To myself I could be articulate enough about it. Indeed, I held long
conversations about it, mainly in the darkness of the night, with my
bolder self, who advised me so cleverly and who told me all the
tactful things and all the forceful things that I ought on occasion to
say. Then there came, with that other self, a conversation which
settled things. It went something in this way:
"You have let things go far enough."
"Yes," I admitted guiltily, "I know it."
"It's time you took a stand."
"I know it," I again admitted forlornly.
"Why don't you do it then?" sternly asked the bolder self. He could
afford to be bold, it wasn't he who had the talking to do. "Why don't
you explain to Felicia the way you feel about it and how it looks and
all about it----"
This time it was myself who grew bold. I said:
"You great ass! Do you think I'm going to let you make me make Felicia
cry?"
"Better have her cry," grumbled the other self, "than let her expose
herself unthinking to--well, all sorts of things." (One would have
thought to hear him that Monty Saunders was the measles!)
We were silent a while, and in my imagination I saw again the
distressing spectacle of Felicia weeping. I suppose there is no man
who has been married a year who has not made his Felicia cry.
You cannot explain how the terrible thing came about. It may be you
had a moment of surface impatience. Generally it's something less
definite than that--a bit of chaff at an untimely moment, an
indiscreet question put forth in a spirit of the friendliest
curiosity.
"Why," for instance you may have said, "isn't dinner ready?"
You didn't mind its not being ready in the least, but, not being used
to having dinners of your own, you were amused and interested to know
the cause of its lateness. And there before your eyes the unbelievable
has happened, Felicia is in tears, and it is your fault.
You are like a landsman who has pulled an innocent-looking plug out of
the bottom of a boat and sees it fill and founder before his eyes; you
feel like a man who lights a match and lo! his house is in flames;
with such horror and bewilderment does the sight of a weeping Felicia
fill you. Guilt and bewilderment struggle with one another, as her
mouth quivers pitifully and her eyes fill with slow tears. She turns
away to battle with them, and, instead of holding your tongue, you
choose from among all the silly, inadequate things there are in the
world to say, "What's the matter, dear?"
"I--I--left--a book in--my room," answers Felicia, and she pushes past
you and goes out of the door, and, though you don't know it at the
time, she is as bewildered as you are.
You walk up and down the floor two or three times, you open the door
and shut it, finally you can't stand it any longer, you must find out
how Felicia does. You go up to your room, and there on the bed is what
is left of the gallant, saucy Felicia you know. It is a crumpled
little heap, and you can see only a knot of disordered hair and
shaking shoulders, and as if this wasn't bad enough, there is added
the sound of muffled sobs. You go up to her and put a beseeching hand
on her shoulder.
"Felicia," you implore. Then from the depths of the pillow come the
broken words:
"Go--away--go--away--and--leave--me--alone." Nor is the tone all
anguish, anger finds its place there as well, and this bewilders you
still more. You could not know, of course, that Felicia is angry at
you for having seen her cry.
"I can't go away and leave you like this," you say.
The shoulders shake still harder, the sobs are louder, for sympathy is
hard to bear in such moments of humiliation--but this too you find out
later.
You walk across the room, helplessly, hopelessly. You murmur forth
apologies, though you don't know for what you are apologizing, and
words of endearment and of sympathy, though you can't tell what it is
you are sympathetic about. You would do anything, abase yourself to
any degree, to stop the noise of sobbing which is slowly sapping your
manhood.
You stand looking down on poor Felicia--what _is_ the matter with her?
What has happened?
"I don't believe you can be well, my darling," you are fool enough to
say. Inside you your other self is grumbling:
"Well, I'm hanged if _I_ understand women!"
If only she would stop; she must have been crying ten minutes, and you
have aged years. If only you understood why, how much easier it would
be! The only thing you do understand is that whatever you say and
whatever you do, or whether it's sympathy or silence, it's wrong.
There is a knock on the door.
"Dinner is served," says a voice, and you (feeling like a quitter, but
you can't stand the sight of her any longer) say:
"Felicia, I'm going down. I don't seem to be doing you any good----"
Felicia raises her head.
"You're not!" says she spitefully. They're the first words she has
spoken since she pleaded with you in agonized tones to "let her be."
Then, as you sit down to the mockery of oysters and soup, anger rises
in you. What creatures women are! Hasn't a man a right to ask why
dinner isn't ready in his own house without the sky falling? You look
at your watch; more than half an hour late. Well, why wasn't it ready?
Why? When a man comes home tired from the office, he has a right to
expect his dinner to be ready. Yes, by Jove! and a right to ask "Why?"
and a right, too, to expect a cheerful, pleasant wife! What struck
Felicia, anyway? and in spite of your anger, pity sweeps over you for
poor little Felicia crying upstairs, and you rise and go to the door,
angry and distressed, while your inner self tells you pity is unmanly.
You feel abused and bruised; how scenes take it out of one, you think
resentfully, and just here you pause, for there are footsteps on the
stairs. It can't be Felicia, you think. But it is Felicia, who comes
into the room, beautifully dressed. Why, she must have got up and
dressed, tears and all, the instant you left the room! She comes in
gallantly, carrying the powder on her nose with effrontery, denying
her eyes, which still show the ravages of tears, by the gay smile on
her lips; and as dinner progresses, excellent, and with Felicia all as
natural and gay as possible, you wonder more than ever what the devil
it was all about anyway. But at night, as you ponder it over again,
you get a certain blurred vision of what it meant. You are too young
in marriage to put it into words, but you have an intuition that
marriage, after all, is a very new country for Felicia, full of a
thousand details you know nothing about, whose A, B, C she must learn
slowly and painfully--and all alone, there is no one to help her. You
can't. She's got to grape her way about by herself in this unfamiliar
land. All you can do is to be very, very considerate and very, very
careful not to make her cry.
But hang it all, if she's going to cry every time you ask if dinner is
ready, how are you going to help making her? And all at once the
vision of how careful you have got to be makes you feel bowed down
with care. You will never, you are sure, speak another natural word in
her presence. Who would have believed she would cry so easily? How
awful to consider you made her! Then you hear Felicia give a little
breath of a sigh, like a child which has sobbed itself to sleep.
"Felicia," you say impulsively, "I was a brute."
"I was a goose," she protests, "an awful little goose," and deep down
in your heart you agree with her, though you declare again it was your
fault, and you have an uneasy feeling that she is at one with you
about your being a brute, and you fall asleep at last thinking that
things never again can have the same glamour between you two, that
somehow Felicia's tears have cried away the bloom of marriage. But in
the morning you wake up and wonder what it was you thought had
happened, for nothing has--things haven't changed. You merely resolve
that you will try to understand, mere man that you are, the finer
creature the Lord has trusted you with. But oh, why can't women be
reasonable?
* * * * *
This scene flitted through my mind as the silence fell between my two
selves; the other one of me brooded over my inertia in the matter in
hand. At last he broke the silence and my awful vision of Felicia in
tears with:
"A man ought, you know, to look after his young wife. He shouldn't let
her make herself conspicuous with men, especially with a silly young
ass. It isn't being jealous," he concluded virtuously.
"Oh, no, we're not jealous," I agreed eagerly.
"You must speak to her."
"I can't."
"Why?" he demanded. And then it came out. Why? It had been staring me
in the face all along. I had known why, but I had shirked, as long as
I could, putting my confession of weakness into words. If I had never
seen Felicia cry, it would have been different. I might have talked
to her as man to man, but now:
"I can't, because it's impossible for me to interfere with Felicia."
I told him. There it was. It was constitutionally impossible for me to
interfere, in words anyway. It was like a sense lacking, but there
where my Felicia-preventing faculties should have been there was a
blank.
"Do you mean you would let her do anything?"
"Anything," I assented.
"Let her drift from you and not reach out your hand for her?"
"I couldn't raise my hand," I confessed sadly. There it was. I
couldn't do the disagreeable task known as "bringing her to her
senses." If Felicia couldn't feel that I didn't like what she did, I
couldn't, for the life of me, or even the life of Felicia, open my
mouth. And I believe there are a great many men like me in the world,
and more women, too. A certain kind of pain makes us dumb. A certain
pride freezes back the words that would come. The men of us have
perhaps seen our Felicias cry. And there's no use saying afterwards,
Why didn't you tell me? What, after all, is the use of words, when
it's written all over you in the very set of your coat that you're
hurt?
So now it was all settled. There was no use in my lying awake at night
any longer while my other self tickled his vanity by making up
admonitory conversations with Felicia, that went this way:
"Felicia," I was to say tenderly yet seriously, "I have something I
want to talk over with you."
Felicia would be impressed by my manner, and even a little frightened,
and she would murmur:
"Yes?" expectantly, meekly.
"Felicia," I was to continue, "I do not want you to think I am blaming
you. I am blaming myself for letting things go so far, for not
explaining things to you before; you are young, you do not understand
the world."
"That is true," Felicia would reply with adorable meekness, as she
lifted questioning eyes to mine. Then I was to sit down beside her and
taking both her hands in mine:
"Dear," I was to continue, "when a young girl has received as much
attention as you have, it is natural for her to imagine that after she
is married men can go on courting her as they did before. But this is
not true. A man's devotion, especially the devotion of an insolent,
useless pup of a young ass like Saunders" (it slipped out in spite of
ourselves, and we put the blue pencil through it, supplying "a fellow
like Saunders") "has a very different meaning when given to a young
girl than to a young married woman. You do not dream this, I know. I
have every confidence in you, dear, and I am speaking now purely to
save you from an unpleasant scene as well as to stop malicious
tongues."
At this Felicia would keep silent, contemplating the abyss pointed out
to her. Indeed, my words have so impressed her that my heart smites
me, but better she should learn from me than in some other way.
"May a married woman have no friends then?" she cries at last.
"All she likes of _friends_," I am to say with a touch of severity.
"But she should take care not to make herself conspicuous with any one
man. For you know, Felicia, you have been making yourself conspicuous.
At the Jarvis week-end party you talked to no one else; last night you
sat an hour in a secluded corner with him. You walk with him, and he
sends you violets. I have no feeling about Saunders, of course. I
merely see these things as the world sees them. Only I know how
innocent you are, that you are accepting these attentions as simply as
you would have before you were married, but, O Felicia, the world does
not know that! Already they are putting you down as a married flirt;
already they are wondering what I am about to let things go on so, and
as for Saunders, his attentions to you are an insult."
"You should have told me before," Felicia murmurs. "You should have
told me!"
Just then the maid would of course bring a card. Felicia would glance
at it, her brows arch themselves with displeasure.
"Tell Mr. Saunders I am not at home," she would say haughtily.
You see, according to that other self, it was all as easy as rolling
off a log. The trouble with him is that he has no practical knowledge
of the world; but at the moment of telling, he would put the glamour
of his ideas over me. It seemed too seductively easy, and it was hard
for me to point out to him that, excellent and satisfactory as this
conversation was, it had the fatal defect of not being the way Felicia
and I talked. This didn't impress him at all; he merely invented
another conversation which didn't put Felicia in nearly as pleasing a
light, but gave me scope for firmness and dignity. I appeared really
very well in the face of her perverseness. Proud of myself, I was to
end by saying, without anger, but with decision:
"And, Felicia, if you can find no way of stopping this objectionable
young man's attentions, I _can_!"
Now all these pleasant plays of fancy were ended forever by my
acknowledging my weakness.
Felicia is fond of saying, "Men differ, but all husbands are alike." I
think she believes this to be an epigram. But O, Felicia, all husbands
are not alike; there are those who can take care of their wives, and
those who can't,--those who can say the word in time, and those who
must sit back weakly silent, morosely sucking their paws while their
wives burn their fingers.
Well, after all, I thought, perhaps it was better so. There would be
negative benefits. This way, at least, I shouldn't make Felicia cry. I
wouldn't say anything I should be sorry for afterwards, if I said
nothing. I had only to sit pusillanimously quiet until Saunders was
guilty of some impertinence, then there would be no more Saunders. I
ground my teeth and thanked God I was not jealous.
But I was soon undeceived if I thought that things were going along as
they had been. First there came a little, tiny, malformed, wordless
doubt, which I strangled as it was born; then a suspicion I wouldn't
see. I closed my eyes. In my loyalty I lied even to myself, but my
bolder self in his inexorable fashion made me look at it at last.
"Felicia," he asserted, "is keeping something from you. Felicia is
unhappy about something."
It was true, I couldn't deny it, I had ever so many proofs:
(1) I had caught Felicia watching me with melancholy, speculative
eyes. When I asked her what was the matter, she replied "Nothing."
(2) She had bursts of feverish unnatural gaiety.
(3) She didn't look well.
(4) Several times she started to tell me something, but decided not
to.
(5) She had moments of unwonted affection for me, I thought, as if she
were trying to make up to me for something.
Then came, more serious and more conclusive than anything else:
(6) I waked up in the night and was sure I heard Felicia crying softly
and cautiously. As I moved, the sobs stopped and Felicia feigned a
deep sleep.
So for a week a secret walked between us. We put out our hands toward
each other, and its invisible presence kept them from meeting. We felt
the constraint as of a third person always with us, and that third
person was the Secret. We asked mute, unintelligible questions of each
other.
A less subtle mind than my own would have put it crudely that things
were strained and uncomfortable at home.
Meantime, if the Secret sneaked around us, silent, malignant,
invisible, Monty Saunders, for this was his horrid name, was obvious
in every way. It seemed to me that his loud laugh rang perpetually
through my house, that Felicia was always coming in or going out with
him, that wherever we went he was already waiting for us, and that all
the time he was engaged in eating up our happiness, Felicia's and
mine, as fast as ever he could.
I believe now that his ubiquitousness was partly due to my excited
imagination.
This, as I have said, was the situation for one week after I had
acknowledged my Constitutional Inability to Interfere--and on the
eighth evening Felicia and I were to go to a large studio dance. I
dressed with all the groans common, I believe, to the male animal out
of temper. I interspersed my dressing with such remarks as:
"Felicia, I wish you would have them change the laundry man, this
waistcoat's beastly."
I spoiled three ties in tying, I was sceptical of my clothes having
been pressed, while Felicia proceeded unerringly, even with a certain
pleasure, through the intricacies of her own toilet, looking more
disturbingly lovely every minute.
Finally she remarked contemplatively:
"How do you suppose you ever got dressed in time for anything before
you were married?" which was insulting, for I had only asked where two
things were.
She put her head back through the door to say to me with an
impertinent grin:
"Your hat, you know, is in its box on the shelf where it always is,"
and she looked so pretty that an unreasonable desire arose in me to
kill Monty Saunders, and I thought how terrible it must be to feel
jealous, if one could feel as I did when one was only sore and sorry.
I mention this episode only to throw in greater relief what happened
later that evening.
For later that evening a gay little person in fluffy green clothes
danced inside the circles of our lives, and before she passed out she
had cleared up the mist which encompassed us, unloosed my tongue, and
softened Felicia's heart, and all without being so much as aware of
our existence.
Felicia and Lydia Massingbyrd and Cecilia Bennett and I were all
sitting together on a commodious window-seat watching the dancers. It
was significant of the uncomfortable state of our affairs that Felicia
and I only recovered our gaiety and our naturalness toward each other
when we had some one to serve as buffer between us; I was talking and
laughing with the best, while deep down within me my other self
gloomed, fairly smacking his lips over his dismalness, "How little do
Felicia and Lydia dream of the trouble gnawing our vitals," when out
of the midst of our chaff and gossip popped a word that hit me square
in the solar plexus.
"Look," said Lydia, "how well the little woman in green dances. She
has danced all the evening with the same man." And my little fairy
godmother in fluffy green flew past us, as gay and young and happy a
little person as I had seen in a month of Sundays. She was so buoyant
and pretty that she did one good to see, and my foolish inner self had
made a romance about her and the good-looking young fellow, her
partner of a whole evening, before little Cecilia Bennett had time to
say primly:
"That is Mrs. So-and-So."
"And that is not, I take it, Mr. So-and-So?" Lydia remarked.
"Mr. So-and-So is the big, red-haired man talking with the woman in
white lace," replied Cecilia, while disapproval fairly oozed from
her.
"So there you are, and every one is satisfied," Lydia brushed it aside
lightly.
"That is how we look to outsiders!" croaked my other self.
Then little Cecilia Bennett piped up virtuously, "Even if I didn't
love my wife any longer, I should look after her! Until I was engaged,
I was _never_ allowed to dance a whole evening with one man----"
And as we laughed, she went on with some warmth:
"I don't care, I think a man ought to take care of his wife; don't
you, Felicia?"
"And a little child shall lead us," sententiously remarked my inner
self. But Felicia only said flippantly:
"If I acted badly, I should expect to be beaten."
"Well," said Cecilia, also flippantly, following with disapproving
eyes the little person in green, who danced happily by us (it is
Cecilia's first season, and such spectacles make her cynical), "Bobby
will never beat you, Felicia, however much you need it. Bobby's too
kind. He would not even have beaten Lydia!"
"Wouldn't you beat me, no matter what I did?" Felicia appealed to me.
Then for one second my heart stopped and then raced on again, for the
fantastic explanation of her question that came to me was that this
was one of the things she had been trying to ask me; that perhaps she
had wanted me to beat her and storm and take on, and that I had failed
her.
"No, Felicia," I replied sadly, "I shall never beat you." I thought
she looked disappointed. I wondered if I had really found a light in
the darkness that had surrounded us.
Meantime the little lady and her companion had sat down, and in that
crowded place they were talking as eagerly and unconsciously as if
they had been all alone in the Garden of Eden.
"I hate an ostrich," remarked Lydia.
"Her husband doesn't see her, anyway," said Felicia lightly; but there
was an edge of bitterness in her voice; and again I wondered if
through all our meaningless talk Felicia was signalling to me in a
cipher code of her own invention.
"Perhaps he does see just the same, perhaps he cares, and can't find
the words to tell her in," I ventured.
"She may," Felicia speculated, "be keeping on and on, just waiting
for the word from him. She may not be able to stop all by herself--she
may have no way of stopping herself." The corners of her mouth
drooped. I felt she had told me all--everything that had saddened
her, all the things she had tried to say and couldn't. For few of us
can stop all of ourselves, there must be some warning voice to call
"halt" to each of us, and I had been leaving it to Monty Saunders'
first impertinence. Now I had to tell her I was unable to do
anything else.
"He may have tried and tried to tell her and found that he couldn't.
He may have found he was constitutionally unable to interfere," I told
her.
"It seems so easy to me," Felicia murmured, "to say 'I'm jealous'--just
two little words like that----"
And the dull other fellow inside me had kept me awake nights inventing
long-winded lectures for me, when all I needed to say was two little
words. But a groan burst from him, and he made me say it.
"But, O Felicia," my unwilling lips repeated, "those two words are the
hardest words in the whole language." For by the light of Felicia's
words I had found him out, the hypocrite. He had been jealous all
along.
Felicia looked at me with curiosity.
"I suppose they would be hard words to say if one really felt them,"
she said comprehendingly.
"But I'm not jealous!" I longed to shout, but before we could say
anything further, Monty Saunders and a girl danced past us.
"So you brought it off?" said Lydia, looking after the receding pair.
"How did you know?" Felicia demanded.
"He told her," explained little Cecilia Bennett, "when Lydia asked him
how you could stand him around so much, he told her you were helping
him out with Mildred--telling him what to do and keeping his courage
up. He told me, too," pursued Cecilia, with the importance one
naturally feels when one is in the thick of the battle of life. "He
says it's awful to see a proposal before you, and the only way really
is to stumble on it before you know you've made up your mind."
"Poor boy," remarked Lydia. "I should find Mildred formidable myself.
Six feet and muscle!"
"Poor boy!" Felicia exclaimed resentfully. "Poor tattle-tale, going
around telling everybody when he made me promise not to tell a soul.
That's the last time I keep a secret."
That is all the others heard Felicia say, but to me her words meant
golden music, and they told me a hundred different things; they healed
my wounds, they dispelled the clouds from my soul; but, above all the
tumult of my heart, I shouted down to that stupid inner fellow words
of self-congratulation, of how well, how wisely, temperately, I had
acted throughout, and I thanked Heaven that I was constitutionally
unable to make a fool of myself, whatever evil counsellors lodged in
the house I call my "self." But, Felicia, a word from you would have
put forty hours more of sound sleep between me and old age! And what
business, after all, had Felicia "helping out" that silly boy? A
married woman has her home and her husband to think about--besides
Felicia is too pretty--and that I was right is abundantly shown by the
first thing Felicia said to me in the carriage.
"The idiot," she confessed, "told me before he went off to propose to
Mildred that he didn't care whether she accepted him or not!" And I
only held Felicia's hand very tight.
"I didn't think," Felicia went on in a wan little voice, "that you
cared."
There was something she wanted me to answer very much, and not being
quite sure what it was, I still kept silence--not wanting to say the
wrong thing.
"_I'm_ not proud anyway," she went on bravely. "Couldn't you say them
just once--the words that are so hard to say?"
"Oh, I was, Felicia," I cried, "awfully jealous!" And I knew, now that
it was all over, that I had never spoken a truer word. Felicia
breathed a long sigh.
"I hoped you were," she said.
"Couldn't you _see_?" I asked.
"Not until you told me," she answered, always in her meek little
voice, as meek and submissive as ever it was in the conversations I
invented. "I hoped you might be, but you never _said_ anything."
"There you are," said my other self, as smug and satisfied as if he
had done nothing but advise that all along, "there are some things you
have to tell women in words to make them happy--it won't do to act
them."
And for once I believe he was right.