The Husband's Story: A Novel

by David Graham Phillips

You will see, gentle reader, that my list was short indeed.

It is one of the not few drawbacks of riches that they rouse the instinct of cupidity in nearly all human beings. The rich man glances round at a circle of constrained faces, each more or less unsuccessfully striving to veil from him the glistening eye and the watery lip of the gold hunger. Probably you know how pepsin is got for the market—how they pen pigs so that their snouts almost touch food which they can by no straining and struggling reach; how the unhappy creatures soon begin to drip, then to slobber, then to stream into the receiving trough under their jaws the pepsin which the sight of the food starts their stomachs to secreting. As I have looked at the parasite circles of some of my friends I have often been reminded of the pepsin pigs. Some of my friends like these displays, encourage them in every way, associate solely with pepsin pigs. I confess I have never acquired the least taste for that sort of entertainment.

I have traveled the world over, and everywhere I have found men either industriously engaged in cringing or looking hopefully about for some one to cringe to them. Well—what of it?

I owe Dugdale a debt I cannot hope to repay. He, a light-hearted philosopher, made me light-hearted. He kept my sense of humor and my sense of proportion constantly active. There is a stripe of philosopher of the light-hearted variety who lets his perception of the fundamental futility of life and all that therein is discourage him from everything but cynical laughter at himself and at the world. That sort is a shallow ass, fit company for no one but the bleary, blowsy wrecks to whose level he rapidly sinks. Dugdale—and I—were of the other school. We did not—at least, not habitually—exaggerate our own importance. It caused no swelling of the head in him that his name was known wherever people went to the theater, or in me that I usually had to be taken into account when they did anything important in finance. We did not measure the world or rank its inhabitants according to the silly standards in general use. But at the same time we appreciated that to work and to work well was the only sensible way to pass the few swift years assigned us.

It takes a serious man to make even a good joke. A frivolous person can do nothing. That is why so many of our American women, and so many of the men, too, sink into insignificance as soon as the first freshness of youth is gone from them. Youth has charm simply as youth because it seems to be a brilliant promise. When the promise goes to protest the charm vanishes.

I shall reserve what I saw and heard in South America for another volume, one of a different kind. I shall go forward to the following spring when I was once more in New York. Edna and her daughter—so I read in the newspapers—were living in fitting estate in a famous villa they had taken in the fashionable part of the south of France, “for the health of the two young sons of the marchioness.” Frascatoni was gambling at Monte Carlo, Crossley was at his government post in London. I could fill in the tiresome details for both the wives and the husbands—and so, probably, can you. While some business matters were settling, I was turning over in my mind plans for making a systematic search for a wife.

I count on your amusement confidently, gentle reader. If you wished a fresh egg for your breakfast or a suit of clothes to be worn a few weeks and discarded, or an automobile, you would set about getting it with some attention to the best ways and means. But, saturated as you are with silly sentimentalities about marriage, you believe that the most important matter in the world—the matter which determines your own happiness or unhappiness and also the current of posterity—you believe that such a matter should be left to the lottery of chance! Well, I had long since abandoned that delusion, and I purposed to establish my life with as much thought and care as I gave all other matters.

“A dull fellow,” you are saying. “No wonder his wife fled from him.”

I do not wonder that you regard as dull anything that is intelligent. To ignorance intelligence must necessarily seem dull. When any subject of real interest is brought up, some silly, empty-headed pretty woman is sure to say, “How dull! Let’s talk of something interesting.” And there will always be a chorus of laughing assent—because the woman is pretty. So I accept your sneer at me with a certain pleasure. I wish to be thought dull by some people, including some women very good to look at. But out of vanity and in fairness to Edna I must acquit her of having thought me dull—after she had been about the world.

One evening at the Federal Club I fell in with my old acquaintance, Sam Cauldwell, the fashionable physician. He was something more than that—or had been—but was too lazy to use his mind when his gift for sympathetic and flattering gab brought him in plenty of money. Cauldwell was a trained, thoroughgoing sycophant and snob. But he saw the humorous aspect of the gods he was on his knees before—and saw the humor of his being there. He knew the kind of man I was, and liked to take me aside and make sport of his deities for an hour over a bottle of wine. Also—he liked the idea of being, and of being seen, intimate with a man conspicuous for wealth and for the social position of his family—the ex-husband of a princess, the father of a marchioness. Gentle reader, if you wish to see human nature to its depth, you must occupy such a position as mine. Believe me, you are mistaken in thinking the traits you shamedly hide are unique. There are others like you—many others.