“Quite, quite,” said Peter vaguely, and went out of the shop, leaving a puzzled salesman behind him. “Forgot to pay, and all,” thought Thomas. “Not that I’d grudge it if he didn’t pay, only it’s not like him. He looks sadly to day. The old boy’s breaking up. Him and divorce! What does he want to worry his head about divorce for?”
Peter did not know that he had mentioned divorce, to his tobacconist. It would have shocked him if he had known. He spoke unconsciously, and listened mechanically to the man’s reply, but he was, harrowingly, “worrying his head” about divorce. He took snuff in the street, an unheard-of occurrence, but it did not clear his aching brain of the fateful word “divorce.”
Ada had put it there too firmly in her stupid and invincible malignity. She had one aim—to do Sam the greatest injury she could. His offence was rank, and she demanded a proportionate revenge.
She had lived as a spinster for marriage and as a wife by marriage. Marriage was not a duty, but a state of beatitude, and she had walked in the faith of her grotesque illusion that her marriage was singularly blessed. It was childless, and the more blessed for that: there were no intruders on the perfect union of man and wife. It was illusion, and a wilder perversion of the truth than the ordinary self-deceiver can attain; but illusion is the breath of life, and she had fed on her deception till, like a drug-taker, she could not live without it. She had blazoned it abroad in a hundred drawing-rooms. If there were low-voiced colloquies of this or that affair, if it was hinted that men were faithless ever, Ada would grow superior and boast the flawless rectitude of Sam. These were things which happened to other people, who very likely deserved them, and could by no manner of means occur to her. She was not so sunk in imbecility as to deny that they did happen, and to people who were, nominally, married; but they were unsound people, insecurely married. There was a fundamental difference between their marriages and hers. She couldn’t explain; it was too obvious for explanation. She was married, and these others, somehow, were married, yet not married. They had, through lack of merit, stopped short of the seventh paradise where nothing could shake consummate bliss. They were not as she was.
And now she had to face the fact that the impossible had happened to her, and not only had it happened, but was known to have happened. That was where the blow struck home. She had publicly elaborated her case of absolute conviction, she had vaunted his faithfulness, the cardinal connubiality of Sam, and Miss Entwistle was spreading the news that she had been a doting fool! And she hadn’t. She had not doted on Sam. She had not been infatuated with her husband, but with the idea of her husband which she had created and maintained. If only she had had the gumption to defy Miss Entwistle! If only she had concealed her belief in the story as successfully as she had hidden the fact that Sam had a separate room! She had been taken by surprise, she had admitted everything by default, and, worse, she had assured Mrs. Grandage that she would never see Sam again. She did not doubt, in spite of Mrs. Grandage’s good-nature, that this little sequel to the story of Miss Entwistle was in rapid circulation.
She was humiliated publicly, and, as she saw it, the one course open to her was to make Sam suffer a humiliation as drastic and as public as her own. Though it hurt her, he must pay for it; though she died, he must be punished and, sincerely, she expected it to kill her. She lived in a garden of lies, and life without the illusion of her marriage would be as impossible as life without the fragrance of her poisonous flowers to Rappaccini’s daughter, but no matter for that. Ada must be revenged, and divorce, though it killed her, would be the greatest injury that she could do a politician and a pietistic publisher. She managed to square the circle, too. She was to die and make a murderer of him; she was to ruin his business and make a bankrupt of him; and at the same time she was to have the compensation of a handsome alimony. But perhaps vengeance is always irrational, and that is why it belongs to God.
She dinned her word into Peter’s ears with the merciless reiteration of a hurt and howling child. It was her first word and her last, and appeals based on religion shattered themselves against it as fruitlessly as the appeal to reason. What she had said she had said: and she had said “Divorce.” Alternatives did not exist.
For Peter, divorce ranged itself with the abominations of the world, a man-made legal subterfuge to evade the law of God. There might, conceivably, be occasions when divorce was to be condoned as the comparatively little wrong which did a great right, and he tried very honestly to see Ada’s as one of those heroic needs. He failed: he could not even see that Ada was hurt in soul, or in anything but pride. She was in a mood, not of spiritual revolt, but of peevish discontent.
Small wonder that he snuffed prodigiously that night. He had his meed of suffering, and overcharged his small account with dreadful self-reproach. He, not Ada, and not Sam, was responsible for her violence and for the cause of it; he and the books upon his shelves; reading, his darling sin. He blamed himself for consenting too readily to their marriage. Sam, he had thought, would lead Ada: on what grounds had he thought it? What had he known of Sam’s leadership—a prolix, fluent boy at the Concentrics? He had exchanged his daughter for peaceful, solitary evenings with his books—“Self-seeker!” he thought—and the exchange was to recoil upon him now. He had abandoned, after one harsh, undaughterly repulse, his attempt to show her that wearing a wedding ring was not the whole duty of woman—“The sin of Pride,” he thought—and had returned to browse amongst his books. Sam seemed a good fellow, too. There were those Classics, and the texts, and the prosperous old age of Mr. Carter, who, but for Sam, would certainly have ended his days in the workhouse. But, failing with Ada, he ought to have appealed to Sam.... Yes, he ought to have taken a strong line with Sam, instead of letting Sam’s worldly success dazzle him. Sam had seemed too big for Peter Struggles to grapple with—the sin of cowardice.
Now it had come to this! Sam had broken the seventh commandment, and Ada wished to forget the words which Peter had read over them when he joined their right hands together, and said, “Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” She commanded a divorce, and it was useless for Peter to insist, out of his small store of worldly wisdom, that divorce was not hers to command. Sam had not been “cruel.”