The Greatest Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Читать онлайн книгу.
print?” I asked.
“The pictures are good.”
I looked it through again.
“Yes, very good, much improved. But I don’t see anything phenomenal — unless it is the absence of advertisements.”
Nellie took it out of my hand and ran it over.
“Just read some of that,” she said. “Read this story — and this article — and that.”
So I sat reading in the sunny silence, the gulls wheeling and dipping just as they used to, and the wide purple ocean just as changeable — and changeless — as ever.
One of the articles was on an extension of municipal service, and involved so much comment on preceding steps that I found it most enlightening. The other was a recent suggestion in educational psychology, and this too carried a retrospect of recent progress which gave me food for thought. The story was a clever one. I found it really amusing, and only on a second reading did I find what it was that gave the queer flavor to it. It was a story about women — two women who were in business partnership, with their adventures, singly and together.
I looked through it carefully. They were not even girls, they were not handsome, they were not in process of being married — in fact, it was not once mentioned whether they were married or not, ever had been or ever wanted to be. Yet I had found it amusing!
I laid the magazine on my rug-bound knees and meditated. A queer sick feeling came over me — mental, not physical. I looked through the magazine again. It was not what I should have called “a woman’s magazine,” yet the editor was a woman, most of the contributors were women, and in all the subject matter I began to detect allusions and references of tremendous import.
Presently Nellie came to see how I was getting on. I saw her approaching, a firm, brisk figure, well and becomingly dressed, with a tailored trimness and convenience, far indeed from the slim, graceful, yielding girl I had once been so proud to protect and teach.
“How soon do we get in, Lady Manager?” I asked her.
“Day after tomorrow,” she answered back promptly — not a word about going to see, or asking anyone!
“Well, ma’am, I want you to sit down here and tell me things — right now. What am I to expect? Are there no men left in America?”
She laughed gaily.
“No men! Why, bless you, there are as many men as there are women, and a few more, I believe. Not such an over-plus as there used to be, but some to spare still. We had a million and a half extra in your day, you know.”
“I’m glad to learn we’re allowed to live!” said I. “Now tell me the worst — are the men all doing the housework?”
“You call that ‘the worst,’ do you?” inquired Nellie, cocking her head to one side and looking at me affectionately, and yet quizzically. “Well, I guess it was — pretty near ‘the worst!’ No dear, men are doing just as many kinds of business as they ever were.”
I heaved a sigh of relief and chucked my magazine under the chair.
“I’d begun to think there weren’t any men left. And they still wear trousers, don’t they?”
She laughed outright.
“Oh, yes. They wear just as many trousers as they did before.”
“And what do the women wear,” I demanded suspiciously.
“Whatever kind of clothing their work demands,” she answered.
“Their work? What kind of work do they do?”
“All kinds — anything they like.”
I groaned and shut my eyes. I could see the world as I left it, with only a small proportion of malcontents and a large majority of contented and happy homes; and then I saw this awful place I was coming to, with strange, masculine women and subdued men.
“How does it happen that there aren’t any on this ship?” I inquired.
“Any what?” asked Nellie.
“Any of these — New Women?”
“Why, there are. They’re all new, except Mrs. Talbot. She’s older than I am, and rather reactionary.”
This Mrs. Talbot was a stiff, pious, narrow-minded old lady, and I had liked her the least of any on board.
“Do you mean to tell me that pretty Mrs. Exeter is — one of this new kind?”
“Mrs. Exeter owns — and manages — a large store, if that is what you mean.”
“And those pretty Borden girls?”
“They do house decorating — have been abroad on business.”
“And Mrs. Green — and Miss Sandwich?”
“One of them is a hat designer, one a teacher. This is toward the end of vacation, and they’re all coming home, you see.”
“And Miss Elwell?”
Miss Elwell was quite the prettiest woman on board, and seemed to have plenty of attention — just like the girls I remembered.
“Miss Elwell is a civil engineer,” said my sister.
“It’s horrid,” I said. “It’s perfectly horrid! And aren’t there any women left?”
“There’s Aunt Dorcas,” said Nellie, mischievously, “and Cousin Drusilla. You remember Drusilla?”
Chapter 2.
THE day after tomorrow! I was to see it the day after tomorrow — this strange, new, abhorrent world!
The more I considered what bits of information I had gleaned already, the more I disliked what lay before me. In the first blazing light of returned memory and knowledge, the first joy of meeting my sister, the hope of seeing home again, I had not distinguished very sharply between what was new to my bewildered condition and what was new indeed — new to the world as well as to me. But now a queer feeling of disproportion and unreality began to haunt me.
As my head cleared, and such knowledge as I was now gathering began to help towards some sense of perspective and relation, even my immediate surroundings began to assume a sinister importance.
Any change, to any person, is something of a shock, though sometimes a beneficial one. Changes too sudden, and too great, are hard to bear, for any one. But who can understand the peculiar horror of my unparalleled experience?
Slowly the thing took shape in my mind.
There was the first, irrevocable loss — my life!
Thirty years — the thirty years in which a man may really live — these were gone from me forever.
I was coming back; strong to be sure; well enough in health; even, I hoped, with my old mental vigor — but not to the same world.
Even the convict who survives thirty years imprisonment, may return at length to the same kind of world he had left so long.
But I! It was as if I had slept, and, in my sleep, they had stolen my world.
I threw off the thought, and started in to action.
Here was a small world — the big steamer beneath me. I had already learned much about her. In the first place, she was not a
“steamer,” but a thing for which I had no name; her power was electric,
“Oh, well,” I thought, as I examined her machinery, “this I might have expected. Thirty years of such advances as we were making in 1910 were sure to develop electric motors of