WHY did we go to Brooklyn?
By the time Edna and I had been married six years I learned many things about her inmost self. I was not at all analytic or critical as to matters at home. I used my intelligence in my own business; I assumed that my wife had intelligence and that she used it in her business—her part of our joint business. I believed the reason her part of it went badly was solely the natural conditions of life beyond her control. A railroad, a factory could be run smoothly; a family and a household were different matters. And I admired my wife as much as I loved her, and regarded her as a wonderful woman, which, indeed, in certain respects she was.
But I had discovered in her several weaknesses. Some of these I knew; others I did not permit myself to know that I knew. For example, I was perfectly aware that she was not so truthful as one might be. But I did not let myself admit that she was not always unconscious of her own deviations from the truth. I had gained enough experience of life to learn that lying is practically a universal weakness. So I did not especially mind it in her, often found it amusing. I had not then waked up to the fact that, as a rule, women systematically lie to their husbands about big things and little, and that those women who profess to be too proud to lie, do their lying by indirections, such as omissions, half truths, and misleading silences. I am not criticising. Self-respect, real personal pride, I have discovered in spite of the reading matter of all kinds about the past, is a modern development, is still in embryo; and those of us who profess to be the proudest are either the most ignorant of ourselves or the most hypocritical.
But back to my acquaintance with my wife’s character. When I told her we should have to live nearer my work, my new work, than Passaic, she promptly said:
“Let’s go to Brooklyn.”
“Why not to New York?” said I. “At least until I get thoroughly trained, I want to be close to the office.”
“But there’s Margot,” said she. “Margot must have a place to play in. And we couldn’t afford such a place in New York. I can’t let her run about the streets or go to public schools. She’d pick up all sorts of low, coarse associates and habits.”
“Then let’s go to some town opposite—across the Hudson. If we can’t live on Manhattan Island, and I think you’re right about Margot, why, let’s live where living is cheap. We ought to be saving some money.”
“I hate these Jersey towns,” said Edna petulantly. “I don’t think Margot would get the right sort of social influences in them.”
As soon as she said “social influences” I should have understood the whole business. The only person higher up on the social ladder with whom Edna had been able to scrape intimate acquaintance in Passaic was a dowdy, tawdry chatterbox of a woman—I forget her name—who talked incessantly of the fashionable people she knew in Brooklyn—how she had gone there a stranger, had joined St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, and had at once become a social favorite, invited to “the very best houses, my dear; such lovely homes,” and associated with “the most charming cultured people,” and so on and on—you know the rest of the humbug.
Now, one of the discoveries about my wife which I but half understood and made light of, had been that she was mad, literally mad, on the subject of social climbing. That means she was possessed of the disease imported into this country from England, where it has raged for upward of half a century—the disease of being bent upon associating by hook or by crook with people whose strongest desire seems to be not to associate with you. This plague does not spare the male population—by no means. But it rages in and ravages the female population almost to a woman. Our women take incidental interest or no interest in their homes, in their husbands, in their children. Their hearts are centered upon social position, and, of course, the money-squandering necessary to attaining or to keeping it. The women who are “in” spend all their time, whatever they may seem to be about, in spitting upon and kicking the faces of the women who are trying to get “in.” The women who are trying to get “in” spend their whole time in smiling and cringing and imploring and plotting and, when it seems expedient, threatening and compelling. Probe to the bottom—if you have acuteness enough, which you probably haven’t—probe to the bottom any of the present-day activities of the American woman, I care not what it may be, and you will discover the bacillus of social position biting merrily away at her. If she goes to church or to a lecture or a concert—if she goes calling or stays at home—if she joins a suffrage movement or a tenement reform propaganda, or refuses to join—if she dresses noisily or plainly—if she shuns society or seeks it, if she keeps house or leaves housekeeping to servants, roaches, and mice—if she cares for or neglects her children—if she pets her husband or displaces him with another—no matter what she does, it is at the behest of the poison flowing through brain and vein from the social-position bacillus. She thinks by doing whatever she does she will somehow make her position more brilliant or less insecure, or, having no position at all, will gain one.
And the men? They pay the bills. Sometimes reluctantly, again eagerly; sometimes ignorantly, again with full knowledge. The men—they pay the bills.
Now you know better far than I knew at the time why our happy little family went to Brooklyn, took the house in Bedford Avenue which we could ill afford if we were to save any money, and joined St. Mary’s.
A couple of years after we were married my wife stopped me when I was telling her what had happened at the office that day, as was my habit. “You ought to leave all those things outside when you come home,” said she.
She had read this in a book somewhere, I guess. It was a new idea to me. “Why should I?” said I.
“Home is a place for happiness, with all the sordidness shut out,” explained she. “Those sordid things ought not to touch our life together.”
This sounded all right. “It seemed to me,” stammered I, apologetically, “that my career, the way I was getting on, that our bread and butter— Well, I thought we ought to kind of talk it over together.”
“Oh, I do sympathize with you,” said, or rather quoted, she. “But my place is to soothe and smooth away the cares of business. You ought to try not to think of them at home.”
“But what would I think about?” cried I, much perplexed. “Why, my business is all I’ve got. It’s the most important thing in the world to us. It means our living. At least that’s the way the thing looks to me.”
“You ought to think at home about the higher side of life—the intellectual side.”
“But my business is my intellectual side,” I said. “And I can’t for the life of me see why thinking about things that don’t advance us and don’t pay the bills is better than thinking about things that do.” It seemed to me that this looking on my business as something to be left on the mud-scraper at the entrance indicated a false idea of it got somewhere. So I added somewhat warmly: “There’s nothing low or bad about my business.” And that was the truth at the time.
“I don’t know anything about it,” replied she with the gentle patience of her superior refinement and education. “And I don’t want to know. Those things don’t interest me. And I think, Godfrey”—very sweetly, with her cheek against mine—“the reason husbands and wives often grow apart is that the husband gives his whole mind to his business and doesn’t develop the higher side of his nature—the side that appeals to a woman and satisfies her.”
This touched my sense of humor mildly. “My father gives his mind to one of those high sides,” said I, “and we nearly starved to death.”
“Your father!” exclaimed she in derisive disgust.
“My father,” said I cheerfully, “he does nothing but read, talk, and think politics.”
“Politics! That isn’t on the higher side. Women don’t care anything about that.”
“Well, what do they care about?” I inquired.
“About music and literature—and those artistic things.”
“Oh, those things are all right,” said I. “But I don’t see that it takes any more brains or any better brains to paint a picture or sing a song or write a novel than it does to run a railroad—or to plan one. If you’d try to understand business, dear,” I urged, “you might find it as interesting and as intellectual as anything that doesn’t help us make a living. Anyhow, I’ve simply got to give my brains to my work. You go ahead and attend to the higher side for the family. I’ll stick to the job that butters the bread and keeps the rain off.”
She was patient with me, but I saw she didn’t approve. However, as I knew she’d approve still less if I failed to provide for her and the two young ones—there were two at that time—I let the matter drop and held to the common-sense course. I hadn’t the faintest notion of the seriousness of that little talk of ours. And it was well I hadn’t, for to have made her realize her folly I’d have had to start in and educate her—uneducate her and then reëducate her. I don’t blame the women. I feel sorry for them. When I hear them talk about the lack of sympathy between themselves and American men, about the low ideals and the sordid talk the men indulge in, how dull it is, how different from the inspiring, cultured talk a woman hears among the aristocrats abroad, said aristocrats being supported in helpless idleness throughout their useless lives, often by hard-earned American dollars—when I hear this pitiful balderdash from fair lips, I grow sad. The American woman fancies she is growing away from the American man. The truth is that while she is sitting still, playing with a lapful of the artificial flowers of fake culture, like a poor doodle-wit, the American man is growing away from her. She knows nothing of value; she can do nothing of value. She has nothing to offer the American man but her physical charms, for he has no time or taste for playing with artificial flowers when the world’s important work is to be done. So the poor creature grows more isolated, more neglected, less respected, and less sought, except in a physical way. And all the while she hugs to her bosom the delusion that she is the great soul high sorrowful. The world moves; many are the penalties for the nation or the race or the sex that does not move with it, or does not move quickly enough. I feel sorry for the American woman—unless she has a father who will leave her rich or a husband who will give her riches.
I feel some of my readers saying that I must have been most unfortunate in the women I have known. Perhaps. But may it not be that those commiserating readers have been rarely fortunate in their feminine acquaintances?—or in lack of insight?
Now you probably not only know why we went to Brooklyn, but also what we did after we got there. I have not forgotten my promise to gentle reader. I shall not linger many moments in Brooklyn. True, it is superior to Passaic, at least to the part of Passaic in which I constrained gentle reader to tarry a minute or two. But it is still far from the promised heights.
My wife owes a vast deal to Brooklyn. As she haughtily ignores the debt, would deny it if publicly charged, I shall pay it for her. Brooklyn was her finishing school. It made her what she is.
In the last year or so we spent in Passaic there had been, as I have hinted, a marked outward change in all three of us. The least, or rather the least abrupt, change had been in me. Associated in business with a more prosperous and better-dressed and better-educated class of men, I had gradually picked up the sort of knowledge a man needs to fit himself for the inevitably changing social conditions accompanying a steady advance in material prosperity. I was as quick to learn one kind of useful thing as another. And just as I learned how to fill larger and larger positions and how to make money out of the chances that come to a man situated where money is to be made, so I learned how to dress like a man of the better class, how to speak a less slangy and a less ungrammatical English, how to use my mind in thinking and in discussing a thousand subjects not directly related to my business.
If my wife had been interested in any of the important things of the world, I could have been of the greatest assistance to her and she to me. And we should have grown ever closer together in sympathetic companionship. But although she had a good mind—a superior mind—she cared about nothing but the things that interest foolish women and still more foolish men—for a man who cares about splurge and show and social position and such nonsense is less excusable, is more foolish, than a woman of the same sort. Women have the excuse of lack of serious occupation, but what excuse has a man? Still, she was not idle—not for a minute. She was, on the contrary, in her way as busy as I. From time to time she would say to me enigmatically: “You don’t appreciate it, but I am preparing myself to help you fill the station your business ability will win us a chance at.” It seemed to me that I was doing that alone. For what was necessary to fill that station but higher and higher skill as a man of affairs?
When we had made our entry in Brooklyn and had seated ourselves in the state in Bedford Avenue which she had decided for, she showed that she felt immensely proud of herself. We took the house furnished throughout—nicely furnished in a substantial way, for it had been the home of one of the old Brooklyn mercantile families.
“It’s good enough to start with,” said she, casting a critical glance round the sober, homelike dining room. “I shan’t make any changes till I look about me.”
“We couldn’t be better off,” said I. “Everything is perfectly comfortable.” And in fact neither she nor I had ever before known what comfort was. Looking at that house—merely looking at it and puzzling out the uses of the various things to us theretofore unknown—was about as important in the way of education as learning to read is to a child.
“It’s good enough for Brooklyn,” said she. She regarded me with her patient, tender expression of the superior intelligence. “You haven’t much imagination or ambition, Godfrey,” she went on. “But fortunately I have. And do be careful not to betray us before the servants I’m engaging.”
The show part of the house continued to look about as it had when we took possession. But the living part went to pieces rapidly. We had many servants. We spent much money—so much that, if I had not been speculating in various ways, we should have soon gone under. But the results were miserably poor. My wife left everything to her servants and devoted herself to her social career. The ex-Brooklyn society woman at Passaic had not deceived her. No sooner had she joined St. Mary’s than she began to have friends—friends of a far higher social rank than she had ever even seen at close range before. They were elegant people indeed—the wives of the heads of departments in big stores, the families of bank officers and lawyers and doctors. There were even a few rather rich people. My wife was in ecstasy for a year or two. And she improved rapidly in looks, in dress, in manners, in speech, in all ways except in disposition and character.
Except in disposition and character. As we grow older and rise in the world, there is always a deterioration both in disposition and in character. A man’s disposition grows sharper through dealing with, and having to deal sharply with, incompetence. The character tends to harden as he is forced to make the unpleasant and often not too scrupulous moves necessary to getting himself forward toward success. Also, the way everyone tries to use a successful man makes him more and more acute in penetrating to the real motives of his fellow beings, more and more inclined to take up men for what he can get out of them and drop them when he has squeezed out all the advantage—in brief, to treat them precisely as they treat him. But the whole object in having a home, a wife, a family, is defeated if the man has not there a something that checks the tendencies to cynicism and coldness which active life not merely encourages but even compels.
There was no occasion for Edna’s becoming vixenish and hard. It was altogether due to the idiotic and worthless social climbing. She had a swarm of friends, yet not a single friend. She cultivated people socially, and they cultivated her, not for the natural and kindly and elevating reasons, but altogether for the detestable purposes of that ghastly craze for social position. Edna was bitter against me for a long time, never again became fully reconciled, because I soon flatly refused to have anything to do with it.
“They will think there’s something wrong about you, and about me, if you don’t come with me,” pleaded she.
“I need my strength for my business,” said I. “And what do I care whether they think well or ill of me? They don’t give us any money.”
“You are so sordid!” cried she. “Sometimes I’m almost tempted to give up, and not try to be somebody and to make somebodies of Margot and you.”
“I wish you would,” said I. “Why shouldn’t we live quietly and mind our own business and be happy?”
“How fortunate it is for Margot that she has a mother with ambition and pride!”
“Well—no matter. But please do get another cook. This one is, if anything, worse than the last—except when we have company.”
We were forever changing cooks. The food that came on our table was something atrocious. I heard the same complaint from all my married associates at the office, even from the higher officials who were rich men and lived in great state. They, too, had American wives. In the markets and shops I saw as I passed along all sorts of attractive things to eat, and of real quality. I wondered why we never had those things on our table. Heaven knows we spent money enough. The time came when I got a clew to the mystery.
One day Edna said: “I’ve been doing my housekeeping altogether by telephone. I think I’ll stop it, except on rainy days and when I don’t feel well.”
By telephone! I laughed to myself. No wonder we had poor stuff and paid the highest prices for it. I thought a while, then to satisfy my curiosity began to ask questions, very cautiously, for Edna was extremely touchy, as we all are in matters where in our hearts we know we are in the wrong. “Do you remember what kind of range we have in our kitchen?” I asked.
“I?” exclaimed she disgustedly. “Certainly not. I haven’t been down to the kitchen since we first moved into this house. I’ve something better to do than to meddle with the servants.”
“Naturally,” said I soothingly. And I didn’t let her see how her confession amused me. What if a man tried to run his business in that fashion! And ordering by telephone! Why, it was an invitation to the tradespeople to swindle us in every way. But I said nothing.
As usually either it was bad weather or Edna was not feeling well, or was in a rush to keep some social engagement, the ordering for the house continued to be done by telephone, when it was not left entirely to the discretion of the servants. One morning it so happened that she and I left the house at the same time. Said she:
“I’m on my way to do the marketing. It’s a terrible nuisance, and I know so little about those things. But it’s coming to be regarded as fashionable for a woman to do her own marketing. Some of the best families—people with their own carriages and servants in livery—some of the swellest ladies in Brooklyn do it now. It’s a fad from across the river.”
“You must be careful not to overtax yourself,” said I.
And I said it quite seriously, for in those days of my innocence I was worried about her, thought her a poor overworked angel, was glad I had the money to relieve her from the worst tasks and to leave her free to amuse herself and to take care of her health! I had not yet started in the direction of ridding myself of the masculine delusion that woman is a delicate creature by nature if she happens to be a lady—and of course I knew my Edna was a lady through and through. It was many a year before I learned the truth—why ladies are always ailing and why they can do nothing but wear fine clothes and sit in parlors or in carriages when they are not sitting at indigestible food, and amuse themselves and pity themselves for being condemned to live with coarse, uninteresting American men.
Yes, I was sincere in urging her to take care how she adopted so laborious a fad as doing her own marketing. She went on:
“If I had a carriage it wouldn’t be so bad.”
She said this sweetly enough and with no suggestion of reproach. Just the sigh of a lady’s soul at the hardness of life’s conditions. But I, loving her, felt as if I were somehow to blame. “You shall have a carriage before many years,” said I. “That’s one of the things I’ve been working for.”
She gave me a look that made me feel proud I had her to live for. “I hope I’ll be here to enjoy it,” sighed she.
I walked sad and silent by her side, profoundly impressed and depressed by that hint as to her feeble health. I know now it was sheer pretense with her, the more easily to manage me and to cover her shortcomings. I ought to have realized it then. But what man does? She certainly did not look ill, for she was not one of those who were always stuffing themselves at teas and lunches, and talked of a walk of five blocks as hard exercise! She had learned how to keep health and beauty. What intelligence it shows, that she was able to grasp so difficult a matter; and what splendid persistence that she was able to carry out a mode of life so disagreeable to self-indulgence. If her intelligence and her persistence could have been turned to use! Presently we were at the butcher shop. I paused in the doorway while she engaged in her arduous labor. Here is the conversation:
“Good morning, Mr. Toomey.” (Very gracious; the lady speaking to the trades person.)
“Good morning, ma’am.” (Fat little butcher touching cracked and broken-nailed hand to hat respectfully.)
“That lamb you sent yesterday was very tough.”
“Sorry, ma’am. But those kind of things will happen, you know.” (Most flatteringly humble of manner.)
“Yes, I know. Do your best. I’m sure you try to please. Send me—let me see—say, two chickens for broiling. You’ll pick out nice ones?”
“Yes, indeed, ma’am. I’ll attend to it myself.”
“And something for the servants. You know what they like.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll attend to it.”
“And you’ll not overcharge, will you?”
“I, ma’am? I’ve been dealing with ladies for twenty years, right here, ma’am. I never have overcharged.”
“I know. All the ladies tell me you’re honest. I feel safe with you. Let me see, there were some other things. But I’m in a hurry. The cook will tell your boy when he takes what I’ve ordered. You’ll be sure to give me the best?”
“I’d not dare send anything else to you, ma’am.” (Groveling.)
A gracious smile, a gracious nod, and Edna rejoined me. Innocent as I was, and under the spell that blinds the American man where the American woman is concerned, I could not but be upset by this example of how our house was run—an example that all in an instant brought to my mind and enabled me to understand a score, a hundred similar examples. There was I, toiling away to make money, earning every dollar by the hardest kind of mental labor, struggling to rise, to make our fortune, and each day my wife was tossing carelessly out of the windows into the street a large part of my earnings. I did not know what to do about it.
Edna’s next stop was at the grocer’s. I had not the courage to halt and listen. I knew it would be a repetition of the grotesque interview with the butcher. And she undoubtedly a clever woman—alert, improving. What a mystery! I went on to my office. That day, without giving my acquaintances there an inkling of what was in my mind, I made inquiries into how their wives spent the money that went for food—the most important item in the spending of incomes under ten or twelve thousand a year. In every case the wife or the mother did the marketing by telephone. All the men except one took the ignorance and incompetence of the management of the household expenses as a matter of course. One man grumbled a little. I remember he said: “No wonder it’s hard for the men to save anything. The women waste most of it on the table, paying double prices for poor stuff. I tell you, Loring, the American woman is responsible for the dishonesty of American commercial life. They are always nagging at the man for more and more money to spend, and in spending it they tempt the merchants, the clerks, their own servants, everyone within range, to become swindlers and thieves.”
“Oh, nonsense,” said I. “You’re a pessimist. The American woman is all right. Where’d you find her equal for intelligence and charm?”
“She may be intelligent,” said he. “She doesn’t use it on anything worth while, except roping in some poor sucker to put up for her and to put up with her. And she may have charm, but not for a man who has cut his matrimonial eye teeth.”
I laughed at Van Dyck—that was my grumbling friend’s name. And I soon dropped the subject from my mind. It has never been my habit to waste time in thinking about things when the thinking could not possibly lead anywhere. You may say I ought to have interfered, forced my wife to come to her senses, compelled her to learn her business. Which shows that you know little about the nature of the American woman. If I had taken that course, she would have hated me, she would have done no better, and she would have scorned me as a sordid haggler over small sums of money who was trying to spoil with the vulgarities of commercial life the beauties of the home. No, I instinctively knew enough not to interfere.
But let us take a long leap forward to the day when I became president of the railroad, having made myself a rich man by judicious gambling with eight thousand dollars loaned me by father Wheatlands. He was a rich man, and in the way to become very rich, and he had no heir but Edna after the drowning of her two brothers under a sailboat in Newark Bay. Margot was in a fashionable school over in New York. My wife and I, still a young couple and she beautiful—my wife and I were as happy as any married couple can be where they let each other alone and the husband gives the wife all the money she wishes and leaves her free to spend it as she pleases.
When I told her of my good fortune, and the sudden and large betterment of our finances, she said with a curious lighting of the eyes, a curious strengthening of the chin:
“Now—for New York!”
“New York?” said I. “What does that mean?”
“We are going to live in New York,” replied she.
“But we do live in New York. Brooklyn is part of New York.”
“Legally I suppose it is,” replied she. “But morally and æsthetically, socially, and in every other civilized way, my dear Godfrey, it is part of the backwoods. I can hardly wait to get away.”
“Why, I thought you were happy here!” exclaimed I, marveling, used though I was to her keeping her own counsel strictly about the matters that most interested her. “You’ve certainly acted as if you loved it.”
“I didn’t mind it at first,” conceded she. “But for two or three years I have loathed it, and everybody that lives in it.”
I was amazed at this last sally. “Oh, come now, Edna,” cried I, “you’ve got lots of friends here—lots and lots of them.”
I was thinking of the dozen or so women whom she called and who called her by the first name, women she was with early and late. Women she was daily playing bridge with— Bridge! I have a friend who declares that bridge is ruining the American home, and I see his point, but I think he doesn’t look deep enough. If it weren’t bridge it would be something else. Bridge is a striking example, but only a single example, of the results of feminine folly and idleness that all flow from the same cause. However, let us go back to my talk with Edna. She met my protest in behalf of her friends with a contemptuous:
“I don’t know a soul who isn’t frightfully common.”
“They’re the same sort of people we are.”
“Not the same sort that I am,” declared she proudly. “And not the sort Margot and you are going to be. You’ll see. You don’t know about these things. But fortunately I do.”
“You don’t seriously mean that you want to leave this splendid old house——”
“Splendid? It’s hardly fit to live in. Of course, we had to endure it while we were poor and obscure. But now it won’t do at all.”
“And go away from all these people you’ve worked so hard to get in with—all these friends—go away among strangers. I don’t mind. But what would you do? How’d you pass the days?”
“These vulgar people bore me to death,” declared she. “I’ve been advancing, if you have stood still. Thank God, I’ve got ambition.”
“Heaven knows they’ve never been my friends,” said I. “But I must say they seem nice enough people, as people go. What’s the matter with ’em?”
“They’re common,” said she with the languor of one explaining when he feels he will not be understood. “They’re tiresome.”
“I’ll admit they’re tiresome,” said I. “That’s why I’ve kept away from them. But I doubt if they’re more tiresome than people generally. The fact is, my dear, people are all tiresome. That’s why they can’t amuse themselves or each other, but have to be amused—have to hire the clever people of all sorts to ent