Perhaps, by the by, that is really the Problem: where is the early husband to disappear to? Even if every time he saw her coming he were to duck under the table, somebody would be sure to notice it and make remarks. Ought he to take himself out one dark night, tie a brick round his neck, and throw himself into a pond?
What is a Lady to do with a Husband when she has finished with him?
But men are so selfish. The idea does not even occur to him; and the lady herself is too generous to do more than just hint at it.
Maybe it is Society that is to blame. There comes a luminous moment when it is suddenly revealed to the Heroine of the Problem Play that it is Society that is at the bottom of this thing. She has felt all along there was something the matter. Why has she never thought of it before? Here all these years has she been going about blaming her poor old father; her mother for dying too soon; the remarkable circumstances attending her girlhood; that dear old stupid husband she thought was hers; and all the while the really culpable party has been existing unsuspected under her very nose. She clears away the furniture a bit, and tells Society exactly what she thinks of it—she is always good at that, telling people what she thinks of them. Other people’s failings do not escape her, not for long. If Society would only step out for a moment, and look at itself with her eyes, something might be done. If Society, now that the thing has been pointed out to it, has still any lingering desire to live, let it look at her. This, that she is, Society has made her! Let Society have a walk round her, and then go home and reflect.
Could she—herself—have been to blame?
It lifts a load from us, fixing the blame on Society. There were periods in the play when we hardly knew what to think. The scientific father, the dead mother, the early husband! it was difficult to grasp the fact that they alone were to blame. One felt there was something to be said for even them. Ugly thoughts would cross our mind that perhaps the Heroine herself was not altogether irreproachable—that possibly there would have been less Problem, if, thinking a little less about her clothes, yearning a little less to do nothing all day long and be perfectly happy, she had pulled herself together, told herself that the world was not built exclusively for her, and settled down to the existence of an ordinary decent woman.
Looking at the thing all round, that is perhaps the best solution of the Problem: it is Society that is to blame. We had better keep to that.
CHAPTER IX
Civilization and the Unemployed.
Where Civilization fails is in not providing men and women with sufficient work. In the Stone Age man was, one imagines, kept busy. When he was not looking for his dinner, or eating his dinner, or sleeping off the effects of his dinner, he was hard at work with a club, clearing the neighbourhood of what one doubts not he would have described as aliens. The healthy Palæolithic man would have had a contempt for Cobden rivalling that of Mr. Chamberlain himself. He did not take the incursion of the foreigner “lying down.” One pictures him in the mind’s eye: unscientific, perhaps, but active to a degree difficult to conceive in these degenerate days. Now up a tree hurling cocoa-nuts, the next moment on the ground flinging roots and rocks. Both having tolerably hard heads, the argument would of necessity be long and heated. Phrases that have since come to be meaningless had, in those days, a real significance.