IV THE BABY

Undoubtedly the baby makes a great difference. He fills up the flat, for one thing. I foresee that he will turn us out of it. Nevertheless he is valuable, and probably worth his space even in New York. His name is Samuel French. Cordelia named him after her father. She is extremely pleased with him. So is Matilda Finn, so is my mother, so is my mother-in-law. Even the trained assistant to nature who was here to welcome him seemed very pleased to meet Samuel, and both his grandfathers have been around to inspect him, and have approved and duly benefacted him. Neither of these aged but still profitable men has had a grandchild before, and they seem to like it. As for me, naturally I am like to burst with the pride at being associated, however humbly, with an achievement so important. Father-in-law is building a new room on to his summer palace in Connecticut, with a view, I think, to the more convenient entertainment of his new descendant, and I think that nothing but consideration for my fiscal incapacity withholds him from building Cordelia a country house. By various expedients I have swelled our sixty dollars a week to about seventy, which is a grateful gain, and appreciable in spite of the demands of the Post-office, the public transportation companies, the market-men, and the other agencies of depletion, so corroding to the fiscal being; but even—let me see, seven times fifty-two weeks—but even $3,640 is not an annual income that seems equal to the maintenance of two residences. I guess if we are to have a suburban home it must be an all-the-year-round home for the present, and father-in-law’s place in Connecticut is not just the right place for that. It is some miles from the station, and involves maintenance of horsepower of some sort, and of course that is unspeakable except as father-in-law provides it. Our lay would be a villa about the length of a baseball ground from the station, or, better still, something five cents from Wall Street by tunnel or trolley, and you catch the car on the next corner.

But think of the crowd on the car!

No, I won’t think of it. It is the common lot hereabouts, and I should be able to stand my share of it, which I would not get in full, anyhow, because, being a lawyer, I can leave home a little later, and leave for home usually a little earlier or later than the great body of the workers for a living.

My new responsibility has brought me a variety of new appreciations. As a parent I find I have new sentiments about parents, and increased esteem and regard for them as pillars that uphold life and direct it. Beyond doubt, they are fine for upholding grandchildren. No doubt there would be considerably more grandchildren in our world if there were more grandparents who recognized their responsibilities and made provision, as a matter of course, to meet them. But that does not accord with the lively individualism of our generation. Not only are we all desirous of independent life, but our parents prefer it for us. Accordingly, when we get above the social plane in which independent life for man and wife can be maintained for twenty dollars a week, marriage is apt to come late. There are immense advantages about that social plane in which twenty dollars a week is a complete living, and the wife is cook and housemaid, wife, mother, and nurse all in one, and the state provides education, and the doctor adjusts his charges to your income, and all the man has to look after is food, clothes, shelter, and pocket money! I hope the people who are born with a call on that phase of existence appreciate their luck. To rise to the twenty-dollar-a-week phase must be full of satisfactions, but to drop to it is quite another matter. Whatever starting-point is dealt out to us, it is from that point that we have to go on, and, whether we like it or not, the point at which it behooves us to arrive is measured from the point at which we start.

Raising babies must have been very much simplified by the invention of the kodak. There is no attitude, expression, sentiment, costume, or absence of costume of Samuel that this handy little instrument has not perpetuated. And inasmuch as Samuel varies and progresses from hour to hour, acquiring personality, weight, and accomplishments, changing in his features and developing new resemblances, the click of the kodak is almost as frequent in our flat as the whir of the sewing-machine. When infants had to run to the photographer’s for every new picture, I don’t see how they got their natural rest. You know they sleep about eighteen hours a day. One would think that with all that somnolence a baby would be no more trouble than a dormouse, but Samuel is almost a complete occupation. As an example of woman’s work he qualifies by being never done. When he is asleep he is about to waken, and when he is awake he is about to sleep, and either way he is either taking nourishment or about to take it, or taking a bath, or changing his clothes, or acquiring ideas, or taking first lessons in language. Since I have known him I sympathize with the woman who thought it just as easy to raise six children as one, because one took up all your time, and six couldn’t do more.

I never saw Cordelia so much amused with anything, and I admit to being, myself, more diverted and entertained than I should have thought possible. I had a puppy once that was a delight, so cheerful, so prodigal of affectionate welcomes, and so incessant in his activities. Mother has got him now. She appropriated him—or he her—and kept him, she said, to remind her of me. But Samuel beats the puppy. He does not get around as briskly yet as the puppy did, but he has the same delight in very simple toys, and a similar liveliness of mind, and a like capacity to be pleased. He is quite a lot like that puppy as he was when I first got him.

I didn’t need anything to increase my interest in getting home at night. Cordelia attended to that. But Samuel has increased it. He is awake when I get home, and, though he is usually getting ready to go to bed, he always expresses a flattering satisfaction at meeting me again, and has interesting details of progress to report, and smiles, and puts out arms, and makes inarticulate noises, and sits in my lap, and makes an inventory of my accessible properties.

And, of course, there is a great deal to be told about him, including the day’s report of what has been said of him by admiring friends, and of the visits he has made and received, and, now and then, statistics of his weight and progress in intelligence and activity. I think Cordelia talks to Matilda Finn and her various visitors about him all day, and then to me about him most of the evening. It is surprising that so small a carcass should afford so much discourse.

We have entered him at a suitable school, which is perhaps another token of the incompleteness of my emancipation. You know that for some years past some of the boarding-schools have been so highly esteemed, for one reason or another, by unemancipated parents that they have coveted the privilege of having their sons go to them, and, to insure getting it, have entered their boys’ names at those schools as soon as they were born. So I entered Samuel at the school where I went myself. If that implied incompleteness of emancipation in me, I don’t care. Samuel must have his chance. It is enough for me to be emancipated. Emancipation is a personal affair, like conversion, and no one ought to try to force his emancipation on any one else, least of all a parent on a child. Samuel may prefer the old order, and by the time he grows up we may have the wherewithal to enable him to experiment with it if there is any of it left. I don’t know that there will be, and, to be sure, when did life offer a bigger or more uncertain speculation than this that Samuel yawns and gapes in the face of? Perhaps I ought not to call it uncertain, except as to times and means and details, but that’s enough; and as to those the uncertainty is ample. The great task that is doing now seems to be the improvement of the common lot. No doubt that is always going on when civilization is in its forward moods, but nowadays there is uncommon urgency about it, and remarkable command and handling of the progressive forces, and apparent enfeeblement of the powers of resistance. It is very attractive, very hopeful, but I suppose no thoughtful person denies that it is possible to improve the common lot so much and so fast as to force society into the hands of a receiver. That is one possibility that little Samuel is up against, and for that matter so are his parents; for the receivership may come, and reorganization after it, before Samuel is old enough to sit into the game.

My! my! what will you see, little son? All the women voting, all the trades-unions joined under a single head, armies abolished, the immediate will of majorities the supreme and only law, detachable marriage, detachable judges, detachable constitutions?

You may, you may; and so may your parents, for that matter, and are as likely to, perhaps, as you are. But stay with us, none the less. There seems always to be good sport in this world for good sports—no matter what may be going on. Folks lived, and liked to live, hereabouts when the men walked between plow-handles with a rifle across their shoulders, and they can stand considerable variations in public habits without losing the appetite for life. An unchanging order is bound to grow tiresome, always did, always will; though outside of China it is hard to find one, and even there the old order is moving now. We must try to make a good sport of Samuel; one who will be interested in life no matter what, and, when new rules are making, have a say about them.

I don’t see why I hang back so about votes for women. At times I think I am not opposed. I think I don’t care. But I read all the opposed discourse that has any sense in it with sympathy, and all the pro discourse in a critical spirit, rejoicing when it seems to me unsound. It is true enough that there is no compelling reason why I should want votes for women. My proprietors don’t want them. Mother sniffs at them. Cordelia is observant, with very much such an instinctive leaning toward the antis as I have. Why should I excite myself about “equal suffrage” when my ladies like things better as they are? Aren’t mother and Cordelia representative women? A great deal more so, I think, than most of the suffragists. The mass of women hereabouts don’t seem to be concerned about voting. The suffragists in agitating to make them concerned seem to be trying to create an artificial want. They go about to persuade women that they are oppressed, and are rated politically with insane persons, criminals, and aliens.

Now, what is all that? Is it progress, or is it mischief? Is it based on a mistaken conception of women’s job, or is it a natural detail of the redistribution of powers and privileges that appears to be going on? Am I opposed because I am a pig and a stand-patter and an old fogy? Are votes worth so much fuss, anyhow, and is it going to make any vital difference whether American women have them or not?

I don’t know that it is. The women and the men are so inextricably bound together that it is inconceivable that with woman suffrage the vote should divide in proportions materially different from what happens now. But that’s not a reason for letting suffrage come. I do think that at present men and women do not long work together on the same level at the same tasks. Where women come in either they work under the direction of men or the men go out. The departments of life in which they rule—and there are plenty of them—are those in which men do not compete. I don’t think they can compete with men as voters or as organizers and directors of political government. If the suffragists get their votes for women, they will get an enlarged electorate controlled by men as now. And why should it be expected that the controlling men in that case will be better than they are now? Are the mass of women wiser, more honest, and better judges of men than the mass of men? I don’t think so. I think men and women are just mates. There seems to be a woman to match every man, but different from him, and a man to match almost every woman. It is not sensible to compare a superior woman with an ordinary or inferior man, and point out that she is fitter to vote than he is. Of course she is, but that does not touch the real question, which is whether government will be better conducted with votes for all women than it is now.

Those agitators talk about the “injustice” of depriving women of the ballot. They might as well talk of the injustice of the refusal of water to run uphill. There’s no injustice about it. It is nature. If it can be bettered, all right. Water will run uphill if there is enough pressure behind it. But if injustice has been done woman about her vote, it was done when she was born female and not male, and the appeal from that lies to the higher court.

Was there any done? Take it by and large, is it a misfortune to born a girl and not a boy? That may happen to any of us any time we happen to be born. It’s a toss-up. It’s not the slightest credit to us to be born male, and certainly it should not be the slightest discredit to us to be born female; but according as we are born male or female we are born to different duties. If political government is one of the male duties, civilization will not get ahead by having men loosen their hold on it. For my part I suppose that down in the intricacies of my composition I have an instinctive conviction, or hunch, that political government is a male attribute, and that out of that comes my objection to abdicate, or even dilute, my share of it. Instinctive convictions have great weight in these matters, though the surface arguments they put out may be inadequate or mistaken, as the anti-suffrage arguments are so apt to be. The suffragist expounders demolish them, and think that they have accomplished something; but, alas! the demolition of puerile arguments leaves the question just where it was, with the pith of it still untouched. Still I think the agitation does good, bothering people like me, and making us think; asking us, What does belong to women, then, if not votes? How else are you going to give them equal life? What does justice demand for them if not the suffrage?

If the males since the beginning of time have overestimated their importance and erred in regarding themselves as specialists in government, then it is only a matter of time when we shall be disabused of that error and shaken down into our rightful places. But if government—meaning political government rather than domestic—really prospers better in the long run in the hands of males, in their hands it is likely to stay—the substance of it certainly, however that shadow we call a vote may flutter off, and wherever it may alight.

Nothing happens without a cause. If the men are to be abased, doubtless it will be for their abundant sins. If they will not work as men should, they will lose their jobs. If they will not govern as men should, they will be governed. History is a record of the strong races subduing the weak, and the wise the foolish, to the end that strength and wisdom shall prevail in human affairs. In these days of Monroe doctrines and alliances and arbitration treaties those harsh processes seem to have been superseded. Is this invasion by women of the province of men a new expedient of Nature to preserve the competition that is essential to human progress?

We cannot beat Nature. She is obdurate, resourceful, impossible to fool, with a trick to meet every trick that is offered her. She seems determined that man shall come to something and plays man against man to make him better himself, and is probably equal, if occasion demands it, to play one half of him against the other. For of course that is what woman is—the other half of man. There cannot be a real competition between the two halves, for they are inseparably joined and have to pull each other along. But for all that, they are distinct individuals, and one in a given period may make faster progress than the other, with a good deal of disturbance of relations and equities and ideas. What man gets, woman gets; what woman gets, man gets. When woman gets education, liberty, opportunity, protection, the whole race gets those benefits.

Then shall we say that when woman gets the vote the race is that much ahead? It may be, but to me it has not been so revealed up to these presents. Who gave man strength gave him dominion. If he loses dominion it will be because he has either misused his strength or lost it.

Samuel has not lost his. He is truly a great power. As I have said, he is almost a complete occupation for his mother, and a profitable, satisfying occupation, too. I confess to fears in time past that girls of Cordelia’s sort did not have enough to do to bring them their proper growth and keep them happy. If they didn’t go to college and didn’t marry as soon as they got out of school, they seemed to drift into a lot of occupations that looked rather futile, and like a mere provision for killing time. They played around, they visited, they dabbled in anything that came handy—dances, charities, house-parties, art, music, extra improvements for the mind—anything that could be cast into a void of time which should have ached, and doubtless did. It used to make me sorry for the girls because it seemed so hard for them to buckle down to anything remunerative and continuous and really get ahead in it. If they did that, they forfeited too many opportunities of the leisure class, to which it seems to be intended that the daughters of the well-to-do, from nineteen to about twenty-three, shall belong. If they went to college, that solved the problem for those years, but it came back at them as soon as they came out. If they were satisfied with their indefinite employments it was bad, and if they were not it was also bad. So I used to feel sorry for the girls because their job looked to me so vague, and their employments so fragmentary and unpromising.

I dare say I was wrong, and that the girls were working more hours at their proper vocation than I had the wit to recognize. I see it more clearly now; that there are fruits that ripen best in the sun, and should not be hurried in the process; that Cordelia did not really waste those years in which she waited for me to get started as a wage-earner, but learned in them a kind of patience and useful domestication, besides other accomplishments that make her better to live with now.

Major Brace has paid us the compliment to look in and inspect Samuel. He expressed himself as pleased with him, and was very gratifying in the warmth of his congratulations to Cordelia and me. Speaking as a father of almost complete experience, he told me of the special enthusiasm he felt for a child that had never run up a dentist’s bill. Samuel hasn’t. There is little or nothing about him as yet that would interest a dentist; but Cordelia, whose forefinger is a good deal in his mouth, says there may be any minute.

I must ask mother if that is so. No doubt Cordelia’s enthusiasm is liable to mislead her.

I believe Cordelia dislikes to spend money. I find her perpetually weighing something that might be had against its price, and deciding not to have it. Unless the purchasable object is indispensable or very positively desirable—like a kodak to snap at Samuel—the money looks better to her. That’s remarkable, isn’t it? People differ in temperament as well as in training about that, inheriting tighter or looser fists, I suppose, according to the forebear they individually trace back to. To me, now, things that I want always look better than what money I have. It makes me unhappy to spend much more than I have, but I enjoy very much spending what I have got. I never have any money ahead, unless you can see savings in life insurance, to which I make some inadequate pretense. Maybe that is a defect in my character, though accumulation on seventy dollars a week has its reluctances when you have a wife and baby and a cook and flat and all that. Still, if I had no elders to fall back on I’d have to pinch some salvage out of every dollar.

But Cordelia is naturally more retentive than I am. It is remarkable how little she cares, relatively, for things. She has a good many things, and has always been used to them. She likes them, but with an interest that is altogether secondary, preferring power, independence, and tranquillity of mind to objects of convenience or embellishment, and to almost everything else except health and an easy conscience. She has a private fortune—I don’t know that I have mentioned that—not large, but yielding sufficient income to buy her clothes. All girls ought to have private fortunes. Small ones will do: do better, perhaps, than larger ones, for I don’t suppose it is quite ideal to be swamped by your wife’s money. Cordelia gets a great deal of comfort out of hers, but I see her basis of expenditure is different from mine. Mine is adjusted to what I have; hers to what, on due reflection, she would rather have than money. On that basis she spends not only her own money, but mine. I dare say she will be a rich woman some day, and, I hope, still married to me; so there is a chance that, with other good luck, I may gather some surplus too. I believe she dislikes to shop; indeed, I have heard her say so. There is a streak of Scotch in the Frenches, and I dare say it happened her way. My! my! What luck! When you think of the women—and men too, but especially women—whose highest happiness is to buy things and lug them home, it seems a marvelous dispensation that I should have acquired a companion of so opposite a sort. To be sure, no girl that was infatuated with the joys of purchase would have thought twice of me; and yet, who can tell, for I suppose there are girls who have neither self-restraint nor self-denial about anything, and are liable to think they must have something that really would not suit them at all? I have always thought that Rosamond Viney in Middlemarch was the most fatal character in literature. What must it be to be money-grubber for a woman like that, with an expensive appreciation of the material side of life and no conception of the rest of it! Stars above! how much better it is to be lucky than wise, especially in youth, when, as Major Brace assures me, none of us know anything. There was Solomon, who wrote the Proverbs, and Ben Franklin, who wrote Poor Richard; both able to make shrewd discourse by the ream, and neither of them fortunate on the domestic side. Probably it does not accord with the economy of nature that wise men should have wise wives; certainly if there is a scheme of things that is worthy of respect, it would not have fitted into it for me to have a foolish one.