Further Foolishness | Page 4

She is The Wife of
the Other Man. Just what there is, for the reader, about other men's
wives, I don't understand. I know tons of them that I wouldn't walk
round a block for. But the reading public goes wild over them. The
old-fashioned heroine was unmarried. That spoiled the whole story.
You could see the end from the beginning. But with Another Man's
Wife, the way is blocked. Something has got to happen that would
seem almost obvious to anyone.
The writer, therefore, at once puts the two snoopos--The Man and The
Woman--into a frightfully indelicate position. The more indelicate it is,
the better. Sometimes she gets into his motor by accident after the
theatre, or they both engage the drawing-room of a Pullman car by
mistake, or else, best of all, he is brought accidentally into her room at
an hotel at night. There is something about an hotel room at night,
apparently, which throws the modern reader into convulsions. It is
always easy to arrange a scene of this sort. For example, taking the
sample beginning that I gave above, The Man, whom I left sitting at the
cabaret table, above, rises unsteadily --it is the recognised way of
rising in a _cabaret_--and, settling the reckoning with the waiter,
staggers into the street. For myself I never do a reckoning with the
waiter. I just pay the bill as he adds it, and take a chance on it.
As The Man staggers into the "night air," the writer has time--just a
little time, for the modern reader is impatient--to explain who he is and
why he staggers. He is rich. That goes without saying. All clean-limbed
men with straight legs are rich. He owns copper mines in Montana. All
well-tubbed millionaires do. But he has left them, left everything,
because of the Other Man's Wife. It was that or madness--or worse. He

had told himself so a thousand times. (This little touch about "worse" is
used in all the stories. I don't just understand what the "worse" means.
But snoopopathic readers reach for it with great readiness.) So The
Man had come to New York (the only place where stories are allowed
to be laid) under an assumed name, to forget, to drive her from his
mind. He had plunged into the mad round of--I never could find it
myself, but it must be there, and as they all plunge into it, it must be as
full of them as a sheet of Tanglefoot is of flies.
"As The Man walked home to his hotel, the cool night air steadied him,
but his brain is still filled with the fumes of the wine he had drunk."
Notice these "fumes." It must be great to float round with them in one's
brain, where they apparently lodge. I have often tried to find them, but I
never can. Again and again I have said, "Waiter, bring me a Scotch
whisky and soda with fumes." But I can never get them.
Thus goes The Man to his hotel. Now it is in a room in this same hotel
that The Woman is sitting, and in which she has crumpled up the
telegram. It is to this hotel that she has come when she left her husband,
a week ago. The readers know, without even being told, that she left
him "to work out her own salvation"--driven, by his cold brutality,
beyond the breaking-point. And there is laid upon her soul, as she sits
there with clenched hands, the dust and ashes of a broken marriage and
a loveless life, and the knowledge, too late, of all that might have been.
And it is to this hotel that The Woman's Husband is following her.
But The Man does not know that she is in the hotel, nor that she has left
her husband; it is only accident that brings them together. And it is only
by accident that he has come into her room, at night, and stands
there--rooted to the threshold. Now as a matter of fact, in real life, there
is nothing at all in the simple fact of walking into the wrong room of an
hotel by accident. You merely apologise and go out. I had this
experience myself only a few days ago. I walked right into a lady's
room--next door to my own. But I simply said, "Oh, I beg your pardon,
I thought this was No. 343."
"No," she said, "this is 341."
She did not rise and "confront" me, as they always do in the
snoopopathic stories. Neither did her eyes flash, nor her gown cling to
her as she rose. Nor was her gown made of "rich old stuff." No, she
merely went on reading her newspaper.

"I must apologise," I said. "I am