Part 30

Nor do we any more know why we cease to love than we know why we love. We do not know why the touch of the hand that has thrilled us ceases to thrill; nor why the charm that was once so potent vanishes into thin air, nor why the fascination flees, and the one who once held us enthralled becomes a bore who wearies us to tears. It just happens, and we are as helpless before one situation as before the other.

There are not many men who are cruel enough to find sport in breaking a woman’s heart, and who deliberately win a girl’s love, and play with it, and fling it away. There are not many husbands who would not remain their wives’ eternal lovers, if it was in their power to control their affections. That was their romantic dream when they married. That way their happiness lay, and they would have kept their romance had it been a matter of their own volition.

Unfortunately, the disillusion came. The glory and the circling wings departed. Somehow their wives lost their allure for them, and strive as they might, they could not see them again with the eyes of a lover, or bring back their charm. Many a man would be just as glad to fall in love again with his wife as she would be to have him fall in love with her once more, but he cannot do it. You cannot fan dead ashes into a flame.

Perhaps if wives realized how impossible it is to resurrect a dead love, they would guard the living love more carefully, and run fewer risks of killing it. They would not take the chance of disillusioning their husbands by going about sloppy and slovenly at home, and thus presenting a fatal contrast to the trimly dressed women in their offices, and the beautified ladies they meet in society. They would reflect that no man would have much appetite for domestic kisses when flavored with cold cream, and that if a wife wishes to be regarded as a ladylove, she must look the part instead of resembling a sack of potatoes.

And they would see to it that love is not assassinated on their hearthstones by ceaseless, senseless quarrels, by whining, and complaining, and nagging, and petty tyrannies. Nor would they permit love to die of that commonest and most deadly ailment, boredom. For if a woman can interest her husband enough before marriage to make him pick her out from all the rest of the world for his life partner, she can interest him enough to hold him until the end of the chapter if she is willing to take the trouble and perform the labor necessary to do so.

If, though, a woman, through carelessness or ignorance, has lost the love of the man she loves, there is absolutely no way in which she can win it back. Through duty or a sense of honor she may hold his body, but his soul has gone from her forever, and she is wise if she accepts the inevitable.

If she is a girl, she should let the sweetheart who is tired of her go, instead of trying to hold him. Some other man she may make love her, but not the old one for whom she has lost her charm.

If she is a married woman whose husband has ceased to love her, let her agonize no more over the impossible task of reviving his passion for her. Let her fill her life with other interests and thank God that there are so many other pleasant things in the world besides love.

For of this she may rest assured. There is no reviving of dead love. When once we have lost our taste for a person everything is over. It is finished, as the French say.

THE SHOW WEDDING

The Turks have passed a law prohibiting elaborate and costly marriage ceremonials, and forbidding the giving of expensive wedding presents. What a pity that we cannot have such an edict issued in this country! For there is no other one thing that would do more to allay heartburnings and jealousies, prevent nervous prostration and bankruptcy, and promote peace and thrift than to officially “can” the show wedding.

In all fairness, we must admit that the display wedding is a feminine vice. No man, probably, ever really yearned to make a public exhibition of himself as he was being led as a lamb to the slaughter. But by the time she is ten years old the average girl has begun planning her wedding and deciding whether she will have a big church affair, with ushers and flower girls and ring-bearers and maids and matrons of honor and bridesmaids and a white satin dress and a real lace veil, and all the other flubdubs, or whether she will be married at home under a floral canopy, with an admiring audience fenced off from her by white ribbons. And to realize this ten-minute splurge she is ready to ruthlessly ruin her family and half kill herself. If she doesn’t get it, she goes through life feeling that she has missed her big moment. It is from this silly, dopey daydream that women should be rescued by law, since few of them have the common sense and good taste to put it aside themselves.

To begin with, it would do away with the disgraceful, barefaced holdups that precede weddings. These are camouflaged under the appropriate name of “showers,” for they cause every friend of an engaged girl to shed salt and bitter tears at the realization of how much they will be mulcted for in silk-stocking showers, and handkerchief showers, and towel showers, and kitchen showers, and all the other showers that go to make up a bridal deluge. It would also prevent that sinking feeling at the pit of the stomach with which we are attacked at sight of a large, thick white envelope in the mail. We know that it means a “stand-and-deliver” present, which somehow always comes just at a time when the rent is overdue, or a doctor bill has to be paid, or we had saved up a little money by pinching economies to buy a new hat or suit.

It isn’t that we are stingy or mean, or that we begrudge a gift to a friend. It is only that we would like to give when we can do so freely, and enjoy the giving, instead of having to give at a time when it is actually dishonest to bestow a present. Why, I have known people who had to put off needed dental work or taking a sick child to the country when three or four wedding presents fell together. The wedding gift was a debt of honor. “They sent us a set of salad forks.” “She gave us a clock when we were married,” and it had to be returned in kind. The abolition of the show wedding would prolong the days of many a poor, old, hard-worked father, whose daughter’s trousseau is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

It is not because she needs them, or has any use for them, that Sally Ann, who is a poor girl marrying a poor young man, has to have piles of orchid chiffon undergarments, hand-embroidered and belaced and beribboned. It is because they are to be displayed to her catty friends, who will finger them, and appraise them, and criticize them, and then go home wondering how her father is ever going to pay for them. If her lingerie were not Exhibit A at the wedding Sally Ann would go along and provide herself with a reasonable amount of underwear that would stand wear and washing, and not run papa into debt.

But Sally Ann has to have her show wedding. She has to trail up the church aisle in her white satin and her tulle veil, and all the rest of it. And by the time father has paid for the church and the flowers, and the bridesmaid’s presents, and the reception, and the automobiles, he has had to borrow money at the bank and has saddled himself with a debt that bends his back a little more, and puts new lines in his face, and adds to his burden in work and worry, which was already more than he could bear. And it has all been for a few minutes’ flaunting of herself in the face of an audience of people who smiled and nudged each other, and said: “Did you ever see her look so homely? Brides always look their worst.” “Wonder what he ever saw in her to make him pick her out.” “Is that the bridegroom? Looks like a scared rabbit.” “How on earth do you suppose her father will ever pay for this? Everybody knows he can’t afford it,” and so on, and so on. Just what everybody says at a wedding.

Above all, the abolition of the show wedding and the saving of the foolish expenditure it involved would enable many a young couple to set up housekeeping out of debt; and, best of all, they would begin life simply and honestly, and with the admiration and gratitude of all who know them. Getting married is the crucial act in a man’s and woman’s life. It is the most awful and solemn thing they ever do. And why they want to have a thousand curious eyes peering at them when they take the step that is going to plunge them into hell or lift them into heaven passes comprehension. It would not be more incongruous to send out invitations to people to come and watch you die than it is to come and see you married.

Wise that young couple who simply slip around to the parson and make their vows at the altar, with no one but God to look on.

LII

WHEN YOUR CHILDREN ARE GLAD YOU DIE

Parents seem to run to extremes. Of the common, or garden, variety of fathers and mothers there appears to be two types. One is the overindulgent, which lavishes too much money, too many fine clothes, too many motorcars on its offspring, and that brings up its children to be idle and worthless wasters and spenders. The other type of parent is the Spartan one that is as hard as nails, unsympathetic, close-fisted; that denies its children every indulgence, and that holds to the theory that the harder it makes life for the young the better it is for them. Both schools of thought are wrong.

Undoubtedly, parents make a very great mistake when they sacrifice everything to their children and make doormats of themselves for their children to walk on. They weaken their sons and daughters by pampering them too much and by standing between them and the struggle that alone makes muscle of body and soul, and they do their children a cruel injustice by cultivating in them extravagant tastes and habits that perhaps they cannot later on give them the money to gratify. Certainly it is an unedifying spectacle to behold, as we often do, a mother in patched, made-over clothes, while her daughters fare forth in the latest imported Parisian models, or a seedy father riding on the street car while son burns up the road in a speedy sports car and is decked out like Solomon in all his glory.

Also we can but deplore the folly of parents who skimp, and slave, and deny themselves every comfort in order that their daughters can make a splurge in society, and that their sons may loaf through college courses, where they acquire nothing but a college yell and a contempt for their hump-shouldered old dads. We could weep when we see tired old women who are converted into unpaid nursemaids by their married daughters who are always coming in and dumping their babies down on mother when they want to go off on a trip or play bridge. And what tears we have left we could shed over the men whose sons are always getting into trouble and coming back to father for help when they know that they are robbing him of the pittance he has saved up for his old age.

But between doing everything for your children and doing nothing at all for them is a long step, and the parents who do not help their children to get a start in life fail just as much in doing their duty to them as do the foolishly fond parents who kill their children’s initiative by swaddling them in cotton wool. Of course, necessity is a grim teacher. If you chuck a child into the water where it must sink or swim, it is pretty apt to strike out and keep afloat somehow. And it is true that a great many successful men and women are the children of parents who were so poor that they could do nothing for them, and that they fought their way to an education and battled their way to success against all sorts of hardships. But there is a great difference between the parents who cannot help their children and those who will not help their children, between the fathers and mothers who would give their heart’s blood to their children and those who will not give them a few dollars. And while the children may feel all love and reverence for the poor parents who were powerless to assist them, they can but feel bitter resentment toward the parents who stand callously by, watching their struggles without holding out a helping hand.

A large number of parents have an idea that it does young people good to be deprived of pleasures, to be reared to no indulgences, to know hardships. And so even when they have plenty of money they deny their children pretty clothes and the advantages of education and travel, and when they get married they let them scuffle for themselves. They do not give the girl a dowry nor set the boy up in business.

It seems to me that this is a cruel and an inhuman thing to do, and that it serves no purpose but to kill in the child’s breast every particle of affection it had for its father and mother. For it dooms the children to years of struggle and self-sacrifice, pinching economies and anxieties that it might so easily have escaped. And God knows that life is not so easy for any of us that we can afford to have any of the pleasure taken out of it.

It also often shuts the door of opportunity for the child or puts off success for many weary years. The few thousands of dollars that father might have invested in the firm which would have raised Tom from being a clerk to a partner might have carried him on to fortune. If father would have financed the extra course of study in his profession for John, he would have achieved success and begun big money making years before he did. If father had given Mary an allowance big enough to hire servants, she would not have worked herself to death cooking, and washing, and baby tending. But father wouldn’t do it. He held on to every penny and let his children fight it out the best way they could. The daughter of such a man once said to me:

“My father is dead and I have inherited a large fortune, but it has come to me too late to do me any real good. When I was a girl I never had any pretty clothes. I never had a nice home to invite my friends to. I never had any indulgences. I never could even go with the people I was entitled to go with because I did not live in the style they did. I married a poor man and my father never helped us. I wore my youth out in housework that I was not strong enough to do. If he had given me $10,000 when I needed it, it would have done me more good than all that I have inherited does me now.”