She is assailed by strange temptations, horrible temptations, from which she shrinks back afraid. This hunger and thirst in her soul are so tormenting that she has frightful cravings for Something to satisfy her hunger and quench her thirst. She is tempted to take to drink, or to drugs, to dull the throbbing of her brain, to wake her up out of this awful lassitude, to give her a momentary excitement and vitality, and then—forgetfulness. She must have some kind of excitement—to break the awful monotony of her life, this intolerable dullness of her little home. If only an adventure would come to her! Some thrilling, perilous adventure, however wicked, whatever the consequences. She feels the overmastering need of some passionate emotion. She would like to plunge into romantic love again, to be set on fire by it. Somewhere about the world is a man who could save her, some strong man with a masterful way with him, brutal as well as tender, cruel as well as kind, who would come to her, and clasp her hands, and capture her. She would lean upon him. She would yield, willingly.... She tries to crush down these thoughts. She is horrified at the evil in them. Oh, she is a bad woman! Even in her loneliness her face scorches with shame. She gives a faint cry to God to save her. But again and again the devilish thoughts leer up in her brain. She begins to believe that the devil is really busy with her and that she cannot escape him.
She has a strange sense of impending peril, of something that is going to happen. She knows that something must happen.
In this Eighth Year she is in a state bordering on hysteria, when anything may happen to her. Even her husband is beginning to get alarmed. He is at last awakened out of his self-complacency. He is beginning to watch her, with a vague uneasiness. Why does she look so queerly at him sometimes as though she hated him? Why does she say such bitter, cruel, satirical things, which stab him and leave a poison in the wound? Why does she get into such passionate rages about trivial things, and then reveal a passionate remorse? Why does she sink into long silences, sitting with her hands in her lap, staring at the pattern on the carpet, as though it had put a spell upon her? He cannot understand. She says there is nothing wrong with her health, she refuses to see a doctor. She scoffs at the idea of going away for a little holiday to the seaside. She says it would bore her to death. Once she bursts into tears and weeps on his shoulder. But she cannot, or will not, explain the cause of her tears, so that he becomes impatient with her and talks to her roughly, though he is sorry afterwards. He begins to see now that marriage is a difficult game. Perhaps they were not suited to each other. They married too young, before they had understood each other.... However they have got to make the best of it now. That is the law of life—to make the best of it.
So in the Eighth Year the husband tries to take a common-sense view of things, not knowing that in the Eighth Year it is too late for common sense as far as the wife is concerned. She wants uncommon sense. Only some tremendous and extraordinary influence, spiritual, or moral, or intellectual, beyond the limits of ordinary common sense, may save her from the perils in her own heart. She must find a way of escape, for these unsatisfied yearnings, for this beating heart, for this throbbing brain. Her little home has become a cage to her. Her husband has become her jailer. Her life has become too narrow, too petty, too futile. In the Eighth Year she must find a way of escape—anyhow, anywhere. And in the Eighth Year the one great question is in what direction will she go? There are many ways of escape.
CHAPTER VII
One way of escape is through the door of the Divorce Court. Sir Francis Jeune, when he was President of the Divorce Court, saw before him many of these escaping women, and he noted down the fact about the Eighth Year; and sitting there with an impassive face, but watchful eyes, he saw the characters in all these little tragedies and came to know the type and the plot from constant reiteration. Sometimes the plot varied, but only in accidentals, never in essentials. As the story was rehearsed before him, it always began in the same way, with a happy year or two of marriage. Then it was followed by the first stress and strain. Then there came the drifting apart, the little naggings, the quarrels, the misunderstandings, until the wife—it was generally the wife—became bored, lonely, emotional, hysterical, and an easy victim for the first fellow with a roving eye, a smooth tongue, and an easy conscience. The procession still goes on, the long procession of women who try to escape through the Divorce Court door. Every year they come, and the same story is told and retold with sickening repetition. In most cases they are childless wives. That is proved, beyond dispute, by all statistics of divorce. Sometimes they have one or two children, but those cases are much more rare. But even when there are children to complicate the issues and to be the heirs of these tragedies, the causes behind the tragedies are the same. The woman has had idle hands in her lap before the Eighth Year of marriage has been reached. In the early years her little home was enough to satisfy her mind and heart, and her interests were enough to keep her busy. The coming of the first child, and of the second, if there is a second, was for a time sufficient to crowd her day with little duties and to prevent any restlessness or any deadly boredom. All went well while she had but one maidservant, and while her husband’s feet were still on the lower rungs of the ladder. But the trouble began with the arrival of the extra servant and with the promotion of her husband. It began when gradually she handed over domestic duties to paid people, when she was seldom in the kitchen and more in the drawing-room, when the children were put under the charge of a nurse, and when the responsibilities of motherhood had become a sinecure. The fact must be faced that a child is not always a cure for the emptiness of a woman’s heart, nor an absolute pledge of fidelity between husband and wife. These women who seek a way of escape from their little homes are not always brought to that position by the unfulfilled instincts of motherhood. For many of them have no instincts of motherhood. They feel no great natural desire to have a child. They even shrink from the idea of motherhood, and plead their lack of courage, their ill-health, their weakness. With their husbands they are partners in a childless scheme, or if they have a child—they quickly thrust it into the nursery to leave themselves free.
But, on the other hand, it is a fact borne out by all the figures that a child does in the vast majority of cases bind together the husband and wife, as no other influence or moral restraint; and that among all the women who come to the Divorce Court the overwhelming majority is made up of childless wives.
These women are not naturally vicious. They have not gone wrong because their principles are perverted. They are not, as a rule, intellectual anarchists who have come to the conclusion that the conventional moral code is wrong and that the laws of marriage are neither divine nor just. On the contrary, they are conscience-stricken, they are terrified by their own act. Many of them are brokenhearted and filled with shame. It is pitiful to hear their letters read in court, letters to their husbands pleading for forgiveness, asking for “another chance,” or trying, feebly, to throw the blame on the man, and to whitewash themselves as much as possible. To judge from their letters it would seem that they were under some evil spell, and that they were conscious of being dragged away from their duty as though Fate had clutched them by the hair, so that although they struggled they could not resist, and were borne helplessly along upon a swift tide of passion carrying them to destruction. “I could not help myself” is the burden of their cry, as though they had no free-will, and no strength of will. Occasionally they give tragic pictures of their idle lives, so lacking in interest, so barren, so boring. There is another phrase which crops up again and again: “Oh, I was bored—bored—bored!” It was the man that saved her from boredom who now shares the woman’s guilt, and stands in the witness box in this court of honor. He came to her just at that moment in the Eighth Year when she was bored to death. He was kind, sympathetic, understanding. He brought a little color back into her cheeks, a little laughter into her eyes, a little sunshine into her life. He seemed such a boy, so youthful and high-spirited, such a contrast to her husband, always busy, and always worrying over his business. He told good stories, took her to the theatre, arranged little supper-parties, made a new adventure of life. He would sit chatting with her over the fire, when there were flickering shadows on the walls. He chased away the ghosts, gave her new dreams, brought new hopes.... And then suddenly he begins to tempt her; and she shrinks back from him, and is afraid. He knows she is afraid, but he tries to laugh away her fears. She pleads with him to go away, but there is insincerity in her voice, her words are faltering. She knows that if he were to go away she would be left more lonely than before, in intolerable loneliness till the ghosts would rush back at her. So he stays, and tempts her a little more. Gradually, little by little, he becomes her great temptation, overwhelming all other things in life dwarfing all other things, even her faith and honor. How can she resist? By what power within her can she resist?