I have said that the religion preached by Jesus (now wholly extinct in
the world) was highly favourable to women. This was not saying, of
course, that women have repaid the compliment by adopting it. They are,
in fact, indifferent Christians in the primitive sense, just as they
are bad Christians in the antagonistic modern sense, and particularly
on the side of ethics. If they actually accept the renunciations
commanded by the Sermon on the Mount, it is only in an effort to flout
their substance under cover of their appearance. No woman is really
humble; she is merely politic. No woman, with a free choice before her,
chooses self-immolation; the most she genuinely desires in that
direction is a spectacular martyrdom. No woman delights in poverty. No
woman yields when she can prevail. No woman is honestly meek.
In their practical ethics, indeed, women pay little heed to the
precepts of the Founder of Christianity, and the fact has passed into
proverb. Their gentleness, like the so-called honour of men, is visible
only in situations which offer them no menace. The moment a woman finds
herself confronted by an antagonist genuinely dangerous, either to her
own security or to the well-being of those under her protection—say a
child or a husband—she displays a bellicosity which stops at nothing,
however outrageous. In the courts of law one occasionally encounters a
male extremist who tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the
truth, even when it is against his cause, but no such woman has ever
been on view since the days of Justinian. It is, indeed, an axiom of
the bar that women invariably lie upon the stand, and the whole effort
of a barrister who has one for a client is devoted to keeping her
within bounds, that the obtuse suspicions of the male jury may not be
unduly aroused. Women litigants almost always win their cases, not, as
is commonly assumed, because the jurymen fall in love with them, but
simply and solely because they are clear-headed, resourceful,
implacable and without qualms.
What is here visible in the halls of justice, in the face of a vast
technical equipment for combating mendacity, is ten times more obvious
in freer fields. Any man who is so unfortunate as to have a serious
controversy with a woman, say in the departments of finance, theology
or amour, must inevitably carry away from it a sense of having passed
through a dangerous and almost gruesome experience. Women not only bite
in the clinches; they bite even in open fighting; they have a dental
reach, so to speak, of amazing length. No attack is so desperate that
they will not undertake it, once they are aroused; no device is so
unfair and horrifying that it stays them. In my early days, desiring to
improve my prose, I served for a year or so as reporter for a newspaper
in a police court, and during that time I heard perhaps four hundred
cases of so-called wife-beating. The husbands, in their defence, almost
invariably pleaded justification, and some of them told such tales of
studied atrocity at the domestic hearth, both psychic and physical,
that the learned magistrate discharged them with tears in his eyes and
the very catchpolls in the courtroom had to blow their noses. Many more
men than women go insane, and many more married men than single men.
The fact puzzles no one who has had the same opportunity that I had to
find out what goes on, year in and year out, behind the doors of
apparently happy homes. A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of
them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death
upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is
often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife
of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to
bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and
stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air
of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings
of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour—all these
things must revolt any woman above the lowest. To be the object of the
oafish affections of such a creature, even when they are honest and
profound, cannot be expected to give any genuine joy to a woman of
sense and refinement. His performance as a gallant, as Honor de Balzac
long ago observed, unescapably suggests a gorilla’s efforts to play the
violin. Women survive the tragicomedy only by dint of their great
capacity for play-acting. They are able to act so realistically that
often they deceive even themselves; the average woman’s contentment,
indeed, is no more than a tribute to her histrionism. But there must be
innumerable revolts in secret, even so, and one sometimes wonders that
so few women, with the thing so facile and so safe, poison their
husbands. Perhaps it is not quite as rare as vital statistics make it
out; the deathrate among husbands is very much higher than among wives.
More than once, indeed, I have gone to the funeral of an acquaintance
who died suddenly, and observed a curious glitter in the eyes of the
inconsolable widow.
Even in this age of emancipation, normal women have few serious
transactions in life save with their husbands and potential husbands;
the business of marriage is their dominant concern from adolescence to
senility. When they step outside their habitual circle they show the
same alert and eager wariness that they exhibit within it. A man who
has dealings with them must keep his wits about him, and even when he
is most cautious he is often flabbergasted by their sudden and
unconscionable forays. Whenever woman goes into trade she quickly gets
a reputation as a sharp trader. Every little town in America has its
Hetty Green, each sweating blood from turnips, each the terror of all
the male usurers of the neighbourhood. The man who tackles such an
amazon of barter takes his fortune into his hands; he has little more
chance of success against the feminine technique in business than he
has against the feminine technique in marriage. In both arenas the
advantage of women lies in their freedom from sentimentality. In
business they address themselves wholly to their own profit, and give
no thought whatever to the hopes, aspirations and amour propre of their
antagonists. And in the duel of sex they fence, not to make points, but
to disable and disarm. A man, when he succeeds in throwing off a woman
who has attempted to marry him, always carries away a maudlin sympathy
for her in her defeat and dismay. But no one ever heard of a woman who
pitied the poor fellow whose honest passion she had found it expedient
to spurn. On the contrary, women take delight in such clownish agonies,
and exhibit them proudly, and boast about them to other women.