LIGHT INTERVIEWS WITH SHADESIBLUEBEARD TELLS WHY HE KILLED WIVES
I drew this assignment to interview the shade of Bluebeard because our girl reporter backed out at the last minute,—said she had no objection to a nice, ladylike assignment such as getting Pharaoh’s daughter to talk about Annette Kellerman or having a chat with Joan of Ark, or whatever Mrs. Noah’s name was, but she balked at calling on a wife murderer who had never been introduced.
If I had not been warned in advance I should have thought this was surely an impostor—a barefaced one, too, for he wore no beard—to whose room I was ushered by a bellboy of the Olympus Hotel.
“Surprised at my appearance, eh?” he chuckled. “Everybody is. Expect to see a ferocious-looking monster with a long blue beard and a bowie knife sticking out of his belt. It’s about time the folks down below got thereal facts, not only of my appearance but of my character. That’s why I’ve consented for the first time to talk for publication. I want to be set right in the eyes of those mistaken mortals. You are a young man and unmarried, I presume, from your happy, carefree countenance. Well, then, here is a thing I hope you’ll learn by heart: where singleness is bliss ’tis folly to have wives. I’ve tried it and I know. I, too, was once a happy, cheerful, careless bachelor, like Adam, you know. And like Adam I didn’t get my eyes opened until after marriage. By the way, speaking of Adam, did you ever pause to think that not until marriage came into the world did man have to dig for a living? Yet I digress. What I started out to say was that marriage is an excellent institution, but like all good things, it can be overdone. My mistake was in being too idealistic. I had resolved to find the ideal, the perfect wife, the kind you read about in poetry (a perfect woman, nobly planned, to warn, to comfort and command). Well, my first wife laid too much emphasis on the ‘command.’ She took it literally. I found I had made a mistake and decided to bury it. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Clementina was her name. She was not of a trustful nature. Invariably her first greeting on my returning home late at night took thesharply interrogatory form: ‘Where have you been?’ Frequently I would have been glad to tell her, only I could not remember. It has been said that ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder,’ but it did not seem to work out that way worth a cent at three o’clock in the morning. We had words, she seeking to obtain what she termed the ‘last’ one. But still there were always more to follow.
“I came in time to feel that I did not possess that treasure of treasures, a wife’s perfect confidence in her husband. One night, I remember, I started to get into bed with my overcoat on. It was merely a bit of harmless absent-mindedness. But Clementina continued to refer to the trifling incident daily, and nightly, for weeks afterwards. She even communicated the circumstance to friends and relatives, including her maternal parent, who naturally had no interest in the subject. When we were invited out to dinner she employed the incident as a conversational topic. I begged her to desist. She refused. I realized that it was high time to ‘try again.’ I need not go into details. But Clementina ceased to trouble and the weary was at rest. The coroner was a personal friend of mine. I had voted for him in three different precincts, and he kindly brought in a verdict of ‘justifiable uxoricide,’ or somethingof that sort, and everything was nice and comfortable.
“That was Clementina. Now let me see—let me see—who came next? Susannah? No, she was Number Three, I’m pretty sure. My memory isn’t what it used to be, but if I only had my old card index here I could tell you in two seconds. Sapphira? No, she came later. Oh, now I’ve got it: Maria. Yes, I had to get rid of Maria within a year. Nice, amiable girl she was, too, in most respects. Always had the meals on time, never hauled me out at night to call on the new neighbors, would rather darn socks for her husband than crochet a new sweater for herself, and had an impediment in her speech. I’d often heard there were such women, with impediments in their speech, but had never met one before. I thought it was a recommendation, but I was mistaken. It only made her take that much longer to say what she was going to say, anyway. When Maria and the impediment clashed it was always Maria that finally won out. But it took time. Verbally Maria required a long time to pass a given point, but she kept on until she passed it. Maria had one great fault. You’re not married, young man, and you may not grasp this defect in all its hideousness.But this was it: she always talked to me when I was trying to shave.
“At that time I wore a beard, but no side-whiskers, and I shaved every morning before breakfast. It was Maria’s invariable habit to stand at the bathroom door and engage in conversation—or rather monologue interspersed with questions. In consequence I got to spending more money for court-plaster than for shaving soap. A man stopped me on the street one day, gave a second look at my liberally-scarred countenance, and hailed me as a fellow graduate of Heidelberg. Finally, I decided that this business had gone on long enough. I gave Maria fair warning. The very next morning she stuck her head in at the door, just as I was trying to steer around a pimple below my right ear, and told me not to forget to bring home those lamb chops for dinner. I cut a gash an inch long and dropped the razor on the floor. That was Maria’s farewell appearance. There was no demand for an encore. The coroner kindly found that the impediment in her speech had stuck in her throat and she had choked to death. He was a good scout.
“And now we come to Susannah, Number Three, Series N. G. Susannah started out splendidly. She came highly recommended. Ithought she was going to be one of the best wives I ever had. But, like all the others, she soon disclosed a fatal failing. I call it ‘fatal’ because it always turned out that way for all my wives. It may seem a trifle to you, young man, but that’s because you’ve never been married. The trouble was this, and it soon got on my sensitive nerves: the only time I could get Susannah’s absorbed, undivided attention was when I talked in my sleep. Then, I have reason to believe, she would sit up and listen by the hour. But at other times she might as well have been totally deaf, so far as paying attention to what I was trying to say was concerned. She always seemed to be thinking of something—I hope it wasn’t somebody—else. I’d start telling her about a business deal I’d just put through with some fellows up at Bagdad, or begin discussing the chances of the Damascus ball team for winning the pennant next year, and before I’d talked ten minutes I’d see as plain as day that she wasn’t hearing a word I said.
“She’d contracted the crocheting habit, too—I don’t know where she picked it up—and she’d work away, whispering to herself and nodding at me every now and then, until I thought I’d go wild. One night while I was right in the midst of telling her a funny storyI’d heard at the Khayyam Country Club, she actually interrupted me to remark that she’d just found a new way of purling 14 by casting off 11 and dropping 34, or something of the sort, and I just up and—and— Well, there’s no need to harrow your feelings. Suffice it to say that I added one more to the Association of Former Mothers-in-Law of Bluebeard. Whenever one of my wives departed this life rather suddenly the ex-mothers-in-law always held a sort of indignation meeting. Sometimes they passed resolutions, too. But it didn’t seem to do any good. Just advertised the fact that I was a widower again. Didn’t seem to prejudice the girls against me. In fact, one leap-year I had to get a lot of rejection slips printed, like the magazine editors use, for replying to proposals. I read somewhere once that it always made a fellow popular to get a reputation as a lady-killer, and I seem to have proved it.
“And so it went. All the undertakers in town were trying to stand in with me. But I thought they went a little too far when they adopted a set of appreciative resolutions and invited me to address their annual convention. Some folks have no sense of propriety. The preachers showed more tact. It’s true that one offered to do all my marrying on the basisof a yearly contract, but that was a strictly private, business arrangement, the same as I had with the firm of caterers and liverymen which supplied both cakes and camels. I could go on all night telling you about my other wives and the causes of their sudden shufflings-off—Sapphira, who objected to my smoking in the front parlor; Anastasia, who believed the adjective ‘annual,’ as applied to house-cleanings, meant every week; Boadicea, who was strong for women’s rights, but refused to go downstairs first to tackle the burglar; Sheba, who took me along when she went shopping and parked me for two hours outside a department store; Delilah the Second, who wanted to cut my hair so as to save enough money to get herself a new winter hat, as if my overhead charges weren’t high enough already. These are just a few samples from my souvenir collection of matrimonial misfits that I happen to recall offhand. The proverb says, ‘A word to the wives is sufficient,’ but I never found it so. Not by a long shot. I found action more effective than words. They say bigamy means one wife too many; but so does monogamy sometimes. If my experience helps other married men I shall be glad to have given this interview. I like to talk, because nowadays I feel I can do so withoutinterrupting some wife or other. Just one word more, and then good night:
“There is no marrying in heaven. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”