They and I

By good fortune I found a loose match. I lighted a fresh cigar.

“Dick, I suppose, is the average man,” said Robina.

“Most of us are,” I said, “when we are at home. Carlyle was the average man in the little front parlour in Cheyne Row, though, to hear fools talk, you might think no married couple outside literary circles had ever been known to exchange a cross look. So was Oliver Cromwell in his own palace with the door shut. Mrs. Cromwell must have thought him monstrous silly, placing sticky sweetmeats for his guests to sit on – told him so, most likely. A cheery, kindly man, notwithstanding, though given to moods. He and Mrs. Cromwell seem to have rubbed along, on the whole, pretty well together. Old Sam Johnson – great, God-fearing, lovable, cantankerous old brute! Life with him, in a small house on a limited income, must have had its ups and downs. Milton and Frederick the Great were, one hopes, a little below the average. Did their best, no doubt; lacked understanding. Not so easy as it looks, living up to the standard of the average man. Very clever people, in particular, find it tiring.”

“I shall never marry,” said Robina. “At least, I hope I sha’n’t.”

“Why ‘hope’?” I asked.

“Because I hope I shall never be idiot enough,” she answered. “I see it all so clearly. I wish I didn’t. Love! it’s only an ugly thing with a pretty name. It will not be me that he will fall in love with. He will not know me until it is too late. How can he? It will be merely with the outside of me – my pink-and-white skin, my rounded arms. I feel it sometimes when I see men looking at me, and it makes me mad. And at other times the admiration in their eyes pleases me. And that makes me madder still.”

The moon had slipped behind the wood. She had risen, and, leaning against the porch, was standing with her hands clasped. I fancy she had forgotten me. She seemed to be talking to the night.

“It’s only a trick of Nature to make fools of us,” she said. “He will tell me I am all the world to him; that his love will outlive the stars – will believe it himself at the time, poor fellow! He will call me a hundred pretty names, will kiss my feet and hands. And if I’m fool enough to listen to him, it may last” – she laughed; it was rather an ugly laugh – “six months; with luck perhaps a year, if I’m careful not to go out in the east wind and come home with a red nose, and never let him catch me in curl papers. It will not be me that he will want: only my youth, and the novelty of me, and the mystery. And when that is gone – ”

She turned to me. It was a strange face I saw then in the pale light, quite a fierce little face. She laid her hands upon my shoulders, and I felt them cold. “What comes when it is dead?” she said. “What follows? You must know. Tell me. I want the truth.”

Her vehemence had arisen so suddenly. The little girl I had set out to talk with was no longer there. To my bewilderment, it was a woman that was questioning me.

I drew her down beside me. But the childish face was still stern.

“I want the truth,” she said; so that I answered very gravely:

“When the passion is passed; when the glory and the wonder of Desire – Nature’s eternal ritual of marriage, solemnising, sanctifying it to her commands – is ended; when, sooner or later, some grey dawn finds you wandering bewildered in once familiar places, seeking vainly the lost palace of youth’s dreams; when Love’s frenzy is faded, like the fragrance of the blossom, like the splendour of the dawn; there will remain to you, just what was there before – no more, no less. If passion was all you had to give to one another, God help you. You have had your hour of madness. It is finished. If greed of praise and worship was your price – well, you have had your payment. The bargain is complete. If mere hope to be made happy was your lure, one pities you. We do not make each other happy. Happiness is the gift of the gods, not of man. The secret lies within you, not without. What remains to you will depend not upon what you thought, but upon what you are. If behind the lover there was the man – behind the impossible goddess of his love-sick brain some honest, human woman, then life lies not behind you, but before you.

“Life is giving, not getting. That is the mistake we most of us set out with. It is the work that is the joy, not the wages; the game, not the score. The lover’s delight is to yield, not to claim. The crown of motherhood is pain. To serve the State at cost of ease and leisure; to spend his thought and labour upon a hundred schemes, is the man’s ambition. Life is doing, not having. It is to gain the peak the climber strives, not to possess it. Fools marry thinking what they are going to get out of it: good store of joys and pleasure, opportunities for self-indulgence, eternal soft caresses – the wages of the wanton. The rewards of marriage are toil, duty, responsibility – manhood, womanhood. Love’s baby talk you will have outgrown. You will no longer be his ‘Goddess,’ ‘Angel,’ ‘Popsy Wopsy,’ ‘Queen of his heart.’ There are finer names than these: wife, mother, priestess in the temple of humanity. Marriage is renunciation, the sacrifice of Self upon the altar of the race. ‘A trick of Nature’ you call it. Perhaps. But a trick of Nature compelling you to surrender yourself to the purposes of God.”

I fancy we must have sat in silence for quite a long while; for the moon, creeping upward past the wood, had flooded the fields again with light before Robina spoke.

“Then all love is needless,” she said, “we could do better without it, choose with more discretion. If it is only something that worries us for a little while and then passes, what is the sense of it?”

“You could ask the same question of Life itself,” I said; “‘something that worries us for a little while, then passes.’ Perhaps the ‘worry,’ as you call it, has its uses. Volcanic upheavals are necessary to the making of a world. Without them the ground would remain rock-bound, unfitted for its purposes. That explosion of Youth’s pent-up forces that we term Love serves to the making of man and woman. It does not die, it takes new shape. The blossom fades as the fruit forms. The passion passes to give place to peace. The trembling lover has become the helper, the comforter, the husband.”

“But the failures,” Robina persisted; “I do not mean the silly or the wicked people; but the people who begin by really loving one another, only to end in disliking – almost hating one another. How do they get there?”

“Sit down,” I said, “and I will tell you a story.

“Once upon a time there was a girl, and a boy who loved her. She was a clever, brilliant girl, and she had the face of an angel. They lived near to one another, seeing each other almost daily. But the boy, awed by the difference of their social position, kept his secret, as he thought, to himself; dreaming, as youth will, of the day when fame and wealth would bridge the gulf between them. The kind look in her eyes, the occasional seeming pressure of her hand, he allowed to feed his hopes; and on the morning of his departure for London an incident occurred that changed his vague imaginings to set resolve. He had sent on his scanty baggage by the carrier, intending to walk the three miles to the station. It was early in the morning, and he had not expected to meet a soul. But a mile from the village he overtook her. She was reading a book, but she made no pretence that the meeting was accidental, leaving him to form what conclusions he would. She walked with him some distance, and he told her of his plans and hopes; and she answered him quite simply that she should always remember him, always be more glad than she could tell to hear of his success. Near the end of the lane they parted, she wishing him in that low sweet woman’s voice of hers all things good. He turned, a little farther on, and found that she had also turned. She waved her hand to him, smiling. And through the long day’s journey and through many days to come there remained with him that picture of her, bringing with it the scent of the pine-woods: her white hand waving to him, her sweet eyes smiling wistfully.

“But fame and fortune are not won so quickly as boys dream, nor is life as easy to live bravely as it looks in visions. It was nearly twenty years before they met again. Neither had married. Her people were dead and she was living alone; and to him the world at last had opened her doors. She was still beautiful. A gracious, gentle lady, she had grown; clothed with that soft sweet dignity that Time bestows upon rare women, rendering them fairer with the years.

“To the man it seemed a miracle. The dream of those early days came back to him. Surely there was nothing now to separate them. Nothing had changed but the years, bringing to them both wider sympathies, calmer, more enduring emotions. She welcomed him again with the old kind smile, a warmer pressure of the hand; and, allowing a little time to pass for courtesy’s sake, he told her what was the truth: that he had never ceased to love her, never ceased to keep the vision of her fair pure face before him, his ideal of all that man could find of help in womanhood. And her answer, until years later he read the explanation, remained a mystery to him. She told him that she loved him, that she had never loved any other man and never should; that his love, for so long as he chose to give it to her, she should always prize as the greatest gift of her life. But with that she prayed him to remain content.

“He thought perhaps it was a touch of woman’s pride, of hurt dignity that he had kept silent so long, not trusting her; that perhaps as time went by she would change her mind. But she never did; and after awhile, finding that his persistence only pained her, he accepted the situation. She was not the type of woman about whom people talk scandal, nor would it have troubled her much had they done so. Able now to work where he would, he took a house in a neighbouring village, where for the best part of the year he lived, near to her. And to the end they remained lovers.”

“I think I understand,” said Robina. “I will tell you afterwards if I am wrong.”

“I told the story to a woman many years ago,” I said, “and she also thought she understood. But she was only half right.”

“We will see,” said Robina. “Go on.”

“She left a letter, to be given to him after her death, in case he survived her; if not, to be burned unopened. In it she told him her reason, or rather her reasons, for having refused him. It was an odd letter. The ‘reasons’ sounded so pitiably insufficient. Until one took the pains to examine them in the cold light of experience. And then her letter struck one, not as foolish, but as one of the grimmest commentaries upon marriage that perhaps had ever been penned.

“It was because she had wished always to remain his ideal; to keep their love for one another to the end, untarnished; to be his true helpmeet in all things, that she had refused to marry him.

“Had he spoken that morning she had waited for him in the lane – she had half hoped, half feared it – she might have given her promise: ‘For Youth,’ so she wrote, ‘always dreams it can find a new way.’ She thanked God that he had not.

“‘Sooner or later,’ so ran the letter, ‘you would have learned, Dear, that I was neither saint nor angel; but just a woman – such a tiresome, inconsistent creature; she would have exasperated you – full of a thousand follies and irritabilities that would have marred for you all that was good in her. I wanted you to have of me only what was worthy, and this seemed the only way. Counting the hours to your coming, hating the pain of your going, I could always give to you my best. The ugly words, the whims and frets that poison speech – they could wait; it was my lover’s hour.

“‘And you, Dear, were always so tender, so gay. You brought me joy with both your hands. Would it have been the same, had you been my husband? How could it? There were times, even as it was, when you vexed me. Forgive me, Dear, I mean it was my fault – ways of thought and action that did not fit in with my ways, that I was not large-minded enough to pass over. As my lover, they were but as spots upon the sun. It was easy to control the momentary irritation that they caused me. Time was too precious for even a moment of estrangement. As my husband, the jarring note would have been continuous, would have widened into discord. You see, Dear, I was not great enough to love all of you. I remember, as a child, how indignant I always felt with God when my nurse told me He would not love me because I was naughty, that He only loved good children. It seemed such a poor sort of love, that. Yet that is precisely how we men and women do love; taking only what gives us pleasure, repaying the rest with anger. There would have arisen the unkind words that can never be recalled; the ugly silences; the gradual withdrawing from one another. I dared not face it.

“‘It was not all selfishness. Truthfully I can say I thought more of you than of myself. I wanted to keep the shadows of life away from you. We men and women are like the flowers. It is in sunshine that we come to our best. You were my hero. I wanted you to be great. I wanted you to be surrounded by lovely dreams. I wanted your love to be a thing holy, helpful to you.’

“It was a long letter. I have given you the gist of it.”

Again there was a silence between us.

“You think she did right?” asked Robina.

“I cannot say,” I answered; “there are no rules for Life, only for the individual.”

“I have read it somewhere,” said Robina – “where was it? – ‘Love suffers all things, and rejoices.’”

“Maybe in old Thomas Kempis. I am not sure,” I said.

“It seems to me,” said Robina, “that the explanation lies in that one sentence of hers: ‘I was not great enough to love all of you.’”

“It seems to me,” I said, “that the whole art of marriage is the art of getting on with the other fellow. It means patience, self-control, forbearance. It means the laying aside of our self-conceit and admitting to ourselves that, judged by eyes less partial than our own, there may be much in us that is objectionable, that calls for alteration. It means toleration for views and opinions diametrically opposed to our most cherished convictions. It means, of necessity, the abandonment of many habits and indulgences that however trivial have grown to be important to us. It means the shaping of our own desires to the needs of others; the acceptance often of surroundings and conditions personally distasteful to us. It means affection deep and strong enough to bear away the ugly things of life – its quarrels, wrongs, misunderstandings – swiftly and silently into the sea of forgetfulness. It means courage, good humour, commonsense.”

“That is what I am saying,” explained Robina. “It means loving him even when he’s naughty.”

Dick came across the fields. Robina rose and slipped into the house.

“You are looking mighty solemn, Dad,” said Dick.

“Thinking of Life, Dick,” I confessed. “Of the meaning and the explanation of it.”

“Yes, it’s a problem, Life,” admitted Dick.

“A bit of a teaser,” I agreed.

We smoked in silence for awhile.

“Loving a good woman must be a tremendous help to a man,” said Dick.

He looked very handsome, very gallant, his boyish face flashing challenge to the Fates.

“Tremendous, Dick,” I agreed.