A lady and her husband

by Amber Reeves Blanco White

Mary was aware by this time that she would be exceedingly sorry to lose Miss Percival. She had grown fond of the capable young woman, and she felt that at this moment she was more than ever in need of unromantic capacity. Moreover—it had not occurred to her before—there was now no reason why the question of the waitresses should not be treated on its merits. It would be as well, she told herself bitterly, if somebody gained something from the ruin of her happiness.

"As a matter of fact," she said, "I was going to tell you, when you sprang this mine upon me, that you must prepare yourself for being worked very hard. I am not going on with the Holiday Home, and I haven't given up, though I know it looked as if I had, the matter of wages. If you desert me now, Miss Percival, you will be deserting on the eve of a serious engagement. I never wanted you more."

But Miss Percival still seemed doubtful. "There is another difficulty," she said, "but it's personal. I can't very well explain—" She looked at Mary anxiously, as if she would like to say something but was afraid of its reception.

Mary gathered that Miss Percival's mind was troubled. She leaned forward kindly. "Tell me anything you care to if it's a difficulty," she said; "we have worked together for more than a year now, and you ought to know whether it's likely that I can help you!"

Miss Percival laughed, and Mary thought the laugh was strained. "There'll be no question of your wanting to keep me when you've heard what I've got to say," she said. Then she looked Mary in the face. "The fact is, I came here for a definite purpose, and I'm going because I can see that I have made you very unhappy. I came here to make you unhappy, really, but not in this way. When your daughter told me what you wanted me for I thought that here at last was a chance of getting something done. I meant to open your eyes, to make you understand the connection between your luxury and the sweating of those underpaid exhausted girls. Of course, you might have been a fool or a coward, or a painted lady, but I thought that if you were a decent woman you couldn't see these girls suffer and fold your hands again and do nothing for them. So I came, and when I saw you I knew it would be all right, so I stayed. But now I can see you are ill, and terribly unhappy. I don't feel that I've done wrong in edging you on. There was a chance that those girls of yours might gain by it, and of course, so far as that goes, you rich people deserve to be unhappy, but I can't stay and watch you!" She jumped up from her chair, and went to the mantelpiece, where Mary could not see her face. "Of course, I don't pretend that you wouldn't have found out a good deal for yourself," she went on, as Mary said nothing, "but I feel that I've stood at your elbow the whole time, underlining it all and rubbing it in, never letting you miss things, and now I think that perhaps I was the wrong person, and I've done it the wrong way. I ought to have helped you more, and tried to think out with you what ought to be done and how we could best set about it. But I left all that to you. I haven't helped you at all. I told myself that I didn't want to bias you, only to show you the truth. But it wasn't that really. I was angry and I gave way to my feelings. I expect we could have persuaded Mr. Heyham if I had made you take me into your confidence. But I couldn't bear that you should manipulate him and be tactful with him. I hated him, I wanted you to fight him, and hurt him, and get the better of him. And of course he has won, and the person who has been hurt is you."

Mary stared at her painfully, but she could only see the back of Miss Percival's head. "Why do you hate my husband?" she asked.

Miss Percival's reply came slowly. "I don't hate him particularly. I hate all men when they're powerful and using their power to be cruel to women. And that's most of them—nearly always, whether they mean to or not." She turned abruptly. Her face was white, and to Mary, attending to her closely, it seemed strange. It must have owed its look of firm intelligence, Mary felt, to some trick of self-control, for now that this was broken by emotion Miss Percival looked crudely, pitiably young. "I have tried not to feel like that," she was saying, "I don't want to hate them. I know—I've told myself over and over again that hate is ugly, and clumsy, and sterile! I've tried my best to tear myself free of it, but I haven't ever succeeded. It only comes back again. I hate them—I hate them from the bottom of my soul."

Mary looked at her almost with respect. There never had been in her own muddled life, she felt, a passion as compelling as this. It was wrong, it was deplorable, but it had the dignity of defiance and revolt. She became conscious of a sympathetic excitement that was dispelling her weariness, filling her again with the warmth of life. In the face of Miss Percival's rebellion she could not be afraid any more that she herself would lack courage to protest.

"You must have some reason," she suggested, "this sort of feeling does not come of itself!"

Miss Percival shook her head. "I don't know how it came," she said, "though I could find a hundred reasons—I can see a fresh reason in every man I meet! When I look at their faces in the street, in a 'bus, anywhere, their mean stupid faces—men who get their ideals out of the halfpenny papers, men who think about money on an office stool all day, and then go home and treat some woman as an inferior—I wonder that any woman has ever loved a man. They're ugly, they're greedy, they're coarse-minded!" She shuddered, and crossed her hands across the front of her throat. "I hate them for everything," she said, "for their cruelty, for their insolence—look what they've done! They've taken the whole world and made it theirs; everything we have in it is only ours, now, because they choose to give it to us. We haven't even a right to our own children. And if we don't like what they give, if we loathe it, if we're in anguish, they don't care. They're not interested in us, they don't want to know what we are in ourselves, or what we think of our lives, it saves them trouble to call us mysteries. They're our masters, and they're strangers to us; they're our masters, and if we show that we are unhappy, they're bored! To one another they're civilised people, but to us to whom they've denied their civilisation they're savages,—arrogant, intolerant, vain, angry with anything that disturbs their comfort."