Читать книгу The Eighth Year: A Vital Problem of Married Life - Philip Gibbs - Страница 6

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In the fifth and sixth years they have settled down to the jog-trot of the married life. Not yet do they see the shadow of the Eighth Year looming ahead. They have faced the reality of life, and knowing each other as they really are have made a working compromise. Their love has steadied down to a more even flame, and passion is almost extinguished. They have decided to play the game, according to the creed of their class, exactly as their neighbors are playing it.

It is largely a game of bluff, as it is played in thousands of small households. It is a game, also, of consequences, as I shall have to show. It consists in keeping up appearances, in going one better than one’s neighbor whenever possible, and in making a claim to a higher rung of the social ladder than is justified by the husband’s income and rank in life. It is the creed of snobbishness. For this creed everything is sacrificed—contentment of mind, the pleasure of life, the little children of life.

In many flats of Intellectual Mansions, and even in the small houses of the “well-to-do” suburbs, children do not enter into the scheme of things. The “babies have been left out of the business.” For people who are keeping up appearances to the last penny of their income cannot afford to be burdened by babies. Besides, they interfere seriously with social ladder-climbing, drag down a married couple of the younger generation to the domestic squalor of their parents’ early life. The husband cannot bear the thought that his wife should have to make beds in the morning and mend stockings in the evening, and wheel out a perambulator in the park. It is so very “low down.” The husband wants to save his wife from all this domestic drudgery. He wants her to look pretty in the frocks he buys her. He wants her to wear more expensive frocks than any other woman in his circle of friends. He likes to hear his friends say, “How charming your wife looks to-night, old man!” and to hear elderly ladies say to his wife, “What a beautiful gown you are wearing, my dear!”

He is working hard now in order to furnish his wife’s wardrobe—not only for her pleasure, but for his pride. After the first romance of love, ambition comes to gild reality. He is ambitious to build up a beautiful little home. The furniture with which they started married life on the hire system has been bought and paid for, and is now replaced here and there by “genuine antiques.” He puts some good prints on his walls and buys some water-color sketches, and becomes in a small way a patron of the arts. It is pleasant during one of his wife’s evening At Homes to take a guest on one side and say “What do you think of that? Pretty good, eh? It’s an original, by Verdant Green, you know.”

He has urged upon his wife the necessity of giving recherché little dinners, to which he can invite friends better off than himself, and distinguished guests whom he wishes to impress. As he explains to his wife, “one has to do these things.” And he does them rather well, paying some attention to his wines—he keeps a good dinner claret—and to his cigars, which he buys at the stores. He also suggests to his wife that now she has an extra servant she had better establish a weekly At Home, an informal little affair, but pleasant and useful, because it shows the world, their world, that they are getting on in the social scale. Here again, distinguished visitors may be invited to “drop in.” It is good for business. A pretty, well-dressed wife makes a favourable impression upon solicitors who have briefs to give away or upon wealthy clients. One must keep up appearances, and make a good show. Besides, it is pleasant to put on evening clothes after a hard day’s work and to play the host. It gives a man some return for all his toil. It gives him a reason for living. And it brightens up one’s home-life. “Man does not live by bread alone,” he must have some cakes and ale, so to speak.

But it is expensive. As every year of marriage passes, the expenses increase, steadily, miraculously. It is difficult to account for them, but there they are, facing a man in his quarterly reckoning. And the two ends must be made to meet, by extra work, by putting one’s nose down to the grindstone. The husband does not come home so soon as he used to do in the early days. But he has the satisfaction of knowing that while he is away at work his wife is keeping up his social reputation and doing all the things which a lady in her station of life is expected to do. He thanks heaven that his wife is happy.

She is not unhappy, this wife, in the fifth and sixth year of marriage. After the first romantic illusions failed her she settled down quietly enough to play the game. It is quite interesting, quite amusing. Now and again queer doubts assail her, and she has strange flutterings at the heart, and little pinpricks of conscience. It is about the question of motherhood. Perhaps it would be better for her to have a baby. However, she has threshed out the question a hundred times with her husband, and he has decided that he cannot afford a family yet, and after all the flat is very small. Besides, she shirks the idea herself—all the pain of it, and the trouble of it.... She thrusts down these queer doubts, does not listen to the flutterings at the heart, ignores the little pinpricks of conscience. She turns quickly to the interests of her social life and falls easily into the habit of pleasant laziness, filling her day with little futile things, which seem to satisfy her heart and brain. When her husband has gone to business she dresses herself rather elaborately for a morning stroll, manicures her nails, tries a new preparation for the complexion, alters a feather, or a flower, in one of her hats, studies herself in the glass, and is pleased with herself. It passes the time. Then she saunters forth, and goes to the shops, peering in through the great plate-glass windows at the latest display of lingerie, of evening gowns, of millinery. She fancies herself in some of the new hats from Paris. One or two of them attract her especially. She makes a mental note of them. She will ask her husband to let her buy one of them. After all Mrs. Fitzmaurice had a new hat only last week—the second in one month. She will tell him that. It will pique him, for there is a rather amusing rivalry between the Fitzmaurices and them.

So the morning passes until luncheon, when she props the morning newspaper against the water-jug, reading the titbits of news and the fashion page while she eats her meal, rather nicely cooked by the new servant, and daintily served by the little housemaid. Another hour of the day passes, and it is the afternoon.

She lies down for half an hour with the latest novel from Mudie’s. It has a good plot, and is a rather exciting love-story. It brings back romance to her. For a little while she forgets the reality which she has learnt since her own romantic days. Here love is exactly what she imagined it to he, thrilling, joyous, never-changing. The hero is exactly what she imagined her husband to be—before he was her husband—strong, gentle, noble, high-souled, immensely patient. And after many little troubles, misadventures, cross-purposes, and strange happenings, marriage is the great reward, the splendid compensation. After this the hero and heroine live happily ever afterwards, till death does them part, and—there is nothing more to be said. The novel ends with the marriage bells.

She knows that her novel has not ended with the marriage hells, that, in fact, the plot is only just beginning as far as she is concerned. But she does not allow herself to think of that. She revels in romantic fiction, and reads novel after novel at the rate of three a week. Occasionally one of these novels gives her a nasty shock, for it deals with realism rather than romance, and reveals the hearts of women rather like herself, and the tragedies of women rather like herself, and the truth of things, in a cold, white light. She reads the book with burning eyes. It makes her pulse beat. It seems rather a wicked book, it is so horribly truthful, not covering even the nakedness of facts with a decent layer of sentiment, but exposing them brutally, with a terrible candor. She hates the book. It makes her think of things she has tried to forget. It revives those queer doubts, and makes her conscience prick again. She is glad when she has sent it back to the library and taken out another novel, of the harmless kind, in the old style. She lulls her conscience to sleep by the dear old love-stories, or by the musical comedies and the costume-plays to which she goes with one of her girl-friends on Wednesday or Saturday matinées.

She goes to the theatre a good deal now, because she is living more independently of her husband. That is to say she no longer waits for his home-coming, as in her first days of marriage, with an impatient desire. She has long seen that they cannot be all in all to each other, sharing all pleasures, or having none. He has realized that, too, and goes to his club at least once a week—sometimes more often, to enjoy the society of men, to get a little “Bohemianism,” as he calls it.

She has made her own circle of friends now, the young wives of men like her husband, and many of her afternoons are taken up with little rounds of visits, when she is amused by the tittle-tattle of these wives, by their little tales and scandals, by their gossips about servants, frocks and theatres.

She, too, has social ambitions like her husband. Her evenings At Home are agreeable adventures when she is pleased with the homage of her husband’s friends. She takes some trouble with her little dinner-parties and writes out the menus with a good deal of care, and arranges the flowers, and occasionally looks into the kitchen to give a word to the cook. She wears her new evening gown and smiles at her husband’s compliments, with something of her old tenderness. After one of these evening At Homes the husband and wife have moments of loving comradeship like those in the first days of their marriage. It is a pity that some trivial accident or dispute causes ill-temper at the breakfast-table.

But, on the whole, they play the game rather well in the fifth and sixth years of their married life. The husband takes the rough with the smooth. In spite of occasional bad tempers, in spite of grievances which are growing into habits of mind, he is a good fellow and—he thanks heaven his wife is happy.