As I entered the house, I saw my wife—how I hated that word then—seated in the drawing room. She did not look at me, and I passed on into my private room. When I came out again, she sprang toward me, but I retreated, saying, “Don’t come to me, never touch me again.” She threw herself upon the floor, wailing and begging me to forgive her. My heart was stone, my whole body dead to her. After a while she took a seat and I listened in silence, while she told me all. How the Hon. had flattered her, deceived and so seduced her, that at the Birthday Ball, after a waltz together, he had taken her into the kala jagah—well is it named the black place—and then had taken liberties with her, and then on and on—why repeat the hateful story?
By the time she had finished I had formed my plan, and said this to her, “Your Hon. seducer will probably not tell of this. The only one else who knows it is Ram Kishn, and he will not tell, and we need not say anything. We can live in hell here, and that is enough, without telling others to have them add fuel to the flames. You can have that side of the house entirely to yourself. One of the rooms you can use as a dining room, and you can have the carriage for your evening drives. I will keep this side of the house for myself, and we’ll live as never seeing each other.”
The thought of the pleasant life we had passed, and of this horrible life coming, made me exclaim, “What infamous crimes were my ancestors guilty of, that I should be cursed like this? Why should I be damned for the sins of that villainous father of mine?”
At this she asked, “Am I not to be your wife again?”
“My wife!” I exclaimed; “No, never, never again. Your purity is gone. You are polluted for me. You have violated all your rights, not by a sudden passion, but deliberately, time and again. You took advantage of my absence. You have done your best to degrade me, to ruin me, and to pollute yourself. You have not the slightest claim on me for any rights or privileges. As for love, such as I had for you yesterday, my heart is now dead to you. I forgive you, pity you, and will provide every comfort for you, but you are not my wife except in name, and never can be.”
She fell back in a swoon, and I called her ayah, waiting woman, and left the room.
What else could I do? Since then I have often thought of what I did, and my conscience has never condemned me. I acted toward her as I would have had her act toward me if the circumstances were changed. Had I broken my loyalty to her in but one instance, she would have been right in dealing with me as I dealt with her. I do not believe in two codes, one for erring men, and another for erring women. If men demand virtue in their wives, and cast them off when they fall, then let the men apply the same law to themselves. The man who has commerce with more than one woman, is as guilty as the woman who has had commerce with more than one man. If immorality is wrong in a woman, why not in a man? Why should the man have the right to transmit the curse of sensualism or debased appetite to his children more than the woman? Why should a woman in marriage take up a damaged article of a man, any more than a man a disreputable woman for a wife?
Asks a Danish novelist, “Is a woman who has had no relationships with a man before marriage entitled to expect the same in her husband? Is a man who has had relationships with other women before marriage entitled to complain of his wife who has had such relationships?” Another gives this paragraph—a conversation of a father with his daughter. “There,” he says, “is woman’s noblest calling.” “As what?” asks the daughter. “As what! Have you not listened? As—as the ennobling influence in marriage, as that which makes men pure, as—” “As soap?” she suggests. “Soap?” asks he, “what makes you think of soap?” “You make out that marriage is a great laundry for men. We girls are to stand ready, each at her wash-tub with her piece of soap. Is that how you mean it?”
Once conversing with a young man, a full-blooded European in high position, from a remark of mine he was led to ask, “Do you think that children will inherit the disease of their father?” “Inevitably,” I replied, “and I do not believe that God himself can or will avert this natural law.” He replied, with a tremor in his voice, “I am very sorry to hear you say that, as I am going to be married in a few days.” I changed the subject, and made another remark, when he asked, “Don’t you believe in the blood of Jesus to atone for our sins?” “No,” said I, “not at all.” “Well!” he exclaimed, “if I did not believe in that, I do not know what I should do.”
His was a strange mixture of practice and belief, like vice and virtue sleeping in each other’s arms in the same bed. Living in the midst of sin, diseased, and about to commit the meanest of frauds by marrying a pure, noble girl, and yet professing to believe in Jesus, the purest of men, who denounced lust in the severest terms, and taught that even lustful desire was as criminal as adultery. Why should there not be pure-minded, physically clean men, for fathers, as well as pure-minded and beautiful women for mothers?