Jerome Jerome - They and I

"Thinking what a beast he has been ought to make him impatient himself with himself," considered Robina. "He ought to be feeling so ashamed of himself as to be willing to do anything."

The owl in the old yew screamed, whether with indignation or amusement I cannot tell.

"And woman," I said, "had the power been hers, would she have used it to sweeter purpose? Where is your evidence? Your Cleopatras, Pompadours, Jezebels; your Catherines of Russia, late Empresses of China; your Faustines of all ages and all climes; your Mother Brownriggs; your Lucretia Borgias, Salomes―I could weary you with names. Your Roman task-mistresses; your drivers of lodging-house slaveys; your ladies who whipped their pages to death in the Middle Ages; your modern dames of fashion, decked with the plumage of the tortured grove. There have been other women also―noble women, their names like beacon-lights studding the dark waste of history. So there have been noble men―saints, martyrs, heroes. The sex-line divides us physically, not morally. Woman has been man's accomplice in too many crimes to claim to be his judge. 'Male and female created He them'―like and like, for good and evil."

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.