Gala-Days

by Gail Hamilton

As to mending gloves, after the first attack it is time lost. Let one or two pairs, kept for show and state, be irreproachable; but the rest are for service, and everybody knows that little serving can be done with bandaged hands. You must take hold of things without gloves, or, which amounts to the same thing, with gloves that let your fingers through, or you cannot reasonably expect to take hold of things with any degree of efficiency.

So, as I was saying, I sat on the coach-top twisting my gloves, and I wished in my heart that men would not do such things as that very agreeable gentleman was doing. I do not design to enter on a crusade against tobacco. It is a mooted point in minor morals, in which every one must judge for himself; but I do wish men would not smoke so much. In fact, I should be pleased if they did not smoke at all. I do not believe there is any necessity for it. I believe it is a mere habit of self-indulgence. Women connive at it, because—well, because, in a way, they must. Men are childish, and, as I have said before, animal. I don't think they have nearly the self-restraint, self-denial, high dignity and purity and conscience that women have,—take them in the mass. They give over to habits and pleasures like great boys. People talk about the extravagance of women. But men are equally so, only their extravagance takes a different turn. A woman's is aesthetic; a man's is gross. She buys fine clothes and furniture. He panders to his bodily appetites. Which is worse? Women love men, and wish to be loved by them, and are miserable if they are not. So the wife lets her husband do twenty things which he ought not to do, which it is rude and selfish and wicked for him to do, rather than run the risk of loosening the cords which bind him to her. One can see every day how women manage,—the very word tells the whole story,—MANAGE men, by cunning strategy, cajolery, and all manner of indirections, just as if they were elephants. But if men were what they ought to be, there would be no such humiliating necessity. They ought to be so upright, so candid, so just, that it is only necessary to show this is right, this is reasonable, this is wrong, for them to do it, or to refrain from the doing. As it is, men smoke by the hour together, and their wives are thankful it is nothing worse. They would not dare to make a serious attempt to annihilate the pipe. They feel that they hold their own by a tenure so uncertain, that they are forced to ignore minor transgressions for the sake of retaining their throne. I do not say that women are entirely just and upright, but I do think that the womanly nature is GOOD-er than the manly nature; I think a very large proportion of female faults are the result of the indirect, but effective wrong training they receive from men; and I think, thirdly, that, take women just as they are, wrong training and all, there is not one in ten thousand million who, if she had a faithful and loving husband, would not be a faithful and loving wife. Men know this, and act upon it. They know that they can commit minor immoralities, and major ones too, and be forgiven. They know it is not necessary for them to keep themselves pure in body and soul lest they alienate their wives. So they yield to their fleshly lusts. What an ado would be made if a woman should form the habit of smoking, or any habit whose deleterious effects extend through her husband's or her father's rooms, cling to his wardrobe, books, and all his especial belongings! Suppose she should even demand an innocent ice-cream as frequently as her husband demands a cigar,—suppose she should spend as much time and money on candy as he spends on tobacco,—would she not be considered an extravagant, selfish, and somewhat vulgar woman? But is it really any worse? Is it less extravagant for a man to tickle his nose, than for a woman to tickle her palate? If a cigar would enfoul the purity of a woman, does it not of a man? Why is it more noble for a man to be the slave of an appetite or a habit, than for a woman? Why is it less impure for a man to saturate his hair, his breath and clothing, with vile, stale odors, than for a woman? What right have men to suppose that they can perfume themselves with stenches,—for whatever may be the fragrance of a burning cigar, the after smell is a stench,—and be any less offensive to a cleanly woman than a woman similarly perfumed is to them? I have never heard that the female sense of smell is less acute than the male. How dare men so presume on womanly sufferance? They dare, because they know they are safe. I can think of a dozen of my own friends who will read this and bring out a fresh box of cigars, and smoke them under my very own face and eyes, and know all the time that I shall keep liking them; and the worst of it is, I know I shall, too. All the same, I do not thoroughly respect a man who has a habit of smoking.

But if men will smoke, as they certainly will, because they are animal and stubborn and self-indulgent and self-willed, let them at least confine their fireworks to their own apartments. If a wife would rather admit her fuliginous husband to her sitting-room than forego his society altogether,—as undoubtedly most women would, for you see it is not a question between a smoky husband and a clear husband, but between a smoky one and none at all, because between his wife and his cigar the man will almost invariably choose the cigar,—I have nothing to say. But don't let a man go into other people's houses and smoke, or, above all things, walk smoking by the side of women. No matter if she does give you permission when you ask it. You should not have asked it. We don't wish you to do it, you may be sure. It is a disrespectful thing. It partakes of the nature of an insult. No matter how grand or learned or distinguished you may be, don't do it. I saw once one of our Cabinet Ministers walking, with his cigar in his mouth, by the side of the wife of the British Minister, and it lowered them both in my opinion, though I don't suppose either of them would take it much to heart if they knew it. If you are walking in the woods or fields, it may be pardonable; but in the public streets no private compact can be of any avail. It is a public mark of disrespect. If you don't regard us enough to throw away or keep away your cigar when you join us, just don't join us. Keep your own side of the street. Nobody wants you; at least I don't. Walk alone if you like, or with whomsoever you can, but if you walk with me, you shall "behave yourself."

But how frightfully hungry these long coach stages make one! especially among the mountains. Famine lurks in that wild air, and is ever springing upon the unwary traveller. The fact was, however, that I had the most dreadful appetite all the way through. "Really," Halicarnassus would say, "it is quite charming to see you in such fine health," being at the same time reduced to a state of extreme disgust at my rapacity. He made an estimate, one day, that I had eaten since we started thirty-one and a half chickens, and I have no doubt I had; for chickens were my piece de resistance as well as entrees; and then they WERE chickens, not old hens,—little specks of darlings, just giving one hop from the egg-shell to the gridiron, and each time the waiter only brought you one bisegment of the speck, all of whose edible possibilities could easily be salted down in a thimble. I don't say this by way of complaint. A thimbleful of delicacy is better than a "mountain of mummy"; and here let me put in a word in favor of that much-abused institution, hotels. I cannot see why people should go about complaining of them as they do, both in literature and in life. My experience has been almost always favorable. In New York, in Saratoga, in Canada, all through the mountain district, we found ample and adequate entertainment for man and beast. Trollope brings his sledge-hammer down unequivocally. Of course there will be certain viands not cooked precisely according to one's favorite method, and at these prolonged dining-tables you miss the home-feeling of quiet and seclusion; but I should like to know if one does not travel on purpose to miss the home-feeling? If that is what he seeks, it would be so easy to stay at home. One loses half the pleasure and profit of travelling if he must box himself up with his own party. It is a good thing to triturate against other people occasionally. For eating, there are, to be sure, the little oval dishes that have so aroused Trollopian and other ire; and your mutton, it is true, is brought to you slice-wise, on your plate, instead of the whole sheep set bodily on the table,—the sole presentation appreciated by your true Briton, who, with the traditions of his island home still clinging to him, conceives himself able, I suppose, in no other way to make sure that his meat and maccaroni are not the remnants of somebody else's feast. But let Britannia's son not flatter himself that so he shall escape contamination. His precautions are entirely fruitless. Suppose he does see the whole beast before him, and the very bean-vines, proof positive of first-fruits; cannot the economical landlord gather up heave-shoulder and wave-breast and serve them out to him in next day's mince-pie? Matter revolves, but is never annihilated. Ultimate and penultimate meals mingle in the colors of shot-silk. Where there is a will, there is a way. If the cook is of a frugal mind, and wills you to eat driblets, driblets you shall eat, under one shape or another. The only way to preserve your peace, is to be content with appearances. Take what is set before you, asking no questions for conscience' sake. If it looks nice, that is enough. Eat and be thankful.

Trollope says he never made a single comfortable meal at an American hotel. The meat was swimming in grease, and the female servants uncivil, impudent, dirty, slow, and provoking. Occasionally they are a little slow, it must be confessed; but I never met with one, male or female, who was uncivil, impudent, or provoking. If I supposed it possible that my voice should ever reach our late critic, whose good sense and good spirit Americans appreciate, and whose name they would be glad to honor if everything English had not become suspicious to us, the possible synonyme of Pharisaism or stupidity, I should recommend to him Lord Chesterfield's assertion, that a man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's bad manners. For the greasy meats, let him forego meats altogether and take chickens, and he will not find grease enough to soil his best coat, if he should carry the chick away in his pocket. We always found a sufficient variety to enable us to choose a wholesome and a toothsome dinner, with many tempting dainties, and scores of dishes that I never heard of before, and ordered dubiously by way of experiment, and tasted timorously in pursuit of knowledge. As for the corn-cake of the White Hills, if I live a thousand years, I never expect anything in the line of biscuit, loaf, or cakes more utterly satisfactory. It is the very ultimate crystallization of cereals, the poetry and rhythm of bread, brown and golden to the eye, like the lush loveliness of October, crumbling to the touch, un-utterable to the taste. It has all the ethereal, evanishing fascination of a spirit. Eve might have set it before Raphael. You scarcely dare touch it lest it disappear and leave you disappointed and desolate. It is melting, insinuating,—a halo, hovering on the border-land of dream and reality, beautiful but uncertain vision, a dissolving view. I said something of the sort to Halicarnassus one morning, and he said, Yes, it was—on my plate. And yet I have never had as much as I wanted of it,—never. The others were perpetually finishing their breakfast and compelling me, by a kind of moral violence, to finish mine. I made an attempt one morning, the last of my sojourn among the Delectable Mountains, when the opposing elements had left the table prematurely to make arrangements for departure, and startled the waiter by ordering an unlimited supply of corn-cake. Like a thunder-bolt fell on my ear the terrible answer: "There isn't any this morning. It is brown bread." Me miserable!

As we went to dinner, in a large dining-room, upon our arrival at the Glen House, it seemed to me that the guests were the most refined and elegant in their general appearance of any company I had seen since my departure, and I had a pleasant New-English feeling of self-gratulation. But we were drawn up into line directly opposite a row of young girls, who really made me very uncomfortable. They were at an advanced stage of their dinner when we entered, and they devoted themselves to making observations. It was not curiosity, or admiration, or astonishment, or horror. It was simply fixedness. They displayed no emotion whatever, but every time your glance reached within forty-five degrees of them, there they were "staring right on with calm, eternal eyes," and kept at it till the servants created a diversion with the dessert. Now, if there is any thing that annoys and disconcerts me, it is to be looked at. Some women would have put them down, but I never can put anybody down. It is as much as I can do to hold my own,—and more, unless I am with well-bred people who always keep their equilibriums. One of these girls was the companion of a venerable and courtly gentleman; and the thought arose, how is it possible for this girl to have possibly that man's blood in her veins, certainly the aroma of his life floating around her, and the faultless model of his demeanor before her, and not be the mirror of every grace? Of how little avail is birth or breeding, if the instinct of politeness be not in the heart. That last remark, however, must "right about face" in order to be just. If the instincts be true, birth and breeding are comparatively of no account, for the heart will dictate to the quick eye and hand and voice the proper course; but where the instincts are wanting, breeding is indispensable to supply the deficiency. What one cannot do by nature he must do by drill. Sometimes it seems to me that young girlhood is intolerable. There is much delightful writing about it,—rose-buds and peach-blossoms and timid fawns; but the timid fawns are scarce in streets and hotels and schools,—or perhaps it is that the fawns who are not timid draw all eyes upon themselves, and make an impression entirely disproportionate to their numbers. I am thinking now, I regret to say, of New England young girls. Where they are charming, they are irresistible; they need yield to nobody in the known world. But I do think that an uninteresting Yankee girl is the most uninteresting of all created objects. Southern girls have almost always tender voices and soft manners. Arrant nonsense comes from their lips with such sweet syllabic flow, such little ripples of pronunciation and musical interludes, that you are attracted and held without the smallest regard to what they are saying. I could sit for hours and hear two of them chattering over a checker-board for the pleasure of the silvery, tinkling music of their voices. But woe is me for the voices, male and female, that you so often hear in New England,—the harsh, strident voices, the monotonous, cranky, yanky, filing, rasping voices, without modulation, all rise and no fall, a monotonous discord, no soul, no feeling, and no counterfeit of it, loud, positive, angular, and awful. Indeed, I do not see how we New-Englanders are ever to rid ourselves of the reproach of our voices. The number of people who speak well is not large enough materially to influence the rest. Teachers do not teach speaking in school,—they certainly did not in my day, and I have no reason to suppose from results that they do now,—and parents do not teach it at home, for the simple reason, I suppose, that they do not know it themselves. We can all perceive the discord; but how to produce concord, that is the question. This one thing, however, is practicable if sweetness cannot be increased, volume can be diminished. If you cannot make the right kind of noise, you can at least make as little as possible of the wrong kind. Often the discord extends to manners. Public conveyances and public places produce so many girls who are not gentle, retiring, shady, attractive. They are flingy and sharp and saucy, without being piquant. They take on airs without having the beauty or the brilliancy which alone makes airs delightful. They agonize to make an impression, and they make it, but not always in the line of their intent. Setting out to be picturesque, they become uncouth. They are ridiculous when they mean to be interesting, and silly when they try to be playful. If they would only leave off attitudinizing, one would be appeased. It may not be possible to acquire agreeable manners, any more than a pleasant voice; but it is possible to be quiet. But no suspicion of defect seems ever to have penetrated the bosoms of such girls. They act as if they thought attention was admiration. Levity they mistake for vivacity. Peevishness is elegance. Boldness is dignity. Rudeness is savoir faire Boisterousness is their vulgate for youthful high spirits.

And what, let me ask just here, is the meaning of the small waists that girls are cramming their lives into? I thought tight-lacing was an effete superstition clean gone forever. But again and again, last summer, I saw this wretched disease, this cacoethes pectus vinciendi, breaking out with renewed and increasing virulence; and I heard women—yes, grown-up women, old women—talking about the "Grecian bend," and the tapering line of the slender, willowy waist. Now, girls, when you have laced yourselves into a wand, do not be so infatuated as to suppose that any sensible man looks at you and thinks of willows. Not in the least. Probably he is wondering how you manage to breathe. As for the Grecian bend, you have been told over and over again that no Grecian woman, whether in the flesh or in the stone, ever bent such a figure,—spoiled if it was originally good, made worse if it was originally bad. You wish to be beautiful, and it is a laudable wish; but nothing is beautiful which is not loyal, truthful, natural. You need not take my simple word for it; I do not believe a doctor can anywhere be found who will say that compression is healthful, or a sculptor who will say that it is beautiful. Which now is the higher art, the sculptor's or the mantua-maker's? Which is most likely to be right, the man (or the woman) who devotes his life to the study of beauty and strength, both in essence and expression, or the woman who is concerned only with clipping and trimming? Which do you think takes the more correct view, he who looks upon the human body as God's handiwork, a thing to be reverenced, to be studied, to be obeyed, or one who admires it according as it varies more or less from the standard of a fashion-plate, who considers it as entirely subordinate to the prevailing mode, and who hesitates at no devices to bring it down to the desired and utterly arbitrary dimensions? This is what you do; you give yourselves up into the hands, or you yield submissively to the opinions, of people who make no account whatever of the form or the functions of nature; who have never made their profession a liberal one; who never seem to suspect that God had anything to do with the human frame; who, whatever station in life they occupy, have not possessed themselves of the first principles of beauty and grace, while you ignore the opinions, and lay yourself open to the contempt, of those whose natural endowments and whose large and varied culture give them the strongest claim upon your deference. The woman who binds the human frame into such shapes as haunted the hotels last summer, whether she be a dressmaker or a Queen of Fashion, is a woman ignorant alike of the laws of health and beauty; and every woman who submits to such distortion is either ignorant or weak. The body is fearfully and wonderfully and beautifully made, a glorious possession, a fair and noble edifice, the Temple of the Holy Ghost, beautiful its symmetry, for its adaptations, for its uses; and they who deform and degrade it by a fashion founded in ignorance, fostered by folly, and fruitful of woe, are working a work which can be forgiven them only when they know not what they do.

If this is not true, then I know not what truth is. If it is not a perfectly plain and patent truth, on the very face of it, then I am utterly incapable of distinguishing between truth and falsehood. Yet, if it is true, how account for the tight-lacing among women who are in a position to be just as intelligent as the doctor and the sculptor are?

Girls, I find a great deal of fault with you, do I not? But I cannot help it. You have been so written and talked and sung and flattered into absurdity and falsehood, that there is nothing left but to stab you with short, sharp words. If I chide you without cause, if I censure that which is censurable, if I attribute to a class that which belongs only to individuals, if I intimate that ungentle voices, uncultivated language, and unpleasing manners are common when they are really uncommon, if I assume to demand more than every person who loves his country and believes his countrywomen has a right to demand, on me be all the blame. But for ten persons who give you flattery and sneers, you will not find one who will tell you wholesome truths. I will tell you what seems to me true and wholesome. Poetasters and cheap sentimentalists will berhyme and beguile you: I cannot help it; but I will at least attempt to administer the corrective of what should be common sense. The Magister was forced to let Von Falterle have a hand in Albano's education, but he "swore to weed as much out of him every day as that other fellow raked in. Dilettanteism prattles pleasant things to you: I want you to BE everything that is pleasant. Where a fulsome if not a false adulation praises your slender grace, I shall not hesitate to tell you that I see neither slenderness nor grace, but ribs crushed in, a diaphragm flattened down, liver and stomach and spleen and pancreas jammed out of place, out of shape, out of use; and that, if you were born so, humanity would dictate that you should pad liberally, to save beholders from suffering; but of malice aforethought so to contract yourselves is barbarism in the first degree. And all the while I am saying these homely things, I shall have ten thousand times more real regard and veneration for you than your venders of dainty compliments. Regard? Jenny, Lilly, Carry, Hetty, Fanny, and the rest of you, dearly beloved and longed for,—Mary, my queen my singing-bird, a royal captive, but she shall come to her crown one day,—my two Ellens, graceful and brilliant, and you, my sweet-mouthed, soft-eyed islander, with your life deep and boundless like the sea that lulled you to baby-slumbers,—knowing you, shall I talk of regard? Knowing you, and from you, all, do I not know what girls can be? Sometimes it seems as if no one knows girls EXCEPT me. If the world did but know you, if it knew what deeps are in you, what strength and salvation for the race lie dormant in your dormant powers, surely it would throw off the deference that masks contempt and give you the right hand of royal fellowship.

And if, in the world just as it is, girls did but know themselves! If they did but know how delightful, how noble and ennobling, how gracious and consoling and helpful, they might be, how wearied eyes might love to rest upon them, how sore hearts might be healed, and weak hearts strengthened, by the fragrance of their unfolding youth! There is not one girl in a thousand, North or South, who might not be lovely and beloved. I do not reckon on a difference of race in North and South, as the manner of some is. The great mass of girls whom one meets in schools and public places are the ones who in the South would be the listless, ragged daughters of poverty. The great mass of Southern girls that we see are the cherished and cultivated upper classes, and answer only to our very best. Like should always be compared with like. And I am not afraid to compare our best, high-born or lowly, with the best of any class or country. They have, besides all that is beautiful, a substantial substratum of sound sense, high principle, practical benevolence, and hidden resources. To behold them, they sparkle like diamonds. To know them, they are beneficent as iron. Let all the others emulate these. Let none be content with being intelligent. Let them determine also to be full of grace.