A lady and her husband

by Amber Reeves Blanco White

She sought in all seriousness, only to be shocked by the perversity and frivolity of her own mind. She knew very little about the ethics of mankind, and the first really definite system that occurred to her was that of the Mahommedans, who believe—she did not really know much about the Mahommedans—that a man may do as he pleases, but a woman who sins should be shut up in a sack and thrown into the Bosphorus. That came pretty near on the whole, she concluded, thinking it over, to our own English practice, though perhaps, since it was more drastic, it might be more effective in securing womanly virtue, but she did find herself able to accept it on that account. Then there were the Puritans—she could fairly take them as representing the theory of good people to-day. Anyone who disobeys the moral precepts of the English churches should, if not executed at once, be punished and made miserable for the rest of his life. There was something to be said for such a stringency, if only it could be enforced—Mary wished she knew more of the state of morals under the Ironsides and Oliver Cromwell. If we all really believed that, she wondered, so that all virtuous or cowardly or prudent people acted upon it, would the world be the richer for the triumph of their hatred and contempt? Would the groans of its backsliders be truly edifying? Then she stopped herself. She was being unfair again. The churches were always ready to rejoice over the sinner who repented—was it repentance, then, that she must ask alike of James and Rosemary before she forgave them and hid their wickedness from the eyes of the world?

For a moment she thought that she had found what she was seeking, then her spirits sank. How could anybody possibly tell whether James had repented or not? He would say that he had repented—he would even believe it—but what would he mean more than that he could not bear to see his Mary unhappy and did not intend, if he could help it, to hurt her again? James was not a man who ever repented, he merely put provoking matters out of his mind. And she could not imagine him comforted, either, by the rejoicings of the Churches.

For the first time she felt fully the deficiencies of her early education. She did not even know what her parents had learned from their lives—her mother, of course, had been a really nice woman, but her father must have held views of some sort upon so important a question. She had always thought of him as ennobled and distinguished by the breadth and the abundance of his views.... It was not long before, from the dim confusion of the past, a memory of her father came back to her. It had been an accepted fact that Mary never understood any sentences that she might overhear as she passed the half-open door of Mr. Trent's study, and since she was a modest and loyal girl she had not understood them, but now she remembered clearly her father's thin, amiable voice explaining to some friend whom she could not see that Christian morals were the invention of astute and envious monks. Monks had no use for a happy and virtuous people: they needed a race of sinners cowed by the fear of hell. Otherwise what place was there for the Church's ministrations?

She did not believe that this could be true, she deplored the accident that had presented her with such an example of her dear father's thoughts, but that a good clever man like him could believe such terrible things seemed to show that the whole question must be in confusion. She did not suppose, in that case, that she was likely to solve it. If everyone were alike, to begin with, and everyone could marry, and marry young, and all marriages turned out happily, then there would be something to go upon. But as it was she did not find in her own thoughts the least germ of a solution.

She did find, however, a growing shame at her own harshness, a realisation of her own ignorance. It was not only Cromwell and the Turks about whom she knew nothing. She knew nothing of modern men, or modern life, she did not know the force or the nature of love, or what place there is left for it in a driven and burdened world. She did not even know why her own husband had deceived her. And she did not believe that she would ever know. Now that she was released from the strain of her wrath against James, from the rigidity of her injured virtue, she decided, with an immense relief, that she might put the whole matter from her mind. Rosemary and her friends might study things of this sort, might draw their conclusions from evidence that to Mary was unimaginable. Rosemary was a modern woman, fearless of truth. To Mary truth was less than reticence. She could not, she realised, discuss such subjects frankly, even with herself. It was her duty, therefore, since she shrank from the knowledge without which judgment is only prejudice, to admit her own ignorance and be merciful. She saw now that James, even while he deceived her, had not been a monster but a human being, acting as human beings act—because they are kind, because they are afraid, because the small words and deeds of everyday life have made a chain for them. There was no need for her to be angry with James. The existing state of affairs might permit him, though he was her husband, to sin, but it had also enabled James to give his wife twenty-seven years of happiness and freedom from care. In all those years she had not bought her right to be angry with him by a single sacrifice, or a single protest. To keep her happiness intact James had disabled his clerks from marrying and driven his girls on to the streets. She had not even cared to find out that this was so. And when, at last, she had known, she had not acted. She had argued a little with James, and then given way. When her ignorance had disappeared she had found another method, wifely obedience, of shutting out the thought of suffering. In the beginning, she remembered, she had not wished to follow James's suggestion because she had been afraid that he and Trent might come to think badly of her. They had thought badly—and she had been terrified. The girls might be crippled by standing or die of consumption, but she, whose profits they made, must keep James's good opinion. Let James deceive her, however, let him give another woman a little of the love and the money he had promised her, and virtue gave her strength. She hated him, she was furious with him, though she tried she could not forgive him—it had been simple to forgive him his sins against others!

Her thoughts ran easily down the familiar channels of self-reproach. About James's sin she had not been able to think either justly or coherently—she had struggled in vain against the repulsion she felt for such a subject. But now, when she had only to blame herself, the power of her mind came quickly back to her.

She could not doubt, she decided now, that in the matter of the girls she was more to blame than James. His attitude, that had seemed to her so callous, was due she thought now to a fact beyond his control, the fact of his being a man. For men, after all, are not like women. They have different ideals and different standards of value. They do not think as women do in terms of health and happiness, but in terms of knowledge, of riches, of power. She checked herself and went through that again—she must build up her argument carefully for she was dealing now with unfamiliar notions. A clever man is more, she told herself, than a person, a husband, a father, the centre of various personal relations. He is the guardian, the vehicle, of an idea. He wants to impose this idea of his on his environment, to work it out, to see it take form; and for a man success in his career, in his chosen enterprise, is justification. If he has no career and no ideas at all he deceives himself, and makes himself hot and happy playing games.

He does not trouble to think—it is not his business to think whether what he is doing serves the race or not. He wants to do something, and do it better than other people, and have his friends congratulate him and his womenfolk make a fuss about it. No—Mary pulled herself up—no, that was unjust, she was letting herself lose touch with her real thought! A man likes success, who doesn't?—and he likes a little petting, particularly if one allows him to pretend that he despises it. But in the end it is not petting that sways him. He has a need to impress himself on the world that he finds outside him, an impulse that drives him to achieve his ends recklessly, ruthlessly, through any depth of suffering and conflict. She must be very just, she told herself, she must be serious, and not assume that little air of half-amused toleration with which middle-aged women are apt to dismiss the turbulence of men. She had often assumed it, in order perhaps, she thought now, to save her temper, but this was not an occasion for its use. For it is just by means of the qualities that are often so irritating, their tiresome restlessness, their curiosity, their disregard for security, for seemliness, even for life itself, that men have mastered the world and filled it with the wealth of civilisation. It is after this foolish, disorganised fashion of theirs, each of them—difficult, touchy creatures—busy with his personal ambitions, that they have armed the race with science, dignified it with art—one can take men lightly, she told herself solemnly, to protect oneself from annoyance, but one cannot take lightly the things that men have done.

Women, however—this was the thought that had stirred her to begin her thinking—women are not divided by all these different aims. Their single end, poor hampered things, is the service and the care of human beings. Amid the magnificent confusion of man's conquests, in a world whose riches and beauties man has turned to plunder, they do what they can to love people, to feed them, to keep them healthy and happy.

It was exactly plunder that she meant—she told herself after a minute's consideration—for what are women, after all, but mere camp-followers, dragged up and down the world, allowed to exist and to carry out their work in the interstices of man's enterprises, even permitted to enrich themselves, if they can, by stealing a little here and there from the vast accumulations of his loot, but without power to influence the campaign, to choose the enemy, to choose the issue, even to decide the order of the day's journey? It is no wonder, poor things, she thought, forgiving them in advance, that with their children to rear and their men to humour they have not been able to heal the wounds of these preposterous battles, that in a land littered up with bricks, with iron, with food, with stuffs, with books, with pictures, with tools and machinery, with all the wealth that men—brilliant acquisitive creatures—so love to produce, most of the people who live among these riches are denied an access to knowledge and lack the simple necessities of health. It is no wonder, but the point that she wanted—she made very sure of it—is that this business that has not been done, this task of distributing and administering, is not men's but women's work. Men care for things, for their splendid complicated expensive things, women care for the happiness that can be got from them. There are women, of course, who don't, women like magpies, who have absorbed men's ideals without doing the work that makes them honourable—she made the concession hastily, for it suddenly occurred to her that hers would hardly be a man's view of women—but after all one can put such people aside. In her own life Mary had always put them aside, regarding them as the affair of men and not of decent women. They were spoiled, poor things, and doubtless not mainly by their own fault. There are men who prey on the world, one can match the two sets of them against one another. To protect the poor and the helpless is women's work, and if they neglect the task there seems no reason—the London Library had not been reassuring—to suppose that it will ever be properly done.