Part 6 (2/2)
”My wife a grievance! Absurd! The facts are incontrovertible. What grievance can she have?”
The grievance that Mr. Omicron, becoming every day more and more the plain man, is not exercising imagination in the very field where it is most needed.
What is a home, Mr. Omicron? You reply that a home is a home. You have always had a home. You were born in one. With luck you will die in one. And you have never regarded a home as anything but a home. Your leading idea has ever been that a home is emphatically not an office nor a manufactory. But suppose you were to unscale your eyes--that is to say, use your imagination--try to see that a home, in addition to being a home, is an office and manufactory for the supply of light, warmth, cleanliness, ease, and food to a given number of people?
Suppose you were to allow it to occur to you that a home emphatically is an organization similar to an office and manufactory--and an extremely complicated and delicate one, with many diverse departments, functioning under extremely difficult conditions? For thus it in truth is. Could you once accomplish this feat of imaginative faculty, you would never again say, with that disdainful accent of yours: ”Mrs.
Omicron has nothing in the world to do but run the house.” For really it would be just as clever for her to say: ”Mr. Omicron has nothing in the world to do but run the office.”
I admit heartily that Mrs. Omicron is not perfect. She ought to be, of course; but she, alas! falls short of the ideal. Yet in some details she can and does show the way to that archangel, her husband. When her office and manufactory goes wrong, you, Mr. Omicron, are righteously indignant and superior. You majestically wonder that with four women in the house, etc., etc. But when you come home and complain that things are askew in your masculine establishment, and that a period of economy must set in, does she say to you with scorn: ”Don't dare to mention coffee to-night. I really wonder that with fourteen (or a hundred and forty) grown men in your establishment you cannot produce an ample and regular income?” No; she makes the best of it. She is sympathetic. And you, Mr. Omicron, would be excessively startled and wounded if she were not sympathetic. Put your imagination to work and you will see how interesting are these comparisons.
IV
She is an amateur at her business, you say. Well, perhaps she is. But who brought her up to be an amateur? Are you not content to carry on the ancient tradition? As you meditate, and you often do meditate, upon that infant daughter of yours now sleeping in her cot, do you dream of giving her a scientific education in housekeeping, or do you dream of endowing her with the charms that music and foreign languages and physical grace can offer? Do you in your mind's eye see her cannily choosing beef at the butcher's, or s.h.i.+ning for your pleasure in the drawing-room?
And then Mrs. Omicron is, perhaps, not so much of an amateur as you a.s.sume. People learn by practice. Is there any reason in human nature why a complex machine such as a house may be worked with fewer breakdowns than an office or manufactory? Harness your imagination once more and transfer to your house the mult.i.tudinous minor catastrophes that happen in your office. Be sincere, and admit that the efficiency of the average office is naught but a pretty legend. A mistake or negligence or forgetfulness in an office is remedied and forgotten. Mrs. Omicron--my dear Mr. Omicron--never hears of it. Not so with Mrs. Omicron's office, as your aroused imagination will tell you. Mrs. Omicron's parlourmaid's duster fails to make contact with one small portion of the hall-table. Mr. Omicron walks in, and his G.o.dlike glance drops instantly on the dusty place, and Mr. Omicron e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.es sardonically: ”H'm! Four women in the house, and they can't even keep the hall-table respectable!”
Mr. Omicron forgets a letter at the bottom of his unanswered-letter basket, and a week later an excited cable arrives from overseas, and that cable demands another cable. No real harm has been done. Ten dollars spent on cables have cured the ill. Mrs. Omicron, preoccupied with a rash on the back of the neck of Miss Omicron before-mentioned, actually comes back from town without having ordered the mutton. In the afternoon she realizes her horrid sin and rushes to the telephone.
The butcher rea.s.sures her. He swears the desired leg shall arrive. But do you see that boy dallying at the street corner with his mate? He carries the leg of mutton, and he carries also, though he knows it not nor cares, the reputation and happiness of Mrs. Omicron. He is late.
As you yourself remarked, Mr. Omicron, if a leg of mutton is put down late to roast, one of two things must occur--either it will be under-cooked or the dinner will be late.
Now, if housekeeping was as simple as office-keeping, Mrs. Omicron would smile in tranquillity at the _contretemps_, and say to herself: ”Never mind, I shall pay the late-posting fee--that will give me an extra forty minutes.” _You_ say that, Mr. Omicron, about your letters, when you happen to have taken three hours for lunch and your dictation of correspondence is thereby postponed. Only there is no late-posting fee in Mrs. Omicron's world. If Mrs. Omicron flung four cents at you when you came home, and informed you that dinner would be forty minutes late and that she was paying the fee, what, Mr. Omicron, would be your state of mind?
And your imagination, now very alert, will carry you even farther than this, Mr. Omicron, and disclose to you still more fearful difficulties which Mrs. Omicron has to face in the management of her office or manufactory. Her staff is uneducated, less educated even than yours.
And her staff is universally characterized by certain peculiarities of mentality. For example, her staff will never, never, never, come and say to her: ”Please, ma'am, there is only enough coffee left for two days.” No! Her staff will placidly wait forty-eight hours, and then come at 7 p.m. and say: ”Please, ma'am, there isn't enough coffee----”
And worse! You, Mr. Omicron, can say roundly to a clerk: ”Look here, if this occurs again I shall fling you into the street.” You are aware, and he is aware, that a hundred clerks are waiting to take his place. On the other hand, a hundred mistresses are waiting to take the place of Mrs. Omicron with regard to her cook. Mrs. Omicron has to do as best she can. She has to speak softly and to temper discipline, because the supply of domestic servants is unequal to the demand. And there is still worse. The worst of all, the supreme disadvantage under which Mrs. Omicron suffers, is that most of her errors, lapses, crimes, directly affect a man in the stomach, and the man is a hungry man.
Mr. Omicron, your imagination, now feverishly active, will thus demonstrate to you that your wife's earthly lot is not the velvet couch that you had unimaginatively a.s.sumed it to be, and that, indeed, you would not change places with her for a hundred thousand a year.
Your att.i.tude towards her human limitations will be modified, and the general ma.s.s of misunderstanding between s.e.x and s.e.x will tend to diminish.
(And if even yet your att.i.tude is not modified, let your imagination dwell for a few instants on the extraordinary number of bad and expensive hotels with which you are acquainted--managed, not by amateurish women, but by professional men. And on the obstinate mismanagement of the commissariat of your own club--of which you are continually complaining to members of the house-committee.)
V
I pa.s.s to another aspect of Mr. Omicron's private reflections consequent upon Mrs. Omicron's dreadful failure of tact in asking him about the ring after the mutton had proved to be underdone and the coffee to be inadequate. ”She only thinks of spending,” reflected Mr.
Omicron, resentfully. A more or less true reflection, no doubt, but there would have been a different colour to it if Mr. Omicron had exercised the greatest of his faculties. Suppose you were to unscale your eyes, Mr. Omicron--that is to say, use your imagination--and try to see that so far as finance is concerned your wife's chief and proper occupation in life is to spend. Conceive what you would say if she announced one morning: ”Henry, I am sick of spending. I am going out into the world to earn.” Can you not hear yourself employing a cla.s.sic phrase about ”the woman's sphere”? In brief, there would occur an altercation and a s.h.i.+ndy.
Your imagination, once set in motion, will show you that your conjugal existence is divided into two great departments--the getting and the spending departments. Wordsworth chanted that in getting and spending we lay waste our powers. We could not lay waste our powers in a more satisfying manner. The two departments, mutually indispensable, balance each other. You organized them. You made yourself the head of one and your wife the head of the other. You might, of course, have organized them otherwise. It was open to you in the Hottentot style to decree that your wife should do the earning while you did the spending. But for some mysterious reason this arrangement did not appeal to you, and you accordingly go forth daily to the office and return therefrom with money. The theory of your daily excursion is firmly based in the inherent nature of things. The theory is the fundamental cosmic one that money is made in order that money may be spent--either at once or later. Even the miser conforms to this theory, for he only saves in obedience to the argument that the need of spending in the future may be more imperious than is the need of spending at the moment.
The whole of your own personal activity is a mere preliminary to the activity of Mrs. Omicron. Without hers, yours would be absurd, ridiculous, futile, supremely silly. By spending she completes and justifies your labour; she crowns your life by spending. You married her so that she might spend. You wanted some one to spend, and it was understood that she should fill the situation. She was brought up to spend, and you knew that she was brought up to spend. Spending is her vocation. And yet you turn round on her and complain, ”She only thinks of spending.”
”Yes,” you say, ”but there is such a thing as moderation.” There is; I admit it. The word ”extravagance” is no idle word in the English language. It describes a quality which exists. Let it be an axiom that Mrs. Omicron is human. Just as the tendency to get may grow on you, until you become a rapacious and stingy money-grubber, so the tendency to spend may grow on her. One has known instances. A check-action must be occasionally employed. Agreed! But, Mr. Omicron, you should choose a time and a tone for employing it other than you chose on this evening that I have described. A man who mixes up jewelled rings with undertone mutton and feeble coffee is a clumsy man.
<script>