“And so it went. All the undertakers in town were trying to stand in with me. But I thought they went a little too far when they adopted a set of appreciative resolutions and invited me to address their annual convention. Some folks have no sense of propriety. The preachers showed more tact. It’s true that one offered to do all my marrying on the basis of a yearly contract, but that was a strictly private, business arrangement, the same as I had with the firm of caterers and liverymen which supplied both cakes and camels. I could go on all night telling you about my other wives and the causes of their sudden shufflings-off—Sapphira, who objected to my smoking in the front parlor; Anastasia, who believed the adjective ‘annual,’ as applied to house-cleanings, meant every week; Boadicea, who was strong for women’s rights, but refused to go downstairs first to tackle the burglar; Sheba, who took me along when she went shopping and parked me for two hours outside a department store; Delilah the Second, who wanted to cut my hair so as to save enough money to get herself a new winter hat, as if my overhead charges weren’t high enough already. These are just a few samples from my souvenir collection of matrimonial misfits that I happen to recall offhand. The proverb says, ‘A word to the wives is sufficient,’ but I never found it so. Not by a long shot. I found action more effective than words. They say bigamy means one wife too many; but so does monogamy sometimes. If my experience helps other married men I shall be glad to have given this interview. I like to talk, because nowadays I feel I can do so without interrupting some wife or other. Just one word more, and then good night:
“There is no marrying in heaven. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
II
QUEEN ELIZABETH DISCLOSES WHY SHE NEVER MARRIED
“Nothing would have induced me to talk for publication,” said Queen Elizabeth, as she negligently lit a cigarette and with a graceful gesture invited me to take a seat, “if you hadn’t printed that interview with that horrid old Bluebeard last week. They used to say that I was a heartless coquette, and that all the men were losing their heads over me. Well, if a young man had come to ask me, around the year 1588, why I had never married—as you have just done—he’d have lost his head in just about the time it would have taken the chief executioner to respond to a hurry call. But times have changed and we change with them. History has done many cruel wrongs to my memory, and I want to be set right. I didn’t stay single for lack of proposals, I can tell you. Why, before I was sixteen the front yard of our palace looked like a college campus, it was so full all the time of young men carrying flowers and boxes of candy and ringing the doorbell, wanting to know if Princess Elizabeth were in. I had every other girl in England jealous of me, if I do say it myself. But I saw too much of marriage at home. My father did enough marrying for the whole family.
“Life got to be just one stepmother after another. I began to lose count. I decided that one member of the family had given enough of a boost to the institution of matrimony, and it didn’t need any further endorsement from me. I soon appreciated the truth of the saying, ‘Man proposes.’ I got so many proposals I had my maids of honor knit a lot of mittens to hand to the fellows as a souvenir. Finally the men saw I was in earnest and let me alone; that is to say, most of them. A few foolish fellows continued to write poetry (that is what they called it) and send presents, but my mind was made up and I refused to change it. It was about this time that our court fool remarked that woman’s favorite occupations were changing her mind, her clothes and her name. And about five minutes afterward he changed his permanent address to the Tower of London. All the world’s a stage, as my friend Shakespeare used to say, and ninety-nine out of a hundred men consider themselves perfectly equipped for the rôle of comedian. But it’s possible to be too fatally funny.
“Now, about that interview with Brother Bluebeard last week. I suppose he thought he was funny when he said about the only time a man gets his wife’s absorbed, undivided attention is when he talks in his sleep. But that’s about the only time a man says anything worth listening to. It just made my blood boil—that man Bluebeard calmly talking about the wives he’d killed. Not that I believe half of it. He was only boasting. And that reminds me: there used to be an organization called the Ananias Club. But who ever heard of a Sapphira Club? There wouldn’t be enough members to hold a meeting in a telephone booth. But ‘all men are liars,’ and married ones have more ready-made opportunities. It has been estimated that in a married lifetime of forty years the average man will be called upon to answer the perfectly reasonable inquiry, ‘Where have you been?’ 14,610 times. This calculation allows for 365 answers in each ordinary year and 366 in leap-years. And when her husband replies to her altogether proper interrogation, too often the wife realizes, like the Queen of Sheba, that the half has not been told her.
“From Ananias to Munchausen and down to the modern press agent, the experts at exaggeration have all been men. Fishermen’s tales and sailors’ yarns are proverbial. A woman trying to tell a lie feels like a fish out of water, and at the first opportunity flops back into the ocean of truth.
“There’s another slander on women I’d like to say a few words about, and that’s the charge of talkativeness. Men have always flocked to the talkative professions like ducks to water. Most lawyers and barbers are men. Are there any women auctioneers? There are few women preachers. There was a time when all the talking in the world was done by one man, but there was no conversation until the arrival of Eve. She did the listening. It is essential to conversation that there be a listener, and man’s happiness was not complete until there was somebody to hear him talk. The average husband loves to deliver home lectures on baseball in summer and politics in winter. Here we have the reason for the popularity of women’s clubs. No man being present, they have a chance to talk. Go into any church Sunday morning and what do you see? An audience composed principally of women listening to a man talking. The recording angel who tries to keep up with a man has to be an expert at taking lightning dictation. One of the newest works in three large volumes is entitled, ‘Last Words of Great Men.’ The edition makes no pretensions to being complete. That, of course, would be impossible when we have had so many great men, all of them talking steadily to the last. But it is worth noting that we have only meagre records of the last words of any great woman. Poor thing! With her husband, and a man doctor and a clergyman at her bedside, what chance would she have?
“I’ll admit that there have been a few of the so-called great men of history who have not been noted for their love of talk, but when such a man is discovered everybody calls attention to him as if he were a genuine curiosity of nature. He is usually given a nickname indicative of his peculiarity, such as William the Silent, and people travel miles to get a look at him. Practically every man is Speaker of the House, and in his case the title is no misnomer. For instance, it’s a question whether all the ancient martyrs put together ever said as much about their sufferings as one modern man with a boil on his neck. Man even goes ahead and invents new languages like Esperanto and baseball, and golf.