Part 13 (2/2)
The doctor fell back in his chair with a groan and a laugh.
”Yes; the same one you may have heard me mention before. She told me that all through her childhood her family was saving and pulling together to build a fine big house. They worked along for years until, when she was a young lady, they finally accomplished it; built a big three-story house that was the admiration of the countryside. Then they moved in. And it took the women-folks every minute of their time, and more, to keep it clean and in order; it cost as much to keep it up, heated, furnished, repaired, painted, and everything the way a fine house should be, as their entire living used to cost. The fine big grounds they had laid out to go with the mansion took so much time to--”
”You see. You see. That's just what I meant,” broke in the doctor.
”Well, I'm a near relative of my great-aunt's. One day, when all the rest of the family was away, she set fire to the house and burned it to the ground, with everything in it.”
”She didn't!” broke in Mrs. Sandworth, who had been coaxed to a fitful attention by the promise of a coherent story.
Rankin laughed. ”Well, that was the way she told it to me, and I don't doubt she _would_ have,” he amended.
The doctor grunted, ”Huh! But would _you_!” He went on, ”You couldn't compete with your rivals, anyhow, if you didn't concentrate everything on making chairs. Don't you know the successful business man's best advertis.e.m.e.nt? 'All of my life-strength I've put into the product I offer you,' he says to the public, and it's true.”
”Oh, well, if I couldn't do business there'd be an end of the matter, and none of your horrible prophecies would come true.”
”Your wife wouldn't let you.”--Dr. Melton took up another line of attack--”she'd want a motor-car and 'nice' a.s.sociates and a fas.h.i.+onable school for the children, and a home in the 'respectable' part of town.”
Rankin's easy-going manner changed. He sat up and frowned. ”There you step on one of my corns, Doctor”--he did not apologize for the rustic metaphor--”I don't believe a single, solitary identical word of that.
It's my most hotly held conviction that women are so much like humans that you can't tell the difference with a microscope. I mean, if they're interested in petty, personal things it's because they're not given a fair chance at big, impersonal things. Everybody's jumping on the American woman because she knows more about bridge-whist than about her husband's business. _Why_ does she? Because he's satisfied to have her--you can take my word for it! He likes her to be absorbed in clubs and bridge and idiotic little dabblings in near-culture and pseudo-art, just for the reason that a busy mother gives her baby a sticky feather to play with. It keeps the baby busy. It keeps his wife's attention off him. It's the American man just as much as the woman who's mortally afraid of a sure-enough marriage with sure-enough shared interests. He doesn't want to bother with children, or with the servant problem or the questions of family life, and he doesn't want his wife bothering him in his business any more than she wants him interfering with hers. That idea of the matter is common to them both.”
”That's a fine, chivalric view of the situation,” said the doctor sardonically. ”Maybe if you'd practiced as long in as many American families as I have, you might have a less idealistic view of your female compatriots.”
”I don't idealize 'em,” cried Rankin. ”Good Lord! Don't I say they're just like men? They amount to something if they're given something worth while to do--not otherwise.”
”Don't you call bringing up children worth while?”
”You bet I do. So much so that I'd have the fathers take their full half of it. I'd have men do more inside the house and less outside, and the women the other way 'round.”
The doctor recoiled at this. ”Oh, you're a visionary. It couldn't be done.”
”It couldn't be done in a minute,” admitted Rankin.
The doctor mused. ”It's an interesting thought. But it's not for our generation. A new idea is like a wedge. You have to introduce it by the thin edge. The only way to get it started is by beginning with the children. Adults are hopeless. There's never any use trying to change them.”
”Oh, you can't fool children,” said Rankin. ”It's no use teaching them something you're not willing to make a try at yourself. They see through that quick enough! What you're really after, is what they see and learn to go after themselves. If anything's to be done, the adults must take the first step.”
”But, as society is organized, the idea is preposterous.”
”Society's been organized a whole lot of different ways in its time. Who tells me that it's bound to stay this way? I tell you right now, it hasn't got _me_ bluffed, anyhow! My wife--if I ever have one--is going to be my sure-enough wife, and my children, _my_ children. I won't _have_ a business that they can't know about, or that doesn't leave me strength enough to share in all their lives. I can earn enough growing potatoes and doing odd jobs of carpentering for that!”
The doctor looked wonderingly at the other's kindling face. ”Rankin,”
he asked irrelevantly, ”aren't there _ever_ moments when you despair of the world?”
The voice of the younger man had the fine tremor of sincerity as he answered, ”Why, good heavens, _no_, Doctor! That's why I dare criticize it so.”
The doctor looked with an intensity almost fierce into the other's confident eyes. He laid his thin, sinewy hand on the other's big brown fist, as though he would fain absorb conviction by contact. ”But I'm sick with the slowness of the progress you talk of--believe in,” he burst out finally. ”It comes too late--the advance from our tragic materialism; too late for so many that could have profited by it most.”
He looked toward Lydia bending over her aunt's fancy work. Rankin followed the direction of his eyes.
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