In the Best of Humour

Otago Witness, Issue 4042, 1 September 1931, Page 5

In the Best of Humour

(Copyright.—For the Otago Witness.)

THE STARTLING DISCLOSURES OF A WRONGED WOMAN.

By

STEPHEN LEACOCK.

[Author’s Suggested Note by the Editor: The following startling disclosures are, in our opinion, the most powerful piece of selfrevelation that we have seen revealed this season. The writer lays her soul bare and jumps on It. She takes her readers into the most intimate recesses of a woman’s life, and if we know anything about readers, this hits them where they live. The writer does not spare herself.] CHAPTER I. MY (FIRST) CHILDHOOD. I want to begin these disclosures by speaking of my childhood. First let me talk, of my parents. There were two of them; my father and mv mother. And I am now going to tell here something about my father which up till now I have never even whispered to a soul, namely, that he was born in Peterboro, Ontario. My father seldom spoke of having been born in Peterboro. But I know he

brooded over it. I remember once when I was quite a little girl he drew me to him and patting my head quietly he murmured,. “ I was born in Peterboro.” After that he sat silent, looking into the fire for a long time. Then he put on his hat and went out. And a little afterwards he came in again. A FAMILY SECBET. While I am speaking of my father,I may as well set down something else about him that I only came to know gradually and that I did not fully understand at fifst, and that is that he was five feet nine inches and seveneighths high. I recall as if it were yesterday my mother measuring him against the wall, and saying as she looked at the measuring tape, “ Five feet nine inches and seven-eighths.” I was too young to know what seveneighths meant at the time; later on I came to know. But to the best of my belief neither my father nor my mother ever mentioned to anybody that he was five feet nine inches and seven-eighths high. They were proud people and kept things to themselves. THE PATERNAL VICE. Now that I am speaking of my father and wish to leave nothing concealed, I may as well state the fact openly that he was a vegetarian. I have decided, in putting down this life story, to leave nothing unsaid —that I can think of to say—and so I will simply chronicle the fact that my father was a vegetarian, and let the reader judge for himself.

But this I only came to know slowly as I passed gradually out of my childhood, a thing it look me a long time to do. As a little child I thought he was an Episcopalian, or at times I fancied him a Wesleyan Methodist. Later I came to know the truth. He was a vegetarian. Only once or twice, however, did I ever hear him refer to the fact. I remember once he took me on his knee and said, “ I have been a vegetarian all my life”; then he kissed me and put me down and walked out of the house. He did not come back again for a long time; not till meal time. I grew to know that my father always came back at meal times. I think he was too proud to stay away. MOTHER’S PAST. My mother stands out less vividly before me, partly, perhaps, because I never knew her height as accurately as I knew my father’s.

But I will record here one thing about her that always seemed to me to mark her. off from most people, and in a way to isolate her in a class by herself, and that is that as a girl she had lived for some years in Little Block, Oklabraska. Why this should have been so, I never knew. My mother never explained it to me and never spoke of it. But I think it gave her a kind of loneliness. Later on as I slowly grew up, which took years and years, I began to understand that my mother was a disappointed woman. She realised, I think, that she had been let in in marrying father. Each time she looked at him she felt that he certainly was a prize package. LOST ROMANCE. The idea, I imagine, grew in her mind that if she hadn’t married father, she might have hit something better and could hardly have struck anything worse. There comes into every woman’s life the knowledge that she has married the wrong man. So it was with mother. The realisation that father was a nut more and more shadowed her life. Once, in one of her rare moments of confidence, she told me that there was a Mr Jones in Little Block, Oklabraska, whom she could have married who was very musical and played the gramophone to perfection, but he had lung trouble and drank whisky and was a Communist. So she held him off and he went west for his lungs and got better and made a lot of money in cattle and joined the Republican Party,

But meantime mother had married father.

NOW IT CAN BE TOLD. I suppose every woman has a romance in her life like mother’s. I often used to wonder where I would have been if mother hadn’t married father, but had married Mr Jones. But I couldn’t think it out. It beat me to .it. And now let me try to give a more intimate and confidential picture of my home, because I want to make my reader feel that he knows me. Our house stood in the country on the tenth concession of the township of Blank backwards and sideways from the road and a little edgeways. I can shut my eyes and see it; but when I open them I can’t. It was only a mile down the road to the post office of Blank and five miles and ten rods to the village of Blank. Our county town was Blink and there was no large city nearer to us than Asterisk. With these facts well in mind, the reader can form a pretty clear picture of my home and its sui*roundings. I should perhaps have added that our nearest railway station was at and our only telegraph office was at . Let the reader get these facts clearly before him and he will have a grip on my narrative which he otherwise might fail to get. Perhaps it is pertinent to say that the Express Company had an agfney at * * * * and that there was a first class garage not more than three miles from A TRUE CONFESSION. At any rate, it was here in these quiet surroundings that I passed my first girlhood—not my second, my first. And now I -am going to give my reader something of the kind that he has been sitting up waiting for. I want to take him into all my secrets, and tell him some things that I suppose no woman ever tells to the world. When I set myself to write these disclosures I said to myself that I would conceal nothing, but would tell my reader everything. If a great deal of'what I have to say sounds unusual, I can only defend it on the ground that at least it is the truth. I want to be quite frank with myself and speak of myself as if I were discussing somebody else. I want the reader to judge for himself everything that I have done. I don’t know whether I make my meaning quite clear. I am trying to state it as simply as I can. I will only say that what I mean is that lam trying to say what I mean. I can find no other words to express it more simply, but if I can think of any later on I’ll use them. I want to begin by saying 'that like ra great many girls I was for a long time densely ignorant. I doubt whether society realises even yet, in spite of all the revelations and confessions that have been published, how ignorant girls are. In my own case up to the age of But stop. That’s a peach of a place to end up this chapter. My readers can sit guessing what I didn’t know and when I learned.it for another week.