Part 3

After ten months of married life Edna fell ill. All you married men will prick up your ears at that. Why is it that bread winners somehow contrive to keep on their feet most of the time, little though they know as to caring for their health, reckless though they are in eating and drinking? Why is it that married women--unless they have to work--spend so much time in sick bed or near it? They say we in America have more than nine times as many doctors proportionately to population as any other country. The doctors live off of our women--our idle, overeating, lazy women who will not work, who will not walk, who are always getting something the matter with them. Of course the doctors--parasites upon parasites--fake up all kinds of lies, many of them malicious slanders against the husbands, to excuse their patients and to keep them patients. But what is the truth?

Edna, who read all the time she was not plotting to get acquainted with our neighbors--they looked down upon us and wished to have nothing to do with us--Edna who ate quantities of candy between meals and ate at meals rich things she bought of confectioners and bakers--Edna fell ill and frightened me almost out of my senses. I understand it now. But I did not understand then. I believed, as do all ignorant people--both the obviously ignorant and the ignorant who pass for enlightened--I believed sickness to be a mysterious accident, like earthquakes and lightning strokes, a hit-or-miss blow from nowhere in particular. So I was all sympathy and terror.

She got well. She looked as well as ever. But she said she was not strong. “And Godfrey, we simply have got to keep a girl. I’ve borne up bravely. But I can’t stand it any longer. You see for yourself, the rough work and the strain of housekeeping are too much for me.”

“Very well,” said I. The bills, including the doctor’s and drug bills, were piling up. We were more than a thousand dollars in debt. But I said: “Very well. You are right.” We men do not realize that there are two distinct and equal expressions of strength. The strength of bulk, that is often deceptive in that it looks stronger than it is; the strength of fiber, that is always deceptive in that it is stronger than it looks. In a general way, man has the strength of bulk, woman the strength of fiber. So man looks on woman’s appearance of fragility and fancies her weak and himself the stronger. I looked at Edna, and said: “Very well. We must have a girl to help.”

I shan’t linger upon this part of my story. I am tempted to linger, but, after all, it is the commonplace of American life, familiar to all, though understood apparently by only a few. Why do more than ninety per cent of our small business men fail? Why are the savings banks accounts of our working classes a mere fraction of those of the working classes of other countries? And so on, and so on. But I see your impatience, gentle reader, with these matters so “inartistic.” We sank deeper and deeper in debt. Edna’s health did not improve. The girl we hired had lived with better class people; she despised us, shirked her work, and Edna did not know how to manage her. If the head of the household is incompetent and indifferent, a servant only aggravates the mess, and the more servants the greater the mess. All Edna’s interest was for her music, her novels, her social advancement, and her dreams of being a grand lady. These dreams had returned with increased power; they took complete possession of her. They soured her disposition, made her irritable, usually blue or cross, only at long intervals loving and sweet. No, perhaps the dreams were not responsible. Perhaps--probably--the real cause was the upset state of her health through the absurd idle life she led. Idle and lonely. For she would not go with whom she could, she could not go with whom she would.

“I’m sick of sitting alone,” said she. “No wonder I can’t get well.”

“Let’s go back near the old folks,” suggested I. “Our friends won’t come to see us in this part of the town. They feel uncomfortable.”

“I should think they would!” cried she. “And if they came I’d see to it that they were so uncomfortable that they would never come again.”

I worked hard. My salary went up to fifteen hundred, to two thousand, to twenty-five hundred. “Now,” said Edna, “perhaps you’ll get hands that won’t look like a laboring man’s. How can I hope to make nice friends when I’ve a husband with broken finger nails?”

Our expenses continued to outrun my salary, but I was not especially worried, for I began to realize that I had the money-making talent. Three children were born; only the first--Margot--lived. Looking back upon those six years of our married life, I see after the first year only a confused repellent mess of illness, nurses, death, doctors, quarrels with servants, untidy rooms and clothes, slovenly, peevish wife, with myself watching it all in a dazed, helpless way, thinking it must be the normal, natural order of domestic life--which, indeed, it is in America--and wondering where and how it was to end.

I recall going home one afternoon late, to find Edna yawning listlessly over some book in a magazine culture series. Her hair hung every which way, her wrapper was torn and stained. Her skin had the musty look that suggests unpleasant conditions both without and within. Margot, dirty, pimply from too much candy, sat on the floor squalling.

“Take the child away,” cried Edna, at sight of me. “I thought you’d never come. A little more of this and I’ll kill myself. What is there to live for, anyhow?”

Silent and depressed, I took Margot for a walk. And as I wandered along sadly I was full of pity for Edna, and felt that somehow the blame was wholly mine for the wretched plight of our home life.

* * * * *

When I was twenty-eight and Edna twenty-three, I had a series of rapid promotions which landed me in New York in the position of assistant traffic superintendent. My salary was eight thousand a year.

It so happened--coincidence and nothing else--that those eighteen months of quick advance for me also marked a notable change in Edna.

There are some people--many people--so obsessed of the know-it-all vanity that they can learn nothing. Nor are all these people preachers, doctors, and teachers, gentle reader. Then there is another species who pretend to know all, who are chary of admitting to learning or needing to learn anything, however small, yet who behind their pretense toil at improving themselves as a hungry mouse gnaws at the wall of the cheese box. Of this species was Edna. As she was fond of being mysterious about her thoughts and intentions, she never told me what set her going again after that long lethargy. Perhaps it was some woman whom she had a sudden opportunity thoroughly to study, some woman who knew and lived the ideas Edna had groped for in vain. Perhaps it was a novel she read or articles in her magazines. It doesn’t matter. I never asked her; I had learned that wild horses would not drag from her a confession of where she had got an idea, because such a confession would to her notion detract from her own glory. However, the essential fact is that she suddenly roused and set to work as she had never worked before--went at it like a prospector who, after toiling now hard and now discouragedly for years, strikes by accident a rich vein of gold. Edna showed in every move that she not hoped, not believed, but knew she was at last on the right track. She began to take care, scrupulous care, of her person--the minute intelligent care she has ever since been expanding and improving upon, has never since relaxed, and never will relax. Also she began to plan and to move definitely in the matter of taking care of Margot--to look after her speech, her manners, her food, her person, especially, perhaps, the last. Margot’s teeth, Margot’s hair, Margot’s walk, Margot’s feet and hands and skin, the shape of her nose, the set of her ears--all these things she talked about and fussed with as agitatedly as about her own self.

Edna became a crank on the subject of food--what is called a crank by the unthinking, of whom, by the way, I was to my lasting regret one until a few years ago. For a year or two her moves in this important direction were blundering, intermittent, and not always successful--small wonder when there is really no reliable information to be had, the scientists being uncertain and the doctors grossly ignorant. But gradually she evolved and lived upon a “beauty diet.” Margot, of course, had to do the same. She took exercises morning and night, took long and regular walks for the figure and skin and to put clearness and brightness into the eyes. I believe she and Margot, with occasional lapses, keep up their regimen to this day.

The house was as slattern as ever. The diet and comfort and health of the family bread-winner were no more the subject of thought and care than--well, than the next husband’s to his wife. She gave some attention--intelligent and valuable attention, I cheerfully concede--to improving my speech, manners, and dress. But beyond that the revolution affected only her and her daughter. Them it affected amazingly. In three or four months the change in their appearance was literally beyond belief. Edna’s beauty and style came back--no, burst forth in an entirely new kind of radiance and fascination. As for little Margot, she transformed from homeliness, from the scrawny pasty look of bad health, from bad temper, into as neat and sweet and pretty a little lady as could be found anywhere.

You, gentle reader, who are ever ready to slop over with some kind of sentimentality because in your shallowness you regard sentimentality--not sentiment, for of that you know nothing, but sentimentality--as the most important thing in the world, just as a child regards sickeningly rich cake as the finest food in the world--you, gentle reader, have already made up your mind why Edna thus suddenly awakened, or, rather, reawakened. “Aha,” you are saying. “Served him good and right. She found some one who appreciated her.” That guess of yours shows how little you know about Edna or the Edna kind of human being. The people who do things in this world, except in our foolish American novels, do because they must. They may do better or worse under the influence of love, which is full as often a drag as a spur. But they do not _do_ because of love. I shall not argue this. I shrink from gratuitously inviting an additional vial of wrath from the ladies, who resent being told how worthless they in their indolence and self-complacence permit themselves to be and how small a positive part they now play in the world drama. I should have said nothing at all about the matter, were it not that I wish to be strictly just to Edna, and she, being wholly the ambitious woman, has always had and still has a deep horror of scandal, intrigue, irregularity, and unconventionality of every sort.

It was necessary that we move to a place more convenient to my business headquarters in New York City. A few weeks after I got the eight thousand a year, Edna, and little Margot and I went to Brooklyn to live--took a really charming house in Bedford Avenue, with large grounds around it. And once more we were happy. It seemed to me we had started afresh.

And we had.

II

Why did we go to Brooklyn?

By the time Edna and I had been married six years I learned many things about her inmost self. I was not at all analytic or critical as to matters at home. I used my intelligence in my own business; I assumed that my wife had intelligence and that she used it in her business--her part of our joint business. I believed the reason her part of it went badly was solely the natural conditions of life beyond her control. A railroad, a factory could be run smoothly; a family and a household were different matters. And I admired my wife as much as I loved her, and regarded her as a wonderful woman, which, indeed, in certain respects she was.

But I had discovered in her several weaknesses. Some of these I knew; others I did not permit myself to know that I knew. For example, I was perfectly aware that she was not so truthful as one might be. But I did not let myself admit that she was not always unconscious of her own deviations from the truth. I had gained enough experience of life to learn that lying is practically a universal weakness. So I did not especially mind it in her, often found it amusing. I had not then waked up to the fact that, as a rule, women systematically lie to their husbands about big things and little, and that those women who profess to be too proud to lie, do their lying by indirections, such as omissions, half truths, and misleading silences. I am not criticising. Self-respect, real personal pride, I have discovered in spite of the reading matter of all kinds about the past, is a modern development, is still in embryo; and those of us who profess to be the proudest are either the most ignorant of ourselves or the most hypocritical.

But back to my acquaintance with my wife’s character. When I told her we should have to live nearer my work, my new work, than Passaic, she promptly said:

“Let’s go to Brooklyn.”

“Why not to New York?” said I. “At least until I get thoroughly trained, I want to be close to the office.”

“But there’s Margot,” said she. “Margot must have a place to play in. And we couldn’t afford such a place in New York. I can’t let her run about the streets or go to public schools. She’d pick up all sorts of low, coarse associates and habits.”

“Then let’s go to some town opposite--across the Hudson. If we can’t live on Manhattan Island, and I think you’re right about Margot, why, let’s live where living is cheap. We ought to be saving some money.”

“I hate these Jersey towns,” said Edna petulantly. “I don’t think Margot would get the right sort of social influences in them.”

As soon as she said “social influences” I should have understood the whole business. The only person higher up on the social ladder with whom Edna had been able to scrape intimate acquaintance in Passaic was a dowdy, tawdry chatterbox of a woman--I forget her name--who talked incessantly of the fashionable people she knew in Brooklyn--how she had gone there a stranger, had joined St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, and had at once become a social favorite, invited to “the very best houses, my dear; such lovely homes,” and associated with “the most charming cultured people,” and so on and on--you know the rest of the humbug.

Now, one of the discoveries about my wife which I but half understood and made light of, had been that she was mad, literally mad, on the subject of social climbing. That means she was possessed of the disease imported into this country from England, where it has raged for upward of half a century--the disease of being bent upon associating by hook or by crook with people whose strongest desire seems to be not to associate with you. This plague does not spare the male population--by no means. But it rages in and ravages the female population almost to a woman. Our women take incidental interest or no interest in their homes, in their husbands, in their children. Their hearts are centered upon social position, and, of course, the money-squandering necessary to attaining or to keeping it. The women who are “in” spend all their time, whatever they may seem to be about, in spitting upon and kicking the faces of the women who are trying to get “in.” The women who are trying to get “in” spend their whole time in smiling and cringing and imploring and plotting and, when it seems expedient, threatening and compelling. Probe to the bottom--if you have acuteness enough, which you probably haven’t--probe to the bottom any of the present-day activities of the American woman, I care not what it may be, and you will discover the bacillus of social position biting merrily away at her. If she goes to church or to a lecture or a concert--if she goes calling or stays at home--if she joins a suffrage movement or a tenement reform propaganda, or refuses to join--if she dresses noisily or plainly--if she shuns society or seeks it, if she keeps house or leaves housekeeping to servants, roaches, and mice--if she cares for or neglects her children--if she pets her husband or displaces him with another--no matter what she does, it is at the behest of the poison flowing through brain and vein from the social-position bacillus. She thinks by doing whatever she does she will somehow make her position more brilliant or less insecure, or, having no position at all, will gain one.

And the men? They pay the bills. Sometimes reluctantly, again eagerly; sometimes ignorantly, again with full knowledge. The men--they pay the bills.

Now you know better far than I knew at the time why our happy little family went to Brooklyn, took the house in Bedford Avenue which we could ill afford if we were to save any money, and joined St. Mary’s.

A couple of years after we were married my wife stopped me when I was telling her what had happened at the office that day, as was my habit. “You ought to leave all those things outside when you come home,” said she.

She had read this in a book somewhere, I guess. It was a new idea to me. “Why should I?” said I.

“Home is a place for happiness, with all the sordidness shut out,” explained she. “Those sordid things ought not to touch our life together.”

This sounded all right. “It seemed to me,” stammered I, apologetically, “that my career, the way I was getting on, that our bread and butter-- Well, I thought we ought to kind of talk it over together.”

“Oh, I do sympathize with you,” said, or rather quoted, she. “But my place is to soothe and smooth away the cares of business. You ought to try not to think of them at home.”

“But what _would_ I think about?” cried I, much perplexed. “Why, my business is all I’ve got. It’s the most important thing in the world to us. It means our living. At least that’s the way the thing looks to me.”

“You ought to think at home about the higher side of life--the intellectual side.”

“But my business _is_ my intellectual side,” I said. “And I can’t for the life of me see why thinking about things that don’t advance us and don’t pay the bills is better than thinking about things that do.” It seemed to me that this looking on my business as something to be left on the mud-scraper at the entrance indicated a false idea of it got somewhere. So I added somewhat warmly: “There’s nothing low or bad about my business.” And that was the truth at the time.

“I don’t know anything about it,” replied she with the gentle patience of her superior refinement and education. “And I don’t want to know. Those things don’t interest me. And I think, Godfrey”--very sweetly, with her cheek against mine--“the reason husbands and wives often grow apart is that the husband gives his whole mind to his business and doesn’t develop the higher side of his nature--the side that appeals to a woman and satisfies her.”

This touched my sense of humor mildly. “My father gives his mind to one of those high sides,” said I, “and we nearly starved to death.”

“Your father!” exclaimed she in derisive disgust.

“My father,” said I cheerfully, “he does nothing but read, talk, and think politics.”

“Politics! _That_ isn’t on the higher side. Women don’t care anything about _that_.”

“Well, what do they care about?” I inquired.

“About music and literature--and those artistic things.”

“Oh, those things are all right,” said I. “But I don’t see that it takes any more brains or any better brains to paint a picture or sing a song or write a novel than it does to run a railroad--or to plan one. If you’d try to understand business, dear,” I urged, “you might find it as interesting and as intellectual as anything that doesn’t help us make a living. Anyhow, I’ve simply got to give my brains to my work. You go ahead and attend to the higher side for the family. I’ll stick to the job that butters the bread and keeps the rain off.”

She was patient with me, but I saw she didn’t approve. However, as I knew she’d approve still less if I failed to provide for her and the two young ones--there were two at that time--I let the matter drop and held to the common-sense course. I hadn’t the faintest notion of the seriousness of that little talk of ours. And it was well I hadn’t, for to have made her realize her folly I’d have had to start in and educate her--uneducate her and then reëducate her. I don’t blame the women. I feel sorry for them. When I hear them talk about the lack of sympathy between themselves and American men, about the low ideals and the sordid talk the men indulge in, how dull it is, how different from the inspiring, cultured talk a woman hears among the aristocrats abroad, said aristocrats being supported in helpless idleness throughout their useless lives, often by hard-earned American dollars--when I hear this pitiful balderdash from fair lips, I grow sad. The American woman fancies she is growing away from the American man. The truth is that while she is sitting still, playing with a lapful of the artificial flowers of fake culture, like a poor doodle-wit, the American man is growing away from her. She knows nothing of value; she can do nothing of value. She has nothing to offer the American man but her physical charms, for he has no time or taste for playing with artificial flowers when the world’s important work is to be done. So the poor creature grows more isolated, more neglected, less respected, and less sought, except in a physical way. And all the while she hugs to her bosom the delusion that she is the great soul high sorrowful. The world moves; many are the penalties for the nation or the race or the sex that does not move with it, or does not move quickly enough. I feel sorry for the American woman--unless she has a father who will leave her rich or a husband who will give her riches.

I feel some of my readers saying that I must have been most unfortunate in the women I have known. Perhaps. But may it not be that those commiserating readers have been rarely fortunate in their feminine acquaintances?--or in lack of insight?

Now you probably not only know why we went to Brooklyn, but also what we did after we got there. I have not forgotten my promise to gentle reader. I shall not linger many moments in Brooklyn. True, it is superior to Passaic, at least to the part of Passaic in which I constrained gentle reader to tarry a minute or two. But it is still far from the promised heights.

My wife owes a vast deal to Brooklyn. As she haughtily ignores the debt, would deny it if publicly charged, I shall pay it for her. Brooklyn was her finishing school. It made her what she is.

In the last year or so we spent in Passaic there had been, as I have hinted, a marked outward change in all three of us. The least, or rather the least abrupt, change had been in me. Associated in business with a more prosperous and better-dressed and better-educated class of men, I had gradually picked up the sort of knowledge a man needs to fit himself for the inevitably changing social conditions accompanying a steady advance in material prosperity. I was as quick to learn one kind of useful thing as another. And just as I learned how to fill larger and larger positions and how to make money out of the chances that come to a man situated where money is to be made, so I learned how to dress like a man of the better class, how to speak a less slangy and a less ungrammatical English, how to use my mind in thinking and in discussing a thousand subjects not directly related to my business.