I_t is the Eighth Year_. The wife does not know the significance of
that. The husband goes on his way without seeing the ghosts that have
invaded his little household. He is too busy to see. The whole energy of
his mind now is devoted to the business of his life. He must earn money,
more money, still more money, because expenses still keep increasing,
by leaps and bounds. He finds it more and more difficult to cut his coat
according to his cloth. He is often surprised because with a much larger
income he seems to be just as “hard up” as when he started the adventure
of marriage. He wonders, sometimes, whether the game is worth the
candle. What does he get out of it? Precious little. Not much fun. In
the evenings he is tired, although his brain is still worrying over the
details of his work, over his business disappointments and difficulties,
and plans. Now and again he is surprised at the strange quietude and
lassitude of his wife. He catches a look of tragedy in her eyes, and it
startles him for a moment, so that he asks her if she is feeling unwell.
She laughs, in a mirthless way, and seems to resent the question.
“Perfectly well, thanks,” she says. He shrugs his shoulders. He cannot
bother about a woman’s whims and moods. Women are queer kittle-cattle.
He can’t make ‘em out. Even his own wife is a perfect mystery to him.
It is a pity they get on each other’s nerves so much. What more does she
want? He has given her everything a woman may desire--a beautiful little
home, many little luxuries, plenty of pin-money. He does not stint her.
It is he that does the stinting. He is always working for her so that
she may play. However--work is best. To do our job in life is the best
philosophy.
So the husband has on one side the passing suspicion that something is
wrong with his wife, and the wife hides her heart from him.
Something _is_ wrong with her. Everything is wrong, though she does not
know why and how. She feels lonely--horribly lonely in spite of all her
friends. She feels like a woman alone in a great desert with no other
human soul near her, thrust back upon her own thoughts, brooding over
her own misery. There is a great emptiness in her heart, and she has
a great hunger and a great thirst of soul which she cannot satisfy.
Nothing satisfies that empty, barren heart of hers, that throbbing
brain. She has finished with Mudie’s novels. She can find no
satisfaction in _them_. She revolts from the tittle-tattle of her women
friends. That is no longer amusing. She finds no pleasure in the beauty
of her face. It is no longer beautiful. She hates the sight of her face
in the glass. She is afraid of those big wistful eyes which stare at
her. She is sick to death of dressing herself up. How futile it is! How
utterly vain and foolish!
She is haunted with ghosts; the ghosts of What-Might-Have-Been. They
whisper about her, so that she puts her hands to her ears, when she is
alone in her drawing-room. Faces peer at her, with mocking eyes, or with
tempting eyes--the faces of men who might have been her lovers, baby
faces of unborn children. Little hands flutter about her heart, pluck at
her, tease her. The ghosts of her girlhood crowd about her, the ghosts
of dead hopes, of young illusions, of romantic dreams. She thrusts them
away from her vision. She puts her hands before her eyes, and moans a
little, quietly, so that the servants in the kitchen shall not hear.
She is assailed by strange temptations, horrible temptations, from
which she shrinks back afraid. This hunger and thirst in her soul are so
tormenting that she has frightful cravings for Something to satisfy her
hunger and quench her thirst. She is tempted to take to drink, or to
drugs, to dull the throbbing of her brain, to wake her up out of this
awful lassitude, to give her a momentary excitement and vitality, and
then--forgetfulness. She must have some kind of excitement--to break
the awful monotony of her life, this intolerable dullness of her little
home. If only an adventure would come to her! Some thrilling, perilous
adventure, however wicked, whatever the consequences. She feels the
overmastering need of some passionate emotion. She would like to plunge
into romantic love again, to be set on fire by it. Somewhere about the
world is a man who could save her, some strong man with a masterful way
with him, brutal as well as tender, cruel as well as kind, who would
come to her, and clasp her hands, and capture her. She would lean
upon him. She would yield, willingly.... She tries to crush down these
thoughts. She is horrified at the evil in them. Oh, she is a bad woman!
Even in her loneliness her face scorches with shame. She gives a faint
cry to God to save her. But again and again the devilish thoughts leer
up in her brain. She begins to believe that the devil is really busy
with her and that she cannot escape him.
She has a strange sense of impending peril, of something that is going
to happen. She knows that something _must_ happen.
In this Eighth Year she is in a state bordering on hysteria, when
anything may happen to her. Even her husband is beginning to get
alarmed. He is at last awakened out of his self-complacency. He is
beginning to watch her, with a vague uneasiness. Why does she look so
queerly at him sometimes as though she hated him? Why does she say such
bitter, cruel, satirical things, which stab him and leave a poison in
the wound? Why does she get into such passionate rages about trivial
things, and then reveal a passionate remorse? Why does she sink into
long silences, sitting with her hands in her lap, staring at the
pattern on the carpet, as though it had put a spell upon her? He cannot
understand. She says there is nothing wrong with her health, she refuses
to see a doctor. She scoffs at the idea of going away for a little
holiday to the seaside. She says it would bore her to death. Once she
bursts into tears and weeps on his shoulder. But she cannot, or will
not, explain the cause of her tears, so that he becomes impatient with
her and talks to her roughly, though he is sorry afterwards. He begins
to see now that marriage is a difficult game. Perhaps they were not
suited to each other. They married too young, before they had understood
each other.... However they have got to make the best of it now. That is
the law of life--to make the best of it.
So in the Eighth Year the husband tries to take a common-sense view of
things, not knowing that in the Eighth Year it is too late for common
sense as far as the wife is concerned. She wants uncommon sense. Only
some tremendous and extraordinary influence, spiritual, or moral, or
intellectual, beyond the limits of ordinary common sense, may save her
from the perils in her own heart. She must find a way of escape, for
these unsatisfied yearnings, for this beating heart, for this throbbing
brain. Her little home has become a cage to her. Her husband has become
her jailer. Her life has become too narrow, too petty, too futile. In
the Eighth Year she must find a way of escape--anyhow, anywhere. And in
the Eighth Year the one great question is in what direction will she go?
There are many ways of escape.