Joking apart

It must be funny to have the partner of one’s life say, “You are quite beyond me, Henry dear, altogether.” It must give one such a shock, although of course it is true. Henry is so far removed from Mrs. Henry that if they manage to keep within calling distance of one another all their lives they are said to be “quite an idyllic couple.” We all know that if two people are knocking about idly in a field, one of them looking for golf balls or beetles or a lost trifle from the pocket, the other sewing or aimlessly preoccupied with thoughts about moth in the cupboards or the drawing in of the days, their conversation is not likely to be either profound or meaty; nor can it be even that interchange of feather-weight looks and intonations which are the pollen of mutual understanding. Mr. and Mrs. Henry’s life is very like this sort of knocking about together in a field. Sometimes Henry wanders off and says something with a little more ginger to it, and then Mrs. Henry is exceedingly offended, and complains that he is quite beyond her altogether.

The Henrys have not drifted apart lately; they are as near together now as ever they were. In fact, they are far less likely to drift apart now than they were at first. They are kept together by the strong tie of habit, and, some say, by public opinion. Others maintain that although public opinion prevents Henry from ever thinking of bolting, if he did entertain the thought public opinion would have less hold upon him than would his deep-rooted habit of staying with his wife. Thirty years ago they were kept together by a different tie, which might easily have been broken had either of them thought to break it. The tie was a sort of chemical affinity fortified by conscience. Love in all its expressions is more like something chemical than anything else, and the chemical experiment of Mr. and Mrs. Henry’s marriage was, at one time, a very touch-and-go business. Chemical affinity caught them as they meandered at a garden-party; it kept them together at several subsequent entertainments, just because neither of them were the sort of atoms that are so—I don’t know the right expression; it may be volatile, I call it impulsive—as ever to unglue themselves from the atom they chance to unite with, unless under great provocation from some other very masterful atom.

Henry was not such a gluey, adhesive atom as Mrs. Henry, but he had a conscience, and a dash of imagination or poetry or something. He saw much that was invisible to Mrs. Henry, and he saw it better when there was a female figure in the foreground of what he saw, giving just the human touch to the picture. When he became attached to Mrs. Henry he kept his attention riveted on her without an idea of the dangers by which their union was beset. There were hundreds of brilliant and powerful atoms whirling past under his very nose, but their chemical attraction was neutralized for him by the fact that he never lifted his eyes from Mrs. Henry and his dreams. This instinct of keeping the eye of love fixed on the beloved object is implanted in the heart of man by the god of populations, who knows that marriages must be kept going—the Henry kind of marriages anyhow. It is impossible to stop and consider each case separately.

“You must get on, Mr. Cupid; move quickly, please. Pair them off—(we can see the testy old gentleman in the spectacles)—yes, yes, just like the frogs, certainly; we must get on. There’s this batch of babies to be got off at once to keep up the numbers. So—Harper, Harthorn; Jones, Johnson; Smith, Smithson. Couple them up, please, anyhow. Light and dark alternately if you can; don’t put two tall ones together, nor two dwarfs if you can help it; mix the temperaments as much as possible——” Cupid strikes; stops dead. “I refuse, sir. I am very sorry, but there are two here whom you must let me consider, please. The very foundations of your throne will be shaken if these are ill-assorted. Very dangerous elements to combine, these two, sir. Very little known about their action——”

My metaphors are getting so mixed that it will soon be impossible to disentangle them. What I meant was that although it is said to be in the nature of atoms to stick together until one or other leaves for some more powerful attraction, in the case of the human atom a protective quality has been given which enables them to resist other attractions so long as they do not look about and consider. This saves a lot of time for the testy old gentleman in spectacles. In fact, the work would never get done otherwise; there would be a dozen changes of plan before any marriage came off.

But it was touch-and-go many a time with Henry had he but known. Atoms came near his path, which, had they drawn him to themselves, might have brought about a richer fact than that which is called the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Henry.

For although they have lived together so long, he is still altogether beyond her, and she is (though he does not mention this) altogether beyond him. They hear each other saying things all day, but, in so far as speech is a meeting ground for thought, they have never spoken to one another. If Henry were a lop-eared rabbit he could not expect less from each day as it dawns. He expects breakfast (dear thing), but then so does Bunny, and he expects other meals throughout the day. He expects his house to be made clean, and Mrs. Henry on the one hand and the gardener on the other very kindly see to that. He expects changes in the weather, in the seasons, in the dawn and fading of day; but he expects no other change. How surprised Henry or the rabbit would be at anything unusual in the behaviour of Mrs. Henry or the gardener. Suppose Mrs. Henry were to say with sincerity, “I think so-and-so,” instead of “I always say so-and-so.” Suppose that she showed by a sudden look of life behind her eyes that for one moment her thought had stood beside his thought and had seen what he saw. Nothing in the papers would, I believe, surprise poor Henry more than if this happened, for in these thirty years it has never occurred once.

At first in his humility he thought that it was because her thoughts were above the range of his coarse words; that when she said, “Yes, dear, quite so,” it meant that she was reaching down to grasp his idea, and that when she had pulled it up beside hers he would see to a distance he had never seen before. But, instead, he found that he never reached her mind at all; he called to her and she answered as people answer on a golf-course, or in the street, or in the hall of an hotel, with lookers-on within hearing, careful of the prejudices of society. But just where she stood he never knew, of what she saw he had no idea. He sometimes thought that her dwelling must be under a green canvas umbrella behind a molehill. Then Henry became more and more exclusively male. The chemical tie between him and her had been strengthened by conscience and habit until there was very little fear of the busy old gentleman’s plans being upset by any untoward volatility on the part of atom Henry. But perhaps if Henry had heard some of the things his wife said when she was driven to involuntary candour by the weight of many years’ disgust with the male sex, he might have—oh no, hardly that! She must have a home and so on. And then the fuss! fancy inquiries and no real reason to give! Besides, she was a very good sort of woman. Women would not be such faithful mothers, perhaps, if they were not rather limited in their desires: no man could stand the strain of what they have to put up with. So Henry would surely reflect, and as he reflected he would put his hand in his pocket with the ease of habit, and pay the tax-collector, and the doctor, and the gardener, and the schoolmaster and all of them.

“Of course, my ideal,” says Mrs. Henry in confidence to Mrs. James, “is to have a nice house quite in town; close to the trams, so that there is no difficulty in getting about in the evening. If you dine out two or three times a week, and pay a cab each time, it runs up so—but men never think of these things!” Henry does think of them a good deal, but paying the cab bill is a mild and peaceful occupation compared to getting into evening clothes half an hour after he comes home, in order to sit through a long evening between two women, one of whom looks like a muffin which has fallen, wet, into a box of cheap jewellery, and the other looks like a cormorant who has just been converted to some rather faddy new religion. He has to turn from one to the other for two hours, as sweetbread succeeds fish; and when the women have gone, and the pleasant smile has left his face, he is obliged to follow them almost immediately (for, after all, what is half an hour’s rest?), and stand about suffering all sorts of torture, music perhaps, or more rot from a pair of lacy old idiots. And then to be driven home too late to do anything; for you can’t sit up at night if you have to be off early next day. It is all very well now and then, for a change, and to go to people whom you like——

Let us now hear some more of what Mrs. Henry really, really thinks.

“You know,” she says, “children are a great tie.” I wish that some one would explain exactly what they mean by this remark. Suppose that children are a tie to bind Mrs. Henry down from those wild flights of adventure and the freedom of the buccaneer to which she is naturally prone, well, what a pity! However, we all admit that they are a great tie. Their childish thoughts are such a dull field in which to confine the brilliancy of mamma’s reflections on Hall Caine or the ladies whom she knows, or our spiritual nature in general. Of course they are not nearly so great a tie to a man.

Now Henry has got so used to looking at things in one way that he would agree to this proposition, because he knows quite well that he never in his life sat up with baby, no matter what was wrong, while Mrs. Henry never left the children at all if they were ill; and she never got away for a whole morning like he did. Why, he could fritter away the whole day at the office and never be called off for anything! But then, if the chemical attraction that brought him and her together had contained a spark of anything like laughter, he would have made his own ribs ache and hers too when she said that children were no tie to a man. If they tie her to the house what else, in heaven’s name, ties him to the office? Isn’t he bound to his stool by cords woven of school bills, doctor’s and dentist’s bills, rent for larger, airier premises, the elaborate “summer out” in seaside lodgings instead of the cheap holidays in god-painted solitudes before the nursery days?

But then, as Mrs. Henry so justly says, a man never thinks of these things. Perhaps it is as well that he doesn’t or we might none of us be here, either to write or read this captious book.

Such analytical thoughts do not amuse the Henrys, and quite rightly. He sometimes had freakish moments, and gay imaginings flew high through his head thirty years ago. There were all sorts of merry firework stuff ready to burst into Catherine-wheels and “God Bless our Home,” if anyone had brought a little living spark of fire to set it off. But Mrs. Henry does not think in that way. There never seems to be anything to laugh at that she can see, although she enjoys a joke as much as anybody.

But what is so amusing about the whole thing is that under the canvas umbrella behind the molehill where Mrs. Henry lives, there is a strange life that is quite beyond Henry altogether. There are large qualities like unselfishness, innocence, courage. In case of fire or flood Mrs. Henry would save all the children, or even Henry himself, at the cost of her life, without a thought beyond annoyance at the incompetence of men who build houses that catch fire like flannelette.

Virtues like those would be brilliant objects if they were taken into the air and allowed to mix freely with vices, so that we could have a good look at both and decide which we prefer, honestly and without prejudice on either side. If, instead of stuffing all the vices into a box where they get mouldy and breed maggots, and instead of keeping all the virtues folded up with a string round them and a macintosh over the top, they were both taken out and used as occasion offered, Mr. and Mrs. Henry might find it necessary to approach one another enough to hand things backwards and forwards. And so they might eventually get talking, and neither be quite beyond the other any more.