THE MAN WHO COULD MANAGE WOMEN
OR thought he could. Which comes to the same thing. His name was Yethill, and he was a Junior Captain in the R. A.
Yethill belonged to the New School; he was a specimen of the latest military development of the age. By their smoked spectacles shall ye know Yethill and his peers; by the right foot, which is broadened by the lathe; by the right thumb, which is yellowed with acids and sticky with collodion; by the hard-bitten, pragmatical, theoretical, didactic way of treating all mysteries in heaven—a locality which is interesting only in virtue of the opportunities afforded to trick aviators—and earth, in which mines may be dug, and upon which experiments may be carried on. These men wake themselves in the morning, and heat their shaving water by means of electrical machines of their own invention. They carry kodaks in their bosoms, and are, in the matter of imparting information, human volcanoes continually in eruption.
Yethill was not behind his fellows in this respect. When he had said his little say upon the Theory of Wireless Photophony, the Detection of Subterranean Mines by the K Rays, and the irresponsibility of the bedbug in connection with beri-beri; when he had told the Head of the Electrical Department how many watts are equivalent to a horse-power, and explained to the Colonel, who is sinfully proud of his men, that the employment of the uneducated inferior in warfare will cease with the century, and that the army of the future will consist entirely of officers, he would drop his voice to a confidential whisper and control his elbows. He talked heliographically as a rule, and if a man were left to listen to him—he could, as a rule, clear the Mess smoking-room in ten minutes from the start—he would dilate at length upon his best-loved hobby, the art of managing women.
Yethill was no Adonis. He had a knobby, argumentative head, a harlequin set of features, each separate one belonging to a different order and period of facial architecture; and a figure which was not calculated, as his tailor observed with bitterness, to do justice to a good cut. But it was wonderful to hear him talk in that conquering, masterful way of his. He had an appalling array of statistics to prove that the majority of marriages were miserable; that life, connubially speaking, was dust and ashes in the mouths of nineteen Benedicts out of twenty. But the darkest hour presaged the dawn. Let the man about to marry, let the already-married, but adopt the Yethill system of sweetheart-and-wife breaking, and thenceforth all would be well. And thousands of voices arising from the uttermost ends of the civilized earth would hail with one accord Yethill as their deliverer.
Then came an essay on the New Art of Courtship.
“To a man,� Yethill would say, jerking his knee and stammering a little, as his custom was when excited, “who is a reasonable being, the woman he loves is a woman—only spelt with a big ‘W’; the woman he likes is a woman spelt in the ordinary way; and the woman he doesn’t like is a mere creature of the female sex. To a woman,� Yethill would continue, “who is, nineteen times out of twenty, a perfectly unreasonable being;—the man she loves is a demi-god; the man she doesn’t love is a man;—and the man she dislikes is a gorilla. She quite overlooks the fact that in every individual human male these three may be found united. And man is weak enough to humor her. So that out of so many marriages that take place, a majority—a frightful majority—are founded upon illusions. And the subsequent state of conjugality may be called a state of evolution, in which these primary illusions, after undergoing a process of disarrangement and disintegration, are finally reduced to impalpable powder, and the Bed Rock of Reality is laid bare. We know what happens after that!�
The listening man generally knew enough to grunt an affirmative. And Yethill would, with many weird facial jerks and twitches, go on to explain the system.
The great system was, like all other wonderful discoveries, involved in a very simple plan of procedure. It consisted only in reversing the accepted order of things. A man, supposedly desirous of getting married, recognizing in himself the existence of the trinity above mentioned, should assert the existence of the third person from the very outset—suppress the demi-god, show the gorilla. Let the woman you were about to make your wife see the worst of you before you showed her the best. Let her pass through the burning fiery furnace before you admitted her into the Paradise that is the reward of proved devotion. Let her know what bullying meant before you took to petting—blame her weaknesses before you praised her virtues. Under this régime there would be no illusions to commence with; and married life, instead of being full of disappointments, would be replete with delightful surprises. Your wife married you, believing you to be a gorilla.
“There’s the weak point,� the listener would interpolate. “What woman, unless a lunatic of sorts, would marry a gorilla?�
Yethill would not hear of this objection. He was always deaf when you came to it. He would pound on—dilate on the surprise and joy with which she found that she had married a man, and the rapture with which she would greet the final discovery that she had got hold of a demi-god.
“It sounds splendid,� the other men would say, “but it won’t wash. Look here, I’m going to take Miss So-and-So up to a Gaiety matinée to-morrow. To follow up your system I ought to call for her in my worst clothes, be surly on the way to the station, and neglectful in the tunnels. I ought to dump her into her stall like a sack, go out to ‘see a man’ between every act, and take it for granted that she doesn’t want cool tea and warm ices. You know that’d never do! She’d give me the bag to-morrow. And she’d be right!�
But Yethill hearkened not. There was excitement at the Arsenal, and much babbling in barracks, the day on which it was publicly made known that Yethill contemplated giving an object-lesson in support of his great system very shortly.
The object was Miss Sallis.
Miss Sallis was a fluffy little pink-and-white girl, the daughter of a retired Admiral, who lived near the Dockyard.
Men had dined with Miss Sallis, and played tennis with Miss Sallis, and flirted with Miss Sallis, during several seasons past. Some of them had asked for her hand—she wore fives in gloves—and had not got it. Thus, Yethill’s announcement was received with a certain degree of risibility. No bets were made upon the chances of Yethill’s getting her, the odds against his acceptance were too tremendous. Yethill proposed. He mentioned that his prospects of advancement in the Service were not very promising; that his scientific pursuits would have to be relinquished if he were to set up an establishment on even a moderate scale, and that he did not intend to relinquish those pursuits; that there were several hereditary diseases in his family; that, while bestowing upon the lady he honored with the offer of his hand a regard which justified his proposal, he should not have made that proposal had the lady been poor—with other statements of equal candor. A more wonderful proposal was never made.
What was more wonderful still, Miss Sallis accepted him! He bought her a ring, containing three small fragments of petrified red-currant jelly, embedded in fifteen-carat gold; and when she asked him to put it on her finger said, “Oh, rot!� and wouldn’t. He spent a certain amount of time with his betrothed, but invariably carried a scientific work in his pocket, wherein he might openly take refuge when the primrose paths of love proved wearisome. He forbade her to dance with other men, and did not dance with her himself. He snubbed her when she asked questions about his camera, his lathe, his batteries, and tried timidly to be interested in magnets and inductors, acids and cells, because they interested him. He carried out his system thoroughly. If Miss Sallis had any illusions about Yethill he bowled the poor little thing over, right and left, like ninepins, long before the wedding day.
With the loss of her illusions went some of her good looks. She made a pretty-looking little bride. With her fluffy pale hair, her pink nose, and her pink eyelids, a not remote resemblance to an Angora kitten was traced in her. She was married in a traveling-gown, without any bridesmaids; and after the wedding-breakfast Captain and Mrs. Yethill drove home to their lodgings on the Common. The wedding-trip had been abandoned—from no lack of money, but because Yethill said he had had enough of traveling, and the custom of carrying a bride away, as if in triumph, to the accompaniment of rice and slippers, was “guff.� He certainly played the gorilla as if to the manner born. The poor little woman loved him; he loved her. But as his skull was made of seven-inch armor-plate, he went on knocking it against his system. He had got used to the gorilla-business, and couldn’t leave it off. Yet, out of his wife’s sight and hearing, he was a doting husband. The Duke in the Story of Patient Griseldis must have been a man of Yethill’s stamp.
Mrs. Yethill, as time went on, began to be a walking manifestation of the effects of the system. She lost her gaiety and her pink cheeks; her smile became nervous and her dress dowdy. The little vanities, the little weaknesses, the little affectations, which had helped to make Miss Sallis charming, had been bullied out of Mrs. Yethill’s character until it was as destitute of any blade of verdure as a skating-rink. She had proved herself the most patient, loving, tolerant of wives; but Yethill went on trying her. She stood the trials, and he invented new tests—exactly as if she had been a Government bayonet or a regulation sword-blade. A bright man Yethill!
They were called upon, and returned visits, at intervals. A taste for society was one of the tendencies which were to be chastened. Female friends were prohibited, as being likely to sow the seed of incipient rebellion against the system.
“I don’t care, Tom, if I have you!� said Mrs. Yethill, patting her gorilla, who, mindful of his own tenets, was careful not to exhibit any appreciation of her attention. But he made up for it by boasting that evening in the smoking-room, until those who hearkened with difficulty prevented themselves from braining him with legs of chairs. Their wives would have commended them for the deed. Yethill had not many admirers about this period.
But he went on blindly. Can one ever forget how he crowed over having cured Mrs. Yethill of a tendency toward jealousy, of the vague and indiscriminating kind? The prescription consisted in posting to himself letters highly scented and addressed in a variety of feminine scrawls. Yethill was good at imitating handwriting!—and he absented himself from the domestic hearth for several days together whenever there was a recurrence of the symptoms. The method wrought a wonderful cure; but Mrs. Yethill began to grow elderly from about this period. You could hardly have called her a young woman, when the baby came, and brought his mother’s lost youth back to her, clenched in one pudgy hand. The vanished roses fluttered back and perched upon her thin cheekbones again. She was heard to laugh. Her husband, who secretly adored her, and who had continued to stick to the system more from a desire for her glorification than his own, feared a retrogression. So he thought out a new torture or two, and put them into active application. He sneered at the puerilities of nursery talk. He downcried the beauty and attainments of the baby when she praised them. He pooh-poohed her motherly fears, when the ailments inseparable from the joyous period of infancy overtook his heir. This was the last straw laid upon Mrs. Yethill’s aching shoulders. The downfall of the great system followed.
In this way. His wife came into his workshop one morning. The workshop was forbidden ground, and Yethill dropped the negative he was developing, and turned to stare. He saw that she was very pale, and that her lips were bitten in. He heard her say that there was something the matter with baby, and she wanted the doctor.
Solely in the interests of his wife whom he esteemed above all living women, Yethill refused to allow the doctor to be sent for. The child was as right as a trivet. Women were always worrying. She was to get away with her nonsense, and leave him in peace. With more to the same effect. She drooped her head, and went away obediently, only to return in half an hour, with another version of the same prayer upon her lips. Would he—would he come and look for himself? Yethill was thoroughly annoyed. Yethill refused. Yethill went on, stubbornly, dabbling with his negatives, until right from overhead—baby’s nursery was above the workshop—Yethill had never heard a woman scream like that before.... Something like an ice-bolt shot down his spine. He dashed up to the nursery, and looked in. The sight he saw there sent him tearing across the Common, a hatless, coatless man, to the Doctor’s house.
When the Doctor came he said he could be of no use; he ought to have been called in an hour ago. And Yethill, hearing this fiat, and meeting his wife’s eyes across the table, felt the system totter to its foundations.
He found himself wondering at her for taking baby’s end so quietly; but he had schooled her to endure silently. There were no tears—he had always jeered at tears. The Doctor took him aside before he left.
“You must treat your wife with kindness—and consideration, Yethill,� said the Doctor, “or I won’t answer for the consequences!�
As if Yethill needed to be told to be kind or considerate! As if Yethill had never loved—did not love—the late Miss Sallis! He planned a revelation for her without delay. He would take her in his arms; kiss her, and tell her that her time of trial was overpast; give her her meed of praise for her heroism, her meed of sympathy for her grief—and his. And he would own that he had made a mistake in the matter of baby deceased. And she would forgive—as she always had forgiven.
As he decided this, she came into the room. She was quite composed. She carried something behind her. She spoke to him very quietly in a dull, strange, level voice—so strange a voice that, just as he was about to open his arms and say, “Annie!� in the voice he had been saving up for the Day of Revelation, the gesture and the word wouldn’t come.
“Tom,� said Mrs. Yethill, “what should you say if I told you that I had made up my mind to kill myself?�
She brought her hand from behind her; it held one of Yethill’s revolvers. She had been very much afraid of these lethal instruments in the early days of her marriage, but under the system had learned to clean them, and even drew the cartridges. But the thing she held wasn’t loaded, Yethill was quite sure of that. It sealed up the fountain of his admiring tenderness to have her treat him to commonplace, vulgar heroics. It put her out of drawing, and Yethill out of temper.
She asked again:
“What would you say if I told you I mean to kill myself?�
Yethill ran his armor-plated head against the last wall. He answered brutally:
“I should tell you, if you were such a fool as to threaten such a thing, to do it, and have done with it!�
She said, “Very well!�—and did it.
When people came running in, they found something—perhaps it was the system—scattered on the walls, on the floor, everywhere. And Yethill was howling, and beating his seven-inch skull against heavy pieces of furniture, and calling on Annie to come back. But she had escaped, and was in no hurry; and he hadn’t the pluck to follow her out of the world and apologize.
“Was she mad?� somebody asked the Doctor; and the Doctor said:
“No; but she might have become so if she had lived much longer with a lunatic!�
“You mean——?�
“I mean,� said the Doctor, “that Yethill has been suffering from dementia for years. I mean that he will see the inside of a Lunatic Asylum in six months from date.�
But the Doctor was wrong. He did—in three!