Volume Ii Part 4 (2/2)
Men who have any real manliness however, do not give in to this kind of thing; though there are some, as effeminate and gus.h.i.+ng as women themselves, who like this sloppy effusiveness of love and carry it on into quite old age, fondling the ancient grandmother with grey hair as lavishly as they had fondled the youthful bride, and seeing no want of harmony in calling a withered old dame of sixty and upwards by the pet names by which they had called her when she was a slip of a girl of eighteen. The continuance of love from youth to old age is very lovely, very cheering; but even 'John Anderson my Jo' would lose its pathos if Mrs. Anderson had ignored the difference between the raven locks and the snowy brow.
All that excess of flattering and petting of which women are so fond becomes a bore to a man if required as part of the daily habit of life. Out in the world as he is, hara.s.sed by anxieties of which she knows nothing, home is emphatically his place of rest--where his wife is his friend who knows his mind; where he may be himself without the fear of offending, and relax the strain that must be kept up out of doors; where he may feel himself safe, understood, at ease. And some women, and these by no means the coldest nor the least loving, are wise enough to understand this need of rest in the man's harder life, and, accepting the quiet of security as part of the conditions of marriage, content themselves with the undemonstrative love into which the fever of pa.s.sion has subsided. Others fret over it, and make themselves and their husbands wretched because they cannot believe in that which is not for ever paraded before their eyes.
Yet what kind of home is it for the man when he has to walk as if on egg-sh.e.l.ls, every moment afraid of wounding the susceptibilities of a woman who will take nothing on trust, and who has to be continually a.s.sured that he still loves her, before she will believe that to-day is as yesterday? Of one thing she may be certain; no wife who understands what is the best kind of marriage demands these continual attentions, which, voluntary offerings of the lover, become enforced tribute from the husband. She knows that as a wife, whom it is not necessary to court nor flatter, she has a n.o.bler place than that which is expressed by the attentions paid to a mistress.
Wifehood, like all a.s.sured conditions, does not need to be b.u.t.tressed up; but a less certain position must be supported from the outside, and an insecure self-respect, an uncertain holding, must be perpetually strengthened and rea.s.sured. Women who cannot live happily without being made love to are more like mistresses than wives, and come but badly off in the great struggles of life and the cruel handling of time. Placing all their happiness in things which cannot continue, they let slip that which lies in their hands; and in their desire to retain the romantic position of lovers lose the sweet security of wives. Perhaps, if they had higher aims in life than those with which they make s.h.i.+ft to satisfy themselves, they would not let themselves sink to the level of this folly, and would understand better than they do now the worth of realities as contrasted with appearances. And yet we cannot but pity the poor, weak, craving souls who long so pitifully for the freshness of the morning to continue far into the day and evening--who cling so tenaciously to the fleeting romance of youth. They are taken by the glitter of things--love-making among the rest; and the man who is showiest in his affection, who can express it with most colour, and paint it, so to speak, with the minutest touches, is the man whose love seems to them the most trustworthy and the most intense. They make the mistake of confounding this show with the substance, of trusting to pictorial expression rather than to solid facts. And they make that other mistake of cloying their husbands with half-childish caresses which were all very well in the early days, but which become tiresome as time goes on and the gravity of life deepens. And then, when the man either quietly keeps them off or more brusquely repels them, they are hurt and miserable, and think the whole happiness of their lives is dead, and all that makes marriage beautiful at an end.
What is to be done to balance things evenly in this unequal world of s.e.x? What indeed, is to be done at any time to reconcile strength with weakness, and to give each its due? One thing at least is sure. The more thoroughly women learn the true nature of men, the fewer mistakes they will make and the less unhappiness they will create for themselves; and the more patient men are with the hysterical excitability, the restless craving, which nature, for some purpose at present unknown, has made the special temperament of women, the fewer _femmes incomprises_ there will be in married homes and the larger the chance of married happiness. All one's theories of domestic life come down at last to the give-and-take system, to bearing and forbearing, and meeting half way idiosyncrasies which one does not personally share.
_SOCIAL NOMADS._
As there are wandering tribes which neither build houses nor pitch their tents in one place, so there are certain social nomads who never seem to have a home of their own, and who do not make one for themselves by remaining long in any other person's. They are always moving about and are to be met everywhere; at all sea-side places; at all show places; in Switzerland, France, Italy and Germany; where they live chiefly in _pensions_ at moderate charges, or in meagre lodgings affiliated to a populous _table d'hote_ much frequented by the English. For one characteristic of social nomads is the strange way in which they congregate together, expatiating on the delights of life abroad, while seeing nothing but the outside of things from the centre of a dense Britannic circle.
Another characteristic is their chronic state of impecuniosity, and the desire of looking like the best on a fixed income of slender dimensions. Hence they are obliged to organize their expenditure on a very narrow basis, and therefore live in boarding-houses, _pensions_, or wherever good-sized rooms, a sufficient table, and a constant current of society are to be had at small individual cost. As they are people who travel much, they can speak two or three languages, but only as those who have learnt by ear and not by book. They know nothing of foreign literature, and but little of their own, save novels and the cla.s.s which goes by the name of 'light.' Indeed all the reading they accomplish is confined to newspapers, magazines and novels. But at home, and among those who have not been to Berlin, who have never seen Venice, and to whom Paris is a dream still to be realized, they a.s.sume an intimate acquaintance with both the literature and the politics of the Continent--especially the politics--and laugh at the English press for its blindness and onesidedness. They happen to know beyond all doubt how this Correspondent was bought over with so much money down; how that one is in the toils of such or such a Minister's wife; why a third got his appointment; how a fourth keeps his; and they could, if they chose, give you chapter and verse for all they say.
If they chance to have been in India some twenty or thirty years ago, they will tell you why the Mutiny took place, and how the change of Government works; and they can put their fingers on all the sore places of the Empire, beginning with the distribution of patronage and ending with the deficiency of revenue, as aptly as if they were on the spot and had the confidence of the ruling officials. But in spite of these little foibles they are amusing companions as a rule, if shallow and radically ill-informed; and as it is for their own interest to be good company, they have cultivated the art of conversation to the highest pitch of which they are capable, and can entertain if not instruct. When they aim at instruction indeed, they are pretty sure to miss the mark; and the social nomad who lays down the law on foreign statesmen and politics, and who speaks from personal knowledge, is just the one authority not to be accepted.
Always living in public, yet having to fight, each for his own hand, the manners of social nomads in _pensions_ are generally a strange mixture of suavity and selfishness; and the small intrigues and crafty stratagems going on among them for the possession of the favourite seat in the drawing-room, the special attention of the head-waiter at table, the earliest attendance of the housemaid in the morning, is in strange contrast with the ready smiles, the personal flatteries, the affectation of sympathetic interest kept for show. But every social nomad knows how to appraise this show at its just value, and can weigh it in the balance to a grain. He does not much prize it; for he knows one characteristic of these communities to be that everybody speaks against everybody else, and that all concur in speaking against the management.
Still, life seems to go easily enough among them. They are all well-dressed and for the most part have their tempers under control.
Some of the women play well, and some sing prettily. There are always to be found a sufficient number of the middle-aged of either s.e.x to make up a whist-table, where the game is sound and sometimes brilliant; and there are sure to be men who play billiards creditably and with a crisp, clean stroke worth looking at. And there are very often lively women who make amus.e.m.e.nt for the rest. But these are smartly handled behind backs, though they are petted in public and undeniably useful to the society at large.
The nomadic widow is by some odd fatality generally the widow of an officer, naval or military, to whose rank she attaches an almost superst.i.tious value, thinking that when she can announce herself as the relict of a major or an admiral she has given an unanswerable guarantee and smoothed away all difficulties. She may have many daughters, but more probably she has only one;--for where olive-branches abound nomadism is more expensive than housekeeping, and to live in one's own house is less costly than to live in a boarding-house. But of this one daughter the nomadic widow makes much to the community; and especially calls attention to her simplicity and absolute ignorance of the evils so familiar to the girls of the present day. And she looks as if she expects to be believed. Perhaps credence is difficult; the young lady in question having been for some years considerably in public, where she has learnt to take care of herself with a skill which, how much soever it may be deserving of praise, can scarcely claim to be called ingenuous. She has need of this skill; for, apparently, she and her mother have no male relations belonging to them, and if flirtations are common with the nomadic tribe, marriages are rare. Poor souls; one cannot but pity them for all their labour in vain, all their abortive hopes. For though there is more society in the mode of life they have chosen than they would have had if they had lived quietly down in the village where they were known and respected, and where, who knows? the fairy prince might one day have alighted--there are very few chances; and marriages among 'the inmates' are as rare as winter swallows.
The men who live in these places, whether as nomadic or permanent guests, never have money enough to marry on; and the flirtations always budding and blossoming by the piano or about the billiard-table never by any chance fructify in marriage. But in spite of their infertile experience you see the same mother and the same daughter year after year, season after season, returning to the charge with renewed vigour, and a hope which is the one indestructible thing about them. Let us deal tenderly with them, poor impecunious nomads; drifting like so much sea-wrack along the restless current of life; and wish them some safe resting-place before it is too late.
A lady nomad of this kind, especially one with a daughter, is strictly orthodox and cultivates with praiseworthy perseverance the society of any clergyman who may have wandered into the community of which she is a member. She is punctual in church-going; and the minister is flattered by her evident appreciation of his sermons, and the readiness with which she can remember certain points of last Sunday's discourse. As a rule she is Evangelically inclined, and is as intolerant of Romanism on the one hand as of Rationalism on the other.
She has seen the evils of both, she says, and quotes the state of Rome and of Heidelberg in confirmation. She is as strict in morals as in orthodoxy, and no woman who has got herself talked about, however innocently, need hope for much mercy at her hands. Her Rhadamanthine faculty has apparently ample occasion for exercise, for her list of scandalous chronicles is extensive; and if she is to be believed, she and her daughter are almost the sole examples of a pure and untainted womanhood afloat. She is as rigid too, in all matters connected with her social status; and brings up her daughter in the same way of thinking. By virtue of the admiral or the major, at peace in his grave, they are emphatically ladies; and, though nomadic, impecunious, homeless, and _tant soit peu_ adventuresses, they cla.s.s themselves as of the cream of the cream, and despise those whose rank is of the uncovenanted kind, and who are gentry, may be, by the grace of G.o.d only without any Act of Parliament to help.
Sometimes the lady nomad is a spinster, not necessarily _pa.s.see_, though obviously she cannot be in her first youth; still she may be young enough to be attractive, and adventurous enough to care to attract. Women of this kind, unmarried, nomadic and still young, work themselves into every movement afoot. They even face the perils and discomforts of war-time, and tell their friends at home that they are going out as nurses to the wounded. That dash of the adventuress, of which we have spoken before, runs through all this section of the social nomads; and one wonders why some uncle or cousin, some aunt or family friend, does not catch them up in time.
If not attractive nor pa.s.sably young, these nomadic spinsters are sure to be exceedingly odd. Constant friction with society in its most selfish form, the absence of home-duties, the want of the sweetness and sincerity of home love, and the habit of change, bring out all that is worst in them and kill all that is best. They have nothing to hope for from society and less to lose; it is wearisome to look amiable and sweet-tempered when you feel bitter and disappointed; and politeness is a farce where the fact of the day is a fight. So the nomadic spinster who has lived so long in this rootless way that she has ceased even to make such fleeting friends.h.i.+ps as the mode of life affords--has ceased even to wear the transparent mark of such thin politeness as is required--becomes a 'character' notorious in proportion to her candour. She never stays long in one establishment, and generally leaves abruptly because of a misunderstanding with some other lady, or maybe because some gentleman has unwittingly affronted her. She and the officer's widow are always on peculiarly unfriendly terms, for she resents the pretensions of the officer's daughter, and calls her a bold minx or a sly puss almost within hearing; while she throws grave doubts on the widow herself, and drops hints which the rest of the community gather up like manna, and keep by them, to much the same result as that of the wilderness. But the nomadic spinster soon wanders away to another temporary resting-place; and before half her life is done she becomes as well known to the heads of the various establishments in her line as the taxgatherer himself, and dreaded almost as much.
Nomads are generally remarkable for not leaving tracks behind them.
You see them here and there, and they are sure to turn up at Baden-Baden or at Vichy, at Scarborough or at Dieppe, when you least expect them; but you know nothing about them in the interim. They are like those birds which hybernate at some place of retreat no one yet ever found; or like those which migrate, who can tell where? They come and they go. You meet and part and meet again in all manner of unlikely places; and it seems to you that they have been over half the world since you last met, you meanwhile having settled quietly to your work, save for your summer holiday which you are now taking, and which you are enjoying as the nomad cannot enjoy any change that falls to his lot. He is sated with change; wearied of novelty; yet unable to fix himself, however much he may wish it. He has got into the habit of change; and the habit clings even when the desire has gone. Always hoping to be at rest, always intending to settle as years flow on, he never finds the exact place to suit him; only when he feels the end approaching, and by reason of old age and infirmity is a nuisance in the community where formerly he was an acquisition, and where too all that once gave him pleasure has now become an insupportable burden and weariness--only then does he creep away into some obscure and lonely lodging, where he drags out his remaining days alone, and dies without the touch of one loved hand to smooth his pillow, without the sound of one dear voice to whisper to him courage, farewell, and hope. The home he did not plant when he might is impossible to him now, and there is no love that endures if there is no home in which to keep it. And so all the cla.s.s of social nomads find when dark days are on them, and society, which cares only to be amused, deserts them in their hour of greatest need.
_GREAT GIRLS._
Nothing is more distinctive among women than the difference of relative age to be found between them. Two women of the same number of years will be substantially of different epochs of life--the one faded in person, wearied in mind, fossilized in sympathy; the other fresh both in face and feeling, with sympathies as broad and keen as they were when she was in her first youth; with a brain still as receptive, as quick to learn, a temper still as easy to be amused, as ready to love, as when she emerged from the school-room to the drawing-room.
The one you suspect of understating her age by half-a-dozen years or more when she tells you she is not over forty; the other makes you wonder if she has not overstated hers by just so much when she laughingly confesses to the same age. The one is an old woman who seems as if she had never been young, the other 'just a great girl yet,' who seems as if she would never grow old; and nothing is equal between them but the number of days each has lived.
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