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 class 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 Saturday 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.