"Because," said he, "I"m a man and not a mouse. Because I don"t want to be at the beck and call of every dog and devil that has a bit more money than I have--a man has got to be a man sometimes," he growled.
"Sure, you"re telling the truth," said his wife, nodding her head at him.
"A man should be a man sometimes. It"s the pity of the world that he can"t be a man always: and, indeed, it"s the hard thing for a woman to tell herself that the man she has got isn"t a man at all, but a big fool with no more wit than a boy."
Now this was the first time he had found his wife take trouble lying down. As a rule she was readier for a fight than he was. She jumped into a row with the alacrity of a dog: and the change worked on him. He looked at her listless hands, and the sight of those powerful organs hanging so powerlessly wrought on him. Women often forget that their weakness is really their strength. The weakest things in the world are by a queer paradox always the strongest. The toughest stone will wear away under the dropping of water, a mushroom will lift a rock on its delicate head, a child will make its father work for it. So the too capable woman will always have a baby to nurse, and that baby will be her husband. If she b.u.t.tress her womanhood too much she saps his manhood.
Let her love all she can and never stint that blessing, but a woman cannot often be obeyed and loved at the same time. A man cannot obey a woman constantly and retain his self-respect: the muscles of his arms reproach him if he does, and the man with his self-respect gone is a man with a grudge, he will learn to hate the agent who brought him low. A day may come when he will rise and beat her in self-defence, with his fists if he is sufficiently brutalised, some subtler, but no less efficient, weapon if his manhood refuses to be degraded--and this was our case. His wife had grabbed the reins and driven the matrimonial coach: driven it well, that is true, but the driver, by right of precedent, had sat by hurt and angry, and at last, in an endeavour to prove his manhood among men, he had d.a.m.ned his employer"s self and work, although in reality all his fury was directed against the mother of his children. He threw up his work, and the semi-conscious thought that went home with him was--"Now she will be sorry. If she must do everything let her earn the bread."
The woman knew what poverty meant, and she had four young children. It was the thought of these helpless ones crying with hunger (she could hear them already, her ears were dinned with their hungry lamentation) that took the fibre out of her arms, and left her without any fight. She could only sit and look with wretched eyes on the man whom she had been demoralising, and, for the first time since he knew her, the tears came, and the poor woman laid her head on the kitchen table and wept.
He was astonished, he was dismayed, but he could not stand her tears: he ran to her--the first time he ever did run to her--
"Sure, darling," said he, "is it crying you are? What would you be doing that for? If I"ve lost one job I can get another. I"m not afraid of work, and I know how to do it. I"ll get something to do at once, if it"s only wheeling a handcart, or selling c.o.c.kles in public-houses. Wisha, dry your eyes--they"re as pretty as they ever were," said he, trying to look at them, while his wife, with a strange shyness, would not let him see, for she felt that there was a strange man with her, some one she did not know. That was a man"s hand on her shoulder, and she had never felt a man"s hand before, as long as she was married.
"I"ll go out at once," said he, "and when I come in to-night I"ll have a job if I have to bang it out of some one with a shovel."
He slapped on his hat, kicked the soap out of the way, tramped through the water on the floor, and when at the door he turned again and came back to kiss his wife, a form of caress which had long fallen into desuetude, and so, out into the street, a man again.
When he had gone his wife returned to her scrubbing, and, as she worked she smiled at something she was remembering, and, now and again, a bit of a song came from lips that had scolded so much. Having finished her work she spent nearly an hour at the looking-gla.s.s doing up her hair (grand hair it was, too) with her ears listening for a footstep. Now and again she would run to the pot to see were the potatoes doing all right--"The children will be in shortly," said she, "and hungry to the bone, poor dears."
But she was not thinking of the children. The warmth of a kiss was still on her lips. Something in the back of her head was saying--"He will do it again when he comes in."
And the second honeymoon was pleasanter than the first.
III
She was tall and angular. Her hair was red, and scarce, and untidy.
Her hands were large and packed all over with knuckles and her feet would have turned inwards at the toes, only that she was aware of and corrected their perversities.
She was sitting all alone, and did not look up as I approached--
"Tell me," said I, "why you have sat for more than an hour with your eyes fixed on nothing, and your hands punching your lap?"
She looked at me for a fleeting instant, and then, looking away again, she began to speak.--Her voice was pleasant enough, but it was so strong that one fancied there were bones in it--
"I do not dislike women," said she, "but I think they seldom speak of anything worth listening to, nor do they often do anything worth looking at: they bore and depress me, and men do not."
"But," said I, "you have not explained why you thump your lap with your fist?"
She proceeded--
"I do not hate women, nor do I love men. It was only that I did not take much notice of the one, and that I liked being with the other, for, as things are, there is very little life for a person except in thinking. All our actions are so c.u.mbered by laws and customs that we cannot take a step beyond the ordinary without finding ourselves either in gaol or in Coventry."
Having said this, she raised her bleak head and stared like an eagle across the wastes.
After I had coughed twice I touched her arm, and said--
"Yes?"
"One must live," said she quickly. "I do not mean that we must eat and sleep--these mechanical matters are settled for many of us, but life consists in thinking, and nothing else, yet many people go from the cradle to the grave without having lived differently from animals. I do not want to be one of them. Their whole theory of life is mechanical. They eat and drink. They invite each other to their houses to eat and drink, and they use such speech as they are gifted with in discussing their food and whatever other palpable occurrence may have chanced to them in the day. It is a step, perhaps, towards living, but it is still only one step removed from stagnation. They have some interest in an occurrence, but how that occurrence happened, and what will result from it does not exercise them in the least, and these, which are knowledge and prophecy, are the only interesting aspects of any event."
"But," said I, "you have not told me why you sit for a full hour staring at vacancy, and thumping on your knee with your hand?"
She continued--.
"Sometimes one meets certain people who have sufficient of the divine ferment in their heads to be called alive: they are almost always men.
We fly to them as to our own people. We abase ourselves before them in happy humility. We crave to be allowed to live near them in order that we may be a.s.sured that everything in the world is not nonsense and machinery--and then, what do we find--?"
She paused, and turned a large fierce eye upon me.
"I do not know," said I, and I endeavoured vainly to look everywhere but at her eye.
"We find always that they are married," said she, and, saying so, she lapsed again to a tense and worried reflection.
"You have not told me," I insisted gently, "why you peer earnestly into s.p.a.ce, and thump at intervals upon your knee with the heel of your fist?"
"These men," said she sternly, "are surrounded by their wives. They are in gaol and their wives are their warders. You cannot go to them without a permit. You may not speak to them without a listener. You may not argue with them for fear of raising an alien and ridiculous hostility. Scarcely can you even look at them without reproach.--How then can we live, and how will the torch of life be kept alight?"
"I do not know," I murmured.
She turned her pale eye to me again.
"I am not beautiful," said she.
But there was just a tremor of doubt in her voice, so that the apparent statement became packed with curiosity, and had all the quality of a question.
I did not shrug my shoulder nor raise an eyebrow--
"You are very nice," I replied.
"I do not want to be beautiful," she continued severely. "Why should I? I have no interest in such things. I am interested only in living, and living is thinking; but I demand access to my fellows who are alive. Perhaps, I did not pay those others enough attention. How could I? They cannot think. They cannot speak. They make a complicated verbal noise, but all I am able to translate from it is, that a something called lip-salve can be bought in some particular shop one penny cheaper than it can in a certain other shop. They will twitter for hours about the way a piece of ribbon was st.i.tched to a hat which they saw in a tramcar. They agitate themselves wondering whether a m.u.f.f should be this size or that size?--I say, they depress me, and if I do turn my back on them when men are present I am only acting sensibly and justly. Why cannot they twitter to each other and let me and other people alone?"
She turned to me again--
"I do not know," said I meekly.
"And," she continued, "the power they have; the amazing power they have to annoy other folk. All kinds of sly impertinences, vulgar evasions, and sneering misunderstandings. Why should such women be allowed to take men into their captivity, to sequester, and gag, and restrain them from those whom they would naturally be eager to meet?
"What," she continued fiercely, "had my hat to do with that woman, or my frock?"
I nodded slowly and grievously, and repeated--
"What indeed?"
"A hat," said she, "is something to cover one"s head from the rain, and a frock is something to guard one"s limbs from inclement weather.--To that extent I am interested in these things: but they would put a hat on my mind, and a black cloth on my understanding."
We sat in silence for a little time, while she surveyed the bleak horizon as an eagle might.
"And when I call at their houses," said she, "their servants say "Not at home," a lie, you know, and they close their doors on me."