Old Gorgon Graham Part 6

Good mothers often make bad mothers-in-law, because they usually believe that, no matter whom their daughters marry, they could have gone farther and fared better. But it struck me that Helen's ma has one of those retentive memories and weak mouths--the kind of memory that never loses anything it should forget, and the kind of mouth that can't retain a lot of language which it shouldn't lose.

Of course, you want to honor your mother-in-law, that your days may be long in the land; but you want to honor this one from a distance, for the same reason. Otherwise, I'm afraid you'll hear a good deal about that French count, and how hard it is for Helen to have to a.s.sociate with a lot of mavericks from the Stock Yards, when she might be running with blooded stock on the other side. And if you glance up from your morning paper and sort of wonder out loud whether Corbett or Fitzsimmons is the better man, mother-in-law will glare at you over the top of her specs and ask if you don't think it's invidious to make any comparisons if they're both striving, to lead earnest, Christian lives. Then, when you come home at night, you'll be apt to find your wife sniffing your breath when you kiss her, to see if she can catch that queer, heavy smell which mother has noticed on it; or looking at you slant-eyed when she feels some letters in your coat, and wondering if what mother says is true, and if men who've once taken chorus-girls to supper never really recover from the habit.

On general principles, it's pretty good doctrine that two's a company and three's a crowd, except when the third is a cook. But I should say that when the third is Helen's ma it's a mob, out looking for a chance to make rough-house. A good cook, a good wife and a good job will make a good home anywhere; but you add your mother-in-law, and the first thing you know you've got two homes, and one of them is being run on alimony.

You want to remember that, beside your mother-in-law, you're a comparative stranger to your wife. After you and Helen have lived together for a year, you ought to be so well acquainted that she'll begin to believe that you know almost as much as mamma; but during the first few months of married life there are apt to be a good many tie votes on important matters, and if mother-in-law is on the premises she is generally going to break the tie by casting the deciding vote with daughter. A man can often get the best of one woman, or ten men, but not of two women, when one of the two is mother-in-law.

When a young wife starts housekeeping with her mother too handy, it's like running a business with a new manager and keeping the old one along to see how things go. It's not in human nature that the old manager, even with the best disposition in the world, shouldn't knock the new one a little, and you're Helen's new manager. When I want to make a change, I go about it like a crab--get rid of the old sh.e.l.l first, and then plunge right in and begin to do business with the new skin. It may be a little tender and open to attack at first, but it doesn't take long to toughen up when it finds out that the responsibility of protecting my white meat is on it.

You start a woman with sense to making mistakes and you've started her to learning common-sense; but you let some one else shoulder her natural responsibilities and keep her from exercising her brain, and it'll be fat-witted before she's forty. A lot of girls find it mighty handy to start with mother to look after the housekeeping and later to raise the baby; but by and by, when mamma has to quit, they don't understand that the butcher has to be called down regularly for leaving those heavy ends on the steak or running in the shoulder chops on you, and that when Willie has the croup she mustn't give the little darling a stiff hot Scotch, or try to remove the phlegm from his throat with a b.u.t.ton-hook.

There are a lot of women in this world who think that there's only one side to the married relation, and that's their side. When one of them marries, she starts right out to train her husband into kind old Carlo, who'll go downtown for her every morning and come home every night, fetching a snug little basketful of money in his mouth and wagging his tail as he lays it at her feet. Then it's a pat on the head and "Nice doggie." And he's taught to stand around evenings, retrieving her gloves and handkerchief, and snapping up with a pleased licking of his chops any little word that she may throw to him. But you let him start in to have a little fun scratching and stretching himself, or pawing her, and it's "Charge, Carlo!" and "Bad doggie!"

Of course, no man ever believes when he marries that he's going to wind up as kind Carlo, who droops his head so that the children can pull his ears, and who sticks up his paw so as to make it easier for his wife to pull his leg. But it's simpler than you think.

As long as fond fathers slave and ambitious mothers sacrifice so that foolish daughters can hide the petticoats of poverty under a silk dress and crowd the doings of cheap society into the s.p.a.ce in their heads which ought to be filled with plain, useful knowledge, a lot of girls are going to grow up with the idea that getting married means getting rid of care and responsibility instead of a.s.suming it.

A fellow can't play the game with a girl of this sort, because she can't play fair. He wants her love and a wife; she wants a provider, not a lover, and she takes him as a husband because she can't draw his salary any other way. But she can't return his affection, because her love is already given to another; and when husband and wife both love the same person, and that person is the wife, it's usually a life sentence at hard labor for the husband. If he wakes up a little and tries to a.s.sert himself after he's been married a year or so, she shudders and sobs until he sees what a brute he is; or if that doesn't work, and he still pretends to have a little spirit, she goes off into a rage and hysterics, and that usually brings him to heel again. It's a mighty curious thing how a woman who has the appet.i.te and instincts of a turkey--buzzard will often make her husband believe that she's as high-strung and delicate as a canary-bird!

It's been my experience that both men and women can fool each other before marriage, and that women can keep right along fooling men after marriage, but that as soon as the average man gets married he gets found out. After a woman has lived in the same house with a man for a year, she knows him like a good merchant knows his stock, down to any shelf-worn and slightly damaged morals which he may be hiding behind fresher goods in the darkest corner of his immortal soul. But even if she's married to a fellow who's so mean that he'd take the pennies off a dead man's eyes (not because he needed the money, but because he hadn't the change handy for a two-cent stamp), she'll never own up to the worst about him, even to herself, till she gets him into a divorce court.

I simply mention these things in a general way. Helen has shown signs of loving you, and you've never shown any symptoms of hating yourself, so I'm not really afraid that you're going to get the worst of it now.

So far as I can see, your mother-in-law is the only real trouble that you have married. But don't you make the mistake of criticizing her to Helen or of quarrelling with her. I'll attend to both for the family.

You simply want to dodge when she leads with the right, take your full ten seconds on the floor, and come back with your left cheek turned toward her, though, of course, you'll yank it back out of reach just before she lands on it. There's nothing like using a little diplomacy in this world, and, so far as women are concerned, diplomacy is knowing when to stay away. And a diplomatist is one who lets the other fellow think he's getting his way, while all the time _he's_ having his own. It never does any special harm to let people have their way with their mouths.

What you want to do is to keep mother-in-law from mixing up in your family affairs until after she gets used to the disgrace of having a pork-packer for a son-in-law, and Helen gets used to pulling in harness with you. Then mother'll mellow up into a nice old lady who'll brag about you to the neighbors. But until she gets to this point, you've got to let her hurt your feelings without hurting hers. Don't you ever forget that Helen's got a mother-in-law, too, and that it's some one you think a heap of.

Whenever I hear of a fellow's being found out by his wife, it always brings to mind the case of d.i.c.k Hodgkins, whom I knew when I was a young fellow, back in Missouri. d.i.c.kie was one of a family of twelve, who all ran a little small any way you sized them up, and he was the runt. Like most of these little fellows, when he came to match up for double harness, he picked out a six-footer, Kate Miggs. Used to call her Honeybunch, I remember, and she called him Doodums.

Honeybunch was a good girl, but she was as strong as a six-mule team, and a cautious man just naturally s.h.i.+ed away from her. Was a pretty free stepper in the mazes of the dance, and once, when she was balancing partners with Doodums, she kicked out sort of playful to give him a love pat and fetched him a clip with her tootsey that gave him water on the kneepan. It ought to have been a warning to Doodums, but he was plumb infatuated, and went around pretending that he'd been kicked by a horse. After that the boys used to make Honeybunch mighty mad when she came out of dark corners with Doodums, by feeling him to see if any of his ribs were broken. Still he didn't take the hint, and in the end she led him to the altar.

We started in to give them a lovely s.h.i.+varee after the wedding, beginning with a sort of yell which had been invented by the only fellow in town who had been to college.

As I remember, it ran something like this:

_Hun, hun, hunch!

Bun, bun, bunch!

Funny, funny!

Honey, honey!

Funny Honeybunch!_

But as soon as we got this off, and before we could begin on the dishpan chorus, Honeybunch came at us with a couple of bed-slats and cleaned us all out.

Before he had married, Doodums had been one of half a dozen half-baked sports who drank cheap whisky and played expensive poker at the Dutchman's; and after he'd held Honeybunch in his lap evenings for a month, he reckoned one night that he'd drop down street and look in on the boys. Honeybunch reckoned not, and he didn't press the matter, but after they'd gone to bed and she'd dropped off to sleep, he slipped into his clothes and down the waterspout to the ground. He sat up till two o'clock at the Dutchman's, and naturally, the next morning he had a breath like a gasoline runabout, and looked as if he'd been attending a successful c.o.o.n-hunt in the capacity of the c.o.o.n.

Honeybunch smelt his breath and then she smelt a mouse, but she wasn't much of a talker and she didn't ask any questions--of him. But she had brother Jim make some inquiries, and a few days later, when Doodums complained of feeling all petered out and wanted to go to bed early, she was ready for him.

Honeybunch wasn't any invalid, and when she went to bed it was to sleep, so she rigged up a simple little device in the way of an alarm and dropped off peacefully, while Doodums pretended to.

When she began to snore in her upper register and to hit the high C, he judged the coast was clear, and leaped lightly out of bed. Even before he'd struck the floor he knew there'd been a horrible mistake somewhere, for he felt a tug as if he'd hooked a hundred-pound catfish. There was an awful ripping and tearing sound, something fetched loose, and his wife was sitting up in bed blinking at him in the moonlight. It seemed that just before she went to sleep she'd pinned her nightgown to his with a safety pin, which wasn't such a bad idea for a simple, trusting, little village maiden.

"Was you wantin' anything, Duckie Doodums?" she asked in a voice like the running of sap in maple-sugar time.

"N-n-nothin' but a drink of water, Honeybunch sweetness," he stammered back.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "N-n-nothin' but a drink of water"]

"You're sure you ain't mistook in your thirst and that it ain't a suddint cravin' for licker, and that you ain't sort of p'intin' down the waterspout for the Dutchman's, Duckie Doodums?"

"Sh.o.r.ely not, Honeybunch darlin'," he finally fetched up, though he was hardly breathing.

"Because your ma told me that you was given to somnambulasticatin' in your sleep, and that I must keep you tied up nights or you'd wake up some mornin' at the foot of a waterspout with your head bust open and a lot of good licker spilt out on the gra.s.s."

"Don't you love your Doodums anymore?" was all d.i.c.kie could find to say to this; but Honeybunch had too much on her mind to stop and swap valentines just then.

"You wouldn't deceive your Honeybunch, would you, Duckie Doodums?"

"I sh.o.r.ely would not."

"Well, don't you do it, Duckie Doodums, because it would break my heart; and if you should break my heart I'd just naturally bust your head. Are you listenin', Doodums?"

Doodums was listening.

"Then you come back to bed and stay there."

Doodums never called his wife Honeybunch after that. Generally it was Kate, and sometimes it was Kitty, and when she wasn't around it was usually Kitty-cat. But he minded better than anything I ever met on less than four legs.

Your affectionate father,

JOHN GRAHAM.

P.S.--You might tear up this letter.

No. 8

From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards, Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont, at Yema.s.see-on-the-Tallaha.s.see. In replying to his father's hint that it is time to turn his thoughts from love to lard, the young man has quoted a French sentence, and the old man has been both pained and puzzled by it.

VIII

CHICAGO, January 24, 189-.

_Dear Pierrepont_: I had to send your last letter to the fertilizer department to find out what it was all about. We've got a clerk there who's an Oxford graduate, and who speaks seven languages for fifteen dollars a week, or at the rate of something more than two dollars a language. Of course, if you're such a big thinker that your ideas rise to the surface too fast for one language to hold 'em all, it's a mighty nice thing to know seven; but it's been my experience that seven spread out most men so thin that they haven't anything special to say in any of them. These fellows forget that while life's a journey, it isn't a palace-car trip for most of us, and that if they hit the trail packing a lot of weight for which they haven't any special use, they're not going to get very far. You learn men and what men should do, and how they should do it, and then if you happen to have any foreigners working for you, you can hire a fellow at fifteen per to translate hustle to 'em into their own fool language. It's always been my opinion that everybody spoke American while the tower of Babel was building, and that the Lord let the good people keep right on speaking it. So when you've got anything to say to me, I want you to say it in language that will grade regular on the Chicago Board of Trade.

Some men fail from knowing too little, but more fail from knowing too much, and still more from knowing it all. It's a mighty good thing to understand French if you can use it to some real purpose, but when all the good it does a fellow is to help him understand the foreign cuss-words in a novel, or to read a story which is so tough that it would make the Queen's English or any other ladylike language blush, he'd better learn hog-Latin! He can be just the same breed of yellow dog in it, and it don't take so much time to pick it up.