Part 36

LXVI

A MAN’S RIGHT TO HIS HOME

It is a matter of continual wonder to me that women do not realize how unjustly they treat their husbands about their homes. Of course, a woman’s home is her castle and all that, and it is right and proper that she should be the ruler of it. Moreover, inasmuch as the average man is in his home only a very few of his waking hours, while his wife spends practically all of her time in it, it is more important that it should come up to her ideal and fire her fancy than his. She should have the right of choice in selecting the neighborhood she desires to live in, because she has to know the people next door and look across the street all day, and he doesn’t. Nor should any mere husband presume to dictate about the number, size, and arrangements of the closets in a house that is going to be his wife’s workshop. Nor should a man interfere with his wife’s taste in decoration, no matter how much it runs to putting ruffled petticoats on the furniture and installing forests of floor lamps, for having a home dolled up as she wants it, fills a woman with a great and exceeding peace and joy, and no good husband should withhold this pleasure from his wife.

But all that does not give the wife the right to monopolize the home and use it for her sole behoof and benefit, as so many women think it does. The man who pays the freight, the man who buys the house and who supports it, should have a few poor, simple privileges in it which even a wife should recognize and respect. He should at least, in all common fairness, have the status of a star boarder in the home his money keeps a going concern. He seldom does, however. There is not one home in a thousand where the man of the house has even a room of his own which he can furnish in accordance with his own taste and where he can mess around as much as he likes.

I have known many men who tried to establish dens for themselves in their houses, but before they got fairly settled, with their collections of stamps or fishing rods or stuffed animals or what-not disposed around them, their wives decided that it would be just the place for a sewing room or the nursery. Three hooks in a closet and a couple of drawers in a chiffonier are about all most men get for their private use in their homes, and at that they generally find that their wives and daughters have superimposed feminine fripperies over their best suits and parked their silk stockings on top of their shirts. So universal is the feeling among women they have a right to the entire house that when a wife does concede an easy chair and a reading lamp to her husband she boasts of it loudly and calls everybody’s attention to her unusual and generous gesture, whereat all marvel. And even her husband himself puffs out his chest and feels that he is a pampered household pet.

Why women should feel that they have an exclusive right to exercise the hospitality of the home nobody knows, but they do. If you will observe you will see that in most homes it is the wife’s family who are perpetually billeted in the spare bedroom, while the husband’s family makes few and occasional visits. You will also observe that there are ten men who have their mothers-in-law living with them to one man whose mother resides under his roof. Any wife would think it very mean in him if her husband did not extend a cordial welcome to Aunt Sally and Cousin Sue when they were invited for a visit and if he wasn’t willing to have her pretty young sister come and stay indefinitely in town with them so as to have the benefits of the city. And she expects him to register great joy when her mother telegraphs that she is coming for a month or two.

But it is another pair of sleeves when it comes to a husband’s relatives, and there are precious few men who would dare to dump a bunch of their kinspeople on their wives. Many a man is afraid to ask even his own mother to come to see him. The average husband would fall dead with surprise if his wife ever intimated to him that she considered the fact that he paid for the rent and food and light and heat and general upkeep of the home gave him just as much right to have his family stay with them as she had to have hers.

As to the friends who come to the house, the wife considers it her prerogative to settle that little matter by herself and thinks that her husband has nothing to do with it. She spreads the mat with “Welcome” on it for those she likes and slams and bolts the door in the faces of those she doesn’t fancy. And she practically never fancies her husband’s old friends. So the man who had looked forward to having his old friends in his new home, who had dreamed of long talks with Tom by his fireside and to having Bob, who was closer than a brother, drop in at any time for pot-luck finds, somehow, not only that they do not come, but that he is afraid to ask them to come. Wives are always complaining that their husbands are not willing to stay at home. Perhaps the remedy is making the home a democracy instead of an autocracy. If men had more rights and privileges at home they might like staying in it better.

LXVII

DEVOURING FRIENDS

“One of the greatest pests in the world is what I call the devouring friend,” said a woman the other day. “She is a bloodthirsty cannibal who gobbles you up alive, and you have no way of protecting yourself against her, because the sacred name of friendship bars the use of all the lethal weapons that you can use in defending yourself against other bores and social nuisances.

“Of course, the common or garden variety of devouring friend is the one who literally eats you out of house and home. She is a self-invited guest who drops you a little note saying that she is passing through your city or that she has to have a little dental work done or wants to consult a doctor or do some shopping, and she does so pine to see her darling Susan and talk over old times, and will it be convenient for her to come and spend a few days with you? All of which being translated simply means that she desires to graft a hotel bill off you.

“Anyway, she comes and camps in your spare room by the week, because she always manages to string out the dental work or the appointments with the doctor or the milliner. She should worry. For she is having a good time at no expense. Furthermore, by hints and insinuations she inveigles your husband into taking her to places of amusement that you have not felt that you could afford even when there were only two of you to pay for. And she runs your grocery bill up to the skies because she develops a taste for the most expensive food. And as you see her calmly consuming the price of your new dress you know exactly how a cornfield feels when a swarm of seven-year locusts settles down on it and goes into action.

“Then there are the devouring friends who eat up your time. I am a busy woman. I cannot afford to waste a minute. Unfortunately for me, I have a number of women friends who are rich and whose principal occupation in life is killing time. Now, these women know perfectly well that I not only do all of my own housework but that I make my children’s clothes and that if they kill a morning for me they upset my whole schedule and make my work pile up upon me so that my labor is twice as hard.

“But does that keep them from interrupting me? Lord, no. Every time Maud has a spat with her mother-in-law she will drop over and spend a whole morning giving me all the harrowing details. Every time Lulu’s husband gives her a new limousine I have to waste hours of my valuable time listening to a minute description of all its splendor. Every time Sallie and Susie want to be sympathized with or want to brag about their children they ruin the heart of a day’s work for me by backing me up against a wall and making me listen. And a dozen times a day I am interrupted by women who call me up over the telephone to hold long and fruitless conversations about nothing.

“Yet there is no possible way to protect my precious time against these friends who eat it up. They are all charming women. They like me and I like them. I want to retain their friendship, so I cannot shut my door in their faces when they come to see me. I can’t ask them to leave when they stay too long. I can’t ring off when they call me over the telephone. I can’t even say ‘damn’ aloud, no matter how much I am thinking it. But I know what the cynic meant when he said that if God would save him from his friends he would protect himself from his enemies.

“Then there are the devouring friends who swallow up all of your home life. My husband’s business is such that he has only one or two evenings at home a week. We would like to have these to ourselves to keep up our acquaintance or to go out on a little spree together. We have proclaimed this fact loudly and long to our friends and we refuse every invitation that it is possible to get out of for those two sacred occasions. But it doesn’t do a particle of good.

“Being an unusually charming and entertaining individual, my husband is regarded by my friends as a social tidbit—a particularly savory hors d’œuvre, as it were—and they gobble up our evenings together without the slightest compunction. If we won’t go to them, all right. They will come to us. So just about the time we are settling down for a real heart-to-heart talk, here come the Smiths to pass a pleasant evening with us, or the Joneses descend upon us and bear us off, shrieking and protesting, to listen to their new radio, or the Thompsons telephone that they are just coming over for a game of bridge.

“And there are the other devouring friends who nibble away at our independence like a mouse at a cheese, until some day we suddenly wake up to the fact that our freedom is all gone. We haven’t a vestige of liberty left. We dare not give a party and leave them out. We have to explain to them everything we do and tag meekly along in their footsteps. And there are other devouring friends who gnaw constantly on our sympathies by telling us all of their troubles and making us bear their burdens for them. They are ghouls who make us feed them our hearts to satisfy their morbid appetite for pity. Perhaps there is no way to get rid of devouring friends, but it certainly would add to the pleasures of life if we could swat them as we do other household pests.”

LXVIII

THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS

What is the secret of happiness? I once asked Mary Anderson this question and she replied: “To find out what you want of life, and then to have the courage to take it. I wanted quiet, seclusion, home and husband and children, the ordinary domestic life of woman,” she went on. “I had the courage to leave the stage at the very height of my career. And I have had the courage to refuse every offer to go back, no matter how dazzling it was. I have also had the courage to stay in my sleepy little village and refuse to let myself be drawn into the brilliant whirl of London society. I have been happy because I knew what I wanted, and I have been brave enough to take it in spite of all temptations to be led into doing the things that I did not want to do.”

Undoubtedly this is one of the answers to the great riddle that we are always asking and that so few solve. A great many people are unhappy because they do not really know what they want. They have no clear vision of the thing they are seeking. They are torn between conflicting desires and never settle down to any one thing, and find contentment and peace in that. You see this exemplified in the men who are always changing from one occupation to another, and who work with their minds on their golf and play golf with their minds on their work. You see it in the women who are fretful and peevish wives and mothers, complaining of the burdens of domesticity and feeling that they have missed happiness in not following some career, and in the women who have followed careers and who are always bemoaning their loneliness because they have no families. Yet how seldom do the disgruntled, who lament their fate in life so loudly, have the courage to face about and take the road that they at least believe leads to happiness! We behold so many idle tears that we are inclined to believe there are vast numbers of human beings who get a kind of morbid pleasure out of misery.

But what is the secret of happiness? I give four guesses at the conundrum. The first is work, to keep so busy that we do not have leisure to think whether we are happy or not. There is no other pleasure comparable to the clean joy of being swallowed up in some useful, constructive work that calls forth every power of mind and body. Your own job, that you do competently, has for you a never-failing interest, a perpetual thrill that nothing else in the world can give. Only brainless idiots are content to loaf. Intelligent, thinking men and women must keep busy in order to be happy.

My second guess is that happiness is the bird in the hand and not the bird in the bush. If we are ever to be happy we must be happy now at the present moment. We cannot put it off until to-morrow. You are always hearing people say that they are going to do this and that when they get rich, that they are going to travel when they are old, they are going to play, they are going to take up old acquaintances, they are going to enjoy themselves five, ten, twenty years hence. But when the time comes that they have set to be happy in, they find that they have lost their capacity for enjoyment. Those who have inched and pinched and sweated every penny trying to accumulate a fortune have formed such a habit of parsimony that it is agony to them to spend money. Those who have denied themselves too much have lost all desire. Those who have stayed at home too long have become such a fixture on Main Street that they are lonesome and homesick everywhere else.

So the happy men and women are those who take the goods the gods provide each hour. They make a reasonable provision against the rainy day, and then they indulge themselves in the good clothes, the pretty home, the comfortable car, the palatable food, the little trips that are within their reach. They do not put off every pleasure until some mythical, problematic day, when they will be able to live in a palace and have a Rolls-Royce and Paris clothes and when they will be too old and rheumatic and set in their ways to want to do anything but sit by the fire in their own familiar chair. Never was there sounder philosophy conveyed than in the old comic opera ditty which said, “I want what I want when I want it,” and if we don’t take it then, it is dust and ashes in our teeth.

Happiness consists in simple things. We are always envying the rich and great, and think how happy they must be, but we might well pity them, for they have far more sources of sorrow than we have. Beyond a modest competence, riches are a burden, and money can become a curse that blights every natural joy. The millionaire is cut off from the greatest of all happiness—that of knowing himself loved for himself alone. He suspects the motive of every friend, he does not even trust the woman he marries, and he knows his wealth to be a blight upon his children. The real source of happiness is in enjoying simple things—a gorgeous sunset, a beautiful landscape, a clever book, a good dinner, the talk of a friend, the unfaltering love of husband or wife, a baby’s arms around your neck, a fine son and daughter filling you with pride and joy. These have no price tag on them. They may belong just as much to the poor man as the rich man. Indeed, they oftener do.

Finally, remember the song, “I Want to Be Happy, but I Can’t Be Happy Till I Make You Happy, Too.” In unselfishness, in doing good to others—that is the real answer to the secret of how to be happy.