One day he chucked his job, put up his tools, told the boss he could do
this and that, called hurroo to the boys, and sauntered out of the place
with a great deal of dignity and one week's wages in cash.
There were many reasons why he should not have quitted his work, not the
lightest of them being that the food of a wife and family depended on his
sticking to it, but a person who has a temper cannot be expected to have
everything else.
Nothing makes a man feel better than telling his employer that he and his
job can go bark at one another. It is the dream of a great many people,
and were it not for the glamour of that idea most folk would commit
suicide through sheer disgust. Getting the "sack" is an experience which
wearies after the first time. Giving the sack is a felicity granted only
to a few people. To go home to one's wife with the information that you
have been discharged is an adventure which one does not wish to repeat,
but to go home and hand her thirty shillings with the statement that you
have discharged yourself is not one of the pleasantest ways of passing
time.
His wife's habits were as uncertain as her temper, but not as bad. She
had a hot tongue, a red head, a quick fist and a big family--ingredients
to compose a peppery dish. They had been only a short time married when
she gave her husband to understand that there was to be only one head of
that household, and that would not be he. He fought fiercely for a
position on the executive but he did not get it. His voice in the
household economy, which had commenced with the lordly "Let this be
done," concluded in the timidly blustering "All right, have it your own
way."
Furthermore, the theory that a woman is helpmate to a man was repugnant
to her. She believed and asserted that a man had to be managed, and she
had several maxims to which she often gave forcible and contemptuous
utterance--
"Let a man go his own road to-day and he will be shaking hands with the
devil to-morrow.
"Give a man his head and he'll lose it.
"Whiskers and sense were never found in the same patch.
"There's more brains in one woman's finger than there is in the
congregated craniums of a battalion of men folk.
"Where there is two men there's one fight. Where there's three there's a
drinking match, two fights and a fine to be paid."
But while advocating peace at any price and a tax on muscles that were
bigger than a fly's knuckle she was herself a warrior of the breed of
Finn and strong enough to scare a pugilist. When she was angry her
family got over the garden wall, her husband first. She did not think
very much of him, and she told him so, but he was sufficient of a man not
to believe her.
For a long time he had been a dissatisfied person, leading a grumpy
existence which was only made bearable by gusts of solitary blasphemy.
When a man curses openly he is healthy enough, but when he takes to
either swearing or drinking in secret then he has travelled almost beyond
redemption point.
So behold our man knocking at the door, still warmed by the fray with his
late employer, but with the first tremors of fear beginning to tatter up
and down his spine.
His wife opened the door herself. She was engaged in cleaning the place,
a duty in which she was by no means remiss, one of the prime points in
her philosophy being that a house was not clean until one's food could be
eaten off the floor. She was a big comely woman, but at the moment she
did not look dainty. A long wisp of red hair came looping down on her
shoulders. A smear of soot toned down the roses of her cheek, her arms
were smothered in soap suds, and the fact that she was wearing a pair of
her husband's boots added nothing to her attractions.
When she saw her husband standing in the doorway at this unaccustomed
hour she was a little taken aback, but, scenting trouble, she at once
opened the attack--
"What in the name of heaven brings you here at this hour of the day, and
the place upset the way it is? Don't walk on the soap, man, haven't you
got eyes in your head?"
"I'm not walking on the soap with my head," he retorted, "if I was I'd
see it, and if it wasn't on the floor it wouldn't be tripping folk up. A
nice thing it is that a man can't come into his own house without being
set slipping and sliding like an acrobat on an iceberg."
"And," cried his wife, "if I kept the soap locked up it's the nice, clean
house you'd have to come into. Not that you'd mind if the place was
dirty, I'll say that much for you, for what one is reared to one likes,
and what is natural is pleasant. But I got a different rearing let me
tell you, and while I'm in it I'll have the clean house no matter who
wants the dirty one."
"You will so," said he, looking at the soapy water for a place to walk on.
"Can't you be coming in then, and not stand there framed in the doorway,
gawking like a fool at a miracle."
"I'll sail across if you'll get a canal boat or a raft," said he, "or, if
the children are kept out of sight, I'll strip, ma'm, and swim for it."
His wife regarded him with steady gloom.
"If you took the smallest interest in your home," said she, "and were
less set on gallivanting about the country, going to the Lord knows
where, with the Lord knows who, you'd know that the children were away in
school at this hour. Nice indeed the places you visit and the company
you keep, if the truth were known--walk across it, man, and wipe your
feet on the kitchen mat."
So he walked into the kitchen, and sat down, and, as he sat, the last
remnants of his courage trembled down into his boots and evaporated.