The Woman Who Did

Chapter 17

And yet our Herminia was a woman after all. Some three years

later, when Harvey Kynaston came to visit her one day, and told her

he was really going to be married,--what sudden thrill was this

that passed through and through her. Her heart stood still. She

was aware that she regretted the comparative loss of a very near

and dear acquaintance.

She knew she was quite wrong. It was the leaven of slavery. But

these monopolist instincts, which have wrought more harm in the

world we live in than fire or sword or pestilence or tempest,

hardly die at all as yet in a few good men, and die, fighting hard

for life, even in the noblest women.

She reasoned with herself against so hateful a feeling. Though she

knew the truth, she found it hard to follow. No man indeed is

truly civilized till he can say in all sincerity to every woman of

all the women he loves, to every woman of all the women who love

him, "Give me what you can of your love and of yourself; but never

strive for my sake to deny any love, to strangle any impulse that

pants for breath within you. Give me what you can, while you can,

without grudging, but the moment you feel you love me no more,

don't pollute your own body by yielding it up to a man you have

ceased to desire; don't do injustice to your own prospective

children by giving them a father whom you no longer respect, or

admire, or yearn for. Guard your chastity well. Be mine as much

as you will, as long as you will, to such extent as you will, but

before all things be your own; embrace and follow every instinct of

pure love that nature, our mother, has imparted within you." No

woman, in turn, is truly civilized till she can say to every man of

all the men she loves, of all the men who love her, "Give me what

you can of your love, and of yourself; but don't think I am so

vile, and so selfish, and so poor as to desire to monopolize you.

Respect me enough never to give me your body without giving me your

heart; never to make me the mother of children whom you desire not

and love not." When men and women can say that alike, the world

will be civilized. Until they can say it truly, the world will be

as now a jarring battlefield for the monopolist instincts.

Those jealous and odious instincts have been the bane of humanity.

They have given us the stiletto, the Morgue, the bowie-knife. Our

race must inevitably in the end outlive them. The test of man's

plane in the scale of being is how far he has outlived them. They

are surviving relics of the ape and tiger. But we must let the ape

and tiger die. We must cease to be Calibans. We must begin to be

human.

Patriotism is the one of these lowest vices which most often

masquerades in false garb as a virtue. But what after all IS

patriotism? "My country, right or wrong, and just because it is my

country!" This is clearly nothing more than collective selfishness.

Often enough, indeed, it is not even collective. It means merely,

"MY business-interests against the business-interests of other

people, and let the taxes of my fellow-citizens pay to support

them." At other times it means pure pride of race, and pure lust of

conquest; "MY country against other countries; MY army and navy

against other fighters; MY right to annex unoccupied territory

against the equal right of all other peoples; MY power to oppress

all weaker nationalities, all inferior races." It NEVER means or

can mean anything good or true. For if a cause be just, like

Ireland's, or once Italy's, then 'tis a good man's duty to espouse

it with warmth, be it his own or another's. And if a cause be bad,

then 'tis a good man's duty to oppose it, tooth and nail,

irrespective of your patriotism. True, a good man will feel more

sensitively anxious that strict justice should be done by the

particular community of which chance has made him a component member

than by any others; but then, people who feel acutely this joint

responsibility of all the citizens to uphold the moral right are not

praised as patriots but reviled as unpatriotic. To urge that our

own country should strive with all its might to be better, higher,

purer, nobler, more generous than other countries,--the only kind of

patriotism worth a moment's thought in a righteous man's eyes, is

accounted by most men both wicked and foolish.

Then comes the monopolist instinct of property. That, on the face

of it, is a baser and more sordid one. For patriotism at least can

lay claim to some sort of delusive expansiveness beyond mere

individual interest; whereas property stops short at the narrowest

limits of personality. It is no longer "Us against the world!" but

"Me against my fellow-citizens!" It is the last word of the

intercivic war in its most hideous avatar. Look how it scars the

fair face of our common country with its antisocial notice-boards,

"Trespassers will be prosecuted." It says in effect, "This is my

land. As I believe, God made it; but I have acquired it, and

tabooed it to myself, for my own enjoyment. The grass on the wold

grows green; but only for me. The mountains rise glorious in the

morning sun; no foot of man, save mine and my gillies' shall tread

them. The waterfalls leap white from the ledge in the glen; avaunt

there, non-possessors; your eye shall never see them. For you the

muddy street; for me, miles of upland. All this is my own. And I

choose to monopolize it."

Or is it the capitalist? "I will add field to field," he cries

aloud, despite his own Scripture; "I will join railway to railway.

I will juggle into my own hands all the instruments for the

production of wealth that my cunning can lay hold of; and I will

use them for my own purposes against producer and consumer alike

with impartial egoism. Corn and coal shall lie in the hollow of my

hand. I will enrich myself by making dear by craft the necessaries

of life; the poor shall lack, that I may roll down fair streets in

needless luxury. Let them starve, and feed me!" That temper, too,

humanity must outlive. And those who are incapable of outliving it

of themselves must be taught by stern lessons, as in the splendid

uprising of the spirit of man in France, that their race has

outstripped them.

Next comes the monopoly of human life, the hideous wrong of

slavery. That, thank goodness, is now gone. 'Twas the vilest of

them all--the nakedest assertion of the monopolist platform:--"You

live, not for yourself, but wholly and solely for me. I disregard

your claims to your own body and soul, and use you as my chattel."

That worst form has died. It withered away before the moral

indignation even of existing humanity. We have the satisfaction of

seeing one dragon slain, of knowing that one monopolist instinct at

least is now fairly bred out of us.

Last, and hardest of all to eradicate in our midst, comes the

monopoly of the human heart, which is known as marriage. Based upon

the primitive habit of felling the woman with a blow, stunning her

by repeated strokes of the club or spear, and dragging her off by

the hair of her head as a slave to her captor's hut or rock-shelter,

this ugly and barbaric form of serfdom has come in our own time by

some strange caprice to be regarded as of positively divine origin.

The Man says now to himself, "This woman is mine. Law and the Church

have bestowed her on me. Mine for better, for worse; mine, drunk or

sober. If she ventures to have a heart or a will of her own, woe

betide her! I have tabooed her for life: let any other man touch

her, let her so much as cast eyes on any other man to admire or

desire him--and, knife, dagger, or law-court, they shall both of

them answer for it." There you have in all its native deformity

another monopolist instinct--the deepest-seated of all, the

grimmest, the most vindictive. "She is not yours," says the moral

philosopher of the new dispensation; "she is her own; release her!

The Turk hales his offending slave, sews her up in a sack, and casts

her quick into the eddying Bosphorus. The Christian Englishman, with

more lingering torture, sets spies on her life, drags what he thinks

her shame before a prying court, and divorces her with contumely.

All this is monopoly, and essentially slavery. Mankind must outlive

it on its way up to civilization."

And then the Woman, thus taught by her lords, has begun to retort

in these latter days by endeavoring to enslave the Man in return.

Unable to conceive the bare idea of freedom for both sexes alike,

she seeks equality in an equal slavery. That she will never

achieve. The future is to the free. We have transcended serfdom.

Women shall henceforth be the equals of men, not by levelling down,

but by levelling up; not by fettering the man, but by elevating,

emancipating, unshackling the woman.

All this Herminia knew well. All these things she turned over in

her mind by herself on the evening of the day when Harvey Kynaston

came to tell her of his approaching marriage. Why, then, did she

feel it to some extent a disappointment? Why so flat at his

happiness? Partly, she said to herself, because it is difficult to

live down in a single generation the jealousies and distrusts

engendered in our hearts by so many ages of harem life. But more

still, she honestly believed, because it is hard to be a free soul

in an enslaved community. No unit can wholly sever itself from the

social organism of which it is a corpuscle. If all the world were

like herself, her lot would have been different. Affection would

have been free; her yearnings for sympathy would have been filled

to the full by Harvey Kynaston or some other. As it was, she had

but that one little fraction of a man friend to solace her; to

resign him altogether to another woman, leaving herself bankrupt of

love, was indeed a bitter trial to her.

Yet for her principles' sake and Dolly's, she never let Harvey

Kynaston or his wife suspect it; as long as she lived, she was a

true and earnest friend at all times to both of them.