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!