The horrid intimacy of urban life for all poor and needy people must be very wearing. Its lack of privacy is most distressing. But this becomes enormously aggravated, of course, where the bread-winner must do his work within the walls of the cramped home. And that aggravation of difficulties is multiplied tenfold if the bread-winner's work must not only be done inside the home, but must also be the product of sustained and concentrated thought; if it be work of that sort which lends itself readily to interruption, in which a moment's break may mean an hour's delay, and an hour's delay may mean for the worker a fit of hot disgust in which his unfinished task finds its way into fireplace or waste-paper basket.
The year which I gave to trying to make a success of our married life appears to me in the retrospect as a monotonous series of abortive honeymoons, separated by interludes of terribly hard and unfruitful labour for me (more exhausting than any long sustained working effort I ever made), throughout which, out of respect for my praiseworthy resolutions as a would-be good husband, my exacerbated temper was cloaked in a sort of waxy fixative, even as some men discipline their moustaches. I see myself in these periods as a man acutely tired, miserably conscious of the barren nature of his exhausting daily toil, and wearing a horrible set smile of connubial amiability; the sort of smile which, in time, produces a kind of facial cramp.
My wife, poor little soul, was not, I think, burdened by any self-imposed task touching the set of her lips. And it may be this was so much the worse for her. In the absence of any recognised duty she knew of no distraction save her visits to her mother, regarding which she felt a certain furtiveness to be necessary, by reason of my ill-judged show of impatience in this matter, and my refusal to open my own arms to the woman who, for years, had made Fanny's life a burden to her.
'Confound it!' I thought. 'My part was to release her from this harridan's clutches, not to go round and mix tears and gin with the woman.'
But I was wrong. I should have gone much farther, or not near so far. (How often that has been my fault!) Either I should have prevented those visits, or sterilised them by taking part in them.
By the time that a spell of the set smile and the barren labours had brought me near to breaking point, Fanny would be frequently tearful and desperately peevish from her boredom, and from poor health; for I fancy she was in little better case than I as regards the penalties of a faulty and inadequate dietary, combined with long confinement within doors. These conditions would produce in me a day or two (and a sleepless night or two) of black, dyspeptic melancholy, and quite hopeless depression. Then, as like as not, I would try a long tramp, probably in Epping Forest, and after that--another abortive honeymoon. In other words, full of wise resolutions and determined hopefulness, I would apply the fixative to my domestic circle smile and amiability, and make an entirely fresh start, with a little jaunt of some kind as a send off.
I fancy Fanny's faith in these foredoomed attempts remained permanently unsullied. I know she used to resolve to discontinue the long gossipy afternoons with her mother in Howard Street--in some mysterious way the mother had lain aside all her old pretensions as a tyrannical autocrat, and they met now, I gathered, as friendly gossips--and to become an ideal wife for a literary man. She would even tell our landlady not to clean or tidy our rooms any more, since she, Fanny, intended to do this in future. And she would do it--for a week or so; just as I would keep up my sickening grin, and the attempt to make myself believe that I really liked doing my work in public libraries, reading-rooms, waiting-rooms, and other such inspiring places. Not even on the first day of a new honeymoon could I force myself to fancy I liked the attempt to work in our joint sitting-room. That affected me like a neuralgia.
The point, and perhaps the only point I can make in extenuation of my admitted failure to conduct my married life to a successful issue, I have made already; for one year I did, according to my poor lights, strive consistently and hard for success. Throughout another year I did strive as hardly, and almost equally consistently to make our joint life tolerable for us both. More than that I cannot claim, and, in the light of all that happened, I feel that this much is rather pitifully little.
X
It may very well be that during the first years after my marriage some of the chickens I had hatched out in the preceding years of slum life and incessant scribbling came home to roost. In the case of my reckless sins against hygiene and my digestion, I know they did. But also, I fancy, as touching work, and its monetary reward; for my earnings increased somewhat, while my work suffered deterioration, both in quality and quantity.