The Eleventh Virgin · Part I · Chapter 1 5 (2/3)

“Then too,” Miss Smythe reminded them, “one must remember the emotional wave line of women which stands in contradistinction to the steady even flow of that of man. After all, one cannot ignore the physiological basis of existence. According to recent tests made by Dr. Peraugh,” then remembering that the explanation of the tests was couched in language perhaps not fit for the ears of undergraduates and mixed company, she paused.

“You mean those published in Eros?” Mr. Fenton helped her out.

“Quite so,” Miss Hubbard agreed. “And do you remember those in an earlier issue which proved that woman’s brain is fully equal to a man’s and quite as capable of grappling with problems of state. There can be no doubt therefore that Pompadour and du Barry swayed the rulers of France, not through physical charm, but through their mental and spiritual qualities.”

“But I can’t see that their physical qualities weren’t the basis,” June protested. “If du Barry hadn’t been beautiful she would have always been a milliner’s apprentice. As it was, she attracted men, and they were the ones who educated her till she passed out of their hands and became Louis XV’s mistress.”

“You are getting down to specific cases, my dear,” Miss Hubbard reminded her, but before she could raise the conversation to generalities again, Regina had pitched in.

“I liked du Barry,” she assured them. “She was so beautifully frank. When she discovered in her footman an old lover of hers, she honestly confessed in her memoirs to falling a victim to his charms and being faithless to the king and didn’t try to excuse herself. All she did was to admit she was a flighty creature and dismiss him from her service for fear she’d fall again.”

“You must remember that French literature,” said Mr. Lord, succeeding where Miss Hubbard had failed, “is not restricted in the sense that English literature is. This freedom is apt to lead us to lay undue emphasis on that frankness and our reticence.”

“But then there is always the implication,” Miss Smythe hastened to say, “of character in our sublimest moments. You must remember those lines of Henley⁠—

“ ‘Some starlit garden grey with dew

Some chamber flushed with wine and fire

What matters so that I and you

Are worthy of our desire.’ ”

“Ah! ‘Worthy’! That is the point,” said Miss Hubbard softly. “And those other lines⁠—

“Some moment that will magnify the universal soul,

And quicken and control.”

The usual pause that separates a quotation from the rest of the conversation fell and the guests began to deposit their empty cups and saucers on the center table and to brush the crumbs from their knees. And in the pause Regina jumped up.

“Lordy, an editorial conference at five, and we’re late,” she reminded June.

“You must come again,” Mr. Fenton assured them.

“Yes, it has been very interesting,” was all the girls could say and as they went out they could hear Miss Hubbard italicizing⁠—“ ‘Youth shows but half. See all. Be not afraid,’ ” and Mr. Lord’s “Quite so!”

“Do you suppose they hang over their teacups and worry about sex every afternoon?” June asked Regina as they were getting into bed that night to read history for an hour before going to sleep.

“I wonder why they don’t live a full life as Miss Hubbard called it. Then they wouldn’t spend so much time gabbling about it.”

“I don’t believe for one minute that she’s living with anybody, Regina. You know the rumors that go around the campus. This is the way it looks to me. Mr. Lord, probably, is urging her to take the fatal step and she feels she is in danger of doing it. That gives her a feeling of superiority over the other old maid instructors and she speaks with authority. But if she had taken it, she wouldn’t talk so much about it, or if she did talk, what she’d say would have made more sense.

“Do you know, I’d like to write a theme for Mr. Lord only it would get me in a mess⁠—”

“What sort of theme? Your brain is entirely too active, June.” Regina settled back, glad to postpone the history reading for a time.

“On those things they were talking about this afternoon.” June pondered deeply. “Well in the first place, you know by all sorts of ways whether you like a man physically or not. You can tell without living with him first, I should think. And you can tell whether a man keeps himself clean and what sort of table manners he has, so you get an idea of what breakfast with him would be like in the morning. That’s the physical side of it.

“On the other side, the mental and spiritual, all the men we know and talk to try to impress us with their mentality and they put their best mental clothes on for us just as a male bird displays all its beauty of coloring for the sake of the female. Not that they want to marry us. They just want our admiration, the same as we like theirs.”

“That disposes of trial marriages, in a superficial way,” Regina agreed.

“Unless a trial marriage lasted for several years,” June went on very seriously, “it wouldn’t do any good. For any shorter time, a man would feel that he’s on his good behavior and just show off all the time⁠—put his best foot first. Of course on a desert island the time could be shorter, but not in our present civilization when a man is away all day working and sometimes the woman, too.

“Then if you lived with one man for a year or so and got tired of him, physically and mentally⁠—and found he hadn’t any depths to discover, then I should think you’d lack the courage to change and take another mate for fear you’d tire again.

“Such a course would just lead to promiscuity, I should think, even though it deserves a more dignified name than promiscuity.”

“Promiscuity wouldn’t be so bad,” Regina said thoughtfully. “There’s Madame du Barry. Think of the education you’d get by living with one man after another. That is, if you have a receptive mind and pick out intelligent men.”

“But couldn’t you get it without the physical side entering in?” June protested, a little shocked.

“No,” Regina decided. “You’d get just the smattering of an education. If you want to make an intensive study, you’d have to live with the man who knew all you wanted to know. You see with women of brains, an intelligent man uses his mental charms rather than physical to captivate her.”

“Yes, and when the personal equation enters in, you learn much more than when you’re studying by yourself. I was slumping in history till you joined the class in January. Then I felt I had to go you one better, so I’ve been studying like mad ever since.”

“I want a thorough knowledge of biology,” Regina went on dreamily.

“But who would want to live with a man like Professor Hawkins”⁠—June interrupted her practically.

Regina made a wry face. “That’s the trouble. You’ve got to have a mental and physical combination and I suppose it’s rare. No, I couldn’t ever live with Professor Hawkins.”

“Even if we were immoral⁠—”

“No, unmoral,” Regina corrected.

“Either way. As long as you’re independent about it, you don’t care whether people call you the one or the other. Anyway, even if we were immoral we couldn’t⁠—we wouldn’t have any opportunity⁠—we probably wouldn’t even be asked if we did have the opportunity of knowing them⁠—to live with the men we wanted to; Anatole France, for instance, or Fritz Kreisler, or H. G. Wells. But think what we’d learn if we could!”

The girls sighed.

And there were the other conversations that would always be remembered. One morning Regina cut a class to interview Mrs. Rose Pastor Stokes who was lecturing at the university on socialism. The girls took turns getting stories for the school paper and the well known radical had fallen to Regina, much to her delight. She was still blazing with enthusiasm that afternoon at tea, and her eyes had red lights in them. Tomorrow she would talk with equal fire of Benvenuto Cellini but today radicalism, as expressed by Mrs. Stokes, flowed through her veins.

“What a wonder she is! Didn’t you think she was stunning, June? Tall and distinguished and just as poised!” (Poised was one of Regina’s favorite words at the time.)

“And she was so lovely to me. She said she had red hair the color of mine and that I reminded her of herself when she was a girl. That was a real compliment, I think. She told me how she worked in a factory on the East Side of New York when she was a girl and how she struggled for an education in the university settlement there. And this New York millionaire came along and married her. There’s romance for you. It’ll make a ripping story for tomorrow morning’s paper. I’ll write it after tea.”

Socialism as a creed did not appeal to Regina. Perhaps it was because on the only occasions she had attended the Socialist local in the town, two of her instructors had been there, and held positions as executives in the branch. This was sufficient evidence that socialists were not persecuted, as she had imagined, and that free speech was not merely a phrase in the constitution. She could learn all she wanted on the subject from her economics professor, who was a well-read and nonpartisan teacher. “I am an instructor,” he once told them, “not a politician.” So Regina, partly as a result of American indifference to politics and partly through a Nietzschean conviction that the mob wasn’t worth assisting, learned just enough about socialism to pass her term examinations in political economy, and no more.

“I told Mrs. Stokes why I wasn’t interested in Socialism and she laughed at me and said I was very young.” Regina dimpled ruefully. “So I told her I would like to hear about her activities in the birth control movement, since they didn’t teach that in Economics 1b and didn’t have a society in the town.”

“You’re not going to say anything about that in the Mirror,” Regina’s fiancé Ray broke in. “We’d be suppressed and probably we’d be canned.”

“There you are⁠—there’s your free speech,” pointed out Jim, who had his astute moments.

“Here is part of the feminist movement which people don’t know about except when they pick up their papers and find out Mrs. Stokes has gone to jail for a month for distributing pamphlets on the subject. What wouldn’t tenement mothers give to have one of those pamphlets. But they haven’t any chance to learn until the newspapers agitate for it and the legislature changes the laws. It’s up to the press.”

“You’re editor, Jim. If Regina or I wrote an article on the history of the birth control movement, would you print it?” June asked.

“Nope.”

“Of course not. You haven’t the guts. But this is what would happen. The article would be printed and you and the person who wrote it would be called up before the dean and expelled. The rest of the staff would stand back of you, print a farewell edition of the paper, shouting for liberty and free speech, and they also would get kicked out. An uproar in a university of five thousand students wouldn’t go unnoticed and just because Regina’s father was President of the Board of Trade and Jim’s father owns railroads, the big papers would make a stir. And in all the fuss, people would hear about birth control⁠—it would be advertised, so to speak, and mothers would cry for it. And demand is always followed by supply⁠—so there you are.”

“I love the way we sit around and talk about what we could do,” Regina sniffed. “Get a couple of people like Mrs. Stokes on the staff and something would be done.”

“Bah! placed in the same situation we are, she’d do just what we do⁠—nothing! Besides,” Jim suddenly remembered, “I thought we decided last week we were Nietzscheans.”

“That’s one way of getting away from responsibilities,” Regina protested, still under the influence of Mrs. Stokes.

“I’ll stick to Nietzsche,” June decided consistently. “Why give up several years of good fun and education and incur the wrath of the worthy Mr. Henreddy by fighting for a mob of stupid, dirty people. They haven’t gumption enough to lift up their voices and complain. I’ll fight for myself and for what I want and that will keep me busy, I guess. I’m not in danger of having babies yet a while, so why worry? And I want another sandwich!”

There were three poets who visited the university that year, and caused much discussion⁠—John Masefield, Edgar Lee Masters and Vachel Lindsay.

Before the first arrived June cut all her classes, spent the day in the library, gloating over The Everlasting Mercy, The Widow in the Bye Street, The Daffodil Fields and Dauber. Regina, Ray and Jim followed her example and there were energetic discussions of Masefield, Masters and Lindsay.

“It’s a good thing we read Masefield’s stuff before he got here,” Regina said over the inevitable cup of tea. “In that huge auditorium he was the hardest man to hear! But I think he’s a wonder.”

“I think he was bashful, he sounded so muffled; but I’d much rather have a poet act that way. Lindsay was too flamboyant. As a matter of fact,” June continued, “Masefield acted as though he were shy and unwilling. He probably needed the money. Books of poetry are never best sellers.”

“I was all prepared not to like him,” Ray confessed. “I have a prejudice against English writers coming over to America to be hailed as geniuses. We pay too little attention to our own product to know whether it’s any good or not. We take English writers for granted. But Masefield’s all right and I think his poetry’s great stuff.”

It was an opinion that was echoed by the several thousand students who went to hear him. And when it was rumored that Masefield had actually been a sailor, and had acted as assistant bartender in a New York saloon, there was a run on the library for his books. He was a man who had “lived,” it was decided.

Whether free verse was really poetry was a much debated question for a time. Vachel Lindsay had declaimed verse of the open road, immaculately dressed in an evening suit.

“The incongruity of his dress and the roughness of his poetry sets me against him,” Regina insisted. “Let him wander around the Middle West dressed in corduroys and recite in the wheat fields if he wants to. The farmers and field hands probably looked on him as a lunatic, that is, unless he composed and chanted as he worked, pitching hay, for instance. He’d be like sailors with their chanteys in that case and in establishing a precedent all sorts of songs of the fields would crop up.”

“I understand that’s what he did do,” June put in. “He worked in the fields, living the life of the people, and writing a poetry of the people. His songs are like the negro melodies in the south⁠—they have real beauty⁠—or like the cowboy songs which have never been well done.

“What I object to about the man is his misplaced enthusiasm in appearing before two or three thousand students who have little appreciation of art or beauty. If he’d blackened his face to recite ‘General Booth Enters Heaven’ they might have enjoyed his recitation as they would a minstrel show. As it was, his way of reciting was unprecedented and therefore ridiculous and they didn’t catch at all the lilting music of it. I didn’t myself until I read it the next day and got away from the spirit of the crowd in judging it.”

Then came Edgar Lee Masters, not in person, but in the shape of a small green volume from which Mr. Lord read short “vitriolic” epitaphs. The adjective was Mr. Lord’s.

Immediately rhetoric instructors were deluged with themes in free verse, and a free verse column appeared in the Mirror.

“It’s a marvelous piece of work,” Jim decreed. “Anybody who has lived in a small Middle Western town would know that. It’s real poetry because it has a languorous, sad rhythm in it, a desolate undercurrent note that you feel in an ugly little town on a summer afternoon.”