‘If you have not sold yourself for British gold, and for British acres, and for British rank, I have nothing to say against it,’ said Miss Wallachia Petrie that same evening to her friend Caroline Spalding.
‘You know that I have not sold myself, as you call it,’ said Caroline. There had been a long friendship between these two ladies, and the younger one knew that it behoved her to bear a good deal from the elder. Miss Petrie was honest, clever, and in earnest. We in England are not usually favourably disposed to women who take a pride in a certain antagonism to men in general, and who are anxious to shew the world that they can get on very well without male assistance; but there are many such in America who have noble aspirations, good intellects, much energy, and who are by no means unworthy of friendship. The hope in regard to all such women — the hope entertained not by themselves, but by those who are solicitous for them — is that they will be cured at last by a husband and half-a-dozen children. In regard to Wallachia Petrie there was not, perhaps, much ground for such hope. She was so positively wedded to women’s rights in general, and to her own rights in particular, that it was improbable that she should ever succumb to any man, and where would be the man brave enough to make the effort? From circumstances Caroline Spalding had been the beloved of her heart since Caroline Spalding was a very little girl; and she had hoped that Caroline would through life have borne arms along with her in that contest which she was determined to wage against man, and which she always waged with the greatest animosity against men of the British race. She hated rank; she hated riches; she hated monarchy and with a true woman’s instinct in battle, felt that she had a specially strong point against Englishmen, in that they submitted themselves to dominion from a woman monarch.
And now the chosen friend of her youth, the friend who had copied out all her poetry, who had learned by heart all her sonnets, who had, as she thought, reciprocated all her ideas, was going to be married and to be married to an English lord! She had seen that it was coming for some time, and had spoken out very plainly, hoping that she might still save the brand from the burning. Now the evil was done; and Caroline Spalding, when she told her news, knew well that she would have to bear some heavy reproaches.
‘How many of us are there who never know whether we sell ourselves or not?’ said Wallachia. ‘The senator who longs for office, and who votes this way instead of that in order that he may get it, thinks that he is voting honestly. The minister who calls himself a teacher of God’s word, thinks that it is God’s word that he preaches when he strains his lungs to fill his church. The question is this, Caroline would you have loved the same man had he come to you with a woodman’s axe in his hand or a clerk’s quill behind his ear? I guess not.’
‘As to the woodman’s axe, Wally, it is very well in theory; but —’
‘Things good in theory, Caroline, will be good also when practised. You may be sure of that. We dislike theory simply because our intelligences are higher than our wills. But we will let that pass.’
‘Pray let it pass, Wally. Do not preach me sermons tonight. I am so happy, and you ought to wish me joy.’
‘If wishing you joy would get you joy, I would wish it you while I lived. I cannot be happy that you should be taken from us whither I shall never see you again.’
‘But you are to come to us. I have told him so, and it is settled.’
‘No, dear; I shall not do that. What should I be in the glittering halls of an English baron? Could there be any visiting less fitting, any admixture less appropriate? Could I who have held up my voice in the Music Hall of Lacedaemon amidst the glories of the West, in the great and free State of Illinois, against the corruption of an English aristocracy, could I, who have been listened to by two thousand of my countrywomen and men while I spurned the unmanly, inhuman errors of primogeniture, could I, think you, hold my tongue beneath the roof of a feudal lord!’ Caroline Spalding knew that her friend could not hold her tongue, and hesitated to answer. There had been that fatal triumph of a lecture on the joint rights of men and women, and it had rendered poor Wallachia Petrie unfit for ordinary society.
‘You might come there without talking politics, Wally,’ said Caroline.
‘No, Caroline; no. I will go into the house of no man in which the free expression of my opinion is debarred me. I will not sit even at your table with a muzzled tongue. When you are gone, Caroline, I shall devote myself to what, after all, must be the work of my life, and I shall finish the biographical history of our great hero in verse which I hope may at least be not ephemeral. From month to month I shall send you what I do, and you will not refuse me your friendly criticism and, perhaps, some slight meed of approbation because you are dwelling beneath the shade of a throne. Oh, Caroline, let it not be a upas tree!’
The Miss Petries of the world have this advantage, an advantage which rarely if ever falls to the lot of a man, that they are never convinced of error. Men, let them be ever so much devoted to their closets, let them keep their work ever so closely veiled from public scrutiny, still find themselves subjected to criticism, and under the necessity of either defending themselves or of succumbing. If, indeed, a man neither speaks, nor writes, if he be dumb as regards opinion, he passes simply as one of the crowd, and is in the way neither of convincing nor of being convinced; but a woman may speak, and almost write, as she likes, without danger of being wounded by sustained conflict. Who would have the courage to begin with such a one as Miss Petrie, and endeavour to prove to her that she is wrong from the beginning. A little word of half-dissent, a smile, a shrug, and an ambiguous compliment which is misunderstood, are all the forms of argument which can be used against her. Wallachia Petrie, in her heart of hearts, conceived that she had fairly discussed her great projects from year to year with indomitable eloquence and unanswerable truth and that none of her opponents had had a leg to stand upon. And this she believed because the chivalry of men had given to her sex that protection against which her life was one continued protest.
‘Here he is,’ said Caroline, as Mr Glascock came up to them. ‘Try and say a civil word to him, if he speaks about it. Though he is to be a lord, still he is a man and a brother.’
‘Caroline,’ said the stern monitress, ‘you are already learning to laugh at principles which have been dear to you since you left your mother’s breast. Alas, how true it is, “You cannot touch pitch and not be defiled.”’
The further progress of these friendly and feminine amenities was stopped by the presence of the gentleman who had occasioned them. ‘Miss Petrie,’ said the hero of the hour, ‘Caroline was to tell you of my good fortune, and no doubt she has done so.’
‘I cannot wait to hear the pretty things he has to say,’ said Caroline, ‘and I must look after my aunt’s guests. There is poor Signor Buonarosci without a soul to say a syllable to him, and I must go and use my ten Italian words.’
‘You are about to take with you to your old country, Mr Glascock,’ said Miss Petrie, ‘one of the brightest stars in our young American firmament.’ There could be no doubt, from the tone of Miss Petrie’s voice, that she now regarded this star, however bright, as one of a sort which is subjected to falling.
‘I am going to take a very nice young woman,’ said Mr Glascock.
‘I hate that word woman, sir, uttered with the halfhidden sneer which always accompanies its expression from the mouth of a man.’
‘Sneer, Miss Petrie!’
‘I quite allow that it is involuntary, and not analysed or understood by yourselves. If you speak of a dog, you intend to do so with affection, but there is always contempt mixed with it. The so-called chivalry of man to woman is all begotten in the same spirit. I want no favour, but I claim to be your equal.’
‘I thought that American ladies were generally somewhat exacting as to those privileges which chivalry gives them.’
‘It is true, sir, that the only rank we know in our country is in that precedence which man gives to woman. Whether we maintain that, or whether we abandon it, we do not intend to purchase it at the price of an acknowledgment of intellectual inferiority. For myself, I hate chivalry — what you call chivalry. I can carry my own chair, and I claim the right to carry it whithersoever I may please.’
Mr Glascock remained with her for some time, but made no opportunity for giving that invitation to Monkhams of which Caroline had spoken. As he said afterwards, he found it impossible to expect her to attend to any subject so trivial; and when, afterwards, Caroline told him, with some slight mirth, the capability of which on such a subject was coming to her with her new ideas of life, that, though he was partly saved as a man and a brother, still he was partly the reverse as a feudal lord, he began to reflect that Wallachia Petrie would be a guest with whom he would find it very difficult to make things go pleasantly at Monkhams.
‘Does she not bully you horribly?’ he asked.
‘Of course she bullies me,’ Caroline answered; ‘and I cannot expect you to understand as yet how it is that I love her and like her; but I do. If I were in distress tomorrow, she would give everything she has in the world to put me right.’
‘So would I,’ said he.
‘Ah, you, that is a matter of course. That is your business now. And she would give everything she has in the world to set the world right. Would you do that?’
‘It would depend on the amount of my faith. If I could believe in the result, I suppose I should do it.’
‘She would do it on the slightest hope that such giving would have any tendency that way. Her philanthropy is all real. Of course she is a bore to you.’
‘I am very patient.’
‘I hope I shall find you so always. And, of course, she is ridiculous in your eyes. I have learned to see it, and to regret it; but I shall never cease to love her.’
‘I have not the slightest objection. Her lessons will come from over the water, and mine will come from where shall I say? over the table. If I can’t talk her down with so much advantage on my side, I ought to be made a woman’s-right man myself.’
Poor Lady R............