As in the case of so many unions in which mutual attraction of a quite superficial nature has been mistaken for love, the marriage of Jim and Dolly was a complete disaster. Disquietude began to make itself felt within a few weeks, but many months elapsed before Jim faced the situation without any further attempt at self-deception. The revelation that he had nothing to say to his wife, no thought to exchange with her, had come to him early. At first he had tried to believe that it was due to some sort of natural reticence in both their natures; and one day, chancing to open a volume of the poems of Matthew Arnold which Dolly had placed upon an occasional table in the drawing-room (for the look of the thing) he had found some consolation in the following lines:— Alas, is even Love too weak
To unlock the heart and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal’d
Their thoughts....
But we, my love—does a like spell benumb
Our hearts, our voices? Must we, too, be dumb?
Other lovers, then, had experienced that blank-wall feeling: it was just human nature. But soon he began to realize that in this case the trouble was more serious. He had nothing[118] to say to her. She did not understand him, nor call forth his confidences.
For months he had struggled against the consciousness that he had made a fatal mistake; but at length the horror of his marriage, of his inheritance, and of society in general as he saw it here in England, became altogether too large a presence to hide itself in the dark corners of his mind. It came out of the shadows and confronted him in the daylight of his heart—an ugly, menacing figure, towering above him, threatening him, arguing with him, whithersoever he went. He attributed features to it, and visualized it so that it took definite shape. It had a lewd eye which winked at him; it had a ponderous, fat body, straining at the buttons of the black clothing of respectability; it had heavy, flabby hands which stroked him as though urging him to accept its companionship. It was his gaoler, and it wanted to be friends with him.
At length one autumn day, while he was sitting in the woods among the falling leaves, he turned his inward eyes with ferocious energy upon the monster, and set his mind to a full study of the situation it personified.
In the first place, Dolly held views in regard to the position and status of wife which offended Jim’s every ideal. She was firmly convinced that marriage was, first and foremost, designed by God for the purpose of producing in the male creature a disinclination for romance. It involved a mutual duty, a routine: the wife had functions to perform with condescension, the husband had recurrent requirements to be indulged in order that his life might pursue its[119] way with the least possible excitement. The whole thing was an ordained and prescriptive business, like a soldier’s drill or a patient’s diet; nor did she seem to realize that there was no room for real love in her conception of their relationship, no sweet enchantment, no exaltation.
Then, again, he was very much disappointed that Dolly had no wish to have a child of her own. She had explained to him early in their married life how her doctor had told her there would be the greatest possible danger for her in motherhood; but it had not taken Jim long to see that a combination of fear, selfishness and vanity were the true causes of her disinclination to maternity. She was always afraid of pain and in dread of death; she always thought first of her own comfort; and she was vain of her youthful figure.
These two facts, that she asserted herself as his wife and that she shunned parenthood, combined to produce a condition of affairs which offended Jim’s every instinct. In these matters men are so often more fastidious than women, though the popular pretence is to the contrary; and in the case of this unfortunate marriage there was an appalling contrast between the crudity of the angel-faced little wife and the delicacy of the hardy husband.
A further trouble was that she regarded marriage as a duality incompatible with solitude or with any but the most temporary separation. One would have thought that she had based her interpretation of the conjugal state upon some memory of the Siamese Twins. When Jim was writing verses in the study—an occupation which, by the way, she[120] endeavoured to discourage—she would also want to write there; when he was entertaining a male friend she would enter the room, and refuse to budge—not because she liked the visitor, but because she must needs assert her standing as wife and as partner of all her husband’s amusements; when he went into Oxford or up to London she would insist on going too; even when he was talking to the gardener she would come up behind him, slip her arm through his, and immediately enter the conversation.
At first, when he used to tell her that he was going alone into Oxford to have a drink and a chat in the public room at one of the hotels, she would burst into tears, or take offence less liquid but more devastating. Later she accused him of an intrigue with a barmaid, and went into tantrums when in desperation he replied: “No such luck.” For the sake of peace he found it necessary at last to give up all such excursions except when they were unavoidable, and gradually his life had become that of a prisoner.
She carried this assertion of her wifely rights to galling and intolerable lengths. She would look over his shoulder when he was writing letters, and would be offended if he did not let her do so, or if he withheld the letters he received. On two or three occasions she had come to him, smiling innocently, and had handed him some opened envelope, and had said: “I’m so sorry, dear; I opened this by mistake. I thought it was for me.”
He could keep nothing from her prying eyes; and yet, in contrast to this curiosity, she showed no interest whatsoever in his life previous to his[121] marriage, a fact which indicated clearly enough that her concern was solely in regard to her relationship with him, and was not prompted by any desire to enter into his personality. At first he had wanted to tell her of his early wanderings; but she had been bored, or even shocked, by his narrations, and had told him that his adventures did not sound very “nice.” Thus, though now she watched his every movement, she had no idea of his early travels, nor knew, except vaguely, what lands he had dwelt in, nor was she aware that in those days he had passed under the name of Easton.
Now Jim enjoyed telling a story: he was, in fact, a very interesting and vivacious raconteur; and he felt, at first, sad disappointment that his roaming life should be regarded as a subject too dull or too unrespectable for narration. “It’s a funny thing,” he once said to himself, “but that girl, Monimé, at Alexandria knows far more about me than my own wife, and I only knew her for a few hours!”
And then her poses and affectations! He discovered early in their married life that her offers to teach the cook her business, or to knit him waistcoats, were entirely fraudulent. She had none of the domestic virtues—a fact which only troubled him because she persisted in seeing herself in the r?le of practical housewife: he had no wish for her to be a cook or a sewing woman. She went through a phase in which she pictured herself as a sun-bonneted poultry-farmer. She bought a number of Rhode Island Reds and Buff Orpingtons; she caused elaborate hen-houses to be set up; and she subscribed to various poultry fanciers’ journals. But[122] it was not many weeks before the pens were derelict and their occupants gone. For some months she played the part of the Lady Bountiful to the village, and might have been seen tripping down the lanes to visit the aged cottagers, a basket on her arm. This occupation, however, soon began to pall, and her apostacy was marked by a gradual abandonment of the job to the servants. Later she had attached herself to the High Church party in Oxford, and had added new horrors to the state of wedlock by regarding it as a mystic sacrament....
The most recent of her phases had followed on from this. She had asked Jim to allow her to bring to the house the orphaned children of a distant relative of her mother’s: two little girls, aged four and five. “It will be so sweet,” she had said, “to hear their merry laughter echoing about this old house. It will be some compensation for my great sorrow in not being allowed to have babies of my own.”
Jim had readily consented, for he was very fond of children; and soon the mites had arrived, very shy and tearful at first, but presently well content with their lot. Dolly declared that no nurse would be necessary, as she would delight in attending to them herself, and for two weeks she had played the little mother with diminishing enthusiasm. But the day speedily came when help was found to be necessary, and now a good-natured nursery-governess was installed at the manor.
Having thus regained her leisure, she bought a notebook, and labelling it “The Tiny Tot’s Treasury,” spent several mornings in dividing the pages[123] into sections under elaborate headings written in a large round hand. Jim chanced upon this book one day—it lay open upon a table—and two section-headings caught his eye. They read:—
Hands, games with Toes, games with
“Can you keep a secret?” “This little pig went to market.”
“Pat-a-cake.”
The book was abandoned within a week or two; but the recollection of its futility, its pose, remained in Jim’s memory for many a day.
The presence of these two little girls, while being a considerable pleasure to Jim in itself, had been the means of irritating him still further in regard to his wife. Sometimes, when she remembered it, she would go up to the nursery to bid them “good-night” and to hear their prayers; and when he accompanied her upon this mission his spontaneous heart was shocked to notice how her attitude towards them was dictated solely by the picture in her own mind which represented herself as the ideal mother. There was a long mirror in the nursery, and, as she caressed the two children, her eyes were fixed upon her own reflection as though the vision pleased her profoundly.
And then, only a few days ago, a significant occurrence had taken place which had led to a painful scene between Dolly and himself. One morning at breakfast the elder of the two little girls had told him that she had had an “awfully awful” dream.
“It was all about babies,” she had said, and then, pausing shyly, she had added: “But I mustn’t tell you about it, because it’s very naughty.”
[124]
He was alone in the room with them at the time, and he had questioned the round-eyed little girl, and had eventually extracted from her the startling information that on the previous evening Dolly had been telling them “how babies grew,” but had warned them that it would be naughty to talk about it.
He was furious, and when his wife came downstairs at mid-morning—she always had her breakfast in bed—he had caught hold of her arm and had asked her what on earth she meant by talking in this manner to two infants of four and five years of age.
“It’s not your business,” was the reply. “You must trust a woman’s instinct to know when to reveal things to little girls.”
“Oh, rot” he had answered, angrily; and suddenly he had put into hot and scornful words his interpretation of Dolly’s untimely action. “The fact is, your motive is never disinterested. You are always picturing yourself in one r?le or another. You didn’t even think what sort of impression you were making on the minds of those little girls: you were only play-acting for your own edification.”
“I don’t understand you,” she had stammered, shocked and frightened.
“You pictured yourself,” he went on, with bitter sarcasm, “as the sweet and wise mother revealing to the wide-eyed little girls the great secrets of Nature. I suppose some Oxford ass has been lecturing to a lot of you silly women about the duties of motherhood, and you at once built up your foolish picture, and thought it would make a charming scene—the[125] gentle mother, the two little babies at your knee, their lisping questions and your pure, sweet answer, telling them the wonderful vocation of womanhood. And then you went upstairs and forced it on the poor little souls, just to gratify your vanity; but afterwards you were frightened at what you had done, and told them they mustn’t speak about it, becaus............