Part 8

The thing that oftenest makes marriage a failure is its dulness. The real specter on the hearth is that awful silence. It is because husbands and wives have nothing interesting to say to each other that they quarrel. It is no joke, it is a sad truth, that in any theater or restaurant you can spot the married couples at a first glance. They are the couples who are sitting up reading the program through from cover to cover between the acts, or are apparently memorizing the menu while the waiter brings their order. The alert, interesting, smiling people who are gayly chatting together are the unwed, or those who are talking to other people’s husbands and wives.

Let even a bore drop into a droopy, dejected family circle that has been yawning itself to death and everybody brightens up and the stream of conversation which had apparently dried up at its source begins to flow again. Two may be company and three a crowd before marriage, but generally after marriage two is gobs of silence and three a godsend.

Yet the majority of people marry for companionship. Before marriage they could never get enough of each other’s society, and they esteemed each other perfect spellbinders. How is it, then, that they get so fed up on each other’s company that they sit up like mutes in the solitude of their homes? Why is it that, apart from fault-finding and spats and complaints about the servants and the tradesmen and bulletins about the children, there is so little family conversation; practically none that is interesting and cheerful and inspiring? You would think that a husband and wife who have all interests in common could never talk themselves out. But they do, and they come to the place where they take refuge behind the evening paper or in solitaire to save themselves from the pretense of even having to maintain the appearance of keeping up social intercourse.

Wives lay the blame for this state of affairs on their husbands. They say, heaven knows, that they would be glad enough to talk, but that you can’t maintain a conversation with a person who always grunts by way of reply, and who could give a clam on ice points on silence and then beat it at the game. Men retort that they have exhausted their conversational powers during business hours, and they desire to rest their vocal cords at home. Nevertheless, it is observable that if somebody interesting happens to call, or they go out to dinner, the very man who was silent at home finds plenty to say.

Now there are several reasons why there is so little conversation in the home. The first reason is because home talk is so often unpleasant. Women, especially, are prone to flavor it with gloom. They like to recite the litany of the day’s mischances. They spoil the flavor of a dinner by telling how much it cost. They bring on a scene with a child by telling of its naughtiness. They thrash over their old grievances because they can’t have what richer women have.

All of this gets on the husband’s nerves, and he retorts by saying a few pithy things about what a fool a man is to marry and burden himself with a family and what a poor manager his wife is, and he gives a few knocks to the dinner for good measure. After which conversation naturally languishes.

Another reason that there is little conversation at home is because it is dangerous. Experience teaches us that we have to watch our tongues and delete our home talk if we want to save ourselves from endless trouble.

A man hates to lie to his wife about what he does. He would enjoy telling her all about the poker game he stayed downtown for last night, and the funny things the boys said and did, but he does not do it because well he knows that the price of such an indiscreet revelation would be to have her nagging him about it forever and a day. A wife would just love to tell her husband about her adventures in buying a new hat, and how she fell for the twenty-five-dollar one instead of the fifteen-dollar one she meant to buy. But she is well aware that she would never hear the last of her extravagance if she did. So they both keep silent.

There is little home conversation because nobody is interested, and nobody pretends to be, in what you say. In the family circle nobody listens. Nobody laughs at your jokes. Nobody sees the points of your merry cracks. Try to tell a good story, and somebody is sure to remark that they have heard it before, and that it is an ancient wheeze. If you had discovered the North Pole and were relating your hairbreadth adventures in reaching it by airplane, somebody would interrupt at the most breathless moment to say that the iceman forgot to deliver the ice yesterday.

Wives won’t listen even when their husbands try to tell them about their hopes and plans and ambitions in their careers. And when a woman tries to talk to her husband about the things that are of vital interest to her he falls asleep and snores in her face.

And that is why conversation is a lost art in the family circle.

XXII

TO MARRY OR NOT TO MARRY?

A young woman once said to me:

“I am, as you know, the private secretary of the head of a very big business concern. I get a generous salary. My hours are easy. My employer, who is an elderly man, is one of the finest men in the world, and treats me with every courtesy, kindness and consideration. I feel it a privilege to be in daily contact with such a brilliant mind as he has. I love my work. I have what they call in men a business head. To me there is no other romance so fascinating as the romance of commerce; no game so absorbing as the business game. And it thrills me to the finger tips to know that I have a part, even if it is a small one, in this great adventure that sends men and ships to the uttermost parts of the earth and that gambles for fortunes.

“It gratifies my vanity to know that I have worked up from the bottom to my present fine position, and it pleases my ambition to know that I can climb still higher, and that every year I will be more efficient and more valuable to my employer. I enjoy the money I make, and the luxuries it brings me, as only a woman can who comes of a poor family, and whose girlhood has been barren of all the pretty things that girls crave. I find a lot of solid satisfaction in watching my bank account grow, knowing that, if I keep on with my job for a few years, I will have put by enough to safeguard my old age.

“So far, so good. If I were going to remain perpetually on the sunny side of forty, I would ask no life better than that of the successful business woman. But the dread hour will strike for me, as it does for all other women, and I am wondering if, when it does, I will not find myself a lonely old woman, and wish that I had married and had children.

“I am thirty now, and I have got to decide the question in the next year or two. Shall I give up my mahogany desk for a gas range? Shall I forfeit my fat pay envelope for a job where I shall have to toil ten times as hard for only my board and clothes? Shall I give up the occupation for which I spent years in preparing myself, for which I have talent and which is a joy for me to perform, for domestic service which I loathe, for which I have no aptitude and in which I am utterly unskilled?

“When I see my sister shabby, bedraggled, overworked, with her crying babies and grouchy husband I feel like clinging to my good, soft, easy office position with both hands. Then rises that specter of the future in my pathway, and I wonder if in staying single I will miss the best that life has to give to a woman, and if I will regret it if I refuse to follow the traditional career of my sex.

“Of course, I know that there are women who try to have their cake, and eat it, too; who grab matrimony with one hand, and hold on to their jobs with the other, but my observation is that they always fall between the stools. They are failures both as business women and as wives and mothers, for to succeed in anything you have to give everything that is in you to it.

“No woman is of much use in an office when nine-tenths of her brain and all of her interest are back home in a cradle and she is worrying over whether a hired nurse is giving the baby its milk. Nor can any woman who comes back home at night, with a worn-out body and jangled nerves, be anybody’s ideal of a wife and mother.

“So as far as I am concerned I have to decide the question which I am going to be, a business woman or a domestic woman, before I take the fatal step, and for the life of me I can’t make up my mind which to do. To marry or not to marry, that is the problem that I am acquiring gray hairs and wrinkles debating.

“Of course, if a fairy prince should come along and say, ‘Come and be my queen, and ride beside me in my limousine and tour the world with me on my yacht,’ I should doff my Cinderella working suit and put on my glass slippers, and step out with him.

“But it is only in novels that millionaires espouse poor working girls. The men who come a-courting me are just ordinary young chaps on small salaries, whose wives will have to do their own cooking, and wear hand-me-downs.

“Nor would there be any difficulty in settling the question if I had an overwhelming passion for some man. Then I would cry, ‘All for love and my job well lost!’ and a two-by-four flat would look better to me than to be president of the greatest corporation in the world. But I am not really in love. I have merely an affection for a certain chap that I might possibly cultivate into a warmer emotion if I decided that it was better, after all, to marry.

“But it is cruel, isn’t it, that a woman has to choose between marriage and her career? When a man marries he merely annexes a home and wife and children to the pleasures and interests of his work, but a woman has to sacrifice one or the other. And I don’t know which one to choose.”

“And whichever way you decide, you will be apt to regret it,” I replied consolingly.

XXIII

WOMAN’S GREATEST GIFT

A man told me the other day that he had not married until he was forty-five years old because he was determined not to marry any woman who did not have a sense of humor, and it took him that long to find one.

A wise man! A very Solomon among men! May his tribe increase! It is a million times more important for a woman to have a well-developed funny bone than it is for her to have a Grecian profile, yet when men go to marry they pick out a girl for a wife because she has melting black eyes, or soulful blue eyes, without ever once observing whether the said eyes look on the funny side of life or take a dark, pessimistic, bilious view of it. Which is one of the reasons that domestic life is no merry jest to the average husband.

A sense of humor is desirable in a man, but it is absolutely essential for a woman to have a sense of humor if she is to be an agreeable life partner, because a woman’s existence is made up of little, nagging things, at which she must either laugh or cry, and if she can’t laugh them off, they get on her nerves, and she goes to pieces.

It is the neurotic, haggard women, who can’t see a joke even after it is diagrammed for them, who fill the insane asylums and the sanitariums and divorce courts. The women who wear the smile that won’t come off, and whose laughter is set on a hair trigger, get to be fair, fat and forty, and you couldn’t pry their husbands away from them with a crowbar. It is the lack of a sense of humor that causes women to make tragedies instead of comedies out of trifles.

Take the servant trouble, for instance. Women worry themselves sick over the mistakes of a green maid, and it never occurs to them that the very blunders that they are shedding tears over are screamingly funny contretemps that they pay out money to see imitated in a sketch on the vaudeville stage.

Of course, no one wants the soup to be seasoned with sugar instead of salt, nor the waste-paper basket to be put on the mantel as a parlor ornament as a perpetual thing, but the mistress who can get a laugh instead of a sick headache out of the mistakes of her Norah or Dinah, fresh from Ireland or the cotton fields, saves her own face and that of the maid whom she later trains into being a good servant.

Moreover, a woman with a sense of humor can take the curse off of even bad cooking, for there is not one of us who would not rather sit down to a boiled dinner with a jolly woman, full of good stories and anecdotes, than to attend a banquet where the hostess is gloomy and peevish and whiny, and who frets with her children and spats with her husband.

Whether a woman makes a success or failure of matrimony depends altogether on whether she has a sense of humor or not. If she can see her husband as one of the most mirth-provoking, side-splitting, uproarious human jokes that nature ever perpetrated she will be happy, and he will bless heaven on his knees for having given him the paragon of wives. But if she sees him as an Awful Problem, or a subject for reformation, neither one of them will ever know a happy hour, and the marriage will either end in a divorce court or a long endurance contest.

The women who wreck marriages are the ones who take their husbands seriously, and who get tragic every time their husbands look at another woman, or play a little poker, or fail to come home at the appointed hour, and who weep when their husbands forget an anniversary, or fail in some little attention they consider their due. The women who keep their husbands enslaved from the altar to the grave are the women who laugh with their husband over their little faults and peculiarities. They make a joke of their husband’s weakness for a pretty face; they have a dozen funny stories to tell about how they helped their husbands out of scrapes, and, instead of feeling ill-used and assuming the pose of a domestic martyr when their husbands forget their birthdays, they go out and buy themselves a particularly nice present, which they pay for without a murmur because they know that a wife with a sense of humor is worth anything she costs.

A sense of humor is even more necessary to a mother than it is to a wife. The humorless woman takes her children too tragically. They wear her out, and she alienates them from her by her ceaseless nagging because she thinks that every little foolish thing they do is full of direful significance. The mother with a sense of humor knows that youth is as subject to certain follies as it is to the mumps and the measles and the whooping cough, and that it must go through these experiences, as it did through the cycle of infantile diseases, but that they are not fatal if they are carefully watched.

She may not approve of all the manifestations of flapperism and jellybeanitis, but she knows that the remedy for them is laughter and not tears, and so she keeps her young ones in bounds with good-natured ridicule. Nor does she break her heart with dismal forebodings about the terrible fate that is bound to overtake boys and girls who do not dress and act as did their grandparents. She has seen too many silly young people develop into fine men and women to borrow trouble worrying over what is going to become of the race.

In its last analysis, a sense of humor is just the sense of proportion that enables us to see things in their true relation to life. It is the thing that keeps us from making mountains out of molehills, and that gives us the courage to smile instead of cry. Happy the woman who has this gift, and thrice happy the man who gets her for a wife.

XXIV

GRAFTING ON THE OLD FOLKS

It is a curious thing, in a way it is a beautiful thing, and it’s a selfish thing, that children rarely ever think of their parents as human beings. Children think of their fathers and mothers as the source whence all blessings flow or they think of them as an avenging justice. But it seldom occurs to them that their parents are men and women, in addition to being parents; that they have the same preferences and long for the same pleasures as other people, and that they have a few rights that even their children should respect.

Of course, a small child unquestionably takes for granted all that its parents give and do for it. It is merely the order of nature that Mother should appear at its bed with the cup of water for which it cries out in the night; that Mother should clean up the dirt it brings into the house and spend hours over the stove cooking the things it likes to eat; and that Father should work while it plays and go shabby to give it fine clothes.

As they grow up, children continue to demand more and more of their parents. They bleed Father and Mother white for the things they want. They are not intentionally cruel, but they will take the last dollar they can wring out of the family purse without ever once thinking that Father and Mother might like to spend some of the money they earn on themselves and in gratifying their own desires. And, curiously enough, even after they have grown to man’s and woman’s estate, the great majority of people still hold to this point of view about their parents. In regulating their lives, they do not take their parents’ rights into consideration. They do not say, “My father and mother have sacrificed enough for me; they have done enough for me. Now I will stand on my own feet, and be as little a burden as possible to them.”

Of course, the most flagrant illustration of this is found in the loafer sons and daughters who let their old parents work and support them. We all know husky, able-bodied young men who play golf while Father slaves in an office, and strapping big girls who perform on the piano while Mother is performing on the gas range. Apparently, it never crosses the mind of these despicable young people that after they are old enough to support themselves they have no right to sponge upon their parents, and graft their living off them. Still less do they ever think that Mother and Father would like to take things easier as they grow older, and indulge in a few of the luxuries they have had to deny themselves while they were raising and educating their children.

Another illustration of how little children regard the rights of their parents you may see in the nonchalance with which young mothers turn over their children to their own mothers. When Sally wants to go to a bridge luncheon or Maud wants to take a trip, they dump the children down on Mother. When Clarabell wants to go to Europe for the summer, she doesn’t worry at all as to what to do with the children. She leaves them, with a thousand instructions as to diet and clothes, and manners and morals, with Mother. So that in innumerable families Mother becomes nothing but a sort of universal nursemaid.

It would shock these daughters to be told what a mean, selfish thing they do in not standing by and doing their own baby tending as Mother did hers. They, themselves, know what it is to walk the colic—what broken nights mean, how incessant must be the care given little children—how nerve-racking children’s noise is. Yet they foist this burden on Mother without a pang of compunction because they are so used to seeing her doing everything for them.

It never occurs to them that she would like to fold her hands in a little peace and rest; furthermore, that she has earned it by bringing up one family, and her daughters haven’t any right to make her substitute on raising another one.

Then there are the children who lay their matrimonial burdens on their parents. John gets married before he is earning enough to support a family. Susie marries a ne’er-do-well, in spite of all efforts to prevent it. Fanny discovers that the man to whom she is married is not her soul mate, and gets a divorce, and comes back home with two or three children. None of these selfish young people, bent on gratifying their own desires, considers Father’s and Mother’s rights in the matter, yet the parents, in the end, are the real sacrifices.

They can’t let John and his wife and children starve, and so the money that Father and Mother had saved up for their old age goes in pittances to help him along. They can’t shut the door in Fanny’s face when she comes back with her divorce and her half-orphaned children, so Father works harder, and Mother pinches and economizes more to raise and educate this second family that their children have thrown upon them. Surely there is no other thing that children need to realize so much as that their parents have some rights. Perhaps if they understood this, and that after a man and a woman have raised a family of children they have a right to peace and quiet and their own money, there would be fewer parasitic sons and daughters.

Perhaps, if they realized that parents had rights, more young people would consider how their marriages would react on their parents, and many a disgruntled wife would carry on with a marriage that wasn’t perfectly congenial rather than burden her old parents with her own and her children’s support.

XXV

ARE YOU A GOOD FATHER?