Chapter 3

Suddenly it swept over me that life had gone all wrong. Here was a dream come true, and no joy in my heart. Tom asked me for my thoughts. I told him, quite frankly, I was thinking of home. I was thinking of mother in her cotton house dress with her knitted shawl around her shoulders, of father in his jeans and high boots tramping over the range with the men; I saw the cow and the pigs and the chickens, the smelly corral and the water hole, the twins trying to rub each other's face in the mud. And I was thinking--Tom would n't fit into my world, and I could not belong to his. That was the second time I heard Tom swear. He wanted to know what kind of a snob I thought he was. He'd be as much at home with dad on the ranch as he was in London. “The fault is with you,” he said. “You 're not adaptable, and you don't try to be.”

Tom did n't understand. He never did. In all the years together, which he made so rich and happy, Tom never understood how hard and bitter a school was that first year of my married life. But Tom did try to give me a good time in London. He took me to interesting places and we were entertained by a number of people, mostly ponderous and stupid. Tom did not suggest that we entertain in our turn. I think he felt I was not ready for it, although even in after years, when we talked frankly about many things, he would never admit this.

I shall never forget my first week-end party in England. I was not well, and Tom, manlike, felt sure the change, a trip down to Essex and new people, would do me good. The thought of the country and a visit with some good simple country folk appealed to me too, so I packed the bags and met Tom at Victoria Station at eleven o'clock. Alas! It is a far cry from a Montana ranch to a gentleman's estate in England! My vision of a quiet visit “down on a farm” vanished the minute we stepped off the train. Liveried coachmen collected our baggage. They seemed to be discussing something; then I heard Tom say: “I guess that 's all. I 'll wire back for the rest of it.”

We were led to a handsome cart drawn by a fine tandem team, and Tom and I were alone for a minute.

“My God, Mary!” he burst out, “didn't you bring any clothes for us?”

“I certainly have,” I retorted, sure I was in the right this time. “Your nightshirt and my nightgown; your toilet articles and mine; a change of underclothes; a clean shirt and two collars for you, and my new striped silk waist.”

I shall never forget Tom's expression.

“Do you know where we are going?” he groaned. “To one of the grandest houses in England! Oh, Lord! I ought to have told you. You 'll need all the clothes you have down here. And--and a valet and maid will unpack the bags--oh, hell!” After more of the same kind of talk, he began to cook up some yarn to tell the valet.

Suddenly all that is free-born in me rose to the surface. “Is it the thing for gentlemen to be afraid of the valet?” I asked my husband. “Does a servant regulate your life and set your standards?”

Tom was quiet for several moments; then he took my hand and said very earnestly: “Mary, don't you ever lose your respect for the real things. It will save both of us.” After a while he added: “Just the same, I 'll have to lie out of this baggage hole.”

He did, in a very casual, laughing way--such a positive set of lies that I marveled and began to wonder how much of Tom was acting and how much was real.

Tom went back to London on the next train, and reached the “farm” with our baggage before it was time to dress for the eight-o'clock dinner.

The dinner was long and stupid. After dinner the women went into the drawing-room and gossiped about politics and personalities until the men joined them, when they sat down to cards. I did not know how to play cards, and so was left with a garrulous old woman who had eaten and drunk over-much.

It had been a long day for me. I was ill and tired. Suddenly sleep began to overpower me. I batted my eyes to keep them open. I tried looking at the crystal lights, but my leaden eyes could not face them. The constant drone of that old woman was putting me to sleep. I tried to say a few words now and then to wake myself. I felt myself slipping. Once my head dropped and came up with a jerk. I watched the great French clock. Its hands did not seem to move. I looked at Tom. He was absorbed in his game. I could not endure it another minute. I went over and said good night to my hostess who had spoken to me only once since my arrival.

Drowsy as I was, I noticed she seemed surprised. “Oh, no,” I told her; “I am not ill, only very sleepy.”

How good my pillow felt!

The next morning Tom was cross. I had made a _faux pas_. I had shown I was bored and peeved and had gone to bed before the hostess indicated it was bedtime. It “was n't done” in England.

“What do you do if you can't keep awake?” I asked. “You slip out quietly, go to your room ask a maid to call you after you have had forty winks, then you go back and pretend you are having a good time,” said Tom.

There were some bitter hours after we got back to London. But Tom won, and I promised to get a companion. Then there came into my life the most wonderful of friends. She was the widow of a British Army officer who had been killed in India, and her only child was dead. She was a woman of education and heart; she understood my needs, all of them, and I interested her. She had seen great suffering; she had a deep feeling for humanity and an honest desire to be of use in the world. In the English register my companion was listed as the Honorable Evelyn, but we quickly got down to Mary and Eve. We loved each other. Eve went to France with us a few months later. She made me talk French with her. My first formal dinner in France was a pleasant surprise. It was like a great family party--not dull and quiet like the English dinner, and ever so much more fun. Everybody participated. If there was one lion at the table, everybody shared him.

There is something in being born on a silken couch. Nothing surprises you. You are at ease anywhere in the world. Eve fitted into Paris as naturally as in her native London, I began to feel at home there myself. It was a city of happy people--care free, natural, sympathetic. There was a lack of restraint which, after the oppressive dignity of London, was a rare treat. No one was critical. Every one accepted my halting and faulty French without ridicule or condescension. The amiability and the friendliness of the French people thawed my heart and began to lift me out of my slough of homesickness. Happiness came back to me.

There had been hours in England when only the knowledge that a woman's rarest gift was coming to me, and that Tom was proud and happy about it, kept me from running away--back to the simple life of my own United States.

I was homesick for mother. Babies were a mystery to me, although I had helped mother with all of hers. We had buried three of them in homemade coffins--pioneering is a ruthless scythe, and only the fit survive. I began to understand my mother and the glory in the character which never faltered, although she was alone and life had been hard. How could I whine when I had Tom and a good friend--and life was like a playground?

I loved the French. They regard life with a frankness which sometimes shocked my reserved Boston husband. He never accepted intimacy. The restraint of old England was still in his blood. The free winds of the prairie had swept it from mine.

My new friends in Paris discovered my happy secret. It was my all-absorbing thought, and I was delighted to be able to discuss it frankly. Motherhood is the great and natural event in the life of a woman in France, and no one makes a secret of it. I was very happy in Paris. And then--Tom had to go to Vienna.

Not even Tom, Eve, and the promised baby could make me happy there. In all the world I had seen no place where the line of class distinction was so closely drawn, where social customs were so rigid and court forms so sacred, as at the Austrian capital. Learning the social customs of Vienna seemed as endless as counting the pebbles on the beach--and about as useful. The clock regulated our habits in Vienna. Up to eleven o'clock certain attire was proper. If your watch stopped you were sure to break a social law. I once saw a distinguished diplomat in distress because he found himself at an official function at eleven-thirty with a black tie--or without one, I have forgotten which!

At first it offended me to receive an invitation--or a command--to appear at a formal function, with an accompanying slip telling exactly what to wear. Then I laughed about it.

Finally I rebelled. On the plea of ill health, I made Tom do the social honors for me, while Eve and I did the museums and the galleries and the music fetes. Years later I went back to Vienna, and I did not discredit my country. But I never loved the city. I enjoyed its art, its fascinating shops, its picturesque streets and people, and its beautiful women. But for me Vienna has the faults of France and England, the poverty and arrogance of London, and the frivolity of Paris, without their redeeming qualities.

So I was glad to return to England. The second day in London, Tom took me to an exhibition important in the art world, or at least in the official life of London. Everybody who was somebody was there. I saw the Princess of Wales and the Marquis of Salisbury, who was then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. I saw Mr. Balfour, so handsome and gracious that I refused to believe there had ever been cause to call him “Bloody Balfour.” There was something kingly about him--yet he was simply Mr. Balfour. Years afterward I realized that to know Mr. Balfour is either to worship him or hate him. No one takes the middle course. I had begun to have a beautiful time that afternoon.

I felt happy, acutely conscious of my blessings and of one coming blessing in particular. Mr. Gladstone joined us, and Sir Henry Irving came over to speak to Eve. She told him I had just said that England had a mold for handsome men. Irving was interesting and striking, though certainly not handsome; but he took the compliment to himself, smiled, bowed his thanks, and said:

“And America for beautiful women.”

Mr. Gladstone, too, could indulge in small talk. “You should have seen her rosy cheeks before she went to the Continent,” he said, and added kindly that I looked very tired and should go down to Hawarden Castle and rest.

“Oh,” I explained happily, “it is n't that--I 'm not tired. It is such a happy reason!” I felt Eve gasp. Mr. Gladstone opened his kind eyes very wide, and his heavy chin settled down in his collar. It was the last bad break I made. But it was a blessing to me, for it robbed all social form of terror. For the first time, I realized that custom is merely a matter of geography. One takes off one's shoes to enter the presence of the ruler of Persia. One wears a black tie until eleven o'clock in Vienna--or does n't. One uses fish knives in England until he dines with royalty--then one must manage with a fork and a piece of bread. One dresses for dinner always, and waits for the hostess to say it is time, and speaks only to one's neighbor at table. In France one guest speaks to any or all of the others; all one's friends extend congratulations if a baby is coming; one shares all his joys with friends. But in England nobody must know, and everybody must be surprised. No one ever speaks of himself in England. They are sensitive about everything personal. But there is an underground and very perfect system by which everything about everybody is known and noised about and discussed with everybody except the person in question. It is a mysterious and elaborate hypocrisy.

With the aid of Eve, I made a thorough study of the geography of social customs. I learned the ways of Europe, of the Orient, and of South America. It is easier to understand races if one understands the psychology of their customs. I realized that social amenities are too often neglected in America, and our manners sometimes truthfully called crude. But I told myself with pride that our truly cultivated people will not tolerate a social form that is not based on human, kindly instincts. It was not until the World War flooded Europe with American boys and girls that I realized the glory of our social standards and the great need to have our own people understand those standards.

IV.

Fear is the destroyer of peace. I knew no peace until I learned not to be afraid of conventions. The three most wretched years in my life might easily have been avoided by a little training at home or at school.

I realize now the unhappiness of those first years of my married life. I was awkward and ill at ease in a world that valued social poise above knowledge. From my childhood I had loved honest, sincere people. After my marriage I met distinguished men and women, even a few who might be called great; but they, too, had their affectations and petty vanities. Being young, I judged them harshly because they set what I considered too much store upon absurd conventions.

In the course of my travels since, I have come to realize that social customs are a simple matter of geography! What is proper in England is bad form in France, and many customs that were correct in Vienna would be intolerable in Spain. In the formal circles of Vienna no one spoke to anybody without an introduction. In Spain there was a more subtle and truly aristocratic standard. The assumption was that anybody one met in the home of one's host was desirable, and it was courtesy, therefore, to begin a conversation with any guest. This is the attitude also in parts of France.

But in those first months I had not acquired my philosophy. I lived through homesick days, and some that were hard and bitter. I stayed with Tom that first year only because I was too bewildered to take any initiative, and because I kept hoping that things would right themselves and I would wake out of my nightmare. My baby came in the second year, and then I could not go home. The simple life of my own people slipped very, very far away. We made a hurried trip back to the United States that summer, but Tom would not consent to my going West. His own family wanted to see our baby, and they decided that the little fellow had traveled enough and should not be subjected to the hardships of a cross-country train trip. So Tom sent for mother and the twins to come to us, and they arrived at the Waldorf Hotel, where we were staying. Dear, simple mother, in her terrible clothes, and the twins, got up with more thought for economy than for beauty! I shopped extravagantly with them. The youngsters wanted to see everything in New York; but mother, despite all of those hard, lonely years in our rough country and the many interesting things for her to do and see in New York--mother wanted nothing better than to stay with the baby.

With all the children she had brought into this world one might think she had seen enough of babies. But she adored my little son. How near she seemed to me then! How hungry I had been for her, without realizing it! I felt that she loved my baby boy as she had never loved me or any of her own children. And I understood why mother never had had time to love her own babies. In the struggle for existence of those hard years she had never had a minute to indulge in the pure joy of having her baby. I sat watching her with her first grandchild, so sweet in his exquisite hand-sewn little clothes, and suddenly I found myself crying hysterically.

Mother was very dear to me from that day. Later in this chronicle I want to give a chapter to my mother and what we both suffered during this period of her visit to New York, for it marked the climax of my own development. When mother and the children started off on their return trip to the West, Tom sent them flowers and candy and fruit. He had already generously put financial worry away from my family for all time, but I knew that he was a little ashamed of some of mother's crudities. I wondered why I did not feel ashamed. I was very, very glad I did not. It gave me something tangible to cling to--a sure consciousness of power, that comes of knowing one possesses the true pride to rise above the opinions of other people.

I would have given my life, that day, to be able to assure my family that material security which they owed to my husband, who neither loved nor understood them. I looked down the years and saw myself crushed by a burden of indebtedness to a man I felt I no longer loved. Only mother's grateful, simple happiness eased my hurt. I had never approached my mother, but I knew now that if her natural dignity and great, kind heart had been given the advantages that the women in my husband's family took as a matter of course, she would have been superior to them all. Yet they barely tolerated mother--no more.

I longed to go home to my own warm, hearty, open West. I stood on the ferry after they had gone, thinking that, if my family were not so deeply indebted to my husband, I would leave him. I suppose I did not really mean that thought, but it made me unhappy. I felt disloyal and dishonest. Finally I told Tom. There was a scene; but from that day he began to understand me, and things were better. A few days later we came home from a dinner party, and, after going to the baby's room for a minute, Tom asked me to stay and talk. But he did not talk. For a long time he sat smoking and thinking. I knew he had something on his mind, and I waited. Finally I realized that he was embarrassed.

“Can I help? Is it something I have done that has embarrassed you?” I asked.

That was many years ago, but I can never forget the look Tom gave me. It held all the love of our courtship and something besides that I had never seen in his face before.

“For God's sake, never say that to me again!” he cried. “Embarrassed me! I am proud of you--you never can know how proud. I was sitting here trying to think how to tell you something my mother said about you, and just what it means.”

His mother! My heart dropped. His mother had never said anything about me, excepting criticism. I had been a bitter disappointment to her. Whatever she said would be politely cruel--at best, a damning with faint praise.

“She said,” my husband went on, “that she is very happy in our marriage, completely satisfied, and that she has come to be proud of you. I don't know how to tell you just what that means.”

I knew. I knew his mother could have given me no higher praise. I had learned what to her were the essentials; I had cultivated the manner she placed above price. But the realization brought self-distrust. Had I lost my honesty and sincerity?

Tom went on to tell me that his mother had particularly admired my attitude toward my own mother, and the manner in which I met every little failing of hers. She felt I had a sense of true values in people, and that the simplicity and sureness with which I had met this situation was the essence of good breeding.

I had not thought it possible that Tom's mother could understand my feeling for my mother and my honest pride in her real worth. Perhaps, I reflected, I had been unjust to my mother-in-law. I knew what a shock I had been to her in the early days of our marriage, and I knew only too well that even Tom had often regretted my ignorance of social usages.

They are simple customs, and should be taught in every school in America, but I had not learned them. I was happy that night and for days afterward.

Then we went back to Europe. Tom knew people on the steamer to whom I took a dislike. They were bold and even vulgar, and Tom admitted that he did not admire them. I made up my mind we should avoid them. The next afternoon I found Tom and that group walking the deck arm in arm, chatting affably. When we were alone, I asked Tom how he could do it. I know now that a man cannot hold an official position like Tom's and ignore politically important people. But he only said rather carelessly, and with a laugh, that it was one of the prices a man pays for public office.

After that I noticed that my husband was known to nearly every one. He had a glad hand and a smile for the public--because it was the public. I watched to see if he had a slightly different smile for the people of Back Bay and his own particular social class; sometimes I thought he had, and it made me a little soul-sick.

I longed for a home for my baby and a few friends I could love and really enjoy. I was not fitted to be the wife of a public man. It was the poverty and crudeness of my youth that had made me intolerant. One of the big lessons life has taught me is that people can be amiable, tolerant, and even friendly, and still be sincere. The pleasantry of social relations among the civilized peoples of the earth is a mere garment we wear for our own protection and to cover our feelings. It is the oil of the machinery of life. I have found that men and women who take part in the big work of the earth wear that garment of civility and graciousness, and yet have their strong friendships and even their bitter enmities.

But I did not understand this when we went back to Europe. I only knew that my husband was amiable to people he did not like, and I questioned how deep his affection for me went. How much of his kindness to me was just the easiest way and the manner of a gentleman?

A hard and bare youth had made me supersensitive and suspicious and narrow. I wanted to measure other people by the standards of my own primitive years. Out on the frontier we had judged life in the rough. Courage and truth were the essentials. A man fought his enemies out in the open, and made no compromises. There was nothing easy in life, no smooth rhythm. And I tried to drag forward with me, as I went, the bold ethics of the frontier. I resented good manners because I believed they were a cloak of hypocrisy.

A few months after we returned to Europe the shadow of death crossed our path, swiftly and terribly. My little son died. Other babies came to us later, but that first little boy had brought more into my life than all the rest of the world could ever give. He had restored my faith in life, my hope, and for a while was all my joy.

People were kind, but I felt that many called merely because it was “good form”--“the thing to do.” Bitterness was creeping into my heart.

Yet why should it not be “the thing to do” to call on a bereaved mother? It is a gesture of humanity. Tom seemed very far away. I felt that his pride was hurt, perhaps his vanity; for he had boasted of the little fellow and loved to show him off. How little I understood!

I bring myself to tell these intimate things because there is a lesson in them for other women--because I resent that any free-born American citizen should be handicapped by lacking so small and easily acquired a possession as poise, poise that comes with knowledge of the simple rules of the social game. It is my hope that this honest confession of my own feelings, due directly to lack of training, may help other women, and particularly other mothers whose children are now in the plastic years.

It was my utter lack of appreciation of manners and customs in my husband's class that estranged me from Tom. I was resentful and antagonistic merely because I was different.