“but then, you know, i have never seen your husband,” egidia was saying to the pretty little woman who, sunk deep in the billowy mound of a very easy chair, her feet upheld to the glow of a north-country fire blazing away in the very height of summer, as usual, was expatiating in the sweetest of voices on her matrimonial unhappiness. she was telling egidia all the truth, or thought she was, and the novelist, in her double capacity of friend and gatherer of welcome “copy,” was listening sympathetically from her sofa.
it was a charming house in the suburbs of newcastle, the abode of charming people, where egidia was staying, and mrs. elles deeply appreciated the friendship with the fashionable lecturer, which had gained her the entry into this home of modernity and culture.
“yes, if you once saw mortimer,” mrs. elles went on, “you would understand all!”
the way she uttered the last word would not have disgraced a tragic actress.
“i want you to come and dine—will you? what day shall it be? tell me, and i’ll fix it. then you will see him, and judge for yourself.{26}”
“my dear,” said the novelist, slowly, “i will come to your dinner with pleasure, but i shall not know any more than you have told me.”
“yes; i have been very, very frank,” said mrs. elles. “and there is another thing”—she sighed vaguely. she was alluding to her husband’s habit of tippling, to which as a loyal wife she forbore from a more direct allusion.
“as a general rule,” egidia went on, a little didactically, in her capacity of mentor, “no husband understands any wife. if he did, he wouldn’t have cared to marry her. it is the mutual antagonism between the sexes which makes them interesting to each other in the beginning. but, afterwards—if they are unable to play the game—exciting enough, i should think—of observing, of adjusting, of utilizing their mutual divergences of character and getting amusement out of them—if she finds no pleasure in the exercise of tact, if he none in the further analysis of the feminine vagaries that he began by finding so charming—then, they begin to jar mutually on each other, and turn that into tragedy which should be the comedy of life for both of them.”
“i understand,” said mrs. elles, humbly; “but then—there is not, and could not be, any comedy of life with mortimer, or tragedy either! there never was. i don’t seem to care to appreciate his character, i know it—it is quite simple—i see it all spread out before me like a map—of a country i don’t care to travel over.{27}”
“but perhaps he can say the same of you,” hazarded egidia.
“no, mortimer has never understood me, never! i am a sealed book to him,” said the wife, airily, although miss giles’ suggestion had indeed given her a little shock.
“don’t flatter yourself, my dear, that you are a sealed book to anyone. it is the common delusion.” (another shock to mrs. elles!) “one is always so much less interesting, so much less complicated, so much less of a sphinx than one thinks.”
“but i have always thought of mine as a very complicated nature,” mrs. elles rejoined, pouting; “i am sure i can’t tell you how many thoughts pass through my mind in a day, and i seem to have a perfectly new mood every minute.”
“so we all have, but we don’t take cognizance of them or act on them all. i should say that you are one of those people who begin with a radical mistake—that of expecting too much of life. you think you have a right to be happy. good heavens! you seek for midi à quatorze heures, you love change for its own sake; you positively enjoy hot water. you would rather have a painful emotion than none at all, you would like to cry, with sophie arnould, ‘oh, le bon temps, j’etais si malheureuse!’ you have not mastered the great fact, that emotions are not to the emotional; to them is generally awarded the dreary crux of the commonplace, and that i think is hardest to bear of all, that one’s cross should come in the way{28} of material comfort and spiritual uneventfulness, and when it comes to the point, instead of action to be taken there is only temper—to be kept!”
“i always scorn to nag,” said mrs. elles, “it seems so ungraceful.”
“i am sure, my dear, that whatever you may feel, you always manage to look decorative!” said the other, smiling. “still, you expect too much and give too little to be what i call easy to live with!”
“that is what i say,” cried mrs. elles, triumphantly. “i call that being complicated.”
“do you?” said the authoress, drily. “i should be tempted to call it want of social tact—an almost culpable ignorance of the science of give and take, a—you must really forgive me for my brutal frankness”—she broke off suddenly and laughed confusedly—“but, you know, you asked me to speak freely.”
“i love it,” declared ph?be elles, adjusting a cushion behind her head. “i think i like to talk about myself, even if it is disagreeable,” she added, with unusual frankness.
egidia smiled irresistibly. it was impossible for her to help liking this unconscious egotist, who confessed to her failings with such a grace, and took plain speaking with such aplomb.
“i think,” she said, trying to give a less serious turn to the conversation, “what you really wanted, in marriage, was a man who would have dominated you—have beaten you, perhaps.{29}”
“yes, i do really believe i should,” said mrs. elles; “that is, if i loved him desperately at the time and he loved me desperately—afterwards! but,” she went on, seriously, “you have given me your views on marriage, and my marriage in particular, but, now you know all my life, what do you advise me to do?”
“do? do nothing! what can you do? what can any woman do?” asked egidia, raising her well-marked eyebrows, and with an air of dismissing an impracticable subject.
then, seeing the unmistakable look of disappointment in the eyes of her feminine telemachus, she added kindly, “ah, you see, when we outsiders come to the domain of practical politics, we are mere theorists—all at sea, and just as helpless and resourceless as any of you slaves of the ring can possibly be. i should advise you to make the best of it, and pray that you may never meet anybody you like better than the man you have got!”
mrs. elles rose to go, it was late. she had had a good time. she had enjoyed the personal discussion, but there was a wilful twist about her mouth, as of one which had swallowed much advice, but had swallowed it the wrong way.
“after this, i must not ask you to come and stop with me in london, i am afraid,” added egidia.
“oh, please do, and i will promise to wear blinkers.”
“blue spectacles would be nearer the mark!” said the novelist. “do that, and i will engage to introduce you to edmund rivers with impunity.{30}”
“well, but you said just now he was incapable of falling in love with any woman.”
“yes, but i never implied that women found it impossible to fall in love with him!” answered egidia, quite gravely. “he is handsome and indifferent, and i know of no combination more dangerous to the peace of our sex!”
. . . . . . . .
mrs. elles’ little dinner was arranged; the invitations, written on beautiful rough note paper with an artistic ragged edge, sent out. mrs. elles had conscientiously consulted her husband’s list of engagements and saw that he was free, and put down a large cross for the eleventh. mortimer would see that he was engaged, and would, as usual, be too lazy or careless to enquire further. on the evening in question, he would necessarily see “what was up,” and would grumblingly admit that he was “let in for one of ph?be’s confounded dinners” instead of a happy gathering at the continental club with the “fellows.”
his wife would, of course, have got on far better without him, as far as the success of her party was concerned, only society so far considers the husband, even if his social capacities are nil, as a necessary adjunct to the dinner table. he has not yet gone out with the épergne, and therefore must be tolerated. but with regard to mrs. poynder and charles, the mistress of the house had put her foot down. she was famous for her little dinners, the entrain of which the presence of her husband did not seem, so{31} far, to have materially diminished. but that of the other two would have been fatally destructive of charm. the pair had been induced to see the matter in somewhat of the same light—four members of a family were a little overwhelming—and the question of economy had weight with mrs. poynder. aunt and nephew were in the habit of considerately inviting themselves out to high tea at the house of a relation of mortimer’s in newcastle on these occasions. mrs. poynder, indeed, owned to a want of sympathy with the “people fibby contrived to get together,” and she was not informed that miss giles, for whom she had developed an unaccountable fancy, was to be of the party.
“my old woman of the sea,” so mrs. elles sometimes spoke of her to her intimates, in whose eyes the ways and speeches of the terrible old lady amply justified the want of reticence implied in her niece’s indiscreet sobriquet. why must she form part of the elles household? everybody wondered, but mrs. elles knew.
for on this point the husband was immutable. he saw plainly that on mrs. poynder did his manly bourgeois comfort depend. his wife only attended to the show side of housekeeping; she saw that there was always plenty of flowers in the drawing-room, winter and summer—but mrs. poynder attended to his shirts and their proper complement of buttons. mrs. elles ordered dinner, but mrs. poynder kept the books and interviewed the tradesmen. his wife{32} paid the smart calls, but mrs. poynder looked up his dull and important relations, and, in her rough undiplomatic way, advanced his affairs. she exercised a certain modest supervision over the whisky bottle, and without saying much, curbed mortimer’s drunken tendencies a good deal.
mrs. elles herself was vaguely cognizant of the advantages of this system, and realized that mrs. poynder’s presence in the ménage gave her leisure to attend to the cultivation of the graces of her own mind and person, and exonerated her from the thankless task of confronting mortimer on the tedious matters of servants, wages, and housekeeping and partial abstention.
“aunt poynder goes down into the arena for me, and fights with wild beasts in the kitchen,” the ungrateful young woman used to say. “she likes it, i verily believe.—but some of their roughness rubs off on her,” she would add, and nobody would gainsay her. mrs. poynder was the professed disagreeable woman of newcastle, and people were apt to fly up side alleys and into shops when they saw her come sailing majestically down granger street.
“oh, mortimer, why did you go and have such awful relations?” mrs. elles exclaimed casually to her husband, one afternoon, when she came back from a visit to egidia at jesmond. she was impelled to say it. mrs. poynder’s coarseness and charles’ roughness seemed now-a-days more obtrusive by contrast with the pleasant manners of the people with{33} whom, by the accident of her friendship with egidia, she had been almost daily thrown into contact. this had been her farewell visit. egidia was going back to town; but, in the course of many and many a long talk, she had sown a plentiful crop of ideas in this wayward head—a seed whose harvest was to prove a very different one to that which she had expected.
mortimer elles was not seriously discomposed by his wife’s remark. “that’s a nice remark to make to a man!” was his not ungentle rejoinder. he had ceased to expect ph?be to curb any expression of opinion out of respect to his feelings, and in return permitted himself his full measure of brutality towards her.
“well, aren’t they?” she repeated, yawning; “when is charles going to pass his examination and relieve us of his presence? i did not bargain for charles as a permanent lodger when i married you, nor aunt poynder indeed, for that matter, but i suppose all is for the worst, in this dreariest of all possible households!”
she expected no answer. these two always wrangled at cross purposes. there was very seldom a positive engagement between them. mrs. elles knew that charles could not leave just yet, knew, too, that mrs. poynder would never go, was not positively sure that she wanted her to go, but just now, when her normal state of discontent was quadrupled by the new influences that had lately come into her{34} life, she could not resist a repetition of an oft-repeated complaint.
she went on in a soft but irritating voice.
“i have no objection to aunt poynder’s engaging all the servants and managing them, but i must say i wish she would let jane alone. i have reserved the right of choosing my own parlour-maid, and when i have succeeded in getting one that suits me, i don’t want her bullied and the place made impossible for her.”
“who bullies her? an idle, good-for-nothing trollop of a creature.”
“there, you see, you don’t like her.”
“no, i don’t,” he replied brutally. “i don’t like her style. she copies you, and you’re not a particularly good model.”
“ah, how miserable i am!” she exclaimed, irrelevantly. “mortimer, tell me, why can’t we get on? it is not my fault, is it?”
“oh! no,” he replied ironically. “you are always in the right. there is nothing more tiresome in a woman.”
“you are frank, mortimer, and almost epigrammatic!”
“shut up, can’t you?” he exclaimed, in accents of annoyance. “i wonder why it is that you always contrive to rub me up the wrong way. here you are abusing me—abusing my relations—why can’t you let them alone? i don’t abuse yours.”
“mine are all dead!” she said, pathetically. “fair game for you!{35}”
“and a nice lot they were!” said the man, now thoroughly roused to ill-temper. “that is, if you have told me the truth about them. you’re pretty good at drawing the long bow, you know.”
at this point in the discussion, mrs. elles withdrew. her relations were—or had been—a weak point, and mortimer had suffered—in his purse—from claims of a ne’er-do-well father-in-law, and a foolish, extravagant mother. ph?be had been brought up badly as a child, had been neglected in her girlhood, and her marriage with mortimer elles had been the making of her—as her people said, and as she had agreed at the time—but it was a grievance with her that, try as she might, she could not give her history a romantic turn in her husband’s eyes. he knew all about her, was full of preconceived notions about her, and she resented the impossibility of keeping up a consistent pose with him, being one of those who reverse the proverb and expect to be heroes to their valets de chambre and heroines to their husbands.
this weakness of hers entailed the other weakness to which her husband had alluded—her consistent ambiguity of phrase, her frequent lapses from truth. these lapses were for the most part unconscious, they were the good face she put on every matter, her artistic presentment of incidents relating to herself and other people, for, to do her justice, she applied the same method to her fellow-creatures, and was never known to retail a spiteful or unpicturesque version of another woman’s affairs.{36}
she considered herself the soul of honour, it is true; she literally would not have told a lie to save her life; but to save her pose and her dramatic presentment from discomfiture, she shrank from no form of embellishment or extenuation. so she “doctored” facts—served up the plain “roast and boiled” of everyday existence with a sauce piquante of her own devising, and thought of herself as one who, compassing under difficulties the whole duty of woman, makes herself as charming, as romantic, as mysterious as circumstances will allow.
. . . . . . . .
half an hour later she looked into the study, where mortimer was sitting, a revolting picture of middle-class ease, with his legs on the table, drinking whisky and water.
“i thought i heard someone crying?”
“so you did. jane. i have told her to go.”
“what?” she screamed.
“yes; we’ve had a row, jane and i. i have sent her packing. i paid her her wages—told her to pack up and go—not later than to-morrow. she was cheeky to me—you teach them all to be damned cheeky to me—and i won’t stand it.” he filled his glass again, pouring with a want of precision that spoke of many previous attacks on the bottle.
“jane cannot have meant”—his wife murmured humbly, cowed by the enormity of the misfortune that had befallen her. jane was her ally, her confidante, her all.{37}
“oh, yes; jane meant it fast enough. don’t talk to me about it. to-morrow she goes!”
he brought his fist heavily down upon the table. his wife started, a start partly real, partly affected.
“if jane goes, i go.”
“nonsense, you are not a servant—i have not dismissed you!”
“dismiss!” she tossed her head. then the real, imminent need of propitiating mortimer occurred to her. she must keep jane at the cost of all humiliation. “mortimer, listen—it puts me out very much. i have a dinner party of twelve next week!”
“the deuce you have! what a woman you are for kick-ups! and i don’t suppose there is a soul coming that i shall care twopence for! well, you must put it off, that’s all!”
“one doesn’t do these things!”
“oh, i do. i’ll write the excuses for you, if you like.”
she stamped her foot. “mortimer—i will not be put to shame before my friends! you have no right to do this to me! oh, what shall i do, what shall i do, tied to a perfect beast like you for the rest of my life?”
“grin and bear it, i suppose. you won’t make me any better by swearing at me!”
“i don’t swear at you! how you speak to me! to me! to me! your wife! how dared you marry me, mortimer?”
“i don’t know about dare,” he said, growing red.{38} “when all is said and done, i don’t think you did much to prevent me!”
“that’s enough!” she raised her hand with a theatrical gesture as if to stop him, and, sinking into an armchair, hid her face in her hands. “insulting! no—i see now—you never loved me! never! never!”
he ostentatiously turned his back on her tragic pose.
“there you go! always in extremes—always injured—always making the worst of it! you couldn’t live without a grievance, i do believe! of course i married you for love—if you must use the absurd word—and now you pay me back by plaguing my life out! and then begin to talk damned sentimental rot about my never having loved you, and so on! now, really, don’t you think we are both a bit too old for that sort of thing?”
“oh, you are—impossible!” she moaned. it was what she felt. it was the one word which fitted the situation, which was no situation, except to herself. mortimer kicked a coal out of the grate savagely with his carpet-slippered foot, and, her sense assaulted by the sickening smell of singed wool, she left the room.
. . . . . . . .
mortimer was drunk—he often was; it was the least heinous of his crimes. she went upstairs crying, and went to bed, but she knew she could not sleep that night, and yet she took no bromide or sulphonal. she wanted to think—she meant to think{39} things out—so she lay, and thought, and thought, with extreme intensity and vigour, if with little coherence. so intent was she that she lay quite straight out and still, and did not toss, while the trains of thought succeeded each other with extraordinary rapidity. the tall clock on the stairs outside her door ticked loudly and monotonously, and the whole problem of her life arrayed itself and measured out its phases to the beat of the pendulum, which seemed to balance them, as it were.
mortimer was impossible! he had always been impossible! his conduct this evening was of a piece with his whole conduct to her, ever since a few weeks after marriage. halcyon weeks, which every woman has a right to expect, while they in no wise concern or affect the life that follows after. his taunt about the circumstances of her marriage to him she dismissed, she knew quite well that she had provoked him to it, he had not meant it, there was no foundation for it. he had wooed and won her in the usual, commonplace way, been timid and attentive, and had begged her for locks of her hair. and she had been complaisant and loving, and had treasured his photograph and made excuses for its ugliness, just like any other foolish girl with her first sweetheart.
why had she done all this? why had she bought that rose-coloured satin dress last christmas, that she had taken such a dislike to, since, that she had only worn it twice? her marriage was a very nearly parallel case, only she had been able to afford to throw{40} aside the one bad bargain, and she had been obliged to abide by the other.
“yes, i can’t say i did not know my own mind, such as it was, when i took mortimer, but, unfortunately, it isn’t the same mind that i have now. it was a child’s mind. the whole fabric of our bodies alters every seven years, they say—well, that means our minds, too—body and soul are one in my creed. it was not this me that was glad to marry mortimer, as he so politely put it—” she laughed bitterly. “it was another me, who had not read ibsen.” she laughed again. “books alter one—reading alters one—life alters one, after all! i married mortimer like a blind puppy, not knowing, not seeing. i am nothing wonderful, but i do think i am too good for him! why did i not see it then? why is a girl such a fool? why does nobody tell her? it is very hard. they say, as one has made one’s bed, so one must lie on it.... but suppose i decline to lie on it?”
she almost leaped in her bed with the shock of this crude presentment of a new idea. then she rose, lit a candle and walked out of her room, and across a landing, and straight into mortimer’s room. she softly approached the bed on which he lay, and, like psyche over again, held the light up on high, and looked critically down upon her sleeping husband.
she felt an indefinable pleasure in thus surveying him helpless who was technically her master. this coarse, clumsy-fibred creature who had yet his full complement of the shrewdness and acuteness that{41} gave him dominion over his fellow-men, and made him known as a “tough customer” in business, slept the sleep—well, if not precisely that of the just, at any rate that of the man whose balance at his bank is secure and his investment sound. he slept like a savage who has laid aside his clubs, and enjoys the dreamless, primitive sleep that he has earned by his feats of arms. his thick, broad eyelids rested peacefully on the cold, blue eyes whose empty glare his wife knew and detested. his lips were closed on his cruel little teeth in a firm, inexpressive line, pacific and meaningless, and his clumsy hands, with their short, square-nailed finger tips, lay palm outwards on the coverlet, as innocently as a child’s.
she might stare at him as long as she pleased, with those burning, insistent eyes of hers, and not fear to break his sleep; his simple nervous system would surely withstand the hypnotism of her enquiring gaze.
but next morning, he would be “all there” as usual; the hectoring, bantering, exacerbating personality would re-assert itself, and make its hundred and one demands on her self-control all through the day, till sometimes it seemed as if she could not look at him or hear his voice without screaming.
“why should i bear it? why should i?” she asked herself, passionately, aloud; and the pettish exclamation was significant of the great revulsion that was taking place in her, a result of the passionate, elucidating fortnight she had passed.{42}
she went back to her room and lay down again, but she closed her eyes no more that night, and by the time the pallid dawn of newcastle had begun to filter through the window curtains, a whole plan of action had shaped itself in her mind. she came down punctually to the eight o’clock breakfast which was exacted by mortimer and which he had never allowed her to forego, putting some constraint on herself to appear perfectly composed, for her heart was beating violently, and she felt the suspicious flush mounting to her cheek, which had so often given unkind friends occasion to say that she painted. but mrs. poynder, who was presiding over the tea and coffee, looked her over with some approval.
“now, that’s the first decent dress i have seen you in, fibby, for many a long day!” she observed, contemplating the plain dress of blue serge—not very new, not very smart—in which mrs. elles had chosen to array herself.
“i am glad you are pleased, aunt poynder,” replied her niece, demurely, gracefully accepting her cup of coffee from the stout, red fingers where the submerged wedding-ring, planted there by the late mr. poynder, glittered. charles elles, who could get more noise out of a cup of coffee than anybody, was drinking his and enjoying it thoroughly. mrs. poynder somehow contrived to knock her knife and fork together on the rim of her plate with vigour every time she took a morsel. mortimer’s carpet slippers, and the dish of bacon which his aunt had{43} set down by the fire to keep warm for him, stood by the fire in grotesque proximity.
“i am going to put off my dinner on the thirty-first,” mrs. elles announced, quietly. “jane is going, and i couldn’t attempt it with a new parlour-maid.”
“i am glad, fibby, to see you in such a peaceable frame of mind,” mrs. poynder rejoined. “mortimer says you were fairly put out at first about his sending jane away.”
“so i was, aunt, but——”
“ye’re quite right, fibby, to take it calm. husbands must have their way. i never thought much of the girl myself; she’s lazy and wears far too much fringe. besides, a man must be master in his own house, and if he can’t send away his own housemaid when it pleases him——”
“yes, aunt.” mrs. elles was playing at meekness, and the sensation was so unusual that she found it rather amusing so far. mrs. poynder could not make it out at all.
“are ye ill, my dear?” she enquired, with some show of solicitude. “to look at ye, i should say that your digestion was not in just apple-pie order.”
“i am all right, aunt,” replied mrs. elles, with forced composure, stamping her foot, however, under the table. her colour was high, as mrs. poynder had remarked, but very clear and bright, and she looked quite ten years younger. her aunt continued to make little onslaughts of this kind on her through{44} breakfast, but she did not retort. her lips formed themselves every now and again into the words, “i am going—i am going—i am going!” as a kind of secret satisfaction. when her husband came down, she actually got up and fetched the terribly plebeian dish of bacon from the fender and put it down in front of him. he thanked her drily.
“if you will excuse me,” she said to them all, “i will go and write some notes that have to be attended to at once.”
she left the room, and the scratching of a feverish pen within the drawing-room was heard for the next twenty minutes through the open door, while mortimer elles, having eaten an enormous breakfast in the short time he had devoted to that purpose, went into the hall and began to rummage for his stick and hat and struggle into his coat. his wife knew the sound well.
“good-bye, mortimer!” she called out. there was a slight suspicion of mockery in her tone that he perceived and resented. he did not answer her, but went out, banging the door behind him loudly and aggressively.
“helmer bangs the door; not nora!” she smiled to herself. she felt extraordinarily gay. the more serious aspects of the step she was taking were not obvious to her at the present moment. she was for the time merely possessed by an irrepressible zeal for the assertion of self, and its disassociation from all trammelling human responsibilities.{45}
presently mrs. poynder went out too, to attend some busybodies’ committee meeting, and mrs. elles took three five-pound notes out of a drawer in her desk, locked it, and, going downstairs, ordered lunch and dinner very carefully. this duty accomplished, she went up to her room, and presented jane, whom she found there, with a very handsome cloth dress she had hardly worn, and her blessing. the affectionate and devoted jane wept, and it was with difficulty that her mistress prevented herself from crying too.
then jane went about her business, and mrs. elles locked herself in. she undid the complicated arrangement of her hair and with a comb parted it as severely as she could resign herself to do, and with a brush dipped in water smoothed out the little curls on her forehead, sighing deeply the while. then she went to a cupboard, and from its most recondite recesses produced a box containing a pair of blue spectacles—her husband’s. she put them on, and standing resolutely in front of a cheval glass, surveyed her appearance.
“good god, can i bear it?” she said aloud, in tones of the very deepest anguish. her face grew sombre for the first time since the conception of flight had become an established fact in her mind. she desperately tugged down a lock and disposed it becomingly on her forehead as usual, and then put it back again.——
“no!... yes!... i must do it like this.... it is the only way i can do it without blame.... it shows that my intentions are honourable.... i am going away to be free, not to flirt.... i must make all that an absolute impossibility!”
she flung a lace scarf over the glass and busied herself with a few necessary preparations. she got out a gladstone bag—just the size she could manage to carry herself—and threw in a few clothes, including a fine white muslin dress she had worn at her “at home” that day, so fine that it would go through a ring almost and took up no room to speak of. a rather valuable sapphire ring she put on her finger, and on second thoughts added a diamond one. then she opened the door of her room, and leaning over the banisters called out, “jane!”
jane replied.
“jane, will you go and draw down those blinds in the drawing-room—all of them—half down. the sun is getting so strong. and then, will you take the heap of letters you will see lying on the bureau, and go and post them at once.”
she put on a sailor hat and a white lace veil over her blue spectacles, and was downstairs and out in the street before jane had got to the fourth blind of the drawing-room, which happened to look out on the back of the house. nora was gone!