An Ocean Tramp. William McFee
to their sex, and write sprightly articles on Bachelor Girls and their Ideals, and the Economic Independence of the Married Woman. They become hysterically lachrymose, in print, over a romantic love affair, and relapse into sordid intrigues on the sly. They demand political power without intending for a single moment to assume political responsibility. Their days are about equally divided between catching a husband and achieving what they describe as “a scoop.”
To all this Miss Flaherty adds an unusual faculty for spectacular antics. She has dressed in a red sweater and plied her trade, for a day, as a shoe-shine boy. She has dressed in a green cloak and sold shamrock on St. Patrick’s day. She has dressed in rags and sung in the streets for charity. She has hired a van and ridden about the suburbs pretending to sell domestic articles. She has attended revival meetings and thrown herself in a spasm of ecstasy upon what she calls the mercy-seat. She has. …
But the author is not absolutely sure whether she has … after all. He is of the opinion that, like most English women, she has no talent for that sort of thing. Like most young women who babble of emancipation she has an unsuspected aptitude for domesticity. She makes tea far better than she writes articles. She is, under a ridiculous assumption of slangy modernity, oppressively conventional.
However, the author’s immediate concern is not with Miss Flaherty’s destiny at all, but with his manuscript which she has been commissioned to place with a publisher. A writer of dime novels, on being consulted as to the way to get a book published, said he didn’t know, never having had a book to publish save in weekly serial numbers; and that, he hastened to observe, was quite another story. And then suddenly remarked, slapping his thigh and reaching for the makings of a fresh cigarette: “Why not try Imogene Flaherty? She’s anxious to start in as author’s agent.” The author had no objections to raise beyond the fact that he disliked doing business with women and was afraid of anybody named Imogene. The dime-novelist shook his head and said women in business and journalism had come to stay. And seriously, Miss Flaherty might easily be of immense assistance to the author. “Very nice girl, too—h-m—hm!” This reminiscently. “Very decent little woman. Go and see her—take my card—down in Cheyne Walk. She had a flat down there near Church Street. H-m. Yes.”
So it happened. And the result had been an explosion. Miss Flaherty had accepted the commission and had read the manuscript and had, in common parlance, gone up in the air. Her enthusiasm literally knew no bounds. She did not actually foam at the mouth, but she displayed all the symptoms of advanced literary hysteria. Now there is this to be said for the sea—it may not furnish one with universal judgments about women but it does provide the solitude and austere discipline which enable a man to coördinate his hitherto chaotic ideas about them. And women, if they only knew how they appear to the imagination of men on the rolling waters, would undoubtedly modify their own conceptions of life, and possibly profit by the change. Imogene, however, had no such moment of illumination. She lived in an enchanted world of imitation emotion and something in the author’s manuscript had set her off, had appealed to her rudimentary notions of fine writing, and engendered a flame of enthusiasm. It is not too much to say that she believed in that manuscript much more than the author did. That is the correct attitude for a successful agent. Imogene did not “push” the book, as salesmen say, so much as herald it. She entered publishers’ offices like a prophetess or one of the seraphim, panoplied in shining plumage, blinding the poor human eyes with beams of heavenly radiance, the marvellous manuscript, like a roll of lost gospels, held out before her. She blew a blast on her trumpet [Pg xxxiii]and the doors of the publishers’ readers swung wide. No knowledge of English literature prevented her from uttering her solemn conviction that here was the greatest book since Geoffrey Chaucer laid down his pen. With intrepid resource she warned the hesitating publisher that he would have none save himself to blame if he missed this chance of immortalizing his house, and eventually a publisher was discovered who was willing to issue the book at the author’s expense. All this, let it be said with regret, did not bring a blush to the author’s sea-tanned cheek. On the contrary, he cherished a secret apprehension that Imogene had gone mad.
The one fly in the ointment at this juncture was the author’s unmannerly attitude towards publishers who issued books at the writer’s expense. He went so far as to characterize them as crooks and declined to have anything to do with them. He had been writing for a good many years of apprenticeship and had arrived at the conclusion that a man might get along in decent comfort all his life without publishing anything at all, if fate so ordered it; and the suggestion that he pay away his hoarded sea-wages just to have his name on a book, clouded a naturally sunny temper for some time.
Here, however, sitting at tea in the intensely artistic flat on the third floor over a grocery-store, and looking out upon the River and the warehouses of the Surrey Side, the author is rapturously apprised that the book is as good as sold. A publisher’s reader, a representative of an important house, has declared that the book has distinction. This is a true record, in the main, and the author is obliged to confess, thirteen years later, that he fell for this. In his simplicity he thought it a fine thing to have distinction. And this is true. It is a fine thing, but the fineness of the bloom is soon licked off by the busy tongues of the Imogenes and their masculine counterparts. The author did not see this so clearly at the time. He felt as a cat feels when stroked. The patrons of distinction were also in a position to make a cash offer for the copyright. In those days, when fifty dollars a month was considered adequate remuneration for his services at sea, the author had modest notions about cash offers. He treated the matter in a sporting spirit and closed.
But it was not consummated in a word and with the gesture of signing one’s name. Things are not done that way when dealing with Imogenes. One has to negotiate a continent of emotional hill-climbing and an ocean of talk. A sea-faring person, schooled to deal with men and things with an economy of effort, is moved to amazement before the spectacle of a “bachelor girl” in action. One assumes, of course, that she intends to remain a “bachelor girl.” There is the solemn initiation into the ranks of her pals. Palship, as she calls it, is something quite different from friendship, and to a man of normal instincts this is an alarming proposition. It is certainly far more exhausting than an intrigue and far less interesting than a rationally controlled friendship with a person of the same sex. And here it is pertinent to put forward what the author conceives to be the fundamental trouble with the Imogenes of both sides of the Atlantic. It is pertinent because he was, at the time of writing this book, under the influence of a very potent and inspiring friendship for a man now dead, a friendship which moulded his ideas and inspired him to hammer out for himself a characteristic philosophy of life. And one of the most important determinations of that philosophy deals with the common errors concerning friendship and love. The mistake of the bachelor girl and her prototypes lies in their failure to recognize the principle of sex as universal. It is not so much that men and women cannot meet without the problem of sex arising between them as that no two human beings can have any interchange of thoughts at all without involving each other in a complex of which masculine and feminine are the opposite poles. The most fascinating of all friendships are those in which the protagonists alternate, each one, owing to freshly revealed depths or shallows in his character, assuming the masculine or feminine rôle. The Latin recognises this by instinct. Just as his nouns are always either masculine or feminine, so are his ideas. And his women, who have never heard of “bachelor girls” or “palship,” have achieved with consummate skill all and more than the Imogenes have ever imagined. Any one who has ever enjoyed the friendship of such women will recall that subtle aroma of sex which informs the whole affair. The coarse-grained northerner is prone to attribute the abundant vitality, the exquisite graces of body and mind to a deftly concealed vampirism or sensuality. Nothing is further from the truth. If you can play up to it, if your emotions and instincts are under the control of a traditional and finely tempered will, a notable experience is yours. Friendship, in fact, is the divinity whose name must not be uttered or he will vanish. She will not inform you, as Imogene does, that you are not in love with her and she is not in love with you and therefore a palship is under way. On the contrary, she will never let you forget that love is a possibility always just out of sight, where it will always remain. She is economically independent because men cannot do without her. She has more rights than the Imogenes will gain in a thousand years; and she is, moreover, [Pg xxxvii]something that men would strive to preserve