Part 5 (1/2)
Remember, he is not overworking so much for himself as he is overworking for you and the children. It is the effect of his success or defeat on the homestead that causes him the agitation. The most of men after forty-five years of age live not for themselves, but for their families. They begin to ask themselves anxiously the question: ”How if I should give out, what would become of the folks at home?
Would my children ever get their education? Would my wife have to go out into the world to earn bread for herself and our little ones? My eyesight troubles me; how if my eyes should fail? My head gets dizzy; how if I should drop under apoplexy?” The high pressure of business life and mechanical life and agricultural life is home pressure.
Some time ago a large London firm decided that if any of their clerks married on a salary less than 150--that is, $750 a year--he should be discharged, the supposition being that the temptation might be too great for misappropriation. The large majority of families in America live by utmost dint of economy, and to be honest and yet meet one's family expenses is the appalling question that turns the life of tens of thousands of men into martyrdom. Let the wife of the overborne and exhausted husband remember this, and do not nag him about that, and say you might as well have no husband when the fact is he is dying by inches that the home may be kept up.
BE LOVABLE.
I charge also the wife to keep herself as attractive after marriage as she was before marriage. The reason that so often a man ceases to love his wife is because the wife ceases to be lovable. In many cases what elaboration of toilet before marriage, and what recklessness of appearance after! The most disgusting thing on earth is a slatternly woman--I mean a woman who never combs her hair until she goes out, or looks like a fright until somebody calls. That a man married to one of these creatures stays at home as little as possible is no wonder. It is a wonder that such a man does not go on a whaling voyage of three years, and in a leaky s.h.i.+p. Costly wardrobe is not required; but, O woman! if you are not willing, by all that ingenuity of refinement can effect, to make yourself attractive to your husband, you ought not to complain if he seek in other society those pleasant surroundings which you deny him.
DO NOT COMPLAIN.
Again, I charge you never talk to others about the frailties of your husband.[1] Some people have a way, in banter, of elaborately describing to others the shortcomings or unhappy eccentricities of a husband or wife. Ah, the world will find out soon enough all the defects of your companion! No need of your advertising them! Better imitate those women who, having made mistake in affiance, always have a veil to hide imperfections and alleviations of conduct to mention.
We must admit that there are rare cases where a wife cannot live longer with her husband, and his cruelties and outrages are the precursor of divorcement or separation. But until that day comes, keep the awful secret to yourself--keep it from every being in the universe except the G.o.d to whom you do well to tell your trouble. Trouble only a few years at most, and then you can go up on the other side of the grave, and say: ”O Lord, I kept the marital secret! Thou knowest how well I kept it, and I thank Thee that the release has come at last.
Give me some place where I can sit down and rest awhile from the horrors of an embruted earthly alliance, before I begin the full raptures of heaven.” And orders will be sent out to the usher angels, saying: ”Take this Abigail right up to the softest seat in the best room of the palace, and let twenty of the brightest angels wait on her for the next thousand years.”
AVOID MEDDLERS.
Further, I charge you, let there be no outside interference with the conjugal relation. Neither neighbor nor confidential friend, nor brother, nor sister, nor father, nor mother, have a right to come in here. The married gossip will come around, and by the hour tell you how she manages her husband. You tell her plainly that if she will attend to the affairs of her household you will attend to yours. What damage some people do with their tongues! Nature indicates that the tongue is a dangerous thing, by the fact that it is shut in, first by a barricade of teeth, and then by the door of the lips. One insidious talker can keep a whole neighborhood badly stirred up. The Apostle Peter excoriated these busybodies in other people's matters, and St.
Paul, in his letter to the Thessalonians and to Timothy, gives them a sharp dig, and the good housewife will be on the lookout for them, and never return their calls, and treat them with coldest frigidity. For this reason, better keep house as soon as possible. Some people are opposed to them, but I thank G.o.d for what are called flats in these cities. They put a separate home within the means of nearly all the population. In your married relations you do not need any advice. If you and your husband have not skill enough to get along well alone, with all the advice you can import you will get along worse. What you want for your craft on this voyage is plenty of sea-room.
BE INTELLIGENT.
I charge you, also, make yourself the intelligent companion of your husband. What with these floods of newspapers and books there is no excuse for the wife's ignorance either about the present or the past.
If you have no more than a half-hour every day to yourself you may fill your mind with entertaining and useful knowledge. Let the merchant's wife read up on all mercantile questions, and the mechanic's wife on all that pertains to his style of work, and the professional man's wife on all the legal, or medical, or theological, or political discussions of the day. It is very stupid for a man, after having been amid active minds all day, to find his wife without information or opinions on anything. If the wife knows nothing about what is going on in the world, after the tea-hour has pa.s.sed, and the husband has read the newspaper, he will have an engagement and must ”go and see a man.” In nine cases out of ten when a man does not stay at home in the evening, unless positive duty calls him away, it is because there is nothing to stay for. He would rather talk with his wife than anyone else if she could talk as well.
ADORN THE HOME.
I charge you, my sister, in every way to make your home attractive. I have not enough of practical knowledge about house adornment to know just what makes the difference, but here is an opulent house, containing all wealth of _bric-a-brac_, and of musical instrument, and of painting, and of upholstery, and yet there is in it a chill like Nova Zembla. Another home, with one-twentieth part of the outlay, and small supply of art, and cheapest piano purchasable, and yet, as you enter it, there comes upon body, mind, and soul a glow of welcome and satisfied and happy domesticity. The holy art of making the most comfort and brightness out of the means afforded, every wife should study.
At the siege of Argus, Pyrrhus was killed by the tile of a roof thrown by a woman, and Abimelech was slain by a stone that a woman threw from the tower of Thebes, and Earl Montfort was destroyed by a rock discharged at him by a woman from the walls of Toulouse. But without any weapon save that of her cold, cheerless household arrangement, any wife may slay all the attractions of a home circle. A wife and mother in prosperous circ.u.mstances and greatly admired was giving her chief time to social life. The husband spent his evenings away. The son, fifteen years of age, got the same habit, and there was a prospect that the other children, as they got old enough, would take the same turn. One day the wife aroused to the consideration that she had better save her husband and her boy. Interesting and stirring games were introduced into the house. The mother studied up interesting things to tell her children. One morning the son said:
”Father, you ought to have been home last night. We had a grand time.
Such jolly games and such interesting stories!” This went on from night to night, and after a while the husband stayed in to see what was going on, and he finally got attracted, and added something of his own to the evening entertainments; and the result was that the wife and mother saved her husband and saved her boy and saved herself. Was not that an enterprise worth the attention of the greatest woman that ever lived since Abigail at the foot of the rock arrested the four hundred armed warriors?
THE TRUE SPHERE.
Do not, my sister, be dizzied and disturbed by the talk of those who think the home circle too insignificant for a woman's career, and who want to get you out on platforms and in conspicuous enterprises. There are women who have a special outside mission, and do not dare to interpret me as derisive of their important mission. But my opinion is that the woman who can reinforce her husband in the work of life and rear her children for positions of usefulness is doing more for G.o.d and the race and her own happiness than if she spoke on every great platform and headed a hundred great enterprises. My mother never made a missionary speech in her life, and at a missionary meeting I doubt whether she could have got enough courage to vote aye or no, but she raised her son John, who has been preaching the Gospel and translating religious literature in Amoy, China, for about forty years. Was not that a better thing to do?
Compare such an one with one of these dieaway, att.i.tudinizing, frivolous, married coquettes of the modern drawing-room, her heaven an opera box on the night of Meyerbeer's ”Robert le Diable,” the ten commandments an inconvenience, taking a.r.s.enic to improve the complexion, and her appearance a confused result of belladonna, bleached hair, antimony and mineral acids, until one is compelled to discuss her character, and wonder whether the line between a decent and indecent life is, like the equator, an imaginary line.
A PRESSING WANT.
What the world wants now is about fifty thousand old-fas.h.i.+oned mothers, women who shall realize that the highest, grandest, mightiest inst.i.tution on earth is the home. It is not necessary that they should have the same old-time manners of the country farm-house, or wear the old-fas.h.i.+oned cap and spectacles and ap.r.o.n that her glorified ancestry wore; but I mean the old spirit which began with the Hannahs and the Mother Lois and the Abigails of Scripture days, and was demonstrated on the homestead where some of us were reared, though the old house long ago was pulled down and its occupants scattered, never to meet until in the higher home that awaits the families of the righteous.