Chapter XII The Views of Two Women
“Is it your moral of Life?
Such a web, simple and subtle,
Weave we on earth here in impotent strife,
Backward and forward each throwing his shuttle,
Death ending all with a knife.”
—Browning.
“The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things,” quoted Mrs. Hadwell, settling back in her easy-chair with intense satisfaction. If, as the poet asserts, “a sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things” certainly a joy’s crown of joy may be remembering unhappier things. One principal reason for Mrs. Hadwell’s calm and unlimited enjoyment of her life lay in the fact that her youth had been spent in other people’s easy-chairs. It is noteworthy that it had been spent in easychairs; women of her type always do spend their lives in easy-chairs, metaphorical and literal; but an easy-chair bestowed upon one by a doting husband, and an easy-chair occupied by sufferance in other people’s homes are, as will readily be perceived, two very different pieces of furniture.
“What do you want to talk about in particular?” Lynn asked, regarding her hostess lazily. Dinner was over; Mr. Hadwell had betaken himself to his club; and the two sat at their ease in a softly shaded luxurious library, filled with unread books in half-calf. Polished mahogany, heavy damask curtains, thick, soft carpets, scent of mignonette and roses, all added to its comfort.
“I want to talk about all sorts of things,” returned Estelle, in answer to her friend’s question. “Interesting things—things that matter—yourself for instance! I wonder why it is that so few people talk interestingly about ordinary things! I believe it must be because they simply will not tell the truth about them; they stick to platitudes for fear of blundering on some thought they feel they oughtn’t to have. Don’t you think that is it? Now we always look things right in the face and say just what we think about them; and that is why we’re so queer—and so nice—and so interesting to one another. And this is such a good opportunity for a talk. We’ve had such a lovely dinner—wasn’t that soup delicious? and, as for that muscatel! Don’t you simply dote on things to eat? I do. I never agree with that man—Solomon, wasn’t it?—who said that he would rather have a dinner of herbs and peace than a stalled ox and strife therewith. Let him have the herbs! and give me the stalled ox every time. If it were nicely served and properly cooked I wouldn’t care if there were seven bad-tempered married couples and sixteen cross cats and twenty squalling parrots all rowing together at my elbow. That’s what it is to be practical. Give me things to eat and a good appetite and I don’t care much what happens. There’s something about a dinner which appeals to me in a way that sunsets and sonatas don’t. And yet some one described me the other day as being ‘spirituelle.’ Fancy!”
“Some one who didn’t know you very well, evidently.”
“Some one who has called me ‘Estelle’ all his life except the four years of it when I wasn’t born; but, as you say, some one who doesn’t know me very well because he happens to be a man and a man who used to be in love with me. Poor thing! And yet he’s happy in his way and I’m happy in mine. He has his ideals and I have my dinners. The only really happy people are the people who have the sense to prefer dinners to ideals and who steadily set to work to get them.”
“I suppose you are happy. If dinners could make anyone happy you ought to be. But, tell me, Del, do you never want anything else?”
“Oh, yes. I want silk dresses and diamond brooches and the feeling that every snob in town will kow-tow as soon as my snub nose appears. And I’ve got them all—thank goodness! I very easily might not have, you know. There are so many others looking out for just the opportunity I seized. And every one said that Henry wasn’t a marrying man. Ridiculous! As if every one wasn’t a marrying man as soon as the right woman came along; the woman who made love to him unremittingly and tactfully without letting him see that she was doing it. It was an awful bore, sometimes, to make love to Henry. It had to be done so carefully. O dear, he was so surly and snubby and so scared of being hooked. But it didn’t do any good: I intended to marry him and I married him—and so could you if you had any gumption!” she exclaimed, veering around and fixing Lynn with a look of intense determination.
“What? Marry Henry?”
“Not my Henry, no; but some other Henry. There are plenty of them and if you don’t take them somebody else will. They all like to be admired and courted. And oh, lucky girl! Fate has dropped an ideal Henry right in your lap.”
“Don’t, Del! My poor lap! And as for ‘ideal,’ why, he has green teeth and goggly eyes.”
“I am sure you are not so good-looking, yourself.”
“Now, Del! Have I goggly eyes and green teeth? Let us be accurate before we are aggravating. Besides, it was horrid of me to speak of his appearance. Only his appearance is so exactly like him that it grates on me, some way.”
“He is a great deal too good for you,” said her friend, indignantly.
“So every one has already told me. Anything is too good for an old, ugly school-teacher, I dare say; but I don’t want him, even if he is too good for me.”
“Now, Lynn, we’ll talk this over. I want to have the whole thing out with you.”
“As you please.”
“Very well, then. We will assume that you are quite determined not to marry Lighton. Two other courses are open to you; the first, to go on teaching all your life; the second, to marry some one else. We will examine these two alternatives—with your permission.”
“Or without it!”
“Or, as you say, without it. Let us begin then. We will suppose that you stay as you are and go on teaching. You are not at all young, now—you needn’t grin. I know I am two years older, but that has nothing to do with it; I’m married. You are not, I repeat, young. Every year you become a little older and a little older.”
“The truth of your remarks is only equalled by their unpleasantness.”
“I don’t care. You go on getting older and older. Your aunt, who has been good to you and of whom you are fond, will be very much disappointed in you. She feels that it is disgraceful not to marry and criminal not to marry Lighton, and I am strongly inclined to agree with her. So, as the years go by and you get older and plainer and less desirable your aunt will grow less and less fond of you. You are not a great favourite with your uncle; to be sure, he has only one supreme favourite in the universe and I needn’t say who that is!—and your aunt will probably die in time. What a happy home you will have, then! Suppose on the other hand, that he should die. You wouldn’t have money enough to live in that big house and you would have to be cooped up in a flat and come home, after teaching all day, to listen to your aunt’s lamentations about the nice establishment you might have had”—
“Thank fortune there are always the poison and the dagger.”
“There are; but they’re the refuge of the coward, and ordinary respectable people don’t commit suicide, however much they want to. Now, having fully disposed of that alternative, let us turn to the other—that you marry some one else. Who else is there? You are a general favourite and lots of men like to talk to you; but who, besides Lighton, is in love with you? I mean of course, that is in a position to marry. We will suppose, though, that you have several other proposals in the next few years—what then? Whom would you rather marry?”
Lynn said nothing and turned her head away.
“The fact is that there is no one you would rather marry and there are very few who could offer you what he does. The trouble with you is that you don’t face things. You know that, if you don’t marry him, you have nothing in life to look forward to; yet, because it isn’t an ideal arrangement, you refuse to consider it. Surely you have outgrown the silly, pretty, childish idea of marrying for love? Look at the people who do marry for love! How many of them are as happy as I am? I, who deliberately angled to catch the richest man of my acquaintance and did it. You could not have managed matters for yourself in the way that I did; and then, Fate, instead of punishing you for being stupid, offers you a prize—and you throw it away. Why?”
“It is a little hard to explain why, Del,” returned her friend, slowly. “I don’t know whether I could make you understand.”
“I don’t know that I have much heart, Lynn, but I have a mind. Try me.”
“Long ago, then, I ‘faced things’ as you call it. I looked right at them hard and baldly and I saw that Life is very hard on woman. Life, Society—even Nature—all seem to be leagued against her. Her one chance of happiness is to make a happy marriage; and in order to make a happy marriage how many things are needed—and how few are forthcoming! Even then she must make up her mind to face certain torture and possible death; and when, after bearing two or three children, she loses her youth, her strength, her good looks, she has the satisfaction of knowing that her husband is as attractive as he was the day she married him. So, practically, in the majority of cases, she has nothing but her children. I am not thinking of you, you monkey; you are a great exception. Of course the children must be worth a great deal to her, but, apart from them, the average woman has precious little. Her husband is usually fond of her—I am speaking, now, of happy marriages—but all the idealism and the romance die very quickly. If, on the other hand, she does as so many do and marries some one who is in love with her but for whom she cares little—what then? All the usual hindrances and no compensations. There is left only spinsterhood. Putting aside the lucky few who have some art, some profession, which means everything to them, unmarried women are, as you have said, simply incumbrances and not happy incumbrances at that. The one happy thing for a woman is to fall in love when she is young, marry some one who adores her, and become so absorbed in her children that she won’t mind the rest. Of course there are a few ideal marriages here and there; cases where people fall in love and stay in love and have satisfactory children and enjoy life; but you know as well as I do how many of these there are. Four altogether; and I have sometimes doubted the fourth.”
“Well, of all the cynics”—
“Not a bit of it; I don’t cherish useless illusions in the face of facts, that’s all. Well, as I began to say, long ago I ‘faced things’ and saw them as they were. The best thing to do was to fall in love and make a happy marriage; that I couldn’t do. The next was to marry some one I didn’t want, or to do something that would support me, and remain unmarried. Of the two, the last seemed the only possible thing. I can get along for the present just as I am and I do not look into the future. As far as I can see, it is bound to be a wretched one, anyway; but I may die—a thousand things may happen. In the meantime I do not worry because of realizing that life is a tragic thing; and I take things very coolly and don’t make a fuss about anything that can’t be helped. When I feel down in the mouth I always console myself with the reflection, first, that it can’t last forever; and, secondly, that however industriously Fate may knock me, she can’t compel me to squeal about it.”
“What a truly cheerful and comforting reflection.”
“Well, do you know anyone more cheerful than I?”
“No, I can’t say that I do; but appearances are certainly deceptive. Then you really prefer unmarried unhappiness to married unhappiness—that is your final choice?”
“That is my final choice.”
“It is an extraordinary one, that is all I can say, when one thinks of all the money that is thrown in with the married unhappiness.”
“Money can’t buy happiness.”
“No, but it can buy some mighty good substitutes for it, my dear. And as far as I can see, you are not going to get anything at all with the unmarried unhappiness.”
“Nothing at all? Freedom, a peaceful mind and an independent income. I’d rather have my liberty than all the houses in Christendom and all the men. Of course I am human; I should prefer to make a happy marriage; but how many people do, and why should I be picked out for a happy fate when so many kinder and better people than I have nothing but trouble from beginning to end of their lives? No; I complain of nothing.”
“Don’t you think you will be sorry for this, some day?”
“If I am, no one will ever know it.”
“If you think all this about your future, why do you want to live?”
“I don’t want to live. Do you? Does any mature person? But I must live and so must you. There is probably some reason for the world and for Nature and for Sin and for all the other queer works of God and of the Devil. Perhaps we shall find it all out some day and then again perhaps we shall sleep so soundly that we shall not care to find out anything at all. That would be nice. It would be still nicer, though, to find out that everything was for the best, really, and that everything about the world was necessary. ‘God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world,’ you know, and all that sort of thing. That phrase about the ‘best of all possible worlds,’ when applied to this, is such rubbish and such inhuman rubbish at that; such an insult to the intelligence and humanity of mankind; yet one can’t help hoping that there will be a ‘best of all possible worlds’ and the mere fact that we want it and look forward to it so instinctively shows that there must be one, somewhere, I think. What do you think?”
“I think I should like to have a brandy and soda,” said Mrs. Hadwell, forlornly. “Positively you have given me the blues. I do hate thinking of heaven and poets and metaphysics and things. This earth is all right if you only have sense. The trouble is, you haven’t any. Oh! I have just thought of something. I have a lovely box of Huyler’s that I haven’t touched. We’ll eat that and Thomas shall light us a little fire and you can have the latest magazine and I’ll read the book of that woman’s—you know! the one that they are making all the fuss about. It’s frightfully amusing and very improper and it doesn’t make one think the least little bit. That’s the sort of book I like, and it’s the sort of book most people like, too, only they won’t say so. Yes, it is, Lynn. You needn’t say it isn’t. Else why is it always out at the library, though they have seven copies, and why is its author able to travel all over the world on her earnings? You don’t understand human nature. All it wants is to be amused and not to be improved. We all like to slide down hill, comfortably, without being obliged to climb up again. And we would all slide down much faster if it wasn’t that the company at the foot of the hill is so unpleasant and the people at the top throw things at you and you can’t throw them back. And the reason that the people at the top throw things is that they are so cross because they don’t really like being stuck up there and they have to pretend they do.”
“Well, you’re not at all cross, yet, Del, and you haven’t slid down hill very fast,” said Lynn, laughing.
“Oh, yes, I have. Anyway I didn’t have far to slide from. I began pretty low down, you know. Oh, I have no illusions about myself. But, even so I have slidden. But you see, if you are clad in gold armour, you can slide as much as you like; for that renders you bullet-proof. If I were a nursery-governess slaving over spoilt brats for the sake of getting a miserable living, I should be thought a very shady character. Just suppose I had said what I said just now about only liking improper things that didn’t make me think! Why, I should be turned out of doors without a character, I suppose. But I am Mrs. Henry Hadwell and so I can slide just as much as I please—within limits. Perhaps it is just as well that there are limits to everything. Otherwise I dare say I should be even worse than I am. And I’m pretty bad, you know. I haven’t any conscience and very little affection. And I have no ideals. But then, as I said before, I have dinners—lovely dinners! How glad I am to think that I am going to have another one to-morrow. Some way, when I think of that, I quite forget all the horrid things you have put into my head to-night. Just think! I—I might have been a nursery-governess. I! I hadn’t brains or industry enough to become a teacher. Ugh! Oh, what horrible lives there are in the world and how lovely to think that I have a lovely home and a doting husband and three darling children and my dinners! What are you thinking about, now?”
“I was just thinking that we were awfully like the lower animals, really,” replied Lynn, with a half-laugh. “A little more complex, but just about like them, otherwise. What does the average bear want? A mate, cubs,—and dinners. If he gets them he is happy; if he doesn’t, he is miserable. If Bob could talk, he would say just about what you have been saying, now.”
“Bob is a sensible dog,” said Mrs. Hadwell, solemnly. “I don’t like dogs and I do like you but justice compels me to state that Bob has a lot more sense than you have. Never mind! you will get wise when it is too late and then you will wish that you had had the sense to imitate me and Bob and all the other practical people in the world. You needn’t think I mind being called a lower animal. If being a lower animal means getting what you want and being a higher animal means getting what you don’t want,—well, I want to be a lower animal, thank you! Lynn! these marron glaces are simply the most delicious things you ever thought of. Do have one!”