A Man's First Wife

( Originally Published 1892 )

"Will you love me always, as long as I live?" questions the fond young wife.

"Always," answers the adoring husband: alive or dead, you will be the one woman of my existence to me. I could never love another. If you should die life would be a desert to me - a lonely island, where I should wait and watch for the ship of death to come to my rescue and bear me away to you."

He means what he says, and when she dies the gloom on his face is as deep as the band of crepe on his hat is wide. Yet as months go by the band narrows and the gloom lightens. Where at first he only noticed other women to compare them unfavorably with his dead darling, and to wonder bitterly why they were spared and she taken, he begins now to notice them individually, and to comment upon their charms, and before the crepe band has wholly disappeared from his hat the gloom has lifted enough from his heart to let in the sunlight of another woman's smile.

He struggles against the temptation which assails him, he tells himself that his heart is buried in the grave of his dead wife, but his heart insists on quickening at the sight of this new woman's face, and at the sound of her voice. The dead face is hidden under six feet of earth. The living face smiles near. One cannot sit by tombs forever in the pride of one's manhood. His darling was too unselfish to desire him to mourn his life away in loneliness. She would tell him to be happy could she speak. He can never forget her, he can never love as he loved her, but he needs a companion to look after his comfort, and to keep him from utter desolation, and to be a mother to his children perhaps.

So he reasons and marries. The new wife is tactful and affectionate. She knows more of the world than his first wife did, maybe, and she "manages him" with a skill that astonishes him. What began as a "good comradeship" and a marriage of convenience develops into a love match.

Those who knew the first wife and thought it an ideal marriage look on this second union with shocked surprise at first, afterwards with resignation; but they say to themselves and to those who knew him in the days of the early marriage, "He can never forget his first wife. It was a perfect love match. He married again merely for convenience. It is all right, of course. She makes him a good wife, they say, but he must have many sad hours when he thinks of that first wife."

Alas for sentiment, that is so seldom true. The fact is, he rarely thinks of the first wife at all, and when he does he thinks of her in the same way he thinks of some incident in his childhood; she is a vague, sweet memory, no more. The dead are so very dead; the living are so much alive.

At the very first, after he has married the second wife, he received a shock now and then when he Icoked at the portrait of his first wife, or came across some souvenir of their love life; but even those things ceased to affect him after a little. The finer sensibilities become easily dulled by custom, especially when the passions are satisfied and the heart and stomach filled.

I recollect being in the house of a widower once who had to be restrained by force from going to the grave of his wife at midnight in a pouring rain. His devotion to her in life had been sincere and unfailing, yet scarcely a year later he brought, home another wife whose love and companionship caused him to forget the second anniversary of the other's death. Her portrait hung always in his room, yet I have seen his eyes rest upon it without seeing it, while he expatiated upon the wit and charm of his living companion.

A bit sad, perhaps, this seems to the sentimental and romantic, but a sadder picture is the man who makes the living wife miserable by extolling the dead one on every occasion.

I sometimes think it is mainly the people who make a very hard thing out of life, and who are very unadaptable to circumstances who remain constant to first loves or dead companions.

The man who takes life easily, and who adapts himself to the people with whom he may be forced to associate, is by far the more agreeable man of the two, and he makes the better citizen because he identifies himself with his surroundings.

But he seldom remains a widower long, and though he may be full of sentiment, he bestows it upon the living, and not upon the dead.

As a rule I have observed that the man who is an ardent lover to his first wife, if she dies becomes an ardent lover to his second; and the man who made a slave of his first wife becomes a slave to his second. From this statement we might conclude that second wives have the best of it anyhow, and yet I never saw the maiden who did not declare that on no conditions would she become a second wife. It is generally considered an undesirable and unhappy lot, despite the many instances where it proves happy and desirable.

It seems prosaic to the romantic mind, albeit it often contains more love and romance than the first.

The dreaming maiden never figures as a second wife in her love visions, however she may figure in real life later on; yet a first marriage often fits a man to be a far tenderer husband and more devoted lover. He remembers his first wife only sufficiently to recall his errors and mistakes, and to avoid them in his treatment to his second. Most girls, however, would prefer taking the risk of his mistakes, to deriving the benefit of his experience.

However numerous may have been a man's amours, a woman likes to think that she has brought a new experience into his life in the honeymoon. A man's first lawful possession of a pure and loving woman for his very own would seem to mark a never to be forgotten era in his life, no matter what unhappiness may have followed; yet the human heart is a strange machine. A sweet and noble woman, whose nature was profound and full of feeling, once shocked me with a confession.

"I was but 22 when my first husband died," she said. "I worshiped him, and we had been ideally happy. All the world seemed a tomb after he died. I did not believe life held any joy for me. My only happiness for years was found in passing whole days beside his tomb. Yet I married again before I was 3o a man who had awakened, it seemed to me, a deeper passion in my heart than the early love. And now year after year goes by in which I forget to notice the anniversary of my first marriage or of my husband's death, so absorbed am I in this man."

As an opposite to this case I knew a stubborn and selfish woman who was persistent and constant it her violent grief at the loss of her young husband. Years passed with no abatement of her angry resentment at fate; and yet, finally she entered into litigation with the aged parents of her husband about the property.

The same dogged characteristics marked each event of her life.

Stubborness is often a strong element in constancy to sorrow.

Yet I would not wish to be understood that only stubborn and selfish natures remain faithful to dead loves. I think only selfish natures impose an outward expression of their grief on all those who come near them, but I have in mind a man who is the soul of unselfishness and goodness of heart, who has remained true to the memory of a dead wife for more than twenty years. He is a very cheerful man, casting sunshine about him where-ever he goes, but "she is always with me," he says.

Never a day passes that I do not live over the four happy years of our brief wedded life. I feel her presence always about me, and I am not unhappy; but I could not marry another woman, for I should feel that I had two wives, she is such a living presence to me always."

This is love in its most rarefied and spiritual type, which we seldom find in the hearts of men. This man is really living in the spirit now, and the casting aside of his body by death will be no more than the crossing of a bridge, from one shore to another. Very few men love their wives with this sort of love; when they do there is no second marriage possible.

Should any force of circumstances render a second marriage advisable with this man, however, and he once decided to take the step, I am not prepared to say that he would retain the memory of the first wife to any marked degree. There is something remarkably absorbing and obliterating in marriage. The living woman who shares a man's name and home is more engrossing than the dead angel, even if she is, only a wife of convenience and not of love.

Even if she irritates and annoys him she keeps his thoughts from straying far away from her.

Women's hearts feed on past memories, but men's seldom do more than nibble at such intangible food. A man thinks of what he sees, a woman of what she remembers. He is no more fickle or unfeeling than woman, but he is more of a philosopher, and he does not make himself miserable over the irre vocable.