SINFUL PERVERSENESS OF THE NATURAL WOMAN

Two months later a certain tension in the rectory of St. Antipas was temporarily relieved.  Like the spring of a watch wound too tightly, it snapped one day at Nancy’s declaration that she would go to Edom for a time ­would go, moreover, without a reason ­without so much as a woman’s easy “because.”  This circumstance, while it froze in the bud every available objection to her course, quelled none of the displeasure that was felt at her woman’s perversity.

Her decision was announced one morning after a sleepless night, and after she had behaved unaccountably for three days.

“You are not pleasing Allan,” was Aunt Bell’s masterly way of putting the situation.  Nancy laughed from out of the puzzling reserve into which she had lately settled.

“So he tells me, Aunt Bell.  He utters it with the air of telling me something necessarily to my discredit ­yet I wonder whose fault it really is.”

“Well, of all things!” Aunt Bell made no effort to conceal her amazement.

“It isn’t necessarily mine, you know.”  Before the mirror she brought the veil nicely about the edge of her hat, with the strained and solemn absorption of a woman in this shriving of her reflection so that it may go out in peace.

“My failure to please Allan, you know, may as easily be due to his defects as to mine.  I said so, but he only answered, ’Really, you’re not pleasing me.’  And, as he often says of his own predicaments ­’What could I do?’ But I’m glad he persists in it.”

“Why, if you resent it so?”

“Because, Aunt Bell, I must be quite ­quite certain that Allan is funny.  It would be dreadful to make a mistake.  If only I could be certain ­positive ­convinced ­sure ­that Allan is the funniest thing in all the world ­”

“It never occurred to me that Allan is funny.”  Aunt Bell paused for an instant’s retrospect.  “Now, he doesn’t joke much.”

“One doesn’t have to joke to be a joke, Aunt Bell.”

“But what if he were funny?  Why is that so important?”

“Oh, it’s important because of the other thing that you know you know when you know that.”

“Mercy!  Child, you should have a cup of cocoa or something before you start off ­really ­”

The last long hatpin seemingly pierced the head of Nancy and she turned from the glass to fumble on her gloves.

“Aunt Bell, if Allan tells me once more in that hurt, gentle tone that I don’t please him, I believe I shall be the freest of free women ­ready to live.”

She paused to look vacantly into the wall.  “Sometimes, you know, I seem to wake up with a clear mind ­but the day clouds it.  We shouldn’t believe so many falsities, Aunt Bell, if they didn’t pinch our brains into it at a tender age.  I should know Allan through and through at a glance to-day, if I met him for the first time; but he kneaded my poor girl’s brain this way and that, till I’d have been done for, Aunt Bell, if some one else hadn’t kneaded and patted it into other ways, so that little memories come back and stay with me ­little bits of sweetness and genuineness ­of realness, Aunt Bell.”

“Nance, you are morbid ­and I think you’re wrong to go up there to be alone with your sick fancies ­why are you going, Nance?”

“Aunt Bell, can I really trust you not to betray me?  Will you promise to keep the secret if I actually tell you?”

Aunt Bell looked at once important and trustworthy, yet of an incorruptible propriety.

“I’m sure, my dear, you would not ask me to keep secret anything that your husband would be ­”

“Dear, no!  You can keep mum with a spotless conscience.”

“Of course; I was sure of that!”

“What a fraud you are, Aunt Bell ­you weren’t sure at all ­but I shall disappoint you.  Now my reason ­” She came close and spoke low ­“My reason for going to Edom, whatever it is, is so utterly silly that I haven’t even dared to tell myself ­so, you see ­my real reason for going is simply to find out what my reason really is.  I’m dying to know.  There!  Now never say I didn’t trust you.”

In the first shock of this fall from her anticipations Aunt Bell neglected to remember that All is Good.  Yet she was presently far enough mollified to accompany her niece to the station.

Returning from thence after she had watched Nancy through the gate to the 3:05 Edom local, Aunt Bell lingered at the open study door of the rector of St. Antipas.  He looked up cordially.

“You know, Allan, it may do the child good, after all, to be alone a little while.”

“Nancy ­has ­not ­pleased ­me!” The words were clean-cut, with an illuminating pause after each, so that Aunt Bell might by no chance mistake their import, yet the tone was low and not without a quality of winning sweetness ­the tone of the injured good.

“I’ve seen that, Allan.  Nance undoubtedly has a vein of selfishness.  Instead of striving to please her husband, she ­well, she has practically intimated to me that a wife has the right to please herself.  Of course, she didn’t say it brutally in just those words, but ­”

“It’s the modern spirit, Aunt Bell ­the spirit of unbelief.  It has made what we call the ’new woman’ ­that noxious flower on the stalk of scientific materialism.”

He turned and wrote this phrase rapidly on a pad at his elbow, while Aunt Bell waited expectantly for more.

“There’s a sermon that writes itself, Aunt Bell.  ’Woman’s deterioration under Modern Infidelity to God.’  As truly as you live, this thing called the ‘new woman’ has grown up side by side with the thing called the higher criticism.  And it’s natural.  Take away God’s word as revealed in the Scriptures and you make woman a law unto herself.  Man’s state is then wretched enough, but contemplate woman’s!  Having put aside Christ’s authority, she naturally puts aside man’s, hence we have the creature who mannishly desires the suffrage and attends club meetings and argues, and has views ­views, Aunt Bell, on the questions of the day ­the woman who, as you have just succinctly said of your niece, ’believes she has a right to please herself!’ There is the keynote of the modern divorce evil, Aunt Bell ­she has a right to please herself.  Believing no longer in God, she no longer feels bound by His commandment:  ’Wives be subject to your husbands!’ Why, Aunt Bell, if you can imagine Christianity shorn of all its other glories, it would still be the greatest religion the world has ever known, because it holds woman sternly in her sphere and maintains the sanctity of the home.  Now, I know nothing of the real state of Nancy’s faith, but the fact that she believes she has a right to please herself is enough to convince me.  I would stake my right arm this moment, upon just this evidence, that Nancy has become an unbeliever.  When I let her know as plainly as English words can express it that she is not pleasing me, she looks either sullen or flippant ­thus showing distinctly a loss of religious faith.”

“You ought to make a stunning sermon of that, Allan.  I think society needs it.”

“It does, Aunt Bell, it does!  And we are going from bad to worse.  I foresee the time in this very age of ours when no woman will continue to be wife to a man except by the dictates of her own lawless and corrupt nature ­when a wife will make so-called love her only rule ­when she will brazenly disregard the law of God and the word of his only begotten crucified Son, unless she can continue to feel what she calls ’love and respect’ for the husband who chose her.  We prize liberty, Aunt Bell, but liberty with woman has become license since she lost faith in the word of God that holds her subject to man.  We should be thankful that the mother Church still stands firm on that rock ­the rock of woman’s subjection to man.  Our own Church has quibbled, Aunt Bell, but look at the fine consistency of the Church of Rome.  As truly as you live, the Catholic Church will one day hold the only women who subject themselves to their husbands in all things because of God’s command ­regardless of their anarchistic desire to ‘please themselves.’  There is the only Christian Church left that knows woman is a creature to be ruled with an iron hand ­and has the courage to send them to hell for ’pleasing themselves.’”

He glowed in meditation a moment, then, in a burst of confidence, continued: 

“This is not to be repeated, Aunt Bell, but I have more than once questioned if I should always allow the Anglo-Catholic Church to modify my true Catholicism.  I have talked freely with Father Riley of St. Clements at our weekly ministers’ meetings ­there’s a bright chap for you ­and really, Aunt Bell, as to mere universality, the Church of Rome has about the only claim worth considering.  Mind you, this is not to be repeated, but I am often so much troubled that I have to fall back on my simple childish faith in the love of the Father earned of him for me by the Son’s death on the cross.  But what if I err in making my faith too simple?  Even now I am almost persuaded that a priest ordained into the Episcopal Church cannot consecrate the elements of the Eucharist in a sacrificial sense.  Doubts like these are tragedies to an honest man, Aunt Bell ­they try his soul ­they bring him each day to the foot of that cross whereon the Son of God suffers his agony in order to ransom our souls from God’s wrath with us ­and there are times, Aunt Bell, when I find myself gazing longingly, like a little tired child, at the open arms of the mother Church ­on whose loving bosom of authority a man may lay all his doubts and be never again troubled in his mind.”

Aunt Bell sighed cheerfully.

“After all,” she said briskly, “isn’t Christianity the most fascinating of all beliefs, if one comes into it from the higher unbelief?  Isn’t it fine, Allan ­doesn’t the very thought excite you ­that not only the souls of thousands now living, but thousands yet unborn, will be affected through all eternity for good or bad, by the clearness with which you, here at this moment, perceive and reason out these spiritual values ­and the honesty with which you act upon your conclusions.  How truly God has made us responsible for the souls of one another!”

The rector of St. Antipas shrugged modestly at this bald wording of his responsibility; then he sighed and bent his head as one honestly conscious of the situation’s gravity.