Herbert Wells - Marriage

Buzard intervened with instances. Dover would have none of them. He displayed astonishing and distinctive knowledge. "Madame Curie," clamoured Buzard, "Madame Curie."

"There was Curie," said Dover. "No woman alone has done such things. I don't say women aren't clever," he insisted. "They're too clever. Give them a man's track or a man's intention marked and defined, they'll ape him to the life——"

Buzard renewed his protests, talking at the same time as Dover, and was understood to say that women had to care for something greater than art or philosophy. They were custodians of life, the future of the race——

"And that's my crowning disappointment," cried Dover. "If there was one thing in which you might think women would show a sense of some divine purpose in life, it is in the matter of children—and they show about as much care in that matter, oh!—as rabbits. Yes, rabbits! I stick to it. Look at the things a nice girl will marry; look at the men's children she'll consent to bring into the world. Cheerfully! Proudly! For the sake of the home and the clothes. Nasty little beasts they'll breed without turning a hair. All about us we see girls and women marrying ugly men, dull and stupid men, ill-tempered dyspeptic wrecks, sickly young fools, human rats— rats! "

"No, no!" cried Trafford to Dover.

Buzard's voice clamoured that all would be different when women had the vote.

"If ever we get a decent care for Eugenics, it will come from men," said a white-faced little man on the sofa beside Trafford, in the confidential tone of one who tells a secret.

"Doing it cheerfully!" insisted Dover.

Trafford in mid-protest was suddenly stricken into silence by a memory. It was as if the past had thrown a stone at the back of his head and hit it smartly. He nipped his sentence in the bud. He left the case for women to Buzard....

He revived that memory again on his way home. It had been in his mind overlaid by a multitude of newer, fresher things, but now he took it out and looked at it. It was queer, it was really very queer, to think that once upon a time, not so very long ago, Marjorie had been prepared to marry Magnet. Of course she had hated it, but still——....

There is much to be discovered about life, even by a brilliant and rising young Professor of Physics....

Presently Dover, fingering the little glass of yellow chartreuse he had hitherto forgotten in the heat of controversy, took a more personal turn.

"Don't we know," he said, and made the limpid amber vanish in his pause. "Don't we know we've got to manage and control 'em—just as we've got to keep 'em and stand the racket of their misbehaviour? Don't our instincts tell us? Doesn't something tell us all that if we let a woman loose with our honour and trust, some other man will get hold of her? We've tried it long enough now, this theory that a woman's a partner and an equal; we've tried it long enough to see some of the results, and does it work? Does it? A woman's a prize, a possession, a responsibility, something to take care of and be careful about.... You chaps, if you'll forgive me, you advanced chaps, seem to want to have the women take care of you. You seem always to want to force decisions on them, make them answerable for things that you ought to decide and answer for.... If one could, if one could! If!... But they're not helps—that's a dream—they're distractions, gratifications, anxieties, dangers, undertakings...."

Buzard got in his one effective blow at this point. "That's why you've never married, Sir Roderick?" he threw out.

The big man was checked for a moment. Trafford wondered what memory lit that instant's pause. "I've had my science," said Dover.

Mrs. Pope was of course among the first to visit the new home so soon as it was open to inspection. She arrived, looking very bright and neat in a new bonnet and some new black furs that suited her, bearing up bravely but obviously in a state of dispersed and miscellaneous emotion....

In many ways Marjorie's marriage had been a great relief to her mother. Particularly it had been a financial relief. Marjorie had been the most expensive child of her family, and her cessation had led to increments both of Mrs. Pope's and Daphne's all too restricted allowances. Mrs. Pope had been able therefore to relapse from the orthodox Anglicanism into which poverty had driven her, and indulge for an hour weekly in the consolations of Higher Thought. These exercises in emancipated religiosity occurred at the house of Mr. Silas Root, and were greatly valued by a large circle of clients. Essentially they were orgies of vacuity, and they cost six guineas for seven hours. They did her no end of good. All through the precious weekly hour she sat with him in a silent twilight, very, very still and feeling—oh! "higher" than anything, and when she came out she wore an inane smile on her face and was prepared not to worry, to lie with facility, and to take the easiest way in every eventuality in an entirely satisfactory and exalted manner. Moreover he was "treating" her investments. Acting upon his advice, and doing the whole thing quietly with the idea of preparing a pleasant surprise for her husband, she had sold out of certain Home Railway debentures and invested in a company for working the auriferous waste which is so abundant in the drainage of Philadelphia, a company whose shareholders were chiefly higher thought disciples and whose profits therefore would inevitably be greatly enhanced by their concerted mental action. It was to the prospective profits in this that she owed the new black furs she was wearing.

The furs and the bonnet and the previous day's treatment she had had, all helped to brace her up on Marjorie's doorstep for a complex and difficult situation, and to carry her through the first tensions of her call. She was so much to pieces as it was that she could not help feeling how much more to pieces she might have been—but for the grace of Silas Root. She knew she ought to have very strong feelings about Trafford, though it was not really clear to her what feelings she ought to have. On the whole she was inclined to believe she was experiencing moral disapproval mixed up with a pathetic and rather hopeless appeal for the welfare of the tender life that had entrusted itself so recklessly to these brutal and discreditable hands, though indeed if she had really dared to look inside her mind her chief discovery would have been a keenly jealous appreciation of Trafford's good looks and generous temper, and a feeling of injustice as between her own lot and Marjorie's. However, going on her assumed basis she managed to be very pale, concise and tight-lipped at any mention of her son-in-law, and to put a fervour of helpless devotion into her embraces of her daughter. She surveyed the house with a pained constrained expression, as though she tried in vain to conceal from herself that it was all slightly improper, and even such objects as the Bokhara hangings failed to extort more than an insincere, "Oh, very nice, dear— very nice."

In the bedroom, she spoke about Mr. Pope. "He was dreadfully upset," she said. "His first thought was to come after you both with a pistol. If—if he hadn't married you——"

"But dear Mummy, of course we meant to marry! We married right away."

"Yes, dear, of course. But if he hadn't——"

She paused, and Marjorie, with a momentary flush of indignation in her cheeks, did not urge her to conclude her explanation.

"He's wounded ," said Mrs. Pope. "Some day perhaps he'll come round—you were always his favourite daughter."

"I know," said Marjorie concisely, with a faint flavour of cynicism in her voice.

"I'm afraid dear, at present—he will do nothing for you."