It is the Eighth Year. The wife does not know the significance of that. The husband goes on his way without seeing the ghosts that have invaded his little household. He is too busy to see. The whole energy of his mind now is devoted to the business of his life. He must earn money, more money, still more money, because expenses still keep increasing, by leaps and bounds. He finds it more and more difficult to cut his coat according to his cloth. He is often surprised because with a much larger income he seems to be just as “hard up” as when he started the adventure of marriage. He wonders, sometimes, whether the game is worth the candle. What does he get out of it? Precious little. Not much fun. In the evenings he is tired, although his brain is still worrying over the details of his work, over his business disappointments and difficulties, and plans. Now and again he is surprised at the strange quietude and lassitude of his wife. He catches a look of tragedy in her eyes, and it startles him for a moment, so that he asks her if she is feeling unwell. She laughs, in a mirthless way, and seems to resent the question. “Perfectly well, thanks,” she says. He shrugs his shoulders. He cannot bother about a woman’s whims and moods. Women are queer kittle-cattle. He can’t make ‘em out. Even his own wife is a perfect mystery to him. It is a pity they get on each other’s nerves so much. What more does she want? He has given her everything a woman may desire—a beautiful little home, many little luxuries, plenty of pin-money. He does not stint her. It is he that does the stinting. He is always working for her so that she may play. However—work is best. To do our job in life is the best philosophy.
So the husband has on one side the passing suspicion that something is wrong with his wife, and the wife hides her heart from him.
Somethingiswrong with her. Everything is wrong, though she does not know why and how. She feels lonely—horribly lonely in spite of all her friends. She feels like a woman alone in a great desert with no other human soul near her, thrust back upon her own thoughts, brooding over her own misery. There is a great emptiness in her heart, and she has a great hunger and a great thirst of soul which she cannot satisfy. Nothing satisfies that empty, barren heart of hers, that throbbing brain. She has finished with Mudie’s novels. She can find no satisfaction inthem. She revolts from the tittle-tattle of her women friends. That is no longer amusing. She finds no pleasure in the beauty of her face. It is no longer beautiful. She hates the sight of her face in the glass. She is afraid of those big wistful eyes which stare at her. She is sick to death of dressing herself up. How futile it is! How utterly vain and foolish!
She is haunted with ghosts; the ghosts of What-Might-Have-Been. They whisper about her, so that she puts her hands to her ears, when she is alone in her drawing-room. Faces peer at her, with mocking eyes, or with tempting eyes—the faces of men who might have been her lovers, baby faces of unborn children. Little hands flutter about her heart, pluck at her, tease her. The ghosts of her girlhood crowd about her, the ghosts of dead hopes, of young illusions, of romantic dreams. She thrusts them away from her vision. She puts her hands before her eyes, and moans a little, quietly, so that the servants in the kitchen shall not hear.
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 somethingmusthappen.
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.
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?
She does not resist. And yet by yielding she does not gain that happiness to which she stretched out her hands. She does not satisfy the great hunger in her heart or quench her burning thirst. She has not even killed the ghosts which haunt her, or healed the pin pricks of her conscience. Her conscience is one great bleeding wound. For this woman of the middle-classes is a creature of her caste Nor in most cases can she break the rules of her caste without frightful hurt to herself. She was brought up in a “nice” home. Her mother was a woman of old-fashioned virtues. Her father was a man who would have seen her dead rather than shamed. She received a High School education, and read Tennyson and Longfellow with moral notes by her class-mistress. She used to go to church, and sometimes goes there still, though without any fervor or strength of faith. She has heard the old words, “The wages of sin is death,” and she shrinks a little when she thinks of them. Above all she has been brought up on romantic fiction, and that is always on the side of the angels. The modern problem novel has arrested her intellect, has startled her, challenged her, given her “notions”; but in her heart of hearts she still believes in the old-fashioned code of morals, in the sweet old virtues. This sin of hers is a great terror to her. She is not brazen-faced. She does not justify it by any advanced philosophy. She is just a poor, weak, silly woman, who has gone to the edge of a precipice, grown giddy, and fallen off the cliff. She throws up her hands with a great cry. The way of escape through the Divorce Court door is not a way to happiness. It is a way to remorse, to secret agonies, to a life-long wretchedness. Her second husband, if he “plays the game” according to the rules of the world, is not to be envied. Between him and this woman there are old ghosts. This way of escape is into a haunted house.
Thousands, and tens of thousands of women who pass through the Eighth Year, not unscathed, find another way out. They are finding it now through this new femininist movement which is linked up with the cause of Women’s Suffrage. The Eighth Year produces many suffragettes, militant and otherwise. At first, in the first years of their married life, they scoffed at the idea of Votes for Women. They could not see the sense of it. They hated the vulgarities of the business, the shamelessness of it, the ugly squalor of these scuffles with the police, these fights with the crowds, these raids on the House of Commons. It was opposed to all their ideals of femininity and to all their traditions of girlhood. “The hussies ought to be whipped,” is the verdict of the young wife in the first stage of her romantic affection. But, later on, when romance has worn very threadbare in the little home, when reality is beginning to poke its head through the drawing-room windows, she finds herself taking an interest in this strange manifestation which seems to be inspired by some kind of madness. She is silent now when some new phase in the conflict is being discussed in her presence. She listens and ponders. Presently she goes out of her way to get introduced to some suffrage woman on the outskirts of her acquaintance. She is surprised to find her a wonderfully cheerful, and apparently sane, woman, very keen, very alert, and with a great sense of humor—utterly unlike her tired, bored and melancholy self. Perhaps she is quite a young woman, a bachelor girl, earning her own living, down in Chelsea, or as a typist secretary in the City. But young as she is she has dived into all sorts of queer studies—the relations between men and women, the divorce laws, the science of eugenics—and she discusses them with an amazing frankness, and in a most revolutionary spirit, startling, and a little appalling, at first to this wife in her Eighth Year. She has made up her mind conclusively on all the great questions of life. She pooh-poohs romantic love. “There is too much fuss made about it,” she says. “It is a mere episode, like influenza. There are bigger things.” She holds herself perfectly free to choose her mate, and to remedy any little mistake which she may make in her choice. At present she prefers her independence and her own job, which she likes, thank you very much. She is tremendously enthusiastic about the work which women have got to do in the world, and there is nothing they cannot do, in her opinion. She claims an absolute equality with men. In fact, she is inclined to claim a superiority. After all, men are poor things.... Altogether she is a most remarkable young woman, and she seems to get tremendous fun out of life—and this wife in her Eighth Year, without agreeing with her yet envies her!
Or perhaps the wife meets a suffrage woman of middle-age. She, too, is a cheerful, keen, alert, bustling woman with cut-and-dried opinions on subjects about which the wife in the Eighth Year is full of doubt and perplexity. She has a certain hardness of character. She is intellectually hard, and without an atom of old-fashioned sentiment. She calls a spade a spade, in a rather embarrassing way, and prefers her facts to be naked. She is the mother of two children, whom she is bringing up on strictly eugenic principles, whatever those may be, and she is the wife of a husband whom she keeps in the background and treats as a negligible quantity. “We wives, my dear,” she says, “have been too long kept prisoners in upholstered cages. It is time we broke our prison windows. I am breaking other people’s windows as well. It lets in a lot of fresh air.”
She talks a great deal about sweated labor, about the white-slave traffic, about women’s work and wages. She talks still more about the treachery of the Government, the lies of politicians, the cowardice of men. “Oh, we are going to make them sit up. We shall stop at nothing. It is a revolution.”
She is amazed at the ignorance of the young wife. “Good heavens, your educationhasbeen neglected!” she cries. “You are like all these stuffy suburban women, who are as ignorant of life as bunny-rabbits. Haven’t you even read John Stuart Mill’sSubjection of Women?Good gracious! Well, I will send you round some literature. It will open your eyes, my dear.”
She sends round a lot of little pamphlets, full of dangerous ideas, ideas that sting like bees, ideas that are rather frightening to the wife in her Eighth Year. They refer to other books, which she gets out of the lending library. She reads Ibsen, and recognizes herself in many of those forlorn women in the plays. She reads small booklets on the Rights of Wives, on the Problems of Motherhood, on the Justice of the Vote. And suddenly, after a period of intellectual apathy, she is set on fire by all these burning sparks. She is caught up in a great flame of enthusiasm. It is like strong drink to her. It is like religious mania. She wakens out of her lethargy. Her feeling of boredom vanishes, gives way to a great excitement, a great exhilaration. She startles her husband, who thinks she has gone mad. She argues with him, laughs at his old-fashioned opinions, scoffs at him, pities him for his blindness. She goes out to suffrage meetings, starts to her feet one day and falters out a few excited words. She sits down with burning cheeks, with the sound of applause in her ears, like the roar of the sea. She learns to speak, to express herself coherently. She offers herself to “the cause.” She sells her trinkets and gives the money to the funds. She is out for any kind of adventure, however perilous. She is one of the Hot Young Bloods, or if she has not the pluck for that, or the strength, one of the intellectual firebrands who are really more dangerous.
It is a queer business, this suffrage movement, which sets these women aflame. There are a few women in it who have the cold intellectual logic of John Stuart Mill himself. They have thought the thing out on scientific lines, in its economic, political, and social aspects. They want the vote honestly, as a weapon to give their sex greater power, greater independence, better conditions of life in the labor market. But the rank and file have no such intellectual purpose, though they make use of the same arguments and believe that these are the mainsprings of their actions. In reality they are Eighth Year women. That is to say, they seize upon the movement with a feverish desire to find in it some new motive in life, some tremendous excitement, some ideals greater and more thrilling than the little ideals of their home life. In this movement, in this great battle, they see many things which they keep secret. They go into it with blind impulses, which they do not understand, except vaguely. It is a movement of revolt against all the trammels of sex relationship which have come down through savagery to civilization; laws evolved out of the inherited experience of tribes and races for the protection of womanhood and the functions of womanhood, laws of repression, of restraint, for the sake of the children of the race; duties exacted by the social code again for the sake of the next generation. Having revolted against the duties of motherhood, all these laws, these trammels, these fetters, become to them intolerable, meaningless, exasperating. The scheme of monogamy breaks down. It has no deep moral purpose behind it, because the family is not complete. The scheme has been frustrated by the childlessness of the wife. Again, this movement is a revolt against the whole structure of modern society as it affects the woman—against the very architecture of the home; against all those tiny flats, those small suburban houses, in which women are cramped and confined, and cut off from the large world. It did not matter so long as there was a large world within the four walls. Their space was big enough to hold the big ideals of old-fashioned womanhood, in which the upbringing of children was foremost and all-absorbing. But for a woman who has lost these ideals and the duties that result from them, these little places are too narrow for their restless hearts; they become like prison cells, in which their spirits go pacing up and down, up and down, to come up against the walls, to heat their hands against them. They believe that they may find in this suffrage movement the key to the riddle of the mysteries in their souls, world-old mysteries, of yearnings for the Unknown Good, of cravings for the Eternal Satisfaction, for the perfect fulfilment of their beings. Their poor husband, a dear good fellow, after all, now that they look at him without hysteria, has not provided this Eternal Satisfaction. He has only provided pretty frocks, tickets for matinées, foolish little luxuries. He does not stand for them as the Unknown Good. After the first year or two of marriage they know him with all his faults and flaws, and familiarity breeds contempt. But here, in this struggle for the Vote, in these window-breakings and house-burnings, in imprisonments and forcible feedings, in this solidarity of women inspired by a fierce fanaticism—there is, they think, the answer to all their unsolved questions, the splendor and the glory of their sex, the possibility of magnificent promises and gifts, in which the soul of woman may at last find peace, and her body its liberty. She is to have the supreme mastery over her own spirit and flesh.
It is a fine promise. But as yet it is unfulfilled. It is not to be denied that for a time at least some of these women do gain a cheerfulness, a keenness, a vitality, which seem to be a great recompense for their struggles and strivings. But they are the younger women, and especially the young unmarried women, who get a good deal of fun out of all this excitement, all this adventure, all the dangerous defiance of law and convention. The older women—many of them—are already suffering a sad disillusionment. They have not yet found those splendid things which seemed at last within their grasp. They are desperate to get them, fierce in their desire for them, but the cup of wine is withheld from their lips. They find themselves growing old and still unsatisfied, growing hard, and’ bitter, and revengeful against those who thwart them. The problems of their sex still remain with them. They may break all the laws, but get no nearer to liberty. They are still prisoners of fate, bond-slaves to a nature which they do not understand. The femininist movement is only a temporary way of escape for the wife who has reached her crisis in the Eighth Year.
There is another way, and it has many doors. It is religion. Many of these women “take to religion” as they take to the suffrage movement, and find the same emotional excitement and adventure in it. They are caught up in it as by a burning flame. It satisfies something of their yearnings and desires. And it is a curious and lamentable thing that although it has been proved conclusively by all masters of philosophy and by all great thinkers, that some form of religion, is an essential need in the heart of women, the whole tendency of the time is to rob them of this spiritual guidance and comfort. Religion is not a part of the social scheme of things in “intellectual mansions” and in the small suburban houses of the professional classes. It is not entirely wiped off the slate, but it is regarded with indifference and as of no vital account in the sum of daily life. Occasionally a certain homage is paid to it, as to a pleasant, old-fashioned ritual which belongs to the code of “good form.” In their courting days the young man and woman went to church now and then on a Sunday morning or a Sunday evening and held the same hymn-book, and enjoyed a little spiritual sentiment. They were married in church to the music of the Wedding March played by the organist. Sometimes as the years pass they drop into a service where there is good singing, a popular preacher, and a fashionable congregation. They regard themselves as Christians, and condescend to acknowledge the existence of God, in a vague, tolerant kind of way. But they do not enter into any intimate relations with God. He is not down on their visiting list. Many of them do not even go as far as those people I have described who regard God as part of the social code of “good form.” They become frankly agnostic and smile at their neighbors who put on top-hats and silk dresses and stroll to church on a Sunday morning. It seems to them absurdly “Early Victorian.” For they have read a great number of little books by the latest writers, who publish their philosophy in sevenpenny editions, and they have reached an intellectual position when they have a smattering of knowledge on the subject of evolution, anthropology, the origins of religion, literature and dogma, and the higher criticism. They have also read extracts from the works of Nietzsche, Kant, and the great free-thinkers, or reviews of their works in the halfpenny newspapers. The ideas of the great thinkers and great rebels have filtered down to them through the writings of little thinkers and little rebels. They have been amused by the audacities of Bernard Shaw and other intellectuals of their own age. They have read the novels of H. G. Wells, which seem to put God in His right place. They have imbibed unconsciously the atmosphere of free-thought and religious indifference which comes through the open windows, through the keyholes, through every nook and cranny. Occasionally the husband lays down the law on the subject with dogmatic agnosticism, or dismisses the whole business of religion with a laugh as a matter of no importance either way, certainly as a problem not worth bothering about.
So the wife’s spiritual nature is starved. She is not even conscious of it, except just now and then when she is aware of a kind of spiritual hunger, or when she has little thoughts of terror at the idea of death, or when she is in low spirits. She has no firm and certain faith to which she can cling in moments of perplexity. She has no belief in any divine authority from which she can seek guidance for her actions. There is no supernatural influence about her from which she can draw any sweetness of consolation, when the drudgery and monotony of life begins to pall on her. When temptations come she has no anchor holding her fast to duty and honor. She has no tremendous ideals giving a large meaning to the little things of life. She has no spiritual vision to explain the mysteries of her own heart, or any spiritual balm to ease its pain and restlessness. She must rely always on her common sense, on her own experience, on her own poor little principles of what is right or wrong, or expedient, or “the proper thing.” When those fail her, all fails; she is helpless, like a ship without a rudder, like a straw in the eddy of a mill race.
It is just at this time, when all has failed her, and when she seems to be drifting helplessly, that she is ready for religion, a bundle of dry straw which will burst into flame at the touch of a spark, a spiritual appetite hungry for food. In hundreds of cases these women take to the queerest kinds of spiritual food, some of it very poisonous stuff. Any impostor with a new creed may get hold of them. Any false prophet may dupe them into allegiance. They get into the hands of peculiar people. They are tempted to go to a spiritualistic séance and listen to the jargon of spiritualism. It frightens them at first, but after their first fears, and a little shrinking horror, they go forward into these “mysteries,” and are obsessed by them. It appears they are “psychical.” Undoubtedly after a little practice they could get into touch with the spirit-world. With planchette and table-rapping, and with mediumistic guidance, they may learn the secrets of the ghost-world, and invoke the aid of spirits in their little household. It becomes a mania with them. It becomes, in many cases, sheer madness.
There are other women who seek their spiritual salvation among the clairvoyants and crystal-gazers and palmists of the West End.
They become devotees of the Black Art, and dupes of those who prey upon the Eternal Gullible. There are others who join the Christian Scientists, and find the key to the riddle of life in the writings of Mrs. Eddy. They experiment in will-power—upon their unfortunate husbands. They adopt the simple life, and bring themselves into a low state of health by fruit diet. They learn a new language full of strange technical terms, which they but dimly understand, yet find comforting, like the old woman and her Mesopotamia, which was a blessèd word to her. But in spite of all its falsity and folly, it does give them a new interest in life, and lift them right out of the ruck of suburban dulness. So far at least it is helpful to them. It is some kind of spiritual satisfaction, though afterwards, perhaps, they may fall into a spiritual excitement and hysteria worse than their old restlessness, and become a nuisance to their family and friends, women withidées fixes.
It is better for them if they can grope their way back to the old Christian faith, with its sweetness and serenity and divine ideals. Here at last the woman may find authority, not to be argued about, not to be dodged, but to be obeyed. Here at last she may find tremendous ideals giving a significance to the little things of life, which seemed so trivial, so futile, and so purposeless. Here is wholesome food for her spiritual hunger, giving her new strength and courage, patience and resignation. Here are great moral lessons from which she may draw wisdom and guidance for her own poor perplexities. Then when temptations come, she may cling to an anchor of faith which will not slip in shifting sands, but is chained to a great rock. The wisdom of the Church, the accumulated experience stored up in the Church, the sweetness of all great Christian lives, the splendid serenity of the Christian laws, so stern and yet so tolerant, so hard and yet so easy, give to this woman’s soul the peace she has desired, not to be found among the ghosts of modern spiritualism, nor in the pseudo-scientific jargon of Mrs. Eddy’s works, nor in the glass-crystals of the clairvoyants. For the Christian faith has no use for hysteria; it exacts a healthy discipline of mind. It demands obedience to the laws of life, by which no woman may shirk the duties of her nature, or pander to her selfishness, or dodge the responsibilities of her state as a wife, or forget her marriage-vows and all that they involve.
There would be no fatal significance about the Eighth Year if the old religion were still of vital influence in the home. For after all, in spite of all our cleverness, we have not yet discovered any new intellectual formula or philosophy which will force men and women to do those things which are unpleasant but necessary to insure the future of the race; to deny themselves so that the future generation may gain; to suffer willingly in this world for the sake of an advantage in a future life. If people do not believe in a future life, and in such rewards as are offered by the Christian dogma, they prefer to have their advantages here and now. But as we know, if we face the facts of life clearly, the advantages, here and now, are not easy to get. Life, at its best, is a disappointing business. There is a lot of rough with the smooth, especially for women, especially for those women of the middle-classes in small suburban homes, over-intel-lectualized, with highly strung nerves, in a narrow environment, without many interests, and without much work. It is just because many of them are entirely without religion to give some great purpose to their inevitable trivialities that their moral perspective becomes hopelessly inverted, as though they were gazing through the wrong end of the telescope. Having no banking account in the next life, they spend themselves in this life, and live “on tick,” as it were. Religion is the gospel of unselfishness. Lacking religion, they are utterly selfish. They do not worry about the future of the race. Why should they? All they are worrying about is to save themselves pain, expense, drudgery. Children are a great nuisance—therefore they will not have children. They want to put in a good time, to enjoy youth and beauty as long as possible, to get as much fun as they can here and now. But, as we have seen, the fun begins to peter out somewhere about the Eighth Year, and “the good time” has disappeared like a mirage when one gets close to it, and even youth and beauty are drooping and faded like yesterday’s flowers. What is the woman to do then? She is the victim of shattered illusions, of broken hopes. Before her is nothing but a gray vista of years. She has nothing to reconcile her with the boredom of her days, nothing to compensate her for domestic drudgery, no cure for the restlessness and feverishness which consume her, no laws by which she may keep straight. She sees crookedly, her spirit rushes about hither and thither. She is like a hunted thing, hunted by her desires, and she can find no sanctuary; no sanctuary unless she finds religion, and the right religion. There are not many women nowadays who find this way of escape, for religion has gone out of fashion, like last year’s hats, and it wants a lot of pluck to wear a last year’s hat.
Besides, the husband does not like it. He discourages religion, except in homoeopathic doses, taken by way of a little tonic, as one goes to the theatre for a pick-me-up. As he remarks, he does not believe in women being too spiritual. It is not “healthy.” If his wife goes to church with any regularity he suspects there is an attractive cleric round the corner. And sometimes he is right. Anyhow, he does not feel the need of religion, except when he gets a pretty bad dose of influenza and has an uneasy thought that he is going to “peg out.” As a rule he enjoys good health, and has no time to bother about the supernatural. He does not meet it in the city. It is not a marketable commodity. It is not, as he says, “in his line of country.” He does not see why it should be in his wife’s line of country. He is annoyed when his wife takes up any of these cranky ideas. He rages inwardly when she takes them up passionately. Why can’t she be normal?
Why on earth can’t she go on as she began, with her little feminine interests, keeping herself pretty for his sake, keen on the latest fashions, neighborly with young wives like herself, and fond of a bit of frivolity now and then? When she complains that she has idle hands in her lap, and wants something to do, he reminds her that she found plenty to do in the first years of her married life. When she cries out that she is bored, he points out to her that she gets much more amusement than he does.
And that is true, because by the time he has reached the Eighth Year he is pretty busy. Ambition has caught hold of him and he is making a career. It is not easy. Competition is deadly. He has got his work cut out to keep abreast with his competitors. It is a constant struggle “to keep his end up.” He finds it disconcerting when he comes home in the evenings after the anxiety of his days, dog-tired and needing sympathy, to find that his wife has an attack of nerves, or a feverish desire to go out and “see something.” He wants to stay at home and rest, to dawdle over the evening paper, to listen to a tune or two from his wife.
He would like her to bring his slippers to him, as she used to do in the old days, to hover round him a little with endearing words, and then, with not too much ofthat, to keep quiet, assenting to his opinions when he expresses them, and being restful. He has his own grievances. He is not without troubles of soul and body. He has had to face disappointment, disillusionment, hours of blank pessimism. He has had to get to grips with reality, after the romanticism of his youth, and to put a check upon his natural instincts and desires. In many ways it is harder for the man than for the woman. Civilization and the monogamous code have not been framed on easy lines for men. To keep the ordinary rules of his caste he must put a continual restraint upon himself, make many sacrifices. Women and wives forget that human nature has not changed because men wear black coats and tall hats instead of the skins of beasts. Human nature is exactly the same as it ever was, strong and savage, but it has to be tamed and repressed within the four walls of a flat in West Kensington, or within a semi-detached house at Wimbledon.
There are moments when the man hears the call of the wild, and loathes respectability and conventionality with a deadly loathing. In his heart, as in the heart of every man, there is a little Bohemia, a little country of lawlessness and errant fancy and primitive desires. Sometimes when he has shut himself up in his study, when the servants are in the kitchen washing up the supper-things, when his wife is lying down with a bad headache, he unlocks the door of that Bohemia in his heart, and his imagination goes roving, and he hears the pan-pipes calling, and the stamp of the cloven hoofs of the old Nature-god. He would like to cut and run sometimes from this respectable life of his, to go in search of adventure down forbidden pathways, and to find the joy of life again in Liberty Hall. This fretful wife of his, this social-ladder climbing, the whole business of “playing the game” in the same old way, makes him very tired, and gets on his nerves at times most damnably. He has his temptations. He hears siren voices calling him. He sees the lure of the witch-women. To feel his pulse thrill to the wine of life, to get the fever of joy in his blood again, to plunge into the fiery lake of passion, are temptations from which he does not escape because he is Something in the City, or a barrister-at-law, and a married man with a delicate wife. But, being a man, with a man’s work, and a man’s ambition, he keeps his sanity, and quite often his self-respect. His eyes are clear enough to see the notice-boards on the boundary lines of the forbidden territory, “Trespassers will be prosecuted,” “Please keep off the grass,” “No thoroughfare.” He locks up the gate to the little Bohemia in his heart, and puts the key into a secret cupboard of his brain. He understands quite clearly that if he once “goes off the rails,” as he calls it, his ambitions will be frustrated and his career spoiled. Besides, being a conventionalist and somewhat of a snob, he would hate to be found out in any violation of the social code, and his blood runs cold at the idea of his making a fool of himself with a woman, or anything of that kind. The creed of his social code, of the pot-hatted civilization, of this suburban conventionality of these little private snob-doms, is stronger in the man than in the woman. When she once takes the bit between her teeth, as it were, she becomes utterly lawless. But the man reins himself in more easily. He finds it on the whole less difficult to be law-abiding. He has also a clearer vision of the logic of things. He knows that certain results follow certain causes. He can measure up the consequences of an act, and weigh them. He is guided by his brain rather than by his emotions. He has certain fixed principles deeply rooted in him. He has a more delicate sense of honor than most women. It is summed up in that old school-phrase of his—“playing the game.” However much his nerves may be jangled, and goodness knows they are often jangled, especially as the Eighth Year draws near, he is generally master of himself. At least he does not, as a rule, have hysterical outbursts, or give rein to passionate impulses, or suddenly take some wild plunge, upsetting all the balance of his life. He does not take frightful risks, as a woman will always take them, recklessly, when she reaches her crisis.
So it is that he looks coldly upon his wife’s desires for some new emotional activity, of whatever kind it may be, religious, political, or ethical. He hates any symptoms of fanaticism. He shivers at any breach of good form. He would like her always to be sitting in the drawing-room when he comes home, in a pretty frock, with a novel in her lap, with a smile in her eyes. He does not and will not understand that this childless wife of his must have strong interests outside her little home to save her from eating her heart out. He hides from himself the fact that her childlessness is a curse which is blighting her. He pooh-poohs her tragic cry for help. He is just a little brutal with her when she accuses him of thwarting all the desires of her soul. And he is scared, thoroughly scared, when at last she takes flight, on wild wings, to some spiritual country, or to some moral, or immoral, territory, where he could not follow. He tries to call her back. But sometimes she may not be called back. She has escaped beyond the reach of his voice.