Читать книгу The Eighth Year: A Vital Problem of Married Life - Philip Gibbs - Страница 5

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It is in the third and fourth year that they begin to find each other out. The bright fires of their passion have died down, burning with a fitful glow, burning low. Until then they had been lovers to each other, hidden from each other by the illusions of romantic love. It was inconceivable that the man could be anything but kind, and tender, and patient, and considerate. It was inconceivable that he could hold any but the noblest ideals, the most exalted aspirations, the most generous sentiments. He had been so wise, so witty, and so gay.

And to the man it had seemed that the woman by his side was gifted with all the virtues. At least she had been eager to please him, to satisfy his least desire, to bend to his will. She had pandered to his vanity, fed his self-conceit, listened to his opinions on all the subjects of life as though they were inspired. If he had been kept out late at work he had found her waiting for him, quick to put her arms about him, to cry out, “Oh, my poor dear, how tired you must be?” She had been grateful to him for all his little gifts, for all his words of love. And he had seen her as a beautiful thing, without flaw or blemish. He had worshipped at the foot of the pedestal on which he had placed her in his ideals.

But now both the husband and wife begin to see each other, not as lovers, but as man and woman. It is rather disturbing. It is distressing to the young wife to discover, gradually, by a series of little accidents, that this man with whom she has to live all her life is not made of different clay from other men, that he is made of the same clay. One by one all the little romantic illusions out of which she had built up the false image of him, from the heroes of sentimental fiction, from the dreams of girlhood, are stripped from him, until he stands bare before her, the natural man. She does not like the natural man at first. It is quite a long time before she can reconcile herself to the thought that she is mated to a natural man, with a touch of brutality, with little meannesses, with moods of irritability, with occasional bad tempers, when he uses bad words. She sees, too clearly for her spiritual comfort, that they are not “twin-souls.” They have not been made in the same mould. His childhood was different from her childhood, his upbringing from her upbringing. She sees that in little things—mere trifles, but monstrously annoying, such as his untidy habits, the carelessness with which he flicks his cigarette ash about the carpet, the familiarity with which he speaks to the servant-maid. She begins to dislike some of his personal habits—the way in which he sneezes, his habit of shaving after breakfast instead of before breakfast, his habit of reading the newspaper at the breakfast table instead of chatting with her as he used to do about the programme for the day. In things less trivial she finds out that her first ideal of him was false. They do not think alike on the great subjects of life. He is a Radical and she is Conservative, by education and upbringing. It hurts her when he argues with revolutionary ideas which seem to her positively wicked, and subversive of all morality. He has loose views about morality in general, and is very tolerant about lapses from the old-fashioned moral code. That hurts her too—horribly. It begins to undermine the foundations of her faith in what used to seem the essential truth of things. But, above all, it hurts her to realize that she and her husband are not one, in mind and body, but utterly different, in temperament, in their outlook on life, in their fundamental principles and ideas.

On the other side the husband makes unpleasant discoveries. He finds out, with a shock, that he was utterly ignorant of the girl whom he asked to be his wife, and that this woman who sits at his breakfast-table is not the same woman as the one who dwelt in his imagination, even as the one who lived with him during the first and second year. She has lost her coyness, her little teasing ways, her girlish vivacity. She begins to surprise him by a hard common-sense, and no longer responds so easily to his old romantic moods. He can no longer be certain of her smiles and her tenderness when he speaks the old love-words. She begins to challenge his authority, not deliberately, nor openly, but by ignoring his hints, or by disregarding his advice.

She even challenges his opinions, and that is a shock to him. It is a blow to his vanity.

It takes down his self-conceit more than a peg or two, especially when he has to acknowledge, secretly, that she is in the right, as sometimes happens. He finds out faults in her now—a touch of selfishness, a trace of arrogance, an irritability of temper of which he has to be careful, especially when she is in a nervous state of health. They begin to quarrel rather frequently about absurd things, about things that do not matter a brass farthing. Some of these quarrels reach passionate heights and leave them both exhausted, wondering rather blankly what it was all about. Then the wife cries a little, and the husband kisses her.

By the end of the fourth year they know each other pretty well.