Fundamentally this is the main cause of woman’s mystery to ordinary man. She is continually springing surprises on him to throw him off his rigid course of action. Continually she is deeply disappointed if she succeeds in doing this. Could anything seem more perverse and contradictory? Is anything really simpler and more straightforward than man’s imperative necessity to pursue his own course quite uninfluenced by her unconsciously motivated actions?
She will beseech him to hurry through the episode, not knowing herself, sometimes, that it is the last thing she really wants or needs. An allegory will serve as an illustration.
§ 122
They are ardent mountaineers. They are ascending Mt. Chocorua in New Hampshire. She is afraid herself to go ahead over the rough mountain trail and see the new views as they develop. She needs also his assistance, his hand, to help her over rocks and fallen tree trunks and up steep ascents. She says to him: “You go ahead and I’ll follow. Rush up quickly and tell me what you see.” If he does so, he runs till he is out of breath and then attempts from a cliff he has reached to shout to her, to tell her how to get up to him, to describe the valley of the Swift River of which he has just caught a glimpse. But he is panting so hard he cannot articulate. Why should he have run ahead of her? Indeed he should not have.
It would have been much wiser for him to reply to her invitation to anticipate her: “Why, dearest, I see you are tired. Of course no woman can keep pace with a strong healthy man up these slopes. Let’s sit down and rest a bit.” He would then sit with her on a mossy stone or tree trunk, or take her on his lap, and point out the beauties of the place they were in, and absolutely refuse to leave her. He really does not wish to see the panorama from the peak first, before she does. He is very foolish to believe her when she says she wishes not to see it herself but to hear about it. She may be, consciously, perfectly sincere and really think she doesn’t care about going clear to the top with him this time.
These two are ardent mountain climbers; but there are many couples where the woman has not ever climbed to the top of a mountain who sends her husband on alone; and, poor thing, he goes, not realizing how much better the view is when two are looking at it.
§ 123
But any two ardent mountain climbers are practically certain to arrive at the top, whether they get there together or the man goes ahead and waits for his lady to come up herself—with the help of another man. For the mountain of which I speak has the peculiarity that no woman can climb alone to the top, as the path is extremely narrow, precipitous and dangerous. If her husband leaves her as they approach the peak (which is an enormous hill of rock capped by one huge boulder), she will be forced to wait until he feels energetic enough to descend a couple of hundred feet or so and help her up. Or if, enchanted himself by the glorious view—miles and miles of rolling country, numerous lakes and the silver ribbon of the Atlantic Ocean nearly eighty miles away—he is absorbed in his own sensations of grandeur, and forgets his wife down there below him as so many men do, it is just possible that another more unselfish and less uncontrolled man will give her his hand and help her to the top, slowly and courteously as behooves a man to do in spite of her effusive protestations to him to leave her and see the sunrise himself from the mountain top.
How will the husband of this woman feel, if, standing and facing the east, he suddenly realizes that there appears his own wife over the edge of the boulder, lifted by the strength of another man?
Had he known the true etiquette of mountain climbing among true married lovers, he would have waited until both had covered together the entire ascent up to the base of the boulder, six feet high and twenty in diameter; and then, making a foot rest for her with his two hands, he would have assisted her to get on this pinnacle herself first, before he did.