Everybody Should Remember To Forget

( Originally Published 1908 )

Jealousy a Disease

IN the railroad station platform at Ashtabula the other day, a Division Superintendent in the employ of the " Lake Shore, " asked me, "Do you know the cause of most railway accidents ?" " What causes most accidents ? Why, the disobedience of orders, " I answered.

"No, it is domestic infelicity. You say, `disobedience of orders,' and this is partially right, but the cause lies deeper. Why should a railway employee disobey orders ? Why should an engineer run past the station when he is ordered to stop ? It is his own life he endangers most.

Why should a train-despatcher send out two trains facing each other at the same time on one track ? Or why does a switch-tender throw a switch right in front of a fast express ?

"People call these things accidents, but that is not the word—they are the result of mental conditions. And it is for the General Manager to be on the lookout for these conditions and every good railroad manager now is. Do you remember when two passenger-trains met head on, out in Indiana, last year ? The engineer of one of these trains had in his pocket an order to take the side-track at a certain station. He ran by that station at fifty miles an hour, and in five minutes there was a crash that snuffed out fifty-four lives and two hundred thousand dollars worth of property.

"I knew the engineer. Let us call him Hank Bristol, for that was n't his name. He was married to a smashing, dashing, beautiful creature, and they boarded at a hotel—had no children. I boarded there, too, and we all made eyes at Hank's dashing wife. She used to play the piano and sing a little, and recite.

The love of one plain, honest man was not enough for her—she craved the admiration of the clever. She was n't a bad woman, just an idle one who spent every spare cent Hank made on finery, and who of course, wanted the finery and herself to be admired. Hank was proud of her, too. One evening he kissed the dear woman good-bye and started out to make a night run.

He went out to the roundhouse and at the last moment the Old Man decided to save Hank back and let him take out a special carrying the President and Directors of the road in the morning. Hank was tickled—it was a great compliment to him. He went home to tell his wife; he used to tell her everything.

"But when he got home, she wasn't there—she had gone to the theatre with a boot and shoe drummer from Chicago.

" Hank went away and walked the streets till morning—his wife never knew, and I believe she doesn't yet. He walked the streets all night and ran out the special in the morning.

"But after that he was never the same. He used to confide in me—he just had to tell some one to keep his heart from bursting with suppressed grief.

"He grew absent-minded, lost flesh, appetite was gone, was nervous—the doctor said he should quit coffee and cut out half the tobacco.

" I knew what was the matter—he was jealous.

I told him so—and he laughed a laugh that gave me goose-flesh. `I jealous ? Why, Bill, you don't know me—I jealous ? The idea!' No, I'm only mad at myself, Bill, because I'm married to a damn fool of a woman, who makes my heart eat itself out with grief because she lives on the fringe of folly. Why don't I leave her! My God!

Bill, that is the trouble—I can't—I love her!'

"Hank did n't work on our road or I'd never have let him touch a throttle, no, not even if he'd been my brother. I knew it would come.

He was found under his engine, the order that he had disobeyed in his pocket, and a picture in his watch of the woman that had caused the disaster. No, it probably has never dawned on this woman that she caused the wreck. She wore deep mourning and the cutest little black bonnet with a white ruche. She was the most fetching widow you ever saw and she knew it without being told.

"Yes, that is what I said—marital infelicity is responsible for the railroad wrecks, and causes most of the others, too.

"The only safe man is the one whose heart is at rest—who has a home, and a wife who stays there and minds her business, looks after the babies, has no secrets, and does not make eyes at other men—that 's the kind! I know every man who works for me, and I know a disturbed, distressed and jealous man a train length away.

My heart bleeds for 'em, but I serve the public, and none such can run an engine for me.

"Do you see that man in the blue overalls down there at the end of the platform ? Well, he is the engineer who will take out this train. See how calm, satisfied and self-possessed he is; he has no cares, no anxieties beyond the desire to do his work well. He is not so awfully brilliant, but he will never disappoint you. Now, when we start, about two miles out, you will hear the engine give three soft toots, and over to the left, a little woman will come out of a white cottage and wave her apron."

The conductor then called, "All aboard!" The bell clanged warningly—we stepped into the coach, and the train started. We had now reached the outskirts of the town, and were skimming along at the rate of thirty miles an hour.

The engine gave three soft, short toots, and I saw the white cottage, a woman standing on the back porch, with children holding on her skirts all 'round—she was waving a big check apron!

" What did I tell you ?" asked the Superintendent—" rest reigns in that man's heart—he will never forget an order—his mind is free, so he does leis work! He is at peace with himself, and at peace with the world."

I am going to write a little here on the subject of jealousy. There is only one kind of jealousy, and that is Sex Jealousy. People often use the word when the thing they refer to is covetousness. We may covet a man's talent, or his possessions, or we may dislike a person—conceiving against him a prejudice and thus belittle him; but jealousy is another matter. Jealousy is not the exclusive possession of the highly organized, nor the extremely sensitive, nor the irritable, nor the weak. The fact is, the strongest natures are more given to jealousy than the weaker ones, and the most patient man may manifest the disease in its most virulent form.

Shakespeare, who knew the human heart as no other writer ever has, gives us a picture of jealousy. The play of Othello is simply a portrayal of this passion. And the man Othello is surely not a man afflicted with "nerves "—he is a great, serene, and self-sufficient personality. He is healthy, honest, trustful, truthful, and filled with a childlike confidence.

But Othello is a man—a strong, well-sexed man. Beware how you arouse such a one!

Othello's intellect was no match for the cold, calculating brain of Iago, and he was played upon by this plotting, soulless knave until his love for Desdemona was curdled into hate, and he killed that which, in all the world, he loved best. Only the strongly sexed are ever jealous.

Weak natures are indifferent—they transfer affection easily—there is n't much to bestow the change is easily effected, and the past forgotten. But the strong give themselves, and the bonds they make are fastened to their souls with hoops of steel. Love, to such, is no light matter.

Jealousy seems the absolute reversal of love.

It is the swinging from the sunny warmth of the equator to the frigid cold of the north pole.

I once saw a woman in a ballroom, calmly seated and chatting pleasantly, her face aglow with good-will and the genial warmth of life. A waltz was being played, and the couples glided past us in mazy, dreamy rhythm.

"How beautiful it all is," she said to me.

And as she said the words, two dancers swung by in close embrace, evidently conversing, their faces near together.

The woman talking to me started to rise, but sank back. The color faded away from her lips, her eyes changed their hue, the eyeballs seemed glazed, her breath came in hot, feverish gasps.

I spoke to her, and she started, absent-mindedly, but did not hear what I said. Over her fine face came a look of abject woe. An awful pain was clutching at her heart; and she tried to hide her anguish with a smile, but the smile was only a grimace, a sorrowful substitute, and it seemed to freeze upon her face, Medusa-like.

" Call my carriage—I am ill, " she said huskily.

Later, I learned that the woman had reached her home, gone to her room, locked the door, thrown herself upon the bed, and at seven o'clock the next morning had been found there, fully robed in all her ballroom finery, moaning and groaning, half delirious. She was undressed and put to bed by her maids, and a physician summoned.

"A kind of typhoid fever, caused by drinking impure water," said the doctor, and cited several other similar cases that had occurred in the neighborhood. It was fully six weeks before the woman was able to be out of her house again.

The jealous spasm that had come over the lady was caused by the sight of her husband dancing with a certain woman. He might dance with any other woman—but not that woman—he had promised he would not !

The sight stifled every generous emotion of her soul, and if she had had the power, she would have blasted the man and woman dead at her feet. Did she have any real " cause " for jealousy ? I do not know—probably not. Othello had no cause for jealousy. Reasons light as air are, to the jealous, confirmation strong as Holy Writ. But the husband who caused his wife this awful pain might have been simply stupid and innocent; he might have been malicious and purposeful in his act; or he might have been guilty and indifferent. I do not know. All that I relate is the phenomena.

Some months ago, in Cincinnati, a colored sleeping-car porter was arrested for attempting to kill his wife. He was slashing her with a razor, and doubtless would have killed her had not help arrived at the minute. She was taken to the hospital, he to jail. The doctors said the woman could not live, and after binding up her wounds and making her as comfortable as possible, a notary was summoned to take the woman's ante-mortem testimony. And this was her statement : " My husband was jealous of me, and tried to kill me; but it was my fault—I purposely made him jealous by pretending I loved another man. When I told him this, he became crazy—it was all my fault—bring him here, so I may know before I die that he has forgiven me."

The doctor in charge went to the police judge the next day and gave it as his opinion that if the prisoner was released and went to the hospital to help nurse the woman, she would recover; but if the man was punished and separated from the woman, she would certainly languish and die.

The judge decided to do an unjudicial thing, and released the prisoner on his own recognizance.

The man went to the hospital, remained there as a helper to the nurses, and inside of a month he and the woman went away with the blessings and the good will of everybody in the place, happy—happier than ever before.

So much for a case where people of very lowly intellect are involved. They lived on the same plane and were mated. Let us now have an instance where one of the intellectual giants of the earth was concerned, and the woman one who was utterly out of his class.

When thirty-two years of age, Goethe had a misunderstanding with Charlotte von Stein, to whom he had written a daily love-letter for eleven years. He now very coldly made a bargain with the father of Christine Vulpius, that the girl should come and keep house for him.

The girl, it seems, was not consulted. She was just twenty, and pink—an obliging, good-natured, strong, buxom country lass.

She took charge of Goethe's household, did what she was ordered to do, and was never in evidence unless he invited. The guests and callers never saw her.

After some months, when Goethe met Charlotte von Stein at a reception, and she coldly asked—" Ah, and how is the health of Miss Vulpius ?" she probed the proud Goethe to the quick.

Goethe grew to be very fond of Christine—she was so obedient, so faithful, so loyal! She never thwarted her master, taunted him, nor annoyed him—she just served him. To be sure, she took no interest in his writings, and this was better than if she had been a little higher in the scale, and sought to rival him in literature.

But the day came when her father thought it would be better for her to have a husband than to be the mistress of a poet, and he brought a worthy yeoman of her own class to see her. The swain came to see Christine, and Goethe, the proud and dignified, who had never felt the pangs of jealousy, was stung and wrung and wounded to his heart's core. His appetite vanished his nights were sleepless. The swain came back a second time, and Wolfgang Goethe threw him bodily into the street, causing him such a panic that he ran for his life, and never again returned.

After living with "Miss Vulpius" for twenty years, Goethe married her, "in order that their children might be legitimate." A man's acts are usually right, but his reasons seldom are.

Goethe married this woman because he loved her, and he wished to prove it to her beyond the ghost of a doubt. To be sure, they lived in a different intellectual world, but there was another world in which they met as equals Call their relationship base if you will—that question is not up for discussion at this time.

Goethe was at times jealous of this woman-she had grown to be a part of his life—she ministered to his well-being, and to secure her more fully to himself, he proclaimed to all the world that he had made her his legal wife.

I once heard Dr. James Bryce Howard, lecturer on Pathology at Bellevue, make a statement to the effect that cancer was caused by jealousy. His argument was something like this :

Jealousy at once affects the circulation, and the emotion strikes at the organs of reproduction.

In moments of good will, when the mind is calm, the circulation is complete, strong, natural; the secretions are active, the pores open, the glands do their perfect work. Let a spasm of hate and fear sweep over the person, and the heart thumps in wild alarm, and then dies down until you can scarcely detect its throb.

The skin grows cold, the pores close, the secretions cease as though a sirocco of death had swept over the body. There is congestion in the parts, then fever, and Nature is working hard to restore an equilibrium. That is just the way cancer grows—there is a stoppage in the circulation, and Nature tries to clear it away by sending more blood to the part. This increased nutrition causes a growth to form, and Nature, who works always according to general laws, not caring for the individual, kills the patient in an effort to cure him.

More women suffer from cancer than men, and three-fourths of all cases of cancer with women are in the mammal glands, or are connected directly with the sex organs. And in summing up the case the Doctor says : " Cancer is caused by misdirected or abnormal sex emotion. If we could bring about perfect love relations we could do away with cancer as well as most other diseases. "

There is no form of woe that will cause a suffering so terrible as jealousy. It grows by what it feeds upon—a suspicion! Ah! it clutches for it, even though it knows it is poison. It lies in wait, it watches, it listens; and finding the proof it wants, suffers more than ever. It suffers if it finds proof, and suffers if it doesn't.

For bodily pain, Nature is pitiful, and quickly sends insensibility. But for the woes of the heart there is only lingering torture—nights of tossing unrest, and days of lagging, leaden misery.

In bereavement by death there soon comes calm and sweet peace, in thought of the virtues of the loved one gone. We consider and dwell upon the good that was in the dead, but in jealousy we think only of the worst in the living. It is a blasting, withering hate towards that which we love best. It corrodes the heart and makes the man hate himself. It forms a trinity of hate—hate for the woman he loves, hate for the suspected person, hate for himself.

That is why it stings so—the jealous person cannot justify himself. And so those who are most jealous always affirm they are not so at all, and scout the idea in hysterical emphasis.

So far, the passion of jealousy has never been analyzed. Many men have written upon it, and all they attempt to do is to describe its manifestations. The cause of jealousy is never equal to the tragedy that tears and rends the soul, and so no cause is ever sufficient. To analyze it perfectly, we must perfectly comprehend the human heart, and this we can never do. Human nature, at last, remains the great riddle of God—contradiction and paradox confront us at every turn.

And should we possibly come to know one soul, this gives no index to others, for in nature there are no duplicates. Who can explain why a woman with a great and tender love for a man will at times tantalize him into a frenzy ? Who can tell why the simple-hearted Moor, Othello, who loved the gentle Desdemona, should conceive such a hatred for her, prompted by a flimsy and groundless suspicion, that he takes her life ? Where these insurrections of the heart are born that wreck and rend the souls of men, is to us unguessed—we simply do not know.

Jealousy seems a sort of rudimentary savage instinct that has come down to us from a time when its manifestation was a violence that knew no restraint, but with tooth and claw struck its object dead, so only the strongest survived. But now we partially hold the savage hate in check, and jealousy, instead of hurting the other person, hurts worst the one who is jealous. We hug the hate and let it gnaw at our vitals, and poison all the well-springs of our life with its venom.

The cure is not easy, and only a person of heroic moral fiber can face the truth and bring philosophy to bear, to heal and cure. At first thought, indifference is the panacea—cease to love at all—be a stoic—but this is to sink below jealousy, and not to rise above it.

To say that jealous people ought to separate, is trite; and it is true that people having totally different temperaments should not force their personal presence on each other to tantalize and taunt and make this earth a hell.

If that engineer could have separated from his wife, she gone her way and he his, he would in time have become indifferent to her, and she might have found a man she could love better.

If she had lived two hundred miles away, he would not have cared who called upon her, or when she went to the theatre. But to see her daily—to live with her and yet know that she was living a life outside of his, stung him to the quick.

Had Christine Vulpius gone away and married a worthy peasant, Goethe would have wished her well, and sent presents to the children; but when she lived in his house, and was a part of his life, and was being courted by another man, Goethe grew furious and paced his room in pain and wrath. Separation is better than lingering death. But jealousy may possibly come to those couples who really need each other. In it always is the element of dissatisfaction with self, and no pain and disappointment equals this—when we are disappointed with ourselves.

Yet very seldom are we quite honest and frank with ourselves; instead of laying the blame at home, we bestow it on another.

But let us be honest—the man who is jealous is himself to blame for the most part.

But even this knowledge does not mitigate the woe. This engineer thought that if he had only been a little more clever he might have filled the heart of his wife so she would not have cared for the admiration of other men. So his trouble was partially a dissatisfaction with himself, and if at last she really was a hypocrite and a fool, why, he was a fool, too, for having married her.

Goethe was far above Christine Vulpius in intellect, but he felt that he had failed to make her happy, else surely she would not have accepted another lover.

But concerning these tragedies of the heart, the wise man does not dogmatize. His heart throbs for all those who suffer. And in his own life he would not escape the pangs of disprized love by loving less; rather does he love more. He seeks to send his love to all, and make it universal.

That he concentrates his affection on certain ones more than others, may be true, but he fixes his thought upon the good that is in them, and waives all else.

Folly, dissipation, absurdity, extravagance, are all about us; but these things do not rend our souls, cause us sleepless nights, and turn the genial current of our lives awry , Let us remember that we cannot afford to admit hate into our hearts—we are the ones who suffer—the wrong is not ours, and so we will not take it in.

Each soul is a center in itself, and the mistakes of others—the follies of wife or child, husband or parent, are none of ours. We are individuals—we came into the world alone, we live alone, and we die alone; and we must be so girded round by right that no fault of another can touch us. God is on our side—nothing can harm us but ourselves. Let us make sure that we are right, and then the follies of others will pass us by unscathed. And above all, remember, it is not for us to punish. " Vengeance is mine :

I will repay, saith the Lord."