IV. A CHAT WITH XANTHIPPE
The machine stopped its clicking the moment I spoke, and the words, “Hullo, old chap!” were no sooner uttered than my face grew red as a carnation pink. I felt as if I had committed some dreadful faux-pas, and instead of gazing steadfastly into the vacant chair, as I had been wont to do in my conversation with Boswell, my eyes fell, as though the invisible occupant of the chair were regarding me with a look of indignant scorn.
“I beg your pardon,” I said.
“I should think you might,” returned the types. “Hullo, old chap! is no way to address a woman you’ve never had the honor of meeting, even if she is of the most advanced sort. No amount of newness in a woman gives a man the right to be disrespectful to her.”
“I didn’t know,” I explained. “Really, miss, I—”
“Madame,” interrupted the machine, “not miss. I am a married woman, sir, which makes of your rudeness an even more reprehensible act. It is well enough to affect a good-fellowship with young unmarried females, but when you attempt to be flippant with a married woman—”
“But I didn’t know, I tell you,” I appealed. “How should I? I supposed it was Boswell I was talking to, and he and I have become very good friends.”
“Humph!” said the machine. “You’re a chum of Boswell’s, eh?”
“Well, not exactly a chum, but—” I began.
“But you go with him?” interrupted the lady.
“To an extent, yes,” I confessed.
“And does he GO with you?” was the query. “If he does, permit me to depart at once. I should not feel quite in my element in a house where the editor of a Sunday newspaper was an attractive guest. If you like that sort of thing, your tastes—”
“I do not, madame,” I replied, quickly. “I prefer the opium habit to the Sunday-newspaper habit, and if I thought Boswell was merely a purveyor of what is known as Sunday literature, which depends on the goodness of the day to offset its shortcomings, I should forbid him the house.”
A distinct sigh of relief emanated from the chair.
“Then I may remain,” was the remark rapidly clicked off on the machine.
“I am glad,” said I. “And may I ask whom I have the honor of addressing?”
“Certainly,” was the immediate response. “My name is Socrates, nee Xanthippe.”
I instinctively cowered. Candidly, I was afraid. Never in my life before had I met a woman whom I feared. Never in my life have I wavered in the presence of the sex which cheers, but I have always felt that while I could hold my own with Elizabeth, withstand the wiles of Cleopatra, and manage the recalcitrant Katherine even as did Petruchio, Xanthippe was another story altogether, and I wished I had gone to the club. My first impulse was to call up-stairs to my wife and have her come down. She knows how to handle the new woman far better than I do. She has never wanted to vote, and my collars are safe in her hands. She has frequently observed that while she had many things to be thankful for, her greatest blessing was that she was born a woman and not a man, and the new women of her native town never leave her presence without wondering in their own minds whether or not they are mere humorous contributions of the Almighty to a too serious world. I pulled myself together as best I could, and feeling that my better-half would perhaps decline the proffered invitation to meet with one of the most illustrious of her sex, I decided to fight my own battle. So I merely said:
“Really? How delightful! I have always felt that I should like to meet you, and here is one of my devoutest wishes gratified.”
I felt cheap after the remark, for Mrs. Socrates, nee Xanthippe, covered five sheets of paper with laughter, with an occasional bracketing of the word “derisively,” such as we find in the daily newspapers interspersed throughout the after-dinner speeches of a candidate of another party. Finally, to my relief, the oft-repeated “Ha-ha-ha!” ceased, and the line, “I never should have guessed it,” closed her immediate contribution to our interchange of ideas.
“May I ask why you laugh?” I observed, when she had at length finished.
“Certainly,” she replied. “Far be it from me to dispute the right of a man to ask any question he sees fit to ask. Is he not the lord of creation? Is not woman his abject slave? I not the whole difference between them purely economic? Is it not the law of supply and demand that rules them both, he by nature demanding and she supplying?”
Dear reader, did you ever encounter a machine, man-made, merely a mechanism of ivory, iron, and ink, that could sniff contemptuously? I never did before this encounter, but the infernal power of either this type-writer or this woman who manipulated its keys imparted to the atmosphere I was breathing a sniffing contemptuousness which I have never experienced anywhere outside of a London hotel, and then only when I ventured, as few Americans have dared, to complain of the ducal personage who presided over the dining-room, but who, I must confess, was conquered subsequently by a tip of ten shillings.
At any rate, there was a sniff of contempt imparted, as I have said, to the atmosphere I was breathing as Xanthippe answered my question, and the sniff saved me, just as it did in the London hotel, when I complained of the lordly lack of manners on the part of the head waiter. I asserted my independence.
“Don’t trouble yourself,” I put in. “Of course I shall be interested in anything you may choose to say, but as a gentleman I do not care to put a woman to any inconvenience and I do not press the question.”
And then I tried to crush her by adding, “What a lovely day we have had,” as if any subject other than the most commonplace was not demanded by the situation.
“If you contemplate discussing the weather,” was the retort, “I wish you would kindly seek out some one else with whom to do it. I am not one of your latter-day sit-out-on-the-stairs-while-the-others-dance girls. I am, as I have always been, an ardent admirer of principles, of great problems. For small talk I have no use.”
“Very well, madame—” I began.
“You asked me a moment ago why I laughed,” clicked the machine.
“I know it,” said I. “But I withdraw the question. There is no great principle involved in a woman’s laughter. I have known women who have laughed at a broken heart, as well as at jokes, which shows that there is no principle involved there; and as a problem, I have never cared enough about why women laugh to inquire deeply into it. If she’ll just consent to laugh, I’m satisfied without inquiring into the causes thereof. Let us get down to an agreeable basis for yourself. What problem do you wish to discuss? Servants, baby-food, floor-polish, or the number of godets proper to the skirt of a well-dressed woman?”
I was regaining confidence in myself, and as I talked I ceased to fear her. Thought I to myself, “This attitude of supreme patronage is man’s safest weapon against a woman. Keep cool, assume that there is no doubt of your superiority, and that she knows it. Appear to patronize her, and her own indignation will defeat her ends.” It is a good principle generally. Among mortal women I have never known it to fail, and when I find myself worsted in an argument with one of man’s greatest blessings, I always fall back upon it and am saved the ignominy of defeat. But this time I counted without my antagonist.
“Will you repeat that list of problems?” she asked, coldly.
“Servants, baby-food, floor-polish, and godets,” I repeated, somewhat sheepishly, she took it so coolly.
“Very well,” said Xanthippe, with a note of amusement in her manipulation of the keys. “If those are your subjects, let us discuss them. I am surprised to find an able-bodied man like yourself bothering with such problems, but I’ll help you out of your difficulties if I can. No needy man shall ever say that I ignored his cry for help. What do you want to know about baby-food?”
This turning of the tables nonplussed me, and I didn’t really know what to say, and so wisely said nothing, and the machine grew sharp in its clicking.
“You men!” it cried. “You don’t know how fearfully shallow you are. I can see through you in a minute.”
“Well,” I said, modestly, “I suppose you can.” Then calling my feeble wit to my rescue, I added, “It’s only natural, since I’ve made a spectacle of myself.”
“Not you!” cried Xanthippe. “You haven’t even made a monocle of yourself.”
And here we both laughed, and the ice was broken.
“What has become of Boswell?” I asked.
“He’s been sent to the ovens for ten days for libelling Shakespeare and Adam and Noah and old Jonah,” replied Xanthippe. “He printed an article alleged to have been written by Baron Munchausen, in which those four gentlemen were held up to ridicule and libelled grossly.”
“And Munchausen?” I cried.
“Oh, the Baron got out of it by confessing that he wrote the article,” replied the lady. “And as he swore to his confession the jury were convinced he was telling another one of his lies and acquitted him, so Boswell was sent up alone. That’s why I am here. There isn’t a man in all Hades that dared take charge of Boswell’s paper—they’re all so deadly afraid of the government, so I stepped in, and while Boswell is baking I’m attending to his editorial duties.”
“But you spoke contemptuously of the Sunday newspapers awhile ago, Mrs. Socrates,” said I.
“I know that,” said Xanthippe, “but I’ve fixed that. I get out the Sunday edition on Saturdays.”
“Oh—I see. And you like it?” I queried.
“First rate,” she replied. “I’m in love with the work. I almost wish poor old Bos had been sentenced for ten years. I have enough of the woman in me to love minding other people’s business, and, as far as I can find out, that’s about all journalism amounts to. Sewing societies aren’t to be mentioned in the same day with a newspaper for scandal and gossip, and, besides, I’m an ardent advocate of men’s rights—have been for centuries—and I’ve got my first chance now to promulgate a few of my ideas. I’m really a man in all my views of life—that’s the inevitable end of an advanced woman who persists in following her ‘newness’ to its logical conclusion. Her habits of thought gradually come to be those of a man. Even I have a great deal more sympathy with Socrates than I used to have. I used to think I was the one that should be emancipated, but I’m really reaching that stage in my manhood where I begin to believe that he needs emancipation.”
“Then you admit, do you,” I cried, with great glee, “that this new-woman business is all Tommy-rot?”
“Not by a great deal,” snapped the machine. “Far from it. It’s the salvation of the happy life. It is perfectly logical to say that the more manny a woman becomes, the more she is likely to sympathize with the troubles and trials which beset men.”
I scratched my head and pulled the lobe of my ear in the hope of loosening an argument to confront her with, not that I disagreed with her entirely, but because I instinctively desired to oppose her as pleasantly disagreeably as I could. But the result was nil.
“I’m afraid you are right,” I said.
“You’re a truthful man,” clicked the machine, laughingly. “You are afraid I’m right. And why are you afraid? Because you are one of those men who take a cynical view of woman. You want woman to be a mere lump of sugar, content to be left in a bowl until it pleases you in your high-and-mightiness to take her in the tongs and drop her into the coffee of your existence, to sweeten what would otherwise not please your taste—and like most men you prefer two or three lumps to one.”
I could only cough. The lady was more or less right. I am very fond of sugar, though one lump is my allowance, and I never exceed it, whatever the temptation. Xanthippe continued.
“You criticise her because she doesn’t understand you and your needs, forgetting that out of twenty-four hours of your daily existence your wife enjoys personally about twelve hours of your society, during eight of which you are lying flat on your back, snoring as though your life depended on it; but when she asks to be allowed to share your responsibilities as well as what, in her poor little soul, she thinks are your joys, you flare up and call her ‘new’ and ‘advanced,’ as if advancement were a crime. You ride off on your wheel for forty miles on your days of rest, and she is glad to have you do it, but when she wants a bicycle to ride, you think it’s all wrong, immoral, and conducive to a weak heart. Bah!”
“I—ah—” I began.
“Yes you do,” she interrupted. “You ah and you hem and you haw, but in the end you’re a poor miserable social mugwump, conscious of your own magnificence and virtue, but nobody else ever can attain to your lofty plane. Now what I want to see among women is more good fellows. Suppose you regarded your wife as good a fellow as you think your friend Jones. Do you think you’d be running off to the club every night to play billiards with Jones, leaving your wife to enjoy her own society?”
“Perhaps not,” I replied, “but that’s just the point. My wife isn’t a good fellow.”
“Exactly, and for that reason you seek out Jones. You have a right to the companionship of the good fellow—that’s what I’m going to advocate. I’ve advanced far enough to see that on the average in the present state of woman she is not a suitable companion for man—she has none of the qualities of a chum to which he is entitled. I’m not so blind but that I can see the faults of my own sex, particularly now that I have become so very masculine myself. Both sexes should have their rights, and that is the great policy I’m going to hammer at as long as I have Boswell’s paper in charge. I wish you might see my editorial page for to-morrow; it is simply fine. I urge upon woman the necessity of joining in with her husband in all his pleasures whether she enjoys them or not. When he lights a cigar, let her do the same; when he calls for a cocktail, let her call for another. In time she will begin to understand him. He understands her pleasures, and often he joins in with them—opera, dances, lectures; she ought to do the same, and join in with him in his pleasures, and after a while they’ll get upon a common basis, have their clubs together, and when that happy time comes, when either one goes out the other will also go, and their companionship will be perfect.”
“But you objected to my calling you old chap when we first met,” said I. “Is that quite consistent?”
“Of course,” retorted the lady. “We had never met before, and, besides, doctors do not always take their own medicine.”
“But that women ought to become good fellows is what you’re going to advocate, eh?” said I.
“Yes,” replied Xanthippe. “It’s excellent, don’t you think?”
“Superb,” I answered, “for Hades. It’s just my idea of how things ought to be in Hades. I think, however, that we mortals will stick to the old plan for a little while yet; most of us prefer to marry wives rather than old chaps.”
The remark seemed so to affect my visitor that I suddenly became conscious of a sense of loneliness.
“I don’t wish to offend you,” I said, “but I rather like to keep the two separate. Aren’t you man enough yet to see the value of variety?”
But there was no answer. The lady had gone. It was evident that she considered me unworthy of further attention.
V. THE EDITING OF XANTHIPPE
After my interview with Xanthippe, I hesitated to approach the type-writer for a week or two. It did a great deal of clicking after the midnight hour had struck, and I was consumed with curiosity to know what was going on, but I did not wish to meet Mrs. Socrates again, so I held aloof until Boswell should have served his sentence. I was no longer afraid of the woman, but I do fear the good fellow of the weaker sex, and I deemed it just as well to keep out of any and all disputes that might arise from a casual conversation with a creature of that sort. An agreement with a real good fellow, even when it ends in a row, is more or less diverting; but a disputation with a female good fellow places a man at a disadvantage. The argumentum ad hominem is not an easy thing with men, but with women it is impossible. Hence, I let the type-writer click and ring for a fortnight.
Finally, to my relief, I recognized Boswell’s touch upon the keys and sauntered up to the side of the machine.
“Is this Boswell—Jim Boswell?” I inquired.
“All that’s left of him,” was the answer. “How have you been?”
“Very well,” said I. And then it seemed to me that tact required that I should not seem to know that he had been in the superheated jail of the Stygian country. So I observed, “You’ve been off on a vacation, eh?”
“How do you know that?” was the immediate response.
“Well,” I put in, “you’ve been absent for a fortnight, and you look more or less—ah—burned.”
“Yes, I am,” replied the deceitful editor. “Very much burned, in fact. I’ve been—er—I’ve been playing golf with a friend down in Cimmeria.”
“I envy you,” I observed, with an inward chuckle.
“You wouldn’t if you knew the links,” replied Boswell, sadly. “They’re awfully hard. I don’t know any harder course than the Cimmerian.”
And then I became conscious of a mistrustful gaze fastened upon me.
“See here,” clicked the machine. “I thought I was invisible to you? If so, how do you know I look burned?”
I was cornered, and there was only one way out of it, and that was by telling the truth. “Well, you are invisible, old chap,” I said. “The fact is, I’ve been told of your trouble, and I know what you have undergone.”
“And who told you?” queried Boswell.
“Your successor on the Gazette, Madame Socrates, nee Xanthippe,” I replied.
“Oh, that woman—that woman!” moaned Boswell, through the medium of the keys. “Has she been here, using this machine too? Why didn’t you stop her before she ruined me completely?”
“Ruined you?” I cried.
“Well, next thing to it,” replied Boswell. “She’s run my paper so far into the ground that it will take an almighty powerful grip to pull it out again. Why, my dear boy, when I went to—to the ovens, I had a circulation of a million, and when I came back that woman had brought it down to eight copies, seven of which have already been returned. All in ten days, too.”
“How do you account for it?” I asked.
“‘Side Talks with Men’ helped, and ‘The Man’s Corner’ did a little, but the editorial page did the most of it. It was given over wholly to the advancement of certain Xanthippian ideas, which were very offensive to my women readers, and which found no favor among the men. She wants to change the whole social structure. She thinks men and women are the same kind of animal, and that both need to be educated on precisely the same lines—the girls to be taught business, the boys to go through a course of domestic training. She called for subscriptions for a cooking-school for boys, and demanded the endowment of a commercial college for girls, and wound up by insisting upon a uniform dress for both sexes. I tell you, if you’d worked for years to establish a dignified newspaper the way I have, it would have broken your heart to see the suggested fashion-plates that woman printed. The uniform dress was a holy terror. It was a combination of all the worst features of modern garb. Trousers were to be universal and compulsory; sensible masculine coats were discarded entirely, and puffed-sleeved dress-coats were substituted. Stiff collars were abolished in favor of ribbons, and rosettes cropped up everywhere. Imagine it if you can—and everybody in all Hades was to be forced into garments of that sort!”
“I should enjoy seeing it,” I said.
“Possibly—but you wouldn’t enjoy wearing it,” retorted the machine. “And then that woman’s funny column—it was frightful. You never saw such jokes in your life; every one of them contained a covert attack upon man. There was only one good thing in it, and that was a bit of verse called ‘Fair Play for the Little Girls.’ It went like this:
“‘If little boys, when they are young,
Can go about in skirts,
And wear upon their little backs
Small broidered girlish shirts,
Pray why cannot the little girls,
When infants, have a chance
To toddle on their little ways
In little pairs of pants?’”
“That isn’t at all bad,” said I, smiling in spite of poor Boswell’s woe. “If the rest of the paper was on a par with that I don’t see why the circulation fell off.”
“Well, she took liberties, that’s all,” said Boswell. “For instance, in her ‘Side Talks with Men’ she had something like this: ‘Napoleon—It is rather difficult to say just what you can do with your last season’s cocked-hat. If you were to purchase five yards of one-inch blue ribbon, cut it into three strips of equal length, and fasten one end to each of the three corners of the hat, tying the other ends into a choux, it would make a very acceptable work-basket to send to your grandmother at Christmas.’ Now Napoleon never asked that woman for advice on the subject. Then there was an answer to a purely fictitious inquiry from Solomon which read: ‘It all depends on local custom. In Salt Lake City, and in London at the time of Henry the Eighth, it was not considered necessary to be off with the old love before being on with the new, but latterly the growth of monopolistic ideas tends towards the uniform rate of one at a time.’ A purely gratuitous fling, that was, at one of my most eminent patrons, or rather two of them, for latterly both Solomon and Henry the Eighth have yielded to the tendency of the times and gone into business, which they have paid me well to advertise. Solomon has established an ‘Information Bureau,’ where advice can always be had from the ‘Wise-man,’ as he calls himself, on payment of a small fee; while Henry, taking advantage of his superior equipment over any English king that ever lived, has founded and liberally advertised his ‘Chaperon Company (Limited).’ It’s a great thing even in Hades for young people to be chaperoned by an English queen, and Henry has been smart enough to see it, and having seven or eight queens, all in good standing, he has been doing a great business. Just look at it from a business point of view. There are seven nights in every week, and something going on somewhere all the time, and queens in demand. With a queen quoted so low as $100 a night, Henry can make nearly $5000 a week, or $260,000 a year, out of evening chaperonage alone; and when, in addition to this, yachting-parties up the Styx and slumming-parties throughout the country are being constantly given, the man’s opportunity to make half a million a year is in plain sight. I’m told that he netted over $500,000 last year; and of course he had to advertise to get it, and this Xanthippe woman goes out of her way to get in a nasty little fling at one of my mainstays for his matrimonial propensities.”
“Failing utterly to see,” said I, “that, in marrying so many times, Henry really paid a compliment to her sex which is without parallel in royal circles.”
“Well, nearly so,” said Boswell. “There have been other kings who were quite as complimentary to the ladies, but Henry was the only man among them who insisted on marrying them all.”
“True,” said I. “Henry was eminently proper—but then he had to be.”
“Yes,” said Boswell, with a meditative tap on the letter Y. “Yes—he had to be. He was the head of the Church, you know.”
“I know it,” I put in. “I’ve always had a great deal of sympathy for Henry. He has been very much misjudged by posterity. He was the father of the really first new woman, Elizabeth, and his other daughter, Mary, was such a vindictive person.”
“You are a very fair man, for an American,” said Boswell. “Not only fair, but rare. You think about things.”
“I try to,” said I, modestly. “And I’ve really thought a great deal about Henry, and I’ve truly seen a valid reason for his continuous matrimonial performances. He set himself up against the Pope, and he had to be consistent in his antagonism.”
“He did, indeed,” said Boswell. “A religious discussion is a hard one.”
“And Henry was consistent in his opposition,” said I. “He didn’t yield a jot on any point, and while a great many people criticise him on the score of his wives—particularly on their number—I feel that I have in very truth discovered his principle.”
“Which was?” queried Boswell.
“That the Pope was wrong in all things,” said I.
“So he said,” commented Boswell.
“And being wrong in all things, celibacy was wrong,” said I.
“Exactly,” ejaculated Boswell.
“Well, then,” said I, “if celibacy is wrong, the surest way to protest against it is to marry as many times as you can.”
“By Jove!” said Boswell, tapping the keys yearningly, as though he wished he might spare his hand to shake mine, “you are a man after my own heart.”
“Thanks, old chap,” said I, reaching out my hand and shaking it in the air with my visionary friend—“thanks. I’ve studied these things with some care, and I’ve tried to find a reason for everything in life as I know it. I have always regarded Henry as a moral man—as is natural, since in spite of all you can say he is the real head of the English Church. He wasn’t willing to be married a second or a seventh time unless he was really a widower. He wasn’t as long in taking notice again as some modern widowers that I have met, but I do not criticise him on that score. I merely attribute his record to his kingly nature, which involves necessarily a quickness of decision and a decided perception of the necessities which is sadly lacking in people who are born to a lesser station in life. England demanded a queen, and he invariably met the demand, which shows that he knew something of political economy as well as of matrimony; and as I see it, being an American, a man needs to know something of political economy to be a good ruler. So many of our statesmen have acquired a merely kindergarten knowledge of the science, that we have had many object-lessons of the disadvantages of a merely elementary knowledge of the subject. To come right down to it, I am a great admirer of Henry. At any rate, he had the courage of his heart-convictions.”
“You really surprise me,” tapped Boswell. “I never expected to find an American so thoroughly in sympathy with kings and their needs.”
“Oh, as for that,” said I, “in America we are all kings and we are not without our needs, matrimonial and otherwise, only our courts are not quite so expeditious as Henry’s little axe. But what was Henry’s attitude towards this extraordinary flight of Xanthippe’s?”
“Wrath,” said Boswell. “He was very much enraged, and withdrew his advertisements, declined to give our society reporters the usual accounts of the functions his wives chaperoned, and, worst of all, has withdrawn himself and induced others to withdraw from the symposium I was preparing for my special Summer Girls’ issue, which is to appear in August, on ‘How Men Propose.’ He and Brigham Young and Solomon and Bonaparte had agreed to dictate graphic accounts of how they had done it on various occasions, and Queen Elizabeth, who probably had more proposals to the square minute that any other woman on record, was to write the introduction. This little plan, which was really the idea of genius, is entirely shattered by Mrs. Socrates’s infernal interference.”
“Nonsense,” said I. “Don’t despair. Why don’t you come out with a plain statement of the facts? Apologize.”
“You forget, my dear sir,” interposed Boswell, “that one of the fundamental principles of Hades as an institution is that excuses don’t count. It isn’t a place for repentance so much as for expiation, and I might apologize nine times a minute for forty years and would still have to suffer the penalty of the offence. No, there is nothing to be done but to begin my newspaper work again, build up again the institution that Xanthippe has destroyed, and bear my misfortunes like a true spirit.”