A lady and her husband

by Amber Reeves Blanco White

He wrote on a sheet of paper, "I will talk this over with you after dinner, J. A. H.," and put it with the letter into a large envelope which he addressed to his son. Then, leaving it on the hall table, he went upstairs to dress. If he had dinner early he would be less likely to see anyone he knew.

Trent, when he came in, a little tired, picked up the envelope and tore it open on his way upstairs. He read James's note with a feeling of impatience. Some difficulty had arisen, he supposed, in the way of the new company. Trent did not share James's interest in the new company. The scheme was his father's. It did not afford him the pleasure of admiring his own ingenuity, and it seemed to him that the new arrangements tended to lessen his importance. He would be on the Board of the new Company, but only as one director among many, and he had not been able to follow his father's sudden delight in cinematographs and the building of cinema palaces. He had agreed to the scheme because it would make him, if it went well, a richer man, but he sometimes grew tired of discussing and praising it. He glanced, now, at the other envelope, and it was with a shock that he recognised his mother's writing. James had not spoken to him of Mary's attitude, and as the months went by he had forgotten his fears. Now they revived, and with them came a slight feeling of superiority. "I knew there would be trouble," he said to himself as he went into his room.

Trent's room was carefully furnished and tidy. Even his golf-clubs and his riding boots seemed evidence less of enjoyment than of the gentlemanly nature of his pursuits. Although he would have to dress in half an hour he changed his shoes, washed his hands, and brushed his hair before he sat down in a comfortable chair to read Mary's letter.

He read it through slowly, after his first start of surprise, and then, as he could not remember a word of it, he read it again. He was amazed—his mother had never seemed to him that sort of woman. He had always thought of her as a good, charming woman, a woman he was very fond of. Now she had done this astonishing thing—he realised, for the first time, that his mother and father were not merely parents, that they lived lives of their own, like his and his friends'. "My father can't," he even admitted, "be a very easy man to live with"—he could see that Mary had been very unhappy when she wrote her letter.

But there his sympathy ended. Mary was a wife, she had no right to behave as she was doing. Trent had always felt very strongly that upper-class Englishwomen, in a way, are sacred; sacred to the noble task of maintaining the ideals of English men and children. He had never doubted that any woman whom he might love would recognise the force of this obligation. He was very fond of his mother—it was most perplexing! He tried to think the matter over calmly. Whatever had happened it was absurd to suppose that she couldn't do all the thinking she liked while his father was at the office. If, as the letter seemed to indicate, there was some emotional difficulty between them, that only made matters worse. In such a case an open breach was not only wrong and foolish, it was indelicate. If what she really wanted was time to get used to the idea of selling the business then she had still no right to run away and take counsel of strangers instead of discussing the affair with her husband and son. She was hopelessly in the wrong, even when one looked at it, as he was doing, from her own point of view. When one thought of the consequences of her action——

He left his chair and began to walk, like his father, up and down the room. Walking, his thoughts came faster and less coherently. Why had she done it?—it was a terrible thing to do! And in what a false position it left them all!

Even he would suffer—why, more especially he! With a pang he remembered Lady Hester. If her family knew that his mother had done such a thing they would not let her marry him, however much money he made. For a moment the poor young man stopped, appalled, then he resumed his pacing. Hester had probably never heard of such a thing as a mother who ran away!

It was impossible that his mother could ruin his life, and ruin it for a mood—a whim—she must not do it, she must not be allowed to do it! She must be brought back and made to feel how unbecoming—how shameful—her behaviour was; he felt a slow, irresistible anger rise in his heart. His mother was disgracing herself, she could claim no mercy. She had rejected her duty to her husband and children, she had put herself outside the scope of man's generosity. He had a right to be angry with her, he said to himself; he did well to be angry!

For a few minutes he was exceedingly angry, then his thoughts began to move in a different direction. Trent, like his mother, took an interest in the processes of his own mind. After all it was no use his losing his head. Anger was foolish and undignified—he sat down again, deliberately, as if to prove to himself by controlling his muscles that he could also control his feelings. His mother had taken leave of her senses, but that was no reason why he should not show self-control. This was a crisis in his life; he must behave wisely, generously!

He tried hard as he sat there, unfortunate youth, to decide on a wise and generous line of conduct. But all that he could think of were his ruined hopes, his wounded feelings, the cruelty and treachery of what Mary had done. He did not feel generous, he felt deeply vindictive. He wanted to be wise and calm, but his resentment seemed to press on him, depriving him of the power of ordering his thoughts. He felt a desire to punish his mother, to make her suffer in return for the suffering she was causing him. He struggled against this feeling, but he was astonished by its strength. "It is extraordinary," he thought, "I am not a vindictive man; I have every wish to behave well, and yet when my whole desire is simply to be just I am prevented from thinking clearly by this primitive instinct of revenge! It is true then, after all, that civilisation is only a cloak for barbarism!" This, in its way, was satisfactory. To the end of his life Trent would treat himself with more respect as a person, under the surface, of untamably savage instincts. But even this interesting discovery did not remove the oppression of his annoyance. When he finally found relief it was in an outbreak of indignation against women in general. He was not worried by any need to be just towards women in general. This was what came—his thoughts ran easily—of women interfering in men's affairs. This was what came of women setting themselves up to be judges of life and conduct without balance or judgment or experience; they lost their heads and everyone else had to bear the consequences. His mother, doubtless—he felt less angry with her already—had been led away. She had talked things over, in the gabbling indecent fashion women have, with some of her friends, possibly with that ridiculous secretary. They had sympathised with her and persuaded her to behave like this. Possibly even Rosemary had known about it. All women nowadays were filled with the same spirit of presumption and ingratitude. His mother had merely been a little more rash, a little weaker, than the others. The whole thing came, he went on to explain to himself, of educating women and encouraging them to express their absurd opinions. His mother had been carried away by the feeling that half the business was hers—that, of course, was her father's fault. Now, although she knew nothing whatever of business, she was not prepared to let anything pass that did not meet with her approval. She had obviously got some idea of responsibility into her head—as if a woman would be responsible for an enormous modern business. There were women who mixed themselves up in business, of course, women who were thoroughly unsexed, and the others didn't understand that and were wild to imitate them. Look at Rosemary and her economics!—Laura, too, had been nearly as bad until she married. He was going on to conclude that early marriage and no education was what was right for women—a woman, to Trent's taste, was enough when she was healthy, pretty, affectionate, and tactful—when he remembered that no one had ever educated his mother and that she had indubitably married and married young. He was forced to admit that now these impossible ideas had got into the air there was no telling whom they would not attack.