|PETER Struggles walked into his tobacconist’s and put his snuff-box on
the counter. There was no need to state his requirements; in fact, he
had not stated them for many years. Shopman and customer understood each
other very well, and business came first; then if there was inclination,
as there usually was, talk followed.
To-day, however, the shopman gaped at Peter in surprise, and made a
half-turn of his head, so that he could see his calendar Wednesday was
Peter’s day for buying snuff with a regularity to which time had given
the force of a tradition, and the tobacconist had even the habit of
using Peter’s visit as a reminder to a fallible memory that he must
wind his clock. The calendar continued him in his belief that to-day was
Thursday, and he felt sure that Peter had been in as usual on Wednesday.
Peter had. Snuffing, of course, is a wasteful habit in any case, and a
shaking hand misses the target more freely than a steady one; but, for
all that, Peter, in his mental anguish, had consumed in one night the
better part of his week’s supply of snuff. The box was indubitably
empty. He had not come to replenish it without some conscientious
qualms--an allowance is an allowance--but he felt that life which
comprised Ada in her present mood and did not comprise snuff, was beyond
bearing. Ada was, it seemed, inevitable: he must mitigate Ada.
“The usual, if you please, Thomas,” he unusually said.
“Yes, sir,” said Thomas, filling the box. “You’ve had a little
accident?”
“An accident? Oh!” Then the fitness of that guess struck him. “Yes,
Thomas, a little accident. By the way, do you know anything about
divorce?”
“Well, sir, I read the _Sunday Judge,_” Thomas replied deprecatingly.
“Very human subject, sir, divorce.”
“You find it so?”
“I take a lot of satisfaction in reading about my sinful
fellow-creatures.”
“Quite, quite,” said Peter vaguely, and went out of the shop, leaving a
puzzled salesman behind him. “Forgot to pay, and all,” thought Thomas.
“Not that I’d grudge it if he didn’t pay, only it’s not like him. He
looks sadly to day. The old boy’s breaking up. Him and divorce! What
does he want to worry his head about divorce for?”
Peter did not know that he had mentioned divorce, to his tobacconist.
It would have shocked him if he had known. He spoke unconsciously,
and listened mechanically to the man’s reply, but he was, harrowingly,
“worrying his head” about divorce. He took snuff in the street, an
unheard-of occurrence, but it did not clear his aching brain of the
fateful word “divorce.”
Ada had put it there too firmly in her stupid and invincible malignity.
She had one aim--to do Sam the greatest injury she could. His offence
was rank, and she demanded a proportionate revenge.
She had lived as a spinster for marriage and as a wife by marriage.
Marriage was not a duty, but a state of beatitude, and she had walked
in the faith of her grotesque illusion that her marriage was singularly
blessed. It was childless, and the more blessed for that: there were no
intruders on the perfect union of man and wife. It was illusion, and
a wilder perversion of the truth than the ordinary self-deceiver can
attain; but illusion is the breath of life, and she had fed on her
deception till, like a drug-taker, she could not live without it.
She had blazoned it abroad in a hundred drawing-rooms. If there were
low-voiced colloquies of this or that affair, if it was hinted that
men were faithless ever, Ada would grow superior and boast the flawless
rectitude of Sam. These were things which happened to other people, who
very likely deserved them, and could by no manner of means occur to her.
She was not so sunk in imbecility as to deny that they did happen, and
to people who were, nominally, married; but they were unsound people,
insecurely married. There was a fundamental difference between their
marriages and hers. She couldn’t explain; it was too obvious for
explanation. She was married, and these others, somehow, were married,
yet not married. They had, through lack of merit, stopped short of the
seventh paradise where nothing could shake consummate bliss. They were
not as she was.
And now she had to face the fact that the impossible had happened to
her, and not only had it happened, but was known to have happened. That
was where the blow struck home. She had publicly elaborated her case
of absolute conviction, she had vaunted his faithfulness, the cardinal
connubiality of Sam, and Miss Entwistle was spreading the news that she
had been a doting fool! And she hadn’t. She had not doted on Sam. She
had not been infatuated with her husband, but with the idea of her
husband which she had created and maintained. If only she had had the
gumption to defy Miss Entwistle! If only she had concealed her belief
in the story as successfully as she had hidden the fact that Sam had
a separate room! She had been taken by surprise, she had admitted
everything by default, and, worse, she had assured Mrs. Grandage that
she would never see Sam again. She did not doubt, in spite of Mrs.
Grandage’s good-nature, that this little sequel to the story of Miss
Entwistle was in rapid circulation.
She was humiliated publicly, and, as she saw it, the one course open to
her was to make Sam suffer a humiliation as drastic and as public as her
own. Though it hurt her, he must pay for it; though she died, he must
be punished and, sincerely, she expected it to kill her. She lived in a
garden of lies, and life without the illusion of her marriage would be
as impossible as life without the fragrance of her poisonous flowers to
Rappaccini’s daughter, but no matter for that. Ada must be revenged,
and divorce, though it killed her, would be the greatest injury that she
could do a politician and a pietistic publisher. She managed to square
the circle, too. She was to die and make a murderer of him; she was to
ruin his business and make a bankrupt of him; and at the same time
she was to have the compensation of a handsome alimony. But perhaps
vengeance is always irrational, and that is why it belongs to God.
She dinned her word into Peter’s ears with the merciless reiteration
of a hurt and howling child. It was her first word and her last, and
appeals based on religion shattered themselves against it as fruitlessly
as the appeal to reason. What she had said she had said: and she had
said “Divorce.” Alternatives did not exist.
For Peter, divorce ranged itself with the abominations of the world,
a man-made legal subterfuge to evade the law of God. There might,
conceivably, be occasions when divorce was to be condoned as the
comparatively little wrong which did a great right, and he tried very
honestly to see Ada’s as one of those heroic needs. He failed: he could
not even see that Ada was hurt in soul, or in anything but pride. She
was in a mood, not of spiritual revolt, but of peevish discontent.
Small wonder that he snuffed prodigiously that night. He had his meed
of suffering, and overcharged his small account with dreadful
self-reproach. He, not Ada, and not Sam, was responsible for her
violence and for the cause of it; he and the books upon his shelves;
reading, his darling sin. He blamed himself for consenting too readily
to their marriage. Sam, he had thought, would lead Ada: on what grounds
had he thought it? What had he known of Sam’s leadership--a prolix,
fluent boy at the Concentrics? He had exchanged his daughter for
peaceful, solitary evenings with his books--“Self-seeker!” he
thought--and the exchange was to recoil upon him now. He had abandoned,
after one harsh, undaughterly repulse, his attempt to show her that
wearing a wedding ring was not the whole duty of woman--“The sin of
Pride,” he thought--and had returned to browse amongst his books. Sam
seemed a good fellow, too. There were those Classics, and the texts, and
the prosperous old age of Mr. Carter, who, but for Sam, would certainly
have ended his days in the workhouse. But, failing with Ada, he ought to
have appealed to Sam.... Yes, he ought to have taken a strong line with
Sam, instead of letting Sam’s worldly success dazzle him. Sam had seemed
too big for Peter Struggles to grapple with--the sin of cowardice.
Now it had come to this! Sam had broken the seventh commandment, and Ada
wished to forget the words which Peter had read over them when he
joined their right hands together, and said, “Those whom God hath joined
together, let no man put asunder.” She commanded a divorce, and it was
useless for Peter to insist, out of his small store of worldly wisdom,
that divorce was not hers to command. Sam had not been “cruel.”
Her fury only doubled. Gone, vanished like the snows of long ago, was
her painted idyll of domestic bliss.
“Cruel?” she said. “He’s never been anything but cruel. I’m black and
blue with his atrocities.”
Very gently he tried to tell her that he did not believe it. “We must
not exaggerate,” he said.
“Exaggerate!” she blazed. “Won’t you believe me till you see it? I’ll go
upstairs and strip. Come when I call.”
He soothed her down at that, seeing that she was capable of doing
herself some signal injury to call in evidence.
“Well, then,” she said, “I want my divorce: get me a divorce.” That was
her simple demand of the priest who married her: it was why Peter took,
unrepentantly, as much snuff in a night as he commonly took in a week,
and why, with replenished stock, he continued next day to take snuff
with a lavish hand.
It irritated Ada, though she had always associated Peter with a
snuff-box, and the untidiness of the habit could not offend her, who
was never offended by dirt, as any mechanical movement in another will
irritate one whose nerves are ill-controlled. They had talked themselves
to a standstill, and sat in moody silence, broken only by the deplorable
sound of taking snuff.
She looked viciously at him. “If you do that again, I shall leave the
room,” she said.
“I’m sorry, my dear,” he said, although, really, it was a pleasant
threat; but when he did it again, it was through pure absent-mindedness,
and he was terribly distressed at his selfishness when Ada flung out
of the room. He had the feelings of a child put in a corner as a
punishment, and to relieve them he took snuff again. She heard him from
the stair, and heard him immediately afterwards poking the fire; and she
thought the loathsome self-absorption of men and their utter callousness
to the anguish of sensitive women were proved beyond the possibility
of doubt. She threw herself on the bed in her old room, alone in a
friendless world.... The bed had a warm eiderdown.
Peter poked the fire because it needed poking. It often did. The grate
was one of those labour-making contrivances which must be periodically
cleared of ash if the fire is to burn at all, and it was rarely cleared.
The woman who “did for” Peter, did for him badly, and he was at the age
when a man needs artificial warmth: a gaunt, shrunk figure as neglected
as his house. Small wonder that, apart from his attachment to St.
Mary’s, he was still a curate. They had considered him for the living
when his vicar moved some years ago, they had considered the little
circle of rich parishioners who made an oasis of civilization in that
savage place, and they had decided that Peter lacked the social graces.
They had seen his mittens, his unfinished coat... they had seen him eat
an orange: and he remained a curate.
The fire was gone beyond the reach of his unscientific poking. That,
too, often happened with a man who had the habit of standing by his
bookshelf reading gluttonously, with his austere person frozen into a
grotesque attitude, some book which he had not the patience to carry to
the fireside: and he was now upon his knees making pathetically clumsy
efforts to revitalize the flame when his inefficient housekeeper opened
the door and showed Anne into the room.
It eased the situation for them both. Anne indeed, was nervous, so
nervous that she had walked three times past the door before she pulled
the bell. She had a befitting awe of the priest, and a tremendous
respect for the man. At Effie’s, because the circumstances there were
tense, it had seemed an easy thing to come to Peter’s, but she had
needed to call on her reserves of courage to keep her place on the
doorstep after she had rung the bell.
Now, however, when she came into the room and saw what he was at, she
pushed him gently aside, and took the poker from his hand. She nursed
the fire skilfully; she was with familiar things which gave her back her
confidence.
As to the trouble, she diagnosed it in a moment. “That woman of yours is
a slut,” she said. “And I’ll talk to her before I go. I reckon I’ve the
right, me and you being connections by marriage.”
She looked at him over her shoulder, and saw that he did not recognize
her. How, indeed, should he? She had avoided Ada’s wedding, and she was
one of a large flock: a face, perhaps, but not a name to him. “I’m Anne
Branstone,” she explained. “Sam’s mother; and I’ll not have you blaming
Sam for this.”
“For the fire?” asked Peter vaguely, he was rather muddled by her brisk
incursion.
“No,” said Anne, almost gaily; “for the fat that’s in the fire.”
She thought she had his measure now--the sort of a man who could live
in a dirty room like this, with a choked ash-pan and fire-irons with the
rust thick on them. But Peter was greater than that. She judged him by
those of his surroundings which had significance for her, and not by
books which expressed everything for him and nothing for her.
“Mrs. Branstone!” he said, as if realizing now with whom he had to deal.
“Sam’s mother,” she repeated, rising from a healthy fire; “and I’ve told
you where not to put the blame. You can, maybe, think yourself of the
right place to put it.”
“Yes,” he surprised her by saying; “on me.”
“You! Oh, if you want to go to the back of behind, you can blame Adam
and Eve. But that’s not what I meant.”
“On me,” he said again. “I consented to this marriage. I sanctioned it.”
“Well,” said Anne, “I’ve not come here to crow, but I’ve the advantage
of you in that. I did not consent,” and her eye strayed involuntarily
to a scar on her hand, memorial of the form of her dissent. “I didn’t
consent because I knew they weren’t in love. I told Sam I knew it.”
“Then,” said Peter, “you are worthier than I am, Mrs. Branstone.”
“Because I knew love matters? There’s nowt so wonderful in knowing that,
and nowt so crafty in foreseeing that a marriage where there is no love
is marred from start to finish.”
“Love matters,” he agreed. “It matters all, for God is love.”
“We’ll come to an agreement, you and me,” she said appreciatively.
“We’ve the same mind about the root of things.”
“This is a terrible business, Mrs. Branstone.”
“I’m none denying it. It’s a terrible thing for a man and wife to live
together when love’s not a lodger in the house; it’s wrong, and the
worst of wrong is that it won’t stay single. Wrong’s got to breed. But,
there,” she finished briskly, “I’m telling you what you know, and when
all’s said, there’s nowt so bad that it’s past mending.”
“Ada wants a divorce,” said Peter, and a sudden glint of triumph came
into Anne’s eye, only to vanish as quickly as it came. She had said,
without believing it, that Ada might make arrangements, and this was to
arrange indeed. It unmade the hollow marriage, it was a solution which
really solved, it was a clean cut; and she wanted to glorify Ada, who
was proving at the eleventh hour that she had the saving grace of common
sense.
Peter did a curious thing. He rose and took a book haphazard from his
shelf, came back to his chair and opened the book. He did not read it,
and he was not being rude, but this was an agitation beyond the reach of
snuff. He tried to calm himself by resting his eyes on print.
Anne was not practised in the ways of bookish men, but, by strange
insight, understood that Peter had gone to a book much as she went to
his grate, to be soothed by its familiarity, and her rejoicing at his
words came to an abrupt end. His action brought home to her, more than
his horror-struck tone, whose significance she almost missed in her joy
at Ada’s practical solution, his loathing of divorce: and it seemed to
her, quite suddenly, that what mattered most in all this business was
that Peter should be happy about it.
It mattered more than Sam and Ada, and even more than Effie, that Peter,
who was, so to speak, an old and sleeping partner, should be satisfied
by their solution. She did not care if this was to per vert the values:
the remnant of Peter Struggles’ life was of more importance than the
young lives of the active members of the firm. And because she had a
practical mind, and believed that one is happy in soul only when one
is first happy in body, she was already thinking past their present
problem: she was considering how the slut in Peter’s kitchen could be
replaced by her own housewifely self.
She resolutely consigned that thought to the future, and returned to
the question of to-day. Ada, wonderfully, wanted a divorce: but Anne
required that Peter should be happy about it, and she perceived the
incompatibility. She saw that juxtaposition could hardly be more crude.
He was a priest, the priest who married them, and she wanted him to
acquiesce contentedly in their divorce.
“Wants a divorce, does she?” she said. “Well, there’s more than Ada to
be thought of.”
“There is, indeed,” said Peter, thinking of his church.
“There’s you,” said Anne, thinking of him. “If she gets one, does she
plant herself on you again?”
He supposed so, unable to disguise his depression at the prospect.
“Aye,” she rubbed it in, “you were well rid of Ada once. It’s not in
human nature to want her back again.” She was thinking singly of his
comfort.
Peter, on his part, took her to imply that if he opposed a divorce it
was for interested motives, that he could continue to be “well rid
of Ada.” He saw with dismay that it was an interpretation which could
reasonably be put on any opposition from him. He thought, in his
humility, that it was a reasonable interpretation, whereas, Peter being
Peter, it was a ludicrously unjust interpretation, and, of course,
Anne did not make it. She had only stated as a fact that Ada at home
prejudiced her father’s comfort: and the comfort of Ada’s father had
become a matter which touched Anne Bran-stone nearly.
“And there are other people, too. There’s Sam,” she went on, “and he is
a desperate bad case. He has no love for Ada. He’s hoisted his notion of
his duty higher than a living love. He wants Ada to come back.”
“I’m sorry to say,” mourned Peter, “that the more he wants it, the less
likely she is to go.”
She tried not to exult too openly at that. “And then,” she said,
“there’s Effie.”
“Effie!” He spoke in scandalized protest.
“Aye, that’s her name, and yon’s just the tone of voice I had myself
when I first heard of her. I want you to see Effie.”
“Never!” said Peter, and for a mild man his bitterness was remarkable.
“Then I must show her to you,” said Anne placidly, “and that’ll mean
going back a bit and showing you other things as well. It’ll mean,” and
she very much regretted it, “showing you this.” She held out her hand
and pointed to the scar. “When Sam told me he wanted to marry Ada, I
came to see her. I saw what I saw, and I told him she’d be the ruin of
him. He didn’t believe me, and I tried to make him see I meant it. I
put my hand into the fire, and I thought to keep it there till he agreed
with me, but he’s stronger in the arm than me, and he got me away.” She
spoke without passion, in simple narrative which Peter found impressed
him deeply. “So I left him and earned my living, and all that. Sam
married her, and the ruin’s come, but it’s not come suddenly. It’s been
coming all the time. I’d date it back,” she reflected, “to the day when
he fooled you about the ‘Social Evil’ pamphlet. He did that because he
wanted a rich husband for Ada.”
Peter had nothing to say. If he had not known before that Sam had
“fooled” him, he did not doubt it now.
“And it grew from that. He’s made money because Ada wanted money, and
after that it grew to be a bad habit. He made it then by writing lies
about himself in the papers, and I don’t know how he’s done it since
then, except that it has been by more lies. He began to fancy himself
at politics. He wanted to be a crowing cock, and it didn’t matter if he
crowed on a dung-heap so long as he crowed. And Ada didn’t care. He gave
her money, and she didn’t care. She didn’t love, and he didn’t love,
and there’s a thing you said just now that I’ll remind you of. You said
God’s love. I’ll leave it to you to name what it is when there isn’t
love.
“And then love came to Sam. Effie came, and you say that God is love.
Sam put it to me in another way. He said he’d found salvation. Well,
it’s a big word, and I dunno. But I do know he found love and it changed
him. He’s done with politics, and he’s done with crowing and with
riches, too. Effie did that by the power of love, and there’s another
thing she did, that’s marked yon lass for me as the finest, strangest
woman in the width of the world. She gave him up and sent him back to
Ada. Well, I’ve heard of sacrifice before, and I’ve done a bit that way
myself, but give up a man she loved and teach him how to make a woman of
his wife, and send him home to do it--it’s more than I can rise to. And
that is Effie Mannering.
“He went home and he tried, and Ada laughed at him. She couldn’t
understand: there wasn’t the one thing there that could make her
understand: there wasn’t love. And he gave up his politics that night
she laughed at him, to leave himself free to tackle Ada. Now Ada’s left
him, and there’s sum-mat else turned up as well. You can guess.”
He looked up sharply. “Aye, that’s it, and the rum thing is that it
surprised them both. Their love’s that sort of love, and I reckon there
are folk would call it careless of them. I would myself nine cases
out of ten, aye, and ninety-nine in a hundred, but not this case. This
wasn’t a case for care; it was a case of love. But a baby’s coming to
Effie, and you know’ as well as I do that none will ever come to Ada.
I’ve finished telling you about Effie now.” There was a long pause and
it seemed several times that Peter was about to break it, and each time
changed his mind. All that he finally said in comment on Effie was, “A
lawless woman,” and it might have been deduced from his tone that he did
not condemn, if he could not, confessedly, admire.
“Aye, lawless,” Anne agreed, “but there’s a law of lawless women and she
has not obeyed it. She’s not a breaker. She’s a maker.”
Peter bowed his head. Perhaps he did not wish Anne to see what was
written in his face. And he lacked conviction when he tried to speak
again. “Whom God hath joined--he began.
“But God,” Anne said, “is love.”
He threw up his hands in a despairing gesture of surrender. “I deserve
to be unfrocked for this,” he said, but he closed the book on his knee
and took snuff violently. It marked the passing of a crisis.
As for Anne, there mingled with her satisfaction at his consent a keen
despondency at his unhappiness. She had both lost and won, and Anne took
little pleasure in a mixed victory. She had not finished yet with Peter
Struggles.