'Because I am.'
And nodding sweetly I walked away.
THE EIGHTH DAY
FROM STUBBENKAMMER TO GLOWE
When Reason lecturing us on certain actions explains that they are best avoided, and Experience with her sledge-hammers drives the lesson home, why do we, convinced and battered, repeat the actions every time we get the chance? I have known from my youth the opinion of Solomon that he that passeth by and meddleth with strife belonging not to him, is like one that taketh a dog by the ears; and I have a wise relative—not a blood-relation, but still very wise—who at suitable intervals addresses me in the following manner:—'Don't meddle.' Yet now I have to relate how, on the eighth day of my journey round Rügen, in defiance of Reason, Experience, Solomon, and the wise relative, I began to meddle.
The first desire came upon me in the night, when I could not sleep because of the mosquitoes and the constant coming into the pavilion of late and jovial tourists. The tourists came in in jolly batches till well on towards morning, singing about things like the Rhine and the Fatherland's frontiers, glorious songs and very gory, as they passed my hastily-shut window on their way round to the door. After each batch had gone I got out and cautiously opened the window again, and then waited for the next ones, slaying mosquitoes while I waited; and it was while I lay there sleepless and tormented that the longing to help reunite Charlotte and her husband first entered my head.
It is true that I was bothered for some time trying to arrive at a clear comprehension of what constitutes selfishness, but I gave that up for it only made my head ache. Surely Charlotte, for instance, was intensely selfish to leave her home and, heedless of her husband's unhappiness, live the life she preferred? But was not he equally selfish in wanting to have her back again? For whose happiness would that be? He could not suppose for hers. If she, determined to be unselfish, went home, she would only be pandering to his selfishness. The more she destroyed her individuality and laid its broken remains at his feet, the more she would be developing evil qualities in the acceptor of such a gift. We are taught that our duty is to make each other good and happy, not bad and happy; Charlotte, therefore, would be doing wrong if, making the Professor happy, she also made him bad. Because he had a sweet way with him and she had not, he got all the sympathy, including mine; and of course the whole of that windy mass of biassed superficiality called Public Opinion was on his side. But how can one, if one truly loves a woman, wish her to live a life that must make her wretched? Such love can only be selfish; accordingly the Professor was selfish. They were both selfish; and if one were not so the other would be more so. And if to be unselfish meant making those about you the opposite, then it must be wrong; and were it conceivable that a whole family should determine to be unselfish and actually carry out the dreadful plan, life in that doomed house would become a perpetual combat de générosité, not in any way to be borne. Here it was that my head began to ache. 'What stuff is this?' I thought, veering round suddenly to the easeful simplicity of the old conventions. 'Just to think of it gives me a headache. The only thing I know of that does not give a woman a headache is to live the life for which she was intended—the comfortable life with a brain at rest and a body wholly occupied with benevolences; and if her meekness makes her husband bad, what does that matter in the end to any one but him? Charlotte ought to be very happy with that kind old man. Any woman would be. Her leaving him must have been owing to some trifling misunderstanding. I am sure it would be for her happiness to go back to him. She would grow quite round and mellow. Could I not do something, say something, to get her to give him another trial? I wish—oh, I wish I could!'
Now from time to time the wise relative quoted above amplifies his advice in the following manner:—'Of all forms of meddling that which deals with man and wife is, to the meddler, the most immediately fatal.'
But where are the persons who take advice? I never yet met them. When the first shaft of sunshine slanted through my window it fell on me in my dressing-gown feverishly writing to Charlotte. The eloquence of that letter! I really think it had all the words in it I know, except those about growing round and mellow. Something told me that they would not appeal to her. I put it in an envelope and locked it in my dressing-case till, unconscious of what was in store for her, she should send me her address; and then, full of the glow that warms the doer of good actions equally with the officious, I put on my bathing things, a decent skirt and cloak over them, got out of the window, and went down the cliff to the beach to bathe.