Florida Pier : writings and about       /       jmcvey.net

Confidences
Harper’s Weekly (February 20, 1909) : 31
hathitrust : link
archive.org : link
 

      The moment that you have confided in a person there is nothing for him to do but slink tactfully away. For a man or woman who knows your life secret to intrude into your line of vision shows a lack of judgment, a want of delicate perception that is astonishingly common. Very often you can change your plans so that the persons who think they know them to the last detail will find they have been wrongly informed. The fact that you did it only serves to confound them the more, and if they feel foolish, that is a thing about which you cannot be expected to bother yourself. It was their own lookout if they believed you. There are so many things which must happen, even though told of, and it is the inevitableness of these things which should teach people how ill-judged a thing listening is. When one sees a confidence coming, it invariably flashes danger signals from a troubled eye, one should take to one’s heels, or, if one is of a phlegmatic disposition, cover one’s ears with a pocket-handkerchief. One only causes oneself to be thoroughly disliked if one persists in listening. You pour into a treacherous ear a tale that you would not have even the ear hear for countless worlds, and the ear remembers it, the traitor! it meets you ever afterward with an air of unhallowed intimacy. A confidant’s knowledge leers familiarly at you from the corner of pursed lips. You hear his insight into your troubles chortling, actually cheering as you pass through a crowded room. Have people no power of concealment? Must they display the thing you gave them so openly, flourishing it for the world to see? A confidence is a thing to eat, to swallow, with difficulty, perhaps, but to consume as utterly as the notes were choked down by the servants of those canny Musketeers — one brave gulp and then never seen again. But most people are incapable of such a feat; one glance at a confidant and the bulge of your confidence is plainly perceptible in his outline. He is incorrigible, heart-breaking. He persists in reminding you of your indiscretion, until you could up with his heels and shake him soundly, until, along with his loose change, cigars, and letters, out rattles the thing you told him, at which you pounce upon it, carry it off, and leave its late receptacle blessedly, safely, ignominiously empty.
      As one goes through life (such a capital phrase, so suggestive of winging through a maze which irritates and entices) one lets drop here and there, for various reasons, none of them decently sufficient second thoughts, a good many confidences. Precious morsels of your sacred self are being risked in fifty different parts of the world. Some people marry after you have confided in them: what a betrayal of a friend! Others take to short-story writing, or entertain choice groups of attentive listeners with, “An interesting case I once came across.” The perfidious wretches! It is as difficult to get a secret to stay lodged in a friend as it is to make a round bundle stop on the top shelf of a closet. One prods it in place with an umbrella, one flings it back every time it falls, and each tussle only helps to develop its boomerang talents.
      Why one confides is a mystery. There is not a human being living that would say, after a second’s deliberation, “I approve of confidences; there is nothing that I know of against them.” Every one has a bad word for them. We all make a point of telling some one to keep his secrets to himself, and we look so tiresomely wise when we are saying it, yet we will, a moment later, use all the artifice and wit that is in us to drag something from some one that he does not want to tell, and we do it under the cloak of thinking it may relieve him. Oh, the wickedness of us! Watch the people who say, “I don’t know why, but all my friends confide in me; I really wish they wouldn’t,” and see the broad smirk of satisfaction that comes over their shameless faces. There is just one thing that people love more than receiving a spicy bit of information, and that is giving it. There are some people so intemperate when it comes to confidences that after they have told all there is about themselves to tell they go right on making it up word for word. They, of course, are severe cases, but it is a cold-blooded man, lacking in a knowledge of himself, who does not enter perfectly into their feelings and admit that he would do the same if he had the brain, the courage, the aptitude for naturalistic invention. It is a kindly instinct which causes people to confide; they say to themselves, here is a jewel plucked from the circle of my life, now who is worthy of sharing it.
      There are moments — quiet, harmonious, secluded moments — when anything less than a confidence seems niggardly and unfitting, for what, after all, is a silence to be used for if not as a foreordained background for low-voiced whispered admissions of everything. When two friends are elaborately comfortable, with hours before them, it shows a lack of trust in each other if they do not tell all they know, or at the moment think of. A truly chivalrous friend, having permitted you to express, confess, and expound opinions you did not know you held until the moment of telling, but from now on will loyally lay claim to, is in necessity bound to wade out as far into conversational depths as the exact spot where you a half-hour ago felt the water lapping your nostrils and, turning, floundered for shore. It is only mutual confidences when, hand in hand, you touched the identical danger-point that can be looked back upon with any degree of comfort or belief in one’s future safety. If you disrobed your heart or mind, and perhaps even allowed it to caper in its natural ungainly condition before an eye clothed in all the respectable paraphernalia of unbroken reticence, then your past will be a torment to you, and your future a place honey-combed with pitfalls where you will walk whimpering, and balance, afraid, on one leg, begging that the next step be spared you; knowing, as you do, that the after effect of such a confidence is a nasty, nose-bruising stumble. Those eyes that saw and did not have the human decency to imitate you in your thoughtless avowal nor match you disclosure for disclosure, and so bind all securely, are going to, with the whip of your recollection, make you dance when they maddeningly turn in your direction. You will grab out of space protecting garments, and hold them in front of you to no avail. You will flap before those gazing eyes voluminous robes and crave a recognition of their concealing properties, and as you drape yourself, smother yourself in double the coverings you just once so idiotically removed, the eye without a gleam of forgetfulness or pity will slowly and knowingly wink. And one’s consequent, justifiable rage is so futile. You magnify the thing you did by every intimated regret. A lying laugh is your one safeguard, a dispersing derisive shout which you do not in the least mean and which seldom deceives your late confidant. As it is, however, your sole hope, you try it persistently before finally giving up. You massage with your frank chuckles the secretion of knowledge in the mind of your friend. You laugh until you could cry, and though your every delighted murmur kneads invaluably the obstinate, hardened bump, in the end you are forced to admit that you have done nothing more than alleviate a few of the more trying symptoms.
 

20260731