“You had better come and see him for yourself,” she added, with a little
laugh; “to tell the truth, I am the woman who has married him. Tuesday
is my day, Number 2, K— Mansions,” and she ran off, leaving me staring
after her.
I believe an enterprising clergyman who would set up a little church in
the Strand, just outside the Law Courts, might do quite a trade,
re-marrying couples who had just been divorced. A friend of mine, a
respondent, told me he had never loved his wife more than on two
occasions—the first when she refused him, the second when she came into
the witness-box to give evidence against him.
“You are curious creatures, you men,” remarked a lady once to another man
in my presence. “You never seem to know your own mind.”
She was feeling annoyed with men generally. I do not blame her, I feel
annoyed with them myself sometimes. There is one man in particular I am
always feeling intensely irritated against. He says one thing, and acts
another. He will talk like a saint and behave like a fool, knows what is
right and does what is wrong. But we will not speak further of him. He
will be all he should be one day, and then we will pack him into a nice,
comfortably-lined box, and screw the lid down tight upon him, and put him
away in a quiet little spot near a church I know of, lest he should get
up and misbehave himself again.
The other man, who is a wise man as men go, looked at his fair critic
with a smile.
“My dear madam,” he replied, “you are blaming the wrong person. I
confess I do not know my mind, and what little I do know of it I do not
like. I did not make it, I did not select it. I am more dissatisfied
with it than you can possibly be. It is a greater mystery to me than it
is to you, and I have to live with it. You should pity not blame me.”
There are moods in which I fall to envying those old hermits who frankly,
and with courageous cowardice, shirked the problem of life. There are
days when I dream of an existence unfettered by the thousand petty
strings with which our souls lie bound to Lilliputia land. I picture
myself living in some Norwegian sater, high above the black waters of a
rockbound fiord. No other human creature disputes with me my kingdom. I
am alone with the whispering fir forests and the stars. How I live I am
not quite sure. Once a month I could journey down into the villages and
return laden. I should not need much. For the rest, my gun and
fishing-rod would supply me. I would have with me a couple of big dogs,
who would talk to me with their eyes, so full of dumb thought, and
together we would wander over the uplands, seeking our dinner, after the
old primitive fashion of the men who dreamt not of ten-course dinners and
Savoy suppers. I would cook the food myself, and sit down to the meal
with a bottle of good wine, such as starts a man’s thoughts (for I am
inconsistent, as I acknowledge, and that gift of civilization I would
bear with me into my hermitage). Then in the evening, with pipe in
mouth, beside my log-wood fire, I would sit and think, until new
knowledge came to me. Strengthened by those silent voices that are
drowned in the roar of Streetland, I might, perhaps, grow into something
nearer to what it was intended that a man should be—might catch a
glimpse, perhaps, of the meaning of life.
No, no, my dear lady, into this life of renunciation I would not take a
companion, certainly not of the sex you are thinking of, even would she
care to come, which I doubt. There are times when a man is better
without the woman, when a woman is better without the man. Love drags us
from the depths, makes men and women of us, but if we would climb a
little nearer to the stars we must say good-bye to it. We men and women
do not show ourselves to each other at our best; too often, I fear, at
our worst. The woman’s highest ideal of man is the lover; to a man the
woman is always the possible beloved. We see each other’s hearts, but
not each other’s souls. In each other’s presence we never shake
ourselves free from the earth. Match-making mother Nature is always at
hand to prompt us. A woman lifts us up into manhood, but there she would
have us stay. “Climb up to me,” she cries to the lad, walking with
soiled feet in muddy ways; “be a true man that you may be worthy to walk
by my side; be brave to protect me, kind and tender, and true; but climb
no higher, stay here by my side.” The martyr, the prophet, the leader of
the world’s forlorn hopes, she would wake from his dream. Her arms she
would fling about his neck holding him down.
To the woman the man says, “You are my wife. Here is your America,
within these walls, here is your work, your duty.” True, in nine hundred
and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand, but men and women are not
made in moulds, and the world’s work is various. Sometimes to her
sorrow, a woman’s work lies beyond the home. The duty of Mary was not to
Joseph.
The hero in the popular novel is the young man who says, “I love you
better than my soul.” Our favourite heroine in fiction is the woman who
cries to her lover, “I would go down into Hell to be with you.” There are
men and women who cannot answer thus—the men who dream dreams, the women
who see visions—impracticable people from the Bayswater point of view.
But Bayswater would not be the abode of peace it is had it not been for
such.
Have we not placed sexual love on a pedestal higher than it deserves? It
is a noble passion, but it is not the noblest. There is a wider love by
the side of which it is but as the lamp illumining the cottage, to the
moonlight bathing the hills and valleys. There were two women once.
This is a play I saw acted in the daylight. They had been friends from
girlhood, till there came between them the usual trouble—a man. A weak,
pretty creature not worth a thought from either of them; but women love
the unworthy; there would be no over-population problem did they not; and
this poor specimen, ill-luck had ordained they should contend for.
Their rivalry brought out all that was worst in both of them. It is a
mistake to suppose love only elevates; it can debase. It was a mean
struggle for what to an onlooker must have appeared a remarkably
unsatisfying prize. The loser might well have left the conqueror to her
poor triumph, even granting it had been gained unfairly. But the old,
ugly, primeval passions had been stirred in these women, and the
wedding-bells closed only the first act.
The second is not difficult to guess. It would have ended in the Divorce
Court had not the deserted wife felt that a finer revenge would be
secured to her by silence.
In the third, after an interval of only eighteen months, the man died—the
first piece of good fortune that seems to have occurred to him personally
throughout the play. His position must have been an exceedingly anxious
one from the beginning. Notwithstanding his flabbiness, one cannot but
regard him with a certain amount of pity—not unmixed with amusement.
Most of life’s dramas can be viewed as either farce or tragedy according
to the whim of the spectator. The actors invariably play them as
tragedy; but then that is the essence of good farce acting.
Thus was secured the triumph of legal virtue and the punishment of
irregularity, and the play might be dismissed as uninterestingly orthodox
were it not for the fourth act, showing how the wronged wife came to the
woman she had once wronged to ask and grant forgiveness. Strangely as it
may sound, they found their love for one another unchanged. They had
been long parted: it was sweet to hold each other’s hands again. Two
lonely women, they agreed to live together. Those who knew them well in
this later time say that their life was very beautiful, filled with
graciousness and nobility.
I do not say that such a story could ever be common, but it is more
probable than the world might credit. Sometimes the man is better
without the woman, the woman without the man.