Yethill was not behind his fellows in this respect. When he had said his little say upon the Theory of Wireless Photophony, the Detection of Subterranean Mines by the K Rays, and the irresponsibility of the bedbug in connection with beri-beri; when he had told the Head of the Electrical Department how many watts are equivalent to a horse-power, and explained to the Colonel, who is sinfully proud of his men, that the employment of the uneducated inferior in warfare will cease with the century, and that the army of the future will consist entirely of officers, he would drop his voice to a confidential whisper and control his elbows. He talked heliographically as a rule, and if a man were left to listen to him—he could, as a rule, clear the Mess smoking-room in ten minutes from the start—he would dilate at length upon his best-loved hobby, the art of managing women.
Yethill was no Adonis. He had a knobby, argumentative head, a harlequin set of features, each separate one belonging to a different order and period of facial architecture; and a figure which was not calculated, as his tailor observed with bitterness, to do justice to a good cut. But it was wonderful to hear him talk in that conquering, masterful way of his. He had an appalling array of statistics to prove that the majority of marriages were miserable; that life, connubially speaking, was dust and ashes in the mouths of nineteen Benedicts out of twenty. But the darkest hour presaged the dawn. Let the man about to marry, let the already-married, but adopt the Yethill system of sweetheart-and-wife breaking, and thenceforth all would be well. And thousands of voices arising from the uttermost ends of the civilized earth would hail with one accord Yethill as their deliverer.
Then came an essay on the New Art of Courtship.
“To a man,� Yethill would say, jerking his knee and stammering a little, as his custom was when excited, “who is a reasonable being, the woman he loves is a woman—only spelt with a big ‘W’; the woman he likes is a woman spelt in the ordinary way; and the woman he doesn’t like is a mere creature of the female sex. To a woman,� Yethill would continue, “who is, nineteen times out of twenty, a perfectly unreasonable being;—the man she loves is a demi-god; the man she doesn’t love is a man;—and the man she dislikes is a gorilla. She quite overlooks the fact that in every individual human male these three may be found united. And man is weak enough to humor her. So that out of so many marriages that take place, a majority—a frightful majority—are founded upon illusions. And the subsequent state of conjugality may be called a state of evolution, in which these primary illusions, after undergoing a process of disarrangement and disintegration, are finally reduced to impalpable powder, and the Bed Rock of Reality is laid bare. We know what happens after that!�
The listening man generally knew enough to grunt an affirmative. And Yethill would, with many weird facial jerks and twitches, go on to explain the system.
The great system was, like all other wonderful discoveries, involved in a very simple plan of procedure. It consisted only in reversing the accepted order of things. A man, supposedly desirous of getting married, recognizing in himself the existence of the trinity above mentioned, should assert the existence of the third person from the very outset—suppress the demi-god, show the gorilla. Let the woman you were about to make your wife see the worst of you before you showed her the best. Let her pass through the burning fiery furnace before you admitted her into the Paradise that is the reward of proved devotion. Let her know what bullying meant before you took to petting—blame her weaknesses before you praised her virtues. Under this régime there would be no illusions to commence with; and married life, instead of being full of disappointments, would be replete with delightful surprises. Your wife married you, believing you to be a gorilla.
“There’s the weak point,� the listener would interpolate. “What woman, unless a lunatic of sorts, would marry a gorilla?�
Yethill would not hear of this objection. He was always deaf when you came to it. He would pound on—dilate on the surprise and joy with which she found that she had married a man, and the rapture with which she would greet the final discovery that she had got hold of a demi-god.
“It sounds splendid,� the other men would say, “but it won’t wash. Look here, I’m going to take Miss So-and-So up to a Gaiety matinée to-morrow. To follow up your system I ought to call for her in my worst clothes, be surly on the way to the station, and neglectful in the tunnels. I ought to dump her into her stall like a sack, go out to ‘see a man’ between every act, and take it for granted that she doesn’t want cool tea and warm ices. You know that’d never do! She’d give me the bag to-morrow. And she’d be right!�