Don't Pick Me

CHAPTER XXVIII

Jane lay awake until she heard Jerry tiptoe up to his room, in the early morning. It gave her an excited sense of satisfaction that, however much he opposed her confessed profession, the thing she had created held him spellbound. The artist in him could not withstand good workmanship. Or perhaps he found her ideas interesting. She could scarcely wait until morning to hear his verdict—and at the same time she dreaded it. She was tempted to go to his room now, and demand it, so that she might sleep.

She had suffered deeply through his facetious recital of her story, it was not until she understood that he was hurt by her neglect to offer him the book that she could force herself to forgive it. How they stumbled about in the dark, missing each other! Was it so in better regulated marriages? Did men and women really ever truly understand each other?

Jane pondered the question as to whether the initial dissimilarity between them was being widened by the engulfing current that was sweeping woman on so rapidly into new waters of unrest. If this storm was carrying her into any more than a temporary separation of interest from man's, then it meant destruction and the need of rebuilding. Men seemed to be blaming women with the unrest in the world to-day. Jerry voiced a grievance against them as trouble makers. It was like blaming the sea for its attraction for the moon—accusing the sun for sailing through its orbit. A force—generated who knows how or where?—had been set in motion. Call it education, industrial and economic freedom, or what you will, it had happened. Women could not start it—could not stop it. Nor could men.

Ours is an age of conflict, of rapid change, taking place in our knowledge and all about us. The conflict is psychological as well as material. Take one small detail of our machinery. In Jane's own lifetime had come a total revolution in man's method of transportation. Subways, elevated trains, automobiles, aeroplanes. How swiftly must the individual readjust himself. He has within him, intensified, the struggle and the discoördination which is taking place in the large social group. He has to meet the crisis of accepting daily new truths, while he is bound, even tortured, by traditional convictions.

It was because the Jerry type of man did not see that this discoördination ramified into every corner of our lives—that it is religious, social, political, as well as material and domestic. But boy-man that he was, he recognized it only where it struck home quickest to him, in his sex life, in his marital relations. He could not realize that this was not the basis of the whole unrest and therefore to be laid at woman's door—that it was only reaction from an universal discoördination.

She had tried to work this out in her book; she had striven with all her power to get above this seething, boiling, electrified whirlpool that we call life, to find purpose in it—direction and ultimate calm. She wanted to drive home her conviction that, whether we swim with the torrent or against it, we must do it together—men and women—adjusting and readjusting.

Dawn came. She heard Anna stirring below, before she dropped asleep. Jerry was still asleep when she left the house. She was relieved that she did not have to meet him, in the disorganized condition of mind and body in which she found herself after her sleepless and perturbed night. She took a brisk walk before she went to her work, and compromised by setting herself to revision rather than creation.

When she came into the nursery on her return, she found Jerry there. At sight of her he put the baby down quickly on the bed, and came toward her, with a look on his face she could not fathom.

"Jane, why, Jane...." he began and stopped. He held out his hand and she laid hers in it, while he still stared at her in the most intense way.

"I can hardly believe it—I couldn't lay it down."