sinister curse that reaches out and lays a hand on the future of the
one he or she marries, he or she is bound in honor to tell the other
one about it. But when there is nothing of this kind, nothing but a
youthful folly, a mistake, a blunder in the dark, bitterly repented
of and lived down, it seems to me the part of wisdom for both men and
women to forego post-mortems, and to wash the slate clean and make a
fresh start.
What they have done does not matter so much as what they are going to
do. And it often happens that just because a man or woman has stumbled
in the past they walk the more carefully among the pitfalls of life,
and that out of the sorrows and repentance for their sins they have
brought a tenderness, a compassion, a forbearance and an understanding
that makes them better men and women than the vast majority of those
who have lived blameless lives.
Confession is always weakness. The brave soul keeps its own secrets,
and takes its own punishment in silence. It takes a strong man or woman
to keep from blabbing, but it pays never to tell anything that you do
not wish the world to know.
XXI
DOMESTIC BOREDOM
The thing that oftenest makes marriage a failure is its dulness.
The real specter on the hearth is that awful silence. It is because
husbands and wives have nothing interesting to say to each other that
they quarrel. It is no joke, it is a sad truth, that in any theater or
restaurant you can spot the married couples at a first glance. They are
the couples who are sitting up reading the program through from cover
to cover between the acts, or are apparently memorizing the menu while
the waiter brings their order. The alert, interesting, smiling people
who are gayly chatting together are the unwed, or those who are talking
to other people’s husbands and wives.
Let even a bore drop into a droopy, dejected family circle that has
been yawning itself to death and everybody brightens up and the stream
of conversation which had apparently dried up at its source begins to
flow again. Two may be company and three a crowd before marriage, but
generally after marriage two is gobs of silence and three a godsend.
Yet the majority of people marry for companionship. Before marriage
they could never get enough of each other’s society, and they esteemed
each other perfect spellbinders. How is it, then, that they get so fed
up on each other’s company that they sit up like mutes in the solitude
of their homes? Why is it that, apart from fault-finding and spats and
complaints about the servants and the tradesmen and bulletins about
the children, there is so little family conversation; practically none
that is interesting and cheerful and inspiring? You would think that
a husband and wife who have all interests in common could never talk
themselves out. But they do, and they come to the place where they take
refuge behind the evening paper or in solitaire to save themselves from
the pretense of even having to maintain the appearance of keeping up
social intercourse.
Wives lay the blame for this state of affairs on their husbands. They
say, heaven knows, that they would be glad enough to talk, but that
you can’t maintain a conversation with a person who always grunts by
way of reply, and who could give a clam on ice points on silence and
then beat it at the game. Men retort that they have exhausted their
conversational powers during business hours, and they desire to rest
their vocal cords at home. Nevertheless, it is observable that if
somebody interesting happens to call, or they go out to dinner, the
very man who was silent at home finds plenty to say.
Now there are several reasons why there is so little conversation in
the home. The first reason is because home talk is so often unpleasant.
Women, especially, are prone to flavor it with gloom. They like to
recite the litany of the day’s mischances. They spoil the flavor of a
dinner by telling how much it cost. They bring on a scene with a child
by telling of its naughtiness. They thrash over their old grievances
because they can’t have what richer women have.
All of this gets on the husband’s nerves, and he retorts by saying a
few pithy things about what a fool a man is to marry and burden himself
with a family and what a poor manager his wife is, and he gives a
few knocks to the dinner for good measure. After which conversation
naturally languishes.
Another reason that there is little conversation at home is because it
is dangerous. Experience teaches us that we have to watch our tongues
and delete our home talk if we want to save ourselves from endless
trouble.
A man hates to lie to his wife about what he does. He would enjoy
telling her all about the poker game he stayed downtown for last night,
and the funny things the boys said and did, but he does not do it
because well he knows that the price of such an indiscreet revelation
would be to have her nagging him about it forever and a day. A wife
would just love to tell her husband about her adventures in buying a
new hat, and how she fell for the twenty-five-dollar one instead of the
fifteen-dollar one she meant to buy. But she is well aware that she
would never hear the last of her extravagance if she did. So they both
keep silent.
There is little home conversation because nobody is interested, and
nobody pretends to be, in what you say. In the family circle nobody
listens. Nobody laughs at your jokes. Nobody sees the points of your
merry cracks. Try to tell a good story, and somebody is sure to remark
that they have heard it before, and that it is an ancient wheeze. If
you had discovered the North Pole and were relating your hairbreadth
adventures in reaching it by airplane, somebody would interrupt at the
most breathless moment to say that the iceman forgot to deliver the ice
yesterday.
Wives won’t listen even when their husbands try to tell them about
their hopes and plans and ambitions in their careers. And when a
woman tries to talk to her husband about the things that are of vital
interest to her he falls asleep and snores in her face.
And that is why conversation is a lost art in the family circle.
XXII
TO MARRY OR NOT TO MARRY?
A young woman once said to me:
“I am, as you know, the private secretary of the head of a very big
business concern. I get a generous salary. My hours are easy. My
employer, who is an elderly man, is one of the finest men in the world,
and treats me with every courtesy, kindness and consideration. I feel
it a privilege to be in daily contact with such a brilliant mind as he
has. I love my work. I have what they call in men a business head. To
me there is no other romance so fascinating as the romance of commerce;
no game so absorbing as the business game. And it thrills me to the
finger tips to know that I have a part, even if it is a small one, in
this great adventure that sends men and ships to the uttermost parts of
the earth and that gambles for fortunes.
“It gratifies my vanity to know that I have worked up from the bottom
to my present fine position, and it pleases my ambition to know that I
can climb still higher, and that every year I will be more efficient
and more valuable to my employer. I enjoy the money I make, and the
luxuries it brings me, as only a woman can who comes of a poor family,
and whose girlhood has been barren of all the pretty things that girls
crave. I find a lot of solid satisfaction in watching my bank account
grow, knowing that, if I keep on with my job for a few years, I will
have put by enough to safeguard my old age.
“So far, so good. If I were going to remain perpetually on the sunny
side of forty, I would ask no life better than that of the successful
business woman. But the dread hour will strike for me, as it does for
all other women, and I am wondering if, when it does, I will not find
myself a lonely old woman, and wish that I had married and had children.
“I am thirty now, and I have got to decide the question in the next
year or two. Shall I give up my mahogany desk for a gas range? Shall
I forfeit my fat pay envelope for a job where I shall have to toil
ten times as hard for only my board and clothes? Shall I give up the
occupation for which I spent years in preparing myself, for which I
have talent and which is a joy for me to perform, for domestic service
which I loathe, for which I have no aptitude and in which I am utterly
unskilled?
“When I see my sister shabby, bedraggled, overworked, with her crying
babies and grouchy husband I feel like clinging to my good, soft, easy
office position with both hands. Then rises that specter of the future
in my pathway, and I wonder if in staying single I will miss the best
that life has to give to a woman, and if I will regret it if I refuse
to follow the traditional career of my sex.
“Of course, I know that there are women who try to have their cake,
and eat it, too; who grab matrimony with one hand, and hold on to
their jobs with the other, but my observation is that they always
fall between the stools. They are failures both as business women and
as wives and mothers, for to succeed in anything you have to give
everything that is in you to it.
“No woman is of much use in an office when nine-tenths of her brain and
all of her interest are back home in a cradle and she is worrying over
whether a hired nurse is giving the baby its milk. Nor can any woman
who comes back home at night, with a worn-out body and jangled nerves,
be anybody’s ideal of a wife and mother.
“So as far as I am concerned I have to decide the question which I am
going to be, a business woman or a domestic woman, before I take the
fatal step, and for the life of me I can’t make up my mind which to do.
To marry or not to marry, that is the problem that I am acquiring gray
hairs and wrinkles debating.
“Of course, if a fairy prince should come along and say, ‘Come and be
my queen, and ride beside me in my limousine and tour the world with me
on my yacht,’ I should doff my Cinderella working suit and put on my
glass slippers, and step out with him.
“But it is only in novels that millionaires espouse poor working girls.
The men who come a-courting me are just ordinary young chaps on small
salaries, whose wives will have to do their own cooking, and wear
hand-me-downs.
“Nor would there be any difficulty in settling the question if I had an
overwhelming passion for some man. Then I would cry, ‘All for love and
my job well lost!’ and a two-by-four flat would look better to me than
to be president of the greatest corporation in the world. But I am not
really in love. I have merely an affection for a certain chap that I
might possibly cultivate into a warmer emotion if I decided that it was
better, after all, to marry.
“But it is cruel, isn’t it, that a woman has to choose between marriage
and her career? When a man marries he merely annexes a home and wife
and children to the pleasures and interests of his work, but a woman
has to sacrifice one or the other. And I don’t know which one to
choose.”
“And whichever way you decide, you will be apt to regret it,” I replied
consolingly.
XXIII
WOMAN’S GREATEST GIFT
A man told me the other day that he had not married until he was
forty-five years old because he was determined not to marry any woman
who did not have a sense of humor, and it took him that long to find
one.
A wise man! A very Solomon among men! May his tribe increase! It is a
million times more important for a woman to have a well-developed funny
bone than it is for her to have a Grecian profile, yet when men go to
marry they pick out a girl for a wife because she has melting black
eyes, or soulful blue eyes, without ever once observing whether the
said eyes look on the funny side of life or take a dark, pessimistic,
bilious view of it. Which is one of the reasons that domestic life is
no merry jest to the average husband.
A sense of humor is desirable in a man, but it is absolutely essential
for a woman to have a sense of humor if she is to be an agreeable life
partner, because a woman’s existence is made up of little, nagging
things, at which she must either laugh or cry, and if she can’t laugh
them off, they get on her nerves, and she goes to pieces.
It is the neurotic, haggard women, who can’t see a joke even after it
is diagrammed for them, who fill the insane asylums and the sanitariums
and divorce courts. The women who wear the smile that won’t come off,
and whose laughter is set on a hair trigger, get to be fair, fat and
forty, and you couldn’t pry their husbands away from them with a
crowbar. It is the lack of a sense of humor that causes women to make
tragedies instead of comedies out of trifles.
Take the servant trouble, for instance. Women worry themselves sick
over the mistakes of a green maid, and it never occurs to them that the
very blunders that they are shedding tears over are screamingly funny
contretemps that they pay out money to see imitated in a sketch on the
vaudeville stage.
Of course, no one wants the soup to be seasoned with sugar instead of
salt, nor the waste-paper basket to be put on the mantel as a parlor
ornament as a perpetual thing, but the mistress who can get a laugh
instead of a sick headache out of the mistakes of her Norah or Dinah,
fresh from Ireland or the cotton fields, saves her own face and that of
the maid whom she later trains into being a good servant.
Moreover, a woman with a sense of humor can take the curse off of even
bad cooking, for there is not one of us who would not rather sit
down to a boiled dinner with a jolly woman, full of good stories and
anecdotes, than to attend a banquet where the hostess is gloomy and
peevish and whiny, and who frets with her children and spats with her
husband.
Whether a woman makes a success or failure of matrimony depends
altogether on whether she has a sense of humor or not. If she can
see her husband as one of the most mirth-provoking, side-splitting,
uproarious human jokes that nature ever perpetrated she will be happy,
and he will bless heaven on his knees for having given him the paragon
of wives. But if she sees him as an Awful Problem, or a subject for
reformation, neither one of them will ever know a happy hour, and the
marriage will either end in a divorce court or a long endurance contest.
The women who wreck marriages are the ones who take their husbands
seriously, and who get tragic every time their husbands look at another
woman, or play a little poker, or fail to come home at the appointed
hour, and who weep when their husbands forget an anniversary, or fail
in some little attention they consider their due. The women who keep
their husbands enslaved from the altar to the grave are the women who
laugh with their husband over their little faults and peculiarities.
They make a joke of their husband’s weakness for a pretty face; they
have a dozen funny stories to tell about how they helped their husbands
out of scrapes, and, instead of feeling ill-used and assuming the pose
of a domestic martyr when their husbands forget their birthdays, they
go out and buy themselves a particularly nice present, which they pay
for without a murmur because they know that a wife with a sense of
humor is worth anything she costs.
A sense of humor is even more necessary to a mother than it is to a
wife. The humorless woman takes her children too tragically. They wear
her out, and she alienates them from her by her ceaseless nagging
because she thinks that every little foolish thing they do is full of
direful significance. The mother with a sense of humor knows that youth
is as subject to certain follies as it is to the mumps and the measles
and the whooping cough, and that it must go through these experiences,
as it did through the cycle of infantile diseases, but that they are
not fatal if they are carefully watched.
She may not approve of all the manifestations of flapperism and
jellybeanitis, but she knows that the remedy for them is laughter and
not tears, and so she keeps her young ones in bounds with good-natured
ridicule. Nor does she break her heart with dismal forebodings about
the terrible fate that is bound to overtake boys and girls who do
not dress and act as did their grandparents. She has seen too many
silly young people develop into fine men and women to borrow trouble
worrying over what is going to become of the race.
In its last analysis, a sense of humor is just the sense of proportion
that enables us to see things in their true relation to life. It is the
thing that keeps us from making mountains out of molehills, and that
gives us the courage to smile instead of cry. Happy the woman who has
this gift, and thrice happy the man who gets her for a wife.
XXIV
GRAFTING ON THE OLD FOLKS
It is a curious thing, in a way it is a beautiful thing, and it’s a
selfish thing, that children rarely ever think of their parents as
human beings. Children think of their fathers and mothers as the source
whence all blessings flow or they think of them as an avenging justice.
But it seldom occurs to them that their parents are men and women, in
addition to being parents; that they have the same preferences and long
for the same pleasures as other people, and that they have a few rights
that even their children should respect.
Of course, a small child unquestionably takes for granted all that
its parents give and do for it. It is merely the order of nature that
Mother should appear at its bed with the cup of water for which it
cries out in the night; that Mother should clean up the dirt it brings
into the house and spend hours over the stove cooking the things it
likes to eat; and that Father should work while it plays and go shabby
to give it fine clothes.
As they grow up, children continue to demand more and more of their
parents. They bleed Father and Mother white for the things they want.
They are not intentionally cruel, but they will take the last dollar
they can wring out of the family purse without ever once thinking that
Father and Mother might like to spend some of the money they earn
on themselves and in gratifying their own desires. And, curiously
enough, even after they have grown to man’s and woman’s estate, the
great majority of people still hold to this point of view about their
parents. In regulating their lives, they do not take their parents’
rights into consideration. They do not say, “My father and mother have
sacrificed enough for me; they have done enough for me. Now I will
stand on my own feet, and be as little a burden as possible to them.”
Of course, the most flagrant illustration of this is found in the
loafer sons and daughters who let their old parents work and support
them. We all know husky, able-bodied young men who play golf while
Father slaves in an office, and strapping big girls who perform on the
piano while Mother is performing on the gas range. Apparently, it never
crosses the mind of these despicable young people that after they are
old enough to support themselves they have no right to sponge upon
their parents, and graft their living off them. Still less do they ever
think that Mother and Father would like to take things easier as they
grow older, and indulge in a few of the luxuries they have had to deny
themselves while they were raising and educating their children.
Another illustration of how little children regard the rights of their
parents you may see in the nonchalance with which young mothers turn
over their children to their own mothers. When Sally wants to go to a
bridge luncheon or Maud wants to take a trip, they dump the children
down on Mother. When Clarabell wants to go to Europe for the summer,
she doesn’t worry at all as to what to do with the children. She leaves
them, with a thousand instructions as to diet and clothes, and manners
and morals, with Mother. So that in innumerable families Mother becomes
nothing but a sort of universal nursemaid.
It would shock these daughters to be told what a mean, selfish thing
they do in not standing by and doing their own baby tending as Mother
did hers. They, themselves, know what it is to walk the colic—what
broken nights mean, how incessant must be the care given little
children—how nerve-racking children’s noise is. Yet they foist this
burden on Mother without a pang of compunction because they are so used
to seeing her doing everything for them.
It never occurs to them that she would like to fold her hands in a
little peace and rest; furthermore, that she has earned it by bringing
up one family, and her daughters haven’t any right to make her
substitute on raising another one.
Then there are the children who lay their matrimonial burdens on their
parents. John gets married before he is earning enough to support a
family. Susie marries a ne’er-do-well, in spite of all efforts to
prevent it. Fanny discovers that the man to whom she is married is not
her soul mate, and gets a divorce, and comes back home with two or
three children. None of these selfish young people, bent on gratifying
their own desires, considers Father’s and Mother’s rights in the
matter, yet the parents, in the end, are the real sacrifices.
They can’t let John and his wife and children starve, and so the money
that Father and Mother had saved up for their old age goes in pittances
to help him along. They can’t shut the door in Fanny’s face when she
comes back with her divorce and her half-orphaned children, so Father
works harder, and Mother pinches and economizes more to raise and
educate this second family that their children have thrown upon them.
Surely there is no other thing that children need to realize so much as
that their parents have some rights. Perhaps if they understood this,
and that after a man and a woman have raised a family of children they
have a right to peace and quiet and their own money, there would be
fewer parasitic sons and daughters.
Perhaps, if they realized that parents had rights, more young people
would consider how their marriages would react on their parents, and
many a disgruntled wife would carry on with a marriage that wasn’t
perfectly congenial rather than burden her old parents with her own and
her children’s support.
XXV
ARE YOU A GOOD FATHER?
Are you a good father to your daughter, Mr. Man? You smile derisively
at my question. A good father to your little girl? You’ll tell the
world you are! Why, she is just the very core of your heart, and there
hasn’t been a blessed thing that she has wanted since the day she was
born that you haven’t given her. Why, you have almost broken your neck
trying to get the moon for her when she cried for it. Pretty dresses,
fashionable schools, good times, her own car, far more luxuries than
you could afford her, you have lavished upon her without stint. You
have kept her wrapped in cotton wool, and she has never known there was
such a thing as work or responsibility or self-denial in the world. You
may have failed in many other directions in doing your full duty, but
you can pat yourself on the back and thank God that you have been a
good father!
Well, let me tell you that if all you have done for your daughter is
just to pamper her and spoil her and make her weak and selfish and
self-centered, you have not been a good father. You have been the
worst sort of father. You have never looked upon your daughter as
anything but a pretty doll to dress up and play with, and dolls cannot
take care of themselves in the rough-and-tumble fight of life. Sooner
or later they are apt to get broken.
Let me tell you what I consider a good father. A good father is a man
who doesn’t look upon his daughter as a toy or a piece of bric-a-brac,
but as a human being who has been born with the heavy handicap of the
feminine sex upon her. That means that she will always be less strong
than a boy, less capable of taking care of herself, in far more danger.
Fewer opportunities will be open to her, and many more perils beset
her than would a boy. Therefore, she needs more protection. She needs
to be better trained to deal with the world. So the good father sees
to it that his girl gets the very best education that she will take.
Not the flubdub, fluffy ruffles sort, but a solid, practical education
that develops whatever gray matter she has got in her pretty little
head, that teaches her to think and reason and that gives her a solid
foundation on which to rear her house of life.