In Camp—Date unknown.
Our days pass, and our nights, and some nights are darker than others, otherwise they are all the same and no one of our days is less good than another. They vary only in the variety of our expeditions and every new place reveals a beauty equal to the first. This morning I allowed Dick to visit the secret place amidstream where I come to write. He took off his garment to bathe, and standing naked in the sun, on a rock above the waterfall, his body burnt brown, and, with his pet ant-eater round his neck, he looked the embodiment of Mowglie in Rudyard Kipling’s “Jungle Book,” the boy who was suckled by the she-wolf, and grew up in the woods, and could speak the language of the animals.
Mowglie could look into the eyes of the Black Panther and make him blink and turn his head away. Mowglie defeated the Tiger, he led the wolves. Mowglie, the Man-cub, learned great wisdom and philosophy from the jungle. This new primæval life seems to have revealed something even to me.
At this moment lying full length in the sun on my rock, I am out of sight, and well out of sound of any human (Oh! No I am not! Here comes an Indian—he is going to cross the stream—he has not seen me—he stops to sharpen his knife on a stone—he has cut a hazel switch—he has crossed the stream—he is gone—)....
I lie here contemplatively, and find myself saying: “If I were a man!....” It is revealed to me that to be a man must be a wonderful accident of birth. To be the right kind of man is to be a king. Now to be a queen, one need not necessarily be the best kind of woman, and being a queen is not worth while anyway. Whereas to be a king means Power. “King by Divine Right.” That defines the finest type of man.
DICK SAILING HIS BATTLESHIP IN THE TURBULENT MEXICAN RIVER
(Photograph by Clare Sheridan)
If I were a man: I mean young, sound of mind and limb, body well conditioned and muscled—indefatigable. Equipped mentally with a moral code and a sense of honor, and fearless. I would feel that I could hold my own with anyone in the world. That I would not be unfairly matched with any other physical force. That in the fight, in play, in competition, I had but to exert my capacity to the utmost to be sure of the issue. Though I were unendowed I would own the world.
If I were a man, I would awake in the morning, stretch my limbs and say: “Thank God!” When I was a girl, I wished I were a boy, and a man (I have never forgotten, though I was very young) said to me: “As wishing won’t change you, you had better try to become the best kind of woman,” but at best, what is to be a woman?