Part 21

“Most of us know in our heart of hearts that if our husband’s love 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.