Between You and Me

by Sir Harry Lauder

"We'd like to have you back, Andy," they'll tell him. "But if the women want to stay, stay they can."

Well, I'll be asking you if it's likely Jenny will act so to her boy, that's hame frae the wars? Ye'll never mak' me think so till you've proved it. Here's the picture I see.

I see Jenny getting more and more tired, and waiting more and more eagerly for Andy to come hame. She's a woman, after a', d'ye ken, and a young one. And there are some sorts of work women were not meant or made to do, save when the direst need compels. So, wi' the ending of the war, and its strain, here's puir Jennie, wondering how long she must keep on before her Andy comes to tak' care of her and let her rest.

And—let me whisper something else. We think it shame whiles, to talk o' some things. But here's Nature, the auld mither of all of us. She's a purpose in the world, has that auld mither—and it's that the race shall gae on. And it's in the heart and the soul, the body and the brain, of Jennie that she's planted the desire that her purpose shall be fulfilled.

It's bairns Jenny wants, whether or no she kens that. It's that helps to mak' her so eager for Andy to be coming back to her. And when she sees him, at long last, I see her flinging herself in his arms, and thanking God wi' her tears that he's back safe and sound—her man, the man she's been praying for and working for.

There'll be problems aboot women, dear knows. There are a' the lassies whose men wull no come back, like Andy—whose lads lie buried in a foreign grave. It's not for me to talk of the sad problem of the superfluous woman—the lassie whose life seems to be over when it's but begun. These are affairs the present cannot consider properly. It will tak' time to show what wall be happening and what maun be done.

But I'm sure that no woman wull give up the opportunity to mak' a hame, to bring bairns into the world, for the sake of continuing the sort of freedom she's had during the war. It wad be like cutting off her nose to do that.

Oh, I ken fine that men wull have to be more reasonable than they've been, sometimes, in the past. Women know more than they did before the war opened the gates of industry to them. They'll not be put upon, the way I'm ashamed to admit they sometimes were in the old days. But I think that wull be a fine thing for a' of us. Women and men wull be comrades more; there'll be fewer helpless lassies who canna find their way aboot without a man to guide them. But men wull like that—I can tell ye so, though they may grumble at the first.

The plain man wull have little use for the clinging vine as a wife. He'll want the sort of wife some of us have been lucky enough to have even before the war. I mean a woman who'll tak' a real note of his affairs, and be ready to help him wi' advice and counsel; who'll understand his problems, and demand a share in shaping their twa lives. And that's the effect I'm thinking the war is maist likely to have upon women. It wall have trained them to self-reliance and to the meeting of problems in a new way.

And here's anither thing we maun be remembering. In the auld days a lassie, if she but would, could check up the lad that was courtin' her. She could tell, if she'd tak' the trouble to find oot, what sort he was—how he stud wi' those who knew him. She could be knowing how he did at work, or in business, and what his standing was amang those who knew him in that way. It was different when a man was courtin' a lassie. He could tell little about her save what he could see.