Part 16

The same strictures apply to the woman who henpecks her husband. That also is one of the quiet home joys that should be strictly confined to the domestic circle. I raise no voice of protest against the woman who has wit and strength and determination enough to oust her husband out of his position as head of the house and assume it herself. It is a matter between the husband and wife, and if he hasn’t enough spunk to fight for his rights he deserves to lose them. But why cannot the bossy women be content with exercising their tyranny quietly and unobtrusively? Why do they insist upon rattling the chains by which they lead their husbands until they call public attention to them?

Think of the women you know who always say “MY house.” “MY car.” “MY children.” Who always walk ahead of their husbands and point out a seat, and say, “John, sit there,” and who always tell John where to get on and where to get off! And think how all the rest of us are embarrassed for poor John! Believe me, dirty linen should be washed at home, and family quarrels staged there. That is one of the main things for which homes are designed.

SHOULD WOMEN TELL?

I get a great many letters from women who write that there is a dark stain on their past life. In the headstrong folly of youth they took a step down the primrose path, then repented of their sin, and turned their back upon it, and laid hold upon righteousness.

Sometimes nobody knows of the slip but the girl herself and the man who was her partner in wrong-doing. Sometimes a woman who had mired her skirts to the knees has washed them clean with her tears of remorse, and had the courage to build anew her life in some place where her early escapades are unknown.

Then love comes to these women. Good men offer them marriage and an honorable place in society. And the question they ask is, shall they tell these men the story of their life before they marry them, or bury the secret in their heart, and leave the matter on the knees of the gods?

This is a problem no human wisdom can solve, for, so far as the woman is concerned, it is a case in which she will be damned if she does, and damned if she doesn’t. Her chances of getting happiness—or misery—through opening up her skeleton closet and exhibiting its contents to the man who has asked her to be his wife are about even, with the odds for happiness slightly in favor of keeping the lid clamped down good and hard on her secret.

The question of right does not enter into the matter unless you institute a prematrimonial confessional in which men shall bare their souls as well as women. There is no more real reason why a woman should tell a man every detail of her past than there is why he should tell her of every time that he has strayed off of the straight and narrow path.

It is true that a couple who knew the worst of each other would start out their life together on a firm foundation of honest understanding, but nobody can claim that it would make for their felicity, or increase their affection for each other. On the contrary, they would have swept away every illusion. They would have destroyed the faith of each in the other, and they would have called into being an evil spirit, a ghost out of the past, that they could not banish, and that would forever stand between them.

Men have had the wisdom to perceive this. They realize that what a woman doesn’t know doesn’t hurt her, but that the thing that she does know she worries herself to death over, and so few men are foolish enough to furnish a wife with a working diagram of their past lives with which she can torture herself, and them. They draw a discreet veil over episodes that are best forgotten, anyway, and deal only in glittering generalities in referring to their gay bachelor days. Moreover, women are sensible enough to let it go at that. No woman wants her husband to tell her things that stab her every time she thinks of them, and that eat like a canker into her memory.

It is only when the case is reversed, and when it is the woman who has a blot upon her past, that she wonders if it is the right thing, the honorable thing, to tell the man who wants to marry her about it. Of course, the woman is bound in this by the double code of morals, which makes one standard for the woman and another for the man, and that, humorously enough, makes a husband feel that he has been exceedingly ill-used if he discovers that his wife has a past that matches his own.

Therefore, because she is afraid that in future years her husband may find out about her past life, or else driven by her conscience, or for the sheer relief of sharing her burden with another, the woman nearly always tells everything to the man before marriage. Sometimes it drives him from her. Sometimes he loves her enough to marry her, in spite of her revelations.

But, while he forgives, he never forgets. Always he is haunted by the memories of what she has revealed. He never trusts her, never wholly believes in her, and he has to be a bigger-souled man than most men are if he does not reproach her with her past, and use it as a whip of scorpions to scourge her with when he is angry with her.

Of course, when either a man’s or a woman’s past life has in it some 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.