Nonsenseorship Part 6

and the place is not "pulled." Even the house detective knows that she is innocently drinking a drink.

Thus has this rebel young generation forced out into the open country with it all the contented young women in their late twenties and early thirties, who may not have been feeling rebellious at all. And the wives of forty-five also, to compete all over again for their own husbands. For "poaching" on the wifely preserves has become the favorite flapper sport!

"Married men," having been forbidden to unmarried young persons for three chaste generations, our flappers, bi-product of inhibition, are promptly appropriating the husbands. This one item of the flapper raid on the married men has done more than the entire twentieth century put together to change the smug structure of American society, and bring us back to normalcy.

Before 1865 no Southern belle considered herself worth her salt unless all the courtly old married men in the country kissed her hand and competed with the young blades for her quadrilles. But when black persons stopped b.u.t.toning up the shoes of the Quality, America entered upon her 1870's, her sombre brown stone fronts, and her cloistered husbands. The money for doing society had simply pa.s.sed into the hands of the descendants of Miles Standish and Priscilla, who carried their consciences into their sober mansions with them. The Age of Innocence was upon us, and has clung close ever since.

From that fatal day on to 1917 each oncoming debutante was taught by her mother to give unto the genus, married man, her most impersonal manner, lest she provoke his "undesirable attentions." If poaching was done, it was from behind a tree. Unmarried girls knew that their place was not in somebody else's home in those days. The wives could protect their preserves by the simple expedient of "talking about" any unmarried young female caught on the married reservations.

And so it came to pa.s.s that the pick of the men were posted, because, as fast as a callow youth gets worth marrying, somebody promptly marries him. The Fast Young Married Crowd was a closed corporation and played exclusively within itself; the female of the species had to compete only with females of equal tonnage. The only sylph-like temptation that a husband could encounter was a dissolute person whose reputation had already been ruined--and she didn't count, because n.o.body invited her to parties anyway. A wife could get as fat as she wanted to in those days.

Even today that same leisurely life might exist for the wives. Even today the wives might be resting their feet under the bridge tables, secure in the consciousness that no bobbed haired young poacher was daring to dance with their husbands, if they had just let prohibitions enough alone--if they had only not been swept away by the high sport of gossiping about our Wild Young People, which struck the country in the summer of 1920. This gossip was an intrinsic phase of the virtue wave which always immediately precedes a crime wave.

The wives just at this point, instead of sitting tight, made the strategic mistake of turning the full force of the ammunition of gossip, which should have been saved for defending husbands from poachers, into an offensive attack on the flapper's lip stick, on her cigarettes, and on her petting parties. Whenever two or three wives were gathered together, their topic was our Wild Young People. That summer, too, saw the launching of that now seasoned romance about the checking of corsets. The resolutions at clubs were being resolved. The preachers were sermonizing. The up-state legislators were drafting bills against flappers' smoking cigarettes.

Human nature can be pushed just so far. Instead of reforming, the young things apparently decided one might as well lose a reputation for stealing a husband as for smoking a cigarette. The whole a.r.s.enal for combating poachers blew up.

To make matters worse, in the excitement of the virtue wave our Wild Young People had been attacked as a group instead of as individuals.

That was the second mistake. The whole strength of gossip consists in selecting one member of the clan for calumny, to stand out disgraced and alone among her exemplary sisters. Because the flappers had been gossiped about _en ma.s.se_, the whole reason for not being gossiped about had ceased. The poacher of that half generation ago had been the kind of a girl who stalked her game alone.

But, when all the girls in town are seeking to steal your husband, what are you going to do about it, if you are a woman of forty-five with a heaviness around the hips and a disinclination to learn the camel walk? Nor can you get the poachers off the scent by crossing the trail with an eligible bachelor. Logically, the young things should have enough sense to ignore a preempted husband and attend to the serious business of getting themselves husbands. But they haven't.

They seem to prefer the husbands of the other women. And curiously, the more they engage in this exotic sport of poaching, the less keen they become about owning a property for somebody else to poach on.

The real interstate joke on Puritanism is that the flapper, who flaps because Puritanism has driven her to it, will automatically bring about its cure. The whole vitality of Puritanism rests on the unswerving principle of letting not thy right hand know what thy left hand doeth, if thy left hand is doing something it shouldn't.

Puritanism could not last out a week-end without the able a.s.sistance of the standardized double life.

And that is just what the flappers refuse to respect. They are even insisting on being taken along on the parties, which, by all the rules of Rolf and Comstock should be confined to man's double life. Where the chorus lady was once the only brand that had the proper and improper equipment to jazz up an evening, now mankind has come to prefer the flapper, who drinks as much as the Broadwayite, is just as peppy and not quite so gold-diggish.

"It is so simple," smiles Barbara nonchalantly blowing her smoke rings. "You old dears set man an impossible standard. As he had always to be pretending holy emotions whenever he was around you he just naturally had to get away half the time, to rest the muscles of his inhibitions. Why, you funny old things actually drove man into his double life, just as you made all of his best stories have two editions, one for a nice girl and one for--well say one not so nice.

Our crowd has done more than all of your silly old social hygiene commissions to bring nearer the single standard--by going part way to meet him."

The preachers are wasting their time when they rail that the flappers are painting their faces like "fallen women." Of course they are painting them that way--for the very good reason that mankind has demonstrated too unmistakably that that kind of woman has "a way with her."

Not so long ago cosmetics became a moral issue. The curl rag was the only beautifier that somehow never lost its odor of sanct.i.ty--and that was doubtless because curl rags were a perfectly logical part of the long-sleeved Canton flannel nightgown civilization. Curls couldn't be so very wrong when they were so frightfully unbecoming in the making.

And so the "good woman" handed over intact to her weaker sister every beautifier that the world had been eight thousand years acc.u.mulating.

Slowly, timidly the allurements returned. The talc.u.m powder bought for baby surrept.i.tiously reached the nose. When the half generation ago was young, we had adopted a certain lip salve, just one shade darker than the way lips come, explaining, to save our reputations, that we were keeping our lips from chapping. Rouge too had come coyly, back--but--and here's the gist of the whole matter--in polite society paint was put on to imitate nature.

We were still doing our make-up as man conducted his double life--with intent to deceive the general public. We still belonged at heart to the Puritan era, in spite of our wicked fox-trot. All may have been artificial below the neck, from our Gossard corsets with their phalanx of garters on to our hobble skirts. But above the neck, we pretended it was natural.

The flapper has changed all that. She has turned the lady up side down, as well as the world. For the flapper is _au naturale_ below the neck. Above the neck she is the most artificially and entertainingly painted creature that has graced society since Queen Elizabeth. With one bold stroke of a pa.s.sionately red lip stick, she has painted out Elaine the Fair and the later-day n.o.ble Christie Girl and painted in an exotic young person, meet to compete alike with a Ziegfield show girl, with a heaven-born Egyptian princess or even a good Queen Bess, who could not move her face after it was dressed up for the morning. And Bess was the Virgin Queen. The American-Victorian is indeed the only era in history when cosmetics became a moral issue.

Even in dour Cromwellian England, rouge registered the wrong politics but not immorality. We are merely getting back to normalcy in cosmetics--back behind the dun wall of the Victorian era.

And it is the flapper who has done it for us. What's more, she has done it frankly and purposefully--because the reformer, in his naive innocence, has explained to her that what she is doing is wicked and will get that kind of "results." Similarly those of 'em who had not yet taken off their corsets at dances, promptly did so when shocked elders began repeating the corset checking story. Dear heart, the only reason that they had not done so before was because the little dears hadn't heard that the worst people were using ribs instead of whalebone that season.

Vice would die out from disuse, if the reformers did not advertise.

THE WOWZER IN THE SOUTH SEAS

[Ill.u.s.tration: Frederick O'Brien finds the South Seas purified and beautified by the Missionaries.]

FREDERICK O'BRIEN

All over the South Seas the censor has had his day. From New Guinea to Easter Island, he has made his rules and enforced them. Often he wrote glowing pages of prose and poetry about his accomplishments, for reading in Europe and America. He was usually sincere, and determined.

He felt that it was up to him to make over the native races to suit his own ideas of what pleased G.o.d and himself. When he had the lower hand, he prayed and strove in agony to change the wicked hearts of his flock to Clapham or Andover standards; he suffered the contumelies of heathen jibes, and now and again--often enough to make a cartoon popular--he was hotpotted or baked on hot stones as a "long pig." When he converted the king or chief, and he always directed his sacred ammunition at the upper cla.s.ses, he took advantage of every inch of spiritual and governmental club put in his hand, and smote the pagan hip and thigh. His sole effort was to make the South Seas safe for theocracy, and to _strafe_ Satan.

Of course, he was a missionary. It is doubtful if any other urge than a religious one could have infused into those canny migrants of the past century the extraordinary zeal that characterized their singular labors in the exquisite and benighted isles of the tropics.

To leave the melancholy and futuristic atmosphere of seminaries and bethels where the ghosts and penalties of millions of sins cast down their hearts, where few baths and drab clothes, dark homes and poor food, made all conscious of dwelling in a vale of tears, and after half a year or more of hard, s.h.i.+p fare and the rough discipline of a tossing windjammer, to find themselves in the most magnificent scenes on the globe, and amid the richest bounty, was trial enough of the unstable soul of man. That they--most of them--resisted the temptations of the tropical demon, that they continued to preach fire and brimstone, to remain flocked and shod, pantaletted and stayed, is proof enough of their cementation to the rock of ages.

The men were even subjected to direr spells. They were youths, the rude boys of farm and hamlet, schooled in simple studies, untried by the wiles of siren blandishments. If married, their courts.h.i.+ps had been without pa.s.sion, and their wedded years without compet.i.tion, and generally without other incidents than children.

A typical union of this kind I find in an old diary of the wife of one of the most famous propagandists of the American G.o.d in Polynesia. He was of Yale and Andover, and she of Bradford, the daughter of a Marlboro deacon. She was twenty-four and he a little older when her cousin called upon her at her Marlboro home, to ask if she would "become connected with a missionary now an entire stranger, attach herself to a little band of pilgrims, and visit the distant land of Hawaii."

"What could I say? We thoroughly discussed the subject. Next week is the antic.i.p.ated, dreaded interview of final decision. Last night I could neither eat nor close my eyes in sleep."

The suitor came. "The early hours of the evening were devoted to refreshments, to free family sociality, to singing, and to evening wors.h.i.+p. Then one by one the family dispersed, leaving two of similar aspirations, introduced as strangers, to separate at midnight as interested friends.

"In the forenoon, the sun had risen high in the heavens, when it looked down upon two of the children of earth giving themselves wholly to their heavenly Father, receiving each other from his hand as his good gift, pledging themselves to each other as close companions in the race of life, consecrating themselves and their all to a life-work among the heathen."

After six months on the wave, she approaches the "land of darkness whither I am bound. When I reflect on the degradation and misery of the inhabitants, follow them into the eternal world, and forward to the great day of retribution, all my petty sufferings dwindle to a point."

They anchor, and "soon the islanders of both s.e.xes came paddling out in their canoes, with their island fruit. The men wore girdles, and the women a slight piece of cloth wrapped around them, from the hips downward. To a civilized eye their covering seemed to be revoltingly scanty. But we learned that it was a full dress for daily occupation."

The note of nudity this really remarkable woman struck at her first sight of the welcoming savages, was the keynote of the new domination of the islands from Hawaii to Australia. The censors were convinced that it was a state of unG.o.dliness. Their reasoning was based on the fig leaf tied about them by the first man and woman when they became conscious of sin, and it proceeded to the logical teaching that the less of the body exposed the more G.o.dly the condition. When they found this nakedness a.s.sociated with a relation of the s.e.xes utterly opposed to their own, and when, especially, the first white wives on the South Sea beaches, found the joyous, handsome, frolicsome women of the islands, making ardent love to their husbands, the innate heinousness of bodily bareness became fixed as a guiding star towards bringing the infidel to the true wors.h.i.+p.

Clothe them and sanctify them, became the motto. From the wondrous Marquesas valleys to the American naval station of Samoa, the bonnet, the bonnet of a half century ago, is the requirement of decency in the coral or bamboo church, as it is in the temples of New York. The nightgown or Mother Hubbard of Connecticut became the proper female attire for natives in the house of G.o.d, and thus, by gradual establishment of a fas.h.i.+on, in their straw homes, and everywhere.

Chiefesses were induced to don calico, and chiefs the woolen or denim trousers of refinement. The trader came to sell them, and so business followed the Bible. Tattooing, which, with the Polynesians and Melenesians, was probably a race memory of clothing in a less tropical clime, was condemned bitterly by the white censors as causing nudity.

A man or woman whose legs and body were covered with marvellous arabesques and gaudy pictures of palms and fish was not apt to hide them under garments.

And here the censor also had an ally in the trader. The two joined, unwittingly, to break down both the old morale of the pagan and the new morality of the converts. The censorious cleric said that the Lord disliked nakedness, or, at least, that unclothedness was unvirtuous, while the seller of calico and alcohol advised the purchase of his goods for the sake of style. He ridiculed tattooing and nudity, but he also laughed with ribaldry at the religious arguments. The confused indigene, driven by admonition and shame put on the hot and griming stuffs, and finally, had them kept on him by statute. The censor in the South Seas achieved his highest reach of holy effort. He had made into law the _mores_ his sect or tribe had coined into morals, and was able to punish by civil tribunal the evildoers who refused to abide by his conception of the divine wish.

But here, old Mother Nature revolted. All over the world it would appear that she is not in touch with the divinity that shapes the ends of the censors. The clothing donned by the natives of the South Seas killed them. They sweated and remained foul; they swam, and kept on their garments; they were rained on, and laid down in calico and wool, They abandoned the games and exercises which had made them the finest physical race in the world, and took up hymn books and tools. The physical plagues of the whites decimated them. They pa.s.sed away as the _tiare_ Tahiti withers indoors. The censored returned to the rich earth which had bred them, and taught them its secrets and demands.

Only a mournful remnant remains to observe the censors.h.i.+p.

But the curious spirit of inversion which tries to make the a.s.sumed infinite of a finite nature, which had sacrificed a race to an invented G.o.d, persists even in the South Seas. One of the most distinguished authors, who has chosen that delectable clime for his researches was arrested for napping on his own _paepae_ partly clothed. The parson informed upon him, and the _gendarme_ fined him. In the British South Seas, where I was recently, prohibition had cast a blight upon the more poetical whites. I remember one night when my vessel was anch.o.r.ed for a few hours in the roadstead of a lonely island, a group of civil servants and a minister of the Church of England had come aboard to buy what comforts they might from our civilized caravan. They sat on deck clinking gla.s.ses occasionally, talking of cities where a man might be freed from the "continuous spying of the uncoo good." That was the phrase they used, being English or Scots, and when the word was pa.s.sed that we up-anch.o.r.ed with the turn of the tide at midnight, they sang in a last burst of lively furor a song of Dionysian regret. One stanza lingers with me:--

Whack the cymbal! Bang the drum!

Votaries of Bacchus!

Let the popping corks resound, Pa.s.s the flowing goblet round!

May no mournful voice be found, Though wowzers do attack us!

In the darkness I called to them as they went down the gangway into their boat, "What is a wowzer?"

"'E's a bloomin' ---- 'oo wants to do unto others wot 'e's bleedin'