Part 14

ARE YOU GOOD COMPANY FOR YOURSELF?

Do you ever think what poor company most of us are for ourselves? It is strange but true that the one individual on God’s earth who bores the average man and woman more than any one else is just himself and herself. There is no society they so dread as their own, and no expedient so desperate that they will not resort to it rather than be left alone with themselves. They will fasten themselves like leeches on kinspeople and friends who try to shake them loose. They will stay on in homes where they know they are not welcome. They will put up with any discomfort in order to herd together. They will hold up the telephone poles at the corners of streets, and walk the aisles of the department stores until they are ready to drop with fatigue.

They will belong to clubs where they foregather with the dull and prosy and fat-witted, and where they spend hours listening to egotists monologue about how great and wonderful they are. Evening after evening they go to vaudeville performances whose every turn is so stupid it is enough to make even a hero scream with pain, and to see moving pictures whose scenarios are an insult to the intelligence of an idiot.

Anything—anywhere, to get away from themselves, to escape having to spend an hour in their own company. So universal is the belief that it is the limit of social and mental poverty to be reduced to your own society for company, that we speak of those who live alone as being lonesome, and pity them accordingly.

It does not even occur to us that they may have that within themselves which could make them gay and witty companions to themselves, of whom they would never tire.

It is easy, of course, to see why many people are bored to tears with their own company. Men and women who never read anything can’t have very much that is new and interesting to say to themselves. After they have discussed the state of the green grocery trade with themselves, on which they are rather fed up anyway after having wrestled with it all day, or mulled over the last gossip about the neighbors next door, and wondered for the millionth time how the Joneses can afford a new car, and where the Smith girl has been spending the evening when she came home at 3 A. M., they find that they have exhausted their conversational repertoire.

But if they are reading people they can never have a dull instant when they are alone, for every book, every magazine, every newspaper is a magic carpet that takes them in an instant into the uttermost parts of the world. There isn’t a strange sight they may not see, or a secret whispered behind a closed door they may not hear; nor a romance unfolded whose thrill does not touch their hearts and stir their pulse. Education and cultivation would be worth while if they did nothing else except take the curse off loneliness.

You can see how people who are envious and jealous and quarrelsome and mean-spirited dread to be left alone with themselves. They have devils from hell for company, those men and women whose souls are filled with bitterness and hate, and who are forever thrashing over old grievances, recalling old wrongs, bringing to life again old enmities.

We all avoid the pessimistic and the cynical—those who can see nothing cheerful or good in the world, and with whom even a chance meeting seems to take the warmth out of the sunshine, and God out of His heaven, and make all life dark and foul. How terrible, then, must it be to live with yourself when you have nothing to say to yourself that does not leave a dark-brown taste in your mouth? It is not strange that those who have lived hard and selfish and grasping lives are poor company for themselves.

You cannot imagine a widow spending a cheery evening recalling how she nagged her poor, dead husband, how cross and peevish and complaining she was, or how little she had done to repay him for all that he had done for her. Neither can you imagine a woman enjoying telling herself that if she had been less extravagant, and content with simple things, if she hadn’t demanded fine clothes and jewels and trips to Europe, that her husband would not have had to kill himself working, and that she might now have some one to talk to, living and breathing, instead of a demon of remorse.

It is not strange that a man wants other company than the recollection of how his coldness and neglect turned the bright, joyous, loving, tender girl he married into a quiet, sad woman who cringed like a whipped dog before his cruel fault-finding. Nor is it strange that the man who has driven hard bargains and overreached in trade, who has ground down the faces of those who worked for him, who has taken advantage of the ignorant and the trustful, and built his fortune on the ruins of widows and children, does not find his own society exhilarating.

When we are old we have nothing but our memories left us. They are enough company if they are filled with the smiling faces of those we loved, who recall to us kindly acts we have done, helping hands we have held out, and if they murmur to us of kindly, gracious deeds. But they are terrible companions if they are filled with memories of cruelty and wrong. Considering that, do what we may, we can never escape from ourselves, that we are bound to endure our own society, is it not a pity that we do not emulate the poet who said, “My mind to me a kingdom is,” and make ourselves better company for ourselves!

XVI

KEEPING YOUNG

None of us wants to die. No matter how strong our religious faith, nor how lustily we sing “Heaven is my home,” none of us is in a hurry to go there. We prefer to stay in a world in which we are acquainted and acclimated. Likewise, we all dread old age. It fills us with horror to think of becoming bent and tottering old men and women, our vigor of mind and body gone, sans hair, sans teeth, sans everything. So from time immemorial humanity has been on the still hunt for some magic that will stay the devastating hand of time and enable it to hold on to the youth it prizes so dearly. The ancients sailed the world over seeking fabled islands and miraculous fountains of perpetual youth. We moderns pin our faith to the surgeon’s knife and the druggist’s bottles, to monkey glands, and face liftings, and paints, and powders, and hair dyes.

All in vain. The black oxen of the years march over us, treading out our youth and beauty, our strength and high spirits, and nothing that we can do will stop them. So it seems a pity that we should waste so much thought, so much struggle, and effort, and energy, and money in essaying an impossible task. For do what we may, we cannot keep young, and when we try to camouflage age as juvenility the only people in the world that we fool are ourselves.

We can dye our hair the gold, or the black, or the jet of girlhood, but we cannot put under it the fresh face of sixteen. We can have our skin gored and tucked until all of our wrinkles are taken out, but there still remain the tired, old eyes that have seen fifty or sixty years. We can starve ourselves until we get the figures of flappers, but we are not lithe and graceful. We are living skeletons. We can roll our stockings and borrow our granddaughter’s clothes, but it doesn’t make us look like debutantes. It makes us look like those afflicted with senile dementia. The truth is, the more we fight age the harder it fights back and the sooner it conquers us. None grow old so quickly as those who work themselves into premature age trying to keep young.

Once I was standing behind a jaunty little figure perched on the runningboard of a car. She wore the gayest and sportiest of sport suits. She had the thin figure of a girl of fifteen. Her bobbed henna-colored hair curled under the brim of a rakish little hat. Presently she turned around and disclosed a face that was like a mask, it was so plastered over with cosmetics. “Heavens! Did you ever see such an old hag?” exclaimed a man near me.

Now, this woman was not more than fifty years old. She was in the prime of life, at an age when many women are handsomer than they ever were in their lives. No one would have thought of her as being old at all, if she had been willing to appear her own honest age; if she had had the pleasing plumpness that belonged to her time of life; if her soft, gray hair had waved about her face, and if she had been appropriately dressed. It was her effort to appear kiddish that called attention to what an old goat she was.

If bobbing and dyeing their hair, and dieting themselves to emaciation, and wearing knee-length skirts made elderly women look young and girlish, they would not only be justified in doing so, it would be a virtue to do it, for thereby they would make themselves easy on the eyes. But just the reverse is true. Their affectation of youth only calls attention to what a long distance they have traveled from youth. Old mutton never seems so old, and tough, and stringy as when it is dressed as spring lamb.

And the folly of trying to act young after you are old is just as great as that of trying to look sixteen when you are sixty. Women have been told so often they must keep their spirits young, they must never think old thoughts, they must never speak of age, or admit to themselves they are getting older, that they have come to believe that, simply by forgetting their birthdays, they can maintain perpetual girlhood.

We all know women who begin every reminiscence by saying that they were very young at the time it happened, and who give us to understand their husbands were cradle snatchers, who married them when they were mere infants. We know old women who are always teasing themselves about men, and talking about their best beaus, and pretending to have flirtations with boys young enough to be their grandsons, and repeating compliments about their eyes or their fascinations they allege men paid them, but that even an idiot would know that they made up themselves. How ridiculous the poor souls make themselves! How infinitely older they appear than the women who do not try to pose as vamps after they have ceased to look the part, and who regard men just as they do women, as interesting and agreeable human beings.

Perhaps, after all, we make too big a bugaboo of growing old. The twilight has its charms no less than the dawn or high noon, and so the last lap of the journey of life has its compensations and its joys if we are willing to accept them.

Anyway, the only way we can escape old age is by dying young. But if we welcome it as a friend, it deals kindlier with us than if we fight it as an enemy.

XVII

GOSSIP, THE POLICEMAN

A young woman writes me that she considers that she has a right to live her own life in her own way and do exactly as she pleases. So she has broken most of the Ten Commandments and snapped her fingers in the face of Mrs. Grundy. And now that she finds that her reputation is being torn to tatters, she thinks that she is being most unfairly treated.

“Oh, how I hate the whole tribe of kitty-cats!” she wails. “Oh, how hard, and cruel, and unjust people are!” Then she asks, “Don’t you think that gossip is the unpardonable sin?”