Part 16 (2/2)
I remained silent, waiting for the necessary explanation.
”You had better come and see him for yourself,” she added, with a little laugh; ”to tell the truth, I am the woman who has married him. Tuesday is my day, Number 2, K---- Mansions,” and she ran off, leaving me staring after her.
I believe an enterprising clergyman who would set up a little church in the Strand, just outside the Law Courts, might do quite a trade, re-marrying couples who had just been divorced. A friend of mine, a respondent, told me he had never loved his wife more than on two occasions--the first when she refused him, the second when she came into the witness-box to give evidence against him.
”You are curious creatures, you men,” remarked a lady once to another man in my presence. ”You never seem to know your own mind.”
She was feeling annoyed with men generally. I do not blame her, I feel annoyed with them myself sometimes. There is one man in particular I am always feeling intensely irritated against. He says one thing, and acts another. He will talk like a saint and behave like a fool, knows what is right and does what is wrong. But we will not speak further of him. He will be all he should be one day, and then we will pack him into a nice, comfortably-lined box, and screw the lid down tight upon him, and put him away in a quiet little spot near a church I know of, lest he should get up and misbehave himself again.
The other man, who is a wise man as men go, looked at his fair critic with a smile.
”My dear madam,” he replied, ”you are blaming the wrong person. I confess I do not know my mind, and what little I do know of it I do not like. I did not make it, I did not select it. I am more dissatisfied with it than you can possibly be. It is a greater mystery to me than it is to you, and I have to live with it. You should pity not blame me.”
There are moods in which I fall to envying those old hermits who frankly, and with courageous cowardice, s.h.i.+rked the problem of life.
There are days when I dream of an existence unfettered by the thousand petty strings with which our souls lie bound to Lilliputia land. I picture myself living in some Norwegian sater, high above the black waters of a rockbound fiord. No other human creature disputes with me my kingdom. I am alone with the whispering fir forests and the stars. How I live I am not quite sure. Once a month I could journey down into the villages and return laden. I should not need much. For the rest, my gun and fis.h.i.+ng-rod would supply me. I would have with me a couple of big dogs, who would talk to me with their eyes, so full of dumb thought, and together we would wander over the uplands, seeking our dinner, after the old primitive fas.h.i.+on of the men who dreamt not of ten-course dinners and Savoy suppers. I would cook the food myself, and sit down to the meal with a bottle of good wine, such as starts a man's thoughts (for I am inconsistent, as I acknowledge, and that gift of civilization I would bear with me into my hermitage). Then in the evening, with pipe in mouth, beside my log-wood fire, I would sit and think, until new knowledge came to me. Strengthened by those silent voices that are drowned in the roar of Streetland, I might, perhaps, grow into something nearer to what it was intended that a man should be--might catch a glimpse, perhaps, of the meaning of life.
No, no, my dear lady, into this life of renunciation I would not take a companion, certainly not of the s.e.x you are thinking of, even would she care to come, which I doubt. There are times when a man is better without the woman, when a woman is better without the man. Love drags us from the depths, makes men and women of us, but if we would climb a little nearer to the stars we must say good-bye to it. We men and women do not show ourselves to each other at our best; too often, I fear, at our worst. The woman's highest ideal of man is the lover; to a man the woman is always the possible beloved. We see each other's hearts, but not each other's souls. In each other's presence we never shake ourselves free from the earth. Match-making mother Nature is always at hand to prompt us. A woman lifts us up into manhood, but there she would have us stay. ”Climb up to me,” she cries to the lad, walking with soiled feet in muddy ways; ”be a true man that you may be worthy to walk by my side; be brave to protect me, kind and tender, and true; but climb no higher, stay here by my side.” The martyr, the prophet, the leader of the world's forlorn hopes, she would wake from his dream. Her arms she would fling about his neck holding him down.
To the woman the man says, ”You are my wife. Here is your America, within these walls, here is your work, your duty.” True, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand, but men and women are not made in moulds, and the world's work is various. Sometimes to her sorrow, a woman's work lies beyond the home. The duty of Mary was not to Joseph.
The hero in the popular novel is the young man who says, ”I love you better than my soul.” Our favourite heroine in fiction is the woman who cries to her lover, ”I would go down into h.e.l.l to be with you.” There are men and women who cannot answer thus--the men who dream dreams, the women who see visions--impracticable people from the Bayswater point of view. But Bayswater would not be the abode of peace it is had it not been for such.
Have we not placed s.e.xual love on a pedestal higher than it deserves? It is a n.o.ble pa.s.sion, but it is not the n.o.blest. There is a wider love by the side of which it is but as the lamp illumining the cottage, to the moonlight bathing the hills and valleys. There were two women once.
This is a play I saw acted in the daylight. They had been friends from girlhood, till there came between them the usual trouble--a man. A weak, pretty creature not worth a thought from either of them; but women love the unworthy; there would be no over-population problem did they not; and this poor specimen, ill-luck had ordained they should contend for.
Their rivalry brought out all that was worst in both of them. It is a mistake to suppose love only elevates; it can debase. It was a mean struggle for what to an onlooker must have appeared a remarkably unsatisfying prize. The loser might well have left the conqueror to her poor triumph, even granting it had been gained unfairly. But the old, ugly, primeval pa.s.sions had been stirred in these women, and the wedding-bells closed only the first act.
The second is not difficult to guess. It would have ended in the Divorce Court had not the deserted wife felt that a finer revenge would be secured to her by silence.
In the third, after an interval of only eighteen months, the man died--the first piece of good fortune that seems to have occurred to him personally throughout the play. His position must have been an exceedingly anxious one from the beginning. Notwithstanding his flabbiness, one cannot but regard him with a certain amount of pity--not unmixed with amus.e.m.e.nt. Most of life's dramas can be viewed as either farce or tragedy according to the whim of the spectator. The actors invariably play them as tragedy; but then that is the essence of good farce acting.
Thus was secured the triumph of legal virtue and the punishment of irregularity, and the play might be dismissed as uninterestingly orthodox were it not for the fourth act, showing how the wronged wife came to the woman she had once wronged to ask and grant forgiveness.
Strangely as it may sound, they found their love for one another unchanged. They had been long parted: it was sweet to hold each other's hands again. Two lonely women, they agreed to live together. Those who knew them well in this later time say that their life was very beautiful, filled with graciousness and n.o.bility.
I do not say that such a story could ever be common, but it is more probable than the world might credit. Sometimes the man is better without the woman, the woman without the man.
ON THE n.o.bILITY OF OURSELVES
AN old Anglicized Frenchman, I used to meet often in my earlier journalistic days, held a theory, concerning man's future state, that has since come to afford me more food for reflection than, at the time, I should have deemed possible. He was a bright-eyed, eager little man.
One felt no Lotus land could be Paradise to him. We build our heaven of the stones of our desires: to the old, red-bearded Norseman, a foe to fight and a cup to drain; to the artistic Greek, a grove of animated statuary; to the Red Indian, his happy hunting ground; to the Turk, his harem; to the Jew, his New Jerusalem, paved with gold; to others, according to their taste, limited by the range of their imagination.
Few things had more terrors for me, when a child, than Heaven--as pictured for me by certain of the good folks round about me. I was told that if I were a good lad, kept my hair tidy, and did not tease the cat, I would probably, when I died, go to a place where all day long I would sit still and sing hymns. (Think of it! as reward to a healthy boy for being good.) There would be no breakfast and no dinner, no tea and no supper. One old lady cheered me a little with a hint that the monotony might be broken by a little manna; but the idea of everlasting manna palled upon me, and my suggestions, concerning the possibilities of sherbet or jumbles, were scouted as irreverent. There would be no school, but also there would be no cricket and no rounders. I should feel no desire, so I was a.s.sured, to do another angel's ”dags” by sliding down the heavenly banisters. My only joy would be to sing.
”Shall we start singing the moment we get up in the morning?” I asked.
”There won't be any morning,” was the answer. ”There will be no day and no night. It will all be one long day without end.”
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