XXX
HUSBAND LOSERS
Three divorced women were talking together the other day and one of them said:
“When we wives lose our husbands we always accuse some other woman of having stolen them from us; and we cry out that our husbands are cruel ingrates, who have taken the best years of our lives and then thrown us aside like broken toys when we were no longer young and beautiful. And we pose as blameless martyrs who are the pitiful victims of man’s perfidy.
“Of course, it saves our faces to be able to lay all the blame for our wrecked homes on others, and it soothes our hurt vanity to be wept over as a poor, innocent, deserted wife. But in the still watches of the night, when we have it out with our own souls, there are mighty few of us who can shrive our consciences and know that we are blameless.
“Most of us know in our heart of hearts that if our husband’s love died, we did our part in administering the lethal dose. We may have done it through ignorance, through carelessness, through blundering stupidity; we may have even done it with the best intentions in the world and with the firm conviction that we were forcing down their throats a remedy that would cure them of all the little ailments and weakness of character from which they suffered. But the point is, we did it. We were accessory to the crime, and we could have prevented it if we had so wished.
“Now, as you know, my husband forsook me for his secretary. I called her a thief who had used her position to rob me of a husband and my little children of their father, and I looked upon him with bitterness and contempt, as a poor weakling who let an adventuress make him forget his honor as a man and his duty to his wife and children. I called Heaven to witness that I was innocent and that I had been a good, true, virtuous woman, who had always done her duty to her family. It took me a long time to see that, if my husband grew weary of me, I had made him tired by my incessant nagging and fault finding; that if he ceased to love me, it was because I was no longer lovable, and that the other woman had not really stolen him from me. I had simply handed him over to her on a silver salver.
“You see, I was one of the wives who did not realize that it is easy enough to get a husband, but the work comes in in keeping one. I thought that after a woman was married she could let herself go, and so I never bothered to keep myself dolled up at home, or to try to make myself pleasant and agreeable. I went in negligee, both as to clothes and manners. Any old rag was good enough to wear at home. Any disagreeable topic was a suitable breakfast-table discussion, and I felt perfectly free to quarrel with my husband, and criticize him, and ridicule all of his little faults and idiosyncrasies.
“I forgot that he went from a sloppy wife to an office where a trim, perfectly groomed woman, younger and better looking than I, waited for him. I forgot that he went from my nagging and fault finding to a girl who was paid to agree with him and whose job depended largely on her flattering him and telling him how wonderful and great he was. It wouldn’t have been human for him not to constitute a daily comparison between us, and it was inevitable that when he did, that I should lose out. If I had kept my doors locked and my burglar alarms in working order no one could have looted my home. And so I am just as responsible for the wreck of it as are those who broke it up.”
“My husband was a gay, pleasure-loving man,” said the second divorcee. “He always wanted to be going somewhere. He loved to be in the thick of crowds. He adored dancing, and restaurants, and the bright lights. He loved fine clothes, and always wanted me to look like a fashion plate. Now, I am a serious-minded woman and was brought up to take a serious view of things, and I felt it my duty to cure my husband of his frivolity by leading him up to what I considered the higher life. I began by trying to wean him away from his old friends, on whom I turned such a cold shoulder that they soon ceased coming to the house. I lectured him about his extravagance and the way he threw away money, and finally got possession of the family purse and doled out dimes to him. I wouldn’t go out with him of an evening, and I rarely let him go without a scene. At first he submitted, but he looked bored and sulky, and then he broke out of jail, which was all his home had come to be to him, and that was the beginning of the end.
“For, of course, when I wouldn’t play with him he found some other woman who would, and who wouldn’t wet-blanket every occasion by her moral strictures or spoil every meal at a restaurant by looking at the pay check. If I had been willing to flatter him, and jolly him, and dance with him, and let him spend his money on me, he would never have left me. But I wouldn’t do it, and my austerity got on his nerves. He wanted a playmate instead of a censor, and so I feel that I am just as much to blame as he was.”
“I lost my husband through ambition,” said the third divorcee. “He was an artist of great talent, and I was mad for him to win fame and money, so I never let him rest. I prodded him on all the time. I was forever a goad in his side, and so I became to him a sort of incarnate conscience, a perpetual reminder of all the unpleasant duties of life. He was temperamental, a child of impulse, and I became his task-mistress, a slave driver to him. Finally he got to the place where he could stand it no more, and he eloped with a young girl as irresponsible as he was. She will never push him on to success as I would have done, but she lets him follow every whim and she will hold him, as I could have done if I had had intelligence enough to see that you can’t make a work horse out of Pegasus.”
“How much happiness we might save if only our wisdom did not come too late,” sighed the first woman.