II
Arrived in Switzerland, we took rooms in a private hotel, so as to avoid all quarrels on the subject of housekeeping.
Marie made up for lost time, for being alone now, and unbacked by sympathising friends, I was again in her power. From the very beginning she posed as the keeper of a harmless lunatic. She made the acquaintance of the doctor, informed proprietor and proprietress, the waitresses, the servants, the other guests. I was shut off from association with intelligent people of my own kindred who understood me. At meals she revenged herself for the silence to which she had been condemned in Paris. She missed no opportunity of joining in the conversation, and literally inundated us with a never-ending stream of foolish twaddle which, she knew, irritated me horribly. And since the uncultured, commonplace crowd among whom we lived always very politely agreed with her, there was nothing for me to do but to keep silence; they regarded my silence as a proof of my inferiority.
She looked ill and fragile, and appeared to be suffering from a great grief; she treated me with dislike and contempt.
All I loved, she detested: she was disappointed with the Alps because I admired them; she scorned the beautiful walks; she avoided being alone with me; she made a practice of anticipating my wishes so as to thwart them; she said Yes whenever I said No, and vice versa; there was no doubt that she hated me.
Alone and solitary in a strange country, I was compelled to seek her society; but since we never talked for fear of quarrelling, I had to be content with merely seeing her at my side, with feeling that I was not quite isolated.
My illness became worse; I was so ill that I could take nothing but beef tea; I lay awake at night, suffering agonies, tortured by an unbearable thirst which I tried to relieve by drinking cold milk.
My brain, keen and refined by study and culture, was thrown into confusion by contact with a coarser brain; every attempt to bring it into harmony with my wife’s caused me to have convulsions. I tried to get into touch with strangers. But they treated me with the forbearance which a sane person usually shows to a lunatic.
For three months I hardly opened my lips. At the end of that time I noticed with horror that I had almost lost my voice, and, from sheer want of practice, had no longer any control of the spoken word.
Determined not to be defeated in the struggle, I began a brisk correspondence with my friends in Sweden. But their guarded language, their deep sympathy, their well-meant advice, plainly betrayed the opinion which they had formed of my mental condition.
She triumphed. I was on the verge of insanity, and the first symptoms of persecutional mania showed themselves. Mania? Did I say mania? I was being persecuted, there was nothing irrational in the thought.
It was just as if I had become a child again. Extremely feeble, I lay for hours on the sofa, my head on her knees, my arms round her waist, like Michel Angelo’s Pieta. I buried my face in her lap, and she called me her child. “Your child, yes,” I stammered. I forgot my sex in the arms of the mother, who was no longer female, but sexless. Now she regarded me with the eyes of the conqueror, now she looked at me kindly, seized with the sudden tenderness which the hangman is said to feel sometimes for his victim. She was like the female spider which devours her mate immediately after the hymeneal embrace.
While I suffered thus, Marie led a mysterious life. She always remained in bed till the one o’clock dinner. After dinner she went to town, frequently without any definite purpose, and did not return until supper, sometimes even later. When I was asked where she had gone, I replied—
“To town!”
And the inquirer smiled furtively.
I never suspected her. I never thought of playing the spy. After supper she remained in the drawing-room, talking to strangers.
At night she often treated the servants to liqueurs; I heard their whispering voices, but I never stooped so low as to listen at her door....
What was it that held me back? I don’t know. Only an instinct, I suppose, which teaches us that those actions are unmanly and dishonourable. Moreover, it had become a sort of religion with me to leave her an absolutely free hand.
Three months passed. Then the fact suddenly struck me that our expenditure was enormous. Now that our expenses were regulated, it was easy to check them.
We paid twelve francs a day at our hotel, that is three hundred and sixty francs a month, and I had given Marie a thousand francs a month. She had therefore spent six hundred francs a month in incidental expenses.
I asked her to account for her extravagance.
“The money has been spent on incidental items!” she exclaimed furiously.
“What! with an ordinary expenditure of three hundred and sixty francs, you spent six hundred francs incidentally? Do you take me for a fool?”
“I don’t deny that you have given me a thousand francs, but you have spent the greater part on yourself!”
“Have I? Let’s see! Tobacco (very inferior quality), and cigars at one penny each: ten francs; postage: ten francs; what else?”
“Your fencing lessons!”
“I’ve only had one: three francs!”
“Riding lessons!”
“Two: five francs.”
“Books!”
“Books? Ten francs—together thirty francs; let us say one hundred francs; that leaves five hundred francs for incidental expenses.... Preposterous!”
“Do you mean to say I’m robbing you? You cad!” What could I say? Nothing at all!...
I was a cad, and on the following day all her friends in Sweden were informed of the progress of my insanity.
And gradually the myth grew and developed. The salient characteristics of my personality became more and more unmistakable as time went on, and instead of the harmless poet, a mythological figure was sketched, blackened, touched up until it closely resembled a criminal.
I made an attempt to escape to Italy, where I felt sure of meeting artists and men after my own heart. The attempt was a failure. We returned to the shores of the Lake of Geneva, there to await Marie’s confinement.
When the child was a few days old, Marie, the martyr, the oppressed wife, the slave without rights, implored me to have it baptised. She knew very well that in my controversial writings I had fought Christianity tooth and nail, and was therefore strongly opposed to the ritual of the church.
Although she was not in the least religious herself, and had not set a foot inside a church for the last ten years, or been to communion for goodness knows how long; although she had only prayed for dogs, fowls and rabbits, the thought of this baptism, which she meant to elaborate into a great festival, completely obsessed her. I had no doubt that the motive which actuated her was the thought of my dislike to ceremonies which I considered insincere, and which are opposed to all my convictions.
But she implored me with tears in her eyes, appealed to my kind and generous nature. In the end I yielded to her importunity, on condition, however, that I was not expected to be present at the ceremony. She kissed my hand, thanked me effusively for what she called a mark of my affection for her, and assured me that her baby’s baptism was a matter of conscience to her, a very vital point.
The ceremony took place. After her return from church, she ridiculed the “farce” in the presence of many witnesses, posed as a free-thinker, made fun of the ceremonial, and even boasted that she knew nothing whatever of the church into which her son had just been received.
She had won the game and could afford to laugh at the whole business; the “vital question” transformed itself into a victory over me, a victory which served to strengthen the hands of my adversaries.
Once again I had humiliated myself, laid myself open to attack, in order to humour the fads and fancies of an overbearing woman.
But my measure of calamities was not yet full. A Scandinavian lady appeared, on the scene, full of the mania called the “Emancipation of Woman.” She and Marie became friends at once, and between them I had no chance.
She brought with her the cowardly book of a sexless writer who, rejected by all parties, became a traitor to his own sex by embracing the cause of all the blue-stockings of the civilised world. After having read Man and Woman, by Emile Girardin, I could well understand that this movement was bound to result in great advantages to the hostile camp of the women.
To depose man and put woman in his place by the re-introduction of the matriarchate; to dethrone the true lord of creation who evolved civilisation, spread the benefits of culture, created all great ideals, art, the professions, all that there is great and beautiful in the world, and crown woman who, with few exceptions, has not shared in the great work of civilisation, constituted to me a challenge to my sex. The very thought of having to witness the apotheosis of those intelligences of the iron age, those manlike creatures, those semi-apes, that pack of dangerous animals, roused my manhood. It was strange, but I was cured of my illness, cured through my intense repugnance to an enemy who, though intellectually my inferior, was more than a match for me on account of her complete lack of moral feeling.
In a tribal war the less honest, the more crafty, tribe generally remains in possession of the battlefield. The more a man respects woman, the more leisure he leaves her to arm and prepare herself for the fight, the smaller are his prospects of winning the battle. I determined to take the matter seriously. I armed myself for this new duel and wrote a book which I flung, like a gauntlet, at the feet of the emancipated women, those fools who demanded freedom at the price of man’s bondage.
In the following spring we changed our hotel. Our new abode was a kind of purgatory where I was continually watched by twenty-five women who, incidentally, furnished me with copy for my book.
In three months’ time the volume was ready for publication. It was a collection of stories of matrimonial life with an introduction in which I voiced a great number of disagreeable home-truths.
“Woman,” I contended, “is not a slave, for she and her children are supported by her husband’s work. She is not oppressed, for nature has ordained that she should live under the protection of the man while she fulfills her mission in life as mother. Woman is not man’s intellectual equal; the man, on the other hand, cannot bear children. She is not an essential factor in the great work of civilisation; this is man’s domain, for he is better fitted to grapple with spiritual problems than she is. Evolution teaches us that the greater the difference between the sexes, the stronger and more fit will be the resulting offspring. Consequently the aping of the masculine, the equality of the sexes, means retrogression, and is utter folly, the last dream of romantic and idealistic socialism.
“Woman, man’s necessary complement, the spiritual creation of man, has no right to the privileges of her husband, for she can only be called ‘the other half of humanity’ by virtue of her numbers, proportionally she is merely the sixth part of a sixth. She should not, therefore, invade the labour market as long as it falls to the lot of the man to provide for his wife and family. And the fact should not be lost sight of that every time a woman wrests an appointment from a man, there is one more old maid or prostitute.”
The fury of the feminists, and the formidable party which they formed, may easily be imagined when one realises that they demanded the confiscation of my book and brought a lawsuit against me.
But despite their attempt to represent my attack as an offence against religion (the folly of the unsexed actually aspired to raise their cause to the dignity of a religion), they were not clever enough to win their case.
Marie obstinately opposed my intention to go to Sweden unaccompanied by her; to take my family with me was out of the question on account of my limited means. Secretly she was afraid that I might escape from her strict guardianship and, worse still, that my appearance in court, before the public, would give the lie to the rumours concerning my mental condition which she had so sedulously disseminated.
She pleaded illness, without, however, being able to make a definite statement as to the nature of her illness, and kept her bed. Nevertheless I decided to appear personally in court, and left for Sweden.
The letters which I wrote to her during the following six weeks, while I was threatened with two years’ penal servitude, were full of love, love rekindled by our separation. My overwrought brain cast a glamour over her fragile form, wove a resplendent halo round her sweet face; restraint and longing clothed her with the white garments of the guardian angel. Everything that was base, ugly, evil, disappeared; the madonna of my first love-dream reappeared. I went so far as to admit to an old friend, a journalist, “that the influence of a good woman had made me more humble and pure-minded.” Probably this confession made the round of the papers of the United Kingdoms.
Did the unfaithful wife laugh when she read it?
The public got its money’s worth, at any rate.
Marie’s replies to my love-letters bore witness to the keen interest which she took in the financial side of the question. But her opinion underwent a change in the same proportion in which the ovations I received in the theatre, in the street and in court increased, and she called the judges stupid, and regretted that she was not a member of the jury.
She met my ardent declarations of love with clever reserve; she refused to be drawn into an argument, and confined herself to the repetition of the words: “To understand one another,” “To comprehend each other’s nature and ideas.” She blamed my failure to understand her for the unhappiness of our marriage. But I could swear that she herself never understood a single word of the language of her learned poet.
Amongst the number of her letters there was one which reawakened my old suspicions. I had mentioned my intention to live permanently abroad, if I was fortunate enough to escape the meshes of the law.
This upset her; she scolded me, threatened me with the loss of her love; she appealed to my pity, went down on her knees before me, as it were, evoked the memory of my mother, and confessed that the thought of never again seeing her country (by which she did not mean Finland) sent cold shudders down her spine and would kill her.
Why cold shudders? I wondered....
To this day I have not found an explanation.
I was acquitted. A banquet was given in my honour, and—oh, irony of fate!—Marie’s health was drunk “because she had persuaded me to appear personally before my judges.”
It was indeed amusing!
As soon as possible I returned to Geneva, where my family had lived during my absence. To my great surprise Marie, whom I had believed to be ill and in bed, met me at the station; she looked well and happy, but a trifle absent-minded.
I soon recovered my spirits, and the evening and night which followed fully compensated me for all the sufferings I had endured during those six weeks.
On the following day I discovered that we were living in a boarding-house which was mainly patronised by students and light women. While listening to their chatter, it came home to me with a pang that Marie had found pleasure in drinking and playing cards with these shady characters. The familiar tone which prevailed revolted me. Marie posed to the students as the little mother (her old game); she was the bosom friend of the most objectionable of the women; she introduced her to me: a slut, who came down to dinner semi-intoxicated.
And in this hell my children had lived for six weeks! Their mother approved of the place, for she was without prejudices! And her illness—her simulated illness—had not prevented her from taking part in the amusements of this disreputable company.
She lightly dismissed all my remonstrances. I was jealous, a stickler, a snob....
And again it was war between us.
We were now confronted by a new difficulty: the question of the education of the children. The nurse, an uneducated country girl, was made their governess, and, in collusion with the mother, committed the most outrageous follies. Both women were indolent, and liked to stay in bed until broad daylight. Consequently the children were obliged to stay in bed also, during the morning, no matter how wide awake they were; if they insisted on getting up, they were punished. As soon as I became aware of this state of things, I interfered; without much ado I sounded the reveille in the nursery, and was greeted with shouts of delight as a deliverer from bondage. My wife reminded me of our contract: personal freedom—her interpretation of which was the limitation of the liberty of others—but I took no notice of her.
The monomania of weak and inferior brains, that desire to equalise what can never be equal, was the cause of much mischief in my family. My elder daughter, a precocious child, had for years been allowed to play with my illustrated books, and had, besides, enjoyed many of the priviliges usually enjoyed by the firstborn. Because I would not extend the same privileges to the younger one, who had no idea of handling an expensive book, I was accused of injustice.
“There ought to be no difference whatever,” she said.
“No difference? Not even in the quantity of clothes and shoes?”
There was no direct reply to my remark, but a contemptuous “fool” made up for the omission.
“Every one according to merit and ability! This for the elder, that for the younger one!”
But she refused to understand my meaning, and stubbornly maintained that I was an unjust father, and “hated” my younger daughter.
To tell the truth, I was more attached to the elder one, because she awakened in me memories of the first beautiful days of my life, and because, also, she was sensible in advance of her years; I may also have been influenced by the fact that the younger one was born at a time when I had grave doubts of my wife’s fidelity.
The mother’s “justice,” I may say, evidenced itself in complete indifference to the children. She was always either out or asleep. She was a stranger to them, and they became devoted to me; their preference for me was so marked that it aroused her jealousy, and in order to conciliate her, I made a practice of letting her distribute the toys and sweets which I bought for them, hoping that in this way she might win their affection.
The little ones were a very important factor in my life, and in my darkest moments, when I was almost broken by my isolation, contact with them bound me afresh to life and their mother. For the sake of the children the thought of divorcing my wife was unthinkable; an ominous fact, as far as I was concerned, for I was becoming more and more her abject slave.