CHAPTER XI: HUSBANDS
To those about to marry a husband often seems not only a subject for affection and admiration but also for respect such as is given to an older and more experienced being. The young bride sees herself in imagination the possessor of a husband and children; she classifies them as belonging to separate orders of being. This I have found to be a mistake, but many of us drift so gently into a knowledge of the fact that we never notice how far we have wandered from our original conception. I realised the position quite suddenly one day. There was no falling apple nor boiling tea-kettle nor anything of that sort to start the theory in my head; it was not even as if I had been cutting down James’s trousers to fit Tom. I had been sitting with my hands in my lap, twiddling my thumbs, when all of a sudden this occurred to me. “James is to the other children what the thumb is to theother fingers. I have five fingers, the most powerful and useful of which stands apart from the others and is called the thumb. I have five children of which the first, the most powerful and useful, is called the husband. I have been deceived by instinct, by tradition, and by my parents, and it does not matter in the least; things are exactly as they were before. I will brush my husband’s hat and think no more about it.” But I did think more about it. I began also to notice other ladies in the same predicament, and marked how unconscious they were of their true position. I watched them feed and dress and exercise their first-born husbands, observing how they advised and reproved and deceived them for their good, how they encouraged them to work and were surprised when the work was recognised and paid for by the world. Mrs. Beehive’s husband was rather celebrated. He had built a great many public buildings, she once told me with pride and in just the same way as she described how baby had begun to take noticeat an exceptionally early age. I could hear her, in imagination, say, “Yes, dear, very nice indeed,” while Mr. Beehive toiled and built like the dearest and humblest of beavers that he is, occasionally reviving his hopeful efforts to explain the nature of creation to the passive, mutton-headed creature who has, so to speak, swallowed him up and borne him anew for herself against his will. Another thing I discovered was that Ruth knew what a husband is and never told me. Servants are much sharper than their mistresses about these things. I suppose it is because they are not distracted by love and marriage. In their minds the master and the children are lumped together with other troublesome and necessary facts which girls have to put up with. (Whether they are “Mother’s” husband and children or the mistress’s makes very little difference.) They want a great deal more cooking than anyone would do for themselves, they tear their clothes, and are unpunctual and passionate. Sometimes they come home drunk and use up the moneythat is wanted for the house, or they speculate and gamble with it—silly fellows—instead of laying it out sensibly on bargains and outings. The only excuse they might have for doing the things they do—littering up the place with books and papers and musical instruments, screaming at one another without their hats in the street, or sitting in poky rooms in their shirt-sleeves—the only excuse they might have for all this folly would be to get well paid for it, so that they might spend at least part of the day sensibly in dancing and holiday-making. But not at all. They come home either as surly as bears or else perfectly limp and useless for conversation, they want more cooking done, and probably have less money on them than they took out. That is Ruth’s view I know, and it is that, secretly or avowed, of all the experienced women of good repute whom I know; those who think otherwise are not wives at heart, they are on a par with, if they are not actually, concubines. Soon after the day when I had twiddled my fingersand thought of these things, I began to notice all sorts of little contributory facts which fitted in with my newly formed theory. What Ruth said was nothing new, but I had never understood it before. I went into the kitchen, as usual, to go through the ceremony which Tom calls “seeing the beef.” I had been out alone the evening before, and had left a chop for James’s dinner.
“There is very little of the cold grouse left, m’m,” said Ruth, “the master’s been at it.”
“But I left a chop for him, didn’t I?” I asked.
“Yes’m, but he’s been at the grouse all the same. He would have it. You can see for yourself.”
Yes, I thought, if things were not as I now see they are, Ruth would have spoken differently. She would have said: “I am sorry, m’m, I can’t let you have the grouse to-day, but it was required for the master.” As it is, the very servants can evidently see no difference between the master wantingcold grouse and the boys raiding the pantry for tarts. Where is my husband? It appears that I have not got one. There is no such thing.
I then remembered with painful feelings of disillusionment something that Clara had said a few days before. “The master’s vests, m’m, they are all out at the elbows, with him yawning like that. He pulls them to pieces every time he raises his arms. I wonder could you speak to him about it?”
“He only yawns like that when he is doing very difficult work, Clara,” I said at the time. “We can’t help it; it wouldn’t do to interrupt him.”
“No, m’m, but if you could just mention it to him—you see it takes me all the evening to mend them when I ought to be getting on with the new curtains.” It was just as if she had said: “Of course, it is a pity he shouldn’t enjoy himself, and I would be the last to wish to stop it, but we can’t let his play stand in the way of what has to be done.”
The idea of a wife being the mother ofher husband is an old one, but it has been too ambiguously put before the public, therefore girls still marry under a misapprehension. The misapprehension is of no consequence and hurts no one, but I cannot help thinking it would save disappointment if instead of nursing a delusion we could idealise a fact. If children were not made unnecessarily ridiculous the supposed husband would not be missed from the family group. If Mrs. Beehive gave to her younger children some of the dignity which she has, by reason of her nature, stripped from Mr. Beehive it would be a great deal better than throwing it away, and Mr. Beehive would suffer less from being placed in the same pigeon-hole with his own baby. Why should the mother of the family be the only one who is allowed any dignity or private life? She denies this, of course, and draws you a beautiful fancy picture of papa, the head of the house. She dresses him up for your benefit in all his war-paint of waistcoat and whiskers, but she does it in just the same spirit as she dressesup her son as a postman to please him while she gets on with her work. And the cruel thing is that she has so long ago stripped him of his natural fur and feathers that when she says “that is enough,” and folds away the waistcoat and whiskers in a drawer, he is exposed to the neighbours in a defenceless and absurd condition.
What is it that binds Mr. and Mrs. Beehive together? The problem has fidgeted me for years. It has disturbed me in my work, and sometimes even caused me to overlook Mr. Jones’s iniquities until it was too late to do anything. I once asked Ruth why it is that married people remain with one another, and she said she supposed it was the evenings.
“What about the evenings?” I asked.
“Well, you see, m’m,” she said, “as you know yourself, there is not very much for unmarried girls as is anyways respectable to do in the evenings.”
“Yes, but the men, Ruth,” I said,“—mind the milk—it is boiling—thank you—why do they stay to be treated like children?”
“Well, m’m, I suppose it is because they are what you might call childish. Of course, you may say they do bring in the money, and some of them are very knowledgeable—such as master—but you’ll find they haven’t much idea of spending an evening profitably without they are married.”
It wouldn’t do to let them know, is a great phrase in every peaceful household. And it is quite true; it would never do at all. Husbands want reasons for everything and we know what that means! It is impossible to make them understand why some perfectly ordinary things cannot be done. We say, perhaps, light-heartedly enough, “I have such a headache, I wish I hadn’t to go out!” and he says, “Well, why do you go out?” Of course we reply that there is the fish to be got—it never came—and then it is his turn to say, “Why not send Ruth?” We explain that Ruth has to cook the dinner.
“But she can’t cook the fish before it comes.”
“But there are the other things?”
“Oh, never mind them, your head is the only thing that matters. Let Ruth go.”
We end by a detailed description of the cook’s afternoon and the havoc this slight disorganisation of the traffic would cause, knowing, of course, perfectly well that there is no reason why Ruth should not go except that she just can’t. Cooks don’t go for fish unless they offer to, and then they are not experienced enough. What we really want the man to do is to say he will go, but we don’t say this because it would end in his sending Ruth and thinking himself very clever. He would report that she was delighted to go and made no fuss whatever. Next day we should be made to feel that the unwritten law had been broken through our fault. We had taken a mean refuge behind the master, whose orders she could not refuse to obey. Things would be very uncomfortable for some time and she would very likely ask whether the master were going to undertake the housekeeping, because if so—etc. But it is impossible to explain all thatat the time, so we are either cross because of the headache and conceal the cause, or else we are rude at once when he begins his suggestions, and then he says women are unreasonable and ought to take more exercise.
I seem always to be exploding fallacies in this book, but there is one more which must be mentioned because it is connected with the husband fallacy. It is part of Mrs. Beehive’s whisker make-up. This is the fallacy of the Experienced Man. I have never yet seen a man who gave me the impression of being in the least experienced in anything more important than the details of his own business. In matters of life and death he is as hopeful at eighty as he was at eight. James still says to me: “What a good plan it would be to share a house for the summer with the Van Diemans. You see, they would not be in our way in the least; they would have rooms to themselves, we needn’t see them unless we want to. He would be there to fish and play golf with me,and you would be left with her. She would probably do the housekeeping for you.”
The last time he mentioned this I said: “Do you ever go to stay with anyone without hiding at the top of the house and pretending you are dead for nine-tenths of the day?” He said no, but that was different—when you had rooms of your own. I replied: “Do you know what you would do? You would open the door of our sitting-room as you came upstairs and say: ‘Why not come in and have a chat and a smoke?’ The poor deluded dears would come in, you would be as pleased as Punch for ten minutes and then begin to fidget.”
“Oh, but then they would go,” said James, “and besides I like it for much longer than that.”
“You don’t, ten minutes is the outside limit. I have timed you often when the Van Diemans have been here: in ten minutes you begin to wind up your watch and ask where they are going to spend Christmas.”
“Oh, do I?” said James.
“Yes, and another thing, you don’t like fishing. It is the idea of fishing that you like. When it comes to the point you go because Van Dieman is such a good chap, but you hate the wet grass, and the flies, and not catching anything.”
“What a sordid mind for detail you have,” he said; “there is no imagination about you.”
“An ounce of experience is worth two pounds of imagination,” I answered.
We took our holiday in an altogether different way, and James was appalled when the Van Diemans told him how they had spent their time. He said it was inconceivable how people could enjoy that sort of thing. When I pointed out that it was entirely owing to my foresight and intelligence that we had not been there, he said shamelessly that it would have been quite different if we had gone; it was just an accident that they had behaved in accordance with their temperaments and their invariable habit.
Women, on the other hand, are soexperienced that I have begun to think they remember not only their childhood but also their previous incarnations. From what I know of both sexes it seems probable that Adam spat out his piece of apple behind the nearest fig-tree, while Eve munched hers conscientiously to the end and got some good out of it. I used to consult Mrs. Beehive in the early days about all sorts of domestic matters, but finally I gave it up because she was so depressing. She said so often: “It’s no good, dear. It’s a nice idea, I know, but you will find it will rot with the sun,” and it always did, in spite of Mr. Beehive saying that it was sure to do beautifully, and that the reason why theirs had been a failure was the unusual dampness of the year; it was not likely to occur again.
Husbands seldom learn by experience to recognise the object of their instinctive desire. Just as a baby screams and reaches towards the plant in the middle of the table when it really needs to go into the kitchen and ask cook for milk with a little water init—not too hot—so a man says to his wife: “I dislike your clothes intensely. I wish you would go and buy a sort of shawl arrangement and drape it round you like the figures you see on a Greek vase. That is the way women ought to dress.” The poor fish-faced lady with the innocent expression and wispy hair goes obediently to Derry and Toms’s and buys an expensive silk shawl which she arranges round her ill-balanced form in exact imitation of the lady on the vase in Edward’s room, and comes down to dinner. Then the real tragedy begins, and all about a shawl! What he really had before his mind was no more a shawl than it was an Inverness cape or a Moujik’s jacket. It was a confection which he had seen on a lady in the Park with a beautiful figure, and if his innocent old dear had bought the same model and put it on he would have called her shameless and abandoned. If he had more experience and fewer childish dreams he would address her as follows: “My dear, I wish that you would not dress inparti-coloured scraps that don’t fit. I cannot myself think what you would look nice in, but first stand up straight and do your hair, and then try on clothes until you find something that I tell you is right.”
It is the folly of either side trying to explain anything to the other that leads to bloodshed.