Part 9

I had not thought it possible that Tom's mother could understand my feeling for my mother and my honest pride in her real worth. Perhaps, I reflected, I had been unjust to my mother-in-law. I knew what a shock I had been to her in the early days of our marriage, and I knew only too well that even Tom had often regretted my ignorance of social usages.

They are simple customs, and should be taught in every school in America, but I had not learned them. I was happy that night and for days afterward.

Then we went back to Europe. Tom knew people on the steamer to whom I took a dislike. They were bold and even vulgar, and Tom admitted that he did not admire them. I made up my mind we should avoid them. The next afternoon I found Tom and that group walking the deck arm in arm, chatting affably. When we were alone, I asked Tom how he could do it. I know now that a man cannot hold an official position like Tom's and ignore politically important people. But he only said rather carelessly, and with a laugh, that it was one of the prices a man pays for public office.

After that I noticed that my husband was known to nearly every one. He had a glad hand and a smile for the public--because it was the public. I watched to see if he had a slightly different smile for the people of Back Bay and his own particular social class; sometimes I thought he had, and it made me a little soul-sick.

I longed for a home for my baby and a few friends I could love and really enjoy. I was not fitted to be the wife of a public man. It was the poverty and crudeness of my youth that had made me intolerant. One of the big lessons life has taught me is that people can be amiable, tolerant, and even friendly, and still be sincere. The pleasantry of social relations among the civilized peoples of the earth is a mere garment we wear for our own protection and to cover our feelings. It is the oil of the machinery of life. I have found that men and women who take part in the big work of the earth wear that garment of civility and graciousness, and yet have their strong friendships and even their bitter enmities.

But I did not understand this when we went back to Europe. I only knew that my husband was amiable to people he did not like, and I questioned how deep his affection for me went. How much of his kindness to me was just the easiest way and the manner of a gentleman?

A hard and bare youth had made me supersensitive and suspicious and narrow. I wanted to measure other people by the standards of my own primitive years. Out on the frontier we had judged life in the rough. Courage and truth were the essentials. A man fought his enemies out in the open, and made no compromises. There was nothing easy in life, no smooth rhythm. And I tried to drag forward with me, as I went, the bold ethics of the frontier. I resented good manners because I believed they were a cloak of hypocrisy.

A few months after we returned to Europe the shadow of death crossed our path, swiftly and terribly. My little son died. Other babies came to us later, but that first little boy had brought more into my life than all the rest of the world could ever give. He had restored my faith in life, my hope, and for a while was all my joy.

People were kind, but I felt that many called merely because it was “good form”--“the thing to do.” Bitterness was creeping into my heart.

Yet why should it not be “the thing to do” to call on a bereaved mother? It is a gesture of humanity. Tom seemed very far away. I felt that his pride was hurt, perhaps his vanity; for he had boasted of the little fellow and loved to show him off. How little I understood!

I bring myself to tell these intimate things because there is a lesson in them for other women--because I resent that any free-born American citizen should be handicapped by lacking so small and easily acquired a possession as poise, poise that comes with knowledge of the simple rules of the social game. It is my hope that this honest confession of my own feelings, due directly to lack of training, may help other women, and particularly other mothers whose children are now in the plastic years.

It was my utter lack of appreciation of manners and customs in my husband's class that estranged me from Tom. I was resentful and antagonistic merely because I was different.

My husband was suffering even as I was suffering; but no one realized it, least of all myself. Every one was especially kind to me, because I was a woman. People are rarely attentive and tender with men when loss comes. Men are supposed to be strong and self-controlled; their hearts are rated as a little less deep and tender than the hearts of women; yet when men are truly hurt they need love and care even as little children.

A month after the baby's death, Tom and I were walking along the Embankment in London one Saturday afternoon, when we met a small girl carrying a little child. The baby was too tired to walk any farther; it was dirty, and was crying bitterly. Tom stopped, spoke to the girl, and offered to carry the baby, who soon quieted down on Tom's shoulder. At the end of that walk Tom's light summer suit was ruined. I expected him to turn with some trivial, jesting remark, but he said nothing. I looked at him and saw that his face was set and hard and his eyes wet. Without looking at me, he said: “Don't speak to me now.”

That moment of silence revealed to me my husband's character better than months of talking.

The next day my husband came to me and said: “Mary, I have asked for a leave of absence. We are going back to the United States. We are going out West to have a visit with your family.”

Two years before I had believed that Tom would not fit into my Northwest. But in twenty-four hours Tom and my father were old pals. He was as much at home with mother and the children as I, and all the neighbors liked him. He was interested in everything on the ranch, and even in the small-town life of the village. He interested father in putting modern equipment on the ranch. He went hunting with the men, played games with the children, visited the little district schoolhouse, and found joy in buying gifts for the youngsters. When mother made a big platter full of taffy, he pulled as enthusiastically as a boy. As I stood at the corral, one day, and watched Tom with my youngest brother, I remembered him at the court of St. James, and I began to understand.

Tom was natural. It was just a part of him to be kindly and gracious to everybody. I had never seen him angry with men of his own type, but I saw him furious enough to commit murder when a man on the ranch tied up a dog and beat her for running away. In after years I saw Tom angry with men of his own class; I saw him waging long, bitter fights against public men who had betrayed public trust. Something barbaric in me was satisfied that my kind, gently bred man was one with the men of my own tribe, who fought man and beast and the elements to take civilization farther west.

Almost a generation slipped by between that visit to the West and the next scene in my life of which I shall write. Many things of personal and of national importance happened meantime, but they have nothing to do with this message to women. I was in France when the World War began. I had been in Vienna again, and in England at regular intervals. I had learned to accept life as I found it, and to get much joy out of living. Sometimes I chafed a little under the demands of social life and needless formalities, but I accepted them as inevitable.

Then the world was torn in two. The earth dripped in blood and sorrow. Life became more difficult than on the frontier, and more elemental. I was present, in the first year of the war, in a house where the King and Queen of the Belgians were guests, where great generals and great statesmen had gathered on great and earnest and desperate business. I was only an onlooker, and I noticed what every one else was too absorbed to see. As the evening progressed, I realized that pomp and ceremony had died with the youth of France. King, generals, statesmen met as human men pitting their wits against one another, desperately struggling to find a way out of the hell into which they were falling.

Twice the king rose to his feet, and no one else stood. They were all too deep in the terrible question of war.

When the meeting was over and the guests of the house ready to retire, the little queen said very quietly: “Madam, may not my husband and I occupy this room together? It is very kind of you to arrange two suites for us, but I am sure there are many guests here to-night--and, anyway, I prefer to be near him.”

The war had done that. Who would expect a queen to think of the problems of housing guests, even a great queen? And the war had made the king not the king, but her man, very near and very dear.

Many other conventions I saw die by the way as the war progressed. Then America came in.

There is a temptation to talk about America in the war, but, after all, that has no bearing on my story. Soon after the United States entered, American men and women began to arrive in Europe in great numbers. I met them everywhere; sight-seeing, in offices, at universities, at embassies and consulates. I met them and loved them and suffered for them.

I was proud of something they brought to France that France needed, and I have no doubt that many of them took back to America something from France that we need.

For pure mental quality and courage, no people on earth could match what the American girls took to France. It was the finest stuff in the world. They knew how to meet hardship without grumbling. They knew how to run a kitchen and see that hungry men were fed. They knew how to nurse, to run telephones, automobiles--anything that needed to be done. Some failed and fell by the wayside, but they were the smallest possible percentage.

Those American girls knew how to do everything--almost everything.