The Log-Cabin Lady - An Anonymous Autobiography Part 5

IV.

Fear is the destroyer of peace. I knew no peace until I learned not to be afraid of conventions. The three most wretched years in my life might easily have been avoided by a little training at home or at school.

I realize now the unhappiness of those first years of my married life.

I was awkward and ill at ease in a world that valued social poise above knowledge. From my childhood I had loved honest, sincere people. After my marriage I met distinguished men and women, even a few who might be called great; but they, too, had their affectations and petty vanities.

Being young, I judged them harshly because they set what I considered too much store upon absurd conventions.

In the course of my travels since, I have come to realize that social customs are a simple matter of geography! What is proper in England is bad form in France, and many customs that were correct in Vienna would be intolerable in Spain. In the formal circles of Vienna no one spoke to anybody without an introduction. In Spain there was a more subtle and truly aristocratic standard. The a.s.sumption was that anybody one met in the home of one's host was desirable, and it was courtesy, therefore, to begin a conversation with any guest. This is the att.i.tude also in parts of France.

But in those first months I had not acquired my philosophy. I lived through homesick days, and some that were hard and bitter. I stayed with Tom that first year only because I was too bewildered to take any initiative, and because I kept hoping that things would right themselves and I would wake out of my nightmare. My baby came in the second year, and then I could not go home. The simple life of my own people slipped very, very far away. We made a hurried trip back to the United States that summer, but Tom would not consent to my going West. His own family wanted to see our baby, and they decided that the little fellow had traveled enough and should not be subjected to the hardships of a cross-country train trip. So Tom sent for mother and the twins to come to us, and they arrived at the Waldorf Hotel, where we were staying.

Dear, simple mother, in her terrible clothes, and the twins, got up with more thought for economy than for beauty! I shopped extravagantly with them. The youngsters wanted to see everything in New York; but mother, despite all of those hard, lonely years in our rough country and the many interesting things for her to do and see in New York--mother wanted nothing better than to stay with the baby.

With all the children she had brought into this world one might think she had seen enough of babies. But she adored my little son. How near she seemed to me then! How hungry I had been for her, without realizing it! I felt that she loved my baby boy as she had never loved me or any of her own children. And I understood why mother never had had time to love her own babies. In the struggle for existence of those hard years she had never had a minute to indulge in the pure joy of having her baby. I sat watching her with her first grandchild, so sweet in his exquisite hand-sewn little clothes, and suddenly I found myself crying hysterically.

Mother was very dear to me from that day. Later in this chronicle I want to give a chapter to my mother and what we both suffered during this period of her visit to New York, for it marked the climax of my own development. When mother and the children started off on their return trip to the West, Tom sent them flowers and candy and fruit. He had already generously put financial worry away from my family for all time, but I knew that he was a little ashamed of some of mother's crudities.

I wondered why I did not feel ashamed. I was very, very glad I did not.

It gave me something tangible to cling to--a sure consciousness of power, that comes of knowing one possesses the true pride to rise above the opinions of other people.

I would have given my life, that day, to be able to a.s.sure my family that material security which they owed to my husband, who neither loved nor understood them. I looked down the years and saw myself crushed by a burden of indebtedness to a man I felt I no longer loved. Only mother's grateful, simple happiness eased my hurt. I had never approached my mother, but I knew now that if her natural dignity and great, kind heart had been given the advantages that the women in my husband's family took as a matter of course, she would have been superior to them all. Yet they barely tolerated mother--no more.

I longed to go home to my own warm, hearty, open West. I stood on the ferry after they had gone, thinking that, if my family were not so deeply indebted to my husband, I would leave him. I suppose I did not really mean that thought, but it made me unhappy. I felt disloyal and dishonest. Finally I told Tom. There was a scene; but from that day he began to understand me, and things were better. A few days later we came home from a dinner party, and, after going to the baby's room for a minute, Tom asked me to stay and talk. But he did not talk. For a long time he sat smoking and thinking. I knew he had something on his mind, and I waited. Finally I realized that he was embarra.s.sed.

"Can I help? Is it something I have done that has embarra.s.sed you?" I asked.

That was many years ago, but I can never forget the look Tom gave me.

It held all the love of our courtship and something besides that I had never seen in his face before.

"For G.o.d's sake, never say that to me again!" he cried. "Embarra.s.sed me! I am proud of you--you never can know how proud. I was sitting here trying to think how to tell you something my mother said about you, and just what it means."

His mother! My heart dropped. His mother had never said anything about me, excepting criticism. I had been a bitter disappointment to her.

Whatever she said would be politely cruel--at best, a d.a.m.ning with faint praise.

"She said," my husband went on, "that she is very happy in our marriage, completely satisfied, and that she has come to be proud of you. I don't know how to tell you just what that means."

I knew. I knew his mother could have given me no higher praise. I had learned what to her were the essentials; I had cultivated the manner she placed above price. But the realization brought self-distrust. Had I lost my honesty and sincerity?

Tom went on to tell me that his mother had particularly admired my att.i.tude toward my own mother, and the manner in which I met every little failing of hers. She felt I had a sense of true values in people, and that the simplicity and sureness with which I had met this situation was the essence of good breeding.

I had not thought it possible that Tom's mother could understand my feeling for my mother and my honest pride in her real worth. Perhaps, I reflected, I had been unjust to my mother-in-law. I knew what a shock I had been to her in the early days of our marriage, and I knew only too well that even Tom had often regretted my ignorance of social usages.

They are simple customs, and should be taught in every school in America, but I had not learned them. I was happy that night and for days afterward.

Then we went back to Europe. Tom knew people on the steamer to whom I took a dislike. They were bold and even vulgar, and Tom admitted that he did not admire them. I made up my mind we should avoid them. The next afternoon I found Tom and that group walking the deck arm in arm, chatting affably. When we were alone, I asked Tom how he could do it.

I know now that a man cannot hold an official position like Tom's and ignore politically important people. But he only said rather carelessly, and with a laugh, that it was one of the prices a man pays for public office.

After that I noticed that my husband was known to nearly every one. He had a glad hand and a smile for the public--because it was the public.

I watched to see if he had a slightly different smile for the people of Back Bay and his own particular social cla.s.s; sometimes I thought he had, and it made me a little soul-sick.

I longed for a home for my baby and a few friends I could love and really enjoy. I was not fitted to be the wife of a public man. It was the poverty and crudeness of my youth that had made me intolerant. One of the big lessons life has taught me is that people can be amiable, tolerant, and even friendly, and still be sincere. The pleasantry of social relations among the civilized peoples of the earth is a mere garment we wear for our own protection and to cover our feelings. It is the oil of the machinery of life. I have found that men and women who take part in the big work of the earth wear that garment of civility and graciousness, and yet have their strong friendships and even their bitter enmities.

But I did not understand this when we went back to Europe. I only knew that my husband was amiable to people he did not like, and I questioned how deep his affection for me went. How much of his kindness to me was just the easiest way and the manner of a gentleman?

A hard and bare youth had made me supersensitive and suspicious and narrow. I wanted to measure other people by the standards of my own primitive years. Out on the frontier we had judged life in the rough.

Courage and truth were the essentials. A man fought his enemies out in the open, and made no compromises. There was nothing easy in life, no smooth rhythm. And I tried to drag forward with me, as I went, the bold ethics of the frontier. I resented good manners because I believed they were a cloak of hypocrisy.

A few months after we returned to Europe the shadow of death crossed our path, swiftly and terribly. My little son died. Other babies came to us later, but that first little boy had brought more into my life than all the rest of the world could ever give. He had restored my faith in life, my hope, and for a while was all my joy.

People were kind, but I felt that many called merely because it was "good form"--"the thing to do." Bitterness was creeping into my heart.

Yet why should it not be "the thing to do" to call on a bereaved mother?

It is a gesture of humanity. Tom seemed very far away. I felt that his pride was hurt, perhaps his vanity; for he had boasted of the little fellow and loved to show him off. How little I understood!

I bring myself to tell these intimate things because there is a lesson in them for other women--because I resent that any free-born American citizen should be handicapped by lacking so small and easily acquired a possession as poise, poise that comes with knowledge of the simple rules of the social game. It is my hope that this honest confession of my own feelings, due directly to lack of training, may help other women, and particularly other mothers whose children are now in the plastic years.

It was my utter lack of appreciation of manners and customs in my husband's cla.s.s that estranged me from Tom. I was resentful and antagonistic merely because I was different.

My husband was suffering even as I was suffering; but no one realized it, least of all myself. Every one was especially kind to me, because I was a woman. People are rarely attentive and tender with men when loss comes. Men are supposed to be strong and self-controlled; their hearts are rated as a little less deep and tender than the hearts of women; yet when men are truly hurt they need love and care even as little children.

A month after the baby's death, Tom and I were walking along the Embankment in London one Sat.u.r.day afternoon, when we met a small girl carrying a little child. The baby was too tired to walk any farther; it was dirty, and was crying bitterly. Tom stopped, spoke to the girl, and offered to carry the baby, who soon quieted down on Tom's shoulder. At the end of that walk Tom's light summer suit was ruined. I expected him to turn with some trivial, jesting remark, but he said nothing. I looked at him and saw that his face was set and hard and his eyes wet.

Without looking at me, he said: "Don't speak to me now."

That moment of silence revealed to me my husband's character better than months of talking.

The next day my husband came to me and said: "Mary, I have asked for a leave of absence. We are going back to the United States. We are going out West to have a visit with your family."

Two years before I had believed that Tom would not fit into my Northwest. But in twenty-four hours Tom and my father were old pals.

He was as much at home with mother and the children as I, and all the neighbors liked him. He was interested in everything on the ranch, and even in the small-town life of the village. He interested father in putting modern equipment on the ranch. He went hunting with the men, played games with the children, visited the little district schoolhouse, and found joy in buying gifts for the youngsters. When mother made a big platter full of taffy, he pulled as enthusiastically as a boy. As I stood at the corral, one day, and watched Tom with my youngest brother, I remembered him at the court of St. James, and I began to understand.

Tom was natural. It was just a part of him to be kindly and gracious to everybody. I had never seen him angry with men of his own type, but I saw him furious enough to commit murder when a man on the ranch tied up a dog and beat her for running away. In after years I saw Tom angry with men of his own cla.s.s; I saw him waging long, bitter fights against public men who had betrayed public trust. Something barbaric in me was satisfied that my kind, gently bred man was one with the men of my own tribe, who fought man and beast and the elements to take civilization farther west.

Almost a generation slipped by between that visit to the West and the next scene in my life of which I shall write. Many things of personal and of national importance happened meantime, but they have nothing to do with this message to women. I was in France when the World War began. I had been in Vienna again, and in England at regular intervals.

I had learned to accept life as I found it, and to get much joy out of living. Sometimes I chafed a little under the demands of social life and needless formalities, but I accepted them as inevitable.

Then the world was torn in two. The earth dripped in blood and sorrow.

Life became more difficult than on the frontier, and more elemental. I was present, in the first year of the war, in a house where the King and Queen of the Belgians were guests, where great generals and great statesmen had gathered on great and earnest and desperate business. I was only an onlooker, and I noticed what every one else was too absorbed to see. As the evening progressed, I realized that pomp and ceremony had died with the youth of France. King, generals, statesmen met as human men pitting their wits against one another, desperately struggling to find a way out of the h.e.l.l into which they were falling.

Twice the king rose to his feet, and no one else stood. They were all too deep in the terrible question of war.

When the meeting was over and the guests of the house ready to retire, the little queen said very quietly: "Madam, may not my husband and I occupy this room together? It is very kind of you to arrange two suites for us, but I am sure there are many guests here to-night--and, anyway, I prefer to be near him."

The war had done that. Who would expect a queen to think of the problems of housing guests, even a great queen? And the war had made the king not the king, but her man, very near and very dear.