Incidentally let me add that when someone once asked Eve if she hadn't often wished she had been a man, she replied:
"Lord no! In that case there would have been two of us, and goodness knows one was enough!"
CHAPTER V
SOME NOTES ON CAIN AND ABEL
My acquaintance with my great-uncles, Cain and Abel, was not particularly intimate and in later years they are seldom spoken of by members of the family for reasons sufficiently obvious to need no mention here. Every family must sooner or later develop an undesirable or two, and on the whole I think that we have done tolerably well in having up to this time only one portrait in our Rogues' Gallery. Just what has become of Cain no one at this writing is aware, but wherever he is I hope when these memoirs of mine are published he will read them far enough to note that one member of the family at least holds him in pleasant recollection for the fun he has afforded him in the past. The two first boys of creation were not bad fellows at all, although as was natural, their bringing up resulted in a general condition of pure cussedness that at times became appalling to their parents. The fact that there had never been any other boys in the world before placed Adam and Eve at a considerable disadvantage in rearing these two youngsters. There were no precedents to go by, and as a consequence the lads were permitted to do a good many things that our modern boys would not dream of doing. There were no schools to send them to, and no Sunday Newspapers with Woman's Pages to instruct Eve in the Complete Science of Motherhood, so that when Cain and Abel came along to bless the world with their presence, neither their father nor their mother knew what on earth to do with them. Then, too, Eve's household duties were such that they very nearly absorbed all her time, and for years the youthful scions of this first family in the land were left to the tender mercies of a kindly old Gorilla who, however amiable and willing she may have been, was hardly the kind of person a modern mother would choose as an influence in the formative years of her children's development. I am quite aware that in some sections of the country to-day this oldtime custom of leaving the young to the care of servants still prevails, and in some cases it has its distinct advantages considering the moral characteristics of the parents who so leave them, but as a social custom to be commended it is an entire failure, and was adopted by Eve not from choice, but from necessity. It was not through any desire to shine in society as a constant attendant at the Five O'Clock teas of her time, or, because she deemed that her duty lay in trying to secure the alleged Emancipation of her Sex from imaginary shackles at the expense of her home life and its responsibilities; or, because she believed that the primary duty of a mother was to provide her offspring with a maternal relative who could expound the most abstruse philosophies of the age with her eyes shut, that led Mother Eve into an apparent neglect of her children. It was simply the inevitable result of the life of her time. One can hardly be all that she had to be whether she wanted to be it or not and at the same time fulfill all the functions of motherhood. The daily labors of a large ranch such as the world practically was at that time were of enormous proportions, and with all due respect to Adam it has always been my profound belief that a good ninety per cent. of them were performed by Eve. It was she who had to look after the domestic details of the hour, day in and day out, while he after the fashion of mankind, led the freer life of the open. Indeed I have never found that in the matter of manual labor Adam was in any wise noted. The naming of the animals was a purely intellectual achievement, and while, of course, he was the provider when it came to getting in the food supply, I have never observed that any man yet created ever regarded a day on a trout stream with a fly and a rod, or a chase through the forest after a venison steak, or a partridge, as in any way even remotely resembling work. On the contrary Adam lived the life of a Naturalist and a Nimrod, while Eve faithfully did the chores. It was inevitable then that the children when they first came along, should be allowed to grow wild, to associate with their inferiors, and to become confirmed in habits that were deplorable and reprehensible. I am entering upon no defense of my Uncle Cain. I do not excuse his misbehavior in the least, but when a censorious world holds up its hands in holy horror whenever he is mentioned, and uses his name as a synonym for evil, I would merely beg it to remember the lad's bringing up, and to ask itself whether under similar conditions it would do much better itself. Particularly do I ask that branch of human society, now growing rather larger than I like to see it, who are themselves allowing their children to grow up, not only removed but far away from all parental influences whatsoever, if they realize that they will have only themselves to blame if they add to the stock of unfortunates who bear the mark of Cain? Of course, a woman who would rather play Bridge than rock her baby to sleep would be a bad influence upon a budding soul at any time, and her child is to be congratulated when its mother's engagement card is full from Sunday to Sunday, but even a mother of that sort owes it to society to see that her place is filled not by any old gorilla from the handiest intelligence office that comes along as poor Eve was forced into doing, but by some capable person in whom the love of motherhood rules as strong as does the passion for the grand-slam in her own breast.
Cain's Inspiration
But enough of this moralizing! I had not meant to preach a sermon, and it is only because I see so many wistful little faces of motherless youngsters around me day after day—Social Orphans, whose mothers have not gone to Heaven, but to Mrs. Grundy's; children who with the qualities of service in their souls are treading dangerously near to the footsteps of the original scapegrace for lack of attention; that I have been led into this garrulous homily. It must not be supposed, either from what I have said that there was never any discipline in the Home of Adam and Eve. Later on there came to be a lot of it, and I am not sure that its excesses in later periods were not as evil in their influence as its utter lack at a time when ten minutes with the hair-brush would have done Cain more good than ten years in the county jail.