Part 6

The trial divorce would do much to solve even those cases in which husbands and wives think that they have fallen out of love with their lawful mates and have found their affinities in others. Nine times out of ten the reason that men and women lose their affection for their husbands and wives is just because they are bored with them. They have had an overdose of them. They have seen them too long and at too close range.

Every woman knows that when she starts off on her summer vacation she sees her husband as just a hump-shouldered, fat, bald-headed man, who is slouchy about dressing; but after she has been away a week she begins to remember what a classical nose he has. In a fortnight she thinks how handsome and distinguished-looking he is, and by the end of the month he is a perfect Valentino to her. The man has just the same reactions about his wife. She goes away fat and frumpy and middle-aged, and she returns merely plump and more attractive than any flapper to him.

Many men and women who think they are permanently tired of their husbands and wives are only temporarily weary of looking at the same face and listening to the same line of conversation across the breakfast table, and if a trial divorce gave them a second choice they would find that they preferred the old love to the new.

For the lure of the “other woman” and the “other man” is chiefly that they are unattainable and unknown, and these charms vanish before the trial divorce that makes them possible and familiar. It gives the foolish, infatuated husband and wife a chance really to compare the long-haired poet or the short-haired flapper with the partners they had and are about to lose.

Give a man time to forget his wife’s nagging, and his peaches-and-cream complexioned secretary will not look as good a risk, after all, to him as his faithful old wife. Give a woman time to forget the mean things her husband said to her when they quarreled, and she will think a long time before she exchanges her good provider for some impecunious glib love-maker.

The truth is, that few men and women find in divorce the solution of their woes that they expected. They picture it as a state of bliss in which they will be free of all woes and cares, an earthly paradise in which there will be no fretting wives or fault-finding husbands, and in which they will be able to do exactly as they please. But they find its golden apples Dead Sea fruit that turns to ashes on their lips. The man who has resented his wife’s tyranny and writhed under her curtain lectures, strangely finds out that he wants to go home, when he has no home to which to go, and nobody to care whether he ever comes back or not.

The woman who has thought she would be happy if she no longer had to live with a neglectful husband, finds that the world also neglects her and that her freedom has merely brought her the freedom of earning her own living. And when this hard and bitter knowledge soaks into the consciousness of men and women many of them would be glad enough to go back again to their old husbands and wives if they could.

So, when we unscramble our scrambled marriage laws, let’s put the trial divorce into them.

XIV

MARRY THE MAN YOU LOVE

A young woman wants to know whether it is better to marry the man she loves, or the man who loves her. Both, I should say. Marriage should be a mutual benefit association in which both parties give and receive; in which they love and are loved in equal measure. Cupid, however, is no dispenser of justice. He rarely holds the scales even. Very few husbands and wives feel the same amount of affection for each other. In almost every married couple one kisses and the other submits to being kissed, as the French proverb cynically puts it.

This being the case, it is better for the woman to be the kisser than the kissee, because, while it is misfortune to a woman never to be loved, it is a tragedy to her never to love.

Of course, every woman desires to be worshiped by some man, and she dreams of having a husband who will be a perpetual lover and spend his life laying tributes at her feet. She feels that she would be perfectly happy doing the goddess-on-a-pedestal act, and occasionally deigning to bestow a kind word on her adorer, as one throws a bone to a dog. Obsessed by this romantic vision, which flatters her vanity, many a woman is beguiled into marrying a man for whom she has only a mild liking because he is so crazy about her. She thinks that he can supply enough love for two, and that she will be happy and satisfied with just being loved.

It does not take her long to find out that she has made a sad mistake, and that there is nothing with which we can get so easily satiated as we can with the affection we do not return. We have no appetite for it and it is tasteless in our mouths. Nor are there any greater bores than those who love us, who cling to us, who want to be always with us, but whom we do not love and of whom we get tired to death.

All of us know doormat husbands whose wives ruthlessly trample them under foot. We all know peevish, disgruntled, discontented wives, whose husbands slave to give them luxuries for which they never get so much as—“Thank you.” We have all held up our hands in horror when some wife left a good, devoted husband and eloped with another man or packed her trunk and hiked out for Hollywood, and we wondered what was the matter with these women that they were not satisfied with their husband’s love.

The trouble with them was that they had married men who loved them instead of men they loved. If they had been doing the love-making and trying to hold the affections of husbands whom they suspected every flapper of trying to steal from them, they would have been too busy, too thrilled and interested to get into mischief.

There are many reasons why a woman who is contemplating matrimony should lay greater stress upon the state of her own affections than she does upon the man’s. The principal one, of course, is because a woman is ten times as much married to her husband as he is to her, and therefore it is ten times more important that she should be pleased with her bargain than it is that he should be satisfied with his.

A married man has a million interests, and distractions, and amusements, and compensations outside of his home, and if his wife does not turn out to be all that his fondest fancy painted her, he has his business to fall back upon, his ambition and his career to console him. He is never wholly dependent on his wife for his happiness. But a woman stakes her all on her matrimonial gamble, and if she does not love her husband, if she does not find happiness in her home, she has nothing.

A woman’s emotions make her life. What she feels is of more interest to her than what she does. She cannot substitute liking for loving any more than she can water for wine. And no matter how much she admires the man to whom she is married, no matter how grateful she is to him for his kindness to her, unless he can raise a thrill in her breast everything is cinders, ashes and dust to her.

She feels that she has missed the best thing in life, the thing she most wanted; and she is restless and dissatisfied, and is forever on a still hunt to find her real soul-mate.

To the average woman, marriage is a state of perpetual sacrifice. She must go through the agony of bearing children, and the long, weary years of ceaseless care and anxiety in rearing them. She must work harder than any hireling at the dull and monotonous task of cooking and cleaning and scrubbing and sewing and mending that it takes to make a comfortable home. And the only thing on earth that can make all of this worth while is love for her husband. That sets a star in her sky. That gilds the humblest task. The woman who stands over a stove cooking a dinner for the husband to whom she is utterly indifferent is a slave driven to her appointed task by her sense of duty. The woman who stands over a stove cooking dinner for a husband she adores is a priestess making a burnt offering of herself on the altar of her god.

The woman who marries the man she loves is never bored, and boredom is the particular curse of the feminine sex. She throws herself heart and soul into her husband’s interests, and is more eager for his success than he is himself. She is never dull, because the smallest thing that concerns him is of more import to her than the events that shake the great outer world. She can find food for thought and scope for her activities in the fact that her husband likes onions with his beefsteak or prefers mushrooms. Her days are filled with pleasurable excitement in preparing for his homecoming of an evening, and when she hears his key in the latch her heart strikes up “Hail to the King.”

The woman who marries the man she loves is never dissatisfied, never disgruntled. He may be a poor thing, but he is her own, the one she cut out of the bunch and which she marked with her own brand. Having got the one thing she wanted most, she can well afford to pity her poor sisters who have only limousines and pearls and the merely tolerated husbands who are the purveyors thereof. A woman should always marry a man with whom she is very much in love, because it insures her a stimulating and interesting life. The reason that most women run down and get slack and slouchy is because they are bored to tears with domesticity. They do not care for their husbands and so they take no trouble to please them.

But the woman who is in love with her husband, who married the man she wanted, is on her tiptoes all of the time. She means to keep him and she takes no chances on disillusioning him with curl papers, and cold cream, and bad cooking, and tantrums. She is eternally in pursuit; and while there may be times when she gets tired and feels as if she would like to sit down and take things easy, still there is no denying that the love chase puts pep in any lady’s day.

A woman should never marry any man except the one with whom she is very much in love, because every woman craves romance, and if she doesn’t get it at home she is very apt to seek it abroad, or else she goes through life hungry, unsatisfied. The wives who get into scandals; who think they find soul-mates in their preachers, or their doctors, or long-haired poets; the wives who run off after strange cults and who burden down the mails with letters to movie actors are all women who married men they didn’t love.

The women who are crazily in love with their husbands make their own angel’s food at home and don’t have to go around trying to pick up stray crumbs on the street. Of course, the woman who loves her husband better than he does her has her moments of acute jealousy, but even these are full of ginger and are better than the dull stagnation of having a man that you don’t take the trouble to lock up at night because you know you can’t lose him.

Truly, it is more blessed to give than to receive, and it is better for a woman to love than to be loved.

XV

ARE YOU GOOD COMPANY FOR YOURSELF?

Do you ever think what poor company most of us are for ourselves? It is strange but true that the one individual on God’s earth who bores the average man and woman more than any one else is just himself and herself. There is no society they so dread as their own, and no expedient so desperate that they will not resort to it rather than be left alone with themselves. They will fasten themselves like leeches on kinspeople and friends who try to shake them loose. They will stay on in homes where they know they are not welcome. They will put up with any discomfort in order to herd together. They will hold up the telephone poles at the corners of streets, and walk the aisles of the department stores until they are ready to drop with fatigue.

They will belong to clubs where they foregather with the dull and prosy and fat-witted, and where they spend hours listening to egotists monologue about how great and wonderful they are. Evening after evening they go to vaudeville performances whose every turn is so stupid it is enough to make even a hero scream with pain, and to see moving pictures whose scenarios are an insult to the intelligence of an idiot.

Anything—anywhere, to get away from themselves, to escape having to spend an hour in their own company. So universal is the belief that it is the limit of social and mental poverty to be reduced to your own society for company, that we speak of those who live alone as being lonesome, and pity them accordingly.

It does not even occur to us that they may have that within themselves which could make them gay and witty companions to themselves, of whom they would never tire.

It is easy, of course, to see why many people are bored to tears with their own company. Men and women who never read anything can’t have very much that is new and interesting to say to themselves. After they have discussed the state of the green grocery trade with themselves, on which they are rather fed up anyway after having wrestled with it all day, or mulled over the last gossip about the neighbors next door, and wondered for the millionth time how the Joneses can afford a new car, and where the Smith girl has been spending the evening when she came home at 3 A. M., they find that they have exhausted their conversational repertoire.

But if they are reading people they can never have a dull instant when they are alone, for every book, every magazine, every newspaper is a magic carpet that takes them in an instant into the uttermost parts of the world. There isn’t a strange sight they may not see, or a secret whispered behind a closed door they may not hear; nor a romance unfolded whose thrill does not touch their hearts and stir their pulse. Education and cultivation would be worth while if they did nothing else except take the curse off loneliness.

You can see how people who are envious and jealous and quarrelsome and mean-spirited dread to be left alone with themselves. They have devils from hell for company, those men and women whose souls are filled with bitterness and hate, and who are forever thrashing over old grievances, recalling old wrongs, bringing to life again old enmities.

We all avoid the pessimistic and the cynical—those who can see nothing cheerful or good in the world, and with whom even a chance meeting seems to take the warmth out of the sunshine, and God out of His heaven, and make all life dark and foul. How terrible, then, must it be to live with yourself when you have nothing to say to yourself that does not leave a dark-brown taste in your mouth? It is not strange that those who have lived hard and selfish and grasping lives are poor company for themselves.

You cannot imagine a widow spending a cheery evening recalling how she nagged her poor, dead husband, how cross and peevish and complaining she was, or how little she had done to repay him for all that he had done for her. Neither can you imagine a woman enjoying telling herself that if she had been less extravagant, and content with simple things, if she hadn’t demanded fine clothes and jewels and trips to Europe, that her husband would not have had to kill himself working, and that she might now have some one to talk to, living and breathing, instead of a demon of remorse.

It is not strange that a man wants other company than the recollection of how his coldness and neglect turned the bright, joyous, loving, tender girl he married into a quiet, sad woman who cringed like a whipped dog before his cruel fault-finding. Nor is it strange that the man who has driven hard bargains and overreached in trade, who has ground down the faces of those who worked for him, who has taken advantage of the ignorant and the trustful, and built his fortune on the ruins of widows and children, does not find his own society exhilarating.

When we are old we have nothing but our memories left us. They are enough company if they are filled with the smiling faces of those we loved, who recall to us kindly acts we have done, helping hands we have held out, and if they murmur to us of kindly, gracious deeds. But they are terrible companions if they are filled with memories of cruelty and wrong. Considering that, do what we may, we can never escape from ourselves, that we are bound to endure our own society, is it not a pity that we do not emulate the poet who said, “My mind to me a kingdom is,” and make ourselves better company for ourselves!

XVI

KEEPING YOUNG

None of us wants to die. No matter how strong our religious faith, nor how lustily we sing “Heaven is my home,” none of us is in a hurry to go there. We prefer to stay in a world in which we are acquainted and acclimated. Likewise, we all dread old age. It fills us with horror to think of becoming bent and tottering old men and women, our vigor of mind and body gone, sans hair, sans teeth, sans everything. So from time immemorial humanity has been on the still hunt for some magic that will stay the devastating hand of time and enable it to hold on to the youth it prizes so dearly. The ancients sailed the world over seeking fabled islands and miraculous fountains of perpetual youth. We moderns pin our faith to the surgeon’s knife and the druggist’s bottles, to monkey glands, and face liftings, and paints, and powders, and hair dyes.

All in vain. The black oxen of the years march over us, treading out our youth and beauty, our strength and high spirits, and nothing that we can do will stop them. So it seems a pity that we should waste so much thought, so much struggle, and effort, and energy, and money in essaying an impossible task. For do what we may, we cannot keep young, and when we try to camouflage age as juvenility the only people in the world that we fool are ourselves.

We can dye our hair the gold, or the black, or the jet of girlhood, but we cannot put under it the fresh face of sixteen. We can have our skin gored and tucked until all of our wrinkles are taken out, but there still remain the tired, old eyes that have seen fifty or sixty years. We can starve ourselves until we get the figures of flappers, but we are not lithe and graceful. We are living skeletons. We can roll our stockings and borrow our granddaughter’s clothes, but it doesn’t make us look like debutantes. It makes us look like those afflicted with senile dementia. The truth is, the more we fight age the harder it fights back and the sooner it conquers us. None grow old so quickly as those who work themselves into premature age trying to keep young.

Once I was standing behind a jaunty little figure perched on the runningboard of a car. She wore the gayest and sportiest of sport suits. She had the thin figure of a girl of fifteen. Her bobbed henna-colored hair curled under the brim of a rakish little hat. Presently she turned around and disclosed a face that was like a mask, it was so plastered over with cosmetics. “Heavens! Did you ever see such an old hag?” exclaimed a man near me.

Now, this woman was not more than fifty years old. She was in the prime of life, at an age when many women are handsomer than they ever were in their lives. No one would have thought of her as being old at all, if she had been willing to appear her own honest age; if she had had the pleasing plumpness that belonged to her time of life; if her soft, gray hair had waved about her face, and if she had been appropriately dressed. It was her effort to appear kiddish that called attention to what an old goat she was.

If bobbing and dyeing their hair, and dieting themselves to emaciation, and wearing knee-length skirts made elderly women look young and girlish, they would not only be justified in doing so, it would be a virtue to do it, for thereby they would make themselves easy on the eyes. But just the reverse is true. Their affectation of youth only calls attention to what a long distance they have traveled from youth. Old mutton never seems so old, and tough, and stringy as when it is dressed as spring lamb.

And the folly of trying to act young after you are old is just as great as that of trying to look sixteen when you are sixty. Women have been told so often they must keep their spirits young, they must never think old thoughts, they must never speak of age, or admit to themselves they are getting older, that they have come to believe that, simply by forgetting their birthdays, they can maintain perpetual girlhood.

We all know women who begin every reminiscence by saying that they were very young at the time it happened, and who give us to understand their husbands were cradle snatchers, who married them when they were mere infants. We know old women who are always teasing themselves about men, and talking about their best beaus, and pretending to have flirtations with boys young enough to be their grandsons, and repeating compliments about their eyes or their fascinations they allege men paid them, but that even an idiot would know that they made up themselves. How ridiculous the poor souls make themselves! How infinitely older they appear than the women who do not try to pose as vamps after they have ceased to look the part, and who regard men just as they do women, as interesting and agreeable human beings.

Perhaps, after all, we make too big a bugaboo of growing old. The twilight has its charms no less than the dawn or high noon, and so the last lap of the journey of life has its compensations and its joys if we are willing to accept them.