Silences (22 page)

            
could put in words the happy sense of home and love that is under and over all, the thousand little ways in which my Darling
shows how strong and tender is his love, Harding’s funny antics, the look of Charley’s earnest blue eyes.

She went on writing, of course, contracting for a serial (after having said she never would again) for
Lippincott’s.
No ambitious compass this time: this was going to be manageable, though still about something. The monthly deadlines once more proved “a tax on one’s endurance. And the horror
of being sick, or the children being sick,” or of any of the other pulls and claims on her time.

The
Nation
reviewer, on October 22, 1868, approved of this book,
Dallas Galbraith:

            
In the conception and arrangement of her story, . . . [the author] displays no inconsiderable energy and skill. She has evidently done her best to make it interesting, and to give her reader, in vulgar
parlance, his money’s worth. . . .

                  
Mrs. Davis, in her way, is an artist.

Mrs. Davis having intended to be, and for a while having practiced being, an artist, had no such illusions. Mrs. Davis, in her way, had become a professional workhorse in the field of letters for income, doing the best she could. Her writing had bought an end to the old economic terrors, and to drudgery;
it had bought servant help and summers by the sea, and made keeping on writing possible.
It had also bought the need to keep writing—for money. She was writing articles and comments on the times now, as well as fiction. She added children’s stories—highly moral—for
Youth’s Companion.
She joined the staff of the New York
Tribune
as contributing editor and began a long stream of articles and editorials.
Clarke became an editor too—for the Philadelphia
Inquirer
—and forgot about a law practice.

Home almost always, Rebecca longed more and more for sky, vista, sea, another view than brick. She was “making fresh attacks on Papa to move out of town,” she wrote Annie, “but Papa reads his paper and won’t hear.”

With Rebecca’s earnings, Papa in 1870 bought their permanent home. In Philadelphia. Another
row house flanked for blocks around by identical twins—but impressive three-story brick ones this time, with yards.

If Rebecca looked out her window anymore, for the rest of her life (except for the sea summers) it was to be to this sliver of sky and those brick houses endlessly repeating themselves. No river, no hills, no slow stream of human life moving by on its way to and from work in the
mills. Her commonplace, her “Centre of the Universe,” was suburban domestic now. She records a typical day:

            
The boys’ bed is close by ours and at daylight they are awake. Charley generally asserting that he is “chivering cold” until he is taken into my arms. Then dear old Hardy puts his head up on the pillow and we whisper a while till the light in the transom shows that Annie [the
maid] is ready to dress. Then I get up and we have breakfast. Clarke rises at 9 or 10. After he has his breakfast he reads the
Inquirer,
smokes his pipe, and goes [to work]. . . . When he comes home he has a supper of raw oysters with me and a cup of tea and then to bed.

Up two or three hours before Clarke was, and until 10 or 11 at night when he came home, Rebecca was running the house, seeing
to the things that had to be done or doing them herself; mothering, teaching, when necessary nursing the boys; evading the neighbors (“Love thy neighbor? . . . The well to do, fat person across the way? I hate my kind when they come within meddling distance”)—and getting her writing done.

That first year in the new house, she revised some articles written in the high-tide time of “happy sense
of home and love,” wrote a few more, and published
Pro Aris et Focis
(For Altar and Hearth), a small book all for domesticity, motherhood—and against women’s rights.
^*

What were these “voices . . . high, shrill and occasionally discordant” going on so about women’s rights? Yes, “shrill” was the recurrent adjective even then.

Equality? Women should no more feel inferior because they are not fit
for men’s work than men feel inferior because they are not fit for women’s work.

Professions for women? “Some of that surplus female population who have no chance of rest
^**
in a husband’s house and many of whom unhappily have no provision for the actual wants of life” should have public occupations open to them; but
not
potential wives and mothers. Was it more a woman’s work “to dissect babies
rather than to suckle them”? And woman’s brain,

            
being like the rest of her frame, of more delicate organization, is not capable of such sustained and continuous mental exertion as man’s.
†

Women vote? Most were properly far too occupied with home responsibilities even to consider taking that on; the rest, the idle, vain, rich, were interested only in fashion and amusement. Besides,
husbands did not
want
their wives in the coarse political arena; and wives would not go against their husbands’ wishes. Nor should. The Bible was clear on the matter: wives must obey their husbands. “If you do not wish to obey, do not marry.”

Had Rebecca joined that succession of professional women
(they are still with us today) who discourse—profitably—to other women on the ordained rightness,
naturalness, and glories of keeping to woman’s sphere, while themselves exercising the privilege of wider realms and fuller use of self? No.

The glories, Rebecca believed; it was for her a time of genuine, deep family satisfactions. The ordain-edness, she also believed. It was a time of strict, literal interpretation of the Bible. That she wrote, worked at a “man’s” occupation, did not occur
to her as contradiction. She carried it on privately, at home, in a woman’s way: that is, not as a man would, but fitted in, secondary to family; at the cost of none of her responsibilities to them. And she obeyed the Biblical injunctions: she kept to her place. It was Clarke’s natural right, as husband, to make the decisions, including where they should live. She accepted unquestioningly that, whatever
their respective capacities, it was Clarke—as a man—who should be enabled to do his best work, while her ordained situation as woman was to help him toward that end: to be responsible for house, children, the proper atmosphere for his concentration and relaxation—and manage her writing when and as best as she could. Men could have love, home, children, and work, without cost to the work. Not
women.

She did not say “Wrong, all wrong.” Violations of human potentiality which she refused to accept as natural, as ordained, in
Life in the Iron Mills,
she accepted as natural and ordained in the situation of women (including her own).

For all the insights throughout her writings on the narrowness, triviality, drudgery, hurts, restrictions in women’s lives—yes, and evidences of capacity
within those restrictions—she could not envision women “as they might be.” Of their domestic, fourteen-hour-a-day, seven-day workweek, she did not ask Hetty’s question, so terribly punished in “The Wife’s Story”: “Was [it] for this reality that God made me?” Nor did she apply to her own sex Hugh Wolfe’s measure of “a true life,” one of “full development of faculties.”

When the high-tide time
of family happiness out of which
Pro Aris et Focis
was written receded for Rebecca, she did not see its relationship to the situation of her sex. She knew only that something had gone terribly wrong with her life, her writing.

She was forty-one now. For eight years—often with exhilaration—she had been juggling cumulative responsibilities, selves, other beings. At last, the children old enough,
she was beginning to have some space for time-self. Old aspirations began to rise. When, once more, she discovered she was pregnant.

The third child (“but the child was a girl”), Nora, was born in 1872.

The following year, Rebecca wrote another revealing “Wife’s Story,” but this time there is neither terror nor temptation in it: the gift is used—without punishment—for family needs; the anguish
is explicit only on the last page.

She called it
Earthen Pitchers,
a seven-part serial in
Scribner’s Monthly
(1873 and 1874) about the fate of two young women earning their living professionally at a time when professional women were an extreme rarity.

Jenny, “built for use but not for show,” is a no-nonsense journalist, with no pretensions to art.

            
Men who wanted to stand well with
Jenny were wont to talk of the strength of her articles, quite as masculine as if they had been done by a man.

Audrey is a musician—violinist, singer, composer. She has been rigorously training herself since early childhood, eight to ten hours a day, for a life in music. Music “is all there is of me,” she says. One of the men in love with her answers:

            
“The best of you, I grant, but
not all. . . . Half of your nature will be fallow. Besides, what do you know to teach by your art? What experience have you of life?”

On a night of auroral light and wild ocean storm, Audrey’s whole-selved concentration on music is momentarily breached by a rousing of desire, a hunger for human love. Later, unable to sleep, she goes out again into the storm:

            
. . . It seemed to her,
she had grown to the age of sea and woods: they had received her into their company; she was one with them . . . she would have penetrated into the heart of this eternal world
if she could; its mysteries, its vastness, its infinite, inaccessible repose. . . . The longing, the hope, which belong to those who are akin with Nature, for which no man has ever found words, oppressed and choked her.
“And I,” she said, looking up and around her, as one who seeks a familiar face, “I too!”

She knows she must find a way to express this longing, this hope. “Strains of simple powerful harmony, unknown before,” come to her. In what is a transcendent experience, she stays all night by the sea. Toward dawn, when “all things seemed waiting, glad, questioning, having accepted her as their own,” kingbirds,
sandpipers “fixing their eyes on her in recognition,” she floats far out to deep water. It has “the solemnity of a baptism.” She knows she has been “summoned by a heavenly call to do her work; forbidden to do any other.”

But Kit, the man she loves, is blinded in a train accident. She marries after all:

            
During those years, while he was both blind and helpless, . . . [she] supported
the family by giving music lessons to all the children in the neighborhood. Her old uncle opposed her bitterly. . . .

                  
“Don’t make a market of your birthright,” he said, “hide it, bury it in a napkin if you will. You sold yourself, but don’t sell that for your own selfish ends, or God will punish you.”

                  
“My birthright is to love,” said Audrey, and laid her hand
on her husband’s arm.

Both women are disillusioned in marriage but manage what happiness they can. Jenny’s husband is a philanderer, dilettante, poseur, who takes all comforts and luxuries as his due. (“Jenny . . . knew all his maxims as she did her alphabet.”) As for Audrey, “No wife could be more loving and cheerful with Kit. Yet, unconsciously, she gives you the impression that she has her
own home and her own people elsewhere and will be gone to them presently.”

The novel ends by the sea:

                  
The sun is heat to her now, and the sea, water.

                  
Presently, when evening begins to gather, and the sunset colors the sky and the pools in the marshes behind them blood-red, and the sea washes into their feet, dark and heavy, with subdued cries
and moans as
though all the love and unappeased longing of the world had gone down into it, and sought to find speech in it, Audrey takes up the child, and begins to hush it on her breast, singing a little cradle song, a simple chant with which she was always crooning it to sleep. It is so hopeful, so joyful, so full of the unutterable brooding tenderness of mother’s love, that Kit, who cares little for music,
finds his heart swell and his eyes dim.

                  
“Your uncle and that Goddard,” he observes, “used to think you had a pretty talent for music Audrey. You were going to teach the whole world by your songs, I remember. But that little tune is all you ever made, eh?. . . And nobody ever heard it but Baby and me. However, it’s very pretty, very pretty. And it was lucky your uncle taught
you as thoroughly as he did. Your scales and notes helped us over a rough place. They served their purpose very well, though your voice is quite gone with teaching.”

He strolls on up the beach.

            
When he was out of sight, a flock of kingbirds fly up from the hedges of bay bushes, and light near her, turning on her their bright black eyes with a curious look of inquiry. When was it
they had looked at her so before?

                  
For one brief moment the tossing waves, the sand dunes, the marshes put on their dear old familiar faces. Old meanings, old voices came close to her as ghosts in the sunlight. The blood rushed to her face, her blue eyes lighted. She buried her hands in the warm white sand. She held the long salt grass to her cheeks. She seemed to have come home
to them again. “Child,” they said to her, as the statues to Mignon, “where hast thou stayed so long?”