Part 10

One cook can take a cheap cut of meat and a handful of vegetables and make of them a ragout, over which an epicure would smack his lips. Another cook will take the same meat and vegetables and make of them a watery stew, with neither flavor nor nutriment to it. It is the same material, but the difference is in the cooks.

That is the way it is all through life. There are a few fortunate individuals who seem to be the darlings of the gods, and with whom Lady Luck walks hand in hand. And there are also a few miserable ones who appear to have been born double-crossed by fate. But the great majority of us get a pretty even deal. We have the same family relationships. We go to the same schools. We have the same chance to work, and the balance is up to us. We are happy or miserable, successful or failures, rich or poor, according to what we make out of our lives. We marry, millions of us. And set up homes. One out of every seven of the marriages ends in divorce. More than three-fourths of the homes are wrecked, not because there is anything especially wrong, not because either husband or wife is an outbreaking criminal, but because they are too ignorant or too selfish to make their marriage a success.

All husbands and wives are cut off the same bolt of humanity. No man is perfect. No woman is an angel. No domestic machine runs along without a jar or a hitch. Every marriage calls for sacrifices, for patience, for forgiveness, endurance, and you get out of it just what you put into it—heaven or hell.

You go to homes that simply irradiate peace and love and good cheer, where there is a happy and contented man, and a smiling and blissful woman: where there are fine children growing up in the right atmosphere. And you go to another home that is a place of torment, where a surly man snarls and snaps, and a disgruntled woman whines and complains, and unruly, uncontrolled children fight like the Kilkenny cats.

Yet both of these families started out with the same equipment. Both couples were in love when they were married. Both had about the same amount of money. Both were called upon to make the same sacrifices. Both had the same chances at happiness. Yet one made a success of marriage, and the other failed.

We talk about opportunity, and when we fail we lay the blame on luck. We say we never had a chance. But the truth is that we are our own luck, that we make our own opportunities.

Did you ever think that every day in the year there are thousands of green country boys going into every big city, seeking their fortunes, and thousands of city boys leaving those same cities because they think that everything is overcrowded and overdone, and that they have no opportunity there? And many of those country boys will find the chance the city boy overlooked, and pick up the fortune he passed by.

The world is full of failures, croaking that there is no money in farming or the mercantile business, and warning young men that they will starve if they become lawyers, or doctors, or actors, or writers, or artists. Yet there are rich farmers with bursting granaries. Everywhere millionaire business men. There are world-famous lawyers and doctors and matinée idols and men who write best sellers.

And the successes are side by side with the failures, working in the same environment, under the same conditions, and the only difference is the difference in the men themselves. It is the difference in the energy, the grit, the determination, the stick-at-iveness, the heart and soul and brains that one man put into his work and the other didn’t. Whether we are happy or not depends upon ourselves, for in reality we all have pretty much the same raw material with which to work.

Sickness, suffering, the death of those we love, disappointment, come to us all. The poorest woman alive and the millionairess bear their children in the same agony, and weep the same tears over little coffins. Money does not buy love, tenderness, nor peace of mind, and just as many hearts ache under silver brocade as under cotton.

But we can hold our souls serene if we will. We can keep from fretting. We can resolutely extract the sweet instead of the bitter out of life. We can dwell on our blessings instead of our miseries, and we can acquire a philosophy that will enable us to laugh instead of weep over the misadventures that befall us.

For our lives are what we make them. It is all up to us.

XXX

HUSBAND LOSERS

Three divorced women were talking together the other day and one of them said:

“When we wives lose our husbands we always accuse some other woman of having stolen them from us; and we cry out that our husbands are cruel ingrates, who have taken the best years of our lives and then thrown us aside like broken toys when we were no longer young and beautiful. And we pose as blameless martyrs who are the pitiful victims of man’s perfidy.

“Of course, it saves our faces to be able to lay all the blame for our wrecked homes on others, and it soothes our hurt vanity to be wept over as a poor, innocent, deserted wife. But in the still watches of the night, when we have it out with our own souls, there are mighty few of us who can shrive our consciences and know that we are blameless.

“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.

The mistake that most wives make is in taking their husbands too seriously. They have heard so much about the mighty masculine intellect that they think their husbands are profound, thoughtful human beings who mean every word they say and whose every act is part of a deeply considered plan of life. Whereas the truth is that men babble just as meaninglessly as women do, and are the creatures of impulse. Also, women are under the misapprehension that they have a monopoly on nerves, and that hysterics are the sole prerogative of the feminine sex.

These beliefs make women attach a significance to the things that men say and do to which they are not entitled; and it makes them “get their husbands wrong” and break their hearts over crimes that the poor, blundering men do not even know that they are committing.

In consequence whereof the wife’s feelings are in a constant state of laceration, and she meets each hard knock with a still harder one, or else goes off and salts her wounds down in the brine of her tears.

Now, no one will argue that a human cyclone is a pleasant companion to live with, nor would any sane woman pick out a man who is giving a life-like imitation of the Day of Wrath with whom to spend her evenings. But, all the same, women make themselves unnecessarily miserable by taking their husbands’ humors too seriously.

The cruel speeches that stab the wife to the soul are not prompted by malice toward her. They are the reaction of nerves that have been frazzled to the breaking point by the worries of the day at the office. The frozen silence which the wife finds it so hard to endure is just sheer exhaustion of mind and body, and the woman who can just take her husband’s moods this way can not only save herself many a tearfest, but can make her husband eat out of her hand by feeding him and laughing at him and jollying him along.

Certainly, the woman who is married to a nervous, overworked man might well do a little mental balancing of accounts and check off a lot of temper, and impatience, and unreason, and fault finding against the finery he gives her, and the success he has achieved, of which she is so proud and which he has literally bought with his life’s blood. She might well forgive his faults and deal leniently with them, since they are the direct result of his struggle to lap her in luxury.

She is, believe me, a discerning and a tender wife who answers her husband’s irascible speeches with a pat on the head and a “there, there, it’s all right,” as she would a sick and fretful child, instead of going to the mat with him.

So much for the wife’s side of the question. Now for the husband’s.

Business furnishes no alibi for surliness, and grouchiness, and general disagreeableness. No man has a right to come home at night and dump down on his own hearthstone all the nerves, and temper, and irritability he has kept bottled up in him all day.

Because a woman has the misfortune to be a man’s wife is no reason he should insult her and say to her things that he would not say to any other woman who had an able-bodied brother, or that he would not dream of saying to any woman who had $10 to spend across his counter, or who was his client, or his patient.