Part 35

She must be a diplomat. The husband question, the children question and the servant question are not to be handled without gloves. There is no hour of the day that she is not called upon to deal with some problem that requires the finesse of a Talleyrand. She must be able, if the white-winged dove of peace is to brood over the home nest, to deal with her husband’s prejudices and circumvent them so delicately that he will never know that he is being induced to do the thing that he swore he would never, never do. She must assert her authority over the growing boy with such cunning that he does not perceive that her fine Italian hand is on the check rein holding him tight and steady. She must be able, without the girls dreaming that she does it, to insinuate a doubt, drop a word of ridicule, imply an impossibility that will keep her daughters out of entangling alliances and steer them toward the reciprocally profitable permanent treaties they should make.

Above all, she must be able to see most when she is apparently stone blind; hear everything when she seems to be as deaf as the adder of the Scriptures; to be most on guard when she looks to be sleeping at her post, and to be most chaperoning her daughters when the onlooker and the girls themselves would swear that she was most giving them their liberty.

She must know how to tread very softly if she keeps off the corns of her servants, for whether a woman is agreeable or disagreeable in the home her children are bound to stay there with her, but it is the blessed privilege of Mary Ann and Bridget and eke of Hulda and Dinah that they can pack their trunks and go. Only the very quintessence of diplomacy renders a mistress persona grata to the kitchen, and the woman who preserves friendly relations with that must understand the Alpha and Omega of how to make a jolly cover the discipline of a martinet. Any woman who, when she is fifty years old, has a husband who thinks her a Solomon in petticoats, grown children who quote mother’s opinion, and a cook who has been with her five years is fitted to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of St. James’s, and nothing but the stupidity of a nation that believes that breeches and brains are synonymous terms keeps her out of the job.

She must be an artist.

It is the woman’s province to create the beauty of the home. This is true whether it is the palace of the millionaire or the three-room flat of the day laborer. Every room that she arranges is a picture, just as much as if she painted a Dutch interior on canvas.

She must be a poet.

A home is not merely a place of shelter and food—it is a thing no less of the spirit and soul—and a woman must put into it the passion of her heart and the joy of creating just as truly as a poet must put them into his song. To make a home that is beautiful, that breathes the spirit of home, that is a haven of peace and rest to those who live in it and that is a glimpse of Paradise to the stranger who is bidden within its gates is a profession the most exacting in which any woman can engage and the one that calls for the greatest number of talents. Also it is the most profitable, for within it are made the men and women who go forth to bless the world. And the wonder of wonders is that so many just plain ordinary women are doing it, and the greatest marvel of all is that they do not realize what a glorious thing they are doing!

LXIV

A FATHER’S INFLUENCE

There is no subject under the sun of which men take such a distorted view as they do of a mother’s influence. Romancers have glorified it, poets have idealized it, musicians have sung it until men have honestly come to think that mothers have a practical monopoly of their children and the sole duty and privilege of shaping their lives. Even fathers seem to think that fathers count for nothing and that all they are good for is paying the bills. In the family circle they take a back seat and let mother run the show. It is Mother’s Day that is celebrated with pomp and flowers and beating the cymbals. Nobody notices Father’s Day—perhaps because the first of the month is always Father’s Day and it comes around so often.

No one would belittle mother’s influence. For good or evil it is all powerful. But it is all powerful because father is so often too stupid or too lazy or too careless or too much absorbed in his business to do his duty to his children by helping to mold their characters. He dodges his responsibility. He passes the buck to mother and salves his conscience with a platitude about a mother’s sacred influence, which in his innermost self he recognizes for the hokum it is. For mother’s influence does not always work for righteousness. Motherhood works no miracles. Bearing a baby does not put brains and wisdom in a hen-minded woman’s head. It does not give a shallow woman depth. It does not make a narrow, prejudiced woman broad and tolerant. It does not make a fool woman wise.

Yet all around us we see men who would not trust their wives’ judgment about anything else on earth, turning over to them their children’s immortal souls. They know their wives to be silly and ignorant—without vision, without the ability to see or understand anything beyond their own little circle—yet they let these morons shape their children’s lives. They let them form their children’s ideals and set their standards. They let them decide on the schools their children shall attend, the churches they shall join, the people with whom they associate.

Yet the very men who trust their children to weak and incompetent and unintelligent wives to rear would not dream of permitting a weak, incompetent, unintelligent partner to run their business. They are too well aware of the value of their personal advice and supervision and of the need of their strong and expert hands on the wheel. Men blindly subscribe to the faith that a mother’s influence is bound to be good, especially upon her daughters, yet a moment’s thought would show them how fallacious such a belief is.

A woman can only give out what she has. She can only try to make her daughters what she is. And unless a man wants his daughters to be just the sort of woman their mother is, he cannot safely leave them in her hands.

It is true that there are not many women who deliberately bring up their girls to be immoral and start their feet on the downward path. But there are thousands upon thousands of mothers whose influence upon their daughters is vicious, because they inculcate in them their own low ideals of honor and honesty. They teach them by precept and example to evade every duty of wifehood and motherhood, and from their very infancy up they instil into them a greed and selfishness that wrecks the happiness of all who come in contact with them. Such are the mothers who teach their daughters how to lie and cheat, how to buy on credit the finery they cannot afford, how to kill a man with their extravagance. Such mothers are those whose favorite maxim is that what a husband doesn’t know doesn’t hurt him. Such a mother is the one who, not long ago, I heard say to her young daughter who was getting married: “Don’t tie yourself down with babies. Go about and amuse yourself and have a good time, and if your husband doesn’t like it he can lump it.”

When a man has that kind of a wife—and no man can be so afflicted without knowing it—he does a criminal thing when he leaves his girls to their mother’s influence. It is his bounden duty to use his influence to correct hers as far as possible. Little as men seem to realize it, children nearly always listen with far more respect to what their fathers say than they do to what their mothers say. For the child knows intuitively that the father has had a broader experience of life than the mother has. It knows that the father goes out into the world and does battle with it every day and that he knows from experience the things about which mother vaguely theorizes. It knows that father knows the rules and how to play the game.

Hence when a man really makes any attempt to develop his children’s characters he finds them as clay in his hands, ready to respond to his slightest touch. It is only when father merely uses his influence as a veto power that it is negligible. That a boy needs his father’s hand in directing and controlling him at the critical time of his life and a father’s wisdom to steer him along the right course is universally recognized, but I often think that a girl needs it even more. For a girl needs to be taught the things that life teaches a man. She needs to be taught to be straightforward and honest and to live up to her contracts, that she must give as well as take in life and that she must have the courage and the grit to carry on when things are hard instead of turning quitter and to make the best of a bad bargain. Many a divorce would have been avoided and many a home that is now broken up, kept intact if a father’s influence over his little girl had made her a good sport, instead of mother’s influence developing a yellow streak in her.

A mother’s influence is a great thing, but it needs to be backed up by father’s. That is why God gave every child two parents instead of one.

LXV

THE RICHES OF POOR CHILDREN

The bitterest cry of poor people is that they have nothing to give their children. The fathers and mothers who cannot buy imported finery for their girls or sports-model cars for their boys and send them off to expensive colleges and fill their pockets with money feel that they have come empty-handed to their children and have nothing to give them. Yet the poorest man and woman who bend above a cradle have it in their power to bestow upon their babe treasures so great that their worth cannot be computed in dollars and cents, and that will bring the child more pleasure and happiness in life than they could purchase with all the wealth of the Rothschilds. For there is no price tag on the most precious things in the world. They are equally free to prince and pauper, and more often the beggar gets them than the millionaire does.

For example, there is love—a close, intimate, personal association—and tenderness and understanding. Poor parents can more easily give to their children than the wealthy can. And the child that has them is rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and the child that has them not is poverty-stricken, although it has all else besides. The mother who rocks her baby to sleep on her breast, whose tender arms are always outstretched to gather her youngsters to her heart, who is never too tired or too busy to listen to childish confidences, who surrounds her little ones with a brooding atmosphere of affection,—gives to her children far more than does the rich mother who gives her children nurses and governesses and pony carts and fine clothes and costly playthings but who does not give them herself; who bestows on them everything but the things that a child wants most and needs most—mother love and tenderness, the real mother touch.

Not long ago a very rich young man figured in a disgraceful scandal, and the one excuse offered in his defense was that his mother was dead and his father had never given him anything except money. He had never had any affection bestowed upon him. He had had no parental guidance. When a little lad he had been put in a school and kept there without even being visited by any one who loved him, without even going home for vacations. He had been just a pitiful little millionaire waif for whom nobody cared. The lot of such a child is infinitely worse than that of the one whose parents are in such humble circumstances that they can give it perhaps only the plainest of food and clothes, but who do give it a real home that is full of close, warm family life. The fathers and mothers to whom children are grateful and whose memories they revere are not those who bequeath them great fortunes, but those who leave them the memory of a love and understanding that never failed and of a childhood that was made sweet by their parents’ cherishing.

No matter how poor you are, you can give your children love and companionship and the privilege of growing up in a peaceful and cheerful home, and that is something that few rich parents can give their children.

Another gift that you can make your children is that of teaching them how to read. When you do that you really don’t need to do much more for them, because you have put a magic coin in their hands that will buy them entrance into all the doors of delight and open to them all of the portals of romance. No one who loves to read can ever be bored or lonely. He or she has only to open a book, and, presto, he or she has for company all of the wit and wisdom of the ages. Gay adventures, beautiful ladies and gallant gentlemen beckon, and one has only to follow them into realms of enchantment. All of interest, all that informs, that thrills, that amuses, is the property of the reader. But, reading does not always come by nature, as Dogberry thought it did. Often it has to be acquired by art, but any child can be taught to like to read; it can be given the reading habit, and no other gift can possibly be bestowed upon it that is half so valuable or that will bring it in such happiness or that will be such an ark of refuge to it in times of trouble.

Another gift that the poorest parents can make to their children is to teach them how to see. Most persons go through the world as blind as bats. They never see anything that isn’t directly under their noses, and thereby they miss half of the fun and pleasure in living. There are men and women to whom a sunset is just a phenomenon of nature that happens every day; to whom a crowd is just a jam of people; who get nothing out of travel but inconvenience and missing the particular kind of breakfast food they prefer, and who loathe rain because they get their feet wet and hate snow because it is messy. And there are other men and women who see the glory of God in every flaming sunset; who thrill to the finger tips at the drama they see enacted in every crowd; to whom travel opens up a new world; to whom every rain is a symphony and every snowstorm a poem.

Which of these get the most out of life—those who see or those who are blind; those who can get pleasure out of little things or those who are too dull and dumb to amuse themselves; those who are sensitive to every beauty in nature, who appreciate music and art and literature, who get the last flavor out of good cooking, or those who find everything flat and stale and uninteresting because they have never been taught to see the under side of things?

Finally, the poorest parents can teach their children that brave attitude toward life without which all the balance is cinders, ashes, and dust. For disappointments and trouble come to us all, and it is only those who have been taught how to make the best of their bad bargains, how to laugh at misfortune and mock at fate, who achieve any real happiness in life. So cheer up, you parents who complain that you have nothing to give your children. You can give them love. You can teach them to read and to see things. You can give them a brave heart. These gifts are worth more than money. And nobody can take them away from those who have them.