Against Nature

In Which Everything that is Young, Inadequate and Tiresome is Included in the Term Natural

LYDIA STEPTOE

I HATE Nature. Nature and simplicity. I always have. I feel I always shall.

I hated simplicity in the cradle. I was given to periods of grim silence at the tender age of six months because I realized that one pin held me together. I should have liked to feel that my personality required at least three pins. Ah, how I could have basked in the knowledge that I, out of all the babies of my community, required three pins to keep me from unwinding!

I fretted if the tucks of my night gown were not inter-tucked, if you know what I mean.

I grew up in anxiety.

At seventeen I had become saturated with the average hero in books. I yearned for one who could encompass his own birth, or some little thing like that.

At nineteen I was almost improbable. At twenty-three I was wearing Burne Jones gowns and stretching my throat till it ached. I patronized two green thumb rings, and no one but the gardener of our orchid house, who was accustomed to peculiar and unaccountable forms of growth, dared address me.

A Cultivated Woman

AT twenty-five I was leaning on every garden - urn within a radius of six miles. I spoke depreciatingly to bird, beast and reptile. Space was my only constituent.

I was growing.

Of course, all this was very difficult for my • friends. My teas reached such a high point of tension that a sermon was finally preached about me by the pastor. He called the sermon "Don't key the E string too high"—I don't remember just what moral it pointed.

I am not an old maid. I am not bitter nor crabbed, I do not stitch narrow-minded mottoes. No, I glory in golden hair and high heels and puce gloves, and you can tell by the way my nostrils quiver that I have suffered delicately over such subjects as whether Conrad got more out of women or the sea.

I hold advanced ideas, but not vulgarly advanced. I keep just prettily ahead of the times, where I show to best advantage, half turned head over shoulder, beckoning the generation.

Neither am I particularly dangerous.

I am supposed to be, just because I scorn other, people's ideas of danger. That always makes people mad.

I am a cultivated woman. There's no denying that I have travelled. There's something Continental in everything I do. For instance,

I always try to keep at least one country between me and my political faiths—that's rather unusual for a woman, you'll admit.

Then I have breeding. You know by the way I walk that I have visited Napoleon's tomb and the grave of Oscar Wilde and the German chamber of horrors in life-like wax. There's something about the way I sit in a chair—well back on the spine—that gives you a hint that I have studied the saddle technique of Jeanne D'Arc in all the better French villages, and only a person who has gone with peculiarly reverent steps up the grand staircase of the Opera could lift her feet with that sense of doom I fill you with when I lift mine.

Safety winces when I walk. There is not a cat in the neighborhood of my apartment that does not jump six inches higher in clearing the fence than any other cat, just because of that something in my personality.

But it's not this alone that makes me narrow my eyes the way I do, and toy sadly with my endive.

It's the realization of the great number of things that come under the damning head of Nature and simplicity.

Everything that is inadequate, young or tiresome is called natural.

Men come under this head—

Love comes under it—

Babies—

Adolescence—

Womanhood—

The debutante—

The jeune fille, and

All kinds of Nature lovers, male and female. To this list of "Natural" things I should like to add hay-fever, detective stories, bad temper, slips of the tongue, pride, and whatever you forgot to do, were too lazy to carry out, or were not clever enough to conceal.

For a beginning let me take the case of men. Men are so simple that you can not help knowing when they are in love, by the singular way they tear down your curtains—hurling themselves on any photograph, not of themselves, of which you may have become fond. The secondary stage ushers in pistols, which they never intend firing off, except in the most desultory way; and before long they fall at your feet, after every other dramatic gesture has been exhausted—but it is only another of Nature's laws working—the cutworm also begins its undermining at the base.

Lochinvars From All Directions

I HAVE been cherished by many men. Men from the burning South have come to New York, following the green line, to hiss such admonitions between their teeth as "Beware!" and "Danger!" Yet in the end, so little has been their power for danger that it has been up to me to tear the tiger rug to pieces all alone, piece by piece, hair by hair.

Men from the cold North, dragging pounds and pounds of skins—encased in so many pairs of mittens that they were quite unable to reach their card-cases—have tried to convince me that I would look lovely with a small sized iceberg as a background, and the rest of the evening it has been my painful duty to keep them from bursting into verdure from their tropical excesses.

So you see they are not only ridiculous but contrary.

Added to that, they seem to think women the legitimate cul-de-sac of every narrow-minded action.

Then, when they have got you all worn out, they drag in babies.

Now what I want to know is why babies are considered such justifiers of a woman's existence?

To justify yourself more than five or six times in a life is rather insisting on the point, it seems to me; a point that even Nature would drop—and Nature almost never drops a point Yet some women go right on to the seventh or eighth. . w

I think it would be far more delicate of women, in every way, to stop clinching arguments with children. ⅛ '

Womanhood should not be thrust upon tho attention. c

And now we come to the jeune fille.

I hate the jeune fille. There isn't that much youth. They are always exclaiming "Where am I?" when they wake up a little too earlv for breakfast. ^

And, oh, the debutante!

I know every young creature is entitled to one coming out, but they come out too far They take a sliding run and land right out here in the midst of women who have suffered and kept their cigarettes lit at the same time.

Somehow, they feel that Nature is on their side.

That's what I have against Nature.

The very presence of a debutante makes me realize that simplicity is not for me. I wish to twine roses—double strength—in my hair, and go intolerably mad. For I could bring things to madness that it has never had.

The Inadequacies of Debutantes

YES, when I hear the laugh of the debutante, and observe all their inadequacies ending in legs; when they discuss Shaw from the standpoint of respect for the beard, and Henry James because he left everything so beautifully unsaid;—then, yes, then, I want to tear down the ivy encircling the family tomb and go into the desert with some nice, rather sophisticated monk, not too given to passionate renunciation.

Here I must ask this one question: how do young girls live through so much safety and yet reach, quite suddenly, the "Dangerous Age"?

That's not the way danger is made.

You cannot possibly be dangerous until you know too much about love.

Love is Nature's trunjp card.

I was once told (of course) that love is beautiful. It was told me by my mother; she should know, she never had it. Absence of it stimulated her imagination. The scientist will tell you that is what absence always does.

She said love is powerful; she also said love is a gift, that it is not only precious but twofold, and not to be tampered with. She added that love is not for the masses. Just what it is for, she said, she had never been able to discover; she said perhaps it belonged, intrinsically, to H. G. Wells.

She said that among Nature lovers there were none so devoted as the tired business man, and she went on to conclude that perhaps it was just as well.

I never asked her what she meant by this. I did not ask her because I know a little something about business men as Nature lovers myself.

They love Nature more than Annette Kellerman and Isadora Duncan put together. The business man backs up any social frightfulness, of which he may have been the instigator, by simply dragging in Nature. He is always pulling your spirits down by lurid descriptions of home with roses clinging to the front porch and smoke issuing from the chimney and hens laying eggs in the back yard.

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I presume almost no one really realizes how dangerous it is to love Nature. I've seen it do peculiar and horrible things to people who had a good start.

Through love of plants men have lost their ability to stand alone, and have become permanently hooked. Through I preoccupation with crawling, bivalvular creatures, they have neglected to shave for such a lengthy period that they be| come too heavily bearded to be of any further use in the home.

Some of the best families have allowed themselves to be photographed for the photogravure section of the Times , —photographed standing knee-deep in bulrushes and pigweed, holding the family baby on a level with their Vandyke's i —and beneath some such title as: "He | loved Nature, but Nature did not wait."

On the other hand, love of Nature i has done even worse things to women.

Under its influence women become prone to nets and sharp pitiful little cries, because they have stepped on a worm or removed the pollen from some butterfly.

Now that I have told you what I hate and why I hate it, I am going to tell you what I would like in the place of Nature and simplicity, for as you may have guessed I am not essentially a destructive critic. No, I believe in building up.

I want women who will solve their destiny without children—

Debutantes who will forego youth— Jeune lilies who will regret it—

Men who will not bank on it—

Love that will not include it—

And Nature lovers who will let Nature have a few private moments—in this way perhaps something wonderful would happen !

Yes I want intricacy, falsity, perfidy —anything, anything that is a step removed from this eternal simplicity that everybody seems to like.

Yes, I am she who narrows her eyes and toys with her endive, and I don't care who sees me.