that they can amuse themselves better. One gets tired of reading all
day long with the aching eyes and weary brain of weakness; yet how few
things a man can do to amuse himself without too great an effort, and
without being dependent on others! But women have a thousand pretty
little devices for whiling away the heavy hours. They can vary their
finger-work almost infinitely, and they find real pleasure in a new
stitch or a stripe of a different colour and design from the last. In
the contempt in which needlework in all its forms is held by the
advanced class of women, its use during the period of convalescence,
when it helps the lagging time as nothing else can, is forgotten. Yet
it is no bad wisdom to remember that the day of sickness will probably
come some time to us all; and to lay in stores of potential interest
and cheerfulness against that day is a not unworthy use of power.
Certain it is that this greater diversity of small, unexciting,
unfatiguing occupations enables women to bear a tedious illness with
comparative patience, and helps to keep them more cheerful than men.
But when the time shall have come for the perfect development of the
androgynous creature, who is as yet only in the pupal state of her
existence, women will have lost these two great helps. Workers outside
the home like their husbands and brothers, like them they will fume
and fret when they are prevented from following their bread-winning
avocations; calculations of the actual money loss they are sustaining
coming in to aggravate their bodily pains. And, as the needle is
looked on as one of the many symbols of feminine degradation, in the
good time coming there will be none of that pretty trifling with silks
and ribbons which may be very absurd by the side of important work,
but which is invaluable as an invalid's pastime. Consequently, what
with the anguish of knowing that her profession is neglected, and what
with the unenlivened tedium of her days, sickness will be a formidable
thing to women of the androgynous type--and to the men belonging to
them.
Again, care and tact are required to rob sickness of its more painful
features, and to render it not too distressing to the home companions.
A real woman, with her instincts properly developed--among them the
instinct of admiration--knows how to render even invalidism beautiful;
and indeed, with her power of improving occasions, she is never more
charming than as an invalid or a convalescent. There is a certain
refined beauty about her more seductive than the robuster bloom of
health. Her whole being seems purified. The coarser elements of
humanity are obscured, passions are at rest, and all those fretful,
anxious strivings, which probably afflict her when in the full swing
of society, are put away as if they had never been. She is forced to
let life glide, and her own mind follows the course of the quieter
flow. She knows too how to make herself bewitching by the art which is
not artifice so much as the highest point to which her natural
excellences can be brought. If the radiance of health has gone, she
has the sweeter, subtler loveliness of fragility; if her diamonds are
laid aside, and all that glory of dress which does so much for women
is perforce abandoned, the long, loose folds of falling drapery, with
their antique grace, perhaps suit her better, and the fresh flowers on
her table may be more suggestive and delightful than artificial ones
in her hair.
Many a drifting husband has been brought back to his first enthusiasm
by the illness of a wife who knew how to turn evil things into good,
and to extract a charm even out of suffering. It is a turn of the
kaleidoscope; a recombination of the same elements but in a new
pattern and with fresh loveliness; whereas the androgynous woman, with
her business worries and her honest, if impolitic, self-surrender to
hideous flannel wraps and all the uglinesses of a sick room crudely
pronounced, would have added a terror to disease which probably would
have quenched his waning love for ever. For the androgynous woman
despises every approach to coquetry, as she despises all the other
insignia of feminine servitude. It is not part of her life's duties to
make herself pleasing to men; and they must take her as they find her.
Where the true woman contrives a beauty and creates a grace out of her
very misfortune, the androgynous holds to the doctrine of spades and
the value of the unvarnished truth. Where the one gives a little
thought to the most becoming colour of her ribbon or the best
arrangement of her draperies, the other pushes the tangled locks off
her face anyhow, and makes herself an amorphous bundle of brown and
lemon colour. Her sole wish is to get the bad time over. How it would
be best got over does not trouble her; and to beautify the inherently
unlovely is beyond her skill to compass. Hence her hours of sickness
go by in ugliness and idle fretting; while the true woman finds
graceful work to do that enlivens their monotony, and in the
continuance of her home duties loses the galling sense of loss from
which the other suffers.
In sickness too, who but women can nurse? Men make good nurses enough
out in the bush, where nothing better can be had; and a Californian
'pardner' is tender enough in his uncouth way to his mate stricken
down with fever in the shanty, when he comes in at meal-times and
administers quinine and brick tea with horny hands bleeding from cuts
and begrimed with mud. But this is not nursing in the woman's sense.
To be sure the strength of men makes them often of value about an
invalid. They can lift and carry as women cannot; and the want of a
few nights' sleep does not make them hysterical. Still they are
nowhere as nurses, compared with women; and the best of them are not
up to the thoughtful cares and pleasant attentions which, as medical
men know, are half the battle in recovery. And this is work which
suits women. It appeals to their love of power and tenderness
combined; it gratifies the maternal instinct of protection and
self-sacrifice; and it pleasantly reverses the usual order of things,
and gives into their hands Hercules twirling a distaff the wrong way,
and fettered by the length of his skirts.
The bread-winning wife knows nothing of all this. To her, sickness in
her household would be only a degree less destructive than her own
disablement, if she were called on to nurse. She would not be able to
leave her office for such unremunerative employment as soothing her
children's feverish hours or helping her husband over his. She would
calculate, naturally enough, the difference of cost between hired help
and her own earnings; and economy as well as inclination would decide
the question. But the poor fellow left all day long to the
questionable services of a hired nurse, or to the clumsy honesty of
some domestic Phyllis less deft than faithful, would be a gainer by
his wife's presence--granting that she was a real woman and not an
androgyne--even if he lost the addition to their income which her work
might bring in; as he would rather, when he came home from his work to
her sick bed, find her patient and cheerful, making the best of things
from the woman's point of view and with the woman's power of
adaptation, than be met with anxious queries as to the progress of
business; with doubts, fears, perplexities; the office dragged into
the sick room, and unnecessary annoyance added to unavoidable pain.
There is a certain kind of woman, sweet always, who yet shows best
when she is invalided. Cleared for a while from the social tangles
which perplex and distress the sensitive, she is as if floated into a
quiet corner where she has time to think and leisure to be her true
self undisturbed; where she is able too, to give more to her friends,
if less to the world at large than at other times. And she is always
to be found. The invalid-couch is the rallying point of the household,
and even the little children learn to regard it as a place of
privilege dearer than the stately drawing-room of ordinary times. Her
friends drop in, sure to find her at home and pleased by their
coming; and her afternoon teas with her half-dozen chosen intimates
have a character of their own, æsthetic and delightful; partly owing
to the quiet and subdued tone that must perforce pervade them, partly
to the unselfishness that reigns on all sides. Every one exerts
himself to bring her things which may amuse her, and she is loaded
with presents of a graceful kind--new books, early fruit, and a wealth
of flowers to which even her poorest friend adds his bunch of violets,
if nothing else. She is the precious child of her circle, and but for
her innate sweetness would run a risk of being the spoilt one. Clever
men come and talk to her, give her cause of thought, and knowledge to
remember and be made glad by for all time; her lady friends keep her
abreast of the outside doings of the world and their own especial
coteries, contributing the dramatic element so dear to the feminine
mind; every one tells her all that is afloat on the sea of society,
but only all that is cheerful--no one brings her horrors, nor disturbs
the frail grace of her repose with petty jealousies and tempers. Her
atmosphere is pure and serene, and the dainty loveliness of her
surroundings lends its charm to the rest.
To her husband she is even more beautiful than in the early days; and
all men feel for her that chivalrous kind of tenderness and homage
which the true woman alone excites. The womanly invalid, gentle,
cheerful, full of interest for others, active in mind if prostrate in
body, sympathetic and patient, is for the time the queen of her
circle, loved and ministered to by all; and when she goes to Cannes or
San Remo to escape the cruelty of the English winter, she carries with
her a freight of good wishes and regrets, and leaves a blank which
nothing can fill up until she returns with the summer roses to take
her place once more as the popular woman of her society.
_ON A VISIT._
To most young people the social arrangement known as going on a visit
to friends at a distance is one of the most charming things possible.
Novelty being to them the very breath of life, and hope and
expectation their normal mental condition, the mere fact of change is
in itself delightful; unless it happens to be something so hopelessly
dull as a visit single-handed to an invalid grandmother, or the yearly
probation of a girl of the period, when obliged to put herself under
the charge of a wealthy maiden aunt with strict principles and no
games of any kind allowed on the lawn. If the young ladies out on a
visit are however, moderately cheerful, they can contrive to make
amusement for themselves out of anything short of such sober-tinted
extremes as these; and very often they effect more serious matters
than mere amusement, and their visit brings them a love-affair or a
marriage which changes the whole tenor of their lives. At the worst,
it has shown them a new part of the country; given them new patterns
of embroidery; new fashions of hairdressing; new songs and waltzes;
and afforded an occasion for a large supply of pretty dresses--which
last to most young women, or indeed to most women whether young or
old, is a very effectual source of pleasure.
The great charm and excitement of going on a visit belongs naturally
to the young of the middle classes; among those of higher condition it
is a different matter altogether. When people take their own servants
with them and live in exactly the same style as at home, they merely
change the furniture of their rooms and the view from the windows. The
same kind of thing goes on at Lord A.'s as at Lord B.'s, in the
Scottish Highlands or the Leicestershire wolds. The quality of the
hunting or shooting may be different, but the whole manner of living
is essentially repetition; and the dead level of civilization is not
broken up by any very startling innovations anywhere. But among the
middle classes there is greater variety; and the country clergyman's
daughter who goes on a visit to the London barrister's family, plunges
into a manner of life totally different from that of her own home; the
personal habits of town and country still remaining quite distinct,
and the possibilities of action being on two different plans
altogether.
A London-bred woman goes down to the country on a visit to a hale,
hearty Hessian, her former school-fellow, who tucks up her woollen
gown midway to her knees, wears stout boots of masculine appearance,
and goes quite comfortably through mud and mire, across ploughed
field and undrained farmyards--taking cramped stiles and five-barred
gates in her way as obstacles of no more moment than was the mud or
the mire. Long years of use to this unfastidious mode of existence
have blinded her to the perception that a woman, without being an
invalid, may yet be unable to do all that is so easy to her. So the
London lady is taken for a walk, say of five or six miles, which to
the vigorous Hessian is a mere unsatisfying stroll, to be counted no
more as serious exercise than she would count a spoonful of
_vol-au-vent_ as serious eating. To be sure the walk includes a few
muddy corners and the like, and Bond Street boots do not bear the
strain of stiff clay clods too well; neither is a new gown of the
fashionable colour improved by being dragged through furze bushes and
bracken, and brushed against the wet heads of field cabbages.
Moreover, crossing meadows tenanted by cattle that toss their heads
and look--and looking, in horned cattle, is a great offence to our
town-bred woman--is a service of peril which alone would take all the
strength out of her nerves, and all the pleasure out of her walk; but
the hostess cannot imagine feelings which she herself does not share,
and the London lady is of course credited with courage, because to
doubt it would be to cast a slur on her whole moral character. The
Hessian minds the beasts no more than so many tree-stumps, but her
friend sees a raging bull in every milky mother that stares at her as
she passes, and thinks something dreadful is going to happen because
the flies make the heifers swish their tails and stamp. Then the dogs
bark furiously as they rush out of farmsteads and cottages; and the
newly dressed fields are not pleasant to cross nor skirt. The visitor
cares little for wild flowers, less for birds, and all trees are
pretty much alike to her; and this long rude walk, accentuated with
the true country emphasis, has been too much for her. Her host wonders
at her evening lassitude and low spirits, and fears that she finds it
dull; and the robust hostess anathematizes the demoralizing effects of
Kensington, and scornfully contrasts her present friend with her past,
when they were both schoolgirls together and on a par in strength and
endurance. 'She was like other people then,' says the well-trained
Hessian who has kept herself in condition by daily exercise of a
severe character; 'and now see what a poor creature she is! She can do
nothing but work at embroidery and crouch shivering over the fire.'
Sometimes however, it happens the other way, and the lady guest, even
though a Londoner, is the stronger of the two. The wife has been
broken down by family cares and the one inevitable child too many; the
guest comes fresh, unworn, unmarried, still young. The wife seldom
goes beyond the garden, never further than the village, and is knocked
up if she has done two miles; the guest can manage her six or eight
without fatigue. Hence she naturally becomes the husband's walking
companion during her visit, to his frank delight and as frank regrets
that his wife cannot do as much. And the wife, though good-breeding
and natural kindness prevent her objecting to these long walks, finds
them hard lines all things considered. Most probably she bitterly
regrets having invited her former friend, and mentally resolves never
to ask her again. She wanted her as a little amusement and relaxation
for herself. Her health is delicate and her life dull, and she thought
a female friend in the house would cheer her up and be a help. But
when she finds that she has invited one who, without in the least
intending it and only by the force of circumstances, sets her in
unfavourable contrast with her husband, we may be sure that it will
not take much argument to convince her that asking friends on a visit
is a ridiculous custom, and that people, especially young ladies fond
of long walks, are best at their own homes.
In London there are two kinds of guests from the country; the
insatiable, and the indifferent--those who wear out their hosts by
their activity and those who oppress them by their supineness. The
Londoner who has outlived all the excitement of the busy city life
wonders at the energy and enthusiasm of his friend. Everything must be
done, even to the Tower and the Whispering Gallery, Madame Tussaud's
and the Agricultural Hall. There is not a second-rate trumpery trifle
which has been in the shop windows for a year or more, that is not
pored over, and if possible, bought; and among the inflictions of the
host may be counted the crude taste of the guest, and the childish
flinging away of money on things absolutely worthless. Or it may be
that the guest has come up stored with many maxims of worldly wisdom
and vague suspicion, and, determined not to be taken in, attempts to
bargain in shops where a second price would be impossible, and where
the host is personally known.
With guests of superabundant energy a quiet evening is out of the
question. They go the round of all the theatres, and fill in the gaps
with the opera and concerts. They have come up not to stay with you,
but to see London; and they fulfil their intention liberally. Or they
are indifferent and supine, and not to be amused, do what you will.
They think everything a bore, or they are nervous and not up to the
mark. They beseech you not to ask any one to dinner, and not to take
them with you to any reception. They are listless at the theatre and
go to sleep at the opera. At the Royal Academy the only pictures they
notice are those landscapes taken from their own neighbourhood, or
perhaps one by a local artist known to them. All the finest works of
the year fall flat; and before you have seen half the exhibition, they
say they have had enough of it, and sit down, plaintively offering to
wait till you have done, in the tone of a Christian martyr.
These are the people who are always complaining of the dirt and smoke
of London and the stuffiness of the houses, as if they were personally
injured and you personally responsible. They show a very decided
scorn for all London produce, natural or artificial, and wonder how
people can live in such a place. They are sure to deride the
prevailing fashions, whatever they may be; while their own, of last
season, are exaggerated and excessive; but they refuse to have the
town touch laid on them during their stay, and heroically follow the
millinery gospel of their local Worth, and measure you by themselves.
They show real animation only when they are going away, and begin to
wonder how they shall find things at home, and whether Charles will
meet them at the station or send William instead. But when they write
to thank you for your hospitality, they tell you they never enjoyed
anything so much in their lives; leaving you in a state of perplexity,
as you remember their boredom, and peevish complainings, and evident
relief in leaving, and compare your remembrance with the warm
expressions of pleasure now before your eyes. All you can say is, that
if they were pleased they took an odd way of showing it.
There are people rash enough to have other people's children on a
visit; to take on themselves the responsibility of their health and
safety, when the young guests are almost sure to fall ill by the
change of diet and the unwonted amount of indulgence allowed, or to
come into some trouble by the relaxing of due supervision and control.
They get a touch of gastric fever, or they tumble into the pond; and
either bronchitis, or a fall from horseback, toppling over from a
ladder, or coming to grief on the swing, or some such accident, is
generally the result of an act which is either heroism or madness as
one may be inclined to regard it. For of all the inconveniences
attending visiting, those incidental to child-guests are the most
distressing. Yet there are philanthropic friends who run these risks
for the sake of giving pleasure to a few young people. Whether they
deserve canonization for their kindness or censure for their rashness
we leave an open question.
As for a certain disturbance in health, that generally comes to other
than children from being on a visit. Hours and style of food are sure
to be somewhat different from those of home; and the slight constraint
of the life, and the feverishness which this induces, add to the
disturbance. Occupations are interrupted both to the guest and the
host; and some hosts think it necessary to make company for the guest,
and some guests are heavy on hand. Some regard your house as a gaol
and you as the gaoler, and are afraid to initiate an independent
action or to call their souls their own; others treat you as a
landlord, and behave as if you kept an inn, making a convenience of
your household in the most unblushing manner. Some are fastidious, and
covertly snub your wines, your table, and your whole arrangements;
others embarrass you by the fervour of their admiration, as if they
had come out of a hovel and did not know the usages of civilized
homes. Some intrude themselves into every small household matter that
goes on before them, and offer advice that is neither wanted nor
desired; and others will not commit themselves to the most innocent
opinion, fearful lest they should be thought to interfere or take
sides. Some of the women dress at the husband; some of the men flirt
with the wife or make love to the daughters surreptitiously; some loaf
about or play billiards all day long till you are tired of the sound
of their footsteps and the click of the balls; other bury their heads
in a book and are no better than mummies lounging back in easy chairs;
some insist on going to the meet in a hard frost; others will shoot in
a downpour; and others again waste your whole day over the
chess-table, and will not stir out at all. Some are so sensitive and
fidgety that they will not stay above a day or two, and are gone
before you have got into the habit of seeing them, leaving you with
the feeling of a whirlwind having passed through your house; and
others, when they come, stick, and you begin to despair of dislodging
them.
On the other hand, there are houses where you feel that you would wear
out your welcome after the third day, how long soever the distance you
have come; and there are others where you would offend your hosts for
life if you did not throw overboard every other duty and engagement to
remain for as many weeks as they desire. In fact, paying visits and
inviting guests are both risky matters, and need far more careful
consideration than they generally receive. But when it happens that
the thing is congenial on both sides, that the guest slips into a
vacant place as it were, and neither bores nor is bored, then paying a
visit is as delightful as the young imagination pictures it to be; and
the peculiar closeness and sweetness of intimacy it engenders is one
of the most enduring and charming circumstances incidental to
friendship. This however, is rare and exceptional; as are most of the
very good things of life.
_DRAWING-ROOM EPIPHYTES._
In every coterie we find certain stray damsels unattached; young
ladies of personable appearance and showy accomplishments who go about
the world alone, and whose parents, never seen, are living in some
obscure lodgings where they pinch and screw to furnish their
daughter's bravery. Some one or two great ladies of the set patronize
these girls, take them about a good deal, and ask them to all their
drums and at-homes. They are useful in their degree; very
good-natured; always ready to fetch and carry in a confidential kind
of way; to sing and play when they are asked--and they sing and play
with almost professional skill; full of the small talk of the day, and
not likely to bore their companions with untimely discussions on
dangerous subjects, nor to startle them with enthusiasm about
anything. They serve to fill a vacant place when wanted; and they look
nice and keep up the ball so far as their own sphere extends. They are
safe, too; and, though lively and amusing, are never known to retail
gossip nor talk scandal in public.