The Salamander.

by Owen Johnson.

FOREWORD

Precarious the lot of the author who elects to show his public what it does not know, but doubly exposed he who in the indiscreet exploration of customs and manners publishes what the public knows but is unwilling to confess! In the first place incredulity tempers censure, in the second resentment is fanned by the necessity of self-recognition. For the public is like the defendant in matrimony, amused and tolerant when unconvinced of the justice of a complaint, but fiercely aroused when defending its errors.

In the present novel I am quite aware that where criticism is most risked is at the hands of those entrenched moralists who, while admitting certain truths as fit subjects for conversation, aggressively resent the same when such truths are published. Many such will believe that in the following depiction of a curious and new type of modern young women, product of changing social forces, profoundly significant of present unrest and prophetic of stranger developments to come, the author, in depicting simply what does exist, is holding a brief for what should exist.

If the type of young girls here described were an ephemeral manifestation or even a detached fragment of our society, there might be a theoretical justification for this policy of censure by silence. But the Salamanders are neither irrelevant nor the product of unrelated forces. The rebellious ideas that sway them are the same ideas that are profoundly at work in the new generation of women, and while for this present work I have limited my field, be sure that the young girl of to-day, from the age of eighteen to twenty-five, whether facing the world alone or peering out at it from the safety of the family, whether in the palaces of New York, the homesteads of New England, the manors of the South or the throbbing cities and villages of the West, whatever her station or her opportunity, has in her undisciplined and roving imagination a little touch of the Salamander.

That there exists a type of young girl that heedlessly will affront every appearance of evil and can yet remain innocent; that this innocence, never relinquished, can yet be tumultuously curious and determined on the exploration of the hitherto forbidden sides of life, especially when such reconnoitering is rendered enticing by the presence of danger--here are two apparent contradictions difficult of belief. Yet in the case of the Salamander's brother, society finds no such difficulty--it terms that masculine process, "seeing the world," a study rather to be recommended for the sake of satisfied future tranquillity.

That the same can be true of the opposite s.e.x, that a young girl without physical temptation may be urged by a mental curiosity to see life through whatever windows, that she may feel the same impetuous frenzy of youth as her brother, the same impulse to sample each new excitement, and that in this curiosity may be included the safe and the dangerous, the obvious and the complex, the casual and the strange, that she may arrogate to herself the right to examine everything, question everything, peep into everything--tentatively to project herself into every possibility and after a few years of this frenzy of excited curiosity can suddenly be translated into a formal and discreet mode of life--here is an exposition which may well appear incredible on the printed page. I say on the printed page because few men are there who will not recognize the justice of the type of Salamander here portrayed.

Only as their experience has been necessarily individual they do not proceed to the recognition of a general type. They know them well as accidents in the phantasmagoria of New York but they do not comprehend them in the least.

The Salamander in the last a.n.a.lysis is a little atom possessed of a brain, thrown against the great tragic luxury of New York, which has impelled her to it as the flame the moth.

She comes roving from somewhere out of the immense reaches of the nation, revolting against the commonplace of an inherited narrowness, pa.s.sionately adventurous, eager and unafraid, neither sure of what she seeks nor conscious of what forces impel or check her. She remains a Salamander only so long as she has not taken a decision to enter life by one of the thousand avenues down which in her running course she has caught an instant vista. Her name disappears under a new self-baptism.

She needs but a little money and so occasionally does a little work. She brings no letters of introduction, but she comes resolved to know whom she chooses. She meets them all, the men of New York, the mediocre, the interesting, the powerful, the flesh hunters, the brutes and those who seek only an amused mental relaxation. She attracts them by hook or crook, in defiance of etiquette, compelling their attention in ways that at the start hopelessly mystify them and lead to mistakes. Then she calmly sets them to rights and forgives them. If she runs recklessly in the paths of danger, it is because to her obsessed curiosity it is imperative for her to try to comprehend what this danger can mean.

She has no salon to receive her guests--she turns her bedroom at noon into a drawing-room, not inviting every one, but to those to whom she extends the privilege fiercely regulating the proprieties. She may have a regular occupation or an occasional one, neither must interfere with her liberty of pleasure. She needs money--she acquires it indirectly, by ways that bear no offense to her delightfully illogical but keen sensibilities. With one man she will ride in his automobile, far into the night--to another she will hardly accord the tips of her gloves. She makes no mistakes. Her head is never dizzy. Her mind is in control and she knows at every moment what she is doing. She will dare only so far as she knows she is safe.

She runs the gamut of the city, its high lights and its still shadows.

She enters by right behind its varied scenes. She breakfasts on one egg and a cup of coffee, takes her luncheon from a high-legged stool in a cellar restaurant, reluctantly counting out the change, and the same night, with supreme indolence, descends from a luxurious automobile, before the flaring portals of the restaurant most in fashion, giving her fingers to those who rank among the masters of the city.

This curiosity that leads her to flit from window to window has in it no vice. It is fed only by the zest of life. Her pa.s.sion is to know, to leave no cranny unexplored, to see, not to experience, to flit miraculously through the flames--never to be consumed!

That her standard of conduct is marvelous, that her ideas of what is permitted and what is forbidden are mystifying, is true. So too is it difficult to comprehend, in the society of men of the world, what is fair and what is unfair, what is "done" and what is not "done." To understand the Salamander, to appreciate her significance as a criticism of our present social forms, one must first halt and consider what changes are operating in our social system.

If one were privileged to have the great metropolis of New York reduced to microcosm at his feet, to be studied as man may study the marvelous organism of the anthill or the hive, two curious truths would become evident. First that those whom the metropolis engenders seldom succeed their fathers, that they move in circles as it were, endlessly revolving about a fixed idea, apparently stupefied by the colossal shadows under which they have been born; secondly that daily, hourly even, a stream of energetic young men constantly arrives from the unknown provinces, to reinvigorate the city, rescue it from stagnation, ascending abruptly to its posts of command, a.s.suming direction of its manifold activities--ruling it.

Further, one would perceive that the history of the city is the result of these two constantly opposed forces, one striving to conserve, the other to acquire. The inheritors constantly seek to define the city's forms, encase its society, limit its opportunities, transform its young activities into inheritable inst.i.tutions; while the young and ardent adventurers who come with no other baggage than their portmanteaux of audacity and sublime disdain, are constantly firing it with their inflaming enthusiasm, purifying it with their new health, forcing the doors of reluctant sets, storming its giant privileges, modernizing its laws, vitalizing its arts, capturing its financial hierarchies, opposing to the solidifying force of attempted systems their liberating corrective of opportunity and individualism. Of the two forces, only the conqueror from without is important.

This phenomenon of immigration is neither new nor peculiar to our civilization. It is indeed the living principle of a metropolis which, as it requires food, water, fire for its material existence, must also hourly levy, Minotaur-like, its toll on foreign youth. Woman has had no counterpart to this life-giving fermentation of young men. The toll of the metropolis has been the toll of corruption, spreading corruption, and this continuous flow of the two s.e.xes through the gates of the city has been like the warring pa.s.sage through the arteries of red life-defending corpuscles and disease-bearing germs.

Now suddenly to one who thus profoundly meditates this giant scheme, a new phenomenon has appeared. All at once amid the long stretching lines of young men that seek the city from the far horizon appear the figures of young women, not by hundreds but by the thousands, following in the steps of their brothers, wage-earners animated by the same desire for independence, eager and determined for a larger view of life, urged outward by the same imperative revolt against stagnation, driven by the same unrest for the larger horizon. This culminative movement, begun in the decline of the nineteenth century, may well be destined to mark the twentieth century as the great era of social readjustment.

In the past the great block to woman's complete and equal communion with man has been her economic dependence on him; while she has not been necessary to man, man has been necessary to her. Hence her forced acceptation of his standard of her position and her duties. In one generation, by this portentous achievement of economic independence, woman in a night, like Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham, has suddenly elevated herself to a position of aggressive equality. Those who see in the feminine movement no further than a question of political expediency perceive no more than a relatively unimportant manifestation. What has happened is that the purely masculine conception of society has been suddenly put to the challenge. Man's conception of religion, of marriage and the family, of property rights versus sentimental rights, of standards of conduct and political expediency, imperfect and groping as they have been, will, in the future, progress according to a new alliance between man and woman. And this world revolution has come, day by day, month after month, in the spectacle of young women, bundles in arms, light of purse, rebel in heart, moving in silent thousands toward the great cities. In this new army of women who have now intrenched themselves in the strongholds of economic independence, there are two distinct but related divisions, the great ma.s.s who must work and the relatively smaller cla.s.s, socially more significant, who must live, those, of whom the Salamanders are the impatient outstripping advance, who are determined to liberate their lives and claim the same rights of judgment as their brothers.

What has brought this great emigration to pa.s.s? Several causes, some actively impelling, others merely pa.s.sively liberating--the taking down of weakened bars.

The causes which have actively impelled this liberating emigration are more clearly perceived, the causes which have pa.s.sively permitted this removal of the bars are less obvious. We are a society of pa.s.sage--between two ports. Scarcely can we recall the thin sh.o.r.es we have departed, nor can any one foretell what outlines, at the end of the voyage, will rise out of the sea of experiment. In every social revolution there are three distinct generations, the first of intrenched traditions, the second of violent reaction and the third of reconstruction. And if it seem a law of nature's tireless action and reaction that fathers and sons should be ever set against one another, ever misunderstanding one another, the true measure of human progress lies in that degree of change which results between the first and the third generations. Between this old generation of authority and this present generation of logic has come a feminine revolution startling in the shock of its abruptness. Yet a social revolution that obliterates in an hour the landmarks of ages, frequently resembles a cataclysm of nature--the gathering torrent only becomes possible with the last six inches of earth. What has broken out in these last half a dozen years has been acc.u.mulating without beginning--for ideas can have no beginnings. They have existed in the unconscious human soul as the germ of physical evolution has lain among the glaciers and the wilderness.

What then was the position of women under the old order? That generation of authority was intrenched in the great social domination of the church. What in effect did religion say to women? It said:

"Remember always that this life is of no moment. It is given you that you may inherit eternity. Reckon not the present, aspire to the next.

Abnegation is glorious, suffering is to be prized, sacrifices patiently made bring you by so much nearer to Heaven. Subordinate yourself, bear everything, accept all burdens gladly. Live for others; forgive, inspire. If this life seem to you narrow and motherhood staggering, bleak, joyless, think not on the fatigue but on the awakening."

With the turning of men's minds to the dormant truths of science came a great agnostic revolt that brought a scientific questioning of all facts and a demand that everything should fall or stand by the test of the reason. In this new enthusiasm for logic, which has overturned so many rooted inst.i.tutions with its militant individualism, the authority of the home has been shattered, divorce has been multiplied in the protest against the old unreasoning tyranny of marriage, and the Puritan domination of the church has too often become a social inst.i.tution for the better ordering of the ma.s.ses and an outward form of polite respectability. In this complete breaking down of authority the voice of the church that spoke to women has been lost.

Another troubling phase began simultaneously, the period of miraculous material opportunity, the fungus growth of fortunes great and little.

The suddenly prosperous parents began to plan for their children those opportunities which had been denied them, seeking to educate them beyond what they had known--a process ever linked with tragedy and disillusionment. What now results, with the thousands of young girls who have learned of magazines and novels or who have gone out from the confining narrowness of little homes to a broader education--not simply in books but in the experience of life, of a certain independency, of the opportunities beyond?

At about the age of eighteen the Salamander returns to town or village, to the mediocrity of the home from which she has escaped, and at once the great choice of life presents itself to her. What she has learned, what she has absorbed from every newspaper has awakened her curiosity and given her a hunger of the great life which is throbbing somewhere, far away, in great cities, in a thousand fascinating forms.

To remain, to take up a mild drudgery in the home, means closing the door on this curiosity. Marriage to such men as remain means at best the renunciation of that romance which is stirring in her imagination. Why should she have been educated, if but to return to a distasteful existence? The parents by the very education which has thrust their daughter so far above their simple needs have destroyed their old authority. No other voice of authority commands her in credible tones to renounce the follies of this life--to consult only the future.

In fact she is none too certain of what is beyond, but she is certain of what she wants to-day. She spurns the doctrine that it is woman's position to abnegate and to immolate herself. New ideas are stirring within her, logical revolts--equality of burden with men, equality of opportunity and of pleasure. She is sure of one life only and that one she pa.s.sionately desires. She wants to live that life to its fullest, now, in the glory of her youth. She wants to breathe, not to stifle. She wants adventure. She wants excitement and mystery. She wants to see, to know, to experience....

And one fine day, inevitably, she packs her valise as her brothers may have done before her, and despite commands, entreaties, tears, she stands at last on the platform of a shivering creaking train, waving the inevitable farewell to the old people, who stand bewildered, straining their eyes after the fast-fading handkerchief, feebly fluttered by the daughter whom they have educated for this. She will come back soon. She will return in a few months--in a year, surely. She never returns.

Sometimes the home has been disrupted by divorce, by death or by indifference; in which case her departure is the sooner. Sooner or later if she is clever or attractive she reaches New York. New York is the troubling light whose rays penetrate to her wherever she may start. At last, one fine day, she crowds impatiently forward to the front of the choked ferry-boat, beholds the play of a million lights starting against the twilight, vast shapes crowding to the water's edge like mythological monsters, towers flinging up new stars among the constellations--and the battle has begun.

What will she become? In six months she has learned the anatomy of the complex struggling city, flinging herself into a ceaseless whirl of excitement. She usually finds a facile occupation which gives her the defense and the little ready money she needs. She goes into journalism, stenography or the office of a magazine. Sometimes she has already been trained to nursing, which opens many avenues of acquaintance to her deft planning. Sometimes she has a trick with pen or pencil and plays at art.

More often she touches the stage in one of a dozen ways. But all this is beside the mark. Her real occupation is exploration--how do they act, these men, clever or stupid, rich, poor, mediocre, dangerous or provokingly easy to manage? What is the extent of the power that she can exert over them?

Her education has been quickly formed. The great fraternity of the Salamanders has taught her of their curious devious understanding. Her acquaintance with women is necessarily limited, but she can meet what men she wishes, men of every station, men drawn to her by the lure of her laughter and tantalizing arts, men who simply wish to amuse themselves, or somber hunters who have pa.s.sed beyond the common stuff of adventuresses and seek with a renewal of excitement this corruption of innocence. She has no fear of these last, matching her wits against their appet.i.tes, paying them back cruelly in snare and disillusion. She lives in automobiles and taxi-cabs, dines in a new restaurant every night--and with difficulty, each week, sc.r.a.pes up the necessary dollars to pay her board. She knows the insides of p.a.w.n-shops, has secret treaties with tradesmen and by a hundred stratagems procures herself presents which may be converted into cash. She is fascinated by "dangerous" men. She adores perilous adventures and somehow or other, miraculously, she never fails in saving her skirts from the contagion of the flames.

The period in which she whirls in this frantic existence--the day of the Salamander--is between eighteen and twenty-five. She does not make the mistake of prolonging, beyond her youth and her charm, this period fascinating though it be. By twenty-five, often sooner, she comes to some decision. Frequently she marries, and marries well, for the opportunities at her disposal are innumerable. Then what she becomes must depend on the invisible hazards that sport with all marriages.

Sometimes she selects a career--few women, indeed, are there in the professions who have not known their years among the Salamanders--but as she is always ruled by her brain, she does not often deceive herself; she sees clearly the road ahead and seldom ventures unless she is convinced. Sometimes she prefers her single existence, resigning herself to a steady occupation, slipping back into Salamanderland occasionally.

Sometimes--more rarely than it would seem--she takes the open step beyond the social pale, conquered at length by the antagonists she has so long eluded--but then she has betrayed the faith of a Salamander.

To a European, the Salamanders are incomprehensible. He meets them often en voyage, often to the cost of his pride, and for his vanity's sake he denies their innocence. In his civilization they could not exist Even the New Yorker, who a.n.a.lyzes her surface manners, recounts her tricks and evasions, her deceptive advances, is still ignorant of the great currents beneath, and of how profound is their unrest.

For, capricious, inconsistent, harum-scarum, dabbling with fire--yet is she not the free agent she so ardently believes? Back of all the pa.s.sionate revolt against the commonplace in life, back of all the defiantly proclaimed scorn of conventions, there are the hushed echoes of the retreating first generation, there are old memories, whispers of childhood faith, hesitations and doubts that return and return, and these quiet suspended sounds constantly turn her aside, make of her a being constantly at war with herself, where will and instinct are ever opposed without she perceives or comprehends the where-for.

We see clearly two generations, the old order of broken authority pa.s.sing sadly away, the new which is bravely seeking a logical standard of conduct beyond that of blind obedience--if yet the time be arrived when humanity be ready. The third--that coming generation in which woman will count for so much, where for the first time she will construct and order--where will it go? Backward a little or forward? Will those who have been Salamanders to-day, turned mothers to-morrow, still teach what they have proclaimed, that what is wrong for the woman is wrong for the man and that if man may experience woman may explore?

THE SALAMANDER