He was tall and she was short. He was bulky, promising to be fat. She
was thin, and, with a paring here and there, would have been skinny.
His face was sternly resolute, solemn indeed, hers was prim, and
primness is the most everlasting, indestructible trait of humanity. It
can outface the Sphinx. It is destructible only by death. Whoever has
married a prim woman must hand over his breeches and his purse, he will
collect postage stamps in his old age, he will twiddle his thumbs and
smile when the visitor asks him a question, he will grow to dislike
beer, and will admit and assert that a man's place is the home--these
things come to pass as surely as the procession of the seasons.
It may be asked why he had married her, and it would be difficult to
find an answer to that question. The same query might be put to almost
any couple, for (and it is possibly right that it should be so) we do
not marry by mathematics, but by some extraordinary attraction which is
neither entirely sexual nor mental. Something other than these,
something as yet uncharted by psychology, is the determining factor.
It may be that the universal, strange chemistry of nature, planning
granite and twig, ant and onion, is also ordering us more imperatively
and more secretly than we are aware.
He had always been a hasty creature. He never had any brains, and had
never felt the lack of them. He was one of those men who are called
"strong," because of their imperfect control over themselves. His
appetites and his mental states ruled him. He was impatient of any
restraint; whatever he wanted to do he wanted urgently to do and would
touch no alternatives. He had the robust good humour which will
cheerfully forgive you to-morrow for the wrongs he has done you to-day.
He bore no malice to any one on earth except those who took their
medicine badly. Meek people got on very well with him because they
behaved themselves, but he did not like them to believe they would
inherit the earth.
Some people marry because other people have done so. It is in the air,
like clothing and art and not eating with a knife. He, of course, got
married because he wanted to, and the singular part of it was that he
did not mate with a meek woman. Perhaps he thought she was meek, for
before marriage there is a habit of deference on both sides which is
misleading and sometimes troublesome.
From the beginning of their marriage he had fought against his wife
with steadiness and even ferocity. Scarcely had they been wed when her
gently-repressive hand was laid upon him, and, like a startled horse,
he bounded at the touch into freedom--that is, as far as the limits of
the matrimonial rope would permit. Of course he came back again--there
was the rope, and the unfailing, untiring hand easing him to the way he
was wanted to go.
There was no fighting against that. Or, at least, it did not seem that
fighting was any use. One may punch a bag, but the bag does not mind,
and at last one grows weary of unproductive quarrelling. One shrugs
one's shoulders, settles to the collar, and accepts whatever destiny
the gods, in their wisdom, have ordained. Is life the anvil upon which
the gods beat out their will? It is not so. The anvil is matter, the
will of the gods is life itself, urging through whatever torment to
some identity which it can only surmise or hope for; and the one order
to life is that it shall not cease to rebel until it has ceased to
live; when, perhaps, it can take up the shaping struggle in some other
form or some other place.
But he had almost given in. Practically he had bowed to the new order.
Domestic habits were settling about him thick as cobwebs, and as
clinging. His feet were wiped on the mat when he came in. His hat was
hung on the orthodox projection. His kiss was given at the stated
time, and lasted for the regulation period. The chimney-corner claimed
him and got him. The window was his outlook on life. Beyond the hall
door were foreign lands inhabited by people who were no longer of his
kind. The cat and the canary, these were his familiars, and his wife
was rapidly becoming his friend.