Part 15
The moral of all of which is, do not sacrifice yourself to your children; do not impoverish yourself for them, but help than all you can while they are young and while they need it, if you do not wish them to be glad when you are dead and your will is read.
LIII
WHAT PRICE PLEASURE?
Do you ever ask yourself if you are not paying too high a price for many of the things in which you indulge yourself? So far as material things go, most of us are keen enough about seeing that we get our money’s worth. We do not pay a thousand dollars for a string of glass beads. We do not buy a battered flivver at Rolls Royce figures, nor will we stand being charged banquet prices for a corned beef and cabbage dinner.
When it comes to spiritual values, however, we lose all sense of proportion. We become spendthrifts, who throw our priceless treasures away, and we literally sell our birthrights for a mess of pottage. One thinks of this particularly just now when one watches so many young persons making such bad and losing bargains with fate. There are the boys scarcely out of their teens who think it is such a sporting thing, so dashing, and that it shows that they are such men of the world to carry flasks on their hips and drink the vile poison that bootleggers sell. For the sake of the kick they get out of this and for a few minutes’ exhilaration, they are risking not only death itself, but what is far, far worse, blindness and imbecility and every sort of nervous ailment.
Look at the pasty-faced, blear-eyed youths with shaking hands that you see all about you, their minds dulled, their energies paralyzed, their ambitions killed by drink; who are done with life before they have ever begun to live. What a price they have paid for booze! Can any boy look at a drunken sot, dirty, poor, despised, and think that the pleasure that he has got out of drink has paid for what it cost him?
And the girls. The girls who are mad for gaiety, crazy for the admiration of men; the girls who go on drinking parties, who indulge in petting parties, who joy-ride until all hours of the night, who let men kiss and fondle them because that is the price that men demand for taking them out. How cheaply they sell themselves! Many a girl pays with shame and disgrace that follow her to the longest day she lives for a single wild party. They buy their fun high, these girls who exchange for it their self-respect, their modesty, their maidenly innocence and their good names.
The family quarrel. That is a domestic luxury for which we have to pay so dearly that it is never worth the cost. Undoubtedly, when one is feeling cross, and irritable, and disgruntled, there is a certain luxury in letting go all of one’s self-control, and turning one’s temper loose, and stabbing right and left with cruel words that wound like dagger thrusts. Also it salves one’s own conscience to lay the blame for everything that goes wrong on some one else. Therefore, many husbands and wives go on a daily orgy of nerves and temper. They vent their spleen against life on each other. They say to each other all the mean and hateful things that they are too politic to say to strangers.
But the price they pay! It bankrupts them. For they kill each other’s love. They slay each other’s respect. They inevitably come to hate each other and to cherish secret grudges, born of insult and injustice. There is no peace nor tenderness in their homes and their marriages either end in divorce or become long drawn out misery. What a price to pay for the lack of a little self-control!
Extravagance. The price of indulging yourself in your youth in the things that you cannot afford is poverty and dependence in your old age. The woman who cannot resist pretty clothes. The woman who is bitten by the society bug and who tries to keep up with people better off than she is. The man who belongs to lodges, when he can’t pay the rent collector. The man who buys an automobile and a radio on the instalment plan. They will pay, as sure as fate, for gratifying the desire of the moment by long years of bitter dependence. Twenty or thirty years from now they will be down and out, and they will either be in almshouses or the hangers on of relatives, who resent having to take care of Poor Uncle John or Cousin Susan. Or they will be burdens on their children, who are having all they can do to take care of their own families.
The highest priced cars in the world are not the gold-plated, satin-lined jewel boxes made for millionaires. They are the cheap little cars bought by the people who cannot afford them and who have to go into debt for them.
And there is the price the lazy pay for shiftlessness. And the price the mother pays who lets her children roam the streets while she plays bridge or goes to clubs. And the price the sarcastic pay who alienate a friend for the sake of making a witty speech. There are a thousand other little gratifications of a mood or inclination, the desire of a moment, that we pay for with tears, with loneliness, with failure, with our very heart’s blood. What a pity we don’t count the cost of things before we indulge ourselves in them!
LIV
THE IDEAL MOTHER
A woman asks: “What qualities should the ideal mother possess?”
To begin with, a mother should have love, and tenderness, and sympathy, and be willing to sacrifice herself for her children. These are the stock virtues of motherhood, and virtually all mothers possess them. But they alone do not make a woman a good mother. Often they do as much harm as good, for you can ruin a child by blind devotion. You can enfeeble it by too much tenderness. You can make it a selfish egotist and an overbearing brute by making yourself a doormat for it to walk over. So to love, tenderness, sympathy and unselfishness the ideal mother must add other qualities, and the most important of these is the ability to see her job as a whole and to realize that she is responsible for the finished goods that she turns out.
Not many mothers have this vision; or, rather, they shut their eyes and refuse to see that the molding of their children’s characters, the settling of their destinies, is in their own hands. They let a high-tempered child grow up undisciplined and without teaching it any self-control. They let a slothful, lazy one grow up without forming habits of industry. They never teach a self-indulgent, greedy child to curb its appetite. They spoil and pamper their children, and then they say that they “hope” their children will turn out all right!
The ideal mother knows that you form children’s characters in the cradle, and so she does not trust to luck with her youngsters. She begins when they are babies to teach them self-control, and thrift, and industry, and all the principles of right living. The ideal mother must have a backbone. Unfortunately, most mothers permit their hearts to crowd out their spinal column until they have no more backbone than a fishing worm. This is why you hear women say despairingly that they can’t do a thing with their 10-year-old child.
It takes nerve, and grit, and determination, and courage to fight self-willed youngsters, and mother is too soft to do it. So she gives in rather than listen to her baby’s howls of rage or go through the struggle of conquering a disobedient child. And the inevitable result is that her children have a contempt for her as a weakling, and ride roughshod over her, and become the outbreaking young hoodlums who fill our jails and brothels.
The ideal mother is a human being. She doesn’t pose before her children as a plaster saint or an oracle on a pedestal. One of the reasons why children do not confide in their parents is because the average father and mother pretend that they were such models of all the virtues when they were young that their children feel they have nothing in common with them and that they wouldn’t understand how a boy or girl feels who wants to do all sorts of foolish things.
How can a girl tell her mother that a boy kissed her, if mother represents herself as Miss Prunes and Prisms, and says that when _she_ was young girls never skylarked, and never went on joy-rides or to cabarets, or held hands in the movies, but spent a pleasant evening sitting up in the parlor in the presence of their elders discussing improving topics?
It is the human mothers who can sympathize with their children’s desire for good times and help them to them; who will stretch a point to get a girl a new frock or a boy the fraternity pin he craves, who get well enough acquainted with their children to really help them and guard them.
The ideal mother has a sense of proportion. She doesn’t see her ducklings as swans. Her love doesn’t blind her to her children’s faults and blemishes. Rather it sharpens her vision, so that she gets a line on them as they really are. Thereby she is enabled to help them make the most of such gifts as they have. She sees that Tom is brilliant but unstable and lacking in purpose, and she holds him to whatever he undertakes to do until she forms the habit of steadfastness in him. She sees that John is dull but a plodder, and she trains him for some occupation in which quickness of mind is not demanded and in which the prizes go to faithfulness and hard work. She sees that Mary is intelligent but homely, and lacking the charms that allure men, so she gives her some occupation by which she can make a good living for herself and which will fill her life with interest. And this sense of proportion keeps her from making her children ridiculous by bragging about them, and boring every one with whom she comes in contact with endless stories of what wonderful and marvelous creatures they are, and how, wherever they go, they are the cynosure of all eyes and the admiration of all beholders.
Finally, the ideal mother should have a sense of humor that will enable her to laugh instead of cry over many of her children’s peccadilloes and keep her from taking them too seriously. For the thing that ails young people is chiefly youth, and they will get over that if you will give them a little time. Because they are idle, irresponsible, pleasure-loving, dance-mad, girl and boy crazy is no reason for prophesying dismal things about them and wringing your hands in despair. It is a passing phase of life at which we elders may well grin, remembering the time when we also were young and foolish. An old woman who had raised up a remarkable family of sons and daughters once gave me this as her recipe for bringing up children: “Kiss them when they are good. Spank them when they’re bad and teach them to obey you.” That is the whole of the law and the prophets.
LV
HOW TO CATCH A WIFE
“You are always telling girls how to catch husbands,” says a young man. “Why don’t you give us chaps a few tips about how to get wives?”
Well, son, perhaps I unconsciously favor women because I belong to their lodge. Also, it is more difficult for a woman to catch a husband than it is for a man to get a wife, not only because women are more inclined to matrimony than men are, but because a woman’s pursuit of a man has to be stealthy and secret and under cover, with all of her tracks carefully hidden and her purposes veiled, whereas a man can go after a woman openly and aboveboard, with everybody looking on and applauding the chase. Therefore, the woman is more in need of any stray hints that may improve her technique than the man is. Still, far be it from me to withhold from my brothers any information I may have about the short cuts to the feminine heart. So to the really earnest seeker after knowledge on this subject I would say:
First. Study your girl. Catalogue her. Find out to what type she belongs and adapt your tactics to the situation, for all women no more rise to the same line of courtship than all fish bite at the same bait. There are some feminine hearts that can only be taken by assault and battery and others that surrender to patient siege. There are women whose love is for sale to the highest bidder and others who bestow it in pity. There are women who like a business proposition and women who fall only for the romantic wooing. So there you are, and your success will depend upon your ability to psychoanalyze the particular woman and upon the skill with which you suggest to her that you are the great unsatisfied need of her soul.
If the girl is of the clear-eyed, upstanding, competent business type, your best method of winning her is by the good, old, well-tried Platonic friendship method. She isn’t anxious to exchange a mahogany desk for a kitchen range nor to give up a good pay envelope and an easy job to toil for some man for nothing. Likewise, she has worked with men too long for her to see any rosy halo around the masculine brow, so she is pretty apt to shy off at any suggestion of marriage and balk at the thought of the altar. But life lacks savor to every woman without masculine society, and so this particular type of woman is especially allured by the idea of a beautiful and satisfying friendship with some man. And when a chap has got his toe that far into the door to a woman’s heart it is his own fault if he does not open it all the way.
Only there is this word of warning: Never pop the question to the business girl in the morning of a sunshiny day when she has on a new frock and a good hat and everything is going swimmingly at the office and she feels fit and fine and ready to buck the world. Instead, choose a rainy evening, when she is sitting alone at home, dejected and forlorn, when she is tired and the boss has been grumpy. Then the thing she wants most on earth is just a nice, strong masculine shoulder to cry on.
If the girl you want is a flapper, your best ally is your bankbook. All you need to look good to her is to be a good spender and a fast worker. Hold not your hand and count not the cost of jewelry and trinketry and candy and flowers and cabarets and eats and joy-rides, and remember that the man with the longest purse wins. Some day she will jazz with you to the preacher, and you will live scrappily ever afterward.
If the girl upon whom your affections are set is a demure little Puritan, make her your Mother Confessor. Confide to her all your sins, real and imaginary. Invent a dark past for her benefit. Make her believe that but for her Sacred Influence you would become an abandoned character and that she alone can lead you up to the higher life. All women have the reformation complex, and the better they are and the less they know of the world the harder they fall for the belief that a grown man’s character is like a piece of dough that they can mold into any shape they please. Once let a girl get the idea into her head that she is responsible for your soul, and she is yours for the taking.
If the girl you want is one that you made mud pies with in childhood and went to school with, and who refuses to see you in a sentimental light, don’t be discouraged by her telling you that she will be a sister to you. Just keep right on strutting your Rachel-and-Jacob stuff. Mighty few women can resist that. Make yourself a habit with the girl. Make yourself necessary to her happiness and comfort by always paying her the little attentions that women like. Fetch and carry for her. Be the one person in the world she can always depend upon to make life pleasant and agreeable for her.
Then suddenly drop her cold. Begin paying furious attentions to some woman she always accuses of being made up and older than she looks and an artful hussy, and it is a hundred-to-one bet that she will call you back and let you see that her feelings toward you were not at all what she had supposed they were. For when she thinks you are about to marry another woman she will wake up to the fact that life will be cinders, ashes and dust without you.
If the girl you desire is one of the morbid sort who hangs between “I will” and “I won’t,” who is always vivisecting her heart and taking her emotional temperature, what you need to use is caveman methods. She is just dying to have you drag her to the altar by the hair of her head, and if you are half a man you will do it. Don’t ever ask that kind of a woman to marry you. Tell her you are going to marry her and that you have the license and the ring in your pocket and are on the way to the chapel with her, and you will give her a thrill that will last a lifetime.
These are only a few of the many ways to win a wife. It is dead easy, and any man can do it who has gumption enough to work out a cross-word puzzle.
LVI
DANGEROUS GIRLS
Chief among the women from whom a young man should pray his guardian angel to deliver him is the Hinting Girl. She is a gentle grafter who holds up every man she meets with a pair of innocent-looking blue eyes that bid him stand and deliver just as effectually and efficiently as if he were looking down the barrels of a couple of blue-nosed revolvers in the hands of a highway robber. You will find these cheerful workers, son, where you least expect them. The very highest society is filled with girls of undisputed position and unquestioned morals, who ruthlessly plunder every man they meet, and you will never encounter an individual more to be feared than these bandits of the parlor.
Did you ever wonder why one girl receives so many more presents than another, and why every man who passes lays some offering on her shrine? Take it from me, this is the result of science and not mere chance. Observe, closely, and you will see, when you call, that she steers the conversation artfully around to the latest play, and before you know it you have offered to take her to it.
Also, she has let you know that violets are her favorite flower, and the date of her birthday. Before Christmas she artlessly confides in you where there is the jeweled vanity, or the hand-painted fan, that she has set her heart upon, and she couldn’t shout it at you any plainer if she bawled it to you through a megaphone that she expects you to come across, and will think you a piker if you don’t.
Beware the Hinting Girl, son. She is the woman who is accessory before the crime of half of the embezzlements of trusted clerks who go wrong, and who, if she got her deserts, would stand in the prisoners’ dock by the side of the poor, weak, trembling boy who has stolen to buy her jewels or to give her a good time. And she makes the sort of wife whose husband rises up and sits down to a never-ending chant of “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!”
Then there’s the Girl With a Past. Very often she has been more sinned against than sinning. Probably her morals are just as good as your own, son; but, even so, such marriages rarely turn out happily. For we have to face the naked fact that, while a man may love a woman well enough to forget and forgive her indiscretions, society, which is not in love with her, remembers them all. And it reminds her husband that it recalls them. The man who marries a Woman With a Past is pretty much in the same fix as the man who hires a reformed embezzler to be his cashier. He hopes he will run straight, but he keeps an eye on the cash box—a situation which doesn’t make for domestic felicity. Of course, there are women who reform and gather in their wild oats crops and ever after raise nothing but garden truck around their doorstep, but even while their husbands are devouring their domestic cabbages and onions there rarely comes a family spat in which they do not throw in their wives’ teeth the kind of farmers they have been. The truth is that it takes a big man and woman to defy the conventions. That is what makes it safest for those of us who are little people to play the game according to the rules laid down by Hoyle. And one of these rules is that women must keep their skirts clean. By and large it is a good rule, son, for it means the purity of race, the integrity of society and a lot of other things that keep this old world going.
Then there’s the Weeping Girl. Whenever you meet with a gentle, sweet, soft, babyish-looking little girl, with a chin that trembles and big eyes that overflow with tears at the slightest provocation, and who can cry without her nose getting red, fly, son, fly. She will fasten herself upon you, and when you try to make a getaway she will cling to you and weep. And no man can behold unmoved a woman crying for him, because he is such a good thing. You will stop to wipe her eyes; and all will be over with you except the long, long years of rainy matrimony when you will have to deal with a wife who cannot be reasoned with or cajoled or coerced into doing anything she doesn’t want to do, because you will be so afraid of starting another freshet of tears.
Then there’s the Domestic Girl, who baits her hook with angels’ food. You might go farther and do worse than marry the Domestic Girl, for while romance is transient one’s appetite remains, and after one’s illusions are gone it is a comfortable thing to have a good dinner to fall back upon. Still, one must confess, the Domestic Girl is apt to have only a bread-and-butter conversation, of which a man might tire in time; so, unless your stomach is developed in excess of your heart, walk warily when the Domestic Girl begins to inveigle you into little meals for two that she cooks for you under a pink-shaded lamp.
Lastly, there is the girl who is just near you—the girl you work with, or who lives in the same boarding house with you, or who comes to visit your sister. Men who have escaped the dangers of all other women are the victims of propinquity which unites them to ladies they couldn’t otherwise have seen through a telescope. Somehow our very nearness to the people with whom we are thrown every day keeps us from getting a perspective on their faults and disabilities, and habit deceives us into thinking that they are more necessary to us than they are. And so we drift into the mismated marriages that keep the divorce courts busy and the world salted down with the brine of our tears.
Therefore, if you perceive that Mamie, whom you thought vulgar at first, no longer gets on your nerves; if you observe that Sadie, who bored you when you first met her, is beginning to interest you with her chatter about what “he said” and “I said,” and you discover that you have quit being shocked by Carrie’s gum-chewing and Mabel’s grammar, then, son, pack your trunk and leave while the leaving is good. Otherwise, the Girl Next to You will get you sure.
But why amplify the list? Some day a girl will tag you, and you will know you are “it,” and a million warnings could not save you from your fate.
LVII
WHEN A GIRL LOVES A MAN
A youth asks me how he can tell whether a girl loves him or not. Well, son, you can’t always tell. There are times when all signs fail, and there is no man so clever, so discerning, so sophisticated that a woman cannot fool him if she set her mind to doing so. For the many generations in which women were entirely subservient to men, and in which they had to get everything they had out of men, and in which all their pleasures and perquisites depended on their wheedling and cajoling men, have made them gifted liars and adept at befooling men.
However, the modern girl, being able to make her own living, and stand upon her own feet, and therefore being to a large degree independent of men, has less need to simulate emotions which she does not feel, and so she has lost the fine technique of her mother and her grandmother and her great-great-great grandmother. Flirting has become a lost art, and the methods of the gold-digger are so crude and raw that any man who is taken in by one deserves all he gets. The average girl is almost brutally frank about the state of her feelings. She hasn’t even subtlety enough about her to keep a man guessing.