XXXI
MARTHA OR MARY?
Clever Mary—who, take it from me, knows her way about—was talking about her friend, Martha, the other day.
“Of course, Martha is the Perfect Housewife,” she said, “but she is a mighty poor wife. Without doubt, she is a great and glorious housekeeper and a cook and baker and cleaner. Never have I seen a rumple in her curtains. Her bedspreads are like the driven snow. And you could eat off her floors. Her house is so immaculate that her husband must feel a perfect stranger in it, and like a bull in a china shop.
“But her days are so taken up with work that she has time for nothing else—not a minute to read or to play, or to be a companion to her husband. In fact, she is so worn out by the time night comes that she is too tired to do anything but go to bed.
“Her husband loves to read, but if he sits up late, the light annoys her so much that she can’t sleep, so she says. So she nags him until he gives it up in disgust. She, herself, never reads anything except the advertisements of the department stores in the papers, and the thrilling accounts of vacuum cleaners and patent breakfast foods in the backs of the magazines. And when her husband tries to talk to her about the things he is interested in—books, sports, his business—he had just as well try to ring any other dumbbell.
“Now, I do all my own housework, and I must be a fairly capable housewife, for my mother-in-law has put her O.K. on me, and that settles that. But there isn’t a spot in my house where we can’t park ourselves at any time. My library table is filled with books and magazines, and if husband drops ashes and scatters the Sunday papers all over the place, I let him, and gently and painlessly remove them after he has passed on.
“I don’t really know anything about sports. I wouldn’t recognize a home run if I met it on the street, but when hubby wants to talk about baseball I assume an intelligent expression. And I am never too tired to play with my husband. I grab my hat the minute he suggests the movies. I can get ready to go anywhere in an hour. I just adjust my complexion—Martha considers that a real vice—and we are off.
“Martha can’t understand why my husband very rarely goes away from home of an evening and almost never without me—while hers beats it to the corner drug store as soon as he has eaten his superexcellent dinner. And I just can’t make her see that it is because she puts her house before him. She worships cleanliness and order, and sacrifices everything to them. The first thing Martha knows, she is going to lose her husband, and she will go around wailing and weeping and telling how hard she worked and what a good housekeeper she was. She never will know that she literally drove him away from her with a broom handle.
“I told Martha the other day that if she would spend less time polishing her mahogany and more time polishing her finger nails and rubbing up her mind, it would be better for her. But she just smiled that superior smile that a model housekeeper always bestows on the woman whom she suspects of having dust on the back pantry shelf, and made a dive for a basement sale of somebody’s patent cleaning fluid.”
Mary is right. Cleanliness and order are two of the domestic virtues that may easily be converted into vices. We all know spick and span houses that are no more homes than a shiny tin box would be. Nobody would dare disarrange a sofa cushion in one of them. Nobody would have the courage to move a chair from its appointed place. To track a bit of mud on one of the shining floors would be a high crime and misdemeanor. To leave anything hanging around would be a sacrilege unspeakable.
Husband and children flee these temples of order and cleanliness as they would a torture chamber. And they live in dread and fear of the woman who has worked herself cross and irritable attaining her ideal of housewifery. Most of the real homes are places not too bright and good for human nature’s daily use. They are places where you can take your ease; places run on a flexible schedule and only reasonably clean and orderly.
Doubtless, the old lady who laid down the maxim, “Feed the brute,” as a rule for retaining a husband’s affections said a wise mouthful to women. But more is to be added, for man does not live by bread alone, and it is just as important to feed his soul as his stomach. Every woman who fails to give her husband good, nourishing food fails as a wife, but she fails even more if she does not give him companionship. For, after all, there is a good restaurant on every corner where a man can satisfy his physical hunger, but none but his wife can minister to his spiritual hunger. Foolish is the woman who doesn’t realize this and who spends her time keeping her house clean instead of making it a home.
But that is the trouble with matrimony. A woman can’t be either a Martha or a Mary. To be a good wife she has got to be both.