died, we did our part in administering the lethal dose. We may have
done it through ignorance, through carelessness, through blundering
stupidity; we may have even done it with the best intentions in the
world and with the firm conviction that we were forcing down their
throats a remedy that would cure them of all the little ailments and
weakness of character from which they suffered. But the point is, we
did it. We were accessory to the crime, and we could have prevented it
if we had so wished.
“Now, as you know, my husband forsook me for his secretary. I called
her a thief who had used her position to rob me of a husband and my
little children of their father, and I looked upon him with bitterness
and contempt, as a poor weakling who let an adventuress make him forget
his honor as a man and his duty to his wife and children. I called
Heaven to witness that I was innocent and that I had been a good, true,
virtuous woman, who had always done her duty to her family. It took me
a long time to see that, if my husband grew weary of me, I had made
him tired by my incessant nagging and fault finding; that if he ceased
to love me, it was because I was no longer lovable, and that the other
woman had not really stolen him from me. I had simply handed him over
to her on a silver salver.
“You see, I was one of the wives who did not realize that it is easy
enough to get a husband, but the work comes in in keeping one. I
thought that after a woman was married she could let herself go, and
so I never bothered to keep myself dolled up at home, or to try to
make myself pleasant and agreeable. I went in negligee, both as to
clothes and manners. Any old rag was good enough to wear at home. Any
disagreeable topic was a suitable breakfast-table discussion, and I
felt perfectly free to quarrel with my husband, and criticize him, and
ridicule all of his little faults and idiosyncrasies.
“I forgot that he went from a sloppy wife to an office where a trim,
perfectly groomed woman, younger and better looking than I, waited
for him. I forgot that he went from my nagging and fault finding to a
girl who was paid to agree with him and whose job depended largely on
her flattering him and telling him how wonderful and great he was. It
wouldn’t have been human for him not to constitute a daily comparison
between us, and it was inevitable that when he did, that I should lose
out. If I had kept my doors locked and my burglar alarms in working
order no one could have looted my home. And so I am just as responsible
for the wreck of it as are those who broke it up.”
“My husband was a gay, pleasure-loving man,” said the second divorcee.
“He always wanted to be going somewhere. He loved to be in the thick
of crowds. He adored dancing, and restaurants, and the bright lights.
He loved fine clothes, and always wanted me to look like a fashion
plate. Now, I am a serious-minded woman and was brought up to take a
serious view of things, and I felt it my duty to cure my husband of
his frivolity by leading him up to what I considered the higher life.
I began by trying to wean him away from his old friends, on whom I
turned such a cold shoulder that they soon ceased coming to the house.
I lectured him about his extravagance and the way he threw away money,
and finally got possession of the family purse and doled out dimes to
him. I wouldn’t go out with him of an evening, and I rarely let him go
without a scene. At first he submitted, but he looked bored and sulky,
and then he broke out of jail, which was all his home had come to be to
him, and that was the beginning of the end.
“For, of course, when I wouldn’t play with him he found some other
woman who would, and who wouldn’t wet-blanket every occasion by her
moral strictures or spoil every meal at a restaurant by looking at the
pay check. If I had been willing to flatter him, and jolly him, and
dance with him, and let him spend his money on me, he would never have
left me. But I wouldn’t do it, and my austerity got on his nerves. He
wanted a playmate instead of a censor, and so I feel that I am just as
much to blame as he was.”
“I lost my husband through ambition,” said the third divorcee. “He
was an artist of great talent, and I was mad for him to win fame and
money, so I never let him rest. I prodded him on all the time. I was
forever a goad in his side, and so I became to him a sort of incarnate
conscience, a perpetual reminder of all the unpleasant duties of
life. He was temperamental, a child of impulse, and I became his
task-mistress, a slave driver to him. Finally he got to the place
where he could stand it no more, and he eloped with a young girl as
irresponsible as he was. She will never push him on to success as I
would have done, but she lets him follow every whim and she will hold
him, as I could have done if I had had intelligence enough to see that
you can’t make a work horse out of Pegasus.”
“How much happiness we might save if only our wisdom did not come too
late,” sighed the first woman.
XXXI
MARTHA OR MARY?
Clever Mary—who, take it from me, knows her way about—was talking about
her friend, Martha, the other day.
“Of course, Martha is the Perfect Housewife,” she said, “but she
is a mighty poor wife. Without doubt, she is a great and glorious
housekeeper and a cook and baker and cleaner. Never have I seen a
rumple in her curtains. Her bedspreads are like the driven snow. And
you could eat off her floors. Her house is so immaculate that her
husband must feel a perfect stranger in it, and like a bull in a china
shop.
“But her days are so taken up with work that she has time for nothing
else—not a minute to read or to play, or to be a companion to her
husband. In fact, she is so worn out by the time night comes that she
is too tired to do anything but go to bed.
“Her husband loves to read, but if he sits up late, the light annoys
her so much that she can’t sleep, so she says. So she nags him until
he gives it up in disgust. She, herself, never reads anything except
the advertisements of the department stores in the papers, and the
thrilling accounts of vacuum cleaners and patent breakfast foods in the
backs of the magazines. And when her husband tries to talk to her about
the things he is interested in—books, sports, his business—he had just
as well try to ring any other dumbbell.
“Now, I do all my own housework, and I must be a fairly capable
housewife, for my mother-in-law has put her O.K. on me, and that
settles that. But there isn’t a spot in my house where we can’t park
ourselves at any time. My library table is filled with books and
magazines, and if husband drops ashes and scatters the Sunday papers
all over the place, I let him, and gently and painlessly remove them
after he has passed on.
“I don’t really know anything about sports. I wouldn’t recognize a
home run if I met it on the street, but when hubby wants to talk about
baseball I assume an intelligent expression. And I am never too tired
to play with my husband. I grab my hat the minute he suggests the
movies. I can get ready to go anywhere in an hour. I just adjust my
complexion—Martha considers that a real vice—and we are off.
“Martha can’t understand why my husband very rarely goes away from
home of an evening and almost never without me—while hers beats it
to the corner drug store as soon as he has eaten his superexcellent
dinner. And I just can’t make her see that it is because she puts her
house before him. She worships cleanliness and order, and sacrifices
everything to them. The first thing Martha knows, she is going to lose
her husband, and she will go around wailing and weeping and telling how
hard she worked and what a good housekeeper she was. She never will
know that she literally drove him away from her with a broom handle.
“I told Martha the other day that if she would spend less time
polishing her mahogany and more time polishing her finger nails and
rubbing up her mind, it would be better for her. But she just smiled
that superior smile that a model housekeeper always bestows on the
woman whom she suspects of having dust on the back pantry shelf, and
made a dive for a basement sale of somebody’s patent cleaning fluid.”
Mary is right. Cleanliness and order are two of the domestic virtues
that may easily be converted into vices. We all know spick and span
houses that are no more homes than a shiny tin box would be. Nobody
would dare disarrange a sofa cushion in one of them. Nobody would have
the courage to move a chair from its appointed place. To track a bit of
mud on one of the shining floors would be a high crime and misdemeanor.
To leave anything hanging around would be a sacrilege unspeakable.
Husband and children flee these temples of order and cleanliness as
they would a torture chamber. And they live in dread and fear of the
woman who has worked herself cross and irritable attaining her ideal of
housewifery. Most of the real homes are places not too bright and good
for human nature’s daily use. They are places where you can take your
ease; places run on a flexible schedule and only reasonably clean and
orderly.
Doubtless, the old lady who laid down the maxim, “Feed the brute,” as
a rule for retaining a husband’s affections said a wise mouthful to
women. But more is to be added, for man does not live by bread alone,
and it is just as important to feed his soul as his stomach. Every
woman who fails to give her husband good, nourishing food fails as a
wife, but she fails even more if she does not give him companionship.
For, after all, there is a good restaurant on every corner where a man
can satisfy his physical hunger, but none but his wife can minister to
his spiritual hunger. Foolish is the woman who doesn’t realize this and
who spends her time keeping her house clean instead of making it a home.
But that is the trouble with matrimony. A woman can’t be either a
Martha or a Mary. To be a good wife she has got to be both.
XXXII
THE T. B. M. AT HOME
A man wants to know if I don’t think his wife is very wrong and foolish
to be hurt and offended because he is often irritable and cross at
home. He says that she knows that he adores her, and that he is a model
of all the standardized domestic virtues, but that he works all day
under a terrific strain, and by the time night comes his nerves are
worn to a frazzle. He thinks that his wife should appreciate this, and
that instead of further rasping them with argumentation, she should
apply a soothing emolument to them.
I agree with the gentleman that it is always the part of prudence for
a wife to give the soft answer that turneth away wrath, instead of
retorting with a snappy comeback when her husband makes a nasty crack
at her. It certainly doesn’t add to the peace and harmony of a home
for a wife to be ready to jump into her fighting clothes every time
her husband makes a pass at her. Nothing comes of family rows but
bitterness, and anger, and disillusion. Nor does any love long survive
them.
I also agree with the gentleman that any woman who has cut her wisdom
teeth on matrimony should be able to assay her husband’s temper
and tell how much of it is due to raw nerves and how much to pure
cussedness, and so know when to spread the salve and when to hand him a
solar-plexus blow. Furthermore, I opine that a wife who starts anything
with her husband at evening until after he is fed and rested, and has
had his smoke and his paper unmolested, deserves to be put in the Home
for the Incurably Feeble-Minded for the balance of her natural life
or else bound over by the courts to keep the peace. For she is either
lacking in brains or just loves a fight for the fight’s sake.
It is the greatest possible pity that women haven’t more sense of humor
than they have, for if they did they would be able to laugh at many
things their husbands do over which they shed scalding tears. It would
enable them to see how really funny it is for a big man to get into a
babyish tantrum over nothing and how much easier it is to kid him out
of it than it is to make a scene over it. Unhappily, however, few women
have a funny bone, and fewer still can see the joke when it is on them,
and so husbands and wives meet temper with temper and irritability with
irritability, and the domestic war goes merrily on.
The mistake that most wives make is in taking their husbands too
seriously. They have heard so much about the mighty masculine
intellect that they think their husbands are profound, thoughtful human
beings who mean every word they say and whose every act is part of a
deeply considered plan of life. Whereas the truth is that men babble
just as meaninglessly as women do, and are the creatures of impulse.
Also, women are under the misapprehension that they have a monopoly on
nerves, and that hysterics are the sole prerogative of the feminine sex.
These beliefs make women attach a significance to the things that men
say and do to which they are not entitled; and it makes them “get their
husbands wrong” and break their hearts over crimes that the poor,
blundering men do not even know that they are committing.
In consequence whereof the wife’s feelings are in a constant state of
laceration, and she meets each hard knock with a still harder one, or
else goes off and salts her wounds down in the brine of her tears.
Now, no one will argue that a human cyclone is a pleasant companion
to live with, nor would any sane woman pick out a man who is giving
a life-like imitation of the Day of Wrath with whom to spend her
evenings. But, all the same, women make themselves unnecessarily
miserable by taking their husbands’ humors too seriously.
The cruel speeches that stab the wife to the soul are not prompted by
malice toward her. They are the reaction of nerves that have been
frazzled to the breaking point by the worries of the day at the office.
The frozen silence which the wife finds it so hard to endure is just
sheer exhaustion of mind and body, and the woman who can just take her
husband’s moods this way can not only save herself many a tearfest, but
can make her husband eat out of her hand by feeding him and laughing at
him and jollying him along.
Certainly, the woman who is married to a nervous, overworked man might
well do a little mental balancing of accounts and check off a lot of
temper, and impatience, and unreason, and fault finding against the
finery he gives her, and the success he has achieved, of which she is
so proud and which he has literally bought with his life’s blood. She
might well forgive his faults and deal leniently with them, since they
are the direct result of his struggle to lap her in luxury.
She is, believe me, a discerning and a tender wife who answers her
husband’s irascible speeches with a pat on the head and a “there,
there, it’s all right,” as she would a sick and fretful child, instead
of going to the mat with him.
So much for the wife’s side of the question. Now for the husband’s.
Business furnishes no alibi for surliness, and grouchiness, and
general disagreeableness. No man has a right to come home at night
and dump down on his own hearthstone all the nerves, and temper, and
irritability he has kept bottled up in him all day.
Because a woman has the misfortune to be a man’s wife is no reason he
should insult her and say to her things that he would not say to any
other woman who had an able-bodied brother, or that he would not dream
of saying to any woman who had $10 to spend across his counter, or who
was his client, or his patient.
If a man can control his temper and his tongue in dealing with the
outside world, he can control it still at home. If he can be polite and
courteous and flattering to other women, he can make the same gracious
speeches to his wife, instead of growling like a bear when she asks
him a simple question. And if he has any sense of honor, he will be
the more careful of what he says to his wife than he is to the others,
because his attitude means nothing to them, but his wife’s whole
happiness is dependent on the way he treats her.
Nor does the fact that he overworks excuse a man’s irritability at
home. Nine wives out of ten would rather have a little more amiability
from their husbands and less money, if they had to choose between the
two. The beloved husbands and wives are not those who work themselves
into a state of nervous irritability for their families. They are those
who keep themselves calm, and good natured, and pleasant to live with.
To expect other people to overlook our temper and forgive the cross
and cruel speeches that we flash out at them without provocation is
demanding too much of human nature.
XXXIII
DON’T BE AFRAID TO LET YOUR HUSBAND SEE YOU LOVE HIM
A woman asks this question: “Is it wise for a wife who loves her
husband devotedly to let him see how dear he is to her? Does the
knowledge that her heart is his for keeps make him undervalue it? Does
she best keep his interest in her alive by keeping him on the anxious
seat? After all, a husband is still a man, and we know that before
marriage the more difficult a woman is to win the more a man chases
her; and the more a woman throws herself at a man’s head the more
adroitly he dodges her. So the question is, Does this same state of
affairs continue after marriage? Do men want their wives to blow hot
and cold, as they do their sweethearts, or do they desire them to be a
good, steady, reliable fire on the hearthstone?”
A man’s attitude toward love undergoes a complete change on his wedding
day. During his courtship, the thing that has been of more importance
to him than anything else in the world has been the state of mind
of his lady love. It has been a wonderful, sentimental adventure
following all her moods and tenses, and plumbing the depths of her
emotions. It has roused his sporting blood for her to be coy and
difficult. Taking her away from his rivals was a game of fascinating
intrigue, and he thrilled with the sense of being a conquering hero
when she finally surrendered to him.
But marriage is another pair of sleeves. It is a different
story altogether. A man marries to end romance, not to have it
to-be-continued-in-our-next serial that will run on the balance of his
life. He wants to be done with doubts, and fears, and heart burnings,
and speculation about the woman he loves, so that he will be free to
give his undivided attention to his business.
Therefore the tactics that won a woman a husband do not serve to hold
him, and the wife who tries to pique her husband’s interest in her by
her flirtations with other men is more apt to land in the divorce court
than to strengthen her position in the domestic love nest. For men do
not wish to be kept guessing about their wives. They want to be sure
of them. The man who is married to a woman who plays around with other
men and who keeps him on the ragged edge of nervous prostration with
jealousies and suspicions does not think that he has drawn a capital
prize in the matrimonial lottery. On the contrary, he thinks that he
has been gold-bricked, and he is not crazy over his bargain.
No woman need be afraid to let her husband know how much she loves him,
because her love makes the strongest claim she can possibly have upon
him. Many a man who has made an unsuitable marriage with a woman with
whom he had no real companionship; many a man who has outgrown the
woman he married in his youth, is kept faithful to her by the knowledge
of her devotion to him. It takes a brute to hurt the one who worships
you, or to leave the one whose whole life is bound up in you.
Nor is there any charm of mind or person that appeals to a man so
much as just the certainty of a wife’s love and the sure knowledge
that if all the world turned against him, there is one who would
still be standing shoulder to shoulder with him; some one who would
go down to the gates of death with him, or wait outside of the prison
gates for him; some one whom neither disease nor poverty nor disgrace
would alienate from him. The coquettish woman who thinks to keep her
husband’s affection for her at fever heat by keeping him uncertain of
her has no such hold upon her man as has the wife whose husband’s heart
doth safely trust in her, sure that whatever else fails him in life,
her love will never fail.
A wife need not be afraid to show her husband her love, because men
are just as heart hungry as women are. They crave affection and
appreciation just as much as women do, and they long just as much as
women do to be petted and fussed over.
No complaint is more common from women than that their husbands stop
all love-making at the altar with a suddenness that jars the very
marrow of their bones. They say that the men to whom they are married
never seem to think that they long to be told that they are still loved
and admired, and that they have made good as wives. They yearn for a
kiss that is warm with passion, instead of a duty peck on the cheek
that has about as much flavor to it as a cold batter cake.
But, apparently, it never occurs to these wives who are starving for
some sign of real living affection themselves that their husbands are
also on the bread line, mutely begging for a stray crumb of love. They
do not realize that a great big, husky, successful man could want to
be chucked under the chin, and babied, and told that he was the most
booful thing on earth, and that his wifeikins got down on her knees and
thanked God every night because she was lucky enough to get him, and
that every day, in every way, she loved him better and better.
Yet there isn’t a man in the world that wouldn’t worship a wife who
handed him that line of chatter, and who wouldn’t walk mighty straight
and reverently before one who opened the doors of her heart and let
him see that he was enshrined therein. No. No wife need be afraid of
letting her husband know how much she worships him. For it is love that
makes the world go round, and that greases the wheels of matrimony.
XXXIV
QUEER THINGS ABOUT MARRIAGE
Did you ever think how many queer things there are about marriage? To
begin with, isn’t it queer that we permit boys and girls to get married
at an age at which they are not permitted to make any other binding
contract? The law appoints guardians to look after the property of
minors, and prevent them from squandering it, or being cheated out of
it by sharpers, but there is no legal safeguard to save foolish girls
and boys from throwing away their life’s happiness on an ill-advised
marriage.
At a time of life when we consider a lad’s judgment too immature for
him to make a thousand-dollar investment, we assume that he is worldly
wise enough to pick out a life mate. At an age when we think a girl’s
taste too unformed and too hectic to select her own clothes, we let her
choose a husband.
Isn’t the casual attitude we take toward matrimony queer?
Marriage is the most important act in our lives, the thing that not
only makes or mars us, but that affects thousands of people yet to be.
Compared with marriage, being born is a mere episode in our careers,
and dying a trivial incident. Yet there is no other thing that we do to
which we give as little intelligent, serious thought.
If we were going into a business partnership to invest our entire
fortune, we would think a long time before we committed ourselves. We
would consider the proposition from every angle. We would look into its
weak spots and try to form an honest opinion of its chances of success.
And we would investigate the past record of the man we were proposing
to go into business with, and find out everything about him.
We would ascertain what sort of a life he had led, how honest and
honorable he was, how much he was to be trusted, and what sort of a
disposition he had, whether he was pleasant to get along with or not.
Yet the worst harm that our business partner could do us would be
to cheat us out of our money. He couldn’t break our hearts and make
our lives miserable. If we didn’t like him, we could dissolve the
partnership without any trouble or disgrace.
But nine times out of ten those who enter into the marriage contract,
which is the most binding contract of all, do not take the trouble to
make even the slightest investigation about the one with whom he or she
is making a life partnership. Every day we read of people who discover
that they are married to bigamists. Every day some husband stumbles
into his wife’s skeleton closet, and finds that the woman whom he
believed pure and innocent has a dark and sordid past. Every day some
agonized mother looks at her deformed or idiotic babe, and sees that
the sins of the father have been visited on her child.