Volume I Part 11 (1/2)

_DOVECOTS._

Times must be very bad indeed if a faithful few are not still left to keep the sources of society sweet and wholesome. When corruption has gone through the whole ma.s.s and all cla.s.ses are bad alike, everything comes to an end, and there is a general overthrow of national life; but while some are left pure and unspotted, we are not quite undone, and we may reasonably hope for better days in the future. In the midst of the reign of the Girl of the Period, with her slang and her boldness--of the fas.h.i.+onable woman, with her denial of duty and her madness for pleasure--we come every now and then upon a group of good girls of the real old English type; the faithful few growing up silently among us, but none the less valuable because they are silent and make no public display; doves who are content with life as they have it in the dovecot, and have no desire to be either eagles dwelling on romantic heights, or peac.o.c.ks displaying their pride in sunny courts. We find these faithful few in town and country alike; but they are rifest in the country, where there is less temptation to go wrong than there is in the large towns, and where life is simpler and the moral tone undeniably higher. The leading feature of these girls is their love of home and of their own family, and their power of making occupation and happiness out of apparently meagre materials. If they are the elders, they find amus.e.m.e.nt and interest in their little brothers and sisters, whom they consider immensely funny and to whom they are as much girl-mothers as sisters; if they are the youngers, they idolize their baby nephews and nieces. For there is always a baby going on somewhere about these houses--babies being the great excitement of home-life, and the antiseptic element among women which keeps everything else pure. They are pa.s.sionately attached to papa and mamma, whom they think the very king and queen of humanity, yet whom they do not call by even endearing slang names. It has never occurred to them to criticize them as ordinary mortals; and as they have not been in the way of learning the prevailing accent of disrespect, they have not shaken off that almost religious veneration for their parents which all young people naturally feel, if they have been well brought up and are not corrupted.

The yoke in most middle-cla.s.s country-houses is one fitting very loosely round all necks; and as they have all the freedom they desire or could use, the girls are not fretted by undue pressure, and are content to live in peace under such restraints as they have. They adore their elder brothers who are from home just beginning the great battle of life for themselves, and confidently believe them to be the finest fellows going, and the future great men of the day if only they care to put out those splendid talents of theirs, and take the trouble of plucking the prizes within their reach. They may have a slight reservation perhaps, in favour of the brother's friend, whom they place on a pedestal of almost equal height. But they keep their mental architecture a profound secret from every one, and do not suffer it to grow into too solid a structure unless it has some surer foundation than their own fancy. For, though doves are loving, they are by no means lovesick, and are too healthy and natural and quietly busy for unwholesome dreams. If one of them marries, they all unite in loving the man who comes in among them. He is adopted as one of themselves, and leaps into a family of idolizing sisters who pet him as their brother--with just that subtle little difference in their petting, in so much as it comes from sisters unaccustomed, and so has the charm of novelty without the prurient excitement of naughtiness.

But this kind of thing is about the most dangerous to a man's moral nature that can befall him. Though pretty to see and undeniably pleasant to experience, and though perfectly innocent in every way, still, nothing enervates him so much as this idolatrous submission of a large family of women. In a widow's house, where there are many daughters and no sons, and where the man who marries one marries the whole family and is wors.h.i.+pped accordingly, the danger is of course increased tenfold; but if there are brothers and a father, the sister's husband, though affectionately cooed over, is not made quite such a fuss with, and the a.s.sociation is all the less hurtful in consequence.

These girls lead a by no means stupid life, though it is a quiet one, and without any spasmodic events or tremendous cataclysms. They go a great deal among the village poor, and they teach at the Sunday-school, and attend the mothers' meetings and clothing-clubs and the like, and learn to get interested in their humbler friends, who after all are Christian sisters. They read their romances in real life instead of in three-volume novels, and study human nature as it is--in the rough certainly, but perhaps in more genuine form than if they learnt it only in what is called society. Then they have their pleasures, though they are of an unexciting kind and what fast girls would call awfully slow. They have their horses and their croquet parties, their lawn tennis and their archery meetings; they have batches of new music, and a monthly box from Mudie's--and they know the value of both; they go out to tea, and sometimes to dinner, in the neighbourhood; and they enjoy the rare county b.a.l.l.s with a zest unknown to London girls who are out every night in the week. They have their village flower-shows, which the great families patronize in a free-and-easy kind of way, and which give occupation for weeks before and subject for talk for weeks after; their school feasts, where the pet parson of the district comes out with his best anecdotes, and makes mild jokes at a long distance from Sydney Smith; their periodical missionary meetings, where they have great guns from London, and where they hear unctuous stories about the saintliness of converted cannibals, and are required to believe in the power of change of creed to produce an ethnological miracle; they have their friends to stay with them--school-girl friends--with whom they exchange deep confidences, and go back over the old days--so old to their youth!--their brothers come down in the summer, and their brothers' friends come with them, and do a little spooning in the shrubbery. But there is more spooning done at picnics than anywhere else; and more offers are made there under the shadow of the old ruin, or in the quiet leafy nook by the river side, than at any other gathering time of the country. And as we are all to a certain extent what we are made by our environment, the doves take to these pleasures quite kindly and gratefully, as being the only ones known to them, and enjoy themselves in a simplicity of circ.u.mstances which would give no pleasure at all to girls accustomed to more highly-spiced entertainments.

Doves know very little of evil. They are not in the way of learning it; and they do not care to learn it. The few villagers who are supposed to lead ill lives are spoken of below the breath, and carefully avoided without being critically studied. When the railway is to be carried past their quiet nest, there is an immense excitement as the report goes that a knot of strange men have been seen scattering themselves over the fields with their little white flags and theodolites, their measuring lines and levels. But when the army of navvies follows after, the excitement is changed to consternation, and a general sense of evil to come advancing ruthlessly towards them. The clergy of the district organize special services, and the scared doves keep religiously away from the place where the navvies are hutted. They think them little better than the savages about whom the Deputation tell them once or twice a year; and they create almost as much terror as an encampment of gipsies. They represent the lawless forces of the world and the unknown sins of strong men; and the wildest story about them is not too wild to be believed. The railway altogether is a great offence to the neighbourhood, and the line is a.s.sumed to destroy the whole scenic beauty of the place. There are lamentations over the c.o.c.kneys it will bring down; over the high prices it will create, the immorality it will cause. Only the sons who are out in the world and have learnt how life goes on outside the dovecot, advocate keeping pace with the times; and a few of the stronger minded of the sisters listen to them with a timid admiration of their breadth and boldness, and think there may be two sides to the question after all. When the das.h.i.+ng captain and his fast wife suddenly appear in the village--as often happens in these remote districts--the doves are in a state of great moral tribulation. They are scandalized by Mrs. Highflyer's costume and complexion, and think her manners odd and doubtful; her slang shocks them; and when they meet her in the lanes, talking so loudly and laughing so shrilly with that horrid-looking man in a green cutaway, they feel as fluttered as their namesakes when a hawk is hovering over the farmyard. The das.h.i.+ng captain, who does not use a prayer-book at church, who stares at all the girls so rudely, and who has even been seen to wink at some of the prettier cottage girls, and his handsome wife with her equivocal complexion and p.r.o.nounced fas.h.i.+ons, who makes eyes at the curate, are never heartily adopted by the local magnates, though vouched for by some far-away backer; and the doves always feel them to be strange bodies among them, and out of their rightful element somehow. If things go quietly without an explosion, well and good; but if the truth bursts to the surface in the shape of a London detective, and the Highflyers are found to be no better than they should be, the consternation and half-awed wonderment at the existence of so much effrontery and villany in their atmosphere create an impression which no time effaces. The first clash of innocence with evil is an event in the life of the innocent the effect of which nothing ever destroys.

The dovecot is rather dull in the winter, and the doves are somewhat moped; but even then they have the church to decorate, and the sentiment of Christmas to enliven them. The absent ones of the family too, return to the old hearth while they can; and as the great joy of the dovecot lies in the family union that is kept up, and in the family love which is so strong, the visits of those who no longer live at home bring a moral summer as warm and cheering as the physical suns.h.i.+ne. But they do not all a.s.semble. For many of the doves marry men whose work lies abroad; these quiet country-houses being the favourite matrimonial hunting-grounds for colonists and Anglo-Indians.

So that some are always absent whose healths are drunk in the traditional punch, while eyes grow moist as the names are given. Doves are not disinclined to marry men who have to go abroad, for all the pa.s.sionate family love common to them. Travel is a golden dream to them in their still homes; but travel properly companioned. For even the most adventurous among them are not independent, as we mean when we speak of independence in women. They are essentially home-girls, family-girls, doves who cannot exist without a dovecot, however humble. The family is everything to them; and they are utterly unfit for the solitude which so many of our self-supporting women can accept quite resignedly. Not that they are necessarily useless even as breadwinners. They could work, if pushed to it; but it must be in a quiet womanly way, with the mother, the sister, the husband as the helper--with the home as the place of rest and the refuge. Their whole lines are laid in love and quietness; not by any means in inaction, but all centred within the home circle. If they marry, they find the love of their husband enough for them, and have no desire for other men's admiration. Their babies are all the world to them, and they do not think maternity an infliction, as so many of the miserably fas.h.i.+onable think it. They like the occupation of housekeeping, and feel pride in their fine linen and clean service, in their well-ordered table and neatly-balanced accounts. They are kind to their servants, who generally come from the old home, and whose families they therefore know; but they keep up a certain dignity and tone of superiority towards them in the midst of all their kindness, which very few town-bred mistresses can keep to town-bred maids. They have always been the aristocracy in their native place; and they carry through life the ineffaceable stamp which being 'the best' gives.

Doves are essentially mild and gentle women; not queens of society even when they are pretty, because not caring for social success and therefore not laying themselves out for it; for if they please at home that is all they care for, holding love before admiration, and the esteem of one higher than the praise of many. If a fault is to be found with them it is that they have not perhaps quite enough salt for the general taste, used as it is to such highly-seasoned social food; but do we really want our women to have so very much character? Do not our splendid pa.s.sionate creatures lead madly wretched lives and make miserably uncomfortable homes? and are not our glorious heroines better in pictures and in fiction than seated by the domestic fire, or checking the baker's bill? No doubt the quiet home-staying doves seem tame enough when we think of the gorgeous beings made familiar to us by romance, and history, which is more romantic still; but as our daily lives run chiefly in prose, our doves are better fitted for things as they are; and to men who want wives and not playthings, and who care for the peace of family life and the dignity of home, they are beyond price when they can be found and secured. So that, on the whole, we can dispense with the splendid creatures of character and the magnificent queens of society sooner than with the quiet and un.o.btrusive doves. And though they do spoil men most monstrously, they know where to draw the line, and while petting their own at home they keep strangers abroad at a distance, and make themselves respected as only modest and gentle women are respected by men.

_BORED HUSBANDS._

The curtain falls on joined hands when it does not descend on a tragedy; and novels for the most part end with a wreath of orange-blossoms and a pair of high-stepping greys, as the last act that claims to be recorded. For both novelists and playwrights a.s.sume that with marriage all the great events of life have ceased, and that, once wedded to the beloved object, there is sure to be smooth sailing and halcyon seas to the end of time. It sounds very cynical and shocking to question this pretty belief; but unfortunately for us who live in the world as it is and not as it is supposed to be, we find that even a union with the beloved object does not always ensure perfect contentment in the home, and that bored husbands are by no means rare.