Ten Degrees Backward

by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

She shook her head where the once dark hair was beginning to turn grey. "No. I'm not really modern, you know: I've advanced as far as motor-cars and the economic position of women and central heating, but I draw the line at smoking and going in flying machines and wearing pyjamas. I'm really almost grandmotherly in some things."

I demurred.

"Yes, I am," she persisted. "If I were modern, I should draw out my own little cigarette-case and offer you an Egyptian or a Virginian, as if I were a slave-driver in the Babylonian marriage market: but as it is, you must consume your own smoke like a manufacturing chimney. As I told you once before, I budded in the 'eighties and blossomed in the 'nineties, and now I'm only fit to be sewn up in lavender-bags and kept in the linen-cupboard. And now, Reggie, tell me all about it."

So I told her, as briefly and truthfully as I could, the whole story of my married life and its culminating tragedy. I told of how doubtful I had been from the beginning of my power to make Fay happy: of my qualms of conscience as to whether at my age I had a right to ask so young a girl to marry me: of how Annabel and Frank—especially Frank—had gradually come between Fay and me: of how I had hated the theatrical entertainments and all that they involved, and yet for Fay's sake had upheld them in the teeth of Annabel's opposition: of how further events had proved that Annabel was right and I was wrong, since the passion for acting—in conjunction with Frank's influence—had finally driven Fay from me: of my increasing anger against Frank and my incapacity to forgive him: of my former gift of healing and of how my enmity towards him had deprived me of this gift: and finally of how this increasing and consuming hatred had driven me into the wilderness, and shut me out from communion with God or man. All this I told without enlargement or restraint. But from one thing I strenuously refrained: I said no word of blame nor uttered a single complaint against my darling. Surely, as her husband, this was the least that I could do. She had weighed me in her balances and found me wanting and rejected me: but she was still my wife, and my loyalty to her was unshaken.

All the time that I was pouring into Isabel's sympathetic ears the feelings that had been pent up in my own breast for two years, she hardly spoke a word: but her blue eyes never left my face, and I felt in every fibre of me that she sympathised and understood.

When I had finished there was a short silence, during which I waited for her verdict, wondering whether she would blame me or Frank or Annabel: or merely insist on the irrevocableness of the marriage-vow; and suggest that I should endeavour—by means of that exploded blunderbuss called marital authority—to compel my wife to come back to me, whether she wished it or whether she did not.

But to my surprise Lady Chayford did none of these things. Her first words were—

"You're up against it now, Reggie: what you've got to do is to forgive Frank Wildacre."

"But I can't," I cried: "it is absolutely impossible."

Isabel nodded her head. "I know that. It was absolutely impossible for the sick and the maimed and the halt to take up their beds and walk: but they did it."