The Joys of Being a Woman, and Other Papers

by Winifred Margaretta Kirkland

This, our first married picnic, dawned as brisk and bright as any. The master is not with us. He departs each morning for a mysterious place called “The Works.” That is something I have always noticed in husbands, that tendency to go forth to “The Works.” Somehow no matter how hard women may toil for their daily bread, they never seem to belong to “The Works” of the world. The white house bustles with picnic preparations. It has to bustle when Jennie is in it. Jennie? Well, Jennie might be called the steam-engine at the middle of the merry-go-round. Some day I think the world will grow wise enough to stop talking about the servant question, and begin to study the philosophy that is still often to be found going about wrapped in a maid’s cap and apron. Jennie, a little person quick of foot, bounces up and down like a merry ball, and cries to the blue May morning while she butters sandwiches, “Picnic time has come again! Picnic time has come again!” Yet I never heard of Jennie’s going on a picnic; do people ever know, I wonder, how much of other people’s unselfishness must go to the making of anybody’s Eden?

The hall rocks to the bouncings and barkings of Mac, for he, too, feels picnic in the air. Mac is a newcomer, so is Peggy, the mare, ready tied beneath a tree to carry us over the hills and far away. When Adam came to this Eden, he brought his animals with him, a method much better than the Scriptural one, for it must have been a strain on any honeymoon, that influx of indiscriminate elephant and dinosaur, cormorant and anteater, and what not. The animals here were carefully chosen, Mac, the shaggy, clumsy, warm-hearted Airedale, and Peggy, high-bred as a lady of the old South, having all such a lady’s charm and grace and fundamental loyalty touched with just the dash of deviltry considered meet to spice the masculine palate. It is with the clatter of Mac’s ecstatic barking as he plunges before Peggy’s light hoofs that we go driving forth toward the blue, hill-swept horizon.

There is a tentative venturesomeness about my friend’s driving, for horsemanship with her is a recent accomplishment, and a proud one, to the zest of which Peggy contributes with a pricking of ears and a graceful dip to the side of the road before every motor-car. Mac trots briskly in front or behind, or to the side. His path through life is one of friendly detours. He will never accomplish any great deeds in dogdom. He is one of the simple souls unconscious of their magnetism. There is not an animal by the roadside that doesn’t come ambling up to his genial little nose. Even a herd of Jersey cows lopes clumsily across the pasture to chat with him at the bars, and no dog, big or little, fails to wish Mac good-morning.

It is the kind of morning for good wishes both for dogs and men. Knotted old farmers, seeing our picnic faces and picnic basket, grin and twinkle, sharing the May sunshine. The hills are a dim blue against a sky still softer. Boulder-strewn pastures, more brown than green, are starred with bluets. Far off there, below a shaggy stretch of pines, is a field so golden with dandelions that it quivers as if held by midsummer heat.

We don’t know where we are going; that is always the charm of our picnics, to follow the will of the road. It carries us past a sawmill in the wood. Its stridency and the tang of fresh sawdust strike sharp across the air fragrant with fern. Then the road is off again across the open, cleaving farms with their broad greening fields. The meadowlarks ring out their calls to us. The bobolinks dart and dive and sing. I turn to my companion in sudden question: “Now that you are married to a woodsman, do you know anything more about birds?”

“Oh, no,” she answers easily, “we know only the nice birds”; thus reassuring me that in her company I need fear, no more than of old, to meet any but the best bird society, robins and blackbirds and orioles and the other long-established families, and reassuring me also as to my fear that the one left behind at “The Works” might prove to be one of these bugaboo birdmen, of all beings the most subtly superior. In fact, it is very difficult to extract good conversation from any kind of human encyclopedia, ornithological or other.

Everywhere the cherry trees and pear are snowed over with white, but the apple blossoms are unopened, turning to a deep rose amid the pale-green leaves. The orchards are nearly human in their individuality, whether they form a little battalion of old men, sturdy and gnarled and steadfast, or a band of little budding baby trees toddling up a hill. There are no great waters in this countryside, but many little glinting brooks, pattering downhill beside our wheels, then meandering through meadows beneath their bushy willows. We are minded to follow a brook and let it lead us to perfect picnic. It leads us, of course, up a hill and up, away from all farms, all valleys, into a deep woods road, hushed and strange, and at last beckons us aside from the road itself, with a twinkle of white birch stems, and the swirl of wild water, white and amber.

It takes a long time to tie and blanket Peggy while I sit dreaming in the dappled shade beside the musical rush of water, haunted by my friend’s own song that once set all this woodland madness to elfin rhythms. But my mood is interrupted by the thumping down of the stout picnic basket. She is smilingly tolerant of my dryad whimseys, but for herself, nowadays, she wishes to unpack that basket and get settled. It is for me also, perhaps, to be smilingly tolerant of the other dryad turned domestic; for me, brook water still has power to turn me dizzy and to make my heart stop beating.

It is the same basket we used to carry, but, like the house, it has a difference. There is a great object concealed in ebony leather, and it is called the “wap-eradicator.” The term is profoundly masculine, for a “wap” is some evil-eyed foreigner who might disturb our picnic privacy, and his eradicator is a pistol. There is also a marvelous jackknife which I pause in unpacking to examine. It again is no lady’s toy, seeing that it has not only all the blades a lady might require, but in addition a screwdriver and a corkscrew, a tack-puller and a can-opener. There is stout enamel ware in the basket, too, whereas we always used to carry china, feminine and fragile. Food, much of that,—but then we always did take food, for I have noticed that poets need a deal of victualing. In fact, roast beef is about the best thing you can do for anybody’s imagination. One packet I myself put in for old sake’s sake, despite her laughter, a yellow envelope packed with her typed poetry. “We’ll never look at it,” she said, and she generally knows. She pulls forth now some scribbled tablets, skeleton stories of my own, “Your little deedles,” she designates them in genial contempt, and plants the cream jar upon them.

Presently she is off to gather fagots for the fire, admonishing my absent-mindedness, “Don’t let Mac eat the food before we do.” I note how much handier she has grown in all wood-lore. To-day the fire needs no coaxing, also it’s a much smaller fire than we used to build. We used to have a scorching splutter for a wee bit of coffee. This fire goes briskly and to the point, showering us now and then with cinders, yet on the whole well-behaved. In other days we toasted our bacon on forked sticks, but there’s a fine frying-pan now, with rings to thrust a rod into, tightening it with twigs. Bacon and eggs sizzle merrily, and the coffee-kettle boils its cover off. We sit smut-cheeked and zestful, and exhibit a great capacity for sandwiches. There is much complacency in our manners. Her coffee, she remarks, “has seven kinds of sticks in it, but is perfectly potable.” The fire, that low, leaping ruddiness against a gray boulder, is the best fire she “ever personally conducted.” As for me, there is plenty of chuckle in me, too, but I am thinking, when shall we begin to talk, for was that not what we always went to the woods for? Somehow, what with building fires, and brewing and frying, with eating and drinking, and giving Mac and Peggy to eat and drink, there has not been time for talking. That will come later, when we have packed away the sandwiches we could not eat, and given Mac his drink from our emptied coffee-pail, and Peggy her two lumps of sugar. Then surely at last we shall talk, about poems and stories, and all things writable, and all things livable. Sometimes I think she guesses what I am waiting for and regards me with a twinkle, while she moves about light-footed, setting away our clutter.