Wild Life (4 page)

Stuband is used to my glibness, I suppose, or might have pitched me a crestfallen look. It was Melba, deliberately serving the boys' coconut hermits ahead of my cold supper, who rattled the plate warningly with the edge of her spatula.

I said to the boys, “In any case, if you're yearning for snow, you should yearn for it on a day of the week when it will do you some good.”

“What's ‘yearn'?” Jules whispered to Stuband, and Stuband, who is an amateur reader and has taught himself the rudiments of vocabulary, said, “It's to pray after something.” George corrected him mildly. “Ma doesn't pray. She's a Freethinker.” Stuband then said, “It's to set your heart for it,” and got to the real point: “School's called off if it snows.”

This brought a light into the faces of the two youngest, quite as if the news pertained to the moment, though an entire Sunday divides them from their next possible encounter with the schoolhouse. In these isolated precincts the school term is intermittent at best, commencing when a teacher can be found and ceasing when one cannot, so my sons have become more than a little spoiled from home schooling. When the six of us are left to our own devices, I teach the children Thucydides & Co. in the mornings, and then—having encouraged them to form museums, to collect fossils and butterflies and to dissect worms—I let them run wild in the woods and fields for the rest of the day while I scribble, which is, more or less, the curriculum famously advocated by Seton and his fellow Woodcrafters as being advantageous to the active minds and bodies of the young.

Melba at last brought round my plate, and while I bolted down the cold roast and mashed potatoes, the lima beans, the new bread and butter, the boys brought up memorable snowfalls and then memorable teachers. The Island School, having lost a string of teachers to the custody of lonely bachelors, has lately taken to hiring girls whose principal qualification is their seeming unsuitableness as brides—hard-featured and repellent girls of vicious disposition and shiftless intelligence. I expect my sons to become wise through teaching one another the canny sufferance of inept teachers.

Stuband kept out of this discussion—he has a quiet center, which I suppose is due to the difficulties of his life—but then he cleared his throat and made an attempt to speak across the boys to me. “I'm glad to see the sky clear off some,” he said. “There's no good to plow while this rain keeps up.” He said this in an interested way, but one of his shortcomings is a notable lack of conversational themes. The boys were arguing about whether Miss Parrish kept a thumbscrew in her desk drawer, and whether the little vial in the deep pocket of her duster contained itching powder or arsenic, and I'm afraid my ear must have been taking this in with somewhat more attention than poor Stuband's weather talk. He went a few words further, seeming to speak to the fork as he pushed it along the edge of his empty plate; and then reversing his fork to travel the opposite way around the china, the poor man lapsed silent.

In the following silence—well, not silence, as the older boys began to give the younger an elaborate account of a girl whose fingernails had turned black from a teacher's hammering them with a handy piece of stove wood—I studied the shape of Stuband's big gray mustache, a smoothly down-turned and pleated crescent very like the horns of an Arctic musk ox, and when he became aware of this, he looked up. There are times when I feel under his scrutiny: as if he has taken me into his hands like a book and is studying the pages.

I was driven to say, “You know, Stuband, there are some very strange things going on in the world today, and the world is flying forward just as fast as it can.” His look became startled, so that I was freed to plow ahead. “Encke's comet,” I said. “Blindness cured by a miraculous drug. Moons circling Jupiter. A tunnel under the Hudson River. We shall soon be piping natural gas from the sloughs into our houses for lights and for cooking.” I then began at some length on the
future of agriculture: in our lifetime, plants rendered microbe-proof; farmers raising isinglass roofs over their fields, just as if they were circus tents—but miles in expanse—and growing their crops under those transparent covers without the suffering of bad weather.

I suppose I thought this would leave him fazed. He is always dim and earnest with respect to my knowledge of the future and of the advances of Science; it is principally for this reason I suffer Melba's practice of asking him in for dinner. But when he had considered things—drawing one horn of his mustache up into his mouth thoughtfully—he said, “I wonder the wind wouldn't take hold of such a roof, Mrs. Drummond. A circus tent won't stand much wind, I know that.”

Finding that our interview had turned suddenly interesting again, Oscar said, “I saw the roof fly off the Renegade Queen's Wild West Fair and Bavarian Exposition!” On the instant, the other boys pushed in with their own recollections of that memorable event, when we all had stood in the streets of Astoria and watched the striped and flounced pavilion of the Renegade Queen sail over the roofs of town and flatten quietly on the backs of thirteen sheep, who were caught by surprise standing dreamily in their own field. It was Frank who remembered: those ewes had gone into a kind of nervous prostration from which they never had recovered, and word had reached us afterward that the farmer had been forced to slaughter every one of them to relieve them of their anxiety.

I kept to the point of my argument: “Not isinglass,” I told Stuband, “which I meant only as a similitude. We should expect to see the invention of an artificial resin, clear as glass but plastic in its consistency, like putty or wax, which will therefore hold up to the wind and keep out every kind of scourge from cutworms to rabbits. The world is in a terrific flux, Stuband, and astonishing things are in the air all around us.”

The boys by then had gone on from talk of slaughtered sheep to other memorable and bloody animal encounters: a hog that had run amok in the neighborhood with the butcher's knife stuck in its throat; a dog whose eye was pierced with a porcupine quill; a drowned gopher found inexplicably high in the crotch of a hemlock tree. Finally they had come round to arguments about the length of time a headless chicken might go on running around a yard spurting blood from its
neck hole, and plans were being made to conduct a scientific test of the question.

“I believe you must be right about that, Mrs. Drummond,” Stuband said to me, and he spread his mouth again so the edge of his teeth parted the mustache in an abstracted smile. “I never have felt so in a flat spin.”

 

The prosperity of the last century has had a curious effect upon literature. As every slum and hamlet has embraced compulsory schooling, unprecedented numbers of literate adults have risen among us, to form a great audience of readers, and though Montaigne has said that books are the only masterpieces of Art the poor can have as well as the rich, it must be these Great Unwashed who are to blame for the commercialization of the publishing industry. Of course, one could argue that publishers have ever worshiped the Dollar more than Art, but with the rise of a large, and largely undiscriminating, audience, publishing houses have raced toward mediocrity as pigs to a trough. Of the immense outpouring of novels, how few will be alive in ninety years? Think how many hundreds of books are never heard of (and justly) after their first editions.

If at the present moment literature looks discouraging—where is the successor to Verne?—not Wells, surely—I suppose we need not lose sleep over it; such states have prevailed in the past and will in the future. But the higher form of Romance is the highest form of fiction and it will never desert us. Such men as write them (and I should say women, if there were any) write as artists and give little consideration to the editor's requirements, being always first concerned with expressing important Truths, though they be unpopular. It is the rest of us who write to earn a living, and if we are to succeed must please the editor, who in turn is driven to please the public.

The Beadle Half-Dime Library refused my little novel
The Magic Helpmate: A Romance of the Seen and Unseen
on the ground that it advocated women's natural superiority, and therefore was bound to fail in the popular market. In that book Lettie Porter is transformed by X rays and develops the ability to influence others' thoughts. Following her husband's cowardly suicide—he cannot accept that she is superior to him in intellect—she founds a meditation center where selected women come to
learn this ability from her, and as her movement grows, these women influence the course of world events in such a way that war and violence of every kind very nearly disappear from the earth. In the final chapter Lettie, though much loved by men and women of all nations, dies a martyr's death at the hands of the incorrigibly malevolent Count Madeira, whose murderous act results—of course!—in his own death as well. In the final scenes, Lettie's serenely beautiful daughter Edith receives the honorific title Empress of the World.

In the world of book publishing, there is an axiom that what is good cannot be popular and what is popular cannot be good; from that, I suppose, I should believe
The Magic Helpmate
better than it is. The poor orphaned manuscript was finally taken by Tosh and Thompson, which printed fewer than a thousand copies, of which more than half were discarded for want of readers.

Fiction could go along slowly in the old days, when it took two weeks to get news from across the Atlantic; now we like our novels to barrel along. And the principal wish of the multitudes is to hear repeated the established views, beliefs, and emotions, without regard to the truth (though even the Great Unwashed will recognize him, I hope, when the successor to Verne, to Kipling, to Poe arises from out the Ordinary Sea; I mistrust the individual man but have faith in the community of them).

There are, of course, considerable practical difficulties to a woman being a great and artful writer while at the same time mother of five children; more profitable and less arduous to write pot-boilers. I therefore have no particular objections to the readers' lowering of standards, having been a beneficiary of it myself. Several books of mine—trivial novels of moon voyages, African adventures, time travel, stories of Black Wizards with mysterious powers of invisibility—-have had a surprising popularity and deliver an income sufficient to support a family of six.

If I pander to popular taste with romantic tales of girl heroes who are both brave and desirable, crack shots, and cunning horsewomen who “clean up well”—if my plots are selected from the ordinary stock of forged letters, birthmarks, disguises, accidental meetings, mistaken identities, babies exchanged in the cradle, newly discovered wills, lost heirs—well, I have been encouraged in it by the economics of the literary marketplace and the necessities of supporting a family. I should have no reason to apologize.

And while I would never put myself forward as a likely successor to Verne—I shall never be as popular—my intrepid heroines are perhaps too
lively for the common rabble—I can amuse and digress with the best of them, and have an imagination that gives way to no man.

C. B. D.

November 1903

This is past midnight, with the boys in bed and Melba below me in the kitchen, though the hour for baking pies is long since past.

I have been in the grip of a jealous muse, so rose again after Stuband had been banished to his own house and everyone here abed, to take up the brave Miss Helena Reed. In the manner of the infamous and popular George Sand, it's sometimes my practice to sit up very late, scratching my pen quietly by candlelight on the tiny
escritoire
in my bedroom, with my cold feet drawn under this chair, which was once my husband's mother's, an ersatz French desk chair with a stiff silk cushion and a carven, inhumanly shaped back—a chair which entirely suits my purposes, as I have a mind that inclines toward wandering if I am too comfortable.

Tonight I believe I was silent as Coleridge's shadows, but shortly I heard the attic floor take Melba's weight. From my mother I've received unbroken health, together with an iron constitution and the gift of getting by on little sleep, but this late-night writing is a practice Melba objects to, believing strongly herself in knitting up the ravell'd sleave of care; she never has been an admirer of George Sand, on the warrant of that woman's queer and scandalous habits.

The attic stairs creaked, and then Melba spoke with her face pressed against the face of my door. “The clock has struck twelve,” she whispered, hoarse and irritable, “an hour at which any respectable woman ought to be asleep.” Practicing her impertinent habit, she then swung the door in and followed her words through. With her feet planted and her candle aloft, she was the very picture of Umbrage.

“Or working,” I said sourly, “if the woman is so inclined,” and I went on doing it. I was at an important point—Helena at the very
heart of the great cave city of the Mountain Giants, and her attention drawn to a scene of great animation and excitement transpiring in the arcade.

It is Melba's usual practice to carry on with her objections, and my habit to resist them, until all impulse to write has been lost in the marshaling of my arguments and I am badgered into a kind of surrender—customarily a promise to retire at the next strike of the clock. But tonight she stood a few moments fixed in my doorway, gathering herself for battle, and then gathered the hem of her nightgown into her fist and went silently out.
My work supports this entire household, and ever has,
I had been preparing to tell her, which is true, and an argument she always will ignore.