THE SUBMISSIVE WOMAN
I remember, when I was a little boy, a beautiful young woman and a very handsome man coming to my father’s house, and these were husband and wife. And I looked upon him with a sort of worshipful wonder, for they told me he was a brave soldier, and had fought gloriously in battles. At that period of my life my young imagination was quickened by every story of adventure, and the only books or pictures that appealed to me were those that told of battle, or of the doughty deeds of soldiers and sailors. The sword seemed to me then far mightier than the pen, which latter I regarded merely as an instrument of scholastic torture.
Imagine my great pride and joy, therefore, when this real live hero talked to me as familiarly as any schoolboy of my own age, and when, looking over some pictures of the Crimean War and Indian Mutiny, which were among my treasures, he told me how he had stormed the heights of Alma and captured Sebastopol, how he had relieved Lucknow, and blown thousands of mutinous Sepoys from the guns. I listened to him with all my sense and spirit. How graphically he described the fights, remembering every detail, even to the name of the little bugler who sounded the “cease firing,” and the exact expression of the Sepoys the moment before the guns were fired that should blow them to eternity! I drank it all in, and thought there never was such a great man in the world as Captain Marshall Meek. No wonder that his sweet and gentle wife cast such constant looks of affectionate pride upon him. She was indeed a fortunate woman to be the wife of such a hero, and I regarded her with boyish enthusiasm, because of her heroic husband’s reflected light. To me they were the most romantic couple I had ever met, for they embodied beauty and chivalry—such as I had read and dreamt of. They might have been Lancelot and Guinevere for me and they remained impressed upon my young memory, she as the beautiful daughter of a distinguished family, he as an ideal soldier, handsome and brave.
I did not see them again till I had reached man’s estate, and then they came once more to my father’s house. But what a change had the years wrought! He was now a shaky, middle-aged man, with alternate intervals of boisterous merriment and ill-temper, and only the reminiscent suggestion of his old gallant bearing and good looks; while she was an absolute wreck of her former self. Her fair, plump features were now sallow and shrunk, her bright, gentle countenance told of nothing but sorrow, suffering, and anxiety; her full, elegant figure had become attenuated beyond recognition. The old regard of proud affection had given place to a haunted, restless look of fear, of expectancy of something terrible. Yes, a few years had transformed the gallant soldier into a confirmed drunkard and bully, and the poor wife into his abject slave.
It was a pitiful story. He had had a sunstroke in India—the original excuse of so many drunkards—and a craving for stimulant had succeeded. Stronger and stronger grew the craving, weaker and weaker the power of resistance, until the habit of drink became so strong that the case was quite a scandal. “Conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman,” was the official designation given to the offence for which he was cashiered from the army, and social ruin was the result. And down with the disgraced man went the wife and children. Society always generalises, and the stain of a name clings to the innocent bearers of it. Of course people pitied poor Mrs. Meek, but with such a husband who could visit her? So, with ruined career, with name disgraced, with shattered constitution, Captain Marshall Meek brought his family home to England, and by undue extravagance and gambling speedily exhausted the income his wife had brought him as dowry. His social disgrace seemed to have made him desperate—his weakness for drink certainly rendered him insensible to all the finer feelings of manhood, and he spared his wife no humiliation.
She was the daughter of a proud and distinguished man, who had won his baronetcy by splendid services to the State, whose father and grandfather before him had won honourable reward from a grateful country. The men and women of her family were proud and spirited to an unusual degree, and when she went to them, socially and financially beggared, to ask assistance for her children, they answered her that she must separate herself from her drunken and disgraceful husband, and then they would see what could be done for her.
But Mrs. Meek was wife before everything; whatever her husband had done, however he might drag her and their children down, whatever he might make her suffer in body and spirit, she was still his wife, and as she had vowed at the altar to love, honour, and obey, so would she strive to fulfil her vows. Therefore pitying and forgiving those of her kinsfolk who had urged her to what she considered the breaking of the marriage vow, she gave up all hope of their assistance, and determined to try and eke out what little was left of her fortune as best she could. Her pride had been sadly humbled, but she still had a remnant of independence. She still hoped to redeem her husband’s reputation, and woo him from the injurious ways of drink.
It was at this period that I met again the hero and heroine who had so captivated my boyish fancy, and never shall I forget the shock of recognition. They seemed to have been transformed by some sort of metempsychosis-while-you-wait process. The Captain’s old buoyancy had given place to irritability pretending to be joviality—a miserable sham, practised exclusively for company. And this seemed to alarm his wife far more than his outbursts of drunken passion, for then she knew that the bully was uppermost, while the cunning of his pretended humour puzzled her, and kept her upon tenter-hooks, fearing what he might say or do.
It was a miserable life for her, poor thing. She, who had lived her youth in luxury, and her early married life in comfort and amid brilliant social surroundings, was now compelled to endure every degradation that genteel poverty and social vagabondage could inflict. They were very poor, yet her good-for-nothing husband insisted upon an outward show of gentility which he had not the grace to support. He would drink in private and in public, he would debase his manhood, and bully his long-suffering wife, but he would drain the very scanty family purse to preserve a pretence of social position. The children were growing up, but little were they heeded, except as servants and errand-boys. Education befitting the sons and daughters of an “officer and gentleman” was out of the question; all the cash that could be squeezed out of the domestic exchequer was appropriated by the Captain for his personal expenses, his clothes, and his drink. Poor Mrs. Meek had to find clothing for the boys and girls as best she might, just as she had to keep the household going. For herself, one or two black silk dresses which had seen better days served her through years of humiliation. She had lost the semblance of gentility, and only tried to make herself look a little smarter when her husband rated her for forgetting her position. Her position, indeed!
And she submitted to all this humiliation, she allowed herself and her children to be dragged down lower and lower, she offended beyond reconciliation the rich, proud relatives who could have helped her, because they expressed their just resentment against her husband and their indignation at her obstinate martyrdom, all simply for love of this man who was quite unworthy of it. She had never heard of Individualism; the thought of a woman having a free soul, with an independent life of her own to work out, had probably never entered her head. She was one of those women who think that the whole duty of woman is towards her husband, be he good or bad, tender or cruel, devoted or selfish. That he has broken his marriage vows does not relieve her of the obligation of hers—she must be faithful to the end. And so Mrs. Meek suppressed her independent womanhood for the sake of a worthless man. There was no question of clinging to an ideal of her girlhood, that was broken long since, and Mrs. Meek was not an idealising woman; she saw things as they were, but she thought it was her duty to try and soften their brutality. If there was little of the old love remaining, there was the old slavish devotion, and the submission of her individuality to his caprice. She retained the mediæval notion that the husband was the wife’s lord and master, and when misfortunes, albeit of his own making, came upon him and involved her, she considered that it was all the more obligatory for her to unself herself, so as to give him the more consideration. She had joined her lot to his for better or for worse, and, as she would not have thought of leaving him had it been better, she would not desert him when fortune was at its worst. Let him humiliate her as he would, she would be a martyr in the sacred cause of wifely devotion.
There are some women who must be martyrs at all cost, if not in earnest, then in make-believe. Generally there is more folly and egotism in their martyrdom than high-minded purpose, but sometimes there is a touch of the genuine angel. Now, I never met a more serious martyr than Mrs. Marshall Meek, and if there was a good deal of the fool about her self-sacrifice, there was something, too, of the angel—no ordinary woman could have been so absolutely without resentment with so much just cause. Whatever she suffered, and Heaven knows she must have suffered as few women in her station of life are called upon to suffer, never was she known to utter complaint. No indignity, no deprivation, could provoke her to reproach her husband; and when I have heard her sons and daughters grumble at their position, she would always chide them gently, and expect pity for their father’s misfortunes. For herself she sought none. God in His own good time would pity her, she would say, till then it was her duty to submit patiently.
But was this just either to herself or her children? For herself, it must rest with her own conscience whether she has made the best use of her life, debasing her soul to the service of a worthless man, be he husband a thousand times over. But for her children, has she not grossly abused her responsibilities? She has sacrificed them to a father who has squandered the most brilliant opportunities, and degraded all their lives. Had she agreed to the wishes of her relatives to separate judicially from her worthless husband, whose downward course she was powerless to stay, she might have restored her children to their proper social position, and secured to them all the advantages of education. But she allowed herself to become estranged from those who could have helped her, and to beg for alms from friends whose purses were of less capacity than their hearts. And, oh! the terrible struggles of her life, the humiliation, the injustice, the pity of it.
Then when the inevitable delirium tremens cut off, in what should have been its prime, a life once so full of promise so grievously unfulfilled, it was all too late to repair the terrible mischief done. The children, who had been dragged up anyhow, lived anyhow, and were married anyhow to those who dragged them down still lower in the social scale. And their mother, the widowed martyr to her sense of wifely duty, ignored by proud and offended relatives, neglected by children whose gratitude she had never encouraged, and, weary of all, has hidden herself away in some obscure lodging to await, as patiently and submissively as she has lived, the coming of easeful death.
And there will always be women like this to soften men’s lives by their own self-submission; but, thank goodness, there be also women who know how to live their own lives, and to stimulate, as well as smooth, the lives of men.