CHAPTER III
In the fifth and sixth years they have settled down to the jog-trot of the married life. Not yet do they see the shadow of the Eighth Year looming ahead. They have faced the reality of life, and knowing each other as they really are have made a working compromise. Their love has steadied down to a more even flame, and passion is almost extinguished. They have decided to play the game, according to the creed of their class, exactly as their neighbors are playing it.
It is largely a game of bluff, as it is played in thousands of small households. It is a game, also, of consequences, as I shall have to show. It consists in keeping up appearances, in going one better than one’s neighbor whenever possible, and in making a claim to a higher rung of the social ladder than is justified by the husband’s income and rank in life. It is the creed of snobbishness. For this creed everything is sacrificed—contentment of mind, the pleasure of life, the little children of life.
In many flats of Intellectual Mansions, and even in the small houses of the “well-to-do” suburbs, children do not enter into the scheme of things. The “babies have been left out of the business.” For people who are keeping up appearances to the last penny of their income cannot afford to be burdened by babies. Besides, they interfere seriously with social ladder-climbing, drag down a married couple of the younger generation to the domestic squalor of their parents’ early life. The husband cannot bear the thought that his wife should have to make beds in the morning and mend stockings in the evening, and wheel out a perambulator in the park. It is so very “low down.” The husband wants to save his wife from all this domestic drudgery. He wants her to look pretty in the frocks he buys her. He wants her to wear more expensive frocks than any other woman in his circle of friends. He likes to hear his friends say, “How charming your wife looks to-night, old man!” and to hear elderly ladies say to his wife, “What a beautiful gown you are wearing, my dear!”
He is working hard now in order to furnish his wife’s wardrobe—not only for her pleasure, but for his pride. After the first romance of love, ambition comes to gild reality. He is ambitious to build up a beautiful little home. The furniture with which they started married life on the hire system has been bought and paid for, and is now replaced here and there by “genuine antiques.” He puts some good prints on his walls and buys some water-color sketches, and becomes in a small way a patron of the arts. It is pleasant during one of his wife’s evening At Homes to take a guest on one side and say “What do you think of that? Pretty good, eh? It’s an original, by Verdant Green, you know.”
He has urged upon his wife the necessity of giving recherché little dinners, to which he can invite friends better off than himself, and distinguished guests whom he wishes to impress. As he explains to his wife, “one has to do these things.” And he does them rather well, paying some attention to his wines—he keeps a good dinner claret—and to his cigars, which he buys at the stores. He also suggests to his wife that now she has an extra servant she had better establish a weekly At Home, an informal little affair, but pleasant and useful, because it shows the world, their world, that they are getting on in the social scale. Here again, distinguished visitors may be invited to “drop in.” It is good for business. A pretty, well-dressed wife makes a favourable impression upon solicitors who have briefs to give away or upon wealthy clients. One must keep up appearances, and make a good show. Besides, it is pleasant to put on evening clothes after a hard day’s work and to play the host. It gives a man some return for all his toil. It gives him a reason for living. And it brightens up one’s home-life. “Man does not live by bread alone,” he must have some cakes and ale, so to speak.
But it is expensive. As every year of marriage passes, the expenses increase, steadily, miraculously. It is difficult to account for them, but there they are, facing a man in his quarterly reckoning. And the two ends must be made to meet, by extra work, by putting one’s nose down to the grindstone. The husband does not come home so soon as he used to do in the early days. But he has the satisfaction of knowing that while he is away at work his wife is keeping up his social reputation and doing all the things which a lady in her station of life is expected to do. He thanks heaven that his wife is happy.
She is not unhappy, this wife, in the fifth and sixth year of marriage. After the first romantic illusions failed her she settled down quietly enough to play the game. It is quite interesting, quite amusing. Now and again queer doubts assail her, and she has strange flutterings at the heart, and little pinpricks of conscience. It is about the question of motherhood. Perhaps it would be better for her to have a baby. However, she has threshed out the question a hundred times with her husband, and he has decided that he cannot afford a family yet, and after all the flat is very small. Besides, she shirks the idea herself—all the pain of it, and the trouble of it.... She thrusts down these queer doubts, does not listen to the flutterings at the heart, ignores the little pinpricks of conscience. She turns quickly to the interests of her social life and falls easily into the habit of pleasant laziness, filling her day with little futile things, which seem to satisfy her heart and brain. When her husband has gone to business she dresses herself rather elaborately for a morning stroll, manicures her nails, tries a new preparation for the complexion, alters a feather, or a flower, in one of her hats, studies herself in the glass, and is pleased with herself. It passes the time. Then she saunters forth, and goes to the shops, peering in through the great plate-glass windows at the latest display of lingerie, of evening gowns, of millinery. She fancies herself in some of the new hats from Paris. One or two of them attract her especially. She makes a mental note of them. She will ask her husband to let her buy one of them. After all Mrs. Fitzmaurice had a new hat only last week—the second in one month. She will tell him that. It will pique him, for there is a rather amusing rivalry between the Fitzmaurices and them.