“Honor Sturgis is extraordinarily nice too, isn’t she?” Rose continued.
“Don’t you like the way she talks? She has the kind of voice that
reminds you of that speech in _King Lear_. Don’t you love gentle voices,
Dombeen? She is tall, too. I believe she’s only an inch shorter than
you. It’s absurd when husbands are immense and their wives little, isn’t
it?”
You see what an imp she could be!
“Honor is writing a description of a visit to Chamounix,” Rose went on.
“I don’t know what the Lowcester Literary Society would do if the
Sturgises hadn’t come to liven it up.”
“We got on very well before they arrived,” I replied.
“Miss Sturgis was in the garden,” Rose continued. “She’s wonderful with
flowers, they say. If she just put a walking-stick into the ground it
would grow. I expect that you and she together would have the most
stunning garden in the world. And she’s not really old, not more than
thirty-eight. Don’t you think that married people should be nearly of an
age? Some day, when I have enough courage, I shall ask Honor—she’s the
easiest, I think—why they’ve never married. With all their money, too!
But Quaker girls often don’t, I believe. It’s funny, because I should
think they’d make wonderful wives, so placid and sensible, don’t you
know. What do you think, Dombeen?”
“I’m sick of the whole subject,” I replied.
* * * * *
Eustace was exhibited not only to me—and, I am aware that, to ordinary
prospective bridegrooms, these probationary visits (probationary, but too
late for remedy) must be a very trying ordeal and we ought not to be too
hard—but to the Strattons. What Rose’s cousins thought of him I have no
means of knowing, but I suppose that girls are as critical of other
girls’ fiancés as we can be of the young women whom our friends so
mistakenly believe to be Minervas or Venuses. But Mrs. Stratton, even if
she may have had a touch of envious regret that Eustace had not first
seen her daughters and fallen to one of them, was pleased with her new
nephew. Or so I gathered from a letter to me in which she congratulated
me upon Rose’s alliance with so promising a counsel and so worthy and
seemly a man, and went on to refer with satisfaction to the cessation of
unfortunate rumours which the engagement would bring about.
Eustace, I found, liked her, and had remonstrated with Rose, but with
infinite patience, about her antipathy to the lady. It was her first
disappointment in him.
Mrs. Stratton had expressed herself as eager that Rose should be married
from her house, and Rose was willing. I was glad that she was, for many
reasons: I did not, for instance, want the wedding in our church, or the
reception in our house, with Eustace’s people all about; I did not want
to see Rose’s husband driving away with her into a new life, alien to me,
from my door, her door. I could not bear the idea of continuing to
entertain the crowd after their departure, when any decent man would wish
to be alone. These were selfish enough reasons, but also natural. I
deny that they lay me open to any very severe censure.
At the same time I should have liked it had Rose said that only from her
true home would she be married. But she did not. Not improbably she had
that desire, but was anxious to spare my feelings. She knew that Eustace
could never be congenial to me, and least of all as her captor.
* * * * *
I went to the wedding, of course; and I have never been more miserable.
It was enough that my Rose was standing there at the chancel steps; but
there was more. This was my first wedding for many years, and I was
startled by the service. The gravity and solemnity of the promises
exacted from each—such promises as not even angels are asked to make and
keep, for there is notoriously no marriage or giving in marriage among
them—filled me with gloom and foreboding and a sense of injustice. It
seemed wrong to ask any human beings—and particularly boys and girls—to
commit themselves in this way. I wondered if barristers when being
married have thoughts of the Divorce Court in their minds—that overworked
department of the profession where the morbid and inquisitive assemble
day after day to gloat over the fragments that remain when all these
sacred bonds and assurances have been broken. “With all my worldly goods
I thee endow,” I heard Eustace repeat after the clergyman. But did he?
Does any husband? What would be a husband’s attitude if the next morning
his wife said that she wanted his property—all the worldly goods with
which he had publicly endowed her—at once? The commonest cause of
married unhappiness that I know of is the refusal of husbands to give
their wives even a requisite fraction of their worldly goods for current
household expenses. But the words will go on being repeated at the
chancel steps for many a year yet.
“In sickness and in health”—doctors know something about the value of
that undertaking, too, and how it is honoured.
And so Rose Allinson became Rose Holt, and those of us who were nearest
the young couple in kin or intimacy followed them into the vestry to wish
them joy and sign the register. Having kissed my darling and written my
name, I slipped away. I could not endure more. The vestry had a back
door and I slipped through it, pocketed my button-hole carnation, and,
after lunch, went to a sale of mezzotints at Christie’s, where I
endeavoured to soothe my feelings by buying two Valentine Greens which
(unless I was to die next week, when one can afford anything) I couldn’t
afford. And so far as I could see then, there was no particular reason
why I should not die next week—nothing, I mean, important enough to call
for my continued existence.
* * * * *
Mrs. Eustace Holt was, I think, fairly happy in her early married life.
I saw her now and then, and was not conscious of anything very wrong.
She seemed to have lost tone: that was all; but I put that down largely
to living in London, cooped up by bricks and mortar instead of her old
free garden life. Also Eustace was not exciting. But I think she was
fond of him, and I know that he was very proud of her, perhaps even to
tiring her by exhibiting her too much to his friends. She was too candid
to be a very easy diner-out, and too courteous not to make the effort.
And then came the tragedy. Rose’s first child died at the end of only
three weeks of life. You remember what she said about wanting boys.
Well, this was a boy, and Rose was in the seventh heaven of delight. She
squandered herself on it. No other young mother, the nurse told me on
that sad day when we buried the poor little creature, had, in her
experience, been so happy. “And that, as you know,” she added to me, “is
a big thing to say.”
I found my poor child inconsolable; in a kind of stupor of bewilderment
and revolt against the blind stupidities of fate. To let this perfect
little being fade into nothingness and allow the ugly, blundering world
to go on!
She was long in recovering and longer still before she was herself again.
I did all I could to get Eustace to let her come to me to convalesce, but
he would not let her out of his sight, and took her to this and that
health resort, and even for one winter to the Riviera.
* * * * *
It was nearly two years before I saw her again, and then I went up to
dine and spend the night by way of celebrating my fiftieth birthday.
That was in 1900.
* * * * *
Every doctor is asked for advice in matrimonial differences, or at any
rate is made a confidant. One can have too many of such confidences; but
I defy any general practitioner, however brusque and curmudgeonly, to
escape them altogether. Most of us have seen so many couples that we can
tell at a glance what is wrong—which brand of incompatibility is in use.
For there are so many. Temper is supposed to have a monopoly in this
matter, but that is far from the case. There can be incompatibility in
other matters, apparently trifling, and trifling in fact unless lifelong
fetters are involved. Incompatibility of temperature, for example, where
the lute is rifted because the wife wants all the fresh air that windows
and doors can let in, and the husband rejoices only in a vacuum. A
doctor sees so many of such antipodal house-mates—I don’t say that all
are married people—that he comes to divide the world into those who are
healthily disposed and those whose only idea of a window is a thing to
shut.
It is a truism that wedded felicity is a very fragile craft, liable to be
swamped by any unforeseen wave, and it requires the most delicate
seamanship, both at the helm and at the sail. I have seen marriages
ruined by so pleasant a spice to ordinary intercourse as irony. Irony in
a husband, and a tendency in a wife to depreciate her husband or make him
a butt in public—these have much misery to answer for. Absence of mind
in a husband can be fatal: an inability to look ahead, to reserve seats,
to order a cab, to remember theatre tickets. And then, again, over-much
presence of mind can be fatal too: an insistence on punctuality and too
much officiousness about the house.
I could not tell which was the cause of the want of sympathy between Rose
and Eustace, but I felt something was wrong almost directly I entered
their door. Outwardly they were pleasant enough together; but there was
no warmth in the air, no electricity. Rose Holt was not Rose
Allinson—very far from it. But she was sweeter than ever to me; almost I
could bring myself to be glad that all was not well, for it made her so
tender, so thoughtfully attentive, to her old friend. It was the Rose of
the middle teens over again, but with a richness and maturity added.
Eustace was courteous, a solicitous host, and I felt spoilt between them.
But there was something wrong. When their eyes met across the table no
light kindled.
It was a comfortable, distinguished house. The furniture was good. The
right books were scattered about, some in French; the right periodicals.
Photographs after the Old Masters. In Rose’s little boudoir were water
colours.
After dinner Eustace left us. He had some difficult papers to go through
and master, and we were left alone.
Rose established me by the fire and sat beside me on a cushion.
“Is all well with my child?” I asked.
She did not reply.
For a long while we were silent. I could not ask her to tell me more;
and she would not volunteer because only half the secret was hers.
“When are you coming to stay with me?” I asked at last.
“Oh, Dombeen, I should love to,” she said. “But it’s impossible.
Eustace doesn’t like me to be away, ever. He counts so on my presence
here.”
“But he could come too,” I said.
“Oh, no,” she replied. “No. He doesn’t like the house to be left. No,
it can’t be done.”
I had no right to press the case. But I could not refrain from
saying—“Then you are never to visit me at all?”
“Of course: some day,” she said. “But not yet. It couldn’t be for a
long while. You see. . .”
And then I learned that she was again to become a mother.
How the world rushes on! A child grows to be a girl, and a girl a wife,
before one can turn round. And then there is another child and the same
restless urgency sets in once more. I thought of some lines I had read
years and years ago that had stuck in my mind:
There is so much we ne’er can know—
No time, no time!
We seem to only come—to go.
* * * * *
I went back feeling all out of tune and dissatisfied. This may be a
common experience with parents after their first visit to their married
daughters; but I had not even thought of it before. True, I had set out
with some vague misgivings, but so often—it is almost the rule—the
realization is better than our fears for it, that I had discounted the
premonition. And now I knew that my girl had made a mistake. It was not
so much that she was unhappy as that she had lost her old habit of
happiness. She had become passive where she had been vividly active.
Instead of joy she had found resignation. I don’t mean that she was
broken-spirited in any way: but she was too quiet. If I were God I
should be very much ashamed of having added resignation to young wives’
armouries.
Rose’s second baby was a girl. Eustace sent me a telegram to that
effect, and I wondered much on her feelings toward it. There had been no
joy in her voice when she had told me of its coming.
I went up to see them when Rose the second—for the child was named after
her mother—was two weeks old, and was led into the room by Eustace.
Much could be written on the different demeanour of husbands on such
occasions, for some behave like impresarios and some like trespassers,
some are boisterous and some are perplexed, but none, however much they
want to disguise it, are totally without pride. Even those husbands who
are as much embarrassed and hampered by their wives presenting them with
a son or a daughter as they would be if their valets were to lose an arm,
cannot wholly conceal their triumph. Eustace, although with cool
reserve, belonged to the impresario class.
How often does one hear well-meaning people say, when discussing the
marriages of others (and of course discussion is superfluous and insipid
when marriages are satisfactory), “Ah, if only they had had a child, what
a difference it would have made!” But in my experience children can
divide parents quite as much as they can unite them. I may have
entertained some hope that the little pink creature with the dark silky
hair in Rose’s arms was to bring Rose and Eustace closer; but there was
no indication of it. Again when their eyes met no light was kindled.
How that other child, that boy of her desire, would have affected the
love of husband and wife it was not now possible to say; but this little
helpless mite in its mother’s arms obviously was without any federating
gift.
Eustace said a few nice things to Rose, and something about new-born
infants being no novelties to me, and left us.
“I suppose she’s perfect!” I said.
“Poor little pet, she’s so warm and dependent,” said her mother.
“A nice doctor?” I asked.
“Quite,” she said, “and the kindest nurse possible.”
“Then you’re happy,” I said, but I knew that she wasn’t.
The unwanted children—are they not tragic figures? And their name is
legion. Every doctor can give you a list!
I don’t say that this minute Rose was exactly unwanted. Rose—my Rose—was
incapable of coldness to anything young and soft and helpless, least of
all a baby; and Eustace, I could see, liked being a father. But the Rose
who had given birth to that little boy, and Rose the mother of this
little girl, were worlds asunder. This Rose was affectionate,
thoughtful, dutiful, protective; that other had been transfigured by
maternal ecstasy and pride.
Eustace and I lunched alone, and I did my best to penetrate his armour,
but in vain. How did he think of his wife? What kind of need of her had
he? Was he disappointed or was all going as he had expected and wished?
Why on earth had she found him attractive and how had he lost his hold on
her? A hint of the possible reason of his own attitude was offered when,
to my question, Didn’t he find himself a little at sea domestically when
Rose was upstairs like this? he replied, No. It seemed that the
direction of the household was his hobby. He arranged the meals in
advance, scrutinized and paid the books, interviewed the servants. He
had done this as a bachelor and liked to know how his money was being
spent.
“With all my worldly goods I thee endow”—the words came back to me as he
talked.
So Rose was not even mistress of her house, had no realm to queen it in.
“What women want is a home” is an old-fashioned saying in which I am a
believer; and Rose was without one. All that she had was a footing in
Mr. Holt’s.
How I longed for some of Mrs. O’Gorman’s trenchancy and candour to tell
him of his mistake! But I had none. I could observe and deduce, but I
had not the courage, or arrogance, to censure.
* * * * *
I went back to my great empty house with a grudge against the universe.
The grudge passed, for I do not dwell on injustice, but the emptiness
remained. And so the next few years went on, and I grew older and
probably more mannered and narrow. I also took an assistant, who was in
time to be a successor. Meanwhile Eustace prospered and Rose brought up
her little girl in Wilton Place, and I saw them only on rare occasions.
One of the strangest things in life is the ease with which people who are
fond of each other do not meet. Our tendency is to run in grooves and
find it difficult to leave them. Or to change the metaphor, no matter
how big the world is, most of us are at heart villagers.
Rose’s letters were regular and, up to a point, informative; and I wrote
with equal regularity. But the written word, no less than the spoken,
often merely conceals the truth; and I got very little inner information
as to the Holt ménage. My deduction was that routine had completely
taken the place of romance (if ever there had been any worth the name).
Rose never complained, but also she never rejoiced. Her truth-telling
impulses were checked by the fact that only half the story belonged to
her. To tell more was to tell Eustace’s share too; and that was not
playing the game.
* * * * *
One afternoon, when Rose the second was five, a message arrived from the
Hall to ask me to come at once to see Master Ronnie.
“Master Ronnie! What is he doing here?” I asked in surprise. When last
I had heard of him he was a soldier in a responsible post in India. I
think it was at Poona; his mother had read me from time to time little
bits in his letters. How old would he be now? Let me see, he was a year
older than Rose, and Rose was twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. So far as I
could recollect, he had never married. His mother had regretted this,
but was always counting on some nice girl attracting him during his next
leave. She did not want him to be caught by any of those Anglo-Indians!
And now here he was, and ill. Ronnie and illness were contradictions in
terms, and I asked the messenger what was wrong. An accident, I
presumed. But it was worse than that. He had had bad fever and could
not get it out of his bones. Ordered home for a long rest and treatment.
Was very thin and white and didn’t seem to relish anything.
When had he arrived?
Three days ago, but he wouldn’t let them send for me before; hated to be
coddled.
I found him in a very poor state. Some malarial poison in his system and
his spirits low. Poor boy, he was only the shadow of his old self. But,
in a way, more attractive still, for his illness had given delicacy to
his candid, merry face, and his charm of manner was unimpaired; while
one’s pity for his condition increased one’s affection for him. When the
admired strong become suddenly the dependent weak there can be a
strengthening of their adherents.
It was while Ronnie was slowly mending, but still only the shadow of his
normal self, that Rose and her little daughter came to stay with me.
Rose had proposed the visit and I was only too glad to have them.
Eustace, she said, was in Paris, on some commission of inquiry.
I had seen Rose-the-less occasionally, but only in London and on her best
behaviour. Playing on my lawn she was more natural, and I delighted in
her straight little body, her quick movements and her eager ways. She
was like her mother, but unlike too—she had a hint of elfishness, which
her mother lacked: she was less essentially womanly; and she had an
imperious touch. She knew what she wanted and her enjoyment came largely
through getting it, whereas her mother as a child had found things
delectable as they came and had not chosen and demanded. But there was
nothing unattractive in the child’s selective impulses: they did not
suggest any kind of rapacity. For the rest, she was very like that
earlier Rose. She made friends as quickly, she asked as many questions
and she was happy all the time.
“Why does mother call you Dombeen?” was one of the first things she
wanted to know.