The Little Lady of the Big House Part 31

"And Spencer is on a par with the Hottentot?" Dar Hyal challenged.

d.i.c.k 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, d.i.c.k, 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," d.i.c.k continued, "these pace-makers, are the inventors, the discoverers, the constructionists, the sporting dominants. A race that sports few such dominants is cla.s.sified 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 b.e.s.t.i.a.l, just as stupid, just as inelastic, just as stagnative, just as retrogressive, as the average savage. 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 dominant--has the Hottentot race produced? The Hawaiian race produced only one--Kamehameha. The negro race in America, at the outside only two, Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton and Du Bois--and both with white blood in them...."

Paula feigned a cheerful interest while the exposition went on. She did not appear bored, but to Graham's sympathetic eyes she seemed inwardly to droop. And in an interval of tilt between Terrence and Hanc.o.c.k, she said in a low voice to Graham:

"Words, words, words, so much and so many of them! I suppose d.i.c.k 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 fixed on his while she spoke, 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 a.s.sured 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 d.i.c.k."

But the devil of speech was in d.i.c.k Forrest's tongue, and before Graham could murmur a reply to Paula, d.i.c.k was challenging him for data on the subject from the South American tribes among which he had traveled. To look at d.i.c.k's face it would have been unguessed that he was aught but a carefree, happy arguer. Nor did Graham, nor did Paula, d.i.c.k'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 d.i.c.k's secret interrogation. Paula's not herself. She's positively 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 d.i.c.k hid his secret thoughts impelled 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 furnis.h.i.+ng the required data.

d.i.c.k, himself talking, in cool sentences amplifying his thesis, apparently engrossed 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 paucity of unit-characters that circulate in the heredity of the lesser 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 d.i.c.k deliberately dangled the bait of a new trend to the conversation, nor did Leo dream afterward that it was the master-craft and deviltry of d.i.c.k 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 wink to the others, answered him. "Females are conservative. They keep the type true. They fix it and hold it, and are the everlasting clog 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 distinguished breeder and practical Mendelian whom we have with us this evening to verify my random statements."

"Let us get down first of all to bedrock and find out what we are talking about," d.i.c.k 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 imp of mockery laughed in the corners of his mouth and curled his thin cynical lips derisively.

Leo was shocked. His face flushed. There was pain in his eyes and his lips were trembling as he looked wistful appeal to d.i.c.k.

"The half-s.e.x," Hanc.o.c.k gibed. "As if the hand of G.o.d had been withdrawn 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!--d.i.c.k, you know. Tell them, tell them."

"I wish I could," d.i.c.k 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 moron? Of an idiot? Of a feeble-minded child? Of a horse? A dog? A mosquito? A bullfrog? A woodtick? A garden snail? And, Leo, what is your own personality when you sleep and dream?

When you are seasick? When you are in love? When you have colic? When you have a cramp in the leg? When you are smitten abruptly with the fear of death? When you are angry? When you are exalted with the sense of the beauty of the world and think you think all inexpressible unutterable thoughts?

"I say _think you think_ intentionally. 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, inflating himself on the edge of a pond and uttering hoa.r.s.e croaks through the darkness to a warty mate, possesses also, at that moment, a vague and groping personality.

"No, Leo, personality is too vague for any of our vague personalities to grasp. There are seeming men with the personalities of women. There are plural personalities. There are two-legged human creatures that are neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. We, as personalities, float like fog-wisps through glooms and darknesses and light-flas.h.i.+ngs. It is all fog and mist, and we are all foggy and misty 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," d.i.c.k retorted. "The point is, Leo, s.e.x and soul are all interwoven and tangled together, and we know little of one and less of the other."

"But women are beautiful," the boy stammered.

"Oh, ho!" Hanc.o.c.k 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 testimony of painting, during the last thousand years, as a reflex of economic conditions and political inst.i.tutions, 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 interfered, "and be truthful, all of you, and say what you do know or do believe."

"Woman is a very sacred subject," Dar Hyal enunciated solemnly.

"There is the Madonna," Graham suggested, stepping into the breach to Paula's aid.

"And the cerebrale," Terrence added, winning a nod of approval from Dar Hyal.

"One at a time," Hanc.o.c.k said. "Let us consider the Madonna-wors.h.i.+p, which was a particular woman-wors.h.i.+p in relation to the general woman-wors.h.i.+p of all women to-day and to which Leo subscribes. Man is a lazy, loafing savage. He dislikes to be pestered. He likes tranquillity, repose. And he finds himself, ever since man began, saddled to a restless, nervous, irritable, hysterical traveling companion, and her name is woman. She has moods, tears, vanities, angers, and moral irresponsibilities. He couldn't destroy her. He had to have her, although she was always spoiling his peace. What was he to do?"

"Trust him to find a way--the cunning rascal," Terrence interjected.

"He made a heavenly image of her," Hanc.o.c.k kept on. "He idealized her good qualities, and put her so far away that her bad qualities couldn't get on his nerves and prevent him from smoking his quiet lazy pipe of peace and meditating upon the stars. And when the ordinary every-day woman tried to pester, he brushed her aside from his thoughts and remembered his heaven-woman, the perfect woman, the bearer of life and custodian of immortality.

"Then came the Reformation. Down went the wors.h.i.+p of the Mother. And there was man still saddled to his repose-destroyer. What did he do then?"

"Ah, the rascal," Terrence grinned.

"He said: 'I will make of you a dream and an illusion.' And he did. The Madonna was his heavenly woman, his highest conception of woman. He transferred all his idealized qualities of her to the earthly woman, to every woman, and he has fooled himself into believing in them and in her ever since... like Leo does."

"For an unmarried man you betray an amazing intimacy with the pestiferousness of woman," d.i.c.k commented. "Or is it all purely theoretical?" Terrence began to laugh.

"d.i.c.k, boy, it's Laura Marholm Aaron's been just reading. He can spout her chapter and verse."

"And with all this talk about woman we have not yet touched the hem of her garment," Graham said, winning a grateful look from Paula and Leo.

"There is love," Leo breathed. "No one has said one word about love."

"And marriage laws, and divorces, and polygamy, and monogamy, and free love," Hanc.o.c.k rattled off.

"And why, Leo," Dar Hyal queried, "is woman, in the game of love, always the pursuer, the huntress?"