AS A WOMAN THINKS

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THERE IS A SPEECH IN THE WIND THAT WE DO NOT KNOW, A HEROISM IN NATURE THAT WE DO NOT COMPREHEND

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AS A WOMAN THINKS

BY CORRA HARRIS Author of “My Book and Heart”

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY The Riverside Press Cambridge 1925

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COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY CORRA HARRIS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

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AS A WOMAN THINKS

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I INTRODUCTORY

This is not a mystical tale, nor a literary interpretation of addled-egg metaphysics. The mind I have has always been laid off sensibly according to the latitudes and longitudes of actual experiences in this present world. I never had an aura, nor the least confidence in the existence of an oversoul. This phrase is the name of a subliminal hysteria, pardonable in poets, but not in prose people with ordinary midget souls. The one I have is no part of the common spiritual vestment. On the contrary, it is an astounding fact too intimately connected with my private consciousness to be exploited in a book, or a street car, or any other public conveyance. I may draw rings around it at a respectful distance before this record ends; I may speculate prudently on souls in general, as one does in futures sometimes; but I shall not risk the presumption of phonographing our immortal part. It is offensive.

The mind is different. This is something no man will deny having, although he may deny his soul. Even if he is pathetically limited mentally, he is the enthusiastic autobiographer of what he thinks. If he has no character, and no energy to achieve, he is the more likely to be the historian, the dramatist, [Pg 4]poet and prophet of his mind. He cannot retain it. I have sometimes thought this explains how we came by that safety valve called language. If we should suffer a total aphasia of words, I suppose the human species would explode. The mind develops so much more power in thinking than we can possibly achieve in action.

And to the last, the minds of other men, their secret thoughts, the motives from which their actions spring remain the most interesting things we can find out.

What follows is such a biography; not an analysis, nor a confession, but the drama I have lived in thinking and believing; how the mind I have, determined my conduct, courage, cowardice, and literally created the life I have lived in spite of everything.

This is no vast undertaking like following the trail of a great intellect. I am incapable of measuring the convolutions of such a brain, say, as Herbert Spencer’s. In any case the record would be scientific, not interesting. These people are born bright, but drab, humanly speaking. I am not opposed to them, you understand; they have their place somewhere over our heads, but not in the common life we lead. My justification in choosing a simpler mind to exploit is that most of us have this kind. We have actual experience in living our thoughts; and the way we do it tears mere philosophy to shreds, no matter how well and logically it has been thought out.

If you are writing the life of a prime minister, you begin by laying the scenes in the times in which he lived. You must set down the kind of king he served, [Pg 5]discuss the people and problems that engaged his attention and made him a great man. I am recording the history of a mind as far removed as possible from the grandeur of kings and the policies of prime ministers. But like these more pretentious biographers, I am drawing my scenes in the right place, giving you a glimpse of the summer-minded, slipshod gentlemen who traveled this road, mismanaged their bankrupt fortunes with such humor and courage, because these are my people. There is a fine rich pigment in the quality of these people which imparts that first clear color to the mind, and may account for the bright loom of thought upon which I spun the days of my life with some wit, a certain dexterous sweetness and an awful strength of hope never justified by the facts.

I do not know how it may be with others who have outgrown themselves and become merely the residents of culture and learning, but I experience a sensation of uneasiness when conversing with a man who evades his own personal pronoun. I always change my seat as soon as possible, because he is concealing some one who should be present and apparent if he is talking.

He will never say ‘I think,’ ‘I believe,’ or ‘I know,’ but he will begin with ‘It is said.’ This may be a scholarly affectation of self-effacement, for all I know, but it is neither natural nor sincere.

We are every one born in the first person singular. We live and die feeling that way. Therefore the pronoun ‘I’ is the most honest and revealing word in the English language. It is our obligatory oral signature. [Pg 6]It is not an egotistical part of speech, unless you are an egotist, but the born-and-bred name by which every man calls himself. Without this provision, you may say, of nature in him, we should never be able to identify him or know whether he is talking his own truth or his own lies or quoting them from some one else.

This is the reason why certain of my books are written in the first person. They must be. It is my way of writing as other people feel, interpretative. I am being confidential, not boastful, except possibly where we may boast together. I am telling experience common to us as human beings and giving the reader the advantage of keeping his own silence.

The method works. It encourages many to give tongue to their lives and feelings, which is a relief if they have held them in for a long time and never expected to see them said anywhere. Just write the truth of your own heart and you will find out how many men and women have lived that same truth more valiantly than you have without emitting it into copy! I have had to make that humbling revision of my attributes since the publication of ‘My Book and Heart.’ These silent ones who write letters not for publication have found in this volume the witness of their own hearts, a record more intimate and personal to them than if it had been written in the third person, or of one already dead and subject in the very nature of the case to biographical speculations.

The record I am now writing will have no such effect, though it may be equally veracious, because we [Pg 7]are further apart in our thoughts than we ever are in our feelings. We may talk much or little, but most of our thinking is done and kept in silence. The human mind is a queer thing. It has more ways of the wild creatures than we have. It never ceases to circle either upon the wing or to prowl in that secret darkness which conceals every man’s mind. It goes off and comes back laden with strange thoughts while you sit gazing with candid eyes into the candid eyes of your companion, whose mind has also been out scouting around and has returned without ever meeting your mind on the way.

I suppose many a man, seated in the possessive case beside some woman, who has a Spencerian countenance and speaks to him in pale blue language of sweetness, would leap for his life if he could see so much as the flash of the thought she is whetting in her neat little head against his peace and happiness. And sometimes if a woman had a look into the mind of her hero she might become an idol breaker in the twinkling of an eye.

But we are not to be judged by what goes on in our minds. One never gets cut in a word or a deed. If all the tools of vengeance forged there were used, this world would be a terrible place. If all the dark thoughts we have were spoken, no man or woman would trust us. But these are the mental vaporings of our lower and meaner natures, conquered in most of us by the moral sense we have acquired which has established better standards.

A wise man can record all he knows of life in one book; but the scriptures of the common man require [Pg 8]two books, and maybe a few gospels, as a sort of quotient in the long division of living. For us there would be the book of the heart, where we keep memories, the hopes that failed, our loves and hates, and whatever Beatitude we needed to comfort or praise us, whether it is a friend, a woman, or a bit of the Word. Your wise man takes no account of this copy. In his analysis of the phenomenon of man, the heart is a figure of speech which refers to the reflex action of the emotions. Then there is for us the other record of the mind, quite distinct. It is the place where we keep the law, or break it; the motives which stimulate and control us, and determine our relations to other men—and to God, who we think made us.

This last notion, in my opinion, is a gross exaggeration of the functions of the Almighty. He made what we call mind and we use it to create ourselves. It works one way in this generation and another way in the next generation. Sometimes it is war; then it is religion, art, one kind of science or another; or it may be a magnificent covetousness, practiced under such terms as industrialism, commercialism, or even the League of Nations—always filled with eleemosynary impulses, for conscience’ sake, according to that very shrewd mind he is developing. It is really the sand-pile where the ostrich of him hides its head. It is at last that thing in us which is as easily degraded by a false belief as by the meanest vice. It can exalt a heathen and trap a Christian saint. It is the way of life we choose, right or wrong.

If some one laid his mind on the table, so to speak, [Pg 9]not as a confession, nor even as a defense, but as a certified human document, it might cast a flicker of light upon dark corners to be turned in the lives of other people. So if I show what a dim thing it was in the beginning, how a child divines peace and happiness without thinking, what a terror thinking became afterwards, how bravely and adventurously my mind guided me, how cunningly it misguided me, what burdensome rewards it earned for me, and what dividends in peace I have lost by following the best Scriptures according to my mind—some of you who read this record may get a hint to watch the thing and control it more wisely than I have controlled mine.

What I shall write will be sown with errors from the point of view of a psychologist, which will be proof to you that it is a veracious record. There may be laws governing mind; but if so, they are like so many other laws we cannot keep and survive. A logical sentence in thinking according to the exigencies of living is bound to be a very short sentence. The longer ones that last through the days of our years contradict much wisdom and a good many Scriptures. But we do get through, and looking back we do see the Word still standing, not changed.

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II WHEN I WAS A CHILD

In the year 1874 there was a road which crossed the State of Georgia. It has disappeared long since, changed by the will of some memory in the hearts of the people. But you may trace it still when the daisies bloom in May. These flowers are not indigenous to this section. Their first seed fell here from the provender fed to Sherman’s cavalry. So, in May, that month of Decoration Days, they bloom again like a long, narrow memorial wreath laid upon the grave of a dead and glorious past. They wind and turn and tumble down many a steep hillside in North Georgia, as this road made its tortuous way among these hills. But when it slipped into the lower, smoother land, it straightened out and lay like a broad red-and-golden ribbon between the great plantations. Farther and farther it stretched until it slid into the city of Augusta and became Green Street—so named, I suppose, because the road that made it came down into the white old town through such a fair and verdant country.

Other roads entered this highway, as smaller streams flow into a broader, swifter river. There were signposts to guide the traveler. I remember one in particular at the entrance of the old Petersburg road, because as a child it seemed to me like a very old man who had been pointing the way a long time and now leaned wearily in the direction indicated. [Pg 11]Above a huge fist, rudely drawn, with the forefinger raised, appeared the legend:

We had sentiment in those days with a lilt to it, and a signpost was as good a place as any to publish it. We were not seeking fame. We were famous enough already. We were surfeited with the terrible distinction of having just concluded a cruel war in glorious defeat. We were some kind of magnificently irresponsible truth but lately crushed to earth, and we were rising again after the grandiloquent manner of our kind, with a beam in our eye and a song on our lips—but not prosperous! It requires more than a century for the phœnix of man to rise above the ashes of war in material things. We arose by a sort of rhythm of the spirit, unencumbered by wealth. The ascent is quicker and less expensive.

Gentlemen in rags traveled this road upon their old raw-boned horses—Don Quixotes, every one, still tilting against the windmills of a graver, saner civilization that had been thrust upon them. They were rumpled, ruddy men who bore themselves with an air and never complained of their poverty after the manner of ignoble men when misfortune overtakes them. They held onto their leisure for a long time as the last asset of a lost fortune, and visited a great deal from one old ramshackle mansion to another. Their laughter was a joyous eruption. They were pedantic with a flourish. They could drop you a long quotation from Faust or Shakespeare without seeming [Pg 12]absurd or causing their victims the least embarrassment, such as we feel when a meaner man quotes a Promethean passage. They required these luminous vestments woven by great poets to adorn the qualities they had. Any one of them would have been admired as a character in a book or as the subject of a funeral oration.

The women of this period were strangely lyrical. Never again shall we see so many fine ladies rise with such grace above the inconvenience of poverty. Dressed in a chignon, a curl, and a cotton frock, they ignored all styles and remained the last word in the poetry of fashion. They had swishing silken virtues and conducted themselves after the manner of the heroine in the last chapter of Proverbs.

Eighty miles above Augusta there stood two huge gate-posts, topped with roughly hewed balls. Between them hung the old gray gate of a famous plantation. When the sun was low in the west it shone through these palings like bars of gold as if there might be nothing beyond but space and silence and brightness. Inside, there was a long avenue stretching away through the trees. Far down, there was a high green terrace; above the terrace, an ancient flower garden, bordered with boxwood and spired with the tops of juniper trees. Blossoming boughs waved like flags in the summer wind. All the spaces inside were filled with humbler flowers; phlox and lilies, violets and hyacinths made misty blue veils in the shadows. Long-soled cactus spread like green footprints upon the dark earth—the whole lonely place a wilderness of bloom left to govern itself.

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Somewhere behind this garden in those days stood a little house, left over like a poor relation in adversity.

I was born there.

My recollection now is that it was a good little house, with a busy mind and a kind heart inside, where a female child would be taught the Lord’s Prayer at an early age, and how to sew and knit; but it was not, you would have concluded at a glance, the cradle of genius. Very few people make provision beforehand for geniuses in their families. They are like the seed that birds scatter—liable to spring up anywhere, but never to be anticipated. For my part, I doubt if they are born at all, but produce themselves by some chance of circumstances; almost any man or woman is remotely liable to become one.

But my first memories are not of this house, nor even of my father and mother. I had that faint impression of them which grown people have of Providence, to be depended upon, but too far off in consciousness to be cultivated. My measure of relationship at this time was that father was very tall, and mother was much shorter and very slender. I was some kind of a little pinwheel of life revolving away from them.

In these earliest years I must have belonged more particularly to the vegetable kingdom. My first vivid impressions are of being in the open, not doing anything, certainly not thinking. I seem to have grown like the grass on the rim of the green terrace beyond the flower garden for a long time. Father [Pg 14]and mother are very sketchy. They appear now in my memory of this period at rare intervals.

I was not sufficiently acquainted with them then to be aware of their anxieties. They belonged to another world. I can barely remember father’s blue gaze following me about, usually with the light of laughter in it. Mother was always busy. She had large gray eyes that caught me up with a glance, washed me like a saucer, set me down again and went on to her next deed with the swiftness of one who wore wings on her feet. This excessive energy may account for the fact that I formed no apron-string attachment to her.

The reputation I had, however, was that of being an extremely affectionate child. This only proves that any record written from memory must be incomplete. I suppose Homer omitted many important historical facts which did not rhyme with those he sang so lustily in his Iliad. Love anchored me so completely later in life, I am rather glad to think that in these first years my affections must have been like those of a busy man for his family, usually latent, but practiced with convincing charm at odd moments. I do not remember ever crying for my mother as other young children do, because I so completely believed in her. She could not forget me or forsake me. So far as I knew then, she would last forever. There was nothing, literally nothing, in my world to worry about. I was already living by faith.

This is the earliest faculty we develop. It is an enduring illusion at which the world and all the vicissitudes of life tear in vain. We replace every hope [Pg 15]that fails with another one. We change our standards and our creeds, but we live and die believing in something. It is a medicine we use to ease the mind. I have had so many letters lately from men and women who no longer believe in God. They have fallen over the precipice of rationalism into an awful pit of darkness. But it is perfectly apparent that any one of them would be quick to believe in a man or woman. They are the same old barnacles of faith we all are, who have lost their hold upon the good bottom, raked off by the lives they have lived or the thinking they have practiced. They are the most credulous people in the world. I never knew one who would not trust a convincing rascal. Or he will take to occultism, some spiritual nostrum, as a certain class of people prefer patent medicine for their physical ailments. What I mean is that the power to believe is born in us, and we must exercise it one

way or the other, as we breathe to live.

I have a vivid recollection of the child I was then, as one might remember the person he used to be in another life, sitting on the green crown of my world, very pudgy, back hunched, fingers curled in the grass, the hair on my head sticking up like a fine bright fringe, eyes wide and quiet, fixed upon nothing in particular, the groggy little somnambulist of a bright dream.