How To Write Special Feature Articles Part 48

Finally I thought of dropping entirely out of the social, religious and charitable activities of the town, investing in a typewriter and subscribing to a correspondence-school course in stenography. I could at least help Carl prepare his lectures and relieve him of the burden of letter writing, thus giving him more time for book reviewing and other potboiling jobs, which were not only delaying his own book but making him burn the candle at both ends in the strenuous effort to make both ends meet.

I knew Carl would object, but I had not expected such an outburst of profane rage as followed my announcement. The poor boy was dreadfully tired, and for months, like the thoroughbred he was, he had repressed his true feelings under a quiet, quizzical smile.

"My heavens! What next?" he cried, jumping up and pacing the floor.

"Haven't you already given up everything you were accustomed to--every innocent pleasure you deserve--every wholesome diversion you actually need in this G.o.d-forsaken, monotonous hole? Haven't I already dragged you down--you, a lovely, fine-grained, highly evolved woman--down to the position of a servant in my house? And now, on top of all this--No, by G.o.d! I won't have it! I tell you I won't have it!"

It may be a shocking confession, but I loved him for that wicked oath.

He looked so splendid--all fire and furious determination, as when he used to rush up to the net in the deciding game of a tennis match, cool and quick as lightning.

"You are right, Carl dear," I said, kissing his profane lips; for I had learned long since never to argue with him. "I am too good to be a mere household drudge. It's an economic waste of superior ability. That's why I am going to be your secretary and save you time and money enough to get and keep a competent maid."

"But I tell you--"

"I know, dear; but what are we going to do about it? We can't go on this way. They've got us down--are we going to let them keep us down? Look into the future! Look at poor old Professor Culberson. Look at half of the older members of the Faculty! They have ceased to grow; their usefulness is over; they are all gone to seed--because they hadn't the courage or the cash to develop anything but their characters!"

Carl looked thoughtful. He had gained an idea for his book and, like a true scholar, forgot for the moment our personal situation.

"Really, you know," he mused, "does it pay Society to reward its individuals in inverse ratio to their usefulness?" He took out his pocket notebook and wrote: "Society itself suffers for rewarding that low order of cunning called business sense with the ultimate control of all other useful talents." He closed his notebook and smiled.

"And yet they call the present economic order safe and sane! And all of us who throw the searchlight of truth on it--dangerous theorists! Can you beat it?"

"Well," I rejoined, not being a scholar, "there's nothing dangerous about my theory. Instead of your stenographer becoming your wife, your wife becomes your stenographer--far safer and saner than the usual order. Men are much more apt to fall in love with lively little typewriters than with fat, flabby wives."

Though it was merely to make a poor joke out of a not objectionable necessity, my plan, as it turned out, was far wiser than I realized.

First, I surrept.i.tiously card-catalogued the notes and references for Carl's "epoch-making book," as one of the sweet, vague wives of the Faculty always called her husband's volumes, which she never read. Then I learned to take down his lectures, to look up data in the library, to verify quotations, and even lent a hand in the book reviewing.

Soon I began to feel more than a mere consumer's interest--a producer's interest--in Carl's work. And then a wonderful thing happened: My husband began to see--just in time, I believe--that a wife could be more than a pa.s.sive and more or less desirable appendage to a man's life--an active and intelligent partner in it. And he looked at me with a new and wondering respect, which was rather amusing, but very dear.

He had made the astonishing discovery that his wife had a mind!

Years of piano practice had helped to make my fingers nimble for the typewriter, and for this advantage I was duly grateful to the family's old-fashioned ideals, though I fear they did not appreciate my grat.i.tude. Once, when visiting them during the holidays, I was laughingly boasting, before some guests invited to meet me at luncheon, about my part in the writing of Carl's History of Property, which had been dedicated to me and was now making a sensation in the economic world, though our guests in the social world had never heard of it.

Suddenly I saw a curious, uncomfortable look come over the faces of the family. Then I stopped and remembered that nowadays wives--nice wives, that is--are not supposed to be helpmates to their husbands except in name; quite as spinsters no longer spin. They can help him spend. At that they are truly better halves, but to help him earn is not nice. To our guests it could mean only one thing--namely, that my husband could not afford a secretary. Well, he could not. What of it?

For a moment I had the disquieting sensation of having paraded my poverty--a form of vulgarity that Carl and I detest as heartily as a display of wealth.

The family considerately informed me afterward, however, that they thought me brave to sacrifice myself so cheerfully. Dear me! I was not being brave. I was not being cheerful. I was being happy. There is no sacrifice in working for the man you love. And if you can do it with him--why, I conceitedly thought it quite a distinction. Few women have the ability or enterprise to attain it!

One of my sisters who, like me, had failed to "marry well" valeted for her husband; but somehow that seemed to be all right. For my part I never could see why it is more womanly to do menial work for a man than intellectual work with him. I have done both and ought to know.... Can it be merely because the one is done strictly in the home or because no one can see you do it? Or is it merely because it is unskilled labor?

It is all right for the superior s.e.x to do skilled labor, but a true womanly woman must do only unskilled labor, and a fine lady none at all--so clothed as to prevent it and so displayed as to prove it, thus advertising to the world that the man who pays for her can also pay for secretaries and all sorts of expensive things. Is that the old idea?

If so I am afraid most college professors' wives should give up the old-fashioned expensive pose of ladyhood and join the new womanhood!

Well, as it turned out, we were enabled to spend our sabbatical year abroad--just in time to give Carl a new lease of life mentally and me physically; for both of us were on the verge of breaking down before we left.

Such a wonderful year! Revisiting his old haunts; attending lectures together in the German and French universities; working side by side in the great libraries; and meeting the great men of his profession at dinner! Then, between whiles, we had the best art and music thrown in!

Ah, those are the only real luxuries we miss and long for! Indeed, to us, they are not really luxuries. Beauty is a necessity to some persons, like exercise; though others can get along perfectly well without it and, therefore, wonder why we cannot too.

Carl's book had already been discovered over there--that is perhaps the only reason it was discovered later over here--and every one was so kind about it. We felt quite important and used to wink at each other across the table. "Our" book, Carl always called it, like a dear. His work was my work now--his ambitions, my ambitions; not just emotionally or inspirationally, but intellectually, collaboratively. And that made our emotional interest in each other the keener and more satisfying. We had fallen completely in love with each other. For the first time we two were really one. Previously we had been merely p.r.o.nounced so by a clergyman who read it out of a book.

Oh, the glory of loving some one more than oneself! And oh, the blessedness of toiling together for something greater and more important than either! That is what makes it possible for the other thing to endure--not merely for a few mad, glad years, followed by drab duty and dull regret, but for a happy lifetime of useful vigor. That, and not leisure or dignity, is the great compensation for the professorial life.

What a joy it was to me during that rosy-sweet early period of our union to watch Carl, like a proud mother, as he grew and exfoliated--like a plant that has been kept in a cellar and now in congenial soil and sunshine is showing at last its full potentialities. Through me my boy was attaining the full stature of a man; and I, his proud mate, was jealously glad that even his dear dead mother could not have brought that to pa.s.s.

His wit became less caustic; his manner more genial. People who once irritated now interested him. Some who used to fear him now liked him.

And as for the undergraduates who had hero-worshiped this former tennis champion, they now shyly turned to him for counsel and advice. He was more of a man of the world than most of his colleagues and treated the boys as though they were men of the world too--for instance, he never referred to them as boys.

"I wouldn't be a d.a.m.ned fool if I were you," I once overheard him say to a certain young man who was suffering from an attack of what Carl called misdirected energy.

More than one he took in hand this way; and, though I used to call it--to tease him--his man-to-man manner, I saw that it was effective. I, too, grew fond of these frank, ingenuous youths. We used to have them at our house when we could spare an evening--often when we could not.

None of this work, it may be mentioned, is referred to in the annual catalogue or provided for in the annual budget; and yet it is often the most vital and lasting service a teacher renders his students--especially when their silly parents provide them with more pocket money than the professor's entire income for the support of himself, his family, his scholarship and his dignity.

"Your husband is not a professor," one of them confided shyly to me--"he's a human being!"

After the success of our book we were called to another college--a full professorship at three thousand a year! Carl loved his Alma Mater with a pa.s.sion I sometimes failed to understand; but he could not afford to remain faithful to her forever on vague promises of future favor. He went to the president and said so plainly, hating the indignity of it and loathing the whole system that made such methods necessary.

The president would gladly have raised all the salaries if he had had the means. He could not meet the compet.i.tor's price, but he begged Carl to stay, offering the full t.i.tle--meaning empty--of professor and a minimum wage of twenty-five hundred dollars, with the promise of full pay when the funds could be raised.

Now we had demonstrated that, even on the Faculty of an Eastern college, two persons could live on fifteen hundred. Therefore, with twenty-five hundred, we could not only exist but work efficiently. So we did not have to go.

I look back on those days as the happiest period of our life together.

That is why I have lingered over them. Congenial work, bright prospects, perfect health, the affection of friends, the respect of rivals--what more could any woman want for her husband or herself?

Only one thing. And now that, too, was to be ours! However, with children came trouble, for which--bless their little hearts!--they are not responsible. Were we? I wonder! Had we a right to have children? Had we a right not to have children? It has been estimated by a member of the mathematical department that, at the present salary rate, each of the college professors of America is ent.i.tled to just two-fifths of a child.

Does this pay? Should only the financially fit be allowed to survive--to reproduce their species? Should or should not those who may be fittest physically, intellectually and morally also be ent.i.tled to the privilege and responsibility of taking their natural part in determining the character of America's future generations, for the evolution of the race and the glory of G.o.d?

I wonder!

(_Boston Transcript_)

A PARADISE FOR A PENNY

MADDENED BY THE CATALOGUES OF PEACE-TIME, ONE LOVER OF GARDENS YET MANAGED TO BUILD A LITTLE EDEN, AND TELLS HOW HE DID IT FOR A SONG

By WALTER PRICHARD EATON

War-time economy (which is a much pleasanter and doubtless a more patriotically approved phrase than war-time poverty) is not without its compensations, even to the gardener. At first I did not think so.

Confronted by a vast array of new and empty borders and rock steps and natural-laid stone, flanking a wall fountain, and other features of a new garden ambitiously planned before the President was so inconsiderate as to declare war without consulting me, and confronted, too, by an empty purse--pardon me, I mean by the voluntarily imposed necessity for economy--I sat me down amid my catalogues, like Niobe amid her children, and wept. (Maybe it wasn't amid her children Niobe wept, but for them; anyhow I remember her as a symbol of lachrymosity.) Dear, alluring, immoral catalogues, sweet sirens for a man's undoing! How you sang to me of sedums, and whispered of peonies and irises--yea, even of German irises! How you spoke in soft, seductive accents of wonderful lilacs, and exquisite spireas, and sweet syringas, murmurous with bees! How you told of tulips and narcissuses, and a thousand lovely things for beds and borders and rock work--at so much a dozen, so very much a dozen, and a dozen so very few! I did not resort to cotton in my ears, but to tears and profanity.

Then two things happened. I got a letter from a Boston architect who had pa.s.sed by and seen my unfinished place; and I took a walk up a back road where the Ma.s.sachusetts Highway Commissioners hadn't sent a gang of workmen through to "improve" it. The architect said, "Keep your place simple. It cries for it. That's always the hardest thing to do--but the best." And the back-country roadside said, "Look at me; I didn't come from any catalogue; no nursery grew me; I'm really and truly 'perfectly hardy'; I didn't cost a cent--and can you beat me at any price? I'm a hundred per cent American, too."