Marie Mattingly Meloney

“ The earth dripped in blood and sorrow. Life became more difficult than on the frontier, and more elemental. I was present, in the first year of the war, in a house where the King and Queen of the Belgians were guests, where great generals and great statesmen had gathered on great and earnest and desperate business. I was only an onlooker, and I noticed what every one else was too absorbed to see. As the evening progressed, I realized that pomp and ceremony had died with the youth of France. ”

“ I had been thinking such kindly things of England—Mr. Balfour fighting for general education; Mr. Gladstone struggling to make England push Turkey back and save Greece; all England raising money for the fire sufferers of Paris and the Indian famine. What a humanitarian race they were! I felt as pro-England as any of the satellites in that room, and almost as much awed. But back of it all was a natural United States be-natural-as-you-were-born impulse. Neither Back Bay Boston nor Tom's Philadelphia friends had been able to repress it. ”

“ Eve went to France with us a few months later. She made me talk French with her. My first formal dinner in France was a pleasant surprise. It was like a great family party—not dull and quiet like the English dinner, and ever so much more fun. Everybody participated. If there was one lion at the table, everybody shared him.
There is something in being born on a silken couch. Nothing surprises you. You are at ease anywhere in the world. Eve fitted into Paris as naturally as in her native London, I began to feel at home there myself. ”

“ It is easier to understand races if one understands the psychology of their customs. I realized that social amenities are too often neglected in America, and our manners sometimes truthfully called crude. But I told myself with pride that our truly cultivated people will not tolerate a social form that is not based on human, kindly instincts. It was not until the World War flooded Europe with American boys and girls that I realized the glory of our social standards and the great need to have our own people understand those standards. ”

“ I was homesick for Wisconsin, homesick for real and simple people. I wanted to go home! That night Tom and I had our first real quarrel, and it was over my dismissal of the Scotch lady of aristocratic birth. Life became intolerable for a while. I dragged through days of bitter homesickness. Nothing seemed real. No one seemed sincere. Life was a stage. Everybody seemed to be acting a part and speaking their pieces with guttural voices. Even my husband's voice sounded different—or else I realized for the first time that Boston apes London English. ”

“ The second day in London, Tom took me to an exhibition important in the art world, or at least in the official life of London. Everybody who was somebody was there. I saw the Princess of Wales and the Marquis of Salisbury, who was then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. I saw Mr. Balfour, so handsome and gracious that I refused to believe there had ever been cause to call him “Bloody Balfour.” There was something kingly about him—yet he was simply Mr. Balfour. Years afterward I realized that to know Mr. Balfour is either to worship him or hate him. No one takes the middle course. ”

“ I longed for a home for my baby and a few friends I could love and really enjoy. I was not fitted to be the wife of a public man. It was the poverty and crudeness of my youth that had made me intolerant. One of the big lessons life has taught me is that people can be amiable, tolerant, and even friendly, and still be sincere. The pleasantry of social relations among the civilized peoples of the earth is a mere garment we wear for our own protection and to cover our feelings. It is the oil of the machinery of life. ”

“ All of human nature and the ups and downs of man are there, from secondhand lace to the mortgaged jewels of broken-down nobility, from sporting games and tickets for sale to relatives wanted, and those mysterious, suggestive, unsigned messages from home or to home. I read the news of the war. We in America did not know there was a war. But Greece and Crete were at each other's throats, and Turkey was standing waiting to crowd the little ancient nation into Armenia or off the map. There was the Indian famine—We did not talk about it at home, but it had first place in the London paper. ”

“ I was awkward and ill at ease in a world that valued social poise above knowledge. From my childhood I had loved honest, sincere people. After my marriage I met distinguished men and women, even a few who might be called great; but they, too, had their affectations and petty vanities. Being young, I judged them harshly because they set what I considered too much store upon absurd conventions.
In the course of my travels since, I have come to realize that social customs are a simple matter of geography! ”

“ I saw more show of wealth, more extravagance, more carelessness, more reckless morals than ever before, and—horrible to contemplate—springing up in the new world, the narrow social standards which war had torn from the old. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That night I believed that the war had broken down many of our barriers; that all foolish customs had died; that the terrific price paid in human blood and human suffering had at least left a world honest with itself, simple and ready for good comradeship; that men were measured by manliness and women by ideals. ”

“ So Tom sent for mother and the twins to come to us, and they arrived at the Waldorf Hotel, where we were staying. Dear, simple mother, in her terrible clothes, and the twins, got up with more thought for economy than for beauty! I shopped extravagantly with them. The youngsters wanted to see everything in New York; but mother, despite all of those hard, lonely years in our rough country and the many interesting things for her to do and see in New York—mother wanted nothing better than to stay with the baby. ”

“ The New York World building was then the tallest in the world. To me it was also the most stupendous.
Impulsively I turned to a man leaning on the ferry-boat railing beside me. “Is n't that the most wonderful thing in the world?” I gasped.
“Not quite,” he answered, and looked at me. His look made me uncomfortable. I could have spoken to any stranger in Madison without embarrassment. It took me about twenty years to understand why a plain, middle-aged woman may chat with a strange man anywhere on earth, while the same conversation cheapens a good-looking young girl. ”

“ One takes off one's shoes to enter the presence of the ruler of Persia. One wears a black tie until eleven o'clock in Vienna—or does n't. One uses fish knives in England until he dines with royalty—then one must manage with a fork and a piece of bread. One dresses for dinner always, and waits for the hostess to say it is time, and speaks only to one's neighbor at table. In France one guest speaks to any or all of the others; all one's friends extend congratulations if a baby is coming; one shares all his joys with friends. ”

“ Yet the same old New England stock that sired their ancestors produced my father's fathers.
Theirs had stayed in Boston, and had had time to teach their children grace and refinement and subtleties. Mine fought for their existence in a new country. And when men and women fight for existence life becomes very simple.
I felt only my own misery that day. Now I realize that the meeting between Tom's mother and his wife was a mutual misery. I was crude. No doubt, to her, I seemed even common. With every one except Tom I seemed awkward and stupid. Poor mother-in-law! ”

“ One day I went to market—the kind of a market to which my mother would have gone—and I saw women whose husbands labored hard, scorning to buy any but porterhouse steaks—merely because porterhouse steak stood for prosperity.
In Washington I met a new kind of American, a type that has sprung up suddenly like an evil toadstool. It is a fungous disease that spreads. Some hangs from old American stock, some dangles from recent plantings, all of it is snobbish and offensive. It wears foreign clothes and affects foreign ways, sometimes even foreign accents. ”

“ But in England nobody must know, and everybody must be surprised. No one ever speaks of himself in England. They are sensitive about everything personal. But there is an underground and very perfect system by which everything about everybody is known and noised about and discussed with everybody except the person in question. It is a mysterious and elaborate hypocrisy.
With the aid of Eve, I made a thorough study of the geography of social customs. I learned the ways of Europe, of the Orient, and of South America. ”

“ The Far West still keeps the American inheritance of open hearted hospitality and its provincialism. The West has inherited some of the finest virtues of our country, and if it is not bitten by Back Bay, Philadelphia, Virginia, or Charleston, it will grow up into its mother's finest child.
“No church west of Chicago, no God west of Denver,” we used to hear when I was a child. But to-day, the churches are part of the community and even men go. People in the West do not seem to go to church merely out of respect for the devil and a conscience complex, but because they like to. ”

“ Fake crests are the first step down, and like all lies they lead to other lies. The next step is ancestors.
Selling and painting ancestors is another business which thrives around New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. And the public swallows it. They swallow each other's ancestors. Even old families take these new descendants as a matter of course.
One of these new Americans recently gave a large feast in Washington with every out-of-season delicacy in profusion. The only simple thing in the house was the mind of the hostess. ”

“ To the Englishman, to be presented at court is to be set up in England as class, to be worshiped by those who have not been in the presence of the queen, and to pay a little more to the butcher and milliner. ”

“ Mother defended herself hotly. To-day I know that justice was on her side. But in that first adolescent self-consciousness my sympathies were all with father. Mother had neglected us—she had not taught us to use table napkins! Becky Sharp used them. People in history used them. I felt sure that Great-Aunt Martha would have been horrified, even in heaven, to learn I had never even seen a table napkin.
Our parents' quarrel dimmed the ecstasy of the “personal belongings.” From that time we used napkins and a table-cloth on Sundays—that is, when any one remembered it was Sunday. ”

“ I remembered the old U. S. A. An American chef waiter might hope to be the father of a President. On the ranch I had cooked for men of less education and much worse manners than this domestic who brought my athletic husband's breakfast to his bedside and who happened to be the proud father of twins. ”

“ There were young girls around us who did not hesitate to comment on everybody there. One little New Jersey girl insisted rather audibly that Clemenceau looked like the old watchman on their block; and a boy, a young officer, complained that General Foch “had not won as many decorations as General Bliss and General Pershing.” Some youngsters asked high officers for souvenirs. Many French people perhaps did worse, but it hurt me to see even a few of our own splendid young people guilty of such crudities, because our American youth is so fine at heart. ”

“ When we were alone, I asked Tom how he could do it. I know now that a man cannot hold an official position like Tom's and ignore politically important people. But he only said rather carelessly, and with a laugh, that it was one of the prices a man pays for public office.
After that I noticed that my husband was known to nearly every one. He had a glad hand and a smile for the public—because it was the public. I watched to see if he had a slightly different smile for the people of Back Bay and his own particular social class ”

“ We were guided up wonderful stairs and led into a sumptuous room, where, with the other guests, we waited for the arrival of the queen and the royal family. No one does anything or says anything at a salon. A “drawing-room” is a sacred rite in England. ”

“ In the other ninety-two per cent the women do their own housework; bring up their own children, and take an active part in the life and growth of America. They are the people who help make this country the great nation that it is.”
After luncheon one of the guests, a woman of great social prominence, distinguished both in her own country and abroad, asked me to drive downtown with her. ”

“ Every one met on new ground, a ground where human beings had faced death together. It was sign of a new fellowship, too deep and fine for even a fish knife to sever. There was no consciousness of ancient class. ”