“Nothing would have induced me to talk for publication,” said Queen Elizabeth, as she negligently lit a cigarette and with a graceful gesture invited me to take a seat, “if you hadn’t printed that interview with that horrid old Bluebeard last week. They used to say that I was a heartless coquette, and that all the men were losing their heads over me. Well, if a young man had come to ask me, around the year 1588, why I had never married—as you have just done—he’d have lost his head in just about the time it would have taken the chief executioner to respond to a hurry call. But times have changed and we change with them. History has done many cruel wrongs to my memory, and I want to be set right. I didn’t stay single for lack of proposals, I can tell you. Why, before I was sixteen the front yard of our palace looked like a college campus, it was so full all the time of young men carrying flowers and boxes of candy and ringing the doorbell, wanting to know if Princess Elizabeth were in. I had every other girl in England jealous of me, if I do say it myself. But I saw too much of marriage at home. My father did enough marrying for the whole family.
“Life got to be just one stepmother after another. I began to lose count. I decided that one member of the family had given enough of a boost to the institution of matrimony, and it didn’t need any further endorsement from me. I soon appreciated the truth of the saying, ‘Man proposes.’ I got so many proposals I had my maids of honor knit a lot of mittens to hand to the fellows as a souvenir. Finally the men saw I was in earnest and let me alone; that is to say, most of them. A few foolish fellows continued to write poetry (that is what they called it) and send presents, but my mind was made up and I refused to change it. It was about this time that our court fool remarked that woman’s favorite occupations were changing her mind, her clothes and her name. And about five minutes afterward he changed his permanent address to the Tower of London. All the world’s a stage, as my friend Shakespeare used to say, and ninety-nine out of a hundred men consider themselves perfectly equipped for the rôle of comedian. But it’s possible to be too fatally funny.
“Now, about that interview with Brother Bluebeard last week. I suppose he thought he was funny when he said about the only time a man gets his wife’s absorbed, undivided attention is when he talks in his sleep. But that’s about the only time a man says anything worth listening to. It just made my blood boil—that man Bluebeard calmly talking about the wives he’d killed. Not that I believe half of it. He was only boasting. And that reminds me: there used to be an organization called the Ananias Club. But who ever heard of a Sapphira Club? There wouldn’t be enough members to hold a meeting in a telephone booth. But ‘all men are liars,’ and married ones have more ready-made opportunities. It has been estimated that in a married lifetime of forty years the average man will be called upon to answer the perfectly reasonable inquiry, ‘Where have you been?’ 14,610 times. This calculation allows for 365 answers in each ordinary year and 366 in leap-years. And when her husband replies to her altogether proper interrogation, too often the wife realizes, like the Queen of Sheba, that the half has not been told her.
“From Ananias to Munchausen and down to the modern press agent, the experts at exaggeration have all been men. Fishermen’s tales and sailors’ yarns are proverbial. A woman trying to tell a lie feels like a fish out of water, and at the first opportunity flops back into the ocean of truth.
“There’s another slander on women I’d like to say a few words about, and that’s the charge of talkativeness. Men have always flocked to the talkative professions like ducks to water. Most lawyers and barbers are men. Are there any women auctioneers? There are few women preachers. There was a time when all the talking in the world was done by one man, but there was no conversation until the arrival of Eve. She did the listening. It is essential to conversation that there be a listener, and man’s happiness was not complete until there was somebody to hear him talk. The average husband loves to deliver home lectures on baseball in summer and politics in winter. Here we have the reason for the popularity of women’s clubs. No man being present, they have a chance to talk. Go into any church Sunday morning and what do you see? An audience composed principally of women listening to a man talking. The recording angel who tries to keep up with a man has to be an expert at taking lightning dictation. One of the newest works in three large volumes is entitled, ‘Last Words of Great Men.’ The edition makes no pretensions to being complete. That, of course, would be impossible when we have had so many great men, all of them talking steadily to the last. But it is worth noting that we have only meagre records of the last words of any great woman. Poor thing! With her husband, and a man doctor and a clergyman at her bedside, what chance would she have?
“I’ll admit that there have been a few of the so-called great men of history who have not been noted for their love of talk, but when such a man is discovered everybody calls attention to him as if he were a genuine curiosity of nature. He is usually given a nickname indicative of his peculiarity, such as William the Silent, and people travel miles to get a look at him. Practically every man is Speaker of the House, and in his case the title is no misnomer. For instance, it’s a question whether all the ancient martyrs put together ever said as much about their sufferings as one modern man with a boil on his neck. Man even goes ahead and invents new languages like Esperanto and baseball, and golf.
“Wives of great men most remind us that they talked all of the time, and departing left behind them words that were not worth a dime. Isn’t that what one of your own American poets said? Sounds something like it, anyway.
“But you wanted to know just why I never married. Well, it was because of these nasty flings at women by the men that I’ve just been speaking of. If they say such things before marriage, what won’t they say after? They’re always talking about women’s curiosity, starting with Eve and the apple. I suppose if there had been a Saturday Eden Post, Adam would have written alleged jokes about it or run a funny department called ‘Musings of a Married Man.’ I blame that Eve and her apple story for this eternal joshing about feminine curiosity. You needn’t look surprised, young man. I’m talking twentieth not sixteenth century language these days, and since yours is a family newspaper probably it’s just as well that I am. When I was queen you’d have thought the English language consisted principally of proper nouns and improper adjectives. We called a spade a spade, and then some. If a lady disliked a gentleman she didn’t say he was a mean old thing. She began by calling him a diabolical blackguard and horse thief, and then gradually grew abusive.
“Woman’s curiosity! All the census-takers and private detectives and professional Paul Pry’s who stick their noses into other people’s businesses are men. So are all the explorers, the individuals who are so curious to find out what’s going on at the other end of the earth that they can’t content themselves at home. If, in the history of the world, a woman has ever been seized by an overwhelming desire to see what the North Pole looks like, she has cleverly concealed the fact. While the men were organizing North Pole and South Pole expeditions, and relief expeditions, and expeditions to rescue the relief expeditions, the wives and mothers remained patiently on the job at home. And when the missing discoverers came back covered with hero medals, and suffering from chilblains, and writer’s cramp, and lecturer’s sore throat, and coupon-clipper’s thumb, the women never asked why heroine medals seem so scarce these days. Talk about curiosity! There’s a universal inquiry which is being put by some man to some woman in some part of the world at every second of every minute of the twenty-four hours, and it is this: ‘What did you do with that LAST money I gave you?’ There it is again, that insatiable curiosity of man which will not let him rest. Man is a perambulating question mark, the personification of the rising inflection, a chronic case of interrogationitis. And he has the nerve to talk about woman’s curiosity!”
“How about Sir Walter Raleigh?”
“Ah, young man, there are exceptions to every rule, and a woman is generally willing to take an exception. Walter was an awfully nice fellow, at first, but I was dreadfully disappointed in him. Do you know, that business of the velvet cloak and the mud puddle was only what you would call a grandstand play? I found out later. It was his last winter’s cloak, and he was just on his way to the Charing Cross rummage sale to give it away, when he happened to meet me. I know it’s so, because I got it straight at the meeting of the Westminster Sewing Society from the Countess of Leicester’s sister-in-law, who said she was told by the cousin of a woman who knew an intimate friend of a friend of Walter Raleigh’s aunt. And she said he actually laughed about it afterward!
“Do you wonder I stayed single? Perhaps I’ve said too much already, but one word more and I am finished. Do you know, young man, why women say marriage is a lottery? It is because they draw most of the blanks.”
Subdued, but with a sigh of relief, I withdrew hastily from the royal presence, feeling that “man’s inhumanity to man” wouldn’t be a marker to what would have happened to Queen Elizabeth’s husband.