A Middle-Aged Women

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

THIS is intended only for the middleaged. Others will not read it. I say middle-aged advisedly, rather than thirty or forty or fifty years, because there seems to be a difference of opinion as to the exact figures. I have a young friend who puts middle-age at thirty. She affirms that sixty is a high average of mortality, and that thirty is, therefore, middle-age, and that women would be a good deal more sensible if they faced the fact courageously, and lived up to it, and dressed up to it, and stopped calling one another girls, which, she declares, is “ perfectly sickening.” She will not hear of placing the beginning of middle-age a day beyond thirty ; and I suspect that she thinks the woman of forty is already upon the downward path of old age. However as I said before, she is young, very young, several years younger than I am, and her opinion may change with advancing years. Opinions have a way of changing with the years, I notice. Old Age skips nimbly away as we approach. Just as our outstretched fingers touch his garment, a hand is laid upon our eyes and we fall asleep, not knowing that we have come upon him unawares. So, too, middle-age has a way of evading approach, slipping from thirty to forty, and from forty to fifty, with placid disregard of fact and of logic. Surely thirty is not middle-age, — nay, then, forty ; but some live to be a hundred, — why not halve it ? It is easy and natural to think in centuries, and to figure in round numbers. “ Threescore years and ten? ” Ay. But that was long ago, — the average of mortality is increasing, — and fifty is a comfortable number. Let us put off the evil day as long as we may. For some morning we shall awake to middle-age, — all of us. A few only will escape, the few chosen of the gods.

And now at last, after this long preamble, I am able to say what I started out to say, namely, that I am a middle-aged woman. Pray do not think hardly of me. I am still respectable. I enjoy music, and I play golf with my son. Occasionally I beat him. But I am middle-aged. How do I know it ? By the same token that you would know it, were I to have the pleasure of meeting you, by the fact that the hard days of life are past. The long, level plain of the upland stretches before me. By and by I shall descend the hill that lies beyond. But that is far in the distance. Now, at last, for a stretch of level road, for the days of the upper air. It has been a hard climb. Surely one may take deep, full breaths and look before and behind and around. When I first woke to the consciousness that I was here at last, I looked about me, and I saw my neighbors, each in her little tent of her chosen task. I saw what was expected of me if I would be as others are.

My neighbor on the right is a middle-aged woman, too. She has been a good mother and a kind neighbor, and every day till she came to middle-age was filled to the brim. Now her children are all in college or in business. But do not think that time hangs heavy on her hands. I never run in for a moment’s chat that I do not find her at work. Yesterday she was piecing and turning an old carpet from the attic — for the servant’s room. To-day it is probably an overcoat, and to-morrow it may be an undershirt. Or I may find her mounted on a chair, her skirt pinned carefully about her, looking over the things that have accumulated on the top pantry shelf. Things too good to throw away and too bad to keep, — the chocolate pot with the broken nose and the plate in two pieces that might be stuck together with white lead, — no, it’s not worth it, — but it seems almost too bad to throw it away, — it was always such a pretty plate, — it would do at least for cookies if it were mended carefully, and the plate goes back to the top shelf, — to wait another day of reckoning and indecision. My hostess dusts her fingers and climbs down from the chair, a little stiff in the joints, — from middle-age, — and greets me with a joyous smile. It is the smile of righteousness. The smile that the attack on the top shelf never fails to bring to the face of a worthy and care-driven housekeeper. The smile that my neighbor will smile to the end of her days, — happy sister! It is only a little while since the days were so full that she could mount to the top shelf but once a year, perhaps not that. It hung over her always, the top shelf. And the day when at last it could be cleaned was marked with a white stone. Now the months are sprinkled with shining, white stones, the graveyard of a life. But she will never know. I shall not tell her, though I shout it aloud to the whole world; and I cherish a hope that I may keep it from her to the last.

We have been neighbors many years. We climbed the hill together. Our children had the same joys and the same sorrows and the same diseases. We went through scarlet fever together — a double quarantine — and croup and diphtheria. What one had, the other had. There was no escape for them or for us. My neighbor, as a young woman, was very beautiful, a kind of regal beauty that made one glad at heart — and proud. I thought of it the other day as she dusted her fingers and climbed down from her chair by the pantry shelf. I have watched the beauty go — and the dreams — from her face. It was the scarlet fever winter that wrought the worst. It left her a middle-aged woman, contented if the sink drain was clean and the cellar well aired. She has always been a good housekeeper. Her home is her kingdom. Her husband and her children are well cared for. But sometimes when I lie awake at night, my heart aches for the regally beautiful creature that began to climb the hill with me, — the woman whose mind stirred, whose laugh flashed along the way. And when I look at her husband, — the rotund, the well-preserved John, — and at her children, wooden and conscientious and selfish, for the most part, I become a violent woman ’s-righter.

Not many rights do I ask, — oh, Protectors of the Poor, — only the right to one’s soul. Not my soul, — I, as you may have suspected long since, am not a good housekeeper. I have no top pantry shelf ; and if I had one, there would probably be nothing on it. And my husband hath a lean and hungry look, and I am very proud of him. As for my children, they must speak for themselves,— they usually do. No, it is not for myself alone that I ask the rights of a human being ; but for that other soul that started with me on the way. The rotund John is not an equivalent. I will have none of him. In the name of her lost soul, I ask it, and for those others, whose tents are pitched along the upper plain, far as the eye can reach. For all of us, — squaws of civilization, each in her little tent, with our pots and pans and our bead-work, with church work and clubs and pantry shelves for consolation, with the smile of achievement on our lips and the dust of dead dreams blown about in our souls, — for all of us, I ask it, — oh, ye men born of woman, — the right to a vital and self-respecting and beautiful middleage.