I suppose I was holding on so tight I could hardly detach myself enough to consider them. And they are really doing nicely. Morgan, Jr., writes delightful letters now — and Roy is getting quite ambiti
ous.”
“It is a pleasure to watch things grow, isn’t it?” her friend agreed. “I should say so! And I’m beginning even to watch myself grow, Mrs. MacAvelly! That young man you — unloaded on me is a liberal education — in some lines.”
“You do find him interesting? I hoped you would.”
“Interesting — very. And drastic! But when I have sense enough to overlook the three sets of artificial sensitiveness — of personality, sex, and class — I do find him instructive and valuable.”
“He has real promise, don’t you think so?”
“Unquestionably. That play of his has big things in it — if he’ll ever learn to mitigate the class prejudices a bit.”
“How does he get on with it? He hasn’t been to see me much since you have let him come here. I’m a sucked orange, I fear.” Mrs. MacAvelly smiled cheerfully, and Stella with her.
“You are more comfortable than the orange still under pressure,” she agreed. “As to the play, he’s got a tremendous scene on. You know he’s pulled it all to pieces and done it over more than once since that reading.”
“Yes — he did tell me that, the last time I saw him.”
“And now we are fighting over the proper attitude of the heroine.
I use the word advisedly — talking with that man is not only hard labor but combat.”
“You have thrived on it at any rate.”
“Yes—” Stella laughed lightly. “The female of the species was more deadly than the male once, at any rate. I’m tremendously proud when I can stand up to him.”
“Does Mr. Widfield like him any better?”
Her face clouded. “No — rather worse if anything. Now your other friend, Mr. Tillotson, Morgan delights in. I never knew him to be so pleased with a new friend. But he can’t bear to have me mention ‘Alias Smith,’ as he calls him. So I just don’t mention him.”
“He doesn’t really object to his visiting you?”
“Of course not! Morgan’s not so narrow as that. He’s always said that I could have any friends or visitors I pleased, so long as he didn’t have to see them. He always dodged poor old Malina, you know.”
“She has not been annoying you lately, has she?”
“She has not! I’ve told the girls not to let her in, you see — I got so angry with her last time. But I can understand about her work, and even her — horridness — since knowing Mr. Tillotson.”
“Another liberal education?”
“Yes — far more liberal. You’ve no idea — or rather you have, and I never had before. What a pleasure it is to have a man friend. You have a lot, haven’t you?”
“Yes — and appreciate them. But then I am a good bit older than you, you see.”
“That hasn’t anything to do with it!” Stella insisted. “It’s because you are — broader, somehow. I’ve been so absolutely wrapped up in Morgan that I’ve had no time or room or inclination to think about anything else.”
“And you have now?”
It was a very quiet question, scarce more than acquiescence. Stella meditated over it conscientiously. “Why, yes — I have. You see, really, I have oceans of time. The boys are gone — the house runs itself. I don’t really see what I would have done this winter without these new things to think about. I’ve done so many new things, you see. Those excursions you took with me — the Settlement evenings — all that horridly interesting time with the prisons and asylums—”
She shivered. “Oh, I’ve learned a lot, and such different books! You can’t think how sudden and queer it is — that tempestuous Socialist person hammering on one side and the calm emotional mind shining on the other!”
“Like the Sun, the Wind, and the Traveler,” Mrs. MacAvelly suggested.
“Exactly. And the Sun wins, as before!”
The visitor smiled softly to herself. Several times she had come within speaking distance of what had been so deep a grief in their last close talk together, and each time Stella had launched off briskly on the boys or her new interests, not as one avoiding a painful subject, but in genuine enthusiasm.
“Let sleeping dogs lie,” Mrs. MacAvelly said inwardly, and began to talk of the play of the season.
Mr. Tillotson was announced, and they both met him cordially.
“Where’s ‘himself’?” he asked. “Still going to Pittsburgh?”
“Cleveland this time,” Mrs. Widfield explained. “I do not understand why leather should require so much traveling — nor why the heads of the business should have to do it.”
“Not so much leather as politics, I fancy, or at least organization,” he suggested, settling into his favorite chair. “I’m glad to see you, Mrs. MacAvelly. You still find life interesting, I trust.”
“I find it more interesting than ever — don’t you?”
“Well — yes. All things taken together, I think I do. I’m the richer by two friends, thanks to your kindness.” He rose and made her an elaborate bow. “And the better amused because of that literary waterspout you turned loose upon us.”
“Does he use you too as ‘material’? Not in office hours, I hope.”
“Not exactly that. My friend here is his favorite prey at present, I believe.” He waved a well-kept hand toward Stella, who leaned back, watching them both with contentment.
“I keep him posted, you see,” she explained. “At first I used to run to him to be comforted. You see I couldn’t complain to Morgan — he can’t bear the man. I’m afraid he’d have said— ‘The more fool you!’ or its polite equivalent. But Mr. Tillotson quite understands why I put up with him, and, I imagine, takes a sneaking satisfaction in the punishment I get.”
“Oh no, no. My dear lady! Not ‘sneaking,’ I hope. I do confess to something of that ‘stern joy’ that — shall I say — parents feel when their children are getting good, although perhaps painful, training.”
Mrs. Widfield protested violently. “Parents indeed! I won’t hear of it for a moment! No, Mrs. MacAvelly, it is the secret triumph of his sex in seeing a woman ‘get hers’ at the hands of a tyrant man.”
“A man has to have some satisfaction in these days of overturning all natural supremacy. Before long we shall be hearing that ‘a man, a spaniel and a walnut tree — the more you beat ’em the better they be.’”
“It has done me good, anyhow,” Stella admitted. “I can see it myself. I can see things more clearly, think more clearly, and talk more clearly — can’t I, Mr. Tillotson?”
“I do not know to what depths of fog and murk your mind was previously accustomed — but you certainly can do all you say at present.”
Mrs. MacAvelly looked from one to the other with her quiet, faintly humorous little smile. “And can you write more clearly, too?” she asked Stella.
“Write? I write?”
“Why not? Everyone writes today.”
“I fancy you would write better than most, Mrs. Widfield. Perhaps you do —— — ?”
She was looking from one to the other with something of a blush, and something of a smile, rather shamefaced on the whole.
“Oh well — that!” She said it as if writing in this sense were common as breathing. “As you say, Mrs. MacAvelly — everyone does a little.”
“Now, Mrs. Widfield!” The editorial eye was sternly upon her. “Is this the hideous bar which now interposes between our previous happy days and that eternal friendship to which we were looking forward? At least — to which I was looking forward?”
“I don’t see any bar,” she answered, a little hurt by his manner.
“Alas for the innocence of women — and more especially for their unprofessionalism! Do you not see, my dear lady — I know Mrs. MacAvelly does — that if you take to writing you must either do it well or ill. If you do it well — which is the most probable case — then rises professional jealousy and stalks between us. In place of the free exchange of thought in which, so far, you have furnished me with a fluttering throng of valuable suggestions — you’ve no idea, Mrs. MacAvelly,”
he said in a mock aside, “how much my work has brightened up since I knew Mrs. Widfield — instead of this peaceful interchange we shall come to regard one another with covert suspicion, to hide our ideas as so much copy, to check — oh, I beg of you not to do it! — to check the crisp epigram, the clever turn of expression — lest the other profit by it.”
“You needn’t be afraid,” she assured him. “I promise never to do that.”
But he was not to be consoled. “You must have heard complaints from the unthinking of the loss of finished brilliancy, of quick spontaneous wit, in the men writers of today. This, I am convinced, is due to the evil habits of our modern women. Whereas in times past they were flattered and grateful to have their brilliancy and stimulating thoughts appreciated by their men friends, now they have the sordid custom of selling the same at so much per word. It is a great loss — a great loss.”
“Admitting this sad prospect for the sake of argument, what are you afraid of if I write badly?”
“That will be even worse,” he answered, sadly shaking his head. “In the first case we could at least maintain an armed equality, and I could still glean a stray sparkle now and then, but in the second — what friendship can stand when one is asked to give an opinion on poor stuff? You will come to me in all the young enthusiasm of the beginner, with such a proud glow of enjoyment in your tender bantlings — and I shall cease to be your friend in reverting to my other self, the editor.”
“That is a ghastly prospect,” Mrs. Widfield agreed. “In spite of Mrs. MacAvelly’s fond belief in my capacities I see but two alternatives. I must either not write — or not let you know it.” She looked at him mischievously but most kindly. There was something very attractive to her temperament in this quiet man. He made no claim on admiration by exhibition of strength, no claim on sympathy by some engaging weakness. She had never known much of men. There were few in her memories of childhood or girlhood, and Morgan was sui generis — she had never compared him with any other. Since that dinner party of Mrs. MacAvelly’s her range had widened, not only in these two who came so often, but in many others she had known through them. Of them all this one stood easily first in her esteem, yet so quiet was he, so undemanding, and uncommunicative that she was sometimes puzzled to account to herself for her strong liking.
Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Page 77