And even in the sad cases where a woman has sown real wild oats in the man’s sense of the word, how different the little moral rules and regulations which we keep for these occasions would appear in the face of an immediate and violent death. I heard not long ago of a very sad story which bears this out. A man very narrowly escaped death from drowning, shortly after he had broken his engagement with a girl he genuinely loved, on her confessing to him that, many years before, she had once yielded to the importunities of a passionate lover. I do not know what were his emotions in the awful moment when the waters closed over him, and he was experiencing that horrible fight for breath which those who have known it describe as the most terrible sensation conceivable. Apparently his hairbreadth escape from death tore from his eyes the swathings of conventional opinion with which he had been blinded. Instead of regarding himself as a deeply wronged man he realised that he had behaved horribly to the unfortunate girl, who had thus been doubly outraged by his sex. He sought her at once and begged to be taken back again, but she happened to be a woman of some spirit, and she refused to trust herself to a man of such narrow views, and given to such harsh judgment.
Of course this treatment increased his love a thousandfold. It obsessed him to a painful degree, and in the end his desperate entreaties prevailed on her deep affection for him and she relented. Their marriage was not very happy, as may be imagined; they both loved to madness and the ghost of that dead passion stood ever between them, an invisible, poisonous presence that killed their joy in each other. After a time a deep melancholy settled on the woman, and she allowed some trifling illness to take such a hold on her that it caused her death.
When she was dying, I am told, she said to her faithful friend: ‘If ever you meet another woman who has made one little slip—a thing which at the time seemed so natural and inevitable as not to be sin at all—tell her never never to confess it to the man she is going to marry, least of all if she loves him. If that confession doesn’t part them altogether, it will always be between them. One does it wishing to be straight, but it’s the most dreadful mistake a woman can make.’
Her wish to be straight had cost this poor woman not only her whole life’s happiness, and her very life itself, but the happiness of the man she loved, in whose interests she had made the confession that wrought the harm. ‘How dearly I have paid! how dearly I have paid!’ she used to say over and over again in her last illness.
This is an absolutely true story, and it seems to me a burning injustice that a woman should suffer so bitterly for what would be absolutely disregarded in a man. I have no doubt there are many similar cases, and emphatically I say that such confessions are ill-advised. The ordinary conventional-thinking man placed in these circumstances would either throw a woman over, or marry her against his convictions. The extraordinary masculine code, for some reason beyond my feminine powers of comprehension, will not admit that a spinster who has had a lover, or even made one ‘false step,’ is a fit person to wed, though no man would object to marrying a widow, and many men take respondent divorcées to wife.
Even in the case of a rarely generous-minded, tolerant and understanding man, who judged the offence at its true computation, such knowledge would only prove disturbing and a source of insecurity to conjugal happiness. No good purpose of any kind can be served, and the ease which confession is proverbially supposed to gain for the sinner would be bought at a very heavy price.
‘But two wrongs don’t make a right, and surely it can’t be proper for a woman to deceive a man on such a vital point,’ the stern moralist may exclaim. Possibly not, according to the strictly ideal standard of ethics; but, viewed from the larger standpoints of life and of commonsense, this ‘deceit’ would appear to be advisable. And be assured, my unpleasant moralist (I’m sure you are an unpleasant person), that the sinner will not get off ‘scot free,’ as you seem to fear. Many and many a stab will be her portion, for memory is a potent poison, and every expression of love and trust from her husband will most likely carry its own special sting, whilst the round, innocent eyes of adoring little children, to whom she is a being that can do no wrong, will be a meet punishment for an infinitely greater fault. Meanwhile the man is in all probability in every way a gainer by the woman’s silence, for doubtless he is doubly dear to her for the very fact that the first man treated her badly, and she may perhaps be a better wife, a stronger and sweeter woman, a more capable mother, by reason of the suffering she has undergone.
Now let no maliciously obtuse person attribute to me the pernicious doctrine that a woman with a past is the best wife for a man. I merely say that a good woman who has surrendered herself to an ardent lover and been afterwards deserted by him must necessarily have gone through such intense suffering that her character is probably deepened thereby and her capacity for love and faithfulness increased. It is another truism that suffering is necessary to bring out the best qualities in women.
Men too should keep the details of their wild oats severely to themselves. In married life there are bound to be secrets and the happiest couples are those who know how to keep them, each to him or her self. A very good motto for the newly betrothed would be that of Tom Broadbent in John Bull’s Other Island—‘Let us have no tellings—perfect confidence, but no tellings: that’s the way to avoid rows!’