He laughed. “That means you don’t really care what happens when they come back.”
My smile was an admission of the correctness of his guess. We dropped our domestic affairs and took up the matters that were more interesting and more important to us.
If you have good sight, unimpaired eyes, you go about assuming—when you think of it at all—that good sight is the rule in the world and impaired eyes the exception. But let your sight begin to fail, let your eyes become darkened, and soon you discover that you are one of thousands—that good sight is the exception, that almost everyone has something the matter with his eyes. The reason human beings know so little about human nature, the reason the sentimental flapdoodle about human virtues, in the present not very far-advanced stage of human evolution, is so widely believed and doubt of it so indignantly denounced as cynicism, lies in the fact that the average human being is ignorant of the afflictions of his own soul. This would be pleasant and harmless enough, and to destroy the delusion would be wickedly cruel, were it not that the only way to cure ailments of whatever sort is to diagnose them. What hope is there for the man devoured of a fever who fancies and insists that he is healthy? What hope is there for the man who eats pleasant-tasting slow poison under the impression that it is food? What a quaint notion it is that the truth, the sole source of health and happiness, is bad for some people, chiefly for those sick unto death through the falsehoods of ignorance and vanity! We humans are like the animal that claws and bites the surgeon who is trying to set its broken leg.
But I am wandering a little. Discover that you have any ailment of body or of soul, and you soon discover how widespread that ailment is. You do not even appreciate how widespread, incessant, and poignant are the ravages of death until your own family and friends begin to die off. I had no notion of the extent of the social or domestic malady of abandoned husbands and fathers until I became one of that curious class.
Among the masses there is the great and growing pestilence of abandoned wives—husbands, worn out by the uncertainties of the laboring man’s income, and disgusted with the incompetence of their wives and with the exasperations of the badly brought up children—such husbands flying by tens of thousands to escape what they cannot cure or endure. Among the classes, from the plutocracy down to and through the small merchants and professional men, I now discovered that there was a corresponding and reversed disease—the abandoned husband.
The husband and father, working hard and presently accumulating enough for ease in his particular station of life, suddenly finds himself supporting, with perhaps all the money he can scrape together, a distant and completely detached family. He mails his money regularly, and with a fidelity that will appear grotesque, noble, or pitiful according to the point of view. In return he gets occasional letters from the loved ones—perfunctory these letters somehow sound, or would sound to the critical, though they are liberally sprinkled with loving, even fawning phrases, such as “dear, sweet papa” and “darling husband.” Where are “the loved ones?” If the family home is in a small town or country, they are in New York or some other city of America usually. If the family home is in the city, they are abroad. What are they doing? Sacrificing themselves! Especially poor wife and mother. She would infinitely prefer being at home with beloved husband. But she must not be selfish. She must carry her part of their common burden. While he toils to provide for the children, she toils in the loneliness or unhappiness of New York or Paris or Rome or Dresden or Genoa. And what is she toiling at in those desert places? Why, at educating the children!
Sometimes it’s music. Sometimes it’s painting. Again it’s “finishing,” whatever that may mean, or plain, vague “education.” There was a time when men of any sort could be instantly abashed, silenced and abased by the mere pronouncing of the word education. That happy day for mental fakers is nearing its close. Now, at the sound of the sacred word many a sensible, practical man has the courage to put on a grin. I have been credited with saying that a revival of the declining child-bearing among American women might be looked for, now that they have found the usefulness of children as an excuse for escape from home and husband. I admit having said this, but I meant it as a jest. However, there is truth in the jest. I don’t especially blame the women. Why should they stay at home when they have no sympathy with the things that necessarily engross the husband? Why stay at home when it bores them even to see that the servants carry on the house decently? Why stay at home when they simply show there from day to day how little they know about housekeeping? Why stay at home when there is an amiable fool willing to mail them his money, while they amuse themselves gadding about Europe or some big city of America?
Abandoned wives at the one end of the social scale, abandoned husbands at the other end. Please note that in both cases the deep underlying cause is the same—money. Too little money, and the husband flies; too much money, and it is the wife who breaks up the family.
As soon as I discovered, by being elected to membership, the existence of the universal order of abandoned husbands I took the liveliest interest in it. I was eager to learn whether there was another fool quite so foolish as myself, also whether the other fools were aware of their own folly. I found that most of them were rather proud of their membership, indulged in a ludicrous cocking of the comb and waggling of the wattles when they spoke of “my family over on the other side for a few years,” or of “my wife, poor woman, exiled in Paris to cultivate my daughter’s voice,” or of “my invalid wife—she has to live in the south of France. It’s a sad trial to us both.”
Then—but this came much later—I discovered that these credulous, money-mailing fools, including myself, were not quite so imbecile, as a class, as they seemed to be. I discovered that they were secretly, often unconsciously, glad to be rid of their uncongenial families, and regarded any money they mailed as money well spent. They toiled cheerfully at distasteful tasks to get the wherewithal to keep their loved ones far, far away!