“Dick, boy, your position is distinctly Carlylean,” Terrence McFane said in fatherly tones.
The sages1 of the madrono grove2 were at table, and, with Paula, Dick and Graham, made up the dinner party of seven.
“Mere4 naming of one’s position does not settle it, Terrence,” Dick replied. “I know my point is Carlylean, but that does not invalidate it. Hero-worship is a very good thing. I am talking, not as a mere scholastic5, but as a practical breeder with whom the application of Mendelian methods is an every-day commonplace.”
“And I am to conclude,” Hancock broke in, “that a Hottentot is as good as a white man?”
“Now the South speaks, Aaron,” Dick retorted with a smile. “Prejudice, not of birth, but of early environment, is too strong for all your philosophy to shake. It is as bad as Herbert Spencer’s handicap of the early influence of the Manchester School.”
“And Spencer is on a par3 with the Hottentot?” Dar Hyal challenged.
Dick shook his head.
“Let me say this, Hyal. I think I can make it clear. The average Hottentot, or the average Melanesian, is pretty close to being on a par with the average white man. The difference lies in that there are proportionately so many more Hottentots and negroes who are merely average, while there is such a heavy percentage of white men who are not average, who are above average. These are what I called the pace-makers that bring up the speed of their own race average-men. Note that they do not change the nature or develop the intelligence of the average-men. But they give them better equipment, better facilities, enable them to travel a faster collective pace.
“Give an Indian a modern rifle in place of his bow and arrows and he will become a vastly more efficient game-getter. The Indian hunter himself has not changed in the slightest. But his entire Indian race sported so few of the above-average men, that all of them, in ten thousand generations, were unable to equip him with a rifle.”
“Go on, Dick, develop the idea,” Terrence encouraged. “I begin to glimpse your drive, and you’ll soon have Aaron on the run with his race prejudices and silly vanities of superiority.”
“These above-average men,” Dick continued, “these pace-makers, are the inventors, the discoverers, the constructionists, the sporting dominants8. A race that sports few such dominants is classified as a lower race, as an inferior race. It still hunts with bows and arrows. It is not equipped. Now the average white man, per se, is just as bestial10, just as stupid, just as inelastic, just as stagnative, just as retrogressive, as the average savage11. But the average white man has a faster pace. The large number of sporting dominants in his society give him the equipment, the organization, and impose the law.
“What great man, what hero—and by that I mean what sporting dominant9— has the Hottentot race produced? The Hawaiian race produced only one— Kamehameha. The negro race in America, at the outside only two, Booker T. Washington and Du Bois—and both with white blood in them....”
Paula feigned12 a cheerful interest while the exposition went on. She did not appear bored, but to Graham’s sympathetic eyes she seemed inwardly to droop13. And in an interval14 of tilt15 between Terrence and Hancock, she said in a low voice to Graham:
“Words, words, words, so much and so many of them! I suppose Dick is right—he so nearly always is; but I confess to my old weakness of inability to apply all these floods of words to life—to my life, I mean, to my living, to what I should do, to what I must do.” Her eyes were unfalteringly fixed16 on his while she spoke17, leaving no doubt in his mind to what she referred. “I don’t know what bearing sporting dominants and race-paces have on my life. They show me no right or wrong or way for my particular feet. And now that they’ve started they are liable to talk the rest of the evening....
“Oh, I do understand what they say,” she hastily assured him; “but it doesn’t mean anything to me. Words, words, words—and I want to know what to do, what to do with myself, what to do with you, what to do with Dick.”
But the devil of speech was in Dick Forrest’s tongue, and before Graham could murmur18 a reply to Paula, Dick was challenging him for data on the subject from the South American tribes among which he had traveled. To look at Dick’s face it would have been unguessed that he was aught but a carefree, happy arguer. Nor did Graham, nor did Paula, Dick’s dozen years’ wife, dream that his casual careless glances were missing no movement of a hand, no change of position on a chair, no shade of expression on their faces.
What’s up? was Dick’s secret interrogation. Paula’s not herself. She’s positively19 nervous, and all the discussion is responsible. And Graham’s off color. His brain isn’t working up to mark. He’s thinking about something else, rather than about what he is saying. What is that something else?
And the devil of speech behind which Dick hid his secret thoughts impelled20 him to urge the talk wider and wilder.
“For once I could almost hate the four sages,” Paula broke out in an undertone to Graham, who had finished furnishing the required data.
Dick, himself talking, in cool sentences amplifying21 his thesis, apparently22 engrossed23 in his subject, saw Paula make the aside, although no word of it reached his ears, saw her increasing nervousness, saw the silent sympathy of Graham, and wondered what had been the few words she uttered, while to the listening table he was saying:
“Fischer and Speiser are both agreed on the paucity24 of unit-characters that circulate in the heredity of the lesser25 races as compared with the immense variety of unit-characters in say the French, or German, or English....”
No one at the table suspected that Dick deliberately26 dangled27 the bait of a new trend to the conversation, nor did Leo dream afterward28 that it was the master-craft and deviltry of Dick rather than his own question that changed the subject when he demanded to know what part the female sporting dominants played in the race.
“Females don’t sport, Leo, my lad,” Terrence, with a wink29 to the others, answered him. “Females are conservative. They keep the type true. They fix it and hold it, and are the everlasting30 clog31 on the chariot of progress. If it wasn’t for the females every blessed mother’s son of us would be a sporting dominant. I refer to our distinguished32 breeder and practical Mendelian whom we have with us this evening to verify my random33 statements.”
“Let us get down first of all to bedrock and find out what we are talking about,” Dick was prompt on the uptake. “What is woman?” he demanded with an air of earnestness.
“The ancient Greeks said woman was nature’s failure to make a man,” Dar Hyal answered, the while the imp7 of mockery laughed in the corners of his mouth and curled his thin cynical34 lips derisively35.
Leo was shocked. His face flushed. There was pain in his eyes and his lips were trembling as he looked wistful appeal to Dick.
“The half-sex,” Hancock gibed36. “As if the hand of God had been withdrawn37 midway in the making, leaving her but a half-soul, a groping soul at best.”
“No I no!” the boy cried out. “You must not say such things!—Dick, you know. Tell them, tell them.”
“I wish I could,” Dick replied. “But this soul discussion is vague as souls themselves. We all know, of our selves, that we often grope, are often lost, and are never so much lost as when we think we know where we are and all about ourselves. What is the personality of a lunatic but a personality a little less, or very much less, coherent than ours? What is the personality of a moron38? Of an idiot? Of a feeble-minded child? Of a horse? A dog? A mosquito? A bullfrog? A woodtick? A garden snail39? And, Leo, what is your own personality when you sleep and dream? When you are seasick40? When you are in love? When you have colic? When you have a cramp41 in the leg? When you are smitten42 abruptly43 with the fear of death? When you are angry? When you are exalted44 with the sense of the beauty of the world and think you think all inexpressible unutterable thoughts?
“I say think you think intentionally45. Did you really think, then your sense of the beauty of the world would not be inexpressible, unutterable. It would be clear, sharp, definite. You could put it into words. Your personality would be clear, sharp, and definite as your thoughts and words. Ergo, Leo, when you deem, in exalted moods, that you are at the summit of existence, in truth you are thrilling, vibrating, dancing a mad orgy of the senses and not knowing a step of the dance or the meaning of the orgy. You don’t know yourself. Your soul, your personality, at that moment, is a vague and groping thing. Possibly the bullfrog, inflating46 himself on the edge of a pond and uttering hoarse47 croaks48 through the darkness to a warty49 mate, possesses also, at that moment, a vague and groping personality.
“No, Leo, personality is too vague for any of our vague personalities50 to grasp. There are seeming men with the personalities of women. There are plural51 personalities. There are two-legged human creatures that are neither fish, flesh, nor fowl52. We, as personalities, float like fog-wisps through glooms and darknesses and light-flashings. It is all fog and mist, and we are all foggy and misty53 in the thick of the mystery.”
“Maybe it’s mystification instead of mystery—man-made mystification,” Paula said.
“There talks the true woman that Leo thinks is not a half-soul,” Dick retorted. “The point is, Leo, sex and soul are all interwoven and tangled54 together, and we know little of one and less of the other.”
“But women are beautiful,” the boy stammered55.
“Oh, ho!” Hancock broke in, his black eyes gleaming wickedly. “So, Leo, you identify woman with beauty?”
The young poet’s lips moved, but he could only nod.
“Very well, then, let us take the testimony56 of painting, during the last thousand years, as a reflex of economic conditions and political institutions, and by it see how man has molded and daubed woman into the image of his desire, and how she has permitted him—”
“You must stop baiting Leo,” Paula interfered57, “and be truthful58, all of you, and say what you do know or do believe.”
“Woman is a very sacred subject,” Dar Hyal enunciated60 solemnly.
“There is the Madonna,” Graham suggested, stepping into the breach61 to Paula’s aid.
“And the cérébrale,” Terrence added, winning a nod of approval from Dar Hyal.
“One at a time,” Hancock said. “Let us consider the Madonna-worship, which was a particular woman-worship in relation to the general woman-worship of all women to-day and to which Leo subscribes62. Man is a lazy, loafing savage. He dislikes to be pestered63. He likes tranquillity65, repose66. And he finds himself, ever since man began, saddled to a restless, nervous, ir............