“King Henry the Eighth wants to see you,” said the city editor as I reported for duty. “Says he doesn’t think we’re giving him a square deal. We’ve printed interviews with Solomon and Bluebeard and Brigham Young, all much-married men, and let them make their explanations to put them in a better light with posterity, but for some reason he can’t understand we’ve passed him up. Better see what the old boy has to say.”
“Yes,” said His Majesty, as he motioned me graciously to a seat in his reception room, “I thought it only due to myself to make a statement for publication, particularly since you have been interviewing some of my noted—er—er—competitors, or perhaps I should say fellow-sufferers, and setting them right with the public. Not that I consider them exactly in my class, of course. Unlike Solomon and Bro. Young, I did not believe in what I might call numerically-simultaneous matrimony, nor like Mr. Bluebeard did I think a man justified, whatever the provocation, in resorting to the most extreme measures himself and taking the law into his own hands. Let everything be done strictly according to law, was my motto. I defy anyone, in the case of my wives, to find the coroner’s verdict defective. I am not saying there is not such a thing as justifiable uxoricide. But I can’t understand how a man could get up his nerve to do it. Certainly, speaking for myself, after being bossed by the first five, I’m sure I didn’t feel like raising my finger, or even my voice, against Mrs. Henry Tudor VI. If they lost their heads I do not think the whole blame should rightly rest on me. It takes two to make a quarrel. There were faults on both sides—especially theirs. History records the—that is—rather sudden shufflings-off of my several spouses, but it doesn’t tell the real reasons therefor. Sometimes it seems to me that the history of my case must have been written either by old bachelors or by members of the women’s rights association. Certainly if experienced married men had done the job they wouldn’t have left out all the extenuating circumstances.”
“As what, Your Majesty?”
“Well, did you ever see any reference in history to the annual earthquake at St. James’ Palace known as the Fall house-cleaning cataclasm? Of course you haven’t. And yet we husbands were afflicted with the same epidemics in those days, that seem so far away, as you are now.”
“I never thought of it before, Your Majesty. With the canning and house-cleaning seasons over, a modern married man begins to realize just how the soldiers felt the day the armistice was signed.”
“Precisely. Even though he knows the trouble is bound to recur when the germs get in the air again next Fall. But the man who has been married to only a limited extent can’t begin to sympathize with a case like mine. The first few wives are the hardest.
“Take this matter of house-cleaning. Every wife has her own system, her exclusive, copyrighted plan of offensive campaign which differs from everybody else’s. My first wife, for example, believed in moving all the furniture out of the dining room into the hall on the very first day of the attack and then served all meals for two days in the form of a stand-up free lunch in the butler’s pantry. The regular hall furniture was moved into the parlor to make room for the dining room furniture. Consequently the place was so cluttered up there was nowhere to sit down. But of course all husbands, even when house-cleaning is not prevalent, have to stand a good deal. My second wife, as soon as she was inaugurated in office as secretary of the interior and speaker of my house, reversed all the precedents of her predecessor. When the house-cleaning epidemic arrived she collected all the furniture in the palace and piled it up in the dining room. On fine days during the upheaval I got a hand-out on the back porch and on wet days I ate in the cellar. I had just become fairly accustomed to this domestic arrangement when Wife III, Series A, appeared on the scene with some entirely different and equally ingenious scheme for turning the house downside up. So it went, each new domestic administration having its own peculiar policies, not only with reference to house-cleaning but to all forms of domestic discipline. I was willing enough to obey—I realized that is the first duty of soldiers and husbands—but I had work keeping track of the orders. I perceived then why so many married men were volunteering for my new army to fight in France: they wanted to get where there would not be quite so much discipline.
“As I was saying, I got mixed on my orders and was constantly making mistakes. Wives so often fail to realize that accidents will happen to the best regulated husbands. For instance, Wife No. 1 had a rule that I must be in by eleven o’clock, but might stay out till twelve if I could tell just where I’d been. Wife No. 2 changed the hour to ten and No. 3, if I recall correctly, fixed it at ten-thirty. It’s not strange if occasionally along late in the evening I got a trifle mixed as to which administration was in office at that precise moment and consequently strayed a bit from the prescribed schedule. I could not always be sure whether I was supposed to be running on eastern or central standard time. As a result the first unvarying greeting that met my ears on my arrival home was apt to assume the sharply interrogatory form. I always answered whenever I could distinctly remember. At least I did my best. Matrimony is paved with good intentions.
“There were other disadvantages, also—connected with what I now perceive to have been my mistaken matrimonial policy—which may not occur to persons of more limited experience. For instance, how many realize that I was virtually at the mercy of a soviet of my wives’ relations? When a wife happened to shuffle off did her relatives immediately conclude that they were no longer my connections by marriage? They did not. They still considered themselves close relations—even closer, when I sought to borrow money from them. After a few matrimonial administrations I had enough ‘in-laws’ to fill a convention hall. Indeed, they did form a sort of mutual benefit association and used to meet and pass resolutions of condemnation on me and condolence with the new incumbent every time I happened to change wives. Sore, of course, because they weren’t invited to the wedding. But I had to draw the line somewhere. In those days, as now, they used to term it ‘solemnizing’ a marriage, although that word ‘obey’ in the ceremony was a joke. And half the time I felt just like a sort of comic supplement. In all my voyaging on the seven seas of matrimony I can recollect very few times when I was allowed to do any of the steering. Looking back, life seems to have been just one wife after another. Why did I do it? Well, I read in the newspapers the other day a supposedly sensational story of a Boston man who got married while under the influence of hypnotism, but I couldn’t see that the case contained any unusual feature.”
“Speaking of matrimony, Your Majesty (as you have just been doing so extensively), have you any advice to offer? What do you consider the lucky month for marriage?”
“Young man,” replied the king in solemn tones as he arose to bid me adieu, “I don’t know anything about that. But I can tell you this: there are at least six unlucky ones. That is as far as I experimented.”
And though I possessed only one-sixth of his matrimonial experience, I shook the aged monarch’s hand in silent sympathy before tiptoeing from his pathetic presence.