The janitor in our building is truly a toiler.He rarely leaves his dismal quarters under the sidewalk, but "Madam" walks the streets clad in sealskin and silk, a "Gainsborough" crowning her false "bang." I always think of Max O'Rell's clever saying, when Isee her: "The sweat of the American husband crystallizes into diamond ear-rings for the American woman." My janitress sports a diminutive pair of those jewels and has hopes of larger ones!
Instead of "doing" the bachelor's rooms in the building as her husband's helpmeet, she "does" her spouse, and a char-woman works for her.She is one of the drops in the tide that ebbs and flows on Twenty-third Street - a discontented woman placed in a false position by our absurd customs.
Go a little further up in the social scale and you will find the same "detached" feeling.In a household I know of only one horse and a COUPE can be afforded.Do you suppose it is for the use of the weary breadwinner? Not at all.He walks from his home to the "elevated." The carriage is to take his wife to teas or the park.
In a year or two she will go abroad, leaving him alone to turn the crank that produces the income.As it is, she always leaves him for six months each year in a half-closed house, to the tender mercies of a caretaker.Two additional words could be advantageously added to the wedding service.After "for richer for poorer," I should like to hear a bride promise to cling to her husband "for winter for summer!"Make another step up and stand in the entrance of a house at two A.M., just as the cotillion is commencing, and watch the couples leaving.The husband, who has been in Wall Street all day, knows that he must be there again at nine next morning.He is furious at the lateness of the hour, and dropping with fatigue.His wife, who has done nothing to weary her, is equally enraged to be taken away just as the ball was becoming amusing.What a happy, united pair they are as the footman closes the door and the carriage rolls off home! Who is to blame? The husband is vainly trying to lead the most exacting of double lives, that of a business man all day and a society man all night.You can pick him out at a glance in a ballroom.His eye shows you that there is no rest for him, for he has placed his wife at the head of an establishment whose working crushes him into the mud of care and anxiety.Has he any one to blame but himself?
In England, I am told, the man of a family goes up to London in the spring and gets his complete outfit, down to the smallest details of hat-box and umbrella.If there happens to be money left, the wife gets a new gown or two: if not, she "turns" the old ones and rejoices vicariously in the splendor of her "lord." I know one charming little home over there, where the ladies cannot afford a pony-carriage, because the three indispensable hunters eat up the where-withal.
Thackeray was delighted to find one household (Major Ponto's) where the governess ruled supreme, and I feel a fiendish pleasure in these accounts of a country where men have been able to maintain some rights, and am moved to preach a crusade for the liberation of the American husband, that the poor, down-trodden creature may revolt from the slavery where he is held and once more claim his birthright.If he be prompt to act (and is successful) he may work such a reform that our girls, on marrying, may feel that some duties and responsibilities go with their new positions; and a state of things be changed, where it is possible for a woman to be pitied by her friends as a model of abnegation, because she has decided to remain in town during the summer to keep her husband company and make his weary home-coming brighter.Or where (as in a story recently heard) a foreigner on being presented to an American bride abroad and asking for her husband, could hear in answer: "Oh, he could not come; he was too busy.I am making my wedding-trip without him."
