Volume I Part 7 (2/2)
There are many varieties of the widow and all are not beautiful. For one, there is the widow who is bent on re-marrying whether men like it or not; that thing of prey who goes about the world seeking whom she may devour; that awful creature who bears down on her victims with a vigour in her a.s.saults which puts to flight the popular fancy about the weaker s.e.x and the natural distribution of power. No hawk poised over a brood of hedge birds, no shark cruising steadily towards a shoal of small fry, no piratical craft sailing under a free flag and accountable to no law save success, was ever more formidable to the weaker things pursued than is the hawk widow to men when she is bent on re-marrying. She knows so much!--there is not a manoeuvre by which a victory can be stolen that she has not mastered and she is not afraid of even the most desperate measures. When she has once struck, he would be a clever man and a strong one who should escape her.
Generally left but meagrely provided for in worldly goods--else her game would not be difficult--she makes up for her financial poverty by her wealth of bold resources, and by the courage with which she takes her own fortunes in hand and, with her own, those of her more eligible masculine a.s.sociates. She is a woman of purpose and lives for an end; and that end is remarriage, with the most favourable settlement that can be obtained by her lawyer from his. If fate has dealt hardly by her--though, may be, compa.s.sionately by her successive spouses--and has landed her in the widowed state twice or thrice, she is in nowise daunted and as little abashed. She merely refits after a certain time of anchorage, and goes out into the open again for a repet.i.tion of her chance. She has no notion of a perpetuity of weeds, and, though she may have cleared her half century with a margin besides, thinks the suggestive orange-blossoms of the bride infinitely more desirable than the fruitless heliotrope of the widow. If one husband is taken, she remembers the old proverb, and reflects on the many, quite as good, who are left potentially subject to her choice. And somehow she manages. It has been said that any woman can marry any man if she determines to do so, and follows on the line of her determination with tenacity and common-sense.
The hawk widow exemplifies the truth of this saying. She determines upon marriage; and she usually succeeds; the question being one of victim only, not of sacrifice. One has to fall to her share; there is no help for it; and the whole contest is, which shall it be? which is strongest to break her bonds? which craftiest to slip out of them?
which most resolute not to bear them from the beginning? This the straggling covey must settle among themselves the best way they can.
When the hawk pounces down upon its quarry, it is _sauve qui peut_!
But all cannot be saved. One has to be caught; and the choice is determined partly by chance and partly by relative strength. When the widow of experience and resolve bears down on _her_ prey, the result is equally certain. Floundering avails nothing; struggling and splas.h.i.+ng are just as futile; one among the crowd has to come to the slaughter, like Mrs. Bond's ducks, and to a.s.sist at his own immolation. The best thing he can do is to make a handsome surrender, and to let the world of men and brothers believe he rather likes his position than not.
But there are pleasanter types of the re-marrying widow than this.
There is the widow of the Wadman kind, who has outlived her grief and is not disinclined to a repet.i.tion of the matrimonial experiment, if asked humbly by an experimenter after her own heart. But she must be asked humbly that she may grant in a pretty, tender, womanly way--if not quite so timidly as a girl, yet as becomingly in her degree, and with that peculiar fascination which nothing but the combination of experience and modesty can give. The widow of the Wadman kind is no creature of prey, neither shark nor hawk; at the worst she is but a cooing dove, making just the sweetest little noise in the world, the tenderest little call to indicate her whereabouts, and to show that she is lonely and feels a-cold. She sits close, waiting to be found, and does not ramp and dash about like the hawk sisterhood; neither does she pretend that she is unwilling to be found, still less deny that a soft warm nest, well lined and snugly sheltered, is better than a lonely branch stretching out comfortless and bare into the bleak wide world. She, too, is almost sure to get what she wants, with the advantage of being voluntarily chosen and not unwillingly submitted to.
This is the kind of woman who is always mildly but thoroughly happy in her married life; unless indeed her husband should be a brute, which heaven forefend. She lives in peace and bland contentment while the fates permit, and when he dies she buries him decently and laments him decorously; but she thinks it folly to spend her life in weeping by the side of his cold grave, when her tears can do no good to either of them. Rather she thinks it a proof of her love for him, and the evidence of how true was her happiness, that she should elect to give him a successor. Her blessed experience in the past has made her trustful of the future; and because she has found one man faithful she thinks that all are Abdiels. As a rule, this type of woman does find men pleasant; and by her own nature she ensures domestic happiness. She is always tenderly, and never pa.s.sionately, in love, even with the husband she has loved the best. She gives in to no excesses to the right nor to the left. Her temperament is of that serene moonlight kind which does not fatigue others nor wear out its possessor. Without ambition or the power to fling herself into any absorbing occupation, she lives only to please and be pleased at home; and if she be not a wife, wearing her light fetters lovingly and proud that she is fettered, she is nothing. As some women are born mothers and others are born nuns, so is the Wadman woman a born wife, and s.h.i.+nes in no other character nor capacity. But in this she excels; and knowing this, she sticks to her _role_, how frequently so ever the protagonist may be changed.
There are widows, however, who have no thought nor desire for remaining anything but widows--who have gained the worth of the world in their condition, 'Jeune, riche, et veuve--quel bonheur!' says the French wife, eyeing 'mon mari' askance. Can the most exacting woman ask for more? And truly such a one is in the most enviable position possible to a woman, supposing always that she has not lost in her husband the man she loved. If she has lost only the man who sat by right at the same hearth with herself--perhaps the man who quarrelled with her across the ashes--she has lost her burden and gained her release.
The cross of matrimony lies heavy on many a woman who never takes the world into her confidence, and who bears in absolute silence what she has not the power to cast from her. Perhaps her husband has been a man of note, a man of learning, of elevated station, a political or a philanthropic power. She alone knew the fretfulness, the petty tyranny, the miserable smallness at home of the man of large repute whom his generation conspired to honour, and whose public life was a mark for the future to date by. When he died the press wrote his eulogy and his elegy; but his widow, when she put on her weeds, sang softly in her own heart a paean to the great King of Freedom, and whispered to herself Laudamus with a sigh of unutterable relief.
To such a woman widowhood has no sentimental regrets. She has come into possession of the goods for which perhaps she sold herself; she is young enough to enjoy the present and to project a future; she has the free choice of a maid and the free action of a matron, as no other woman has. She may be courted and she need not be chaperoned, nor yet forced to accept. Experience has mellowed and enriched her; for though the asperities of her former condition were sharp while they lasted, they have not permanently roughened nor embittered her. Then the sense of relief gladdens, while the sense of propriety subdues, her; and the delicate mixture of outside melancholy, tempered with internal warmth, is wonderfully enticing. Few men know how to resist that gentle sadness which does not preclude the sweetest sympathy with pleasures in which she may not join--with happiness which is, alas! denied her.
It gives an air of such profound unselfishness; it asks so mutely, so bewitchingly, for consolation!
Even a hard man is moved at the sight of a pretty young widow in the funereal black of her first grief, sitting apart with a patient smile and eyes cast meekly down, as one not of the world though in it. Her loss is too recent to admit of any thought of reparation; and yet what man does not think of that time of reparation? and if she be more than usually charming in person and well dowered in purse, what man does not think of himself as the best repairer she could take? Then, as time goes on and she glides gracefully into the era of mitigated grief, how beautiful is her whole manner, how tasteful her attire! The most exquisite colours of the prismatic scale look garish beside her dainty tints, and the untempered mirth of happy girls is coa.r.s.e beside her subdued admission of moral suns.h.i.+ne. Greys as tender as a dove's breast; regal purples which have a glow behind their gloom; stately silks of sombre black softly veiled by clouds of gauzy white or brightened with the 'dark light' of sparkling jet--all speak of pa.s.sing time and the gradual blooming of the spring after the sadness of the winter; all symbolize the flowers which are growing on the sod that covers the dear departed; all hint at a melting of the funereal gloom into the starlight of a possible bridal. She begins too to take pleasure in the old familiar things of life. She steals into a quiet back seat at the Opera; she just walks through a quadrille; she sees no harm in a fete or flower-show, if properly companioned. Winter does not last for ever; and a life-long mourning is a wearisome prospect.
So she goes through her degrees in accurate order, and comes out at the end radiant.
For when the faint shadows cast by the era of mitigated grief fade away, she is the widow _par excellence_--the blooming widow, young, rich, gay, free; with the world on her side, her fortune in her hand, the ball at her foot. She is the freest woman alive; freer even than any old maid to be found. Freedom, indeed, comes to the old maid when too late to enjoy it; at least in certain directions; for while she is young she is necessarily in bondage, and when parents and guardians leave her at liberty, the world and Mrs. Grundy take up the reins and hold them pretty tight. But the widow is as thoroughly emanc.i.p.ated from the conventional bonds which confine the free action of a maid as she is from those which fetter the wife; and only she herself knows what she has lost and gained. She bore her yoke well while it pressed on her. It galled her but she did not wince; only when it was removed, did she become fully conscious of how great had been the burden, from her sense of infinite relief through her freedom. The world never knew that she had pa.s.sed under the harrow; probably therefore it wonders at her cheerfulness, with the dear departed scarce two years dead; and some say how sweetly resigned she is, and others how unfeeling. She is neither. She is simply free after having lived in bondage; and she is glad in consequence. But she is dangerous. In fact, she is the most dangerous of all women to men's peace of mind. She does not want to marry again--does not mean to marry again for many years to come, if ever; granted; but this does not say that she is indifferent to admiration or careless of men's society. And being without serious intentions herself, she does not reflect that she may possibly mislead and deceive others who have no such cause as she has to beware of the pleasant folly of love and its results.
In the exercise of her prerogative as a free woman, able to cultivate the dearest friends.h.i.+ps with men and fearlessly using her power, she entangles many a poor fellow's heart which she never wished to engage more than platonically, and crushes hopes which she had not the slightest intention to raise. Why cannot men be her friends? she asks, with a pretty, pleading look--a tender kind of despair at the wrong-headedness of the stronger s.e.x. But, tender as she is, she does not easily yield even when she loves. The freedom she has gone through so much to gain she does not rashly throw away; and if ever the day comes when she gives it up into the keeping of another--and for all her protestations it comes sometimes--the man to whom she succ.u.mbs may congratulate himself on a victory more flattering to his vanity, and more complete in its surrender of advantages, than he could have gained over any other woman. Belle or heiress, of higher rank or of greater fame than himself, no unmarried woman could have made such a sacrifice in her marriage as did this widow of means and good looks, when she laid her freedom, her joyous present and potential future, in his hand. He will be lucky if he manages so well that he is never reproached for that sacrifice--if his wife never looks back regretfully to the time when she was a widow--if there are no longing glances forward to possibilities ahead, mingled with sighs at the difficulty of retracing a step when made. On the whole, if a woman can live without love, or with nothing stronger than a tender sentimental friends.h.i.+p, widowhood is the most blissful state she can attain. But if she be of a loving nature and fond of home, finding her own happiness in the happiness of others and indifferent to freedom--thinking, indeed, that feminine freedom is only another word for desolation--she will be miserable until she has doubled her experience and carried on the old into the new.
_DOLLS._
The love of dolls is instinctive with girl children; and a nursery without some of these silent simulacra for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the little maids is a very lifeless affair. But outside the nursery door dolls are stupid things enough; and, whether improvised of wisped-up bundles of rags or made of the costliest kind of composition, they are at the best mere pretences for the pastime of babies, not living creatures to be loved nor artistic creations to be admired. Certainly they are pretty in their own way, and some are made to simulate human actions quite cleverly; and one of their charms with children is that they can be treated like sentient beings without a chance of retaliation. They can be scolded for being naughty; put to bed in broad daylight for a punishment; seated in the corner with their impa.s.sive faces turned to the wall, just as the little ones themselves are dealt with; the doll all the time smiling exactly as it smiled before, its round blue beads staring just as they stared before; neither scolding nor cornering making more impression on its sawdust soul than do little missy's sobs and tears when nurse is cross and dolly is her only friend. But the child has had its hour of play and make-believe sentiment of companions.h.i.+p and authority; and so, if the doll can do no good of itself, it can at least be the occasion of pleasantness to others.
Now there are women who are dolls in all but the mere accident of material. The doll proper is a simple structure of wax or wood, 'its knees and elbows glued together;' and the human doll is a complex machine of flesh and blood. But, saving such structural differences, these women are as essentially dolls as those in the bazaar which open and shut their eyes at the word of command enforced by a wire, and squeak when you pinch them in the middle. There are women who seem born into the world only as the playthings and make-believes of human life. As impa.s.sive as the waxen creatures in the nursery, no remonstrance touches them and no experience teaches them. Their final cause seems to be to look pretty, to be always in perfect drawing-room order, and to be the occasions by which their friends and companions are taught patience and self-denial. And they perfectly fulfil their destiny; which may be so much carried to their credit. A doll woman is hopelessly useless and can do nothing with her brains or her hands. In distress or sickness she can only sit by you and look as sorrowful as her round smooth face will permit; but she has not a helping suggestion to make, not a fraction of practical power to put forth.
When a man has married a doll wife he has a.s.signed himself to absolute loneliness or a double burden. He cannot live with his pretty toy in any more reality of sympathy than does a child with her puppet. He can tell her nothing of his affairs, nothing of his troubles nor of his thoughts, because she can impart no new idea, even from the woman's point of view, not from want of heart but from want of brains to understand another's life. Is she not a doll? and does not the very essence of her dollhood lie in this want of perceptive faculty both for things and feelings? What are the hot flushes of pa.s.sion, the bitter tears of grief, the frenzy of despair, to her? She sees them; and she wonders that people can be so silly as to make themselves and her so uncomfortable; but of the depth of the anguish they express she knows no more than does her waxen prototype when little missy sobs over it in her arms and confides her sorrows to its deaf ears.
Whatever anxieties oppress her husband, he must keep them to himself, he cannot share them with her; and the last shred of his credit, like the last effort of his strength, must be employed in maintaining his toy wife in the fool's paradise where alone she can make her habitation. Many a man's back has broken under the strain of such a burden; and many a ruined fortune might have been held together and repaired when damaged, had it not been for the exigencies and necessities of the living doll, who had to be spared all want or inconvenience at the cost of everything else. How many men are groaning in spirit at this moment over the infatuation that made them sacrifice the whole worth of life for the sake of a pretty face and a plastic manner!
The doll woman is as helpless practically as she is useless morally.
If she is in personal danger, she either faints or becomes dazed, according to her physiological conditions. Sometimes she is hysterical and frantic, and then she is actively troublesome. In general, however, she is just so much dead weight on hand, to be thought for as well as protected; a living corpse to be carried on the shoulders of those who are struggling for their own lives. She can foresee no possibilities, measure no distances, think of no means of escape.
Never quick nor ready, pressure paralyzes such wits as she possesses; and it is not from selfishness so much as from pure incapacity to help herself or to serve others that the poor doll falls down in a helpless heap of self-surrender, and lets her very children perish before her eyes without making an effort to protect them.
As a mother indeed, the doll woman is perhaps more unsatisfactory than in any other character. She gives up her nursery into the absolute keeping of her nurse, and does not attempt to control nor to interfere. This again, is not from want of affection, but from want of capacity. In her tepid way she has a heart, if only half-vitalized like the rest of her being; and she is by no means cruel. Indeed, she has not force enough to be cruel nor wicked anyhow; her worst offence being a pa.s.sive kind of selfishness, not from greed but from inactivity, by which she is made simply useless for the general good.
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