: The Husband's Story: A Novel by Phillips David Graham - Husband and wife Fiction; New York (N.Y.) Social life and customs 20th century Fiction

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The Husband's Story

A NOVEL

BY DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS

NEW YORK GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS

Printed in the United States of America

THE HUSBAND'S STORY

Several years ago circumstances thrust me into a position in which it became possible for the friend who figures in these pages as Godfrey Loring to do me a favor. He, being both wise and kindly, never misses a good chance to put another under obligations. He did me the favor. I gratefully, if reluctantly, acquiesced. Now, after many days, he collects. When you shall have read what follows, you may utterly reject my extenuating plea that any and every point of view upon life is worthy of attention, even though it serve only to confirm us in our previous ideas and beliefs. You may say that I should have repudiated my debt, should have refused to edit and publish the manuscript he confided to me. You may say that the general racial obligation to mankind--and to womankind--takes precedence over a private and personal obligation. Unfortunately I happen to be not of the philanthropic temperament. My sense of the personal is strong; my sense of the general weak--that is to say, weak in comparison. If "Loring" had been within reach, I think I should have gone to him and pleaded for release. But as luck will have it, he is off yachting, to peep about in the remote inlets and islets of Australasia and the South Seas for several years.

To aggravate my situation, in the letter accompanying the manuscript, after several pages of the discriminating praise most dear to a writer's heart, he did me the supreme honor of saying that in his work he had "striven to copy as closely as might be your style and your methods--to help me to the hearing I want and to lighten your labors as editor." I assure him and the public that in any event I should have done little editing of his curious production beyond such as a proofreader might have found necessary. As it is, I have done practically no editing at all. In form and in substance, from title to finis, the work is his. I am merely its sponsor--and in circumstances that would forbid me were I disposed to qualify my sponsorship with even so mild a disclaimer as reluctance.

Have I said more than a loyal friend should? If so, on the other hand, have I not done all that a loyal friend could?

I am tempted to begin with our arrival in Fifth Avenue, New York City, in the pomp and circumstance befitting that region of regal splendor. I should at once catch the attention of the women; and my literary friends tell me that to make any headway with a story in America it is necessary to catch the women, because the men either do not read books at all or read only what they hear the women talking about. And I know well--none knows better--that our women of the book-buying class, and probably of all classes, love to amuse their useless idleness with books that help them to dream of wasting large sums of money upon luxuries and extravagances, upon entertaining grand people in grand houses and being entertained by them. They tell me, and I believe it, that our women abhor stories of middle-class life, abhor truth-telling stories of any kind, like only what assures them that the promptings of their own vanities and sentimental shams are true.

But patience, gentle reader, you with the foolish, chimera-haunted brain, with the silly ideas of life, with the ignorance of human nature including your own self, with the love of sloppy and tawdry clap trap. Patience, gentle reader. While I shall begin humbly in the social scale, I shall not linger there long. I shall pass on to the surroundings of grandeur that entrance your snobbish soul. You will soon smell only fine perfumes, only the aromas of food cooked by expensive chefs. You will sit in drawing-rooms, lie in bedrooms as magnificent as the architects and decorators and other purveyors to the very rich have been able to concoct. You will be tasting the fine savors of fashionable names and titles recorded in Burke's and the "Almanach de Gotha." Patience, gentle reader, with your box of caramels and your hair in curl papers and your household work undone--patience! A feast awaits you.

There has been much in the papers these last few years about the splendid families we--my wife and I--came of. Some time ago one of the English dukes--a nice chap with nothing to do and a quaint sense of humor--assembled on his estate for a sort of holiday and picnic all the members of his ancient and proud family who could be got together by several months of diligent search. It was a strange and awful throng that covered the lawns before the ducal castle on the appointed day. There was a handful of fairly presentable, more or less prosperous persons. But the most of the duke's cousins, near and remote, were tramps, bartenders, jail birds, women of the town, field hands male and female, sewer cleaners, chimney sweeps, needlewomen, curates, small shopkeepers, and others of the species that are as a stench unto delicate, aristocratic nostrils. The duke was delighted with his picnic, pronounced it a huge success. But then His Grace had a sense of humor and was not an American aristocrat.

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