How To Write Special Feature Articles Part 8

Constructive criticism of existing conditions may be successfully embodied in the form of a confession article that describes the evils as they have been experienced by one individual. If the article is to be entirely effective and just, the experience of the one person described must be fairly typical of that of others in the same situation. In order to show that these experiences are characteristic, the writer may find it advantageous to introduce facts and figures tending to prove that his own case is not an isolated example. In the confession article mentioned above, "The Pressure on the Professor," the a.s.sistant professor who makes the confession, in order to demonstrate that his own case is typical, cites statistics collected by a colleague at Stanford University giving the financial status of 112 a.s.sistant professors in various American universities.

Confessions that show how faults and personal difficulties have been overcome prove helpful to readers laboring under similar troubles. Here again, what is related should be typical rather than exceptional.

EXAMPLES OF THE CONFESSION STORY. That an intimate account of the financial difficulties of a young couple as told by the wife, may not only make an interesting story but may serve as a warning to others, is shown in the confession story below. Signed "F.B.," and ill.u.s.trated with a pen and ink sketch of the couple at work over their accounts, it was printed in _Every Week_, a popular ill.u.s.trated periodical formerly published by the Crowell Publis.h.i.+ng Company, New York.

THE THINGS WE LEARNED TO DO WITHOUT

We were married within a month of our commencement, after three years of courts.h.i.+p at a big Middle West university. Looking back, it seems to me that rich, tumultuous college life of ours was wholly pagan. All about us was the free-handed atmosphere of "easy money,"

and in our "crowd" a tacit implication that a good time was one of the primary necessities of life. Such were our ideas when we married on a salary of one hundred dollars a month. We took letters of introduction to some of the "smart" people in a suburb near Chicago, and they proved so delightfully cordial that we settled down among them without stopping to consider the discrepancies between their ways and our income. We were put up at a small country club--a simple affair enough, comparatively speaking--that demanded six weeks' salary in initial dues and much more in actual subsequent expense. "Everybody" went out for Sat.u.r.day golf and stayed for dinner and dancing.

By fall there was in working operation a dinner club of the "younger married set," as our local column in the city papers called us; an afternoon bridge club; and a small theater club that went into town every fortnight for dinner and a show. Costly little amus.e.m.e.nts, but hardly more than were due charming young people of our opportunities and tastes. I think that was our att.i.tude, although we did not admit it. In September we rented a "smart" little apartment. We had planned to furnish it by means of several generous checks which were family contributions to our array of wedding gifts. What we did was to buy the furniture on the instalment plan, agreeing to pay twenty dollars a month till the bill was settled, and we put the furniture money into running expenses.

It was the beginning of a custom. They gave most generously, that older generation. Visiting us, Max's mother would slip a bill into my always empty purse when we went shopping; or mine would drop a gold piece into my top bureau drawer for me to find after she had gone. And there were always checks for birthdays.

Everything went into running expenses; yet, in spite of it, our expenses ran quite away. Max said I was "too valuable a woman to put into the kitchen," so we hired a maid, good-humoredly giving her _carte blanche_ on the grocery and meat market. Our bills, for all our dining out, were enormous. There were clothes, too. Max delighted in silk socks and tailored s.h.i.+rts, and he ordered his monogramed cigarettes by the thousand. My own taste ran to expensive little hats.

It is hardly necessary to recount the details. We had our first tremendous quarrel at the end of six months, when, in spite of our furniture money and our birthday checks, we found ourselves two hundred and fifty dollars in debt. But as we cooled we decided that there was nothing we could do without; we could only be "more careful."

Every month we reached that same conclusion. There was nothing we could do without. At the end of the year on a $1200 salary we were $700 behind; eight months later, after our first baby came, we were over a thousand--and by that time, it seemed, permanently estranged.

I actually was carrying out a threat of separation and stripping the apartment, one morning, when Max came back from town and sat down to discuss matters with me.

A curious labyrinthine discussion it was, winding from recriminations and flat admissions that our marriage was a failure and our love was dead, to the most poignant memories of our engagement days. But its central point was Max's detached insistence that we make marriage over into a purely utilitarian affair.

"Man needs the decencies of a home," he said over and over. "It doesn't do a fellow any good with a firm like mine to have them know he can't manage his affairs. And my firm is the kind of firm I want to work for. This next year is important; and if I spend it dragging through a nasty divorce business, knowing that everybody knows, I'll be about thirty per cent efficient. I'm willing to admit that marriage--even a frost like ours--is useful. Will you?"

I had to. My choice rested between going home, where there were two younger sisters, or leaving the baby somewhere and striking out for myself.

"It seems to me," said Max, taking out his pencil, "that if two reasonably clever people can put their best brain power and eight hours a day into a home, it might amount to something sometime. The thing resolves itself into a choice between the things we can do without and the things we can't. We'll list them. We can't do without three meals and a roof; but there must be something."

"You can certainly give up silk socks and cigarettes," I said; and, surprisingly, on this old sore point between us Max agreed.

"You can give up silk stockings, then," he said, and put them down.

Silk socks and silk stockings! Out of all possible economies, they were the only things that we could think of. Finally--

"We could make baby an excuse," I said, "and never get out to the club till very late--after dinner--and stay just for the dancing.

And we could get out of the dinner club and the theater bunch. Only, we ought to have some fun."

"You can go to matinees, and tell me about them, so we can talk intelligently. We'll say we can't leave the kid nights--"

"We can buy magazines and read up on plays. We'll talk well enough if we do that, and people won't know we haven't been. Put down: 'Magazines for plays.'"

He did it quite seriously. Do we seem very amusing to you? So anxious lest we should betray our economies--so impressed with our social "position" and what people might think! It is funny enough to me, looking back; but it was bitter business then.

I set myself to playing the devoted and absorbed young mother. But it was a long, long time before it became the sweetest of realities.

I cried the first time I refused a bridge game to "stay with baby"; and I carried a sore heart those long spring afternoons when I pushed his carriage conspicuously up and down the avenue while the other women motored past me out for tea at the club. Yet those long walks were the best thing that ever happened to me. I had time to think, for one thing; and I gained splendid health, losing the superfluous flesh I was beginning to carry, and the headaches that usually came after days of lunching and bridge and dining.

I fell into the habit, too, of going around by the market, merely to have an objective, and buying the day's supplies. The first month of that habit my bills showed a decrease of $16.47. I shall always remember that sum, because it is certainly the biggest I have ever seen. I began to ask the prices of things; and I made my first faint effort at applying our game of subst.i.tution to the food problem, a thing which to me is still one of the most fascinating factors in housekeeping.

One afternoon in late summer, I found a delightful little bungalow in process of building, on a side street not so _very_ far from the proper avenue. I investigated idly, and found that the rent was thirty dollars less than we were paying. Yet even then I hesitated.

It was Max who had the courage to decide.

"The only thing we are doing without is the address," he said, "And that isn't a loss that looks like $360 to me."

All that fall and winter we kept doggedly at our game of subst.i.tution. Max bought a ready-made Tuxedo, and I ripped out the label and sewed in one from a good tailor. I carried half a dozen dresses from the dyer's to a woman who evolved three very decent gowns; and then I toted them home in a box with a marking calculated to impress any chance acquaintance. We were so ashamed of our attempts at thrift that they came hard.

Often enough we quarreled after we had been caught in some sudden temptation that set us back a pretty penny, and we were inevitably bored and cross when we refused some gayety for economy's sake. We resolutely decided to read aloud the evenings the others went to the theater club; and as resolutely we subst.i.tuted a stiff game of chess for the bridge that we could not afford. But we had to learn to like them both.

Occasionally we entertained at very small, very informal dinners, "on account of the baby"; and definitely discarded the wines that added the "smartness" demanded at formal affairs. People came to those dinners in their second or third best: but they stayed late, and laughed hilariously to the last second of their stay.

In the spring we celebrated Max's second respectable rise in salary by dropping out of the country club. We could do without it by that time. At first we thought it necessary to subst.i.tute a determined tramp for the Sunday morning golf game; but we presently gave that up. We were becoming garden enthusiasts. And as a subst.i.tution for most of the pleasure cravings of life, gardening is to be highly recommended. Discontent has a curious little trick of flowing out of the earthy end of a hoe.

Later that summer I found that a maid was one of the things I could do without, making the discovery in an interregnum not of my original choosing. A charwoman came in for the heavier work, and I took over the cooking. Almost immediately, in spite of my inexperience, the bills dropped. I could not cook rich pastries and fancy desserts, and fell back on simple salads and fruit instead. I dipped into the household magazines, followed on into technical articles on efficiency, subst.i.tuted labor-savers wherever I could, and started my first muddled set of accounts.

At the beginning of the new year I tried my prentice hand on a budget; and that was the year that we emerged from debt and began to save.

That was six very short years ago. When, with three babies, the bungalow became a trifle small, we built a little country house and moved farther out. Several people whom we liked best among that first "exclusive younger set" have moved out too, and formed the nucleus of a neighborhood group that has wonderful times on incomes no one of which touches $4000 a year.

Ours is not as much as that yet; but it is enough to leave a wide and comfortable margin all around our wants. Max has given up his pipe for cigarettes (unmonogramed), and patronizes a good tailor for business reasons. But in everything else our subst.i.tutions stand: gardening for golf; picnics for roadhouse dinners; simple food, simple clothing, simple hospitality, books, a fire, and a game of chess on winter nights.

We don't even talk about economies any more. We like them.

But--every Christmas there comes to me via the Christmas tree a box of stockings, and for Max a box of socks--heavy silk. There never is any card in either box; but I think we'll probably get them till we die.

The following short confession, signed "Mrs. M.F.E.," was awarded the first prize by the _American Magazine_ in a contest for articles on "The Best Thing Experience Has Taught Me":

Forty Years Bartered for What?

A tiny bit of wisdom, but as vital as protoplasm. I know, for I bartered forty precious years of wifehood and motherhood to learn it.

During the years of my childhood and girlhood, our family pa.s.sed from wealth to poverty. My father and only brother were killed in battle during the Civil War; our slaves were freed; our plantations melted from my mother's white hands during the Reconstruction days; our big town house was sold for taxes.

When I married, my only dowry was a fierce pride and an overwhelming ambition to get back our material prosperity. My husband was making a "good living." He was kind, easy-going, with a rare capacity for enjoying life and he loved his wife with that chivalrous, unquestioning, "the queen-can-do-no-wrong" type of love.

But even in our days of courting I answered his ardent love-making with, "And we will work and save and buy back the big house; then we will--" etc., etc.

And he? Ah, alone at sixty, I can still hear echoing down the years his big tender laugh, as he'd say, "Oh, what a de-ah, ambitious little sweetheart I have!"

He owned a home, a little cottage with a rose garden at one side of it--surely, with love, enough for any bride. But I--I saw only the ancestral mansion up the street, the big old house that had pa.s.sed out of the hands of our family.

I would have no honeymoon trip; I wanted the money instead. John kissed each of my palms before he put the money into them. My fingers closed greedily over the bills; it was the nest egg, the beginning.

Next I had him dismiss his bookkeeper and give me the place. I didn't go to his store--Southern ladies didn't do that in those days--but I kept the books at home, and I wrote all the business letters. So it happened when John came home at night, tired from his day's work at the store, I had no time for diversions, for love-making, no hours to walk in the rose garden by his side--no, we must talk business.

I can see John now on many a hot night--and summer _is_ hot in the Gulf States--dripping with perspiration as he dictated his letters to me, while I, my aching head near the big hot lamp, wrote on and on with hurried, nervous fingers. Outside there would be the evening breeze from the Gulf, the moonlight, the breath of the roses, all the romance of the southern night--but not for us!

The children came--four, in quick succession. But so fixed were my eyes on the goal of Success, I scarcely realized the mystery of motherhood. Oh, I loved them! I loved John, too. I would willingly have laid down my life for him or for any one of the children. And I intended _sometime_ to stop and enjoy John and the children. Oh, yes, I was going really to _live_ after we had bought back the big house, and had done so and so! In the meanwhile, I held my breath and worked.

"I'll be so glad," I remember saying one day to a friend, "when all my children are old enough to be off at school all day!" Think of that! Glad when the best years of our lives together were pa.s.sed!

The day came when the last little fellow trudged off to school and I no longer had a baby to hamper me. We were living now in the big old home. We had bought it back and paid for it. I no longer did John's bookkeeping for him--he paid a man a hundred dollars a month to do that--but I still kept my hand on the business.